Tag Archives: Fear

Developing My Loving Self Assistance Group Now on YouTube

‘Developing My Loving Self’ 2.1 & 2.2, both sessions of our second group in the ‘Education in Love’ Assistance Group series, are now available for viewing on YouTube.

If you are watching these for the first time, or if you are reviewing them after your own attendance at one of the groups, my tip for gaining a well-rounded take on the concepts involved is to view the individual presentations from group 1 & 2 together.

That is, after watching the first talk in group 2.1, proceed to watching the first talk (of the same name) in 2.2.  Then move onto the second talk in 2.1. When you watch the second talk in 2.1, you can follow that with the second talk in 2.2, and so on for the entire programme.

Each group’s questions and interactions with Jesus really bring out different elements in the theme of each presentation. This allows the viewer to more fully grasp the foundation material before hearing about its application in other areas.

Here are links to the group playlists:

Education In Love Group 2.1 – Developing My Loving Self Playlist

Education In Love Group 2.2 – Developing My Loving Self Playlist

 

And if you are needing inspiration to launch into watching this material, here is an individual presentation from group 2.1 that is powerful on its own.

Let Yourself Fall from the Plane

Imagine yourself high in the air, a passenger in a small plane. Mid-flight you are calmly sitting in your seat, eating free peanuts and enjoying the scenery from your window seat.

viewfromtheplane

Suddenly, one of the other passengers leaps up, and throws open the door of the plane. Shock fills the cabin.

Everyone else begins to exchange looks, the question written on their faces “What’s going on?”

Someone calls out “Hey, what are you doing?” but the sound of roaring air is all that anyone can hear.

The mystery passenger starts moving through the plane. Sickeningly you realise he is coming towards you.

“Why?!” you think as cold panic begins to creep up your spine. Before you can resist he has undone your seat belt and he grabs you by the shoulders.

Pushing and pulling he drags you towards the open door, air buffets your body and you understand that he means to shove you out into the empty space below.

Without a parachute and thousands of feet up in the air this fall would surely mean death. Wide-eyed, sweat springs from every pore. Your heart is pounding and your voice seems to have cruelly escaped you.

In silent terror you begin to struggle. You desperately grab at anything solid to try to prevent this fate. The fibres of your being are geared to resist, your body is tense.

Clinging to the door frame, your stomach becomes a sudden block of frozen ice as you glimpse the green and brown paddocks far, far below.

And then suddenly, it’s over.

Your hands have loosened from the door frame, the force of the stranger has won and you are free falling, hurtling towards solid earth below.

There is nothing left to do. Your will is surrendered to the fall.

Now, there is only your fear.

**********

My soulmate shared this analogy with me in order to help me better understand the emotional difference between feeling afraid and actually releasing fear.

I believe he was attempting to help me know that:

In order to release fear we must surrender to it.

On the free fall from the plane you don’t talk about your fear, you don’t reason with it.

You don’t intellectually analyze its root cause.

You don’t phone a therapist or a friend.

You don’t have a group therapy session to help you cope.

You don’t seek commiseration, compare notes or consult a text.

You are IN the experience of fear. It dominates your reality and you have no thought or space for anything else.

freefall

While any part of us struggles against fear we cannot let go of it. While we still act to avoid, to mitigate our terror or bargain that we can handle ‘only this portion’ and ‘not that bit of it’ we are not experiencing the emotions that will heal us and change us into beings free from fear.

As you struggled to stay in the plane, no doubt you would have described yourself as terrified. However much of your will was also still involved in resisting[i].

On the free fall to the ground, there is surrender to fear because you know that there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent your circumstance.

Releasing fear also feels like this.

We do not argue with it or rationalise it or do anything at all to try to prevent it. The fear is there and we allow it to overwhelm our senses and experience without resistance or intellectual analysis.

The use of this metaphor is to help us recognise that even in times when we would describe ourselves as feeling afraid most of us are still resisting and attempting to control our terrors and fears. This state does not allow for the release of emotion or changes in our souls.

The story is there to illustrate the difference between fighting at the door and the free fall. In terms of the experience of emotion the two circumstances represent very different states.

But this is where the analogy must end. If I carried it to its completion I would be implying that surrender to fear leads you to physical death.

Actually quite the opposite is true.

Surrender to fear doesn’t lead to you ending up a splattered, dead blob on the ground.

Allowing surrender – without impediment – to the experience of our fears actually prolongs our life and often opens up creative and joyful parts of us that have long been dormant.

It is the denial and suppression of fear that results in certain death.

Surrender to fear actually averts danger.

Allowing our emotions, particularly our fear, means that we become more sensitive to the emotions and motivations of those around us as well. We have clearer, more truthful, perceptions of others and this means that we can make more informed choices and actually act sooner to ensure our safety.

When we release fear we avoid illness, we are more creative and for the first time make joy a real and lasting possibility in our lives.

The release of fear allows us to live in harmony with love and love is the way that we gain life.

If there is any death associated with the surrender to fear is it merely the death of our willingness to honour fear above all else. This is a death to celebrate not mourn.

The major block to the release of fear is that most of us believe that the uncontrolled experience of fear will lead to something worse than death. We believe that there is no point to feeling fear and instead protect and nurse it at all costs. And this is why change does not happen. When we live in these false beliefs, rather than challenging them, we shut down full surrender to fear.

We might experience fear in brief moments but there is no ‘falling from the plane’.

Most people who have heard Divine Truth are at this time in a stagnant place. This is because they are living in their fears or still living in addictions that mask their deepest fears. There is still much ‘fighting at the door’ instead of surrendering to the emotions that are already present within.

[i] It should be noted that I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t resist if someone is literally attempting to throw you from a plane, only to be aware that fear is not passing through us in this place.

Living In Fear & the Freedom to Choose Differently

The sad truth is that the entire world’s population lives in fear in some or all aspects of their lives.

Some of us acknowledge some of our fears some of the time. But seeing our fear doesn’t mean that we deal with it healthily. In fact, most of us feel justified in our fears and demand, be it covertly or overtly, that our environment and the people in our lives make allowances for our fear driven limitations.

Then there are those of us who live in complete denial of large amounts of fear about any number of things at any given time. Denial is a perceived sanctuary and many people reinforce the barricades of the castle and pull up the drawbridge over which truth may have passed. Routines and addictions mask any sensation of fear, numbness becomes the norm, and even though the supposed ‘sanctuary’ can feel cold and damp at times, the real issue of fear is never mentioned and life is branded as normal.

We deny or diminish what scares us because in our souls we are actively resisting and suppressing the sensation of fear. This is how we choose to use our will.

And to aid us in the quest for avoidance we choose and create addictions, and attract relationships to help us navigate our days and unless we are sensitive or aware we rarely notice that the way we are, the way we do, the way we be is less about our real self and more about the escape from fear.

This willingness to live in fear is an affliction that inhibits growth on a global scale. It removes us from our true selves, it creates illness and suffering, it limits joy and discovery. And yet, I notice that most of us, when faced with this simple truth, wish to deny responsibility for our choice in this matter. We might acknowledge the affliction but want no part of the cure.

We resist the truth that living in fear and its multitude of negative consequences has come about through the exercise of our own free will.

What Does It Mean “Living in Fear”?

Living in fear or living by fear is very different to feeling our fears.

living in fear

Living in fear means that we allow the fear within us to guide and dictate our actions, our interests, our relationships, our work, our pleasure, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the programme we watch on TV.

Every action, inaction, decision and indecision is made with the direct purpose of preventing the experience of fear. In other words, we are constantly responding to fear rather than simply allowing ourselves to experience it as a feeling. Fear becomes our evil task master – literally.

It is very difficult to know and discover our true selves when we live in fear since in this state our desires are limited to things that do not trigger fear. What we commonly associate with the sensation of ‘happiness’ is actually a lot more to do with a sense of relief at avoiding fear and having addictions met than any pure experience.

The truth is that as we suppress fear we simultaneously strangle desire and most of us, most of the time, prize the avoidance of fear above the exploration of our wildest dreams and deepest passions. We rarely pause to consider what we would be interested in or inspired by if fear was not a daily part of life.

And while living in fear can come to feel routine and normal it actually requires a great deal of vigilance, effort and control. Whether we realise it or not, when we live in fear all our systems are alert and geared towards its prevention. We walk through life sapped of our vitality and never experience our full potentials for energy and creativity.

Living in fear ages us and limits us. But even more than that, because we honour its prevention above anything else, fear becomes our God, our ruler, the dictator who drives our decisions and assessments. In this state, we are apt to abandon morality and ethics and even rational thought if it means that we can allay fear. In other words, unless we are willing to be humble to the feeling of fear we will become horrible, unloving people when fear is triggered.

Living in fear damages not only ourselves but the world and the people around us. It is the reason we stand idly by when bad things happen. It means we bow to the threats of people who are clearly unloving, thus lowering our own condition and the potentials for love in the immediate environment.

The nursing and retaining of fear is one of the major causes of all evil and unloving behaviour in the world.

Living in fear keeps us silent and inactive when love would compel us to speak and to act.

Living in fear means we begin to prefer error to truth.

While we justify not feeling fear we are automatically going to be unloving and contribute to the evil in the world in our daily activities and through our interactions with others.

There is always a choice between humility to fear and the resistance to and suppression of it. And each time we choose suppression and resistance we employ means, methods and emotions that are out of harmony with love to do it. We purposefully choose to use our will to NOT love, to NOT be ethical, to NOT be truthful, to NOT be moral, and each time we do this we are seeding evil on this planet.

Unfortunately we do this everyday.

And when we commiserate with fear and make allowances for the fear in others we only continue to foster conditions that lead to more evil and suffering.

contributetoevil

Signs We Are Living In Fear

  • We structure our lives to avoid situations that challenge us physically, emotionally or spiritually
  • We avoid situations and people that challenge our belief systems
  • We feel disconnected from our personality
  • We feel tired often
  • We get angry when challenged or things change unexpectedly
  • We are controlling of people or our environment
  • We lament our ‘inability’ to do things, to create, or to feel our feelings
  • We sense fear and get angry or we sense fear and go rigid or freeze
  • We suppress our desires. We might say things like “I don’t know what my passions are”, “I’m not sure what I truly desire or want from life”.
  • We discuss our fears frequently
  • We expect others to make allowances for our fears
  • We justify unloving behaviour due to our ‘special circumstances’ when we become afraid
  • We have difficulty making decisions. We procrastinate. We deny the need for action in our lives, we resist change.
  • We make jokes about our fears or the fears of others. We make fun of people who display fear.
  • We obsess about how others view us or how people feel about us.
  • We judge people or situations often
  • We stay busy – we resist spending time with ourselves doing nothing
  • We can’t be ourselves in front of groups of people – instead we resort to façade or we freeze up
  • We use as many addictive behaviours as possible
  • We live in denial and resort to wishful thinking about our progress and personal development.
  • We seen reassurance often
  • We distract ourselves from our true fears by inventing ‘fears’ we feel we can manage (emotions of self-deception)

Note: There are many more signs that could be added to this list. These are just some examples.

Denial

Most of us are in denial of just how many things frighten and terrify us.

I used to exist largely oblivious of what frightened me. I just didn’t think about it, instead I acted to avoid it and I had addictions that helped me do that.

Coming out of denial can happen as we attract events that make it impossible to deny fear any longer, like say meeting your soulmate who is Jesus (smile).

Or we can take a more pro-active approach by examining our lives truthfully.

We can for example look for three key flags that point to our living in fear:

1. Avoidance

This includes physical avoidance of situations, people and events. It also refers to (perhaps) less obvious avoidances which include every attempt we make to minimise, justify and shift the blame in relation to our fear.

2. Attempts to control & manipulate

This includes control and manipulation of our environment, other people, our children, animals, and spirits. Any time at all that you have the desire to control or influence the will of another away from what they truly desire you are acting in fear rather than feeling it.

3. Anger

This includes any sense of frustration, annoyance or irritability all the way up to outright rage, verbal and physical violence.

Examine the situations, habits, events and relationships which you either avoid, attempt to control or that trigger your anger. In every case you will find that you are living in a fear.

 

signsoflivinginfear

Awareness – It’s Not Enough

We can live in fear and avoid all awareness of our feelings by meeting addictions and controlling our experience and environment. But even after gaining an awareness of our fears, we can continue to live in them if we carry on doing as they command.

We can be aware that we are afraid of certain things but if our physical and emotional choices are still motivated by the desire to prevent the actual confrontation of fear no soul change has occurred. We will continue to live in fear unless we begin to make choices to challenge the messages fear gives us.

I notice many people who say that they have decided to ‘feel their emotions’ are still basing their life choices on fear – which demonstrates that they are not yet challenging their fears. The scope of their lives, limited by fear’s dictate, does not expand and this is proof of living in fear.

Another way I notice many of us not shifting into releasing fear is that we begin to have a sensation of fear or anxiety, but then not let it overwhelm us completely.

Many people live in a constant state they call feeling afraid but are actually just living in fear.

In reality they have slight sense of the feeling, allow it for a little while, feel it’s ‘all too much’ or ‘that’s enough now’ and then do one of two things:

1. Act to suppress it by controlling external circumstances or people
e.g. changing the subject, distracting oneself with a chore or the internet, leaving a situation

2. Shut Down the emotional sensations of fear internally in an attempt to manage or control its expression and prevent overwhelm
e.g. becoming harsh and judgemental of the experience of fear, panicking, intellectually attempting to analyse what the fear is about

While we try to keep the feeling at bay like this we aren’t truly experiencing it and therefore fear won’t dissipate.

While it’s important to recognise the problem of fear and even write a fear list, don’t kid yourself that self-awareness means soul changes. Becoming more aware of our fears and deciding to ‘feel our emotions’ doesn’t mean that we have stopped living in fear.

Really Releasing Fear

First things first, these things are essential:
1. Stop kidding yourself that you are dealing with fears if your life and relationships remain the same
2. Notice how often and in what ways your actions, decisions and opinions are guided by fear

Then in order to change, start to do the opposite of what fear commands, seek ways to challenge fear and, surrender to the experience of the fear that comes as a result.

In order for fear to dissipate it must be experienced emotionally. There are no shortcuts.

Here are some words from my soul mate on this matter:

“I have had to process through a lot of fear myself. My fears were intense, and many times I thought that the effect of it would kill me. But I always felt relief after my experiences. I learnt that we need to do a number of things if we want to get through fear:

1. Always allow the experience of it.

2. Do not go ‘out of body’, do not go away from the experience, do not try to run away. Going ‘out of body’ only allows spirits to take over the body, and running away only increases the fear.

3. Deep breathe all of the time during the experience. Never stop breathing diaphragmatically. This assists you to stay in your body.

4. Have faith in God, and pray for God’s assistance to not only stay in your body, but also to help you go through the experience. Always pray from your heart.

I found that when I did these things, I always got through the fear, even though the pain was very intense, and lasted up to 4 hours at a time, and sometimes longer. Also, once I was through the experience, I allowed myself to sleep, and I looked after myself. Because I allowed the experience, the next experience was always shorter. If your next experience is not shorter, then you are doing one of the above things incorrectly.”runningaway

Understanding the Power of Choice

Fear when left unchallenged pervades our life.

By living in fear we are agreeing to the lie that we really do have things to be afraid of and that love is not the most powerful force in the Universe.

Sadly, the more we tell ourselves these falsehoods and live our lives according to them, the more fear grows.

By avoiding dealing with fear we are avoiding the potentials that love and truth can bring to our lives and to our planet.

Conversely, as soon as we stop living in fear, it will begin to loosen its hold on our lives. We begin to feel more freedom and joy. We make room for Truth.

As we begin to experience fear this liberates our true self and opens up our heart to desire and possibilities previously subdued.

godisreadytohelp

To overcome fear I believe it is necessary for each of us to recognise the individual power for change that God has granted us through the gift of free will. We can harness that gift, and use our will to love.

In fact, it is only through the engagement of our will in opposition to the fear that we currently allow to govern our planet and our lives, that deep, true and lasting fulfilment becomes possible. And through this same use of will we cease supporting the fear in others, which actually assists them towards the possibility of personal fulfilment as well.

Fear fights for itself, it justifies inaction, and it makes us experts at excusing our lack of love. Unless we challenge fear and the hold we’ve given it over our lives, we have no hope of change.

Even the smallest choices made in fear send ripple effects that impact not only ourselves but our environment, our children and those people around us and carry on for longer and in more ways than we can currently conceive of. And each time we make these fear-based choices we reinforce fears commands, we live in the lie and we create more inertia to challenge and confront when we do finally decide to choose love.

We are exercising our will to make choices in relation to fear minute by minute, day by day. The cessation of life lived in fear does not depend on any external circumstance, event or person. It is in our hands alone and depends upon only one thing – the personal choice to cease listening to fear and instead to use our will in the direction of love, truth and ethics. Without making courageous choices that grow integrity to principles such as these, feeling emotions is not only useless but the emotions felt are not those which will heal us.

Yet when we are willing to be steadfast and humble as we challenge fear, emotions will begin to flow from us. Change will happen.

I encourage you to examine your choices- these precious expressions of will. They can be your catalyst for change and growth or simply a manifestation of excuses made to live in fear.

I Escaped a Cult

The other day my kindly youtube account recommended a number of videos for me. I suspect they do this by scanning the word themes of my subscribed channels and suggesting to me videos with similar tags or themes to those I’ve already watched. (I’m sure there is a specific technical term for this process – if you know maybe you can write it in the comments and I can amend this post!)

Since I subscribe to our Divine Truth Channel as well as our FAQ channel, which now has an entire playlist on cults, one of the videos recommended for me was “I Escaped a Cult” (clip below).

I watched the clip. I wept for these people. I felt about the reasons why people are drawn to cults. I prayed for the healing of those I saw on film and all others who are damaged by such horrible acts and erroneous belief systems about God and Love.

It wasn’t until I was finished with all that watching, feeling and praying that I suddenly realized that loads of people assume that my life is similar to those of the people described in the documentary. It also dawned on me that people might even think that we treat people like the ‘leaders’ in these groups treated the people who told their stories.

Its true that the false, slanderous, misleading and sensationalized media coverage of us in recent years has encouraged people to think in such ways. But I am also aware that many would assume these kinds of things simply based on our identity claims.

Now you might think I’m a little slow on the uptake when it comes to considering how others perceive us. Truth be told, I have (of course) considered it all before.

But given how different my life actually is to what the media has said about it, and given that I actively spend everyday attempting to grow in and extend love, truth and humility to others, and given that I am adored, encouraged and inspired by the man I live with, its easy to forget that people think that I live a tortured, power-hungry life with a narcissistic megalomaniac. So extreme is the contrast in viewpoints that the latter assumption can be swiftly dismissed by my heart and mind as utter absurdity (and is thus difficult to retain).

Put simply, such slander is so daft and uninformed that I don’t think about it much anymore. And I sometimes forget that many people are actually holding onto the daft, uninformed and absurd ideas about who we are and what we stand for.

So at times I still feel suddenly very shocked and naive when I watch these types of documentaries and realize that this kind of abusive behaviour would be associated in the minds of others with my life or belief systems.

You see, we are all about assisting people to end their acceptance of abusive and unloving behaviour. We teach the embracing of free will and that to receive Love from the One Absolutely Reliable Source is the surest way to happiness and growth – no intermediary necessary!

We preach that God is not One who punishes or requires penance in order to receive His Love, nor is any person more important or powerful in God’s Eyes than any other (so if we live in harmony with God’s Laws we would never be able to view each other in terms of hierarchy or to set up abusive power systems on Earth).

In short, we are the most anti-cult people I know.

I’ve written about this subject before, and I was considering writing about it again yesterday. But then Jesus had an email requesting an interview/ opinion on cults and he wrote awesome things. So I’m just going to share his words after the clip of the documentary below.

I know that if you read my blog regularly you might be scoffing at the necessity for me to write about such topics. You’re know you’re not a member of anything and you are completely relaxed in the knowledge that you aren’t in a cult, right?

Well, in my opinion and experience its always good to explore emotions around such topics. They are sensationalized in our media and our lives because many people – no, most people – harbor huge fears about being controlled, manipulated and hurt. (Jesus discusses this in more detail in the text below).

While we deny and suppress these fears, they have power in our lives. Fears of being abused, controlled and manipulated, when left unhealed and unchecked, can cause us to be needlessly suspicious of good people, and/or foolishly trusting of people with bad intentions. They are the very fears that people who want control use to manipulate us e.g. they accuse us of being controlled and manipulated in order to have us change to what suits them or to fall back under their control.

It can sound like a complex issue, and honestly unless we explore our doubts and fears things can become complex and confusing. Thankfully if we are willing to delve deep into our feelings, ask the tough questions, and feel our pain of past hurts and manipulation, we do emerge with the clarity to discern who and what is trustworthy.

If we involve God in the process, we also learn what Love truly looks like. With such knowledge we can never be fooled by dubious characters, peddling false teachings and tainted ‘love’.

Excerpt from a Response to a Media Request for an Interview Regarding Cults.

Written by Jesus

April, 2013

No matter what you have heard from other members of the media, we do not have a religion or a cult. All Mary and I do is speak at seminars we provide for free, provide information for free over the internet about Divine Truth, and share Divine Truth with anyone who questions us where possible. Just because we claim that we are Jesus and Mary Magdalene, it does not mean that we fit your assumptions of what persons making those claims would normally be like. We do not have any person staying with us where we live. We live on a 40 acre private property that I purchased quite some time ago when I was still computer programming. No-one else lives with us. We have no experience of living in a cult, and we are not “cult leaders” as the media has falsely claimed, we have no “following”, we do not interact with the same people on a day to day basis, we do not manipulate and control people, since that is against our teachings of love and the honouring of the free will of the individual, and so I could not provide you with any perspective on the matter aside from my own opinion.

I have also placed my comments about Cults on our Divine Truth FAQ YouTube channel for anyone who wishes  to see the truth about what we do, along with my general comments about cults and cult leaders as well. I do feel that many cults on earth are quite destructive, but I also feel that there are many institutions on the planet that are just as destructive in their teachings, because they are not based around love. I include some orthodox religions, economic institutions, political movements, and other professions amongst these destructive institutions. As I said, anything that does not honour the free will of the individual, promote the exercise of love in our day to day life, and allow for the discovery of further Truth, scientific and otherwise, is destructive.

I have a lot of compassion for people who have been a part of cults, and I do completely understand why people are attracted to them. I feel these attractions begin often because of the unloving treatment of parents towards their children, and this makes their children susceptible to the influence of self-installed “authority” figures when they become adults. In addition, many claims are made in the name of God, and people are even encouraged to go to war, and perpetrate violence, for the sake of their “Gods”. This is all cult-ish behaviour on the part of the people encouraging such actions. I have spoken of these things in my Divine Truth FAQ channel.

 *******

I feel that the general population has a huge amount of fear regarding “cults”, and they bring this fear, which I believe comes from their childhood, and their experiences of being controlled and manipulated by society as children, into their adult life. As adults, we usually operate either in agreement to, or rebellion of, unhealed emotional issues from our childhood. This means that we are either attracted to persons who are “cult-like” authority figures, or we could say more like the impression we had of our own parents, or repelled by and afraid of such persons (and sometimes have both reactions at different times, just like when we were children).

If I, within myself, felt secure in my own search for truth, and honoured my own free will to make choices and decisions for myself no matter what other people in society or my family or friends generally thought, and understood what love really acted like, and could determine when someone was truly unloving in their actions towards me, then I would not feel the need to either follow a “cult-leader” or fight against one. I would feel secure in my own choices and decisions, and I would be able to change my mind at any time. I would not listen to anyone who manipulates me or attempted to manipulate or control me through force or threats, since I would see such an action as harming my own free will choice, and being out of harmony with love.

A person with conviction in their own belief system will be firm for what they believe, but they, if they were loving, would never force (either verbally, emotionally or physically) their belief system upon me, and require that I change my own belief system without applying logic and love to the analysis of the belief system they are sharing. They would honour my ability to choose for myself what I wish to believe, even if it disagrees with their own concept of what is right and true. Most religions do NOT do this. They instead attempt to force their beliefs, along with the threat that God will destroy or punish me at some time in the future for having the wrong belief. I feel that God does not punish us for wrong beliefs. I feel that the only penalties in the universe are for acting out of harmony with Love, and so, people who attempt to force me into a belief system are acting out of harmony with love and will eventually feel the weight of their own unloving actions. The pain and suffering in this world are the direct results of society acting out of harmony with Love.

I also feel that society has many false beliefs surrounding what is acceptable when we are a child, compared to what is acceptable when we are an adult. For example, the average Christian believes, as the Bible states in Proverbs 13:24 “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them.” For the average reader of this verse, it justifies spanking the child, or acting violently towards the child, in the name of “love”. So, many people feel justified in hitting their own children as a result, as a form of “discipline”. But if we hit an adult with a stick or even with our hand (even with the intention of correcting them), government law in most Western nations views that as violent assault, for which we can be incarcerated. So, a violent and terrifying act towards a child is tolerated by society (for many reasons including the parents concept of “ownership” over their child, and the acceptance of religious books that promote violence), and, at the same time, the same action perpetrated towards an adult is called a violent crime. This is a measure of the hypocrisy of society, allowing a violent action towards a child who cannot protect itself from such an act, while at the same time attempting to protect an adult who experiences or is threatened by the same violent act.

The result of this is that very few people have a correctly aligned “compass” when it comes to determining what real Love would do. Unfortunately there are many times when we are tolerant of what society calls “heinous crimes” towards children, for many reasons religious and otherwise, and I have only provided one example. These crimes are not tolerated towards adults. Of course, when those children grow up, it makes sense that their own concept of what love is will be severely crippled, and therefore, it becomes difficult for them to determine who actually loves them, and who is just making statements of “love” without any real love being present. It causes them to be open to people who use many words of “love”, but who do not have loving feelings or actions. It opens them to concepts that are flawed when examined by love, and they readily accept such flawed concepts, since those same concepts were forced upon them as children. It will also be very difficult for them to correctly reason about whether the group of people they are becoming involved with actually promote really loving teachings and actions.

As you say, society must learn “where to draw the line”, and I feel the line must be drawn by the thought I mentioned in my previous email to you, and that is; “anything that does not honour the free will of the individual, promote the exercise of love in our day to day life, and allow for the discovery of further Truth, scientific and otherwise, is destructive,” and needs to be corrected. This line would apply whether the problem is exposed within a family, within a community, within an organisation, within a religion, within a government, or within a country. If this line was consistent in all circumstances, then each individual, including children, could feel safe to explore the world and continue their own quest for truth without fearing potential violence, control, manipulation or any other act which would harm its own expression of free will. Then all of us would feel comfortable in the world, whether we had different belief systems or not.

What I am suggesting is that eventually we all need to agree about what is loving behaviour, and what is unloving, and make a personal choice to live in harmony with what is defined as loving. But this will need to be done with logical and reasonable discussion, not with emotive belief systems that have no bearing on logic, not relying on books (religious or otherwise) written hundreds or even thousands of years ago that are obviously flawed when we examine them from the perspective of love, or by reverting to character attacks of others just because they have a different opinion to ourselves.

Just my thoughts towards the discussion for what they are worth.

You can check out more from Jesus about cults here.

He’s so wise my guy.

I love how relaxed and jovial he is answering questions about cults! Every media outlet I’ve encountered accompanies such discussions with ominous, foreboding music. Jesus just cracks a smile and answers without hesitation or fear.