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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teachings
during Janine’s NLP TimeLine Therapy session 8-7-09 (Name is changed to protect client’s privacy.)
(Janine has been feeling depressed because she isn’t doing what really matters to her. The conflict seems to be something about losing contact with her essential self when she engages with people. She used to be passionate about being a storyteller, which was a way of bringing her soul’s connection with the divine together with her connection with people. But the fear was so great when she was doing it in front of people that she eventually had to quit. Also, all of her life she has identified with the story of Joan of Arc.)
“Joan of Arc was following God’s guidance, she was winning the battles, she was in the flow, she was being supported by the people — so at first it felt as though her connection with God and her connection with people were congruent, and it was all great. But eventually she found out that the people in power didn’t really care about her divine guidance. They were coming from a much less evolved place, and the minute she was no longer serving their interests they went against her.
So then she felt a separation between her connection with her higher self or God, and her connection with the people out there. So in order for her to continue to follow her inner guidance, she was now at odds with them. If she dressed in the way she was guided to dress, they were against her for that. She wouldn’t say she didn’t hear voices. So they were against her for that. People wanted to control her to accommodate their belief system.
Joan of Arc played an important part in the evolutionary process. She took it as far as she, as a soul, could take it. She stuck with her guidance, causing her to lose her connection with people, and then they killed her. All of these things happened as a part of an evolutionary process. And now you are here as a part of taking it the rest of the way, because for you, the connection with people is vitally important. You have been willing to give up your connection with people to hold onto your connection with God, but that’s not what you are meant to do. You have isolated yourself, gone out into nature, etc. to get your connection with God. But it’s essential that you also have the connection with people, for your particular path.
This is about being in your divine power, and connecting with people from within your divine power. Stars (movie stars, Olympic champions, etc.) are out there expressing their divine talent, which is what makes them a star. This can make them a target of tabloids and paparazzi and assassins. This is because people are very affected by people who are stars, and they separate themselves from them by worshiping them, because people generally don’t have a sense of their own divinity. Being in your divine power separates you from other people to the degree other people are separated from their own divinity.”
The limiting decision Joan cleared through the TimeLine Therapy Process: “If she is in her Divine power, it separates her from people.”
The first event in which Joan made this limiting decision: She is Adam, and has been alone in the Garden of Eden for a long time. Eve has just been created and she is standing in front of him and he deeply loves her and is so happy to no longer be alone. He feels he has to eat the apple she is offering him or he will lose her. But he also feels that if he does eat the apple, he is giving up his divine power, because it will separate him from God.
Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teaching during the TimeLine Process: “You could say that what Adam was doing when he ate the apple was the step that he, as a human being, needed to take in order to participate in the human evolutionary process. Adam may have felt as though he gave up his divine power by eating the apple, but he, actually, was beginning his journey in the evolutionary process, which is also a part of the divine process. So he wasn’t really leaving the Divine. He was entering into a different stage of things. There is not an inherent separation between divine power and human desire. In the beginning of that process, it appeared there was a separation, because the human consciousness hadn’t evolved yet. Humanity has evolved a huge amount since Adam and Eve. Here we are now, at a much more evolved state, where it is now perfectly possible to join human experience with the Divine.
Eating the apple was not against the Divine. Adam just thought it was. Separation has to do with human consciousness. It does not have to do with the Divine. From the Divine’s position, there is no separation. The Divine was still connected with Adam. He can eat the apple and the Divine is still connected with him. But when he ate the apple he entered into his human experience. It’s like being born, where you forget where you came from. That doesn’t mean that you no longer came from Spirit, or that you’re no longer a part of the Divine body. You are, but you may not know it. It’s a part of the soul’s journey to expand its consciousness to recognize your connection with the Divine, while you’re in the human experience. A number of sources say that a major purpose of the earth experience is bringing the spiritual into the physical. The evolutionary process is not about getting rid of the physical; it’s transforming it through the spiritual.”
Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teachings
during Janine’s NLP TimeLine Therapy session 8-7-09 (Name is changed to protect client’s privacy.)
(Janine was talking about times in her life in which she lost her connection with her divine guidance, and how despairing it has felt to her. Therefore she feels that she can’t trust it to be there when she needs it.)
“Sometimes you hear your inner voice and you can participate in flowing with guidance. And when you can’t, you have to be carried. When you can’t connect with your guidance, then you’re dependent on life to just carry you along, without your conscious participation. When you’re hearing your guidance, you are a part of the guiding. When you don’t, you’re probably in a state of confusion. You’re going blind. Now just because you don’t know what’s happening, that doesn’t mean that you’re not being carried. And you could say it’s putting you into territory in which you don’t have conscious grasp. That’s what’s happening during the dark night of the soul. You’re in the chaos, basically. And so you can’t hear any clear messages or guidance because this is new territory. You are in a place you haven’t been before. You don’t know what it means, you don’t know how to interpret it, you don’t know what to do. You are basically a baby. When you are not in contact with your guidance, that doesn’t mean you are abandoned. It means things are happening outside of your control. It doesn’t mean things are going wrong. It’s just a different stage of experience.”
