QA125 QUESTION: May I ask a question for my daughter with her problem? She has been working very hard with her papers, and with doing all the writing and everything. This morning she found a wrong conclusion based on the fact that she made a bargain with God when she was a little girl. If God would save me and her brother and give us healing, she wouldn’t ask for anything for herself. Now, for first time in all the years, I am better in health and my son is as well. Now she’s breaking down, and in talking to her, as you suggested – talking things over – we came across where she feels that she has to pay the price to God for her bargain. And so she recognizes this and knows that it’s a wrong conclusion, wrong concept. Yet she would like you to show her a way – lead her, or perhaps open up another channel for her – to understand her predicament.
ANSWER: It is so frequent among human beings for man to half-consciously believe that he does not have the right to desire several fulfillments or good things at once – that this would be selfish or immodest or too demanding. Therefore he thinks he has to make bargains, or he has to make choices.
He cannot have, let us say, health and fulfillment in a partnership relationship – or either one of these two – and success in his career and any number of other good things in life that you are supposed to have as far as God is concerned.
Here, this is a typical example. She had made the choice that either she is happy and healthy or someone else, her family, is happy and healthy. She made this choice to begin with.
This is a very important recognition, but she has to see a little more in order to completely free herself from it. It is very important also to meditate that she accepts the fact that this is a wrong conclusion and that it is absolutely in the scheme of the divine intelligence and being that she’s healthy and happy as well as her loved ones. This will be helpful.
In addition to that, in order to really tear out this wrong conclusion by its roots, it is also important to see the following: Why did she make this choice in the first place? Not just because the necessity of making a choice was a wrong belief in itself. This wrong belief has to find its roots in her.
The reason she made this choice was a guilt feeling stemming from a negative, destructive feeling toward her mother and toward her brother. In order to atone for this guilt, she believed she had to give up her entire happiness. She feared so much that her destructive feeling would have a tangible effect on him and you. When you became actually ill, she thought it was her wish that did it, so that then, in order to make up from what she thought was her crime, she made this bargain.
If she can truly make the connection within herself that she thought the sickness of her brother and of you was the result of antagonistic feelings, and that subsequently she made this bargain, she can then face this fact and take it in reality.
Namely, that it was not a crime for the little child to feel that way – that this little child did not know any better. She has to learn to accept her human failings, her human limitations, especially the child she once was and still is to a degree. She could not have helped to feel that way.
If she can accept this, she can then come to the next stage on this particular phase of the Path, which is that her wishes alone could not have created the sickness in either one of you. Either one of you must have had something within yourself that could produce the sickness, for no one can make someone else sick.
It is always the self that produces the conditions – good or bad or indifferent. If one has happiness, it is because one harbors truthful, realistic conclusions. Therefore, one’s emotions and reactions and attitudes and thoughts are constructive.
If one is unfulfilled and unhappy and has a void of loneliness, it’s because the No-current is too strong. And if one has confusion and upheaval, it is because the Yes and the No-currents constantly conflict with one another.
So it could not be destructive wishes of someone else that are responsible for one’s unhappiness; it must be the self.
The destructive wishes for others can only cause destructiveness for one’s self, for you and the other are one. The law is made that way, that it must fall back on yourself. This is exactly what happened with her.
So if she realizes that your and your son’s illness were not caused by her childish hurts and antagonisms, and that she does not have to punish herself by making such a bargain, if she can understand that on the deepest level of her being, she will have a Yes-current where up to now the No-current has been so strong. Therefore, her frenzy for the Yes-current will cease.
I believe that she’s very close to shedding this basic guilt. She’s very close to feeling what I said here, in her own way, rather than merely knowing it in her intellect. She has accomplished a great deal; she’s advancing toward that goal. In this very decisive phase, she just has to make a few shifts of emphasis within herself in order to reach a certain peace and maturity.
QUESTION: Is it possible at two years of age to have these destructive feelings?
ANSWER: Of course. When a child feels frustrated, rejected, and unhappy – and again I say to you whatever your problems are or were, the soul came with such feelings into this world; you could not have made it, whatever your problems were – then of course, these feelings of being slighted, the antagonism and the hostility come up in any age, because it is rampant and only waiting to come forth.
At this point I would like to make this general statement. It is one of the most decisive enlightenments on the path of self-realization and development to comprehend that it is true that one is never responsible for another person and yet, at the same time, it is equally true that one’s strong loving wishes and positive constructive desires for another person as well as for oneself have an immeasurable effect.
This is impossible to explain and certainly sounds like a paradox – like every spiritual truth must appear a paradox to those who have not experienced that two apparent opposites are not mutually exclusive. This is one of those things.
When you comprehend that these two opposites or apparent opposites are not only not mutually exclusive but also interdependent, you will come into the tremendous peace and security of knowing that no one can harm you but your own errors and misconceptions. At the same time, what a powerful influence you can be on your surroundings by your liberated soul and its feelings.
