The spiritual life help practice

I want to give a brief summary of spiritual life help, the process that I teach and advocate as a way for responding to problems and discord. I say this will be a brief summary because I prefer to keep the articles in Believe Perceive fairly short so that people can read and consider them without too much of a time commitment. Beyond this I’ve created other resources that explain, in significant detail, what spiritual life help is and how to apply it. Those who are looking for more thorough explanations and deep analysis can check out a book I’ve written, Believe Perceive: What You Are The Problem… And The Solution, and a free to access podcast that I created, Problems Are Not Real.

Spiritual life help starts with a concept: God is real, God is the only power, and God is only good. This might sound like a fairly reasonable concept, at least from a spiritual perspective, but it’s actually quite radical for this reason — it claims that God is the only power. Many people believe in God but very few people believe that God is the only power. What most people believe is that God is a power among powers, the greatest power perhaps, but that God is essentially in competition with other powers. Why don’t people accept that God is the only power? Because if God is the only power then heaven should be at hand but our human experience, our perceptions, deny this; in fact, the typical human experience is closer to hell than heaven. So either heaven is not at hand at all, which means God is not the only power (and only good), or our human experiences, our perceptions, are something false. The idea that our experiences, our perceptions, are something false is incomprehensible for most people. I believe many people wouldn’t even understand an idea of perceptions being false, and this has to do with a truth: the greatest faith that humans have is faith in their perceptions. People are convinced that perceptions — I consider perceptions to be what we experience through the body’s senses and what thinking mind judgments tell us — are the same thing as reality. What is reality? What my perceptions show me. What do my perceptions show me? Reality. But perceptions and reality cannot be the same thing if God is the only power and only good because perceptions deny that God is the only power and only good.

So what’s the truth? Is God the only power and only good or not? If we have full faith in our perceptions then the answer is no. If we are willing to question the reality of our perceptions then the answer is, possibly, yes. But be aware that perceptions are very compelling, they are very believable, and genuinely questioning them does not come easy.

Let’s say we are open to the idea that experiences of problems and discord are something false, how should we proceed from this? Because even if we should come to a place where we question problem and discord experiences we are still having them, they are still happening to us. Why are they happening to us? And what should we do about them? I’ve come to believe that our convictions are what cause problem and discord experiences. We have various convictions about ourselves, with a foundation conviction that we are separate from and less than God. These convictions create experiences because we are not separate from and less than God but are, in truth, one with God and as God is, created in the image and likeness of God. If this is true, if we are one with God and as God is, created in the image and likeness of God, then we are actually powerful. How does our power get expressed? I believe it gets expressed through our convictions being creative. But here’s something important: these convictions are false, and false convictions cannot create genuine experiences — false convictions create false experiences. So our false convictions are creating false experiences of problems and discord. While these experiences might be false if we buy into them, if we accept them as reality, we reinforce them and the experiences will, for all intents and purposes, become a reality for us… even though they are not, actually, something real.

How should we respond to these false convictions creating false experiences of problems and discord? The spiritual life help approach recommends two steps: spiritual self talk and seek the kingdom. Spiritual self talk amounts to questioning problem and discord experiences, not denying them or being dishonest with ourselves but inquiring, genuinely, about how these experiences contradict the idea of God as all power and only good. Seek the kingdom involves turning some amount of focus in, onto the presence of God that is within us (what Jesus referred to as the kingdom within) rather than keeping all of our focus on what seem to be externals, which is what most people do. These two steps, spiritual self talk and seek the kingdom, are not meant to solve some dilemma or another because any dilemma we experience would have to be false. What these steps do is change the habit of automatically accepting hardship as real while exploring the possibility, the quite unusual possibility, that problems and discord are not something real.