18 QUESTION: What do you mean by solar plexus as opposed to the brain?
ANSWER: A wish can come from the intellect or the brain, or from what is sometimes referred to as the soul. In the region of the solar plexus, in radiant matter not visible with your human eye, is the spiritual magnetic field, where not only all emotions exist, but where all factors pertaining to the entire cycle of existence of an individual are marked and deeply inscribed.
The significance of previous lives, merits, and so-called sins are contained in this field, as well as the whole book of life. Feelings, wishes or thoughts evolve not only from the brain region, but also from this part. Many people have not experienced this yet. When they want something, or when they think or form ideas, they believe it happens in the brain.
But once a certain stage of spiritual development is attained, you will feel that you can wish and even think in the region of your spiritual field. When thoughts come from there, they have a very different quality and character from thoughts coming from the brain.
The same applies to willpower. Will coming from the brain region will lead to tension, unless it is substantiated by will coming from the spiritual or magnetic field. Of course, even a right idea can take root first in the brain, but as long as it remains in that region alone, it will never have the power to penetrate all of the human personality.
Wishing or thinking from the spiritual field involves a person’s higher self or divine spark. Whoever has experienced this will confirm it. Whoever has a thought, an idea, or a wish evolving from the spiritual field will be completely filled with happiness and certainty. That person will know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the thought is true and that truth is living within the soul at this moment.
Faith can never come from the brain. If it is merely a question of intellectual conviction, it is weak faith. But faith coming from the spiritual field and the divine spark is the conviction and experience of truth. Therefore, people who have no faith are wrong when they think that having faith in something is a matter of personal preference.
Faith in its true meaning is always a certainty that has been personally experienced, although the experience cannot be conveyed to others who have not yet had this experience. The fact that many people have the wrong kind of faith does not mean that faith in the true sense does not exist.
By the same token, an emotionally unstable and immature person can have strong and even compulsive inner wishes that may be either partially or entirely in the unconscious. These wishes do not come from the brain, but they do not come from the spiritual field either.
In the process of uncovering a person’s unconscious, not only do sick, wrong and twisted currents become apparent along with ignorance and shortsightedness, and not only do faults and weaknesses manifest which I term the lower self. One also encounters the higher self. Sometimes it is way down, deeply hidden, first under protective masks of falseness that have really nothing to do with the person’s true nature, and then hidden under the lower self. At long last, the part of the higher self that was so far not allowed to function emerges.
In this higher self or divine spark, which is to some extent free in everyone, lies wisdom, truth and love to a very large degree. So there is a very important difference between thinking and wanting in the brain or in the spiritual core. The latter has to be cultivated, of course, and cannot function unless the person goes through a rigorous developmental process of self-purification.
40 QUESTION: Could there be a person almost without manifested knowledge who could still reach into the highest sphere?
ANSWER: But of course! Erudition has nothing to do with self-knowledge, unless it serves and helps development. If erudition is an end in itself, it does not enhance spiritual development. Of course, a natural intelligence is necessary for this Path, but that is something completely different. Erudition is sometimes even more a hindrance than an asset. It may serve as a subterfuge and rationalization, even as an escape.
QUESTION: Also, erudition does not stay with the monad. In other words, it can be discontinued. Is that so?
ANSWER: Certainly. Anything that is superficial is discontinued. Only what reaches the deeper layers of your being remains. That is why it is so important that you integrate your emotions with your superficial outer knowledge, if the latter follows a higher ethical line, as is often the case.
That is the whole point on this Path. You know that when you die, not only your physical body disintegrates but the outer subtle body as well, at some later time. None of it constitutes your real personality. These outer layers are necessary to fulfill your work on this Earth plane, therefore they should bring out the inner person. The inner subtle bodies remain. These are the very layers you reach by digging into your emotions.
An entity may be incarnated with a certain amount of knowledge. Your present environment may offer you additional knowledge. It is up to you what you do with it. Do you use it on a superficial level? Then this knowledge will be gone after the outer subtle body disintegrates. But if you use it to integrate your real self with this new outer knowledge for the purpose of development, then the knowledge you are privileged to absorb in this environment will have served its only valuable use.
67 QUESTION: At one time you said that spiritual knowledge once acquired, in any lifetime, is never lost. Would that come under the heading of the answer you gave earlier that some of the good karma may be postponed?
ANSWER: No, that is not the same. What I meant before refers to good results, a certain pleasantness, conditions that one has earned, so to speak. This might be hindrance for development. But inner knowledge stays. That is not blurred. That would never be a hindrance. Once you have gained it through your efforts, it remains with you at all times. It will help to remove remaining ignorance and blindness. Knowledge you have gained will always be yours, regardless of the circumstances of your life.
70 QUESTION: Once something is learned, like the alphabet, we never have to go back and learn it again. But with the Path, it seems that one is forever falling back. How is this possible, after a certain amount of progress on the Path, to fall back into the silly and petty little crossnesses? This seems to me like the alphabet.
ANSWER: It is not really falling back, my friends. It merely means that you thought you had learned the whole of this particular alphabet, while you really only learned part of it. Before you can entirely eliminate certain childish emotions, you have to have a vast amount of insight, since no inner deviation is separated from other inner conflicts. They are all tied together. As long as this overall insight is not in your consciousness, remnants of the old reactions continue to smolder and come to the fore when you are provoked.
Inner change takes a very long time, you all know that. This should never discourage you. You have to gather the little pieces of information about yourself bit by bit, while you continue to observe your wrong reactions. This constant process, if performed without impatience and anger at yourself, while understanding yourself better with each apparent relapse, will be the best way to achieve the inner change.
You must understand that this change cannot happen so quickly, because your wrong reactions have too long been accustomed to function in the wrong way. Your personal vulnerabilities are too well geared in the old channel. Therefore it takes time, and each apparent relapse should serve as a means to learn and understand more about yourself. It thus becomes the best means for the growth that you desire.
71 GUIDE COMMENT: What is intelligence other than perceiving reality? Some people may have great intelligence – and where it functions, they are in a sort of reality. Where it does not, they are submerged in their confusions and therefore removed from reality.
The difficulty with people who are intelligent is, to a large degree, that they do not realize where they are in unreality. But then, people of little intelligence also are unaware of their lack of reality. Mental and emotional health is reality. To the degree that you are unhealthy, you are in unreality. You do not see the truth.
QA98 QUESTION: In the lectures themself it seems to be that the intellectual approach is the predominant one, in the sessions too. How can one help relax or release that predominant factor?
ANSWER: Yes. Yes. This is a very good question. Of course, many people have that problem. That is a question of training. You see, you must not forget that, if a person has difficulty to have access to his emotions, he has perhaps – sometimes even consciously but sometimes mostly unconsciously – conditioned himself all his life to get away from the emotions. There is a basic fear of them at present, based on a wrong conclusion in itself.
If one starts along this Path and one finds that this is a difficulty, you can begin perhaps, in some cases, to think: “What do emotions mean to me?” Try to think honestly, not in the sense of what your intellectual concept of that is, but of your own experiences: When you were a child, whenever you had emotions, what was the experience then?
You will usually find in a case such as this, where the emotions are difficult to have access to, that predominantly, emotions were something bad when you were a child. There was something disadvantageous. They brought you problems, troubles, punishment in some cases, or unfulfilled love and sadness, a feeling of being excluded.
So at one time or another, you formed in yourself the intention, partly conscious, partly unconscious: “No more emotions; I must beware of them so as not to be hurt.” And with such a conclusion, you go through life that way. For a time it even seems quite successfully, but how actually unsuccessfully you have never realized.
Once you come across this intention you formed – and you do not have to remember actually when and how; it is not a one-time decision you made as a child or as an adolescent perhaps – it is something that came about gradually, by the experience you had. But it is sufficient that you uncover this experience – what emotions meant to you as a child.
If you can get at that, you can work out in your image sessions the wrong conclusions that made it so that you developed yourself lopsidedly, so to speak – that your intellectual approach is stronger developed than your emotional one. And once you have that, you will see that an automatic opening will occur so that you will have access to it.
So the most direct approach in this way is the best. By saying most direct, I simply mean go to the factor that stands in your way, and what stands in your way is the emotional approach, the emotional opening faculty. So look for why.
What were the emotions you remember? And if you train yourself and condition yourself in that way, after a while you will establish a balance within yourself so that you will not be lopsided anymore. And that will afford you the opportunity to realize that your conclusion was childish and wrong. Emotions are no more bad than good: they’re both, or they can be either, depending on the circumstance. And that will develop the faculty in the work to feel and to dig into your emotional reactions.
QUESTION: Does it not seem from what you say that if we choke out the approach through reason, through intellect, which to me seems a balancing force with the emotions, that we are as much lopsided by eliminating that as we are lopsided by eliminating our emotions by choking them also?
ANSWER: No, my dear. If a person has, for one reason or another, used his right leg infinitely more than his left leg – he put more weight on it; he uses it more; he neglects the muscles of the left leg – after a while, this left leg will atrophy, the muscles will atrophy a little. It will become thinner and weaker. Now, in order to establish a balance, what would have to happen?
Temporarily the left leg would have to be used more than the right in order to even out what has been neglected for a long time, until it has caught up with the other. Only then can an even balance be established. The same thing happens here: where emotions have been neglected or used in the wrong way for decades – and I speak only of one lifetime – the emphasis has to be a little stronger temporarily on them so as to use your reasoning process successfully, without pushing them in the background again.
Then once enough is out, enough has developed, enough has come forth, your intelligence can then integrate with the emotions. But if this is done too soon, the balance will never be established. Does that make sense?
QUESTION: It makes sense and it’s precisely the point that I’m trying to make clear, which I would like to repeat. Is this not possible though – since you speak of the time factor – that some humans can move along in a state of balance functioning with both legs, with both the intellect and the emotions.
ANSWER: Certainly it is possible. You see, the other extreme exists also. There’s also the category of people who overstrain their emotions in a wrong extreme and do not use their intelligence, although they may be extremely intelligent people. But they do not apply the intelligence on their own emotional reactions.
In other words, their intelligence goes one way and their emotions go in a completely different way, and often overpower them – they are overpowering. But the two do not go together, and they have to be integrated and become one whole. For that the analysis, the meaning, the significance of the emotions is necessary.
QUESTION: With a person with a stronger left leg than a right leg – isn’t a verbalization and a conceptual key for these people necessary, more than in the other case?
ANSWER: No. No. You mean if the emotional faculties are stronger developed than the intellectual?
QUESTION: Yes.
ANSWER: No. Because why is this unbalance here? Because the emotional is not understood in its meaning, in its significance. The emotions flow wildly and the person is not aware of why, what is based underneath. They just run amuck, without understanding.
I would like to make a statement here. You see, my friends, there is a crass misunderstanding by thinking that in this kind of work, when you analyze your emotions, that you neglect your intelligence or your reasoning faculty. Quite on the contrary!
By making your emotions conscious, by facing them, by asking yourself about their meaning and significance and deeper reasoning processes, you use your intelligence. But you use this reasoning process and this intelligence for your emotions, instead of using it for general concepts, which is again running away from your emotions. Do not think that you neglect your intelligence by making your emotions conscious. That is not true at all.
You do not neglect the reasoning process, not in the least. But it depends in what direction the reasoning process goes. Do you use that reasoning process, which might function beautifully for general concepts, or do you use it to analyze your own emotional and so far subconscious reactions?
So you do not leave out the intelligence in the least. In fact, without this intelligence, you could not be on the Path. It would be an impossibility. A person bare of intelligence could never do it. It is just a question in what direction this intelligence is being used. You may have conditioned yourself, for reasons of escape, partly to use this intelligence in a direction outside of your own emotions, and you will now learn to redirect that direction.
QA114 QUESTION: I find now in my private work, and the medium will agree with me, that I am not intellectually sufficient, but am more inwardly open.
ANSWER: Well, you see, the reason for that is not because it has to be that way. But you cultivate it, deliberately, because this is one of your basic defenses. If you deliberately act intellectually more helpless – less understanding – it plays right into your defense of wanting to remain a child that has to be helped and taken care of. And this is why you are actually also intellectually much more mature than you want to realize.
QUESTION: That is good to have it that way?
ANSWER: You know the answer, my dear.
QUESTION: No, I’m talking about to be inwardly open.
ANSWER: To be inwardly open is certainly good. You see, with many people, it’s the other way around: They’re intellectually much more open and mature than they are emotionally. This is a discrepancy, an imbalance. But this kind of imbalance is also not desirable because it is not necessary. You could be much more even on both. Realize this. See how you want to appear less intelligent and less self-sufficient than you actually are. Just see that. That is all you need.
QA133 QUESTION: I’m aware that I’m feeling too much and not thinking. And, of course, my fear is thinking. Could you give me an idea?
ANSWER: Yes. In the first place, when you say you feel too much, this is qualified, because you see, it is so often not the real feeling, the spontaneous feeling, but a superimposed feeling. So it is not even a real feeling.
When you say you fear black magic, it is not a real feeling. You produce it; you aggrandize it; you manipulate it; you use it to fabricate it. So you have to differentiate between a real feeling – not necessarily a realistic feeling, but a feeling that one actually has. One can have actually fear, an unjustified fear and therefore an unrealistic fear, but it is a real feeling. And it can be a produced feeling, a manipulated and therefore not genuine feeling.
If you do not object or run away from genuine feelings, you will not shy away from thinking either, because the two go hand in hand. To the degree you deny real feelings, to that degree you shy away from thinking. And both happen for the same reason.
The reason for both is the word I almost hesitate to use, because you have used it so often – it is “self-responsibility.” It is the unjustified fear of a finality of your own views and your own decisions.
Let us put it this way. This is why you deny yourself selfhood and independent thinking and actual feelings – because you erroneously believe what you feel now is for always and cannot be changed. And what you think now, if it is wrong, then you’re stamped until the end of your days with that wrong opinion or wrong thought.
Therefore you deny yourself the flexibility of growing where you can say, “This is what I feel now, and this is what I think now. Right or wrong, this is to the best of my ability now. Tomorrow I may change my mind and perhaps feelings.” This integrity of owning up to what you now feel can only exist with a knowledge that you are not condemned to adopt this feeling and this thought for the rest of your life.
If you now meditate, I would advise you to include that you are not condemned and forced to never change your mind. It is not a crime to have a wrong or inaccurate or conditioned opinion or feeling. And at the same time you will allow yourself the liberty to have your own thoughts, and to own up to your actual feelings, and to dispense with the need of fabricated feelings.
QA172 QUESTION: I have an intellectual blockage. It seems like whenever I try to sit down and read something intellectual, I’ll have to put it aside.
ANSWER: What do you mean, when you say “something intellectual”?
QUESTION: When I try to develop myself.
ANSWER: Your mind? {Yes} Your intellect? {Yes} Your erudition? {Yes} Well, maybe that “something” is not to be altogether discredited. Maybe there is somewhere a voice of wisdom contained in this, which should be heeded.
Maybe there’s something from your innermost being, from your reliable real self that says, “First things come first; the intellectual enlargement and extension must not be a primary, it must be a secondary thing, because you already disconnected from your intellect, and something in your feeling self needs more development.”
Now, by concentrating more on the intellect, you widen that chasm, rather than bringing it together by giving more concentration on the emotional immaturity that exists. So, in that sense, your incapacity to concentrate on intellectual matters may be something to be heeded and to be rightly understood.
For often one’s inner self gives one messages that seem like something that’s negative. And yet if it is understood in its full sense, it has tremendous wisdom and the power to set one in the right direction for the total development and liberation of the personality.
Only when this is caught up and you have given the emphasis where it is really now most needed will you find that the intellectual power to concentrate will increase again. That you can be sure of.
QUESTION: If one gives in to letting go of that desire to improve intellectual abilities, wouldn’t that be dangerous in a way?
ANSWER: I do not say nothing – I say a balance. For of course it would be no more dangerous than it is dangerous to neglect any capacity and function of the total personality, whether it be the intellectual, the physical, the spiritual, the emotional. Any neglect creates one-sidedness and imbalance, and is therefore dangerous.
But as it happens, in this time and age, with mankind especially in this civilization, the overemphasis on the intellect has been so preponderant, so vast – at the neglect of all other functions – that a lot of catching up has to be done by mankind to recreate a balance.
If the proper weight is put where one neglected before, the pendulum will find its right balance. So no, I did not say a complete neglect. Also, you see, it is quite impossible to pursue such a path of self-confrontation without automatically using the intellect as well.
For how can you evaluate a misconception, an illusory or illogical idea, if you do not compare it with the reality, with the logic, with the right concept? That already necessitates a much more meaningful and deep cultivation of the intellectual powers, by bringing them to bear on the neglected emotional side.
It is only really secondary that outer knowledge is sought, for that is completely mechanical if it is not underpinned by the inner healthy structure of the total personality.
QA240A QUESTION: I’ve become more aware that my greatest defense against knowing myself and taking responsibility for myself is a way I have of making myself dumb. It’s very effective and I grind to a halt in my ability to take in what I need. Could you say something?
ANSWER: Yes. Of course, the effectiveness of this tool is that you create a thick cottony mask – a mask of cotton clouds – that insulate you, not only against painful feelings within, but anything that might come to you from without. The effect, as you begin to realize, is very grave. It is what prevents you from being alive and fully functioning at your best.
What you need to do here is truly very simple. Again, on the conscious level, fully – with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your conscious intentionality – making the commitment to want to be alive, to want to wake up, to want to have your faculties in every possible way functioning. At the same time, realize that this cannot produce instant results. It is a re-creation, not a magic one.
It is a process of re-creation you institute by observing the old way of reacting and at the same time deepening the recommitment. That work needs to be done by you.
