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I’d like to share a method for seeking God on the relationship level. Most people, especially in forums, seek God intellectually through reading the Bible. They don’t realize that the Bible can only point them to some of God’s characteristics. It cannot create relationship. One must actively interact with God to be in relationship with Him and learn about Him.
To connect with God, a person has to first identify what’s causing the block. Here’s how it works:
Top level: Physical Body and the World
Second level: The Mind (the mental body)
Third level: The Heart (the emotional body)
Fourth Level: The Spirit Body (our true child-of-God self)
That’s the order in which our makeup is stacked. We usually operate only in the physical body and the mental body. In fact, we identify with those so much, we think that we are what we “think” or “do.” That’s how people get the idea that sin is a part of “who they are.” Not so. Dysfunctional emotions are the cause of sin, because the Bible defines sin as behaviors. “Get angry, but don’t sin in your anger.” You see? The sin is an action. And we are not our actions. Therefore, we are not evil. Our spirits are children-of-God, and therefore, we have His characteristics by nature.
The more I get in touch with my authentic child-of-God self (my spirit), I notice that it’s natural to not do sinful behavior. But to get in touch with that part of me, I have to correct the block. The emotional body (the heart) is where the block always is. The emotions are what cause sinful behavior, too. So the heart is the causal point. Not our thoughts, not our actions, but our heart. Thoughts and actions originate in our heart with our emotions.
The dysfunctioning emotions are fear, anger, and grief (sadness). Anytime we feel these things, we can be certain that our heart has not yet been matured, and we are not very well connected with our spirit. The key is not to try to change those feelings. There’s nothing wrong with them. They are feeling and they’re important. They are not us, but they are what we are experiencing. Unconditional love is how we integrate (resolve) these emotions. When we let the emotions be by feeling them, but we do not act on them, then they start to feel loved. We don’t try to change the emotions, because that’s not accepting them. We accept them just the way they are, without condition. We be with them, giving them our attention. If we’re really making progress, we’ll start feeling the parts of our body that resonate when we feel these emotions. That’s required to integrate the emotions.
Felt resonances are when our body has a reaction to our emotions. For instance, my chest tightens when I get angry or scared. My head emanates a sensation from its center when I get angry. My body sometimes feels like its buzzing when certain emotions arise. I feel my heart burn sometimes when I’m upset or sad. I feel sensations in my gut when I experience shame, guilt, or sadness (those are all under grief, sort of). Fear, anger, and grief cover all of the negative emotions that are dysfunction and need integrating. When you feel them trigger, don’t act on them. Just feel them, without condition. Keep doing that each time those emotions trigger. It’s wildly difficult for some people and it can take a lot of patience. But if you’re consistent to do it daily, you’ll make progress. Eventually, the emotions integrate. When they start integrating, a person often cries. Crying is good. When the emotions fully integrate, it often feels very cool. For me, my heart feels great in my chest, and I usually laugh and cry (happy tears).
I use a breathing practice to bring the emotions to the surface. The Presence Process is walks a person through a 10-week process for developing this skill of breathing to bring a person into the present moment, and how to be aware of their heart, and how to respond to the emotions rather than reacting with dysfunctional (sinful) behaviors. I’m on my 3rd 10-week process right now. When I finished my first 10-week process, I was much better at feeling. I’ll give an example. When I used to watch good movies or listen to good music, I’d sometimes feel some emotions heighten in me briefly, then they’d taper off very quickly. After my first 10-weeks, watching a good movie caused me to feel the emotional roller coaster constantly throughout a movie, making it so much more enjoyable! Same with good music. It’s like adding a 4th dimension to life that makes it so much more full.
As we do this practice, we start to get insights from God. The practice has lots of pieces that Christianity lost a long time ago. Abraham was Eastern philosophy, and he’s the origin of Christian beliefs. But we’ve lost a lot of the valuable Eastern practices we used to have. Some of them lasted as long as the 1600s, but we lost them shortly after that, so Protestantism never had many of them to begin with. The insights one gets from God are very interesting and very fulfilling. We find that life is more enjoyable and our health is better as we get better at feeling and integrating emotions. Effectively, what we’re doing is learning to love ourselves unconditionally the way God loves us, and that’s resolving our emotional dysfunctions that block us from connection with Him and our true selves. This is why Jesus says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” When we’re told to die to self, it means die to our ego’s reactions (sinful behaviors) to dysfunctional emotions. Pretty simple stuff, really. As we resolve our fear, anger, and sadness, we end up not having those emotions trigger anymore or drive us. We end up living in unconditional love. That’s why the New Testament says, “Perfect love casts out fear…if a man fears, his heart has not yet been made perfect (mature) in love.” Think of your heart and its dysfunctional emotions as a seven-year-old child. Approach it with love and accept anything it dishes out at you, no matter what. Don’t reason with it. Just accept it as it is. Give it freedom to workout its dysfunction, and it’ll resolve. It wants unconditional acceptance and attention (unconditional love). Give it that, and you’ll see it become very loving. It takes time, though. I needed The Presence Process to follow to accomplish this. I highly recommend it.
The Presence Process (Second/Revised Edition) by Michael Brown
Good luck. And keep in mind, we are not our behaviors (sin is a behavior), so we’re not evil at our core like mainstream Christianity thinks we are. That’s identifying with our actions and thoughts. At our core, we’re children of God with His characteristics. Even if we were evil, accepting our emotions without any intent to change those emotions is loving and affects us very positively. God accepts us as we are, unconditionally. We can practice this on ourselves. As we do, we become very loving and connect with God much better. Life becomes so much more enjoyable. And when we’re enjoyable, we’re much more likely to help others. And that’s what the Bible is all about–letting God free us so that we can be a blessing to others and show them what freedom is.
If you’d like to discuss this, you’re welcome to do so. I have no desire to debate, though.
I’d like to share a method for seeking God on the relationship level. Most people, especially in forums, seek God intellectually through reading the Bible.
That is the limitation of a forum. However, I believe that if you love God, then you will have a hunger for the truth and for understanding in scripture. This is where a forum can be useful.
🙂
Some good points in this article. For me, the most complete I have ever been are the times when my mind is constantly on God. The effect of this is felt in my spirit, soul, and body. I feel like a youth and radiate that which God has placed within me. The further away I am from God, the older I feel.
Hi Brian,
What is your view on jealousy?
___________
God bless
Ed J (Joshua 22:34)
http://www.holycitybiblecode.org _________________________________________________________________________________________________________
”Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.” – JEHOVAH GODHi Brian,
So when Jesus said there is only one way to the Father, though him, he was mistaken?
Sounds like spiritualism.
Deception
Hi Brian.
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
All must repent and be baptised in the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of sin.
Nothing has changed since Peter spoke at Pentecost and those who would try to save their own lives will lose them.
I forgot to add that when parents do this, their kids affected. For instance, one 12 yr old girl was put in a mental institution by her mother because her behavior was so crazy after her parents divorced. The father was upset, so he took her out of the mental institution. The father goes through an intense 10-week Presence Process to process his emotional signatures. When the 10 weeks is over, his daughter is perfectly fine and she was on no meds. She had a slow change that mirrored the father’s changes as he processed his emotions.
On the opposite end of this spectrum, I’ve read an ex-Mormon’s account of both his children falling down in seizures as soon as he realized he was in a false religion and renounced it. The kids were at home with their mom, and the dad was at church when this happened. He was in the temple service for the first time where they revealed that they actually worship and follow Satan as Jesus’ brother. Immediately, he thinks to himself, “I gotta get out of this church. This is wrong.” He calls his wife and finds out his kids had just had seizures at the exact moment he renounced the church. So, there is definitely a spiritual connection from parent to child.
I’ve noticed that my son does better and triggers me less as I work through my issues. Before I did the Presence Process, I noticed that my son would mirror my physical conditions, and yet he shouldn’t. I dealt with the emotional problem and I my condition would immediately go away, and his would, too. Very cool stuff.
There are tons of physical benefits to clearing up the emotional issues. I can give tons of examples of when I worked with people with multiple personality disorder and how healing their emotional issues would take care of their physical problems, including incurable diseases. They would lose weight without dieting and get down to their normal, healthy weight. I learned a lot while working with them for five years. Remember that in Deuteronomy 28, God tells His people if that if they don’t follow the Law (Teachings), they will end up being cursed. One of the curses is “every sickness and disease.” There are a few pages of curses there. It’s one of the longer chapters in the Bible, full of curses. Interesting.
NickHassan,
Call it what you want, but it’s not actually religious. This method isn’t concerned with any religion. Anyone can do it to resolve their emotions dysfunctions. It simply opens the door to connecting with God if someone wants to step through it. In my opinion, religion gets in the way of connecting with God.
Also, if Jesus is God (or at least part of God), then if someone is truly seeking to connect with God, they will connect with Jesus whether they know Him by name or not. God is God, despite the name you know him by. I’m sure lots of people connect with God and God helps them. And since Jesus is part of God, they’re connecting with Jesus and His ways, too.
What’s interesting is that people who go through The Presence Process actually repent of their dysfunctional (sinful) ways. Repent means “turn from.” Turning from a sinful behavior means that you don’t do it anymore. We see Christians struggle with this constantly in Christianity. And Christianity has no answer for these people. Statistically, Christians have the same rate of addiction and dysfunction as non-Christians in the United States. By all means, please look up this stat for yourself online or wherever you like. One hotel owner said that when the Christians come to town for conventions (it’s often just men coming alone), 80% of the rooms buy porn. You can learn that state from Promise Keepers, a Christian organization that helps me overcome porn addiction. If God and Jesus are so concerned with us turning from our sinful behavior, it sounds like Christianity, as a whole, is failing at it according to statistics. These are not twisted statistics, either. These statistics are coming from Christian organizations. The Presence Process actively shows people how to take care of dysfunctional (sinful) behavior, and resolve the emotions that cause it so that it never comes back. This empowers a person to start acting out of their child-of-God nature. They act lovingly at that point.
In my opinion, God is orchestrating this (and the Presence Process agrees with that), so God is the one helping us overcome this stuff. But that’s a simple way of stating it.
Now, you’ve said your piece, Nick. If you want to contribute to the conversation in a productive way, that’s fine. If you want to keep trying to dismantle the conversation, I ask that you stop posting in this thread. If you don’t like it, just don’t read it. If you continue sowing dissent, then I’ll ignore your posts. That’s a pretty fair way to deal with this issue. Good luck.
Hi Brian,
Some folk do not realize that God has reached the end of the line with humans.
He is in no mood to reason with folk and negotiate and build relationships.
Jesus is the last one sent to offer rescue to all from man’s dire state.
He owes us nothing and will accept nothing less than complete submission and obedience to His demands.
But there is a wider road littered with false reasoning and offering false hope that is chosen by most
Hi Brian,
Yes there are many gods and many lords and folk develop their own.
Are you confusing the false church with it’s foolish religiosity to the way of Jesus Christ?
True believers do not worship here or there on a certain day in certain places but they worship the one true God in spirit and truth.
EdJ,
Jealousy is a product of anger and grief (sadness). I think something will make me happy by getting rid of this feeling of sadness, and I’m angry that someone else has it and I don’t. So, if I can get that object, it’ll get rid of the anger and sadness I’m feeling. I don’t want to feel those feelings, so I act out jealously to “feel better” (this is me attempting to not feel those awful emotions). I think I feel better when I execute some jealous behavior (sin) on the person who has what I want, and I think it makes me feel better. But actually, what it’s done is suppressed my ability to feel the anger and sadness, giving the illusion that I feel better. In reality, I just can’t feel as much, so numbness is what I’ve accomplished. A numb heart is a hard heart.
We’re imprinted with our parents spiritual and emotional signatures when we’re in the womb and in our first seven years of life. We learn and develop behavioral reactions (sin) to those uncomfortable felt resonances in our bodies (the spiritual level) and the emotional signatures they contain (the heart’s feelings). We suppress our ability to feel with the sinful behaviors. The solution is to get better at feeling, because those emotions and felt resonances are still there in our bodies. We just have to learn to feel them. As we get better at feeling them unconditionally, they resolve. As they resolve, there’s no anger, fear, or grief to be triggered anymore. The emotional energy that was trapped by those dysfunctional emotions starts to flow again, but now it’s used for more healthy emotions. Think of emotions as energy-in-motion. E-motion. Scientifically speaking, that’s exactly what emotions are at the subatomic level. Everything is made out of energy (check out quantum physics for an explanation of how this works).
Being set on the path of salvation is great, and God and possibly Jesus orchestrates that. But it is our responsibility to then learn the practices of getting rid of sinful behavior by connecting with God through resolving our emotional issues that cause the behaviors. That’s how we approach our true selves and the loving behaviors we naturally do when we’re in our child-of-God state–or as Paul says, “in the spirit.” This accomplishes lasting change. Anyone who says this process of becoming more loving and getting rid of sin is evil really needs to assess what they believe and where their heart truly lies.
Hi Brian,
Certainly suffering of all kinds is a doorway for many to reach out to our Creator God
Jesus came for sinners and says the poor will have the gospel preached to them.
There is no eternal hope outside of the offer he made on behalf of God
Nick,
That’s your opinion and your view of who God is and how He acts. And no offense, but I want nothing to do with your god, because he’s a vengeful, fed-up god who cannot possibly have unconditional love for us. To be “fed up” is the very definition of conditional.
Any god who gets upset with people for doing a practice that makes them more loving is a very emotionally-twisted god.
The God I know is unconditionally loving. And He’s been infinitely patient with me through all of my trials. He’s not concerned with my mistakes, because He knows I’m human and He expects me not to do things perfectly. He simply accepts me as I am, unconditionally, and helps me. That’s the way I try to treat my son–with unconditional love. He flourishes when I do this. However, when I give him lots of rules and demands and I try to control the way he acts and mold him into what I think is a “good” boy, he gets very angry and throws lots of fits and he resents me. The Bible says not to anger our children. Read a book called Summerhill. You’ll see the true nature of children in that book and find that they are not evil at all. That book is real-world proof of this over decades. Many religious folk, like priests and pastors, have called that book a “holy” book, because of what it shows us about human nature. If you truly want to learn with an open mind, that book is a great place to start.
Good luck.
When people die, they will eventually have to go through Jesus to get to heaven. They may end up in hell for a little while first, though. Jesus has the keys to hell, according to the Bible, because He both puts people in and takes them out. He doesn’t lock them away and say, “Sucks to be you! Too bad you didn’t choose me, suckers! Burn forever!” No, He waits patiently till their pride is broken, then they ask Him for help and He forgives them and matures them. It’s very simple and very loving. So yes, in the end, all will go through Jesus, one way or another.
That’s my opinion, and I could be wrong. Just as you have your opinion and it could be wrong. We’re all just doing our best to figure out the truth. Knowing we could be wrong and admitting that is a great first step toward humbleness. But the emotional signatures that cause pride are the best thing to take care of if we want to truly be humble. Otherwise, we’re just faking it to some degree.
Hi Brian,
We can offer nothing useful to our God.
But He chooses to show his mercy and kindness to us as He is love.
He chooses to use us to continue His work when we are joined to His Son but after death there is no more access to these wonderful promises.
Heb 9
It is appointed to men once to die and then the judgement
EdJ,
Jealousy is a product of anger and grief (sadness).
I think I feel better when I execute some jealous behavior (sin) on the person who has what I want, and I think it makes me feel better.
Hi Brian,
Sounds like you got Jealousy confused with envy.
“it is our responsibility to then learn the practices of getting rid of sinful behavior”
With all that practice, have you removed ‘anger’ out of your life yet?___________
God bless
Ed J (Joshua 22:34)
http://www.holycitybiblecode.org _________________________________________________________________________________________________________
”Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.” – JEHOVAH GODNick,
The God I know is unconditionally loving.
He simply accepts me as I am, unconditionally, and helps me.
Hi Brian,
How does he help you if change is not required?
___________
God bless
Ed J (Joshua 22:34)
http://www.holycitybiblecode.org _________________________________________________________________________________________________________
”Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.” – JEHOVAH GODWhen people die, they will eventually have to go through Jesus to get to heaven. They may end up in hell for a little while first, though. Jesus has the keys to hell, according to the Bible, because He both puts people in and takes them out. He doesn’t lock them away and say, “Sucks to be you! Too bad you didn’t choose me, suckers! Burn forever!” No, He waits patiently till their pride is broken, then they ask Him for help and He forgives them and matures them. It’s very simple and very loving. So yes, in the end, all will go through Jesus, one way or another.
Hi Brian,
In a PM you said you said to me that you know nothing of what I believe. Although I agree with
your basic premise, I disagree with the embodiment that ‘Religion’ has imposed on your belief.Here is a verse that is an allusion to your premise to which I agree to.
”Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.” (Matt 5:26)Hell is not a pleasant place, so by turning to God’s propitiation in this plain, much suffering can be eliminated.
___________
God bless
Ed J (Joshua 22:34)
http://www.holycitybiblecode.org _________________________________________________________________________________________________________
”Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.” – JEHOVAH GODHi Brian,
Thank you for your gentle approach here, it is much needed! What you are writing about regarding the Presence Process sounds like developing a practice of meditating on God, His word and His love. Is that correct? I don’t think that can be wrong as long as our mind’s eye is on Him in truth. I don’t see how it would be good to be thinking about buddha or any other god besides Jehovah. I think that would be quite destructive actually. Only the truth will set us free.
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