QA141 QUESTION: They have found that cancer cells are cells which do not relate to one another; thereby they do not control the amount that they should be in a certain area, and therefore they grow to an abnormal degree. Whereas normal cells are in touch with one another and relate and thereby control themselves. So right away I thought, if we do not relate with ourselves, we have to get cancer.

ANSWER: You do not have to get this. No. Because if that were the truth, everyone would have it. [Laughter]

QUESTION: Well, quite a lot of people do have it.

ANSWER: Yes, a lot of people do have it. Because, you see, there are very many different kinds of symbolic expression on the physical level of what exists on the real level of spirit. Now, when cures are found for one and the inner root is not removed, other symptoms will appear, and this has been happening constantly. Diseases have been cured and only when the root has been cured will certain manifestations cease.

Now, man constantly moves in the direction of unification within himself. And anyone here on this Path contributes more to the general unification than you can possibly realize. But this does not need to disturb you any more than any other manifestation on this sphere where guilt, disunification, nonrelationships, disharmony within oneself, contradiction, conflict, duality – all the things that you experience in your world – are a manifestation of this. Wherever you look, you have good or bad, apparently. You have beauty and ugliness; you have life or death; you have pain or pleasure. You have all these dualities constantly.

And yet this very fact of living in this duality is the removed level from the reality where there is no such conflict. So anything would be then disturbing – one thing more, one thing less. But it is all the same.

Let me put it this way. Let us now become a little more personal, and this may be helpful for all my friends here. Whenever there is such an undue disturbance, whatever the outer cause may be, there must be something, somewhere in you where you resist the unification out of the wrong fears, where you do not dare to look at it.

When you have such reactions you may take this as a gauge and immediately speak to yourself and state the positive, constructive desire – even though you feel the negative, even though you feel you do not want to, you may say unto yourself, “Here I feel myself that I do not want to, but this is destructive and this is wrong and I do want to,” because that “I do want to” exists also, and you have to mobilize it.

You have to activate it; you have to strengthen it with your ego. This does not mean repression of the negative. On the contrary. Now, whenever you decide in the right direction – in the direction of truth, in the direction of courage, in the direction that will further your self-respect, your sense of strength – something is put in motion inside and you let it happen. Allow it to happen.

Then allow the result of it to take place in you. And each fear, whether it is self or any others, will immediately or gradually vanish.

QA184 QUESTION: I want to ask a question about the process of cancer. You have commented upon this on several occasions in previous questions and answers. But I am puzzled about the process of cancer specifically. What is the meaning of the cancer process in the psychological level? What is the meaning in the energy level and what is the meaning in the soul level? And then I would ask a question as a physician about how to go about attempting to help in this process, to overcome the process and whether using a drug, for instance, like LSD, would be of help to such a process – to open it up?

ANSWER: First to your question, what is the cancer process? You see, like in every manifestation of any impact, importance, significance, severity, seriousness, any prolonged effect, there is not one but there are many, many reasons that must converge together. Now, as you said, I spoke about any number of them. And you know, it is not with all human beings that all these reasons must converge simultaneously.

One person may produce the same condition with just a number of reasons, while another needs several more reasons before this condition can manifest. This depends on the energy level – the degree the energy is free or congested and contracted and paralyzed – stagnant. There are different types of energy of which you human beings know nothing and cannot know anything because there are no words to explain them. All of this must come together. Now this is on the energy level.

Now, on the psychological level – and also on the soul level, this is interacting – the main reasons are always that it’s a giving up. It’s a will to be negative; it is a will to punish; it is a will to no longer live, at least partially. It is a despair; it is a hating thing; it is the desire to punish; it is a hopelessness; and it is an inability to cope with one’s emotions, holding them in check and denying their flow because they are too threatening.

Now, I come to the last part of the question, which will also answer some more of this aspect. I would say that a drug like LSD could, under certain circumstances, if administered in the right way, be extremely beneficial. I have been asked about LSD in the past, and I have said that this, as well as other drugs, if rightly used, can be very beneficial. And if done in the wrong spirit, it can be extremely harmful – if done as an escape.

Particularly for a cancer patient, the benefit would be that by transcending the ego defenses, a process that the mind may know about but does not sufficiently feel and experience, the feeling can be attained. It is that drug which carries you through the threshold and will make a reality what is otherwise only a theory.

The theory does not provide sufficient incentive to give up the negative will. And this is why an actual experience is of such immeasurable importance for anyone, even though they are noncancer patients, who has come to a point where he knows intellectually what it is all about, but he cannot feel it.

Then if it done once – just once – with the proper help and guidance, then it would be a tremendously useful thing. The experience opens the doors that the will of the mind cannot accomplish by itself because the inner will blocks it. So it can – if this push that the drug administers breaks through the barrier – make the inner will function.

You remember, my friends, that a long, long time ago I gave a lecture about the outer will and the inner will [Lecture #64 Outer Will and Inner Will – Misconception About Selfishness]. We shall come back to that – not at the next session, because we already have a lecture for that – but in a still further future lecture. With the material we have gained now – not just by knowledge in the lectures I have given but due to your own growth in this Pathwork – I will be able to speak more about the inner will as opposed to the outer will and speak more about the function of the inner will and how to reach it.

If this inner will is still blocked, it is because a motivation or incentive is lacking. Although the mind may believe the right things – the truth – the negative levels cannot accept this – cannot believe it – and are locked in a vicious circle. This is why this would be a tremendously helpful thing, that would not be dangerous at all if it is done once and if it is done with the right ambience, with the people helping and protecting and guiding.

QUESTION: What would that be if the inner will is afraid of such an experience? Would that not be what would make the drug dangerous, though?

ANSWER: No, not if the person is outwardly willing and has the support of the other people, because he would then go through the fear and experience his fear in reality, and through the door of the fear which must be experienced.

You know, it is the same thing without the drug. You all know on this Path that if you do not experience your emotions, you stay stuck on the level of the mind, and inwardly, you never budge. You go around in circles over and over and over again. You realize these things. You may even come on deeper levels to some extent; you realize a little more; you feel perhaps a little more. But basically you still stay stuck in the head.

That will be as long as you lack the courage to really experience the feelings, even if they are momentarily unpleasant. The fear, the pain, the anger, the rage, the guilt – all of these feelings must be experienced.

I do not say that this is advisable for everyone. There are many people where the drug experience is not to be advised, ever; they would have to work it out in a slower way. But there are some people whose experience is so shallow, who do not sufficiently experience at all, who are stuck in the level of mind, for whom this would be very useful.

QUESTION: Can one do that in a group?

ANSWER: Yes, it could be done that two or three or one or four or five people help one person. I would say that that would be the way to do it.

QUESTION: May I ask specifically, can you use this instrument to be a little bit more technical about the process of cancer? Can the instrument transmit that information or bring it forth?

ANSWER: You mean medically speaking?

QUESTION: Specifically, what is specific about the process of cancer in the energy level?

ANSWER: Oh. Well, let me try to bring it through. It is specifically a slowing down in one energy body, a stagnation in the other energy body – and stagnation and slowing down are not the same. A slowing down is an ebbing, and stagnation is a congestion. It is the combination of these two soul movements or energy movements that brings about a specific condition in the body, in the cells, that makes the cells break down – a slowing down, an ebbing in one energy body and a cramped stagnation in the other.

The cramped stagnation says, “I must not let my feelings loose,” whether this is anger, hate, rage, guilt, fear, whatever it is, pain. “It is too painful; I must not experience this; I cannot afford to experience this.” It is an unwillingness to experience the emotion that contracts and stagnates the energy. And the ebbing away says, “I do not want anymore.” Does that make sense to you?

QUESTION: It’s very deep, to me very deep. May I ask, these two energy bodies, are you speaking of the energy bodies that surround our bodies, suffuse our bodies, is it the etheric body – which bodies are you referring to specifically?

ANSWER: It is not necessarily the energy that emanates from the physical body. When that is affected, then you can see this, and then it has taken over already in the body to a much greater degree. The energy bodies I speak about – you know, it is not always the same. It varies with different people. It can be the emotional body, the etheric body. It can be the mental body. Each person is different on that. But the cancer process would have to combine these two conditions.

QUESTION: Now, in the etheric body, could you give some detail about, for instance, what is the predominant color in the etheric body, over the area?

ANSWER: No generalizations. It cannot be generalized, because each person has his own color and own emanation that is a conglomerate of many factors, which in the cancer process then adds a new shading to it, again depending on the type of cancer, on the type of emotion behind it, on what emotions are particularly feared, how they are specifically denied – that again is dependent on the type of personality. There are too many factors involved, so that you cannot possibly ever make a generalization here. Each case is different.

QUESTION: May I ask one more specific question? {Yes} Can you comment upon cancer processes that in our medical terminology have their origin on the muscle and other cancer processes that have their origin on bones? Is there anything you can say?

ANSWER: The consciousness that creates, let us say, the bone cancer and the consciousness that creates the muscle cancer expresses something different, fears something different, denies something different – or the blood or the specific organ. Each expresses something different, and that has to be found out individually.

That again influences the color of the field in the cancer manifestation. It is an expression. You must always keep this in mind. Every disease is an expression; it says something. What does it express in each individual case? And I think maybe you can take this into mind in your particular workshop and take these three people. Each expresses really something different. There may be common denominators, of course. Yet, the message is different in each case.

QUESTION: It’s been said that perhaps cancer is produced as an alternative to losing one’s mind to insanity. {Yes} Would you comment on this, and would you comment on the meaning of insanity in this context?

ANSWER: Yes. Now, I would like to make one alteration here. I would say it is not necessarily insanity but the fear of insanity. If something is feared, it might really even bring it about – at least temporarily. An actual insanity is nothing else, but that too – the fear of not being able to handle the emotions. Only he who goes into the insanity lets go of the emotions without knowing how to handle them properly. And he who decides to hold back the emotions also does not know how to handle it, but he decides not to express them.

Now, the right way is to choose to express them in a safe way, learning to express them. And insanity is always as chosen, as deliberately wanted, as anything else is. Now, you, for instance, have to come in contact with that part somewhere inside that says, “I would like to be insane,” so as to understand the fear of it. Do you understand?

QUESTION: Yes. And one more question about the use of a drug, you say it takes you through the threshold on fear. Does that imply that it takes you through, into something positive?

ANSWER: Yes, if you let it, if you allow it, if you courageously go through it.

QUESTION: When one has taken LSD, one hears about cases where it’s pushed people into the borderline of schizophrenia and other things. Is it because those people weren’t ready to take it and resisted it too much?

ANSWER: No, also because they have taken it without the proper preparation, without working on their problems sufficiently long, without the proper supervision and help and guidance, and the whole motivation for taking it, and the circumstances in which they take it, and the repetition of it – this is all wrong and destructive. This is when these things happen, because it can indeed be a very dangerous experience if it is done without knowing these things.

QUESTION: Could you recommend it for me for a certain fear I have?

ANSWER: Not yet. You would have to work a little more on yourself in certain areas where you still resist, and these resistances should be consciously and deliberately overcome before that can be considered.

Next Topic