Can you talk a little more about the spiritual meaning of family connections in the parent-child relationship?

The Guide: What I’m going to say about the mother and the child does not only apply to the mother and the child. It applies also to the father and the child, and it also applies to siblings, and it applies to the important other contacts in life. It has a particular connection with the mother and the child, but the principle is the same with all important relationships.

The significance here is that there is invariably and inevitably a task to be fulfilled together, in the interaction. To whatever degree there is a negative interaction, that is precisely where the task lies, where the unfulfilled problems exist. That is where the most attention and focus is required.

Of course, most people avoid to see this, and then they have to reappear in different combinations again and again and again, until the lesson is perceived and accepted and learned. But sometimes, inadvertently, aspects of the lesson may be learned without the consciousness fully recognizing the task.

But when the spiritual development has sufficiently progressed that these concepts can exist – of a task fulfillment in the very difficulty – then, of course, the task can be fulfilled infinitely more profoundly and efficiently, if you will.

You can see here how one and the same occurrence can be seen in totally different ways. Suppose a very difficult relationship between a mother and a child has nothing but friction and unpleasantness and discontent and mutual frustration and pain and hurt. If you’re very deeply submerged in just the level of manifestation, if you’re very much disconnected from the inner reality, that relationship will seem an undeserved curse for both participants.

However, if you go deeper and look with the outlook you are increasingly gaining through a path such as this, you begin to see suddenly a totally different picture. You see that in the very frustrations and difficulties lies the lesson – the lesson that you as a soul have come for, to fulfill.

This is why, when a mother dies and the child goes on living, and the problem the child has come to resolve has not been recognized and worked and fulfilled, the same relationship that you had with your mother will manifest in different forms and with different people. You will be magnetically attracted to similar conditions that your mother had, in other people.

Or even if these conditions do not really exist, at least you will react to people as if they would exist. That is the repeated chance that the processes and lawfulness of evolution offer you that you can use. Even if you do not fulfill it with the first, real mother, then other possibilities and opportunities present themselves.

So you can see one and the same occurrence in totally different lights. All of you who are on this Path can begin more and more to see that what is apparently bad or undesirable can be seen in a totally different light, when you look at it from the point of view of “what is the meaning for me in terms of my spiritual task for which I came? Where is my lesson in this situation?”

It is always where things are most difficult that the most important lesson ought to be learned. This is why the aspect of the Pathwork that presents the greatest difficulty or that gives you the greatest resistance is the most important one to seek.

The sooner you do so, volitionally, the more difficulties you avoid for yourself, because you will always find a lesson there – whether it is in the relationship with your parents, or the repeated reestablished parents, or in the aspects of your life manifestation. Seek your lesson in the difficulty, and you will fulfill your life.

It goes without saying, of course, that incarnators of relationships do not always and only have negative manifestations. There are very positive ties.

For example, you may come to a parent or to set of parents who will represent, through their own problems, the arena that will trigger off your problems. But in addition to that interaction lie also very positive karmic ties, positive possibilities, what you may call karmic debts, love, the desire to give, to guide, to help – all of that exists.

The lesson is not only in a negative way. The positive manifestation is not that it is so much a lesson but a help. And the negative manifestation can serve as the directive where the task is deeply embedded. The other is the helpfulness, the nurturing.

They both must exist in some inward relationship and corresponding and complementing way. And, of course, with each case, it varies greatly – the relationship of the positive and the negative.

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