SHOCK CHARGING SPIRITUAL ENERGY

 

Another interesting principle about spiritual energy I’d like to briefly mention here has to do with its shock charging nature. I’ve noticed that when I have a charged a lot of negative emotion and when I’m experiencing a great deal of emotional pain and discomfort, it actually feels much easier to charge spiritual energy. It’s actually easier than when I’m not so emotionally negative and am not experiencing emotional pain. I believe this occurs due to the healing nature of spiritual energy. In other words spiritual energy is not like a normal positive emotion that’s harder to feel the more emotionally negative you are and easier to feel the more emotionally positive you are. Rather spiritual energy even works well with negative emotional energy by attempting to remove it and effectively heal you from its effects. Thus the longer you charge negative emotions and engage in sinful behaviors, the more strongly compelled you feel to focus on God and do good again. This is why people often find God after engaging immoral behaviors for a prolonged period of time.

 

 

THE HOLY SPIRIT

 

Earlier I defined God in a fairly objective way that is based solely on the way our subconscious responds to our intention. And on top of defining God in terms of the positive nature of our subconscious response to intention, we also saw that we can know God’s characteristics in a manner that is similar to the one we used to know the characteristics for ideal relationships, such as the perfect friendship. But then how do I know that I’m really not just charging my subconscious according to some subconscious form, like the forms “hero” or “savior”? Is it possible that there is some subconscious form that I’m locking on to when I attempting to focus on the subject that I call “God”? Well part of the answer to this question has to do with the unique feeling of emotional purity that one feels when they focus on God specifically. However, the other part of that answer has to do with a very special phenomenon that occurs as you deep charge spiritual energy more and more. I remember when I was going through the spiritual phase mentioned earlier and charged spiritual energy for about a month straight, I prayed to God and asked for information about the spiritual world. As mentioned earlier on in the book, I always had an intense interest in spirituality and wanted to gain any knowledge that I could related to this topic.

          Well shortly after making that prayer, I started to think about certain things involving spirituality in the way that I normally would. I had a constant habit of trying to use reasoning and logic alone to better understand the spirit world. Well when I engaged in that usual habit this time, after having prayed to God about spirituality, I suddenly felt what I can only describe as a kind of surge of inspirational thought. I found myself using reason to put so many things about the spirit world together that had never occurred to me before and all of it made so much sense. It actually felt like I was being downloaded with information as I was experiencing this momentary period of inspired thought. Although I was technically just trying to use reason to better understand the spirit world the same way I normally do, it still somehow felt different this time. I got the sense that certain thoughts that were popping into my head weren’t actually my own. I continued to have similar experiences like this as I continued to charge spiritual energy more and more. Now to be clear I’m not necessarily talking about the constant ambient compulsion to be more moral, ethical and loving as is normal with this kind of charge in general. Rather, I’d sense compulsions that were very unique and specific and that only occurred some of the time and not actually all of the time. After a while of experiencing this, I began to realize what was happening – or at least I began to believe I did.

          What was happening was that either God or some higher angelic being was actually communicating with me on a subconscious level. These compulsions I would randomly experience at times had a feeling to them that I eventually came to recognize as being different from the normal compulsions that occur due to my own intentions and physical body. It was as though they had a kind of signature feeling to them that I could just tell made them different. Of course most of us are so used to our subconscious only doing things in response to our own thoughts and physical body that it’s not completely clear initially when it’s starting to do stuff in response to something else outside of these two factors. From the conscious mind’s perspective, the experience of subconscious activity during this time is “almost” the same as it normally is. However, there is still a relatively subtle difference and over time I came to learn to recognize that difference. The unique compulsions that I would randomly experience didn’t quite fit the normal pattern of compulsion that I’ve been producing and experiencing for pretty much my whole life. For the most part, I was like a fish in water that didn’t even realize that there was a usual pattern to my subconscious compulsions or that this pattern could ever change.

          However, I eventually came to understand that there was a pattern and learned to recognize the difference between compulsions that followed my normal pattern and ones that seemed to fit this new pattern. The one’s that fit the new pattern seemed to be coming from a spiritual presence of some kind. And it had a consistency to it that allowed me to know that this presence was always the same one each time it had compelled me in some unique way. Eventually I started to describe it as a kind of “voice” I was perceiving on a subconscious level. I came to believe, as mentioned earlier, that this was either God’s voice or the voice of some angelic being. Either way, it was as if it was speaking to me through subconscious compulsions. And it would essentially guide me in certain ways, usually depending on what I had recently prayed about. I will talk a little more about this phenomenon in the next chapter. However, this experience reminded me of something that is often spoken about in Christianity. In church, one often hears about the Holy Trinity – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is considered to be a kind of spiritual presence that comes from God and is able to influence our thoughts, emotions and the events in our lives according to God’s will. Now this is normally considered to simply be a religious belief with no real basis in reality.

          However, from my experience, I came to believe that this phenomenon does truly occur. I started to call this spiritual presence that began to influence me at the subconscious level the Holy Spirit. Simply put, when your spiritual energy charges up far enough and you express a true commitment to God and Jesus Christ, you actually begin to be able to, in a sense, hear the voice of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps more accurately, that voice becomes loud enough to easily recognize on a conscious level. I believe that this spiritual presence is actually always there influencing us, once we first receive it, and is directing our behavior to align itself with the will of God. But it gets quieter and quieter as our spiritual energy drops and louder and louder as our spiritual energy grows. And when it gets very loud, the Holy Spirit is able to influence your subconscious more powerfully and you’re able to perceive God in a whole new way. Now, needless to say, its presence and influence is never negative, invasive or overbearing in any way. It will not harass you or constantly give you compulsions that you don’t want. It respects your free will and will only communicate with you in a way that you have approved of through your free will. It should note that, even if you're not Christian, you can assume that God and higher beings will still guide you through compulsions when your spiritual energy charge is very high for a prolonged period of time. I believe that these compulsions will eventually guide you toward Jesus as they have me. But that is of course an experience that you must verify for yourself.

          We’ll talk more about how you can work with the Holy Spirit to influence and enhance your subconscious behavior in the next chapter. However, one thing I do want to mention now is what the experience of communicating with God, or some higher being, in this manner felt like. As I experienced this phenomenon more and more, I started to get the sense that I was actually communicating with God on a telepathic level. And I remember being amazed at just how clear telepathic communication was. Verbal communication seemed to me so clumsy by comparison. It leaves way too much room for misunderstanding and misinterpretation. I actually started to feel that verbal communication was unworthy of God, at least as his main means of communicating. Telepathic communication on the other hand is much clearer and much more elegant. Information wise, nothing gets missed. You understand everything fully. The best way I can describe it is to compare it to your own subconscious expressions. When you produce an intention and your subconscious carries out the action of expressing the context of that intention in your imagination, then you become aware of all of the information expressed in your intention in a more tangible way. Well instead of your conscious mind being the only one that is able to perceive your own thoughts with this level of fullness and clarity, someone else is now able to through telepathic communication. If some piece of information is missed in telepathic communication, then it simply wasn’t included in the intention you expressed. That being said, we’ll discuss the general mechanics of telepathic communication in more detail when we discuss the nature of psychic abilities in chapter 7.

 

 

VISIONS FROM GOD

 

The next phenomenon I’d like to discuss actually occurs as a consequence of the Holy Spirit. As mentioned in the previous section, the Holy Spirit can actually influence your subconscious as a result of your connection to God. This influence becomes stronger and stronger as you charge more and more spiritual energy. Well another phenomenon that can occur as a result of this influence, although an intense charge of spiritual energy is not necessarily required for it, are special dreams from God that are colloquially referred to as “visions”. When I was younger, I used to see a lot of online videos from people who would claim that they received visions from God and I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of them. Surely some of them were flat out lying and knew that they were lying while others were probably telling the truth as they really did see it. In some of these cases though, the individual probably experienced a regular dream even if they thought that it was a vision. But then was it the case that at least some of these experiences actually were visions in the supernatural sense of the word? The question was, which ones could I really trust and put any kind of stock into as it relates to being a reliable peer into the nature of the spiritual and supernatural? This once again demonstrates the problem with relying on the experiences of others, instead of your own.

          Well when I went through my phase of deep charging spiritual energy that first time, I also started to experience this phenomenon as well. I too started to have what I believed were visions from God and realized that this was a thing that did actually happen in reality. But then what exactly are visions? Well visions are special kinds of dreams that convey some general message from God or a higher being. Usually they’re very symbolic in nature but also very emotionally moving and inspiring. But then how can you tell whether or not you’re having a vision or just a regular dream? Well I like to think of the difference between dreams and visions as being like the difference between a coke and a pepsi or even a sprite and a 7 up. They’re very similar but not quite the same. The most obvious difference between visions and dreams is the way they feel. This is a bit difficult to describe in more detail at this point but, in a nutshell, visions feel very similar to psychic abilities. With psychic abilities, you’re retrieving information that is external to your own thoughts and body and this has a very specific, but subtle, subconscious feeling to it. Visions feel that same way. In fact it was mainly after I began to practice psychic abilities that I learned how to recognize the difference between visions and dreams.

          We’ll talk more about psychic abilities in chapter 7. However, other differences include the sense of patternization I mentioned earlier. Your normal dreams, though probably pretty random, still have a semblance of a pattern to them that reflects your everyday thoughts and experiences. Visions tend to deviate from this pattern so strongly that they will stand out to you, if nothing else, just for being so different and unusual from the normal kind of dreams that you have. Another quality about visions is that they’ll generally be pieces of information that you intuitively “just know” or automatically understand while you’re experiencing the vision. Now this phenomenon does happen in normal dreams too, but the information that you just know will be much more logically coherent and organized than the information that you “just know” for regular dreams. This effect of course is the Holy Spirit influencing your subconscious to alter your perception so that you understand certain things automatically. Now, in my experience, there will be some aspects of the vision that I don’t entirely understand but I will generally comprehend some main message or thesis within the vision. Another quality I’ve noticed about visions is that I tend to wake up almost right away after the vision has ended. I don’t think I’ve ever had a vision and then went back into a normal dream without waking up first.

          Lastly, when I have a vision, I notice that I can usually remember it much more easily and vividly than a normal dream, which I usually forget almost right away after waking up. This makes sense I suppose, since the purpose of a vision would presumably be to deliver some message to me. It wouldn't be very helpful if I was easily able to forget that message. Although spiritual energy is not necessarily required for visions, they do seem to happen more often in my experience when my spiritual energy is high. I suspect that as you charge more and more spiritual energy, you may also start to receive visions from God as well. Sometimes visions will occur in response to a prayer of yours but other times they will sort of just come out of nowhere when you least expect them. Sometimes they’re very intense or rather mild. I remember having a vision about a place that I believe to be hell, which I’ll talk about in more detail in the next chapter. I’ve also had visions that let me know that I was on the wrong path, which I sometimes call a “warning vision”. Personally I believe that everyone gets warning visions throughout their lives, almost as a kind of divine progress report. I’ve also had visions that essentially were messages telling me what I needed to do in response to some prayer. As a Christian, I personally believe you will probably have visions that direct you toward Jesus Christ regardless of what your religion is or how long you’ve been believing in it.

 

 

SPIRITUAL TRADE OFF EFFECT

 

In this section, I’d like to talk about a principle that I’ve come to believe in and perceive the world through as a result of my experience with charging spiritual energy. This principle ultimately shapes the way I perceive the entire purpose of life and the reason why we’re all here. To understand this principle, I’d like you to first recall what was previously mentioned about the nature of happiness both in chapter 14 of book I and in this chapter. I previously stated that happiness was not actually a destination the way it is often depicted in movies but rather is actually more of a juggling act. The emotional state we call happiness is really just the act of properly balancing three different needs you have on a subconscious level. These needs, slightly reworded here, include pleasure, purpose and spirituality. It is only when you properly charge your subconscious for the purpose of all three that you can be truly happy. If any one of these needs are missing, then you won’t truly be happy. In fact I’d even say that spiritual energy, when properly charged and expressed in your behaviors, tends to naturally include the other two anyway – we will talk a bit more about this in chapter 10. However, for clarity, we will still treat it as a separate form of happiness from the other two. Doing this has allowed me to make a rather interesting observation about the nature of human behavior and the reason why we may all be here in the first place.

          At first glance, you might think that the act of charging spiritual energy is generally a pleasurable experience. After all the more spiritual energy you charge, the more connected to God you’re becoming at the subconscious level. If God truly is the most pure source of positivity in all of reality, then surely coming closer to him in any way will always feel good and pleasurable to you right? Well, shockingly, the answer is actually more of a yes and no rather than just a resounding yes. This rather strange and unexpected phenomenon is something that I’ve come to learn about in my own experience with charging spiritual energy and attempting to go deeper into my relationship with God. But then why does this phenomenon occur? Or better yet, how is it even possible that getting closer to God in any way could ever feel anything but more pleasurable? Well the answer actually has to do with what was mentioned in chapter 7 of book I about subconscious forms and the phenomenon of form morphing. Recall that form morphing is the process by which a person charges their subconscious to alter their own perception so that they have an easier time perceiving a specific subconscious form. Well this principle combined with the sensitivity of spiritual energy and certain physical responses from your body are why getting closer to God may not necessarily always feel entirely pleasurable to us.

          To understand this, let’s say that you skipped breakfast and went straight to work in the morning. You ended up becoming so busy at work that you didn’t have a chance to eat. Yes you were so caught up in your work that you didn’t even eat on your lunch break – just go with it with me for a moment here. You then leave work and decide that you’ve earned the right to enjoy a nice extravagant meal after all the hard effort you gave at work today. You decide to go to your favorite restaurant and order your favorite meal. You then leave and go back to your house to eat this meal. As you’re walking toward your home, you notice a homeless parent and child on the street begging for food. The child looks very thin and very weak from hunger and the parent asks for your food in order to feed their child. The only food you have right now is the nice meal you’ve ordered to treat yourself as a kind of reward for working so hard today. You still haven’t eaten the whole day and, once again, feel you have earned the right to enjoy your extravagant meal. But then what do you do? Do you give this family your food to help the child even though you will be hungry in the process or do you decline their request and enjoy the food you’ve earned? Which behavior is the more moral behavior – the one that injures you for the sake of the child or the one that injures the child for your sake? Putting this another way, which behavior is more likely to cause you to produce an intention that ends up bringing spiritual energy in rather than pushing it away? Feeding the hungry child or declining the parent’s request for you own comfort? Naturally, of course, giving away your food and sacrificing your own momentary comfort for that of the child’s is more likely to bring in, or charge, spiritual energy. But then, if you do this, you will feel even more physically uncomfortable from your hunger. And yet still, this behavior will clearly be the more spiritual action in most cases.

          Although this example was a bit over the top, I think it still does well in highlighting the point I wanted to make. As you can see from this example, the more spiritual action was actually not the one that felt most obviously pleasurable in that moment. There was still some discomfort associated with it. And yet, at the same time, it was not completely without some form of pleasure either. The act of giving the family food so that the child will not go hungry will still cause us to feel some degree of emotional pleasure too. We would feel an inner joy at the thought of knowing that the child’s discomfort has been reduced and that we helped to cause this outcome. This inner joy we feel comes from the spiritual energy that we ended up charging through that particular moral action. In other words we were able to charge both spiritual energy, which feels good, and some negative emotional energy, which feels bad, through this altruistic action. The negative emotion of course coming from how you feel at the thought of not being able to enjoy your meal now. In fact even the physical discomfort of being hungry is now also able to continue because you have given your food away. As you can see, this circumstance is rather interesting from a subconscious perspective because it allows you to charge both spiritual energy and negative emotional energy somewhat easily. Or rather, to be more clear, it creates an auspicious opportunity for you to try to charge both despite the fact that they are naturally antithetical to each other. In a sense, moments like these represent opportunities in life where you’re able to essentially trade some physical and emotional comfort in return for more spiritual energy. You can make a choice that increases your connection to God even if it will technically cause you some momentary discomfort in the process.

          And yet this discomfort is not necessarily a requirement either. Although you would still feel some physical discomfort from being hungry in this situation, you didn’t necessarily have to gripe and moan about it either. There is a well known Buddhist quote that I believe describes this paradigm quite well, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”. In other words, you wouldn't have felt any emotional discomfort from your action had you simply chosen not to produce an intention that charged this kind of grieving emotional energy. In fact had you chosen to do this in the case of the hungry child, you’d be able to charge even more spiritual energy and would feel the positive emotions associated with it even more purely and potently. However, because your intention can still alter your perception and cause you to see some negative subconscious form – such as grievance – in a circumstance that it is a good approximation of a positive subconscious form – altruism in this case – you can still end up charging both spiritual energy and some antithethical negative emotional energy through this circumstance. I believe more net spiritual energy would still charge in this case because of its extreme sensitivity. This should occur as long as you’re not grieving too much about your choice to engage in the more virtuous action. Too much grievance could cause you to regret your altruistic choice and could end up pushing away the very spiritual energy your virtuous intention and action brought in. Circumstances like the one in my example highlight the somewhat strange dichotomy that exists between actions that bring spiritual energy in and one’s that tend to push it away. Both possibilities tend to come very close together in these kinds of circumstances and cause them to behave almost like decisive nodal points through the choice based opportunity they provide. On the one hand, you could make a choice that increases your connection to God even though you might feel some discomfort in the process. Or you can choose to increase, or maintain, your own personal comfort at the cost of an opportunity to increase your connection to God.

          This binary phenomenon in choice, as it relates to spiritual energy, is one that I sometimes call the spiritual trade off effect. This is because opportunities like the circumstance involving the hungry child represent situations where you’re essentially faced with making a trade between spiritual energy and satisfying the ego. You can pick one of these outcomes in such situations but not both. Thus you have to essentially trade one feeling for the other. The more often you choose the feeling and action associated with more spiritual energy, the more you’re choosing God over yourself and the more you choose the feeling and action associated with satisfying the ego, the more you’re choosing the self over God. There is a well known story in Native American culture involving two wolves. One of the wolves is good while the other is evil to put it rather simply. Both wolves are constantly at war inside of us, vying for domination of our mind and spirit. The one that will ultimately win in the end is the one that we continuously feed and make stronger through our thoughts and actions. In other words, the more you trade satisfaction of the ego for the satisfaction of your spirit, by increasing your connection to God, the more spiritual a being you’re becoming. Eventually the ego, in a sense, dies from malnutrition and lack of sustenance while the spirit lives on in God and thrives. This truth also represents a very important quality to spiritual energy that is important not to overlook. As mentioned in the section on deep charging, building spiritual energy isn’t as simple as focusing on God and increasing your connection to him in easy and relaxing circumstances, such as in secluded meditation. Due to the nature of our subconscious short term memory and the sensitivity of spiritual energy, to really charge spiritual energy to higher and higher levels, you’ve actually got to engage in real world behaviors that pull spiritual energy in. This means making the more spiritual choice in circumstances that are difficult and could cause you some momentary emotional and physical discomfort.

          In other words, the more spiritual path is not always the one that seems the most comfortable and pleasurable in the moment. Sometimes it can be very uncomfortable and even quite painful physically. Yet it will always be the one that gives you the most pure and fulfilling form of joy that you can experience. Other kinds of joy will simply be ones that your intention tries to charge by virtue of altering your perception. However, because of the extraordinary sensitivity of spiritual energy, you’ll never quite be able to charge these other forms of joy as purely as you can when you actually engage in virtuous and altruistic behavior. Thus to get to really high levels of spiritual energy charge and experience the highest and most fulfilling form of joy, you’ve got to be willing to endure physical discomfort at times, particularly during these spiritual trade off moments. Emotional discomfort is not necessarily required during these trade off circumstances but we will no doubt experience these feelings in our spiritual journey as well due to our own ego. Again, the more our ego dies, metaphorically speaking of course, the less emotional discomfort we’ll feel walking the spiritual path. It should be noted that the life of Jesus is perhaps the most clear example of how the more spiritual path is not always the most physically comfortable or easy to walk. I vehemently disagree with anyone who would describe the spiritual path as one that is based on being comfortable all the time and doing whatever one feels like in the moment to keep that comfort. That just isn’t how spiritual energy works.

 

 

TEMPTATION, NEGATIVE PLEASURE AND POSITIVE PLEASURE

 

In the next section, I’d like to talk about an interesting belief and perspective I’ve come to have as a result of seeing the world through the lens of the spiritual trade off effect discussed in the previous section. However before talking about this, I’d like to talk about another interesting property of spiritual energy that I’ve come to learn about through my own experience charging it. I remember talking to my brother one day about how good it felt to charge spiritual energy and how I couldn’t wait to go back to charging it again. I was too busy at the time to focus on charging it and therefore allowed its energy to discharge. This naturally caused me to not feel as good as I did when it was charged up. My brother, who has little interest in spirituality, made a joke about how I was becoming addicted to this positive feeling that I associated with spiritual energy. However, I then explained to him that this was impossible and isn’t how spiritual energy works. But it is an interesting point from someone on the outside looking in. From this perspective, why couldn’t someone become addicted to the feeling of spiritual energy? Or, in other words, addicted to the feeling of closeness to God? Do spirits and angels in heaven experience “addiction” to God’s spirit? Does that sound right? The answer of course, as alluded to earlier, is no. Spiritual energy has specific properties that actually prevents us from ever becoming addicted to it. This is true no matter how much we may desire to experience the feelings associated with being closer to God’s Spirit.

          One of the main properties of spiritual energy that prevents this feeling of addiction has to do with the freedom it compels us to feel. Recall that spiritual energy compels you to behave in a way that reflects God’s nature. Thus the more spiritual energy you charge, the more of an urge you feel to think and behave in a way that is holy. Well one of the feelings associated with a state of holiness is the feeling of freedom. As you charge more and more spiritual energy, you actually feel more free to do what you wish. You don’t feel like you’re actually being forced in to doing anything. In fact it is ironically this same feeling of freedom that can cause you to choose to do things that push spiritual energy away – we'll briefly revisit this phenomenon again in chapter 10. But then if we feel more free as we get closer to God, then this would seem to also indicate that we will feel less and less addicted as we get closer to God since addiction specifically makes us feel like we're not free. Well, in my experience, this is correct. But this would also seem to be a contradiction of sorts because things we're addicted to still cause us to feel a least a little bit of pleasure too. Is it possible to actually feel pleasure while moving away from God? Is not pleasure a quality of God too? How can one ever feel more pleasure when moving away from God rather than always feeling less of it? Well, oddly enough, I've come to learn that it actually is possible to feel some degree of pleasure while moving away from God but this requires a deeper explanation.

          The reason this is the case has to do with the form morphing phenomenon discussed in chapter 7 of book I and the extreme sensitivity of spiritual energy. Recall that the conscious mind can still charge the subconscious to perceive positive qualities in negative immoral behaviors. The perception of this positive form allows you to actually still engage in a negative behavior and feel a degree of pleasure from it. That pleasure is not actually coming from the negative behavior itself though but rather is coming from the way you morphed the behavior to make it appear like something good. However, even when this is done, the sensitivity of spiritual energy is so great that it is not fooled by your trick to make something bad seem good and still drops as you engage in that immoral behavior. Yet, it does not drop all the way but only a little bit. The fact that you still have some spiritual energy remaining means that you're still capable of feeling pleasure, even if in the way of morphing a context to make an immoral behavior seem good. In the end this all means that you feel both some degree of pleasure from the immoral behavior – due to form morphing – while also, at the same time, feeling some bad feeling from the immoral behavior too – due to the loss of spiritual energy it caused.

          But still, pleasure itself is a quality that comes from God so you cannot keep losing spiritual energy and continue to feel large amounts of pleasure at the same time. This means that if you keep engaging in immoral behaviors, then even the pleasure that you feel from form morphing the behavior will eventually start to go away too and you'll barely be able to feel any pleasure from the immoral behavior. In fact you won't be able to feel much pleasure from any behavior at all, including other immoral behaviors, because your spiritual energy is so low. At this point, you will only feel the negativity of immoral behaviors and will feel a relatively constant sense of emptiness as well. The only way to gain the ability to feel pleasure again, at this point, is by engaging in moral behaviors that replenish your spiritual energy. When we listen to people, who've engaged in negative behaviors for a prolonged period of time, describe how they feel or even when we recall how we felt during times that we've engaged in negative behaviors for prolonged periods of time, this phenomenon of losing the ability to feel pleasure turns out to exactly be the case. Before discussing some examples of this though, let's define a new term to make our discussion a bit smoother. Going forward, we will call pleasure that comes from an immoral behavior negative pleasure.

          A good example of an immoral behavior that can feel good in the moment but cause us to feel empty over time is the act of getting revenge. When someone harms you, you may become bitter about the way they treated you and wish to get revenge on them to even the score. When you finally do get revenge on them, it may actually feel quite good at first. However, a part of you will always feel bad when you see the harm you caused the individual that harmed you. In this case, we often form morph our vengeful action to look more like justice rather than revenge since revenge feels bad to us and justice feels good. But spiritual energy, once again, is not fooled by our mental gymnastics and correctly gets pushed away by our vengeful action. And if we continue to live by satisfying our need for vengeance, we will start to feel more and more empty over time and will eventually be unable to feel almost any pleasure at all. This is nature's way of letting us know that the path we chose is wrong and that we ought to course correct and choose a path that brings spiritual energy in rather than pushes it away.

          That being said, the reason we often continue to engage in immoral behaviors that push spiritual energy is because of the temporary pleasure that we are still able to feel from them. This temporary pleasure of course is the negative pleasure described earlier. When we feel that negative pleasure and recall the experience of it at a later time, we may produce an intention that expresses desire and yearning for more of that form of pleasure. But negative pleasure is associated with immoral behaviors that push spiritual energy away. Thus this intention is really expressing desire for some subconscious frequency that is associated with losing spiritual energy rather than getting more of it. This means that the frequency itself is probably not a purely positive one and that giving in to the desires associated with this frequency is generally going to be bad for us. The feeling of wanting and yearning that we experience from this subconscious frequency associated with negative pleasure is colloquially referred to by the term "temptation". In other words negative pleasures cause us to experience the emotion of temptation. Now what's interesting about the feeling of being tempted is that it seems to weaken our will power and makes us feel like we're unable to resist that which tempts us even though we will often want to.

          The more we focus on this feeling of temptation, the more the frequency itself charges and the more the subconscious alters our perception to want the negative pleasure even more and compels us even more strongly to engage in the immoral behavior associated with that negative pleasure. This means that, as temptation charges more and more, our willpower becomes weaker and weaker and we feel less freedom in our ability to choose as a result. This temptation charge actually represents form of subconscious bondage and is what causes people to continue to engage in immoral behaviors despite the obvious loss of spiritual energy they cause. Often a person will not want to continue to engage in the immoral behavior because the loss of spiritual energy causes them to know, at the subconscious level, that their behavior is wrong. But they're ability to resist the negative pleasure has diminished so much that it's almost like they can't say no to it. When this occurs, the individual's subconscious mind is in a state that is generally alluded to by the term addiction. When a person charges the frequency of temptation for a prolonged period of time, I believe that their body even starts to change to reflection this subconscious state of addiction. This often happens when a person watches too much pornography for example.

          Now this weakening of one's willpower as temptation charges is directly antithetical to the nature of spiritual energy. This is because spiritual energy makes you feel more free as it charges where as temptation makes you feel more restricted, bound and addicted as it charges. This tells us that it is a good rule of thumb to generally assume that anything which tempts you, is essentially trying to get you to engage in a behavior that pushes spiritual energy away rather than bring it in and should be avoided. The trade of spiritual energy for some negative pleasure in return is never worth it. Now in contrast to negative pleasure, as you might have suspected, is positive pleasure. Positive pleasures are pleasures that come from the absolute nature of subconscious energy and do not require form morphing some behavior in order to feel it. You can also think of positive pleasure as any form of pleasure that can easily be experienced while also charging more and more spiritual energy. By definition, this means that it's basically impossible to feel tempted by positive pleasures or for you to become addicted to them. This is because these kinds of pleasures can be experienced more and more as spiritual energy charges.

          Since you can't charge spiritual energy and feel more tempted or be in a state of addiction at the same time, this must mean that you can't get addicted to positive pleasure and will actually more free as a result of experiencing it. The positive emotions you feel from charging spiritual energy itself is actually an example of positive pleasure. Other kinds of positive pleasures include the emotions of love, compassion, inner peace, gratitude, altruism and so on. Behaviors that cause us to feel these emotions, without form morphing, are pretty much always going to be moral behaviors. Moral behaviors in general are neither tempting nor possible to become addicted to. For example, protecting children from abusers or providing comfort for the poor are behaviors that you can never become addicted to because they are truly virtuous behaviors that bring spiritual energy in. That being said though, it should be noted that sometimes a behavior can look moral on the outside but actually be immoral on the inside. For example if you want to practice altruistic behavior and give to others but are really only doing this so that you will be praised by them and feel validated in the belief that you are above others a result, then this is actually an immoral behavior because it stems from the intention and subconscious frequency of pride and vanity.

          Thus a person could actually become tempted to and addicted by a behavior that might seem altruistic but actually isn't. This unfortunately is a behavior that many religious cult leaders engage in when trying to convince others that they are moral. However if we engage in actual moral behaviors that cause you to experience positive pleasure, then this will always pull spiritual energy in and bring you closer to God as a result. One last comment I'd like to make about negative pleasures is that they require a weakness of will while positive pleasures require a strength of will. This is because negative pleasures tempt you while positive pleasures do not. In a certain sense, this would seem to give negative pleasures something of an advantage over positive pleasures. The only real reason to go out of your way to choose positive pleasures over negative ones is because they make you feel closer to God while negative pleasures do not. Thus the very act of making the strenuous effort to resist immoral behaviors that tempt us is actually a sign that you're choosing God and want to be closer to him. This is why the act of resisting temptation is holy in and of itself. In my relationship with God, I have learned that resisting that which tempts me is one of the core tenets involved in maintaining a strong relationship with him. I feel that this core principle is not talked about enough in churches and in society in general.

 

 

BOTH ENDS PRINCIPLE

 

For the final section of this chapter, I’d like to now talk about a very special principle that is related to what we spoke about in the previous two sections. This principle actually relates to what I believe to be involved in the ultimate reason for why we’re all here. In other words, it is related to what you might think of as the purpose of life. I don’t believe it is the only purpose, but it is a major part of it. To understand this principle, recall that living your life in a way that brings you closer to God won’t always be a cake walk. In other words, it won’t always feel like the easiest path to walk – even though it will always be the most fulfilling. This occurs due to the spiritual trade off effect and the fact that the difficulties of life will often put us in circumstances where we can either bring spiritual energy in by acting virtuously or push it away by acting selfishly. In these circumstances we generally won’t be able to do both at the same time so we have to pick one. Well, as I started to think about the world from this perspective more and more, I feel like I started to see a pattern in it and began to have a deeper understanding about the purpose of life and the ultimate nature of the human condition. At first glance it might seem like there are certain people who are born into very unfortunate circumstances in this world and, at the same time, others who are born into very fortunate circumstances. You may have often wondered why this is the case? Why should one person be permitted to live a life of comfort and luxury while another is destined to face a life of extreme hardship and difficulty. This of course is all determined before that person has even done anything wrong and might at least merit the conditions of the life they are born into.

          I was actually never too caught up on those particular questions because I always trusted that God had a good reason for doing this. Well, as I began to look at the world through the lens of the spiritual trade off effect, I believe I began to see some of that reasoning. I realized that, although it may look like some people have really easy lives, most people actually do not have such an easy life. Not even people born into wealthy families of millionaires and billionaires. It may seem like their lives are very easy from the physical human perspective but it actually doesn’t appear that way from a more spiritual perspective, at least not to me. This is because I believe that one of the main purposes of life is ultimately to choose God using your free will. This concept may sound a bit strange when worded this way because it is not clearly defined what “choosing God” means. But that’s where the spiritual trade off effect comes in. I believe that life is ultimately one big test that measures your affinity for choosing God and does this, in part, by virtue of how many times you choose the more virtuous and altruistic path when you could have chosen the more selfish one. In those moments where you could have engaged in some action or way of thinking that pulled spiritual energy in or pushed it away, how many times did you choose the one that pulls it in. Of course such a test would be somewhat pointless if it were not difficult. This is the ultimate reason why life in general is hard. You’re being tested on whether or not you will choose the spiritual path in the most difficult of times and under the most powerful of temptations. Notice for example that no matter how difficult a person’s circumstances are or how much they are suffering, they’re never actually forced to produce a negative intention. Of course they will at some point in this difficult life but nothing actually has the power to force them to. That is not an accident.

          The reason your free will is still perfectly intact during life is so that you can still make the decision to choose goodness even when it’s hard to. But here’s the thing, although everyone is tested on how much they choose God through the decisions they make throughout their life, it is not necessarily the case that everyone takes the same test. Each person’s test is different and is unique to them. But I believe each person’s test is still, in fact, difficult. Such difficulty is quite easy to see for people born into what we would consider to be unfortunate circumstances. For example a person born unattractive or disfigured, too short or too tall, mentally or physically disabled in some way, poor or into difficult and distressing circumstances, such as to abusive parents, could easily be recognized as having a difficult life spiritually. A person who is born with physical features they do not want must learn to love themselves anyway. Someone who is born in circumstances with abusive parents or family must learn at some point in their lives to forgive those who have wronged them. He or she who is born poor and yet sees others flaunting riches – the situation I was born into – must learn not to be jealous or envious of them and should express gratitude for what they do have. When people are born into unfortunate circumstances, they must learn to walk the spiritual path by loving themselves and others who seem to have more in the physical world than they do – that is their test. But then what about people who are born into highly favorable circumstances? For example how is someone who is born healthy and attractive, wealthy, gifted and with highly supportive family and sociological resources challenged in this life? Well, to be clear, they are still challenged but from the other end of the spiritual spectrum.

          Someone who is very attractive for example might be tempted to become conceited and believe that they are above others because of the way they look. An intention that expresses this belief of course would push spiritual energy away. They could also become tempted to use their looks to gain worldly things that feed their temptations. This would create a vicious cycle that continuously pushes spiritual energy away and causes that person to continuously waste their time on earth pursuing physical pleasures that will ultimately leave them unsatisfied and empty due to prolonged loss of spiritual energy. Similarly someone who is born incredibly wealthy might be tempted to become extremely greedy and prideful. Their easy access to worldly pleasures would cause the individual to become highly tempted by them and, if they keep giving into those temptations, highly dependent on them if not completely addicted. This person’s greed and pride would also cause them to look down on others and lack compassion for them as it is easy to perceive them as having less worth than a rich person. Similarly someone who is extremely intelligent or gifted in some way may again think that they are above others who are less intelligent and so on. Thus, from a spiritual perspective, we see that even people who are born in to sociologically favorable circumstances are still quite challenged spiritually. For example I often see stories about adults who make huge amounts of money through adult content online. They think all of this money means that they are gaining something very valuable and easily but, from my perspective, they are gaining absolutely nothing. Anything you gain by trading your spiritual energy for it is nothing gained at all. At least that’s how I see it. And pornographic adult content is generally an activity that pushes spiritual energy away for those that watch it, engage in it or distribute it. We will talk more about this in chapter 5.

          Thus the physical world can create an illusion for these kinds of beautiful and attractive people that actually acts like a trap that can cause them to easily fail the test. Similarly rich people will often donate money to charity, thinking that they are a good person for this and that this makes it ok for them to own more wealth than they would realistically need for ten life times. While it is still a somewhat good thing for them to donate money to charity from a spiritual perspective, it still doesn’t count for all that much as far as the test of life goes – at least that’s what I believe. This is because they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too. In other words they’re trying to do something good but without doing it in a way that really challenges their ego, the selfish part of their identity. While they’re willing to donate money to charity, they’re only willing to do so in a way that doesn’t truly threaten their wealth and comforts. But then you can’t say you fully choose God in that circumstance then because, in reality, you actually still chose comfort and only pretended like you were choosing goodness. Only when the rich man makes a real financial sacrifice in honor of God's name is he actually choosing God over himself. Now I don’t necessarily believe that a rich person has to give all of their wealth away either because they could potentially do more good in the world through that wealth too. For example someone who already has enough wealth to last them ten life times could simply stop keeping the money they earn through a salary and donate it to others so that they may live more comfortably. This rich individual could afford to do this for the rest of their life and forgo making any more money for as long as they live since they simply wouldn’t need it. Yet this concept would be absolutely crazy to most rich people despite the fact that they truly don’t need most of the money they have to live comfortably. They could also use their wealth for good in other ways too such as building and sustaining churches and places a worship. However what matters at the end of the day, I believe, is your intention and whether or not you truly chose virtue over increasing the short term comfort of the self.

          We can see from these examples that even rich and highly attractive people can be born into spiritually difficult circumstances. I don’t really believe that anyone has a truly easy life in terms of spirituality. People born into sociologically favorable circumstances are just challenged from the opposite end of those that are born into sociologically unfavorable circumstances. Because of this I like to call this concept the both ends principle for lack of a better name. This simply refers to the fact that all people have spiritually difficult lives whether they are born into the negative end of what society considers favorable or into the positive end of it. And then, of course, there is everyone in the middle who experiences various degrees of a mixture of both. I believe that when you perceive the different lives that people live and are born into, you can see that no one’s life is really that much better than anyone elses. Spiritual difficulty is completely consistent for everyone across the entire planet as far as I can tell. We will talk more about my beliefs regarding life’s purpose, for those interested in them, in chapter 9 and 10 where we talk about the basic principles of metaphysics.

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Footnotes

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1. Another thing I believe atheist do to convince themselves there is no God is to focus on some random definition of God they create in their conscious mind and then reject it. Since words defined by the conscious mind mean nothing, it is quite easy for them to focus on that definition and reject it without feel bad. However when atheist focus on the definition of God, as defined by the subconscious, and reject that, they feel a very negative feeling that tells them that this desire and belief is wrong – same as with any immoral behavior. However, out of intellectual pride, they may decide to ignore this feeling and focus back on the random definition they made up in their conscious mind in order remain being atheist without feeling bad as a result. Which is pretty much the same mental gymnastics that any one does when trying to avoid the bad feeling that always comes with a behavior that is immoral.

 

2. I say it this way because the body is generally balanced and would rarely release such a large amount of hormones that they cause you to feel sexually excited to the point of insanity. However, even if the body doesn’t necessarily charge your subconscious to this intense level on its own, your mind can still charge sexual energy to this degree if it wants to. In fact the mind charging sexual energy in a negative way is actually what leads to the negative emotion of lust. Many people believe that the body causes you to be lustful due to its effort to get you to reproduce. But I don't believe this is true. The body makes you feel sexually excited, yes. But it doesn't make you feel like you're losing your mind with sexual desire. That comes from the mind charging the frequency of lust and your body changing over time in response to this prolonged charge.