Question: Can you briefly state an effective way to use feelings of discouragement for spiritual growth?

Answer: You may have this backwards. We don’t use clouds to realize the sun. When the clouds are gone, the sun is there. Discouragement is a lying, negative state that drags us into it because we get something out of the relationship. When we end our relationship with what is false, lo and behold the True appears. That’s growth.

Question: You have said that a person must become thoroughly dissatisfied with his or her life as it presently is in order to move beyond it. My question is, how do we prevent this dissatisfaction from becoming despondency, which hinders spiritual growth?

Answer: This is a good question because many of us are already secretly reliant upon feelings of defeat or other destructive self-states. The difference between dissatisfaction with self as it manifests and becoming despondent over these expressions is that we must awaken to how unsatisfactory it is, how draining it feels to despond over anything. Negative states have to go… period.