Understanding Yourself: A Spiritual Approach to Self-Discovery and Soul-Awareness

Two thousand years ago Jesus called a small group of disciples to leave their nets and follow him. He gave them teaching and a path of initiation, only fragments of which are found in the New Testament. The path is as real and as vital today as it was in Jesus' time. And now, at the turning of an age, the ascended master Jesus calls those who would be his disciples to take up that path and to walk and work with him again. Presents twenty-eight steps on that path, with commentary and explanation. The goal: find and externalize the Christ within.

In every age the great spiritual teachers have established their communities--Gautama Buddha and his sangha, Jesus and his disciples, Saint Francis and his brothers. In this book Elizabeth Clare Prophet draws on the teachings of the ascended masters and her many years of experience as a leader of a spiritual community to present examples of the challenges and joys of applying universal principles of community in the real world. She said, “I wish to bring you a deeper understanding of the meaning of the flame of community. It is the flame of the Holy Spirit, hence it is the flame of love. The figure-eight flow of love that stands between the guru and the chela contains the entire community, and it contains the worldwide community of the unascended chelas of the Great White Brotherhood.”

The dark side. The synthetic self. The not-self. The Gnostics called it the counterfeiting spirit and the Theosophists called it the 'dweller-on-the-threshold'. There exists within all of us a collective consciousness of all our misdeeds, momentums of many lifetimes, which emerges as a pseudo-identity that wields human power and causes us to do those things we so often regret. The encounter with the enemy within has been vividly portrayed in classic works of literature such as Sir Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni , Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and in modern movie masterpieces such as Star Wars . From time to time, we contact the tip of the iceberg in our tendency to fear, to be jealous or to get angry and we see those who have become one with their dweller committing rape and mass murder. Download free chapter