Loehr-Daniels Study Course of Basic
Teachings
Edited by Franklin Loehr
If you are going to be intelligent
in the work you do for your Soul, you must have a further understanding of the
importance of attacking and rooting out negative qualities in your personality.
That understanding lies in the understanding of the nature of evil. (See
Atlantis, Lucifer and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, Part 2) .
Evil is not simply the lack of good.
There is a source of energy in the universe that is intent upon bringing about
separation between the Creator and the created, rather than working for
the union of the Creator and the created.
This source has its own will, which
is not God’s will. That source in conflict with God’s will is told about in
terms of the human understanding that prevailed when the last book in the Bible,
the Book of Revelation, was recorded. In the 12th chapter, beginning
at the 7th verse, we read how the forces and beings warring against
God’s will were cast out from the Heavens - the dwelling place of Unity.
Union and Separation cannot abide together.
That which represented separation was cast out. God represents life and the
nourishment of life. The separated consciousness could no longer feed upon its
original source, God. It had to find another source of nourishment.
In the Earth realm it found a state of
consciousness inherently carrying the same energies - the God-qualities - which
gave nourishment in the Heavens. But this Earth source was unevolved. If the
force of separation, which in the Biblical chapter referred to is called “The
Dragon” and which we call evil, could claim this potential God-life on earth as
its own source of nourishment, it could survive. So earth-life in all its forms
was claimed as a food crop to nurture that consciousness departed from
God-consciousness.
Every negative thought, every negative emotion,
gives energy to evil. But every time you refuse to energize within yourself a
negative thought or a negative emotion, you are denying food to the enemy - you
are refusing to nourish evil. So you battle evil within yourself to cleanse and
clear your soul and this earth.
In that process you learn to be a
warrior, to do valiant and effective battle against evil in the world. Souls
cleansed of negativities from individual personality lives can then be banded
together to attack the evils that exist in communities, in nations, in the
world.
The movie The Comedians, which starred
Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Alex Guinness and Peter Ustinov, is a very
graphic presentation of some of the great social evils that exist in our world
today. Such evils can be conquered by souls whose stains from evil have
been scoured away. And a personality, a selected incarnation, can be used as a
major scouring pad for its soul.
Editor’s Note: This movie was
based on Graham Greene’s best-selling novel of the same name. It portrayed the
regime of terror that existed under the dictatorship of “Papa Doc” Duvalier.
If you as a personality are being
used as a scouring pad for your soul, and if you really work at that which needs
to be scoured clean, your efforts can show up in a comparatively short time in
your personality life. This is very cheering.
But then you need to remember that this scouring
process may need to be applied to your personality’s subconscious areas as well,
because the subconscious of the personality has a parrot-like quality as well as
other qualities. It picks up negativities from the conscious level, faithfully
reproduces them, and stubbornly holds on to them even while you are changing on
the conscious level.
This activity on the part of the
subconscious sometimes shows up in dreams. You may go to sleep at the end of one
day during which you have scrubbed hard on a particular defect and have seen it
coming clean. But your subconscious can shape a dream around that defect, and
give it a force-field of emotional negative feeling intense enough so that as
you waken in the morning your consciousness may be, as it were, trapped in that
force-field.
Then you may feel very heavy of spirit,
discouraged, hopeless. This can help you gauge your emotional maturity. You can
hold on to the feelings aroused by the subconscious’ activity, decide your
scrubbing yesterday was all in vain, and gloomily spend the day rescrubbing.
This is emotional immaturity.
Or, you can take mental control of the negative
feelings caused by the dream and say to the subconscious, “Oh, no! I am through
with that area. That has been well scoured and cleaned. Now I will move on to
something else.” This is emotional maturity. The subconscious has a mule-like
quality so you may have to take your stand of emotional maturity several times
to convince the subconscious.
But finally this parrot-like quality of the
subconscious will reproduce the positive practices you are establishing on the
conscious level. Then your use of the personality as a scouring pad will be
completed. There are many other ways in which a person can aid and abet the
growth of its individual soul in earthliving. For one thing, you as a person can
provide a great deal of healthful nourishment to the soul. Remember, the soul is
not an animal being: life and spirit are not native to the realm of matter.
Dr. Loehr went into this earlier in these
lessons. The soul upon incarnation comes into the realm of animal life, but this
is “a strange country” for the soul. Your soul needs your help. You as a person
have the privilege, the opportunity, and the responsibility for nurturing and
assisting your soul.
This is one of the values of making
place for a worship experience in your weekly program. This is one of the
contributions of our churches to us that perhaps we have overlooked.
We often have turned to the church for answers
to problems and questions. If we have felt that we did not receive the answers,
we may have become dropouts from the organized church society.
However, the church offers one thing that no
other organized group in society really offers - that is the opportunity to
worship together. Yes, you can worship by yourself and you need to. But the
church offers the supportive framework of a group of people coming together to
worship, to remember that over and beyond all the problems and the difficulties
of life, over and beyond all the challenges, they are souls, made in the
image and likeness of God, growing into partnership and oneness with Him.
You have the opportunity to nurture your soul by
what you as a person do in the framework of praise and worship, in the framework
of singing together and of prayer, in the framework of listening thoughtfully to
expositions of spiritual matters. In these practices you open up and create in
the earth realm an “environment” similar to that which nourishes and guides your
soul in the other realms.
Editor’s Note: Both Grace and
Franklin could worship in churches whose beliefs were far removed from
theirs—even churches whose pastors would call Grace and Franklin “heretics or
heathens.”
Another way you as a person can help
your soul is by talking to it. This has come out a number of times in the life
readings.
In a given situation Dr. John may say: “Here you
have a soul who is young in earthliving and it is all set to go ahead. It has
had enough lifetimes so that it feels it knows how earthliving should be run,
and it is very enthusiastic. It is reaching out to do this and do that, but it
is getting the personality all mixed up. The person can take hold and in essence
say to the soul, ‘Look, I am the one in earthliving. I have intelligence.
I am an earth being. I know something about earthliving that you don’t know
because you are not an earth being. Now let’s get together. Let us work as
partners together.’”
If necessary, do not hesitate to
take hold of your soul, talk to it, give it encouragement, aid it. But be firm,
too. Sometimes you really have to “tell the soul off.” If you are in the
category of those who think of the soul as knowing everything and being far, far
ahead of the person, this idea may surprise you.
It simply is not true that the soul is always
all-wise, all-knowing - at least the portion of the soul incarnate in a given
personality. There are times in earthliving when the personality expression
knows more than the portion of soul incarnate with it! Not only can you talk to
that portion of your soul that is incarnate with you, but also you can call in
other energies of your own soul to help.
A Loehr-Daniels Life Reading was given for a
young woman who took a very dim view of this life. She couldn't find anything
she wanted to do. She couldn't find any activities that interested her. She did
not like people, and did not want to have anything to do with them.
Dr. John said in her reading: “Here we have a
case of what some people call ‘possession.’ But it is not possession in terms of
an excarnate entity or even another soul wanting to come in and take hold. This
personality is being possessed by a portion of her own soul. She is being
possessed by that portion of her own soul that was in a lifetime immediately
prior to this, in the 1800s, when she lived the kind of a life she really
enjoyed, as a Southern belle, before the Civil War period.
“That portion of the soul continued on in the
excarnate personality and is now reaching back and saying to this one, ‘You are
a part of me, your own soul, so I have a right to tell you what to do and what I
want. I don’t like this life. Let us put into this life some of the elements
that were so good from the earlier life in the 1800s.’” Dr. John taught that the
girl had to talk to her soul and point out that this is not the 1800s, that
patterns of living are quite different now.
Also, Dr. John taught her how to send out a
call for other portions of her soul, more knowing and more understanding, to
join her as a person in swinging around the small portion of the soul resisting
this life and bringing it into a working relationship with the personality.
It was the personality that
could achieve this. How important you as a person are for your own soul!
What does that thought do to you?
How do you feel when you think, “I as a person have a service to render to my
own soul?” Does not that give you a feeling of expandedness?
If you can think often in that way you will find
you will not be so subject to shifting feelings, to moods, to the littlenesses
that assail us all as personalities. You will not be so worried as to whether
you are going to make a contribution to the world - whether your life really is
“going to be worthwhile.” Your life is going to be worthwhile as you serve
your own soul!
Each one of you is very important in
two basic ways. Each one of you is a soul, and each one of you is a
personality.
Each one of you as a soul has a
responsibility to your personality-self. You must help the personality to
discover that, in the simple words of Jesus, “Life is more than food and the
body than raiment.” You as a soul must help the personality push back the
horizons set by the physical senses, and discover and experience the realities
that exist beyond the reach of the senses.
Each one of you as a personality has
a responsibility to your soul. Through the person of you, your soul is
experiencing the earth plane of existence, which, according to Dr. John’s
teachings, is a cosmic school of learning just as much as any other cosmic
school on any plane. There are experiences and learnings a soul can have only
through an incarnation, a personhood. You as a person must help your soul in
those learnings—give it a chance to learn.
How? You must expose yourself to the
search for spiritual truth. You must read, go to lectures, think, meditate, pray
and worship. You must dwell on the things of the Spirit. These things your soul
knows about.
As your soul finds you as a personality turning
to the spiritual life, it will bring its knowledge to you. Through intuition,
through revelation, through flashes of memory, through inspirations, your soul
can give you much of the spiritual knowledge you seek.
As a person what further can you do
for your soul? Live life well! Build character. Build consciousness. For that
is what carries over from one life into another.
As a soul you are - you have
a beingness. You as a soul introduce you as a person to the secret of being. As
a person you do - you act in a way that teaches your soul what it needs
to learn in earthliving.
Being and doing. As you are and as you
do, your soul and your person join hands, become co-partners - and God
blesses you both!
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