CONTENTS*

1 Emotional growth and its function | Podcast

To be in harmony, we have to walk straight in three areas: physically, mentally and emotionally. All three sides of our nature must work together, like two people running a three-legged race, for a human personality to find unity…Having any one area underdeveloped, of course, will also have a crippling effect; it will take the entire personality down.

So when it comes to our emotional nature, what would make us so prone to neglecting, repressing and stunting our own growth?

2 The importance of feeling all our feelings, including fear | Podcast

Just behind our sadness and our pain is our spiritual self. And it’s filled to the brim with peace and joy and safety. But we can’t activate this with our will. We also can’t get to it with any practices or actions that don’t include all our feelings. But as soon as we turn our bow into the storm of rough waters, the sails of our spiritual center fill completely. This is a natural byproduct of the tack we’ve taken…

When we experience these various states and feelings, it’s imperative we don’t delude ourselves into believing the cause is anything going on right now. It’s not. Whatever is coming up now is only a result of a past we’re still nursing in our system. But if we walk through these gateways, we’ll step into life.

3 The Higher Self, the Lower Self, and the Mask Self | Podcast

One of the subtle bodies that every living being has is the Higher Self, or divine spark…Ever since the Fall of the Angels, our Higher Self has gradually wrapped itself in various invisible layers of more dense matter that is somewhere in between the density of the physical body and the Higher Self. Say ‘hello’ to the Lower Self…

The Lower Self, which also varies from soul to soul, holds all of our faults and weakness, along with laziness and ignorance…It always wants to have its own way, without having to pay any price for this…

There is another layer that is quite significant but often overlooked, that we could call the Mask Self. We create this false covering because we realize we’ll likely bump into trouble with our surroundings if and when we give in to our Lower Self…

4 Three basic personality types: Reason, Will and Emotion | Podcast

If we are the Reason Type, we govern our lives primarily using the reasoning process, making us prone to neglecting our emotions…The Emotion Type is equally one-sided…we will impact our surroundings with our uncontrolled emotions…the Will Type makes a master out of the servant…

In their highest state of perfection, the Reason Type is the Angel of Wisdom, the Emotion Type is the Angel of Love and the Will Type is the Angel of Courage. These are all aspects of divinity that each of us can develop, and which can all work together in harmony…

5 Intellect and will as tools or hindrances to self-realization | Podcast

If we boil it down, what obstructs the real self are our layers of confusion and error, on top of which sits our lack of awareness about our confusion and errors…What intellect and will can be used for is cleaning up the errors and confusion that they themselves have created…When we know we are confused, we are closer to our real self than when we are blind to our inner confusion, even if we don’t have any solutions to our problems…

6 The origin and outcome of the Idealized Self-Image | Podcast

There’s just no escaping our knowledge that unpleasantness is possible. It really happens. Our fear of this is ever-present, and that creates a problem for us…So we devise a countermeasure that we falsely believe will circumvent unhappiness, unpleasantness and death: we create an idealized self-image. In short, this is a pseudo-protection that doesn’t work worth a damn…

7 Love, power and serenity in divinity or in distortion | Podcast

There are three major divine attributes—love, power and serenity—that in the healthy person work as a team. They maintain flexibility amongst themselves so one never drowns another out…But when they are in distortion, they step all over each other. Then love, power and serenity get distorted into their evil twins: submission, aggression and withdrawal…

It never occurs to us that our real problem is the solution we have chosen…

8 How and why we recreate childhood hurts | Podcast

Essentially everyone—even the most diligent spiritual seekers—overlooks just how strong the link is between the unfulfillment of our childhood longings and our present-day problems. This isn’t just a nice a theory…

No matter how much we might love our parents, unconscious resentments still simmer under the surface…Inside us is this inner child that can’t let go of the past because it can’t make sense of it; so it also can’t accept and can’t forgive. Over and over, it sets up similar conditions, thinking this time it can win…First of all, it is a total illusion that we were ever defeated. So then it’s just as big an illusion that we can now be the victor…

9 Images and the deep, deep damage they do | Podcast

From practically the time we were born, we have been creating our own impressions about this thing we call life…Something unfortunate happens—one of the many unavoidable hardships of life—and we make a generalization based on it. Roll forward a few clicks and now we have a rock solid, preconceived idea about the way things are. The only problem is, most of the time our conclusions are wrong…

10 Unpacking the pain of our old destructive patterns | Podcast

The climate we grew up in affected us—it was like perpetually receiving a minor shock…We repressed the original frustration and pain we couldn’t deal with, and put it out of our awareness, where it still smolders in the unconscious mind…Our defense mechanisms of aggression, submission and/or withdrawal fully developed…Our images are also a form of defense, designed to fight against painful experiences by erecting a rigid wall constructed entirely from wrong conclusions…

In every case, we hurt others while also rubbing salt in our own wounds…So not only have we done nothing to mitigate the original pain, we’ve invited more of it. Nice work, everyone…

11 Our habit of transferring our split onto everyone | Podcast

We’re here because planet Earth is a perfect match for the negativity remaining in us; it offers conditions compatible with our inner landscape…So Earth is nothing more and nothing less than a classroom for people with splits…

Take a look around and we can see the opposites of duality everywhere: man and woman, day and night, life and death. This is one way Earth pairs up the halves of two-way splits…When we find ourselves ensnarled in a dualistic confusion, we are negatively involved with people and with life. But the worst negative involvement that happens is inside ourselves…Our life conditions will be constructed to bring it to the forefront, until we stop evading the issue and roll up our sleeves…

12 Finding out the truth about ourselves, including our faults | Podcast

This path is based on the simple law of cause and effect…If we apply these teachings to our lives, they will work for us. There is nothing we must believe…If we want to become capable of experiencing genuine happiness, we must learn how to course-correct back into alignment with spiritual laws… None of this can happen by merely concentrating on our outer problems. We must look deeper and find the corresponding inner problems, which always, always, always are the cause of the outer ones…

As long as we don’t recognize how our Lower Self works, it will continue to rule the roost, hiding behind handy excuses and cloaking its devious ways…

13 The ubiquitous faults of self-will, pride and fear | Podcast

There is one fundamental quality that is the core element of who we are…This means that each one of us have kept a kernel of perfection—our original nature—basically intact in our core essence, although it’s now covered by the Lower Self and layer upon layer of imperfections…

So we have two missions. One is to sense what our basic light is, and the other is to realize how these three buzzkills of self-will, pride and fear collude to cover it up…They are the fundamental blockers of our essential light…

14 Exposing the mistaken image we have about God | Podcast

As children, we learned that the highest authority—even higher than Mom & Dad—is God. So it’s not a surprise that we bundle up all our painful subjective experiences with the Ones-Who-Say-No, and dump them on God. Presto change-o—an image has been created…We might call this our God-image…

Before we know it, we will have grown an inner image of God that makes God out to be a monster…Believing this to be true, we turn away from God altogether. We want nothing to do with that monster in our minds…This, folks, is often the real reason someone turns to atheism…

15 Learning to speak the language of the unconscious | Podcast

We have both a conscious mind—the stuff we know—and an unconscious mind—the stuff we don’t know we know. The unconscious is by far the stronger of the two…The unconscious should be credited with far more than it typically is…It’s what controls our fate…Fate is nothing other than the events that occur due to the governing forces of our unconscious. It’s the tiger and we’re the tail…

16 How pleasure gets twisted into self-perpetuating cycles of pain | Podcast

Pain is what results from the conflict created when two creative forces go in opposing directions inside us…Take, for instance, the physical level. The entire physical being is striving for health and wholeness. When there’s a disturbance that pulls the other way, we feel pain…If we were aware that in addition to our desire for health, we have a hidden desire for non-health, the struggle would go away. For we’d be hard pressed to hang onto a desire to be unhealthy if we were consciously aware of it…

So what’s really clogging up the works is the stuff in our unconscious; this is what creates the seeming gap between cause and effect…The cause, then, is the hidden negative wish; the effect is that there’s a disturbance in our system. The end result? Pain…

17 Overcoming our negative intention by identifying with our spiritual self | Podcast

At some point in our journey, we are going to run into a wall of our previously concealed but now plenty-conscious negative intentionality…In our whacky, mixed-up psyches, we unconsciously want whatever it is we fear…

Further, whatever we experience, we also unconsciously want. All of these teachings are built upon these immutable facts. We need to keep this in mind when we come face-to-face with our basic attitude toward life that basically says No…

18 How to use meditation to create a better life | Podcast

More whole is more happy. Our goal, then, is to unify our whole selves, folding in the split off aspects of the Lower Self that remain in separation…Consider the truth that whatever is inside, no matter how painful it might be, cannot be avoided, but rather must be expressed and released…And that, friends, is what meaningful meditation is all about…

19 The giant misunderstanding about freedom and self-responsibility | Podcast

There’s one soul form worth talking about specifically. Because it exists in each and every one of us to some degree. This form is shaped like an abyss and it’s made completely out of illusion…

We might feel like we’ve fallen into this abyss when we can’t accept that this is an imperfect world. Or when we can’t, for the life of us, let go of our self-centered self-will…We’ve become so afraid, though, of taking self-responsibility, our fear of it has become a large part of our abyss. We fear that if we assume self-responsibility, we will fall right in and be swallowed up whole…

It seems like a huge danger to let go of our demand to always have our way…We literally fear we’ll be miserable if we have to give up our demand for Utopia…

©2016 Jill Loree. All rights reserved.

*The order for reading these teachings is flexible. Follow your intuition and go where you feel called. If you get stuck on a teaching, move on. Sticking points may indicate something important to explore more deeply, but don’t let a speed bump derail you.