Emotions

Preface by Linda Mihalic

Emotion, to the Greeks was πάθη = pathe, and emotions were πάθος = pathos. Pathe is at the root of the words sympathy and pathetic, and is closely related to πάσχω = pásxō, to suffer, the root of paschal. Modern ideas about emotion have reduced it to a series of merely chemical responses to experiences; however this is a flawed view at best. Most emotions are negative, better described as aberrations of the soul.

Psychology has missed the point of its calling to study the soul, for it has enshrined all forms of selfishness as "illness," ignoring the God-given faculties of will and desire, and the matchless gift of freedom to choose, thus absolving the embodied soul of all responsibility for its own lack of discipline or self-control.


“Modern psychology has enshrined all forms of selfishness as ‘illness’.”


Emotion is defined as "a natural instinctive state of mind or a strong feeling deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others; instinctive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge."[1] Synonyms include instinct, gut feeling, inclination; sentiment, and sentimentality.

Emotion is distinguished from reason, which is defined as "the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic." Synonyms for reason include "rationality, logic, logical thought, reasoning, and cognition." Thus, using your mind involves logic and reasoning, whereas using your heart is emotional. We do not categorize intuition as a phase of feeling, but of mentation.

Psychological definitions of emotion are slightly different: Emotion is "a state of arousal characterized by alteration of feeling tone and by physiologic behavioral changes."[2] While you can display emotion in crying, laughing, quivering, blushing, or facial expressions, your emotions do not always show. Psychologically, joy, grief, fear, and anger are examples of emotions.

Medically, "Emotion is never purely mental but is always associated with bodily changes such as the secretion of adrenaline and cortisol and their effects. The external expression of emotional content is known as 'affect'. Repressed emotions are associated with psychosomatic disease. The most important, in this context, are anger, a sense of dependency, and fear."[3]

"Emotion can have a powerful impact on memory. Numerous studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than neutral events."[4]


“All emotions are based in your desires, whether
selfish and base, or of the soul and ideal.”


Any strong emotional response or reaction will affect your perception, attention, memory and thinking, including your ability to reason, make decisions or to solve problems. Under threat or other excitement, the limbic system and hypothalamus, the brain's emotional hardware, mediate emotional expressions and feelings. All emotions are based in your desires, whether they are selfish and base, or of the soul and ideal. Your emotional responses are your chemical reactions to the gratification or thwarting of your desires.

Everyone starts life by living solely in the physical and emotional dimensions, which results in using physical and emotional reactions as your response, not logic-based thinking. Beginning at age seven, you start the transition from emotional reactions to develop the critical thinking functions of mind, primarily logic, reason, discernment, discrimination and discretion.

Parents play an astonishingly powerful role in molding a child's reactions to life because they imprint the child with their approach — rational or emotional — during his most impressionable years. Emotions profoundly affect memory. So long as you continue to live your life on a base of emotion, logic can never expand to its fullest proportion within you. Finally, remember that it is much easier to change your mind than it is to change your emotions.







Edna Lister on Emotions

You may experience many emotions and situations in life that you call "love," yet which may have nothing to do with love at all. Love is the rock solid foundation upon which you must build; otherwise, your creations will be washed away in a time of storm. – Edna Lister, Love, the Highway, October 24, 1930.


People are always using or misusing love as sensation and emotion. The feeling of love[5] (but not love itself) is rooted in physical sensation and the subconscious mind. – Edna Lister, Love, the Highway, November 2, 1930.


"Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again." – Luke 6:38. You receive in the same way that you have given, by quality and quantity, according to the emotion behind your giving. – Edna Lister, Your Royal Birth, November 30, 1931.


Raise any fears, thoughts or emotions that are negative or unlike God. Lift it up, and agree with God that it is good. – Edna Lister, January 20, 1933.


“The feeling of love (but not love itself) is rooted in
physical sensation and the subconscious mind.”


Some impulse of desire and/or will rooted deep within the self causes emotional reactions such as anger, feeling hurt, resentful, jealous, etc. You may hold the key to the universe within you, but you must use it for it to do any good. – Edna Lister, January 24, 1933.


You are always releasing Power, in varying degrees. How you use Power in your thoughts, emotions and pictures of imagination determines what the Power you release does in the outer world. – Edna Lister, The Beatitudes, January 29, 1933.


"Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison." – Matthew 5:25. Your real adversary is the selfishness lodged in your subconscious mind, the seat of emotions. There, you are in the "house of bondage," in prison, behind invisible bars, jailed by getting angry.– Edna Lister, The Sermon on the Mount, January 31, 1933.


The emotions you are sending forth create for you. What are you sending forth? Eliminate the negative thoughts, emotions and pictures. Replace them with recognition that God is the Source of all Power, acceptance of what comes to you as yours to lift onto a cloud continent of Light, and surrender of self. – Edna Lister, The Sermon on the Mount, February 1, 1933.


Adultery includes unclean thoughts and emotions of any kind. For example, negative thoughts and feelings indicate believing an adulterated truth. – Edna Lister, Recognizing Your Good, April 22, 1934.


The form of each blood platelet is primarily composed of soul substance with a "brain" to record your thoughts, emotions, and desires, every negative. Thus, the platelets regulate your emotions, thoughts, and desires. Pure blood platelets ensure health. Impure platelets cause illness and disease. Your thoughts, emotions and desires chemically etch a memory of every experience on your blood platelets.[6].

People manifest emotional abnormalities as dropsy, diabetes, swelling, edema and glandular problems. Each time soul illumination strikes, it fills the pituitary gland and further purifies the emotional life.

You express your emotions with your hands. While you can control the muscles and thereby the expression on your face, you gain control of your hands last. To gain greater insight about a person, watch his hands when he talks. – Edna Lister, Ten Plagues on Egypt, May 16, 1934.


“The emotions you send forth create for you. What are you sending forth?”


An internal combustion engine uses gas, a steam engine uses coal, an electric motor uses electricity as power. God has designed your body to burn the fuel of spiritual energy, cosmic rays. If you try to use the worldly energy of human emotions, you dissipate your vigor. – Edna Lister, September 26, 1934.


Heavy food creates heavy thoughts. Overeating indulges over emotionalism. Stop eating before you feel full. – Edna Lister, The Sacredness of All Life, April 12, 1935.


Christ was not born in a stable by accident. His humble birth serves to remind us of the truth. Christ, reborn in you, descends into your animal or mortal nature and environment so that he may work through you to lift you up again to the perfection and wholeness of a son or daughter of God. This is his service of love to us, that by his love and wisdom, we may be fully redeemed, Spirit, soul and body. When you are tempted to believe that your emotions and passions are too strong to master them, recall the Christ child, resting in the manger from which the animals were fed. The lowly manger symbolizes the lowly estate of your personal nature, into which he is reborn to develop the virtues of the Son of God in you and through you. – Edna Lister, The Christian Home, December 22, 1935.


Crystallization in the sacral nerves produces poor health and depression, which dissipate energy unless you lift your emotions. As Light strikes the crystallization, it draws all negative emotions, fears and doubts to the surface for lifting into the Light and cleansing. – Edna Lister, January 3, 1936.


Water represents the catharsis of cleansing the emotions. – Edna Lister, Wings on Your Feet, December 13, 1936.


“Emotions rightly belong to the Christed elements in personality.”


Each sacrament has two parts, the outward visible expression, and an inward invisible spiritual state of grace. You experience the sacraments in two ways, the outward by water in baptism, for example. You experience the inward grace by ascending into the Light, by being positive. To live in a state of grace requires that you cleanse all negative emotions, symbolized by water. – Edna Lister, The Sacraments, March 1, 1937.


God sees just how much beauty and perfection will grow from the emotional heartaches you experience. He makes pure gold for you and of you. If you cry, remember to cry up and give Him your tears. The Master always says, "Come, for my way is wide open." Nothing will hurt you. Just declare it good and it shall be so. The seeming wrongs and hurts are but opportunities to dig out the dry rot at the heart of your reactions to outer situations. They heal and leave no scar, only beautiful flowers that grow in your newly weeded garden of soul.

All is well, though it may not seem so. You may suffer emotional hurt, but think. God is giving you all this wonderful building material to create your ladder to the stars. Each grief you work out in deep love and devotion to the Master, each sorrow you lift high and declare good, is just so much more material with which to work out your philosophy of life on earth. – Edna Lister, August 17, 1937.


To be born means to come into the world. To be born of the flesh describes the birth of the soul into an earthly body. Water symbolizes the emotions, and to be born of water, the amniotic fluid, confers the ability to change darkness into Light. When you are born of the Spirit, it refers to being filled with the Holy Ghost from above. – Edna Lister, Except Ye Be Born Again, November 7, 1937.


Those who make sacrifices of the self with the mind only will find themselves involved in much confusion and pointless discussion. Make your sacrifices to stand and to hold place from the heart, backed by the mind, which means that reason and judgment rule and hold the heart's vain emotions under control until you may conquer them. – Edna Lister, September 28, 1938.

Search the secret places of your soul for hidden, menacing slow detriments of vain emotions, opinions, and prejudices. Lift these in offering to God so that your heart shall stand free in joy for the greatness of your service to the Father. Cleanse your imagination of all vain images and false gods. Pay no more tribute of fear, doubt or worry to false gods in the world. Pay no attention when others wail because of lost position.

Each soul is privileged to climb back from the bottom. No one pushes another to the bottom. Each arrives there of his own soul's consent. See to it that your soul does not consent to any form of darkness. Leave everyone else free to follow their choice of direction while your choice remains with the Light. Keep your vows of silence. Keep your heart clean. Remain under the Light. Continue lifting. Keep your mind clear and heart clean of all self and personal opinions of right and wrong. – Edna Lister, October 12, 1938.


“Self-centered emotion and thinking consume the good
in the heart of each problem.”


Be perfectly whole as to thinking, imagination, and emotional desires. Cleanse these three as your perfected trinity of soul and know that you shall have a trinity of Wisdom, Selflessness and Love in all that you create. – Edna Lister, January 2, 1939.


The Way of Christ, the Via Christa, ultimately requires complete separation from the world, not in physical terms, as in leaving it, but emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Once you leave the world's drag-weight of self behind, the opinions and prejudices, you can know the soul's triumph, joy and glory. – Edna Lister, Life's Highway, April 30, 1939.


Vows of sacrifice of self are personal, not part of general vows for a Degree. No one is forced or even asked to make them. This is the fact, and you may do so or not, as you choose. Yet you can lift the world's darkness only by more and more sacrifice of self. Further surrender of self to be used by Light, further giving up of all emotional shadows to release more love and praise — these constitute the kind of personal sacrifice required to make your creations perfect. – Edna Lister, January 15, 1941.


“Do not accept or deny a test emotionally — ignore it”


When you let will and desire pull in opposite directions, they fill you with conflicting emotions, thoughts, doubts and fears. – Edna Lister, The Teammates, Will and Desire, May 28, 1941.


Your thoughts and emotions form pictures in imagination, and they color your use of the Holy Breath when you speak the Word. Like a flock of birds fluttering around you, your thoughts and words can be raucous black crows or beautiful white doves. Your words, thoughts and emotions are little distractions in your aura, and can plague you if you are not high in consciousness. When the Light comes through, it sends them flying and you can feel pure again. Yet when you close the gate to Light in your mind, the flock returns to roost. – Edna Lister, Eternal Life in the Word, June 29, 1941.


Water represents the emotions, and unquenchable love is the chief emotion in you. Water symbolizes you, as emotion, and as your giving. – Edna Lister, Eternal Life in the Word, June 29, 1941.


The subconscious mind is a Pandora's Box. filled with memories, repressed ideas, suppressed emotions and hunches. Thus, the subconscious is forever fishing in the more stagnant by-waters of the River of Life. It is always opening the box and dragging you backward with regrets about your poor choices and wrong moves. – Edna Lister, Threefold Consciousness, March 15, 1942.


“To misuse a word and emote it creates a debt of force.”


You would need a very special barometer to tell the weight of emotional and mental types of pressure. You feel emotional pressures because you "cannot bear" them. You notice mental pressure when you reject a new idea because you simply cannot believe it. You cannot serve God 100 percent physically, mentally and spiritually when you are caving in to all these pressures. Train yourself to be irresistibly, rapturously expectant about your inheritance. Declare, "Today, I shall win against every challenge I face." – Edna Lister, Your Inheritance, May 31, 1942.


Self-centered love pulls at you emotionally, always making you feel uncomfortable. – Edna Lister, If I Be Lifted Up, May 30, 1943.


Face every episode, condition and past situation in family, social and business life, no matter what. Lift it, loose it and give it to God to see it filled with Light. Especially include all who have blamed you as the cause of their grief, resentment, intolerance and criticism. Do not denounce anyone, but lift and fill them with white Christ Light. This is your work, worldwide, for they all belong to you. Know only your high calling, and follow only the Christ.

Cleanse and purify your self for the peak experience. Enter your room of Light and remain there to lift all emotions. Emotions rightly belong to the Christed elements in personality and belong up in the head centers, not in the heart or solar plexus. Ascend, be compassionate, but do not take the outer situation into yourself. Ascend emotions and all self to dwell in the higher creative center. Put selfish desires and emotions in a room of Light and leave them there. Never let self descend to draw you into the mud. Keep the mess on a cloud until Light dissolves it. You must be tough to take all this and continue.

From this point, your maladies are imagination, so treat them as such. They are a memory, not the real thing. They do not exist so take no heed of them. The Father has cleansed your past. You do not have to review pages that are already clean. Each day is a clean page, so declare, "This one thing I do now, pressing on, reaching forth to the high calling of the Lord Jesus Christ." – Edna Lister, June 30, 1944.


“Pride contains all off-balance emotions, not just one.”


Accept the precious experience of each small episode that has served God, and given you heavenly credits, rewards and advance in initiations. Be certain to carry each pearl of experience forward, and not discard anything in your haste to forget past hurt, sorrow, grief, or burdens before you have forgiven all your debtors. When you grieve about the past, you do not receive your full earnings. If you served in deep joy instead of emotional hurt, grief, and resentment, you would have nothing to make up. As it is, you have more to accomplish. Therefore, fill each day with love to cover any lack created from hurt feelings. To string each tear as a pearl requires that you turn God's love on it as heat to turn it into a pearl of Spirit from the emotional waters of earth. God can reward you only according to your own desires. Keep your desires perfect under His love. – Edna Lister, July 31, 1944.


When you focus on the outer, you've already slid down the greased pole in consciousness. The trick is to keep your eyes on the Light a thousand times an hour. If you let your lines of responsibility go slack, someone else must hold your point. When you fail to hold your lines, everyone on your lines goes into the mud with you. You may not fall into any grief, self-pity, intolerance, resentment or just backward-looking without pushing everyone you have ever contacted off the path. If someone isn't standing by to hold your lines of responsibility, you always, pay a grave debt for your emotional jag and who or whatever you have taken down with you. The greater your love, your desire, your place, position, point, chair or seat, the greater the debt you pay for all slack lines.

Get busy and love. Lift the lines you let drop, each time gaining more strength, never letting go of your lines of service. Every time you look into the past, you push your present gains into the future. We call it delay. If you want the soul's pearl of great price, you must sell the self to get it. Whatever you desire, if it were yours, you would have it. Only self pounds at heaven's door and keeps asking while only thinking about changing. It is legal only to serve well where you are with all your body, heart, mind and soul while praising God that you are finishing this old vibration in joy, thanking Him for the right place He has already given you before you even thought to ask Him. – Edna Lister, December 8, 1944.


“You always pay a grave debt for emotional jags
and who or what you take down with you.”


The only "bad" of any problem is in your own all-consuming to-the-self emotions and thinking. Self-centered emotion and thinking consumes the "good" in the heart of each problem, causing it to be seared black, leaving only charred embers and ashes. The love of God, returned to you after you cast yourself on the altar in love, consumes only the darkness, and leaves the glory of Light and love in its place. – Edna Lister, January 10, 1945.


Your every desire, emotion, thought, prayer and picture of imagination is under scrutiny. You may not just appear to be pleasing those about you, for you must please God. – Edna Lister, January 16, 1945.


When you are unbalanced in body, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, your upset slightly affects the whole planet. However, since everyone does this, the result is confusion and turbulence in world affairs. – Edna Lister, January 18, 1945.


You need to lift the thoughts and emotions behind the idle words you spew.

A poor memory is due to mental, emotional, and physical laziness with many self-excusing reasons to account for it — "I'm too busy. I'm too tired. I have too much to do. I don't have enough hours in the day." It takes rigorous self-discipline to overcome such selfish appetitive soul excuses for its total indifference whether you gain any knowledge. This is the modus operandi of self. – Edna Lister, July 4, 1945.


“Lift the thoughts and emotions behind the idle words you spew.”


Extravagant displays of grief or emotional jags are credited as self-pity, which you must conquer. The subconscious can always find some plausible excuse for doing as it pleases. However, uncovering the truth about self requires discernment and discrimination, which are soul faculties. When the test comes, do not think of the size of the trait or action for which you are criticized, but of the indication of what is under the surface. When you can so forget the test, temptation or trial and instead seize on the criticism as an offense, law counts it as self-pity, pride, resentment, rebellion, and intolerance. When you have at last finished learning about it, you still must plod to erase appetitive soul's little self memory impressions in the sacrum, splenic and solar plexus centers. Now you must work and remain alive, alert and awake.

Do not dwell on blame. Just lift it and know that it is a bit of subconscious mind coming up, otherwise you would not notice it. Subtle subconscious mind puts up a plausible reason to avoid being responsible. Live high, and others will follow. You must pull out the roots of self from all your past lives. You can never stop digging. Each time you fail then win, you build more strength for the next test. You wreck the heart when you misuse Power as force or manipulation. The only way to conquer self is to battle it out on its own ground, a to-the-death struggle. Your only enemy is self-pity, which we call the dweller on the threshold of consciousness. It is like battling a sedative to remain awake. Each time you struggle, even if it ends in failure, you gain more strength to win the next battle. God never gives you a test you cannot pass. If you do not pass the test, you can pass the initiation of self-pity that follows. – Edna Lister, July 11, 1945.


You can do anything you want if you want it hard enough to give up weakness of thinking, emotions, fears and doubts about it. – Edna Lister, July 14, 1945.


You are only as important as the degree to which you lend yourself to be the instrument of Light. Do not permit self to become emotionally upset in any way, and remember that you must be tested. You cannot return Home over broken hearts, dead bodies or unfulfilled duties. Pray without ceasing, but work while you pray. Never leave for another what is yours to do while you take time out for an emotional jag. – Edna Lister, July 16, 1945.


To be fully responsible to law is to strive to be responsible for every deed, thought, desire, picture, emotion, word to the full extent of the law. – Edna Lister, July 20, 1945.


You must cleanse you of all fear and doubt. – Edna Lister, July 22, 1945.


Psychology and the process of thinking, the power of reasoning proceed this way: Induction, comparison, deduction, analysis and synthesis. You constantly induct from the outer through the solar plexus, and it becomes an emotional experience. You compare the present with past experiences, then apply the sifting process of deduction. Under analysis you bring logic and reason to bear as rationalization. Synthesis is your final weaving together of all into a formula or conclusion. It works in this order: Imagination, observation, logic, reason and comprehension. – Edna Lister, July 25, 1945.


“You must have the consent of your emotions and thinking for
your prayer molds to hold their integrity”


Emotional conquering requires not letting the tears fall back into the heart, but to lift them. – Edna Lister, July 26, 1945.


You have asked to see and hear spiritually in full soul illumination. At times you have been unwilling to pay the price, which is responsibility for every hour's time and effort, for every idle thought, picture of imagination, false and treacherous emotion and all your spoken words. – Edna Lister, July 31, 1945.


The urge to feed the self by pitying the self, comes from pride, a true soul detriment. Any feelings or flare-ups of embarrassment or resentment, no matter how small, are pride, which may become so great that any emotion whatsoever is then credited as self-pity. As soon as you think of self first — "What is this going to do for me?" — or to me, it is credited as pride. Pride causes grief and regret to become self-pity, a festering boil deep within the psyche. – Edna Lister, July 31, 1945.


You must lift the anchors to the past. Like a cowboy who lassoed a dead cow's carcass to drag it wherever he went, you are dragging your past. Every time you rehash it emotionally, it smells worse. Let the dead past bury its dead. Lift those who have despitefully used you. The vibrations of the spoken word are real, and every time you talk about people, you disturb them into remembering you, so they talk some more. Do not pity yourself. Every embodied soul has to suffer through lifting his dead past to know God. It is the only way back to Him. – Edna Lister, August 12, 1945.


Until you can rule your own emotions, you are not fit to rule much of anything. You do not begin at the top, but at the bottom, and can mount each rung of the ladder only as you lift your own weight in self. – Edna Lister, September 19, 1945.


“Until you can rule your own emotions, you are not fit
to rule much of anything.”


Love is the emotion of the creator gods. To be "impersonal" in loving means to love until one reaches soul ecstasy, then continue loving without ever asking anything for self, without expecting or demanding love from anyone in the outer. Just loving because the Love of God possesses you so that it must press forth as you, yet forever pouring forth more upon everyone, even those who despitefully use you. You cannot love enough. Love cannot be static ice, which is born of selfishness. Love is active heat that burns, flames, moves out and up. The world has thought that to be impersonal is to be cold. Selfishness is cold, utter personal, ruthlessness. Im- means "not," so impersonal is loving universally, God acting within the person or God as the person. – Edna Lister, September 27, 1945.


Never permit your emotions to rule your thinking. – Edna Lister, September 29, 1945.


When your body becomes fatigued, stop and rest in the Light. Entertain no emotion whatever about it. Let it be just a matter-of-fact recognition of a need to rest briefly. Then get up and go to work, no matter what. Whenever you let emotion play a part in deciding what the body needs, self has entered — that foul little devil is just waiting to rear its head at the slightest opportunity. This is how to recognize selfishness: When you offer an excuse, ask why, or hold any emotion about what you do, lift it immediately. Watch, you will be able to see yourself and what you are doing and saying. You will be able to stop it immediately, ascend in consciousness, lift, and dig it out. Work at making a sacrifice of it. The slightest resentment shows that the self is in control.

Life will always have its problems, its changes. Just meet it without letting emotion dictate. Never stop working, just forget the body and do it. The subconscious mind, controlled by emotions, tries to dictate through it. Analyze your actions to determine whether emotional or mental selfishness is dictating them. – Edna Lister, October 14, 1945.


A person who seeks to force his methods of living on you, physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually is full of opinions and prejudices. Only then will he attempt to interfere with your choice of how to live your Christ-life. You need not offend to remain free. Ascend in consciousness to instantly contact the Light, and see that earth-bound adversary with your soul eyes. Tell him that you are certain he is right in his ideas, and has worked out a wonderful method for himself. Then ask him to tell you more about it. Rest assured, he will be glad to talk about it, and in that talking will forget his original intention. Any adversary will be happy to see your interest in him, and may never realize that you have not promised to follow his method. – Edna Lister, Six Creative Laws, December 1945.


Stand on a higher cloud of Light, with your feet more firmly placed than ever before. Walk upon the waters of emotion. You shall see the Master walking toward you. Look for him, for he will be there, waiting for you. Practice this alone, without distraction. Imagination, ruled by the soul, not by self, is your greatest expression. – Edna Lister, December 13, 1945.


“Walk upon the waters of emotion.”


The first awakening from instinctive consciousness is the realization that you own a body: "I am a body." Thus, the evolution of a physical consciousness comes first. In this stage of development, faith is instinctive and unconscious, just existing as a body. This faith is not yet born again into consciousness greater than self. The second awakening of consciousness deals with the emotions, and says, "I love" and "I hate." This is the first step in consciousness of self as being more than a body. Such persons express their emotions and feelings, not their thinking, as intensely personal and subjective. When those who dwell in emotional consciousness let go of self-restraint, they use their "human nature" as an excuse for their verbal and physical excesses. – Edna Lister, Quickening Spirit, January 20, 1946.


You must lift all emotion to the Oversoul before you can make perfect contact with the white Light of the Christ. – Edna Lister, September 10, 1946.


The worldly idea of a formula of law requires that you curb passions and emotions, to control them. This way, you can do as you please as long as no one else finds out about it. – Edna Lister, The Golden Rule, September 22, 1946.


To be discrete in speech requires discretion in emotions and thinking, with no idle words. – Edna Lister, The Price of Freedom in Christ, November 3, 1946.


Remember to take a deep breath in the morning to cleanse the bloodstream of fatigue, the mental and emotional toxins. – Edna Lister, November 6, 1946.


Practice recognizing the presence of God in your life. As you train your muscles and nerves to be obedient servants to your will, so must you train your thoughts and emotions in obedience. – Edna Lister, Vicarious Atonement, January 5, 1947.


Those living primarily in the physical and emotional dimensions use so-called human nature as their excuse and explanation for doing as they please. To ascend in consciousness from this, you must let go of the urge and tendency to excuse and justify self. Instead, acknowledge that most of your emotional states are personal, and become conscious of the choices you are making. – Edna Lister, Quickening Spirit, January 19, 1947.


Act not on impulse or under emotional stress, but in the sureness of the Light of Truth in all your actions, and you will know the next step. – Edna Lister, February 25, 1947.


A blind, unreasoning belief is an emotional faith that waits to see before it believes. – Edna Lister, Jesus, the Giver of Life, April 20, 1947.


Those who serve evil use the hate, resentment and negative emotions of the world to overthrow God's Reign of Light. Lift those negative emotions; stop aiding evil to win. – Edna Lister, May 10, 1947.


“Emotions can tear down healing.”


The voice of conscience acts as a teacher, presiding over your inner life. It constantly warns you when you slip, when your lines of love-Light are sagging. Yet you adulterate this voice of inner assurance when you cave in to fear and doubts. Then self-pity causes you to lose your joy. By keeping your mind and heart attuned, ever looking up in consciousness, you remain aware and open to the inner voice. Conscience then directs and guides your choices and actions in the ways of right thinking, building of right pictures in imagination and right use of substance through emotions. – Edna Lister, The Voice of Conscience, May 27, 1947.


Your negative emotions and intellectualism can tear down your healing. – Edna Lister, June 13, 1947.


It is shameful that any outer stimulus can cause you to descend in consciousness. No excuse or justification is allowed ever, for to excuse or justify your words or actions is disgraceful. All practice and discipline, whether physical, mental or emotional will give release and relief. All unlikeness to an absolute pattern will slough the habits and remnants of self, until a self-cauterization takes place within. You shall see this. Stand upon that principal in healing to have it be complete. – Edna Lister, July 5, 1947.


Everyone is given the same power for Mind to use as emotional substance, and each lives by the pictures he builds in imagination and mind. Don't be stingy; think greatly and act as a creator god. The world is in chaos because we have not acted as gods. The choice of action is yours. You use the same brain cells, glands, imagination and emotional life to pleasure self or to create the good. – Edna Lister, August 10, 1947.


“The emotional approach creates a god made in man's image and likeness.”


Never allow emotions of self to creep into your thinking. Self-pity is the most corrosive emotion, but how very subtle pride and selfishness are. Analyze every word and emotion down to a fraction, and find from whence it stems. What calamities come from the tiniest undiscovered flaw in one life, which spreads into open rebellion and devastation in another life. – Edna Lister, November 12, 1947.


Do not permit emotions to rule when you are making decisions. Apply logic, reason, discernment, discrimination and discretion to all the facts in the case.

Think, do not emote! Ascend and think in the Light and fire first! – Edna Lister, November 13, 1947.


People know about the toxic by-products of metabolism, but fail to realize that wrong thinking and negative emotions create mental and emotional toxins as well. Breaking up this old crystallization causes much physical discomfort. – Edna Lister, March 18, 1948.


Man's emotional approach creates a god made in his own image and likeness. However, the first step in the emotional approach is to be on your knees in devotion, following the premise that the lower the head, the greater the devotion. Emotional love expresses as devotional love for God on the high side, but as love of the self that reaches, snatches, and reaps without sowing. It will sit and wait for what it wants, but resentfully, not serenely. – Edna Lister, May 8, 1949.


Emotional love is basically the love of self. – Edna Lister, Mother Love, June 12, 1949.


Most people take emotional and mental pictures as memory impressions, hash them all together in mind, pass it out as opinions and prejudices, then calls the result "thinking." – Edna Lister, July 7, 1949.


To completely heal a mind of a martyr complex gives emotional and mental freedom. – Edna Lister, August 10, 1949.


Sweets excite all lower emotional centers and drag you down when you are trying to ascend, and they also create toxic by-products. – Edna Lister, August 15, 1949.


Love is the key to all conquering of the petty little self. At the emotional level, love of self creates fear. Love of God creates faith. – Edna Lister, Comprehension, February 17, 1950.


Light can really stir you up because greater Power heightens emotional sensitivity and can cause irritability. – Edna Lister, God's Eternal Purpose, February 24, 1950.


“Never use so-called human nature as an excuse for doing as you please.”


The subconscious repository is in the solar plexus, which registers emotional and physical disobedience. The repository of mental disobedience is the medulla oblongata in the brain. Headaches and sinus problems come from breaking down the memories of disobedience. Then an illness, bacterial or viral, comes along from the outside to help it along — a prepared excuse from the stress of daily living. All you can cure is an idea, mental or emotional. – Edna Lister, March 27, 1950.


As you ascend in consciousness, you let go of old thoughts, pictures and emotions, which lower your vibration overall. Clearing your thinking first is easiest. Then you deal with the pictures you have created with negative emotions and imagination. – Edna Lister, Pentecost, the Way of Ascension, May 7, 1950.


Your words are reflections of your thoughts and emotions. – Edna Lister, August 17, 1950.


You must remove every prejudice, opinion and negative emotion from your life before you can receive a lasting miracle. – Edna Lister, What I Do Have, I Give, October 1, 1950.


Sacrifice your negative thoughts, pictures, and emotions. Make a sacrifice of everything unbeautiful in your life, then surrender to be the servant of all the Power of God. – Edna Lister, October 3, 1950.


"I love you with all my heart" engages the seat of emotions and the outer expression of love at the heart center – Edna Lister, June 7, 1951.


God chooses you based the quality of your sacrifice, unqualified desire backed by physical, emotional, mental and spiritual strength and balance to be a transforming distributor of His Power. – Edna Lister, June 11, 1951.


Any physical healing is built on a corresponding emotional and mental healing. – Edna Lister, June 23, 1951.


Disposition, under vows to obey such laws as "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." – Matthew 5:48, offends those whom you love most. Conquer your disposition, which is nothing more than letting yourself miss the mark emotionally. – Edna Lister, Forgiveness, the Path of Glory, October 21, 1951.


The law of perfect abundance and increase states that you increase that which you dwell upon, spiritually, mentally or emotionally. If you allow others to dictate to you and thereby change your life's structure, confusion results in your life pattern. Stated another way, if you let others' emotional advice recondition you away from logic and principle, you will confuse your mental patterns. – Edna Lister, Integrating Mind and Power, June 22, 1952.


“You use the same brain cells, glands, imagination and emotional life to pleasure self or to create the good.”


As you grow in grace — meaning that your vibration is raised — as you understand more about God, our Supreme Creator and about His universes, you actually raise the vibration of the cells of your physical body — we call it ascension. You really have seven bodies, and live in them all the time. The outer body is composed of cells and molecules. Inside the molecules are the atoms. Inside those are the electrons. We use these terms for them: Cells form the outer physical body. Molecules compose the desire body, the seat of emotions and desire, and the vital centers. Atoms, which compose the mental body, are used for thought inside the brain cells, the seat of the lotus centers. Electrons compose the fire body, or what we call the vehicle of the soul — you!

When you complete a new initiation, which is only leaving more of the little self behind forever, you actually change bodies. Every time you express a Godlike quality of soul instead of a self-centered desire, a bit of the outer oily substance falls off and you draw the life sparks into the next higher body. So, from the atomic mental body a few life sparks are indrawn and incorporated into the soul itself, a few from the molecular desire body are indrawn into the mental body and best of all, a few from the organs of the physical body are indrawn to the desire body. Nothing peculiar or weird happens to the physical body or its appearance. It looks just the same but as this process of ascension goes on, one day you are walking in a light, glorious higher-vibrating body that is forever after immune to all physical diseases. – Edna Lister, August 16, 1952.


The brain's medulla oblongata holds the records of past emotions of 100,000 lives; these memories can form poisons that attract viruses. – Edna Lister, October 6, 1952.


Live by love, not the lower emotions. It is a matter of choice. – Edna Lister, November 2, 1952.


If you still blame your parents for your failure after age sixteen, you are lying to yourself, for only mental and emotional laziness delays success. – Edna Lister, The Great Challenge, November 23, 1952.


All sects that whip emotional urges to the boiling point are seeking a goal greater than self, but are still afraid of God. They preach exclusive exclusionary creeds and dogmas based in fears. – Edna Lister, The Altar and the Flame, December 14, 1952.


Amputation: the desire body is perfect but it is the seat of emotion, sensation and nerves; therefore an amputee feels pain in the severed limb, due to sensation in the desire body. – Edna Lister, December 18, 1952.


“Live by love, not the lower emotions.”


You may experience ill health due to disobedience to laws, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Yet, you begin healing yourself by obeying the laws of Spirit — the following three cover all phases of life, except the physical. Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. – Matthew 6:33. Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him. – Matthew 5:25. What is that to thee? Follow thou me. – John 21:22. – Edna Lister, The Mystery of All Beauty, March 4, 1953.


Emotions of grief, sorrow and self-pity taint love with the weight of self, and self-pity is the heaviest burden in the world. – Edna Lister, Prayer, the Soul's Aspiration, June 7, 1953.


The molecular desire body is a duplicate of the physical, and is filled with the atomic mental body, which is the source of power for the two denser bodies. Ideally, the desire body fits over the physical exactly as a five-pointed star. You become physically ill if the desire body is chronically out of balance. Straighten your back, and breathe deeply to balance yourself properly, enough to know that you are getting Light and Power. Light waters the pineal body, pituitary gland and brain cells, to vitalize the crystallized emotional memories in the medulla oblongata, which then descend to the solar plexus to be lifted.

This is how you lift soul debts and open past life memories. As you open a new life, your memory of it opens back through childhood. Under the process of ascension, you lift the confused impressions of this life and past lives. As a memory is lifted and cleansed, Light bursts at the solar plexus, driving the creative fire up to the head, opening the eleven, sixteen and thousand-petaled lotuses there. It explodes into the head nerves, and electrifies their phosphorescent tips into what we call a halo. This is simply the thousand-petaled lotus whirling in the golden bowl. – Edna Lister, July 16, 1953.


Watch ever more fervently for small, treacherous hidden emotions of and to the self. Cleanse your heart often, and hide nothing. – Edna Lister, August 15, 1953.


Unload your emotional blocks. They form the ballast, not a cargo on your ship of the soul. – Edna Lister, October 1, 1953.


Never allow the world to clutter your vibration with unworthy thoughts or emotions. – Edna Lister, Look Up and Live, October 4, 1953.


Cover the emotional and mental transgressions of others, especially gossip. See darkness only to lift it, so that no one else sees it. – Edna Lister, Now Is the High Time, December 6, 1953.


Continue breathing the high breath, and every time you give up fears, resentments or negative emotions, it transforms you. Finally, you take half a breath here, and half there, while you stand here, balanced. – Edna Lister, From Surrender to Ascension, January 15, 1954.


You may not want to sacrifice your negative ideas and emotions, but to waste time with opinion and prejudice is like wearing a new dress over old rags. – Edna Lister, Your Life Plan, May 16, 1954.


The only sins against the Holy Spirit arise from the emotional life, the "little self." You must "walk on water" to transcend emotions. Put iron in your spine, and wait upon the Lord until He makes your enemies your footstool.– Edna Lister, Your Life Plan, May 16, 1954.


“The desire body is the seat of emotions, desire, and the vital centers.”


The mysteries of the Mother all involve love and represent the emotional life. You become enmeshed in sin when you misuse Power and translate your experiences through the filters of emotions and sensation. Instead, you must translate all experience into law through the Father's Mind and Wisdom. It's a matter of experience versus theory, or as Plato taught, episteme versus techne: Experience must back theory. The mind may think many things, but experience teaches. Ultimately, love must absorb every offense. – Edna Lister, May 24, 1954.


No physical exertion can make the desire body heavy unless you decree it by saying, "I'm dead tired. I'm just exhausted." You need to decree all day long that your spiritual body is light, free and higher. Feeling you must or even thinking about it is not enough. You must make actual decrees for the spiritual body strength constantly to overcome intense physical and emotional over-strain. Heavy labor serves to rid you completely of physical heaviness until you are walking as a god or goddess of Light in a sublimated desire body, although in outer visible form. – Edna Lister, June 15, 1954.


Your molecular body is the desire body, the seat of the emotional life. It is also the seat of your radar system, which warns you of the approach of the good and the less-good.

Do you breathe deeply of Spirit, or do you just dawdle along from emotion to emotion, just enough to keep you alive? – Edna Lister, June 18, 1954.


Your subconscious mind and emotions can interfere with how your body uses food, medicines, vitamins, etc. Lift your emotions and negative thinking. Discipline the self. – Edna Lister, June 22, 1954.


Opinions come from will, prejudices from emotion. The hindbrain (the cerebellum and medulla) is the seat of the animal urges, aggression and animal emotional proclivities with which you are born. – Edna Lister, November 1, 1954.


Opinions come from expressions of the self-will, prejudices from the emotional life. You go from light into shadow if you have prejudices, then you find yourself in the dark. – Edna Lister, Jesus, the Man of God, December 5, 1954.


An emotional hurt can throw you, and instantly you must decide whom you are serving, God, self or man. You may make no demands, but you must heal hurts. Put a negative line up to the world and it will cast a shadow to knock you down. What is that to thee? Follow thou me. – John 21:22. – Edna Lister, Jesus, the Man of God, December 5, 1954.


Jesus walked on the waters of emotion, and you can, too. Just lift up your self-will, and mate it with God's will. – Edna Lister, Jesus, the Ascending God, December 19, 1954.


Never permit emotional sentimentality to cause you to snap-judge one person as better than another. View all men objectively in the Light. – Edna Lister, March 9, 1955.


Work as hard mentally with every bit of your emotional nature as you can. Under the surface you still pity yourself for having been cheated in life. When you tear that out by the roots, you will be free. – Edna Lister, July 23, 1955.


Every time you speak negatively, you kill a clump of the body's cells. Any earnest thought, feeling or word is a prayer. Every emotion affects certain parts of your body. When you say that you are dumb, stupid, etc., you just drop into your solar plexus "brain" and kill a few brain cells. – Edna Lister, August 4, 1955.


Slavery comes in many forms. You can be a slave to appetites, to a creed or to another's idea of religion, to a family member or to resentment in your own heart. You have no religious freedom if you are enslaved to your emotional life. – Edna Lister, Religious Slavery or Freedom, October 9, 1955.


You "walk on water" when you conquer your emotions. – Edna Lister, Religious Slavery or Freedom, November 27, 1955.


Raise your arms at once under anger or any great surge of negative emotion. The sudden surge closes the lotus petals, but raising your arms in surrender to contact God reopens them with a burst of atomic power. – Edna Lister, November 28, 1955.


Conquer your double-mindedness, double picture-building, good and bad, double thought, hope and doubt, double emotions, love and hate. If your mental, emotional and imaginative eye is single, Christed atomic power will fill your whole body. – Edna Lister, Your Treasures, January 15, 1956.


Subconscious mind is so enemy-conscious, mostly self-created with negative thoughts, pictures and emotions or feelings. – Edna Lister, Spiritual Inventory, January 22, 1956.


"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." – Matthew 5:8. "Pure in heart" means purity of heart, mind and purpose. The heart is the gate of universal Spirit flowing through your emotions and feelings. Purity's one outstanding feature, or attribute, is "Honor above all things." When you hold honor to God as your highest soul value, the Oversoul "I AM" consciousness holds the subconscious selfish emotions and feelings under perfect control. – Edna Lister, The Beatitudes Are Be-Attitudes, February 12, 1956.


Think and do. Do not just dream and emote. – Edna Lister, April 14, 1956.


Stand in the center of balance, where you are in command of emotions. Loose the other fellow and let him go. See him as perfect, yet always see conditions as they are while holding him to the line. – Edna Lister, April 18, 1956.


“Opinions come from will, prejudices from emotion.”


The subconscious mind has twelve phases, and you know fear, illness, etc., until you cleanse them. The subconscious emotional mind is in the solar plexus, but the photographic subconscious memory cells are in the head. A healed, lifted subconscious is a good servant. You lift the good subconscious memories first to become part of soul. Good thoughts are ascended and added to soul experience. Each time you've been hurt or grieved, write it out, analyze your reactions, then burn the list to cleanse the subconscious lines of association in memory. The subconscious will work out your fears. Most of your difficulties stem from pride, opinions, prejudices. Opinions are born of mental willfulness. Prejudices are born of emotional rebellion. You get just what remains after your deductions from complete love, such as resentments and criticisms. – Edna Lister, June 18, 1956.


You redeem a negative emotion, habit or debt when you decide you have had enough of it. For instance, make a declaration of perfection for your eyes, but continue loving your glasses. – Edna Lister, Nor Shadow of Turning, July 15, 1956.


The subconscious mind handles automatic body functioning and mental and emotional imagination. Buried emotional blocks interfere with bodily functioning. For example, you can sit in church and still hate. This is emotional dry ice, like false pride and all the negative emotions, which crystallizes the life sparks. Unless you clean out this dry ice, you will have a blowout. Ideas come from above or from the dry ice on the low pole of crystallization that manifests as paralysis, arthritis, hardened arteries, etc. Crystallizing diseases come when you have heavy emotional debts to pay. Rid yourself of fear, and bring old debts from the soul records up to date. – Edna Lister, July 17, 1956.


Courage requires a balance of Wisdom and Love, with no emotion or sentiment, but with a heart that is strong. Courage bestows the ability to smile in the face of adversity, obstacles and trouble. – Edna Lister, Courage via Faith, August 12, 1956.


Any upset to emotions or thinking is an absence of Light. Fear pays no dividends. Any fear touches the organ in the body affected by that type of fear, despite the soul's goodness. To reassure the subconscious that it has nothing to fear, say, "God is all courage and strength." – Edna Lister, The Light, Your Expression, November 4, 1956.


When you entertain negative emotions, you poison your bloodstream. – Edna Lister, November 26, 1956.


Failure results from mental, emotional and physical laziness. Subconscious mind is the ally of laziness, but it cannot set aside what the conscious mind chooses. Live securely in the kingdom of heaven, above fear and emotions. – Edna Lister, Your Devotion to God, December 16, 1956.


You must lift the emotional, mental and imaginative aspects of your life. – Edna Lister, August 8, 1957.


Make every word, every gesture, every emotion and every thought pay the greatest of all dividends. – Edna Lister, October 3, 1957.


Your emotions easily taint your will. – Edna Lister, October 7, 1957.


Instead of making mountains of your molehills, train your emotions to make molehills of your mountains. Rather than thinking that you do not know enough to act, let expectancy declare that you can do this together with God. With God, all things are possible.

Most people need to straighten out their emotional lives and desires. Many who complain about loneliness often say, "I don't like this," or "I can't stand that." Such decrees that box you into a self-made sarcophagus. You need not like the ugly things in life, but you may not hate them. God says, "Love Me." – Edna Lister, Threefold Nourishment, October 13, 1957.


Discretion is watchful prudence over your emotions, thinking and imagination. It is your restraint, the brakes on what you think and feel.

You use perception to realize the relationship of outer things to your inner life of emotions and thinking. – Edna Lister, Your Capacity for Freedom, November 17, 1957.


Never invest your life in situations and people rather than in God and new creations. When you listen to someone's emotional troubles or complaints, then dramatize it in the retelling, even for lifting, you hold him down with subconscious condemnation. This is the source of some forms of blindness, wearing blinders, passing judgment and blaming. – Edna Lister, November 21, 1957.


The solar plexus, the seat of desire, is at the epigastric nerve center, and serves as the "brain" for subconscious auxiliary control. Emotions have their place in the urges, seated at the cerebellum of the brain. Emotional impulses activate the solar plexus brain center through nerves of the physical and the desire body. – Edna Lister, December 26, 1957.


“Raise your arms at once under anger or any surge of negative emotion.”


The fourth dimensional desire body feels pain before the physical. The physical nerve ends extend to the desire body. You can see the healing of the desire body with the inner eye. – Edna Lister, February 4, 1958.


"I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron: And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel." – Isaiah 45:2-3. The "hidden riches of secret places" refers to opening the subconscious "treasures of darkness," idle words, foolish gossip and fears that delay miracles. Count that day a loss when a treasure of darkness does not reveal itself as a subconscious "something" coming up.

You have a chest of gold in the basement, but must turn on the Light to see it. Hoist your under-the-surface fears and doubts, criticisms and condemnations into the Light and they become your most beautiful black pearls. These are your hidden riches. Your task is continuously seeking to unfold hidden soul substance, the ignorance, and negative emotions that need to come up into the Light for lifting and healing. – Edna Lister, February 5, 1958.


You cannot be self-conscious and God-conscious simultaneously. You cannot listen to the world while you listen for God. You cannot hear the noise of self-centered emotions, and be God-conscious simultaneously. In short, you cannot be dual-minded.

Everything emanates a vibration in the color spectrum. Every word, tone of voice and emotion shows color. – Edna Lister, April 20, 1958.


Your life results depend on how you use your divine faculty of imagination, which sets the keynote of your emotional life. – Edna Lister, As I See God, June 1, 1958.


The Power of the living God is using you and you shall have miracle after miracle and miracle upon miracle in your life when you can hold your mind constantly upon the Light, when you do not allow your emotional life to interfere with the Holy Spirit moving through you, when you do not forget who you are and whom you serve. – Edna Lister, September 4, 1958.


Use logic, reason, discernment, discrimination, and discretion in all your words; otherwise, weak puerile emotional rationalization will result. – Edna Lister, November 10, 1958.


Mere rationalization is based on emotion. Analysis is based on logic, reason, discernment, discrimination, and discretion. Pin your problem on the wall above you and ask Light to fill the problem with Light, then you are not personally involved. – Edna Lister, November 13, 1958.


Make notes of the greatest lessons you have learned at in your present position, how they have affected you personally, your family life, and your relationship to God. State in writing the good coming from each episode to clarify your thinking and put your emotions in orderly precision, to organize what you know to be used in what you do. – Edna Lister, March 27, 1959.


Physical weakness, emotional illness and mental harassment make one vulnerable to suggestions of Light but also to suggestions of darkness. – Edna Lister, June 15, 1959.


Repentance and conversion are experiences related to being saved, yet even those who accept them often misunderstand these terms. Conversion deals with emotions, repentance with the mind. Conversion is not an emotional bubble bath, but a complete change of heart, an about-face, a change of direction from the lower self to the soul. Conversion is a change of emotions and deals with the emotional life. – Edna Lister, Use Imagination as Your Crown, June 21, 1959.


Those who live by earth standards without the love of God, follow philosophies of self. They are in total bondage to the little self and their emotions. – Edna Lister, Your Philosophy of Freedom, June 28, 1959.


People always have some type of inner conflict. Opinions and prejudices are not "of the flesh," but of the mind and emotions. – Edna Lister, I Am the Truth, October 11, 1959.


Love heals, so practice diligence in love, which builds the good and opens doors. Truth statements based on principles work in business, and you can declare that abundance or promotions are coming to you. Yet when it comes to healing the body, emotions and mind, you must definitely stick to your declarations and love God enough. – Edna Lister, Your Full Birthright, December 6, 1959.


Work under the principles that do the work — harmony, equilibrium, and balance. They automatically coordinate mind, emotions and imagination as perfect seeing, hearing and coordination, thereby controlling nerves and muscles with seeing, This is the Power doing the greater works as the combination of these three great principles. – Edna Lister, January 1, 1960.


Compassion is strong and helpful, but sympathy is emotional and does you no good. – Edna Lister, April 22, 1960.


To gird your loins, place a band of Light around the lower abdomen, the Land of Egypt, to include the sacrum nerve plexus at the base of the spine. This band of Light is truth, the name of all fundamental principles. It upholds the liver, spleen and gallbladder. The liver represents sincerity, the spleen patience, and the gall bladder symbolizes unity. Bile, the gall bladder secretion, consists of many waste toxins the body can form from food, fatigue and negative emotional and mental states. Symbolically, bile represents the poison of untruths. Only truth, a blend of all principles, can mix it into a beneficent all-healing product. Truth stands the test of time, but lies and insincerity fall of their own weight. – Edna Lister, God Is Safe and Dependable, June 5, 1960.


If you feel scattered in vibration, ascend in consciousness, reach out with arms of Light, gather your scattered soul substance and negative emotions. Lift your life sparks for cleansing, and declare, "Let this be cleansed and returned to Thy servant. I am that good, I AM. I am that Light, I AM. I am that Love, I AM." – Edna Lister, Your Measure of Power, June 12, 1960.


“Buried emotional blocks interfere with bodily functioning.”


Even the smallest emotion you hold reacts on your body almost instantly. Keep yourself sheathed in Light and wear the whole armor of God daily. – Edna Lister, June 30, 1960.


The main objective in emotional balance is to hold the high point of awareness, never slipping, never sinking, forever aware of everything you do, words, actions, especially thinking, emotions, and images in imagination. It takes only a brief picture, thought, or fleeting emotion and you are at the bottom — climb back instantly! – Edna Lister, September 12, 1960.


The medulla oblongata holds the blood platelets that carry the memory impressions of all emotions and bring past soul debts into the present. When Light releases a record of past debt in the midbrain, the medulla releases the corresponding blood platelets, which enter the bloodstream for lifting. – Edna Lister, October 2, 1960.


When only the love faculties are opened, the individual lives by emotions, dreams and goes off into illusion, unbalanced by wisdom. – Edna Lister, October 3, 1960.


Emotion a good thing if not overdone. Move beyond the emotional swaddling clothes. Do not analyze emotional states or waste so much time on your needs. – Edna Lister, December 5, 1960.


Prayer is an emotional outlet and your only way of reintegrating Mind, Substance and Power. Prayer becomes your ladder of faith. When you pray without ceasing, your prayers build that ladder rung by rung. – Edna Lister, The Ladder of Faith, December 18, 1960.


Change your thoughts, pictures, emotions, and the body can do nothing but respond! You leaven your body with what you think you hide from the soul. – Edna Lister, December 29, 1960.


Once you have lifted the past, you have none. Do not recreate it in words, thoughts or emotions. – Edna Lister, January 15, 1961.


You can appropriate from three sources only, Mind, Substance and Power. Further, you have three tools with which you can appropriate, your imagination, thinking and desires, or emotions. How you use your tools determines how much you desire to appropriate. – Edna Lister, No Shadow of Turning, May 1, 1961.


Victory over death is victory over the emotional life. – Edna Lister, August 3, 1961.


To rest includes resting from thinking, emotions and imagination. – Edna Lister, September 14, 1961.


Nonresistance is a good overall title for the Sermon on the Mount, which covers every emotional need, and includes an attitude to meet every emotion prompted by darkness. Stand, face whatever it is, and you can be serene under difficult situations.

You give two ways, consciously or unconsciously. You unconsciously radiate pictures from imagination, emotions from desire, and thoughts from your thinking. People understand you, and you understand them back without a word spoken. You may consciously give others a piece of your mind, or free advice, though this is often unwise. – Edna Lister, The Key to Right Action, October 1, 1961.


In one sense, the entire Book of Genesis is a metaphor. The woman represents love and the emotions. The man represents wisdom and the intellect. The serpent represents the unrestrained emotional and physical desires for pleasure and excess, subtly entwining and enslaving the soul. The fall of man, from eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, represents the emotions tempting intellect to misuse the creative fire. When the soul had reached a requisite point of knowledge of good and evil, the right and wrong ways to love, God closed the Garden of Eden. – Edna Lister, The Tree of Life, October 15, 1961.


If you do not permit self to interfere, life will follow the proper pattern. Yet all too often people do let self interfere with their emotions, imagination and thinking. You can recondition yourself with a five-way approach: Reason, comparison, induction, deduction, and synthesis.

Make a just appraisal of your life. You can always afford to lose the wrong emotions, the darkness of selfishness, and the useless husks of self. – Edna Lister, Wherever You Go, October 22, 1961.


After a loud noise, sound waves propagate around earth 7.5 times. Emotional and mental "noise" works the same way, propagating waves that circle earth. They continue revolving, and unless you eliminate any hurt, anger, or other negative emotions, every time the wave strikes, you live it again, creating more waves, increasing the power in the original thought waves, suggestions, etc. – Edna Lister, Man, God-High, November 5, 1961.


You have three God-given creative tools — desire, thinking and imagination. Unless you keep them working in balanced unity, you cannot have a balanced life. Peace comes from unifying your emotional desires with perfect thinking. If desires, thoughts and imaginings take you in different directions, you are a mess. – Edna Lister, This One Thing I Know, December 3, 1961.


“Crystallizing diseases come when you have heavy emotional debts to pay.”


At night, go out on a cloud, kneel before your Father, and say, "Here I am Father, a servant of Thy glory. I lift every idle word, every worn out emotion, every past word, deed, picture and desire, every opinion and prejudice, all the lines to everyone I contacted and thought about today. Let Thy Light move through and cleanse them all, to melt, dissolve and absorb all today's darkness. Surround me with Thy divine wall of fire. Please release me from fear, grief, guilt, self-condemnation, prejudice, opinions and thoughts for the self. Stretch me and expand me to become Thy perfect one, an angel of grace and beauty, flexibility and resilient strength.

"I love Thee, love Thee, love Thee. Let Thy love use me to go forth to all I meet, to everyone in the world. I am Thy responsible Daughter (Son) of Light. Use me to release Thy Power now and always. I come to serve this night, to be instructed, to memorize what shall come tomorrow, what to do, and what to say. I set up this mind to register all Thou givest me, and return comprehending all. Thank Thee for all the answers and the discrimination to give them at the right time, in the right way and when to be silent. Thank Thee, Father, for today's experience. Let all the good be retained as pure gold and the dross and taint of earth, let it be burned and dissolved in Thy fires. I enter Thy fires of cleansing for purification. I am Thine, forever and ever." – Edna Lister, January 6, 1962.


No one gets away with forcing himself to overwork, overdraw on his resources of packaged, stored-up energy. Most cases of high blood pressure are a combination physical over-exertion and covered-up emotional resentment. – Edna Lister, January 20, 1962.


When you pray and speak in the name of Jesus the Christ, his name protects the cells of your body, the glands of the creative centers, it protects you in every way, physical, mental, emotional, because you have done it in his name and he does the work for you. – Edna Lister, March 28, 1962.


Keep your emotions, mental life and imagination lifted. The greatness of imagination, thinking and desire determines the difference between a demonstration and a miracle. Under demonstration come delays and failures. God shortens time under a miracle. – Edna Lister, March 29, 1962.


Many people vibrate at the horse and buggy stage physically due to their opinions and prejudices, likes and dislikes and what their condemnation and criticism does to their vibration. When you strip yourself of preconceived ideas about God, when you can no longer say, "Oh, that will never happen. I would never do that," you'll be out of the horse and buggy stage. Watch yourself, you can mentally accept all the benefits of science while you remain in the horse and buggy stage emotionally.

If parents can discipline children without interjecting their own opinions, prejudices and horse and buggy emotions, they will not provoke their children. Further, parents anger their children when they do not live up to the ideals they preach. You have emotional and mental children, too, and your negativity provokes them to wrath. For instance, people degrade the Father-Mother principles when they dwell on political hatreds. – Edna Lister, What Is Compassion? May 6, 1962.


Your malformed creations of imagination, thinking, and emotions trail behind you. – Edna Lister, June 7, 1962.


You transform your life by living the truth, which causes a transfiguration of your body, emotions and mind. – Edna Lister, A Triumphant Soul, September 29, 1962.


Being on earth forces you to be in the world of men with its continual cross-vibrations. This includes conquering of emotions, achieving I AM consciousness, and being able to make just appraisals in life. I AM consciousness must rule the emotions before you can make a just appraisal. – Edna Lister, Many Pearls, Many Treasures, November 25, 1962.


You can't see or hear anything spiritually unless you ascend the emotional life by mating your desire and will with God's desire and will for you. – Edna Lister, December 17, 1962.


Become more highly alert and alive than ever before in your earth life, with no sagging emotionally or mentally again. Each day you must earn the new day's credit for advancement. When a day includes an especially hard task, just remember that you have earned that, too. Do not, complain, whine or pity the self. It is yours! – Edna Lister, February 3, 1963.


Imagination, thinking, the mental life, and emotions pull you down from soul to self. You can kneel at the Source in devotion, then return and speak sharply. Say, "Here I am, Father," and see only Light and devotion. That is the law. The taints of emotion, imagination, thinking cannot touch your nerves then. The nerves quiver from the high vibration when you call upon the Source. You must maintain your high contact during outer experiences to invoke the Light instantly.

A healer may say you must do something to be healed, the Roman Catholic Church says you must offer penance, but we say you must give up something inside. This simply practical Law, because some blocks to healing must exist — wrong seeing, thinking, emotions, wrong seeing of evil instead of Light. – Edna Lister, February 27, 1963.


“Discretion is watchful prudence over your
emotions, thinking, and imagination.”


Healing can be blocked only within your own imagination, thinking or emotions. When you allow yourself to fear, to dread what might come or is coming from somewhere outside, when you blame something from the outside, circumstance or individuals, you give power to false gods, and self blocks the healing. Then the healing process — which can come only from the Source, by setting aside lower laws and accelerating outer mundane laws — is blocked at whatever level your surrender and obedience have taken you. – Edna Lister, June 4, 1963.


Words create a powerful vibration. If you repeat the story of anyone's ill health, your words can create powerful suggestions that color your listener's emotional receptivity, and he may recreate an even stronger negative pattern. If you recreate a story, how he hurt you, how noble you are, you send it back to hit him. You drop your pearl of wisdom in the mud and sell your soul stock short.

Lend yourself to complete sacrifice of self, to rigid obedience in training, physically, emotionally and mentally by keeping things, emotions and thoughts square and in order. – Edna Lister, Born of the Spirit, June 9, 1963.


People become ill because they entertain mental and emotional inner conflicts arising from wrongly directed imagination, thinking and emotional desires. – Edna Lister, June 18, 1963.


When you doubt and fear, you increase your insecurity. When you let in the doubts, you puncture your prayer molds, substance leaks out, and you must gather it up again. You must face situations that you hate and fear until you learn the lesson they hold. – Edna Lister, The Crown of Roses, June 30, 1963.


Each is his own master. Each is the sum total of his own thoughts and emotions, and must conquer self, all doubts and fears! Excuses such as, "Can't you see, I am too weak?" will not do! – Edna Lister, July 21, 1963.


“Mere rationalization is based on emotion”


An experience that arouses fear, doubt, frustration or another negative response means a soul debt is involved. Unless you face and lift such emotions into the Light, their records will harden your silver cord until it cannot stretch flexibly for soul flights. Should you crystallize the strands of the silver cord that way, you then bring fear, doubts, etc., with you into this life. Your soul uses the silver cord to attach itself to the parent cells (sperm and ovum). Any crystallization usually occurs in the four feet of the silver cord closest to the body's heart. Whenever you see a pregnant woman, treat so that the incoming soul's silver cord is cleansed of emotional records so they cannot influence the embodied soul later. – Edna Lister, February 6, 1964.


Jesus had to live through and suffer all that a man could, the full gamut of human emotion and experience, so that the world might truly believe. He had to prove that resurrection and ascension are possible. – Edna Lister, Life, Your Glory and Splendor, April 26, 1964.


You see the body, but not Spirit, mind or emotion. Nobody sees the real you. You may get a glimpse if you use the eyes of love. – Edna Lister, Rejoice! God Reigns, July 5, 1964.


Thoughts can be evil, but the hatred that accompanies the thought is emotional. – Edna Lister, August 2, 1964.


If you dislike friends asking how you are doing, it indicates some under-the-surface thinking or emotional reaction that sends you down. – Edna Lister, August 24, 1964.


Solomon went to the altar at Gibeon and made a thousand burnt offerings because he wanted to be sure he had no buried taints to dilute his hearing, and to hear God's answer clearly. He touched the gamut of the emotional life in the thousand burnt offerings. – Edna Lister, Love and Wisdom, October 4, 1964.


Those who study languages awaken brain cells and keep the knowledge they have worked for. But speaking in tongues is emotionalism. Those who speak in tongues are given credit for their faith, but a true knowledge of the language is not theirs. To speak in tongues is a manifestation of the subconscious, not vision through the glands. – Edna Lister, October 6, 1964.


You must not allow yourself to be possessed by anything, whether people, appetites, emotions or thoughts. – Edna Lister, Judgment and Mercy, October 11, 1964.


“You cannot hear the noise of self-centered emotions,
and be God-conscious simultaneously.”


When you awaken in the morning and feel far from God, you did not lift yesterday's events the night before. While you were out, the appetitive soul took over, fears and doubts entered, and you awakened with emotional heaviness. Before going to sleep, declare that you will awaken light, healthy and inspired. Thus, you keep the door of the crown open. – Edna Lister, The Good Shepherd, November 1, 1964.


When you answer from the self's mental and emotional taints, you say no to God and soul freedom. – Edna Lister, The Great Supper, November 22, 1964.


Your physical is the projected image of your thoughts, your prayers, your devotions and what you do with your emotional life. You can recreate your body with the right kind of thinking and emotional life. You can build a new set of physical nerves because the pattern in the desire body nerves is perfect and untouchable. Do you want to change your pattern? It's up to you. – Edna Lister, November 27, 1964.


In his last labor, Hercules captured Cerberus, the watchdog of Hades, a tough initiation, for Cerberus is the faithful guardian of self who guards the secrets of the subconscious until you forget they exist. This labor always affects you spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically. – Edna Lister, December 11, 1964.


Taints of self dilute the Power moving through you. Your self-discipline must start from the physical and extend to the spiritual, rigidly disciplining the appetitive soul to hold to the highest righteousness, which is right use of all law now. Glory descends from the spiritual to the outer as Power and added life, but discipline must work from the other direction — from objective attention to physical detail through the emotional and the mental — to remove blocks that hinder the Light from doing its perfect work through you. – Edna Lister, January 3, 1965.


You spend at least one-third of your life falling off the path and having to climb it again. Remember, nothing is hidden to the Light, and the most fleeting of thoughts, emotions and vague pictures of imagination can push you back, sometimes many steps. – Edna Lister, March 21, 1965.


When a physical test comes, do not deny it, but ignore it. Do not accept it emotionally or let your subconscious mind move in to take charge. Just do not give it room! Denial gives it substance for being. Ignoring it gives it no life, no substance. – Edna Lister, March 30, 1965.


Attention to detail includes idle words, the greatest detail, all our actions on the outer, every thought, idea, emotion and physical act. – Edna Lister, April 22, 1965.


When a tree bears no fruit, you must uproot it. This is symbolic also of old emotions, ideas, beliefs and idle words. – Edna Lister, The First One Through, May 2, 1965.


Emotionally sentimental love that says, "I want, Give me, I demand," is really compounded of and mixed with selfishness. Selfish love rides the soul with a whip and spurs puts the loved one in bondage, and says, "I gave you the best years of my life." Such counterfeit love is always demanding a return on investment, and lives in a state of, "What will this do for me? How will this affect me?" Such people lack proper timing, so usually blunder. They lack proper spacing, so choose the wrong time and place to talk. Finally, the counterfeit collapses of its own weight. Then they have a nervous breakdown to escape giving more, and go to bed demanding. – Edna Lister, Eternity Is Now Mine, May 9, 1965.


Self-pity is heavier than lead, the most burdensome emotion. – Edna Lister, Appreciation Is a Love Affair, May 16, 1965.


"There are three that bear witness on earth: the Spirit, and the water, and the blood; and these three agree in one." – 1 John 5:8. To "bear record" refers to the soul records. Spirit is the spiritual life; water is the emotional life and blood is the outer physical life and the blood platelets. – Edna Lister, June 14, 1965.


Do not permit yourself to be emotionally touched or affected by anything but the love of God. – Edna Lister, The Oracle Speaks, June 27, 1965.


“An experience that arouses fear, doubt, frustration or another
negative response means a soul debt is involved.”


"When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." – Matthew 6:6. First, you close out the sound of outer noise. The second step is to close out emotional "sound waves," the pull of others' feelings, sorrow, anger or emotional pain. Then, you close out their mental "sound waves," their conflicting or demanding thoughts. Then, and only then, can you stand in the golden silence, using your "Open sesame" key of praise. This puts you in the right place at the right time. All failure comes from being out of step in time or space. They must always work together and overlap to produce a miracle. – Edna Lister, Eternal Youth Through Breathing, October 21, 1965.


You cannot be hurt emotionally by anything unless you expect to be short-changed. – Edna Lister, Comprehension and Recompense, November 7, 1965.


A great sin is to speak a word, think a thought or emote an emotion that can separate Mind, Substance and Power, which as one, is Light. When you misuse a word and emote it, you separate Mind, Substance and Power, which creates a debt of force that only you can lift. – Edna Lister, Truth as Practical Common Sense, November 28, 1965.


All idle words, every false emotion of fear, doubt, criticism, irritation, frustration, all opinions and prejudices have caused crystallized dark blotches in your desire body, seat of emotions and sensation. These form vulnerable spots in the physical, which become outer aches and pains. The higher your consciousness is at all times, the more quickly your guardians can pour Light and life through to lift all the remaining physical blots. – Edna Lister, January 10, 1966.


Anyone who opens a new idea is crucified mentally and emotionally, gets the mudslinging, criticism and force the scoffers send. – Edna Lister, February 3, 1966.


“Conversion deals with emotions, repentance with the mind.”


You must perfect the 144 virtues. Each virtue comprises one of 144 high spiritual steps. Everyone who has striven to eliminate taints has worked at the 144 virtues, none of them perfected but you have worked on the three different grades of 144 virtues, emotional, mental and spiritual. As you strive for high perfection, you need greater effort. Self-pity or any self that you indulge in grows more poignant, deeper, the blame harder, etc. The challenges come from different temptations, different experiences, different people. Yet you are just repeating the same 144 virtues. – Edna Lister, February 12, 1966.


All negative emotions and their expressions eventually fall of their own weight, resulting in a nervous breakdown as the soul seeks to escape the self's negativity. A "synagogue of Satan" describes the disturbance of the physical, mental and emotional life through illness, sorrow and lack that results when you do not pay your soul vows. – Edna Lister, A New Found Horizon, May 8, 1966.


Everyone has his own way of bridging the abyss between earth and heaven. Religion is supposed to be your bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds, but first religion must permeate your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual lives to complete the bridge. – Edna Lister, Decree and Establish, June 26, 1966.


Thousands of nerves, carrying signals from every part of the body cross over at the pyramidal decussation (motor crossover), sending their signals to the opposite side of the brain. Your life's records are written in the brain's neurons. They record your emotional, intellectual and spiritual dimensions at the corresponding molecular-desire, atomic-mental and subatomic-spiritual fire bodies respectively. – Edna Lister, August 4, 1966.


"Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted." – Matthew 5:4. Those who mourn over self in grief, blame and self-pity, end stagnant and crystallized. Mourning for self plays the same old recording, tells the same old story for years. The keynote of "Blessed are they that mourn" is "I surrender" self. You surrender self to become the servant of all Power, to ascend from the valley of tears into the sunlight. This redeems your wasted time and purifies the emotional residue of grief. – Edna Lister, Following Your Path of Destiny, December 4, 1966.


If you do not know what to do or say, you may "ask in faith, nothing wavering." A crown of life is your reward for enduring temptation without wavering. You waver when you stumble over emotional and mental blocks, opinions about, prejudices against and blame for. Transform these heavy weights into faith and love. – Edna Lister, Be Strong to Endure, December 18, 1966.


Pride contains all the off-balance emotions, not just one emotion. It is a composite of competition, getting ahead of the Joneses, arrogance, self-exaltation, playing God, etc. – Edna Lister, May 12, 1967.


Your disposition, emotions, thinking and imagination all have an effect on your organs and parts of your body. – Edna Lister, Judgment and Love, May 14, 1967.


To endure in joy, you must be able to say, "This is good" while looking into the face of black evil, or the most terrible emotional hurt. When you declare, "This is good. Let there be Light," you are seeking the kingdom of God first. Endurance is the greatest soul quality of strength. – Edna Lister, To Stand, to Endure, to Hold, July 2, 1967.


With every emotional jag, you thicken a veil of illusion. – Edna Lister, Religion and the World, November 5, 1967.


"This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood." – 1 John 5:6. Water is volatile, and often insecure. Emotions represent Spirit in its action over and through you for cleansing, and the use of the water of spiritual potentials of God flowing through. Water is visible, but blood is heavy. Soul inhabits the bloodstream as platelets through which emotions and thought intertwine, working like twins to lift or to make you heavy. – Edna Lister, Creating Divine Security, November 19, 1967.


Do not turn your emotions outward to pollute the world, turn them upward as a sacrifice of self to God. – Edna Lister, Jesus' Many Appearances, December 18, 1967.


The greatest testing comes on the emotional plane of living. – Edna Lister, December 18, 1967.


You need the consent of your mental and emotional lives to live life creatively. – Edna Lister, May 6, 1968.


“Prayer is an emotional outlet and your only way of reintegrating
Mind, Substance, and Power.”


You can speak five words and change the vibration of your body cells, and your use of the spoken Word can cause illness or health. Idle words grow from being too emotional. The physical, emotional and spiritual dimensions of your life must remain integrated, in contact and balanced with one another. You must have the consent of your emotions and thinking for your prayer molds to hold their integrity. – Edna Lister, Life in the Atomic Age, May 12, 1968.


Faith is new, untouched substance from the Source that permeates soul from the mental to the emotional to the physical life. Faith permeates the soul first, then the mind, then the emotional life. Metaphysics starts you on the path by teaching you of the need to resurrect the mental and emotional life, by emphasizing doing the "greater works" to change your life pattern. – Edna Lister, The Heavenly Mysteries Unveiled, October 20, 1968.


Mesh your mental and emotional gears in balance so they will not grind with resentment and rejection. – Edna Lister, Five Important Questions, October 27, 1968.


You exist amid a mass of Light vibrations, and are always responding to drafts of different Light from the world's prayers, thoughts, emotions and idle words. Cross vibrations from all over may pummel you, without your knowing why, unless you keep your aura filled with Light. Breathe deeply to inflate the magnetic wall of your universal aura of lights and colors. – Edna Lister, The Rewards of Faith: Wings of Glory, June 22, 1969.


To reach the miracle stage of a physical healing, you must stop taking your emotional temperature. Indulge no self. – Edna Lister, The Rewards of Faith: Light on the Path, June 29, 1969.


All healing is permanent, yet you usually can accept it mentally and emotionally only for the day. The realization that you are healed will dawn eventually. – Edna Lister, August 3, 1969.


On the Adept Degree you are overly concerned with your future, security, pride and opinions and quite overly sensitive emotionally. These are the real stickers. If you say you are digging out the past by concentrating on it, you have a false god, and are enjoying your misery. – Edna Lister, August 7, 1969.


Under your declarations of Light, love absorbs the emotions that hamper you. Do not run away or close out any situation or person emotionally or mentally. You can declare, "Let Thy Light, Father, remove evil from my eyes and ears. Let Thy Light remove this mountain of criticism, resentment, and judgment. Please, remove my unbelief. Father, move in and possess me until I cannot hear Name's voice." – Edna Lister, Moving Mountains, March 3, 1970.


Remain emotionally uninvolved in the darkness you find on earth, but cast it into the sea of Light until memory of it is gone. – Edna Lister, May 11, 1970.


You must clean out the old emotions and psychological trash to make way for new wisdom. – Edna Lister, Jesus' Miracles: Faith Healing, November 15, 1970.


“Ascend your emotional life by mating your desire and will
with God's desire and will for you.”


The first work of faith and healing is to redeem the emotional life. Your emotional life deals with the soul virtues and includes what you "feel" and what you experience. You must cleanse what you "feel." Say, "Father, please cleanse me, redeem me from all self-pity." No one can run on yesterday's used-up Power. You must recharge by redeeming our emotional life. When you have lifted your emotional desires into the Light, you transform your mental life of creative desire, thinking, and imagination. Then you may safely imagine that you are One with the Eternal God and walk within His glory. Nothing is impossible with transformed desire, thinking and imagination. We are creator gods, going home, step by step, to immortality. – Edna Lister, When Is Healing Legal? November 22, 1970.


If you pray and do not have a miracle, you have not cast your net on the right side of the boat. The miracle is coming from the Father above, the up side, not from the net under the water of your emotions. – Edna Lister, From Surrender of Self to Soul Ascension, May 16, 1971.


Appetitive soul's substance carries the memory of every negative emotion, which is why lifting them is so difficult. However, you must persevere to gain soul freedom. – Edna Lister, June 3, 1971.


Water represents the emotions. The subconscious mind feeds on the energy your negative emotions generate. When you win a battle with the self, your former lowest point of detriment becomes your highest point of glory because you have conquered. You reach a new point of glory each time you conquer. – Edna Lister, July 15, 1971.


Endnotes

1^ Oxford English Dictionary.

2^ Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine.

3^ Collins Dictionary of Medicine.

4^ The Free Dictionary.

5^ Oxytocin, the so-called "love hormone," is a neurohypophysial hormone produced by the hypothalamus and stored and secreted by the posterior pituitary gland.

6^ See "What Is Epigenetics?"

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Treatments for Burdensome Emotions

Some impulse of desire and/or will rooted deep within the self causes emotional reactions such as anger, feeling hurt, resentful, jealous, etc. Lift all difficulties onto a cloud continent of Light, where the power of love can melt them. Close your eyes, and imagine yourself within the heart of a radiant sphere of Light. Open yourself to God, which draws you into the Light and the Light into you. – Edna Lister, January 24, 1933.


"Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison." – Matthew 5:25. Your real adversary is the selfishness lodged in your subconscious mind, the seat of emotions. There, you are in the "house of bondage," in prison, behind invisible bars, jailed by getting angry. Take a deep breath, visualize the Master instead, and the prison doors will open. – Edna Lister, The Sermon on the Mount, January 31, 1933.


Today is a new beginning, so treat it as such. Erase all past doubts, fears and indifference from your mind and heart. Make peace with your world, family and friends, and above all, with your own inner household of emotions and thoughts. Lift these high into the Light you release. Lift up your heart on almighty praise to save the children of the world who now perish for a message of faith and hope. – Edna Lister, February 25, 1940.


You take in vital energy as well as oxygen in the air you breathe, and you need to breathe deeply to feed yourself properly, plenty of water and exercise, and to get enough refreshing sleep. Unless you do all this, you can fall prey to many illnesses through slight instances of physical malnutrition. You can suffer other ailments through your emotions, and nearly all of these trace to the key emotional element of desire. A lack of desire always results in some form of physical atrophy. Your brain's functioning becomes cloudy before you feel illness or pain. – Edna Lister, Your Inheritance, May 31, 1942.


From this point, your maladies are imagination, so treat them as such. They are a memory, not the real thing. They do not exist so take no heed of them. The Father has cleansed your past. You do not have to review pages that are already clean. Each day is a clean page, so declare, "This one thing I do now, pressing on, reaching forth to the high calling of the Lord Jesus Christ." – Edna Lister, June 30, 1944.


When your body becomes fatigued, stop and rest in the Light. Entertain no emotion whatever about it. Let it be just a matter-of-fact recognition of a need to rest briefly. Then get up and go to work, no matter what. Whenever you let emotion play a part in deciding what the body needs, self has entered — that foul little devil is just waiting to rear its head at the slightest opportunity. This is how to recognize selfishness: When you offer an excuse, ask why, or hold any emotion about what you do, lift it immediately. Watch, you will be able to see yourself and what you are doing and saying. You will be able to stop it immediately, ascend in consciousness, lift, and dig it out. Work at making a sacrifice of it. The slightest resentment shows that the self is in control.

Life will always have its problems, its changes. Just meet it without letting emotion dictate. Never stop working, just forget the body and do it. The subconscious mind, controlled by emotions, tries to dictate through it. Analyze your actions to determine whether emotional or mental selfishness is dictating them. – Edna Lister, October 14, 1945.


Stand on a higher cloud of Light, with your feet more firmly placed than ever before. Walk upon the waters of emotion. You shall see the Master walking toward you. Look for him, for he will be there, waiting for you. Practice this alone, without distraction. Imagination, ruled by the soul, not by self, is your greatest expression. – Edna Lister, December 13, 1945.


It is shameful that any outer stimulus can cause you to descend in consciousness. No excuse or justification is allowed ever, for to excuse or justify your words or actions is disgraceful. All practice and discipline, whether physical, mental or emotional will give release and relief. All unlikeness to an absolute pattern will slough the habits and remnants of self, until a self-cauterization takes place within. You shall see this. Stand upon that principal in healing to have it be complete. – Edna Lister, July 5, 1947.


Any upset to emotions or thinking is an absence of Light. Fear pays no dividends. Any fear touches the organ in the body affected by that type of fear, despite the soul's goodness. To reassure the subconscious that it has nothing to fear, say, "God is all courage and strength." – Edna Lister, The Light, Your Expression, November 4, 1956.


Instead of making mountains of your molehills, train your emotions to make molehills of your mountains. Rather than thinking that you do not know enough to act, let expectancy declare that you can do this together with God. With God, all things are possible.

Most people need to straighten out their emotional lives and desires. Many who complain about loneliness often say, "I don't like this," or "I can't stand that." Such decrees that box you into a self-made sarcophagus. You need not like the ugly things in life, but you may not hate them. God says, "Love Me." – Edna Lister, Threefold Nourishment, October 13, 1957.


Make notes of the greatest lessons you have learned at in your present position, how they have affected you personally, your family life, and your relationship to God. State in writing the good coming from each episode to clarify your thinking and put your emotions in orderly precision, to organize what you know to be used in what you do. – Edna Lister, March 27, 1959.


The life sparks of a soul's physical body are poisoned by such experiences as suicide, negative passions and emotions. The treatment is, "Let the Spirit of the Living God go through all the bloodstream and all parts of the body — the bone marrow, the heart, the liver, the spleen and the glands — to melt and dissolve the frozen crystallized life sparks so that they may be absorbed into the medulla oblongata for the soul's transition from the body." – Edna Lister, June 15, 1959.


If you feel scattered in vibration, ascend in consciousness, reach out with arms of Light, and gather your scattered soul substance and negative emotions. Lift your life sparks for cleansing, and declare, "Let this be cleansed and returned to Thy servant. I am that good, I AM. I am that Light, I AM. I am that Love, I AM." – Edna Lister, Your Measure of Power, June 12, 1960.


At night, go out on a cloud, kneel before your Father, and say, "Here I am Father, a servant of Thy glory. I lift every idle word, every worn out emotion, every past word, deed, picture and desire, every opinion and prejudice, all the lines to everyone I contacted and thought about today. Let Thy Light move through and cleanse them all, to melt, dissolve and absorb all today's darkness. Surround me with Thy divine wall of fire. Please release me from fear, grief, guilt, self-condemnation, prejudice, opinions and thoughts for the self. Stretch me and expand me to become Thy perfect one, an angel of grace and beauty, flexibility and resilient strength.

"I love Thee, love Thee, love Thee. Let Thy love use me to go forth to all I meet, to everyone in the world. I am Thy responsible Daughter (Son) of Light. Use me to release Thy Power now and always. I come to serve this night, to be instructed, to memorize what shall come tomorrow, what to do, and what to say. I set up this mind to register all Thou givest me, and return comprehending all. Thank Thee for all the answers and the discrimination to give them at the right time, in the right way and when to be silent. Thank Thee, Father, for today's experience. Let all the good be retained as pure gold and the dross and taint of earth, let it be burned and dissolved in Thy fires. I enter Thy fires of cleansing for purification. I am Thine, forever and ever." – Edna Lister, January 6, 1962.


To treat the subconscious, before sleep, say, "I AM loves you into oneness with soul. Thank You, Father, that You weave in this glorious subconscious mind of appetitive soul into this rational mind and soul for greater service unto Thee. I AM now strong and balanced, healed of past emotions, in mind, of memory, spirit, and body, wedded in the Christ mind now expressing on earth. I AM now in the heart of the flame always, while doing God's work, disciplining self and working out my salvation here below." – Edna Lister, February 3, 1962.


When you pray and speak in the name of Jesus the Christ, his name protects the cells of your body, the glands of the creative centers, it protects you in every way, physical, mental, emotional, because you have done it in his name and he does the work for you. – Edna Lister, March 28, 1962.


Imagination, thinking, the mental life, and emotions pull you down from soul to self. You can kneel at the Source in devotion, then return and speak sharply. Say, "Here I am, Father," and see only Light and devotion. That is the law. The taints of emotion, imagination, thinking cannot touch your nerves then. The nerves quiver from the high vibration when you call upon the Source. You must maintain your high contact during outer experiences to invoke the Light instantly.

A healer may say you must do something to be healed, the Roman Catholic Church says you must offer penance, but we say you must give up something inside. This simply practical Law, because some blocks to healing must exist — wrong seeing, thinking, emotions, wrong seeing of evil instead of Light. – Edna Lister, February 27, 1963.


When you doubt and fear, you increase your insecurity. When you let in the doubts, you puncture your prayer molds, substance leaks out, and you must gather it up again. Declare it good. Say, "I am in the right place at the right time. What am I going to put into this place, now that I am here?" God is everything, so add Him to your life. You must face situations that you hate and fear until you learn the lesson they hold. – Edna Lister, The Crown of Roses, June 30, 1963.


Whenever you see a pregnant woman, treat so that the incoming soul's silver cord is cleansed of emotional records so they cannot influence the embodied soul later. – Edna Lister, February 6, 1964.


Under your declarations of Light, love absorbs the emotions that hamper you. Do not run away or close out any situation or person emotionally or mentally. You can declare, "Father, let Thy Light remove evil from my eyes and ears. Let Thy Light remove this mountain of criticism, resentment, and judgment. Please, remove my unbelief. Father, move in and possess me until I cannot hear Name's voice in my mind." – Edna Lister, Moving Mountains, March 3, 1970.


The first work of faith and healing is to redeem the emotional life. Your emotional life deals with the soul virtues and includes what you "feel" and what you experience. You must cleanse what you "feel." Say, "Father, please cleanse me, redeem me from all self-pity." No one can run on yesterday's used-up Power. You must recharge by redeeming your emotional life. When you have lifted your emotional desires into the Light, you transform your mental life of creative desire, thinking, and imagination. Then you may safely imagine that you are One with the Eternal God and walk within His glory. Nothing is impossible with transformed desire, thinking, and imagination. You are a creator god, going home, step by step, to immortality. – Edna Lister, When Is Healing Legal? November 22, 1970.

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The Philosophers on Emotions

The first recorded thinking about emotions came from the ancient philosophers.

Pythagoras evinced such a marked preference for stringed instruments that he even went so far as to warn his disciples against allowing their ears to be defiled by the sounds of flutes or cymbals. He further declared that the soul could be purified from its irrational influences by solemn songs sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. In his investigation of the therapeutic value of harmonics, Pythagoras discovered that the seven modes — or keys — of the Greek system of music had the power to incite or allay the various emotions. It is related that while observing the stars one night he encountered a young man befuddled with strong drink and mad with jealousy who was piling faggots about his mistress' door with the intention of burning the house. The frenzy of the youth was accentuated by a flutist a short distance away who was playing a tune in the stirring Phrygian mode. Pythagoras induced the musician to change his air to the slow, and rhythmic Spondaic mode, whereupon the intoxicated youth immediately became composed and, gathering up his bundles of wood, returned quietly to his own home.

There is also an account of how Empedocles, a disciple of Pythagoras, by quickly changing the mode of a musical composition he was playing, saved the life of his host, Anchitus, when the latter was threatened with death by the sword of one whose father he had condemned to public execution. It is also known that Aesculapius, the Greek physician, cured sciatica and other diseases of the nerves by blowing a loud trumpet in the presence of the patient.


“Pythagoras discovered certain melodies as remedies against
the passions of the soul, despondency and lamentation”


Pythagoras cured many ailments of the spirit, soul, and body by having certain specially prepared musical compositions played in the presence of the sufferer or by personally reciting short selections from such early poets as Hesiod and Homer. In his university at Crotona it was customary for the Pythagoreans to open and to close each day with songs — those in the morning calculated to clear the mind from sleep and inspire it to the activities of the coming day; those in the evening of a mode soothing, relaxing, and conducive to rest. At the vernal equinox, Pythagoras caused his disciples to gather in a circle around one of their number who led them in song and played their accompaniment upon a lyre.

The therapeutic music of Pythagoras is described by Iamblichus thus: "And there are certain melodies devised as remedies against the passions of the soul, and also against despondency and lamentation, which Pythagoras invented as things that afford the greatest assistance in these maladies. And again, he employed other melodies against rage and anger, and against every aberration of the soul. There is also another kind of modulation invented as a remedy against desires." (See Iamblichus, The Life of Pythagoras, Thomas Taylor, trans.)

It is probable that the Pythagoreans recognized a connection between the seven Greek modes and the planets. As an example, Pliny declares that Saturn moves in the Dorian mode and Jupiter in the Phrygian mode. It is also apparent that the temperaments are keyed to the various modes, and the passions likewise. Thus, anger, which is a fiery passion, may be accentuated by a fiery mode or its power neutralized by a watery mode.

The far-reaching effect exercised by music upon the culture of the Greeks is thus summed up by Emil Nauman: "Plato depreciated the notion that music was intended solely to create cheerful and agreeable emotions, maintaining rather that it should inculcate a love of all that is noble, and hatred of all that is mean, and that nothing could more strongly influence man's innermost feelings than melody and rhythm. Firmly convinced of this, he agreed with Damon of Athens, the musical instructor of Socrates, that the introduction of a new and presumably enervating scale would endanger the future of a whole nation, and that it was not possible to alter a key without shaking the very foundations of the State. Plato affirmed that music which ennobled the mind was of a far higher kind than that which merely appealed to the senses, and he strongly insisted that it was the paramount duty of the Legislature to suppress all music of an effeminate and lascivious character, and to encourage only that which was pure and dignified; that bold and stirring melodies were for men, gentle and soothing ones for women. From this it is evident that music played a considerable part in the education of the Greek youth. The greatest care was also to be taken in the selection of instrumental music, because the absence of words rendered its signification doubtful, and it was difficult to foresee whether it would exercise upon the people a benign or baneful influence. Popular taste, being always tickled by sensuous and meretricious effects, was to be treated with deserved contempt. (See Emil Naumann. The History of Music.)

Aristotle dealt with emotion and the emotions (pathos and pathe) in the Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric. He lists eleven emotions in the Nicomachean Ethics, as the "feelings accompanied by pleasure or pain," listing appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, love, hatred, longing, emulation, and pity. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle views the emotions as approaches used in swaying an audience. His list includes anger, calm, friendship, enmity (hatred), fear, confidence, shame, shamelessness, kindness (benevolence), unkindness, pity, indignation, envy, and emulation (and contempt).

The Greek Stoics, the school founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens (301 BC) were largely unaccepting of the emotions (pathos), viewing them as being moral failings in general. And indeed, the majority of emotions are negative states. Stoicism, as a philosophy, is a way of life based on the conscious development of self-control (command of the emotions) in accord with the laws inherent in the natural cosmos. For further information on the specific Stoic philosophers, research Antipater of Tarsus, Cleanthes of Assos, Chrysippus of Soli, Panaetius of Rhodes, Posidonius of Rhodes, Musonius Rufus, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.

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Edna Miriam Lister
1884 –1971
The original Pioneering Mystic
minister, teacher, and author

Edna Lister


Etymology of emotion: a (social) moving, stirring, agitation, from Middle French émotion, from Old French emouvoir stir up, from Latin emovere move out, remove, agitate, from assimilated form of ex- out + movere to move.


References

. "Emotions," Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Rhetoric, Volume 22, Book 2. J. H. Freese, translator. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1926.

"Emotion." Collins Dictionary of Medicine. (2004, 2005); accessed March 6, 2017.

"Emotion." Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health, Seventh Edition. (2003); accessed March 6, 2017.

"Emotion and memory." The Free Dictionary. Wikipedia.org. 2014; Wikimedia accessed March 6, 2017.

Iamblichus. The Life of Pythagoras, Thomas Taylor, 1758-1835, trans. Hollywood, California: Theosophical Publishing House, 1918.

Naumann, Emil. The History of Music, F. Praeger, trans., Sir Frederick Arthur Gore, ed. London, New York: Cassell & Company, Limited, 1886.

The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary: 2 volumes. E.S.C. Weiner, editor. Oxford University Press, 1971.

The Holy Bible. King James Version (KJV).


Related Topics

See Desire

See Imagination

See Thinking

See Vows


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