The life of every living organism must be based on self-interest. Every moment of our lives is based on it. Breathing, eating, sleeping, loving, helping others. A plant turns toward the sun in order to get the nourishment it needs. And it’s flourishing gives us pleasure. If it were to deny itself what it needs to do well, would we think it was being virtuous? The very nature of life is based on self-interest. You are ALWAYS doing what you conceive of as self-interest, even if it’s denying your self-interest in order to be what you believe to be virtuous. The reason you would do this is because it makes you feel better about yourself. If doing what you believe to be virtuous ended up making you feel bad about yourself, you wouldn’t do it.
Following your own self-interest defines who you are. It is the expression of who you are. When you are allowing yourself to move toward your enlightened self-interest you are contributing who you are to the whole. You are revealing a piece of creation.
Even if you are not connected to your enlightened self-interest, you must start with the self-interest you can access in order to move toward more enlightened self-interest. Those who deny their self-interest are living in an artificial shell, a false persona, in a false world. They are not authentic. Life around them is devoid of anything real, and therefore anything of real nourishment or value.
Before you made limiting decisions, and before you started creating false personas and false worlds, you were living in a state of true self-interest, i.e. what really benefited you. Your focus was on life, truth, experience. You were led by what mattered to you. That is what guided your every moment — opening up your life, experience, and development. You were participating in living, flowing, experiential truth.
What makes suicide bombers so frightening and difficult to combat is their denial of the most basic self-interest of being alive. They, presumably, believe they are following the self-interest of doing what it takes to be virtuous, by doing God’s work. And they look forward to their reward in some version of heaven.
The people who are the most disconnected from their own most basic self-interest are the ones who act in ways that are the most distorted and dysfunctional. And it generally results in out of control behavior, under the radar of consciousness. For example people who are immersed in fundamental, repressive religious dogma, who can find no legitimate outlet for their human desires, can tend to act out sexually dysfunctional and destructive behavior in situations where they think it can remain hidden or not talked about, such as molesting children.
It is not possible to deny one’s own self-interest. It will be expressed in some form, either in its pure form or, as a result of being denied, in its distorted form. In its distorted form, it is likely to be destructive.
From the Life is Meant to Work Prepare yourself for a New Reality
teleseminar
A pivotal question at the bottom of how civilization has organized itself is “Is humanity inherently good, or is it bad, or is it simply weak and corruptible?” The bottom line way we define the answer to that has to do with what we believe people would do if they weren’t controlled. And that has to do with the issue of self-interest. If people are not controlled, or if they don’t control themselves, they will go toward their own self-interest. And so the issue then becomes how we perceive what self-interest is.
The idea that self-interest is bad, is based on the idea of original sin. In other words it is based on the idea that if people pursue what they desire, what really matters to them, including human desires, they will break Divine laws and will cause harm to others. But the problem here is not inherent in the nature of self-interest, but in how we conceive of what self-interest is.
When many religious perspectives or spiritual philosophies define human self-interest, they are actually defining human emotional defense systems, which get built up as a result of having made limiting decisions. And when they are advocating letting go of desires, this is also the framework they are referring to. People’s emotional defense systems result in them going toward substitutes for what they desire rather than the real thing. And these substitutes are generally harmful to oneself and others.
But humanity doesn’t live solely in their emotional defense systems, and we are in an evolutionary process through them. Desiring these symbolic substitutes is not the nature of humanity or human desire. People going toward these kinds of desires (that can often be addictive, and that we associate with shallowness, perversion or lacking in self-discipline) does not have to do with the inherent corruptibility or weakness of human beings, or the nature of human desires. Self-interest is inherent in any living creature. It’s not the self-interest that is the problem, it is the substitutes for it that are the problem. And the substitutes are created because of the denial of the real thing. The way to enlightenment is not a denial of our self-interest, or of our human experience, it is the recognition and embracing of the truth of what it is. It is coming into experience, not avoiding it — which means the difference between realizing that the nature of reality is positive, that if we come into what is true, it leads us to the highest good of all concerned.
On the one hand most of humanity doesn’t have any concept of the depth of the distortion of our perception of reality, and how much we are living and forming our perception of reality from an upside-down and insane perspective. But on the other hand, there is little concept of the inherent goodness of the human soul, that what the truth is about who we inherently are is total goodness, not in spite of our self-interest, but because of it. This is because what we really desire leads us to love, truth, connection, meaning, everything true and real. What it is human beings truly desire is a part of the truth of the universe. It is beyond any false persona or egoic self. It is what can bring us out of the perception of the limited physical world we were born into, in which we forgot who we are beyond the physical experience.
Selected from the “Life is Meant to Work” Webinar,
and emailed-in questions people sent.
To listen to this webinar introduction, click here.
(People’s names are changed to protect their privacy.)
Sally: Jane, excellent synthesis and conclusions of this complex topic. Will each session be one hour?
Jane: Yes, each class in the 12-week Course will be an hour.
______________
Randy: Are you going to be teaching A Course in Miracles in this course?
Jane: No. I absorbed what was meaningful to me to absorb from A Course in Miracles. I studied it very intensely and it brought me to new ground in which I was seeing things from a different perspective. And from standing on that perspective, I tapped into a whole other thought system from my own direct experience.
I got the idea from A Course in Miracles that life is meant to work. And when I started seeing clients I started holding that in place. I didn’t really know that it was true. But I was holding it in place, and I was insistent on holding that in place. I think I was born to do that, as I can’t figure out any other reason why I have held onto it with such strong intention. So whatever happened, I interpreted it from the frame-or-reference that life is meant to work. And as a result, I started tapping into a whole body of work, which has kept unfolding and has made the work I do very effective. Because TimeLine is such a fast process, I could almost immediately see the result of holding “life is meant to work” in place. So it has been like a living laboratory over these past 14 years, seeing the results of standing on that premise, and finding that it is true over and over again. We clear the limiting decision, and the person’s life reconfigures itself and proves that it has nothing to do with the way life works, or the external circumstance.
________________________
Jean: It sounds like by the time a person is 50 they might have made hundreds or thousands of limiting decisions. So how long do you think it might take someone, an average person whose life isn’t working, to release enough limiting decisions so their life could work?
Jane: First of all you don’t keep making limiting decisions until you’re 50 years old. Limiting decisions are made before the age of 6 or 7, sometimes in adolescence. It’s rare that you make any limiting decisions beyond that age.
The number of limiting decisions and the length of time it takes to clear them depends on the soul’s path. Some people have a lot of stuff going on — by which I mean a lot of limiting decisions that surface — and they just have to deal with them. They’re set up to make a lot of progress in this lifetime. Other people seem to have an easier path, with less limiting decisions to deal with. And it seems to vary from lifetime to lifetime. It depends on a combination of your soul’s particular path, and how much progress it decides to make in this lifetime. It also has to do with the evolutionary process of your particular soul and of humanity in general. At a certain point a more evolved level of functioning is expected of you in order for your life to work well.
In general when a person works with me, they work for a while and arrive at a place that works for them, at the particular stage in life they are at. I had one woman who cleared the issues she needed to clear in relation to her husband, and their relationship now works wonderfully well, and she was finished. And I haven’t heard from her since. For some people, we clear the issues that were currently of concern to them, and I don’t hear from them for a year or two. And then they come back to clear more, according to what’s up for them in their current life experience.
But that’s about the TimeLine sessions, and that’s different from what I’m doing in the “Life is Meant to Work” program, which has to do with the larger perspective, it shifts how you are experiencing life, and your perspective on what reality is. It’s working with getting you in alignment with the evolutionary process.
_____________________
Anita: If life is meant to work, what about catastrophes such as what happened in Haiti, the death and destruction wasn’t the result of their limiting decisions. It might be the result of limiting decisions of those that are causing global climate change. We’re making decisions and other people are making decisions. So possibly what happened is other people’s limiting decisions can have a limiting effect on us. Some people’s decisions can change the world. They affect everybody. To take an attitude that everything one endures is as a result of one’s limiting belief is to imply that we are islands unto ourselves and are unaffected by what takes place around us.
A baby born with an arm protruding out of its back because of the depleted uranium dumped in Iraq by the Americans, has not created its own reality. A 7 point earthquake that kills and harms huge numbers of people is not created by the limiting beliefs of those people. The fact that the over-population, pathetic housing conditions, poverty and ignorance of the people is a condition of American foreign policy conditions … (Anita wrote a very long question, too long to include here, so this is just a small excerpt.)
Jane: You’ve asked a lot of good questions. This is a large subject and central to the teachings in this 12-week course and can’t be comprehensively explained in this brief Q & A format. So I’ll just answer some pieces of it.
Your limiting decisions only have to do with you. And other people’s limiting decisions only have to do with them. You are never controlled by someone outside of yourself. When you clear the limiting decision, you find that your life shifts, no matter what it is that others are doing.
The alternative perspective to this is a judgmental good-versus-evil perspective, which is one of the causes of the problem — not a solution. This is the perspective that causes people to be in fear, feel they have to control each other, to believe that what they really want will be damaging to others, and all kinds of misconceptions that leads to people attacking each other in the name of defending themselves. It causes people to be afraid of being who they really are, in their full power.
I know this can be hard to grasp. That’s why it’s a 12-week course, because you have to really get into the specifics of how experience is formed in order to untangle this whole thing.
Even on a very direct, relatively benign personal level, limiting decisions appear to make life impossible, and so without really understanding how that works, it’s hard to understand it for more extreme and global situations. The examples I gave in my introduction, about clients’ whose lives turned around from appearing to be impossible to being possible, give some insight into that.
The amazing thing to me is that, whatever the situation is, when you clear the limiting decisions that are at the root of the painful emotions that come up in the situation — when you clear them, your experience of reality does shift.
Yes, we are all affected by each other, but whether our response is an emotionally triggered one or not, is the issue. A trigger means that your experience of reality is distorted because of limiting decisions in that area of life. You can tell whether it’s a trigger or not according to whether your response is empowered and resourceful or not.
What your mind does with each piece of experience, the way it interprets the meaning of it determines whether you go toward solutions or in the opposite direction, regardless of what is happening in your external environment.
It’s probably not possible to understand events and circumstances such as the current disaster in Haiti, or a child being born deformed, outside of the perspective of a soul’s journey. Facilitating, and therefore experiencing, the TimeLine process (a hypnotic NLP process) with many people who have gone back into past lifetimes has given me a valuable perspective on the human process in relation to these kinds of events.
I’ll give you a typical kind of example, of which I have had many similar ones. Let’s say the limiting decision we’re working on is that the person is defective. And in the person’s present here-and-now life, he has a learning disability, which has been limiting his possibilities in life.
In order to clear a limiting decision it’s necessary to go back to the very first event in which it was made. So let’s say we are brought back to a past lifetime, to an event that even I can’t reframe into life is meant to work, because it appears completely impossible — such as being born without legs, and the only means of survival is to do work that requires walking. I have learned that when that kind of thing occurs, it’s not the very first event in which the limiting decision was made. And when we do get to the originating event, you can see where the person’s interpretation was flawed or limited in scope. So, with the cooperation of his unconscious mind, we go back to an earlier lifetime, when he was a 2 year old child, and his parent expected him to be able to do a chore way beyond his development, and when he couldn’t, was abusive to him. So we can see here the problem is the child believing the parent represented reality, not the actual circumstance. And that can easily be reframed with help from me and their present-moment adult perspective.
The reason the person continued that limiting decision into following lifetimes — sometimes even escalating it, such as being born without legs — is because after the limiting decision is made in the originating event, the unconscious mind is invested in proving that it is true, and structures the person’s life experiences in order to prove it. This affects what happens in following lifetimes.
However, when this limiting decision gets cleared, the person’s unconscious mind reconfigures itself and solutions to their present moment life dilemmas become apparent. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.
Now the person going through these different experiences — sometimes extremely painful experiences — is a part of that person’s soul path. But the evolutionary process is to move into increasingly greater alignment with universal truths and with life, in order to move each person toward empowerment, happiness and well-being — toward a state of enlightenment. It’s a process based on love. A major purpose of the 12-week course is to facilitate people moving into this greater alignment.
So this is just a brief response, with much left unexplained, to a deep, complex subject that the “Life is Meant to Work” course is set up to address in depth.
For information about the 12-week Life is Meant to Work Main Course,
and to Register, click here.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
Question from Fellow Healer in New York
Fellow Healer: A dear friend of mine, who has worked the Law of Attraction (LoA) religiously for years, ended up broke at her mom’s house. She called me distraught wondering why the universe isn’t bringing her the wealth she meditated on. What the LoA professors neglect to tell us is that our soul is on a journey and that journey will be fulfilled. Soul trumps LoA. My friend now sees that going home offered her valuable healing time with her family and was vital to her path.
Jane: I agree with your conclusion that the soul’s journey trumps everything else. However, the Law of Attraction does work perfectly, and people are always manifesting, but not necessarily what they consciously desire. To manifest what you consciously desire, there has to be some combination of alignment between the conscious mind, the unconscious mind, and the higher self (i.e. the soul’s path). When the conscious mind is in alignment with the unconscious mind, you are likely to manifest what you consciously want. What causes conscious/unconscious mind misalignment are limiting decisions*. Limiting decisions cause misalignment with what is really true. They then cause the person to manifest the distortion that the unconscious mind now believes to be true. I.e. if the person decides there is not enough, that is what they will manifest. When the limiting decision* is cleared, the unconscious mind now aligns itself with the truth of abundance.
But the soul’s journey also affects how effective particular people are at manifesting what they desire. Many people use, or try to use, the Laws of Attraction to manifest things that are not necessarily in their highest best interest (which also is a result of limiting decisions*). At some point in the soul’s journey, the higher self does not allow that. So this then requires the soul to evolve to going toward what truly benefits them — what I refer to as “enlightened self-interest” — before they will be effective at manifesting what they desire.
* Limiting decisions are unconscious decisions made in early childhood, and are always some form of deciding life is not meant to work and/or there is something inherently wrong with you.
Our perception of reality is how we interpret our experiences in life, and how we have order in it. It is the foundation we build our life upon. It determines where we believe our source of safety, survival and well-being comes from. It is the basis on which we make decisions, determining the kind of life we live, and what the possibilities are for us. It affects whether we go toward or away from solutions, resources, survival and well-being. It’s the very ground we’re standing on.
There are certain cornerstones about the nature of reality that humanity in general holds in place that are out of alignment with larger truth. These cornerstones are what the problems humanity faces are based upon. And even many of those who have expanded their consciousness beyond that limited perspective — when it comes down to what their lives depend upon — are really standing on the old foundation for their reality.
To most people their perception of reality just is what is, and they don’t question the truth of it. But our perception of reality is, in fact, very subjective and changeable. There are many more bits of information that are bombarding our senses every moment than we can possibly take in. We filter out most of it. What bits of reality we take in, and what we filter out, is very subjective.
Perceptions of reality are held in place by individuals, by families and other kinds of groups, by countries, on up to the global human experience. The more people holding a perception of reality in place, the more real the perception appears to be. But that has nothing to do with the truth of the perception.
The thought system I will be teaching in the “Life is Meant to Work” webinar, shifts the old reality perceptions to be in alignment with larger truths.
The world as we know it is rapidly changing. The old structures and ways of participating, functioning, surviving, and prospering, that we have relied upon in the past, are rapidly becoming obsolete. This course will help you make sense of a world that no longer makes sense in the old frames-of-reference.
In this webinar Jane Ilene Cohen, Intuitive & Transformational Counselor, Author, Writer and Visionary unveils a totally positive thought system, developed through the work with her clients over the past 14 years. This thought system is what has enabled her to facilitate profound life changes, reversing their experience of life not working. At the center of it is the principle Life is Meant to Work. This thought system explains what causes your life to not work. It profoundly shifts your experience of reality, allowing your life to come into its full expression of abundance and well-being.
You’ll learn:
How your perceptions of reality get distorted, putting you out of alignment with larger universal truths, causing life to appear to not work.
How this relates to the individual and global crises we are in the midst of.
A new thought system that re-orients your experience of reality to be in alignment with life and universal truths, facilitating your awakening into a more conscious, creative, and abundant life of well-being .
How to become aligned with the evolutionary process, which is pushing humanity into a more evolved perception of reality — so that your personal transition into it will be an easier, more harmonious process.
This webinar is taught in three parts: the free introduction (begins 1/11), the pre-course (begins 1/19), and the main course (begins 2/2).Free Introduction:
Free Introduction:
In the free introduction, Jane will be interviewed by Mo Bailey about the positive new thought system she will be teaching in the Webinar. You’ll get an overview of what this course is about.
When you sign up for this free introduction, you’ll also receive Jane’s list of “The Top 10 Reasons Relationships Fail.”
This 2-week class on Tuesdays or Wednesdays is the prerequisite for the 12- week main course. In it you will learn how your perceptions of reality get distorted, putting you out of alignment with larger universal truths, causing life to appear to not work; and how this relates to the individual and global crises we are in the midst of.
When you register for the Pre-Course you will also receive Jane’s list of “The 10 Most Common Limiting Decisions People Make.”
This is the main 12-week course. See the above initial description for a summary of this course. When you sign up you will also receive Jane’s list of the “Top 10 Attributes of an Evolved Leader.”
The Pre-course is the prerequisite for taking this course. If you miss it, you can sign up for the audio recording, which will be available by Jan. 28th. If you miss the free introduction, the audio will be available by Jan. 14th.
There are several different forms of Webinars and Teleconferences. The one I’m using in my Webinar/Teleconference is a combination of both.
The webinar part is accessed on-line through a website. When you sign up you will receive all of the information you will need to access it. On it you will be able to fill out a profile with your picture on it and a few words about yourself (if you choose to), which makes the event feel more connected. There will be a PowerPoint presentation with the main topic points on it, so you can more easily follow along. There will be a place for you to take notes and email it to yourself at the end. You will also be able to type out questions for Jane for the Q & A part at the end.
The audio for this will be through a teleconference line. This means you will call in on your telephone to a number you will be given so you can hear the webinar. If you don’t have on-line access, you can access this course completely from your phone (but, obviously, without the visuals).
Each class will be recorded and you will be provided with the audio of it soon after each class, in case you weren’t able to be there, or you want to re-listen to it.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
This is a continuation of a dialog with Fellow Healer in New York, from an email/article he sent that Jane has been responding to as a mini series.
Fellow Healer expounded in a number of different ways about new age thinking and platitudes excusing or justifying unloving behavior. One example was his ex-girlfriend Katie’s response to his reaching out to her: “It was an intense preaching with angry undertones that I had no idea where it was coming from. No matter how you put a nice new age twist on it, or try turning the responsibility on me, her behavior toward me is plain ole strange. No matter how enlightened we get, our behavior can and will hurt others.”
“It’s kind of like having a ‘bad’ boss or a parent who may have hit you in your past. Something inside knows this is wrong. Yet you may have no ideas why the other is acting this way. All the new age platitudes do no good. The best thing that can happen is to feel and then from the feelings decide, ‘I can’t change them, but I will never treat someone the way that person treated me.’”
Jane: You experience Katie as being hurtful to you. But who is hurting who is extremely subjective. It appears Katie was feeling attacked on some level by you, or she wouldn’t have had such an angry response. People basically don’t attack other people unless they are feeling attacked. And people decide whether they are being attacked from within an extremely subjective internal experience. People’s experience of reality is very malleable and subjective, and greatly influenced and distorted by the limiting decisions they made. If you try to make sense of reality by judging the behavior of other people, you’ll find the ground you are standing on to be very shaky and unstable.
The issue here is the question: “What is the source of our pain and fear? Does it come from the external world around us, or our internal world?” I think the gist of what you keep saying, in various forms, is focused on proving that it comes from the external world. It comes from Katie, from invulnerable Katrina response team members, it comes from our unloving parents in our childhood, and so on.
What I am holding in place is that “Life is meant to work” — a fundamental perspective taught in A Course in Miracles, the Abraham-Hicks work, as well as other spiritual practices. I believe it to be the paradigm shift humanity is being pushed toward at this time. From that perspective I think what you’re grappling with has to do with the way you perceive the world. If you’re perceiving the world in a way that’s not working, there has got to be a limiting decision* in there. And it’s permeating your life, including your intimate relationships. It affects the experiences that you focus on in your life, as if this is the way the world is. And so you’re fighting it as if it’s these people or these ideas out there that are forming a dysfunctional world. But your experience originates from inside of you. It’s an unhealed pattern in you. And this perception that the external world is the cause of our pain is shared by, perhaps, most other people in the world, which is what is holding the old paradigm in place.
* For a description of limiting decisions, click here.
(Participant’s name is changed to protect her privacy.)
(To Melanie) “If you’re feeling something along the lines of life can’t work, or it’s not working, or it’s not going to work, then you know it’s got to be out of reality, because the bottommost truth is that life is meant to work. So if you’re seeing an impossibility, just know that there’s an unhealed issue in there. It’s not the nature of reality. So whatever emotions are coming up around that, know that they’re not an indication of truth. These are just triggered emotions. That’s all they are. It’s not because life is really like that.”
(Participants’ names are changed to protect their privacy.)
(To Paul) “If you were to say things full out the way you really see them, the way you really feel them, and be where you really are — the way you have it formed in your mind is it’s going to be impossible. Things can’t work with Kira, or you’re not going to be able to make things work at work or with your sisters. There is some way that you don’t come down where you really are at. You only reveal a little bit of it. You say things in a minimal way, rather than full out the way you really are experiencing it. So there’s some way that you don’t really believe that life is meant to work, that truth will end up with things working well. And this is the major thing for all of us, for humanity. We think that it’s our manipulations and our fudgings and our organizing things this way and that way, from our limited perspective, that is somehow making life work. And probably children — and that’s where it begins — the child thinks that the little thing he or she is doing, they think it’s keeping a catastrophe from happening, or a parent from leaving, or whatever association they give it. And that’s what people are doing all of the time. People are generally always manipulating their circumstance to one degree or another, because they don’t believe that things being really the way they are, and being in truth and following what’s truly important and real for you, will end up with things working. People don’t generally believe that.”
(Laura asked how people can stop manipulating things.)
“We’re talking about a major paradigm shift for humanity. There’s a whole frame-of-reference that’s being held in place by everyone. So it’s a process. It’s not something you can just do. It’s a process of being able to come into truth more and more as you clear limiting decisions*.”
(To Paul) “You’ve been afraid to advance yourself as fast as you could because you’re afraid of leaving Kira behind. And so that is a form of the manipulation that I’ve been describing. And underneath that is a lack of realizing that there is a larger intelligence, with a larger perspective beyond the limited perspective that each of us can see of the picture. We’re only seeing a very small view of what’s really happening in the larger frame-of-reference. And from the perspective that life is meant to work, the best you can do is to follow truth, on as deep a level as you can in order to allow what is really meant to happen, to happen. So within the frame-of-reference that you’re looking at it, there really isn’t a solution, or it doesn’t look very hopeful. But there’s a larger frame-of-reference beyond that. And so you have got to get yourself out of this very narrow perspective on things, and start participating in a larger frame-of-reference. Your path and Kira’s path are beyond just the relationship between the two of you. She’s on her life’s path, and you don’t really know exactly what that path is. And you’re on your life’s path, and you don’t know exactly what that is. And you’re trying to manipulate it to work a certain way. And that’s not really going to help. And it hasn’t been helping. It hasn’t been moving things forward. So you need to be on your path, following your path. That’s the only way anything can work.
There is some way that you are not allowing yourself to be in your territory and her to be in her territory. You will have an affect on other people from within your territory, if you reveal where you are at. And that is a much more Divinely guided place to be in because it’s truth. It’s where you’re really at, rather than trying to manipulate her to get her to be in a different place. Trying to have an affect by keeping yourself hidden, and managing the other person, whether at work or with Kira, is not in alignment with Divine order. Instead you reveal where you are at — what works, what doesn’t work for you, what you want, how you respond. You can only connect with Divine order if you’re in truth.”
