QA113 QUESTION: There is a situation I have experienced when I sleep very, very deeply and then awaken, and experience a deep confusion, a panic, as if I am out of time and space, and I don’t know who I am, where I am, or what I am. For me, it can last a very long time before everything floods back and I am aware and recognize where I am and who I am and what I am. Is that somehow a suspension of time?
ANSWER: Well it is really, actually just that. You have been out of this time dimension and do not adjust yourself very quickly back to it. It means a reorientation. It is the very same thing as if a spirit being, a soul, an entity, goes from one time dimension into another either through what you human beings call death or life, being born or being born into another sphere which you call dying.
This is always a reorientation that is a very drastic procedure. It is less drastic when the subtle bodies are still connected with the physical body. But to the degree the separation has taken place, as for instance in operations when you are unconscious, in accidents, it is not only the shock of the fright, it is actually the being, through this shock, further separated from the physical body and its time dimension, its sphere of operation.
Then when you come back to it according to the distance you have been away from this time dimension, to that degree it is difficult to adjust.
Now, how much more difficult is it then if one completely enters a new time dimension. The newborn baby has a most difficult time because it then enters into a limited time dimension. It is always more difficult to do that than to enter a more wider time dimension. And that is why even its bodily frame is so small and meets the slow growth until it fits itself into this environment. It is the same process.
QUESTION: But why is this so different amongst people? Some people are awake instantly and find their way instantly, and others do not?
ANSWER: Well, that has again perhaps a great deal to do with the soul’s attitude towards his life; deep unconscious attitudes may exist there. It is not as easy as to say that one means escape and the other means something else. It is perhaps the whole willingness of the spirit to come, at this particular time, into this incarnation. Some are less willing than others.
This whole attitude reflects in one’s being there. It might also have to do with fears. Certain beings may have a great fear of losing this dimension, this matter, and therefore will not let go. It may have all sorts of reasons; it cannot be generalized.
Roughly speaking, I may say that a great difficulty to find one’s way back into this dimension may be a result of wanting or preferring another dimension, and the opposite may mean preferring to remain in this known dimension rather than going into the wider one.
QA180 QUESTION: The other day, somebody was rejecting me in a group, and immediately I felt a devastating kind of tiredness, which I have felt before. I had the feeling that I don’t want to feel any more. I was wondering whether my reluctance to get started in the morning has something to do with this not wanting to feel.
ANSWER: Yes, very much so. The tiredness is a manifestation of this “I do not wish to feel because if I feel, I may be hurt.” It is terribly important that this becomes so clear to you, because it is not the rejection, it is not the pain, it is not the hurt that could create tiredness, lack of vitality, numbness, deadness.
The deadness of feelings brings so much greater pain and personal insecurity and frustration and unfulfillment than any hurt that another person can inflict upon you, because this hurt of the other person is really an illusion. The illusion will reveal itself as such, only when you have the courage to honestly experience the feeling that really is there – even if it is temporarily an illusory feeling.
For there is no such thing that another person can hurt you in the last analysis. The rejection is in itself an illusory happening. Only when you have the courage to allow your vulnerability to exist can you experience this truth that the hurt is illusory. Only when you allow yourself to experience this vulnerability, will you thereupon find that in this very vulnerability lies life itself, lies the treasure of all being, and finally lies your very security and the resilient, flexible strength that you are constantly, consciously or unconsciously, aiming for.
For as long as the truth of feeling – the vulnerability of your innermost being – is denied, the strength you can acquire is never a genuine one. It is always a brittle, tight, constricted and rigid strength, that is not real strength at all. But it is a pseudostrength that gives the impression of strength, while there is merely a tightness, a stiffness, that denies life and that denies truth.
So when you make this discovery – and you will have to make it over and over again in order to make it real – you will have to realize, my dear, that you’re here on the very threshold which separates your ultimate state of aliveness from the temporary state of deadness that you have inflicted upon yourself. And the decision rests with you.
It is your commitment to a new decision deep within you that counts, that shifts the balance, that creates a new state of being. But the courage to endure a hurt must exist, for only thereby do you enliven the center of your being.
In fact, I will say to you – and not only to you but to all of you – that when that hurt is experienced, you will learn to welcome it. You will see that if you do not exaggerate it, if you cease playing the self-pitying games, the hurt is very near pleasure and aliveness, because the aliveness as such is so welcome. In it you will very soon discover the richness of life, the richness of your own innermost being.
But you must come to this point where you make the decision over and over again, where you decide for life rather than death. The state of dying and being in a human chain of being born and dying, being born and dying, being born and dying, and forgetting and therefore fearing the state of being born and fearing the state of dying, is the exact and immediate outcome of deciding for death and yet also wanting life, but not being able to see that these two opposites create conflict, and therefore creating a cosmic state of dying and being born, of dying and being born.
The pain that this means is a result of denying life, even if the first signs of life that you may often muster up in a dead state are temporarily painful. If the pain is not exaggerated and no game is being played with it, it very soon ceases to be unbearable or frightening. This is my answer.
