Ok the question is, that discernment question.
Telling the difference between the voice for fear and the voice for love.
Initially I used feelings.
I remember one time I was working through the Course and Jesus said, the one right use
of judgement is how do you feel?
I thought I need to pay very close attention to that.
When I looked at the life of David, I said David is into intellectualism, into denial
and repression.
Though David feels some things, David has spent an entire life at not feeling.
Now the course is saying, the one right use of judgement is how do you feel?
The first problem was, ok very good but I don’t feel.
I wish I could feel more intensely and more subtly and be more sensitized to those feelings.
That’s a barometer, a touchstone to getting in touch with what is underneath.
I started going through a process with the preferences, I said to Jesus how am I going
to feel now that I spent decades at not feeling.
Jesus said we are going to use some of those things that you love the most about this world,
music.
I was taken by Jesus to the library and different shops to get this music.
The emotions would just start to well up in me.
Tears would start to come when I would listen to certain music.
Then after the long phase of working with the music, my dog Chipper when I was younger
was like an unconditional loving symbol that I could pour out all the emotions.
I think I saved thousands of years working with this dog.
He would lick my tears when my tears would come out, his little pink tongue would be
licking them.
That was another huge way of getting in touch with emotions.
Then the movies, Jesus would take me to the movies.
Not the movies that David would pick, these were far from it.
I remember being guided to Blockbuster video sometimes.
I would say I am here only to be truly helpful, I’m here to heal, guide me to the movie
that would be best for me.
I would pick the movie and I would say, ugh you have to be kidding.
I am not going to watch this violent movie, or I am not going to watch this sad depressing
movie.
No, I am not going to watch another war story.
I have had enough of these war stories.
The persona of David had very strong preferences in terms of movies as well as music.
The guidance came in to help wash away and bring up those emotions so that I could start
to feel.
The other thing about David, not only was David shy but this shyness carried over into
relationships.
David did not go on his first date until he was 27 years old.
That’s a bit extreme.
That was David.
I remember when I came across the Course and was in a relationship at 28 years old, basically
what I found was that there were these intense emotions that had been pushed down out of
awareness that were coming up now in the context of the relationship.
Very intense.
I had graduate school, this relationship, and a teaching assistantship going on at the
same time.
The combination of those three brought up an enormous amount of emotions.
I would say those were a key block in being able to discern the Spirit versus the ego.
That repression and denial buffered me from being able to tell the difference.
I wasn't sensitized enough.
I remember saying I can't see how people even function in this world with emotions this
intense.
It felt debilitating.
I felt like I was completely dysfunctional as a human being with the intensity.
I felt like I allowed myself to feel and that turned on a waterfall of tears.
I thought omg, I’m not going to be able to turn this waterfall off.
I have unleashed this crying man, after all those years of being the stoic boy that doesn’t
cry.
I turned on this giant waterfall.
Then that turned out to be really important because I became much more sensitized to my
feelings and when I wasn’t in alignment with those thought systems.
I would also hear things from Jesus, the Holy Spirit never commands and never demands.
Then I started to realize that there was a voice in my mind that was doing a lot of commanding
and a lot of demanding.
It was quite stern.
It was quite serious.
Actually it was pushy, very pushy.
I started to really feel this is not the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit never commands, never demands.
Always these gentle suggestions, gentle.
Offering a plate of suggestions to me every day.
The Spirit was very soft.
That started my journey of starting to know the difference.
Because the ego is quite clever, it does disguise itself.
It can even use affirmations and it can even quote the Course.
It quotes scripture.
If it had a face, it would be smiling, it would be snickering.
This works every time.
I get them with the affirmations and the vanity of thinking that they are a spiritual person
for holding on to these spiritual affirmations.
It really was another trick.
It has taken a lot of fine tuning over the years.
It started off with me really allowing myself to feel.
Without that I don’t think that the discernment could have unfolded at the speed in which
it did.
It reminds me of when I go down to South America, a lot of the women down there are so open hearted.
You can feel their hearts immediately, they pour out everything.
They seem to have a lot of partners and husbands that are really the macho, the bravado thing.
That kind of macho bravado thing and trying to stuff feelings down is one of the best
ways at blocking your spiritual awakening.
It shuts it off.
It’s almost like a divisive thing, it keeps the unconscious mind buried.
That is one of the questions we can spend the rest of the week on.
We probably will with Gary’s sessions and my sessions, there will be little pointers
that will come in for increasing that discernment.