QA232 QUESTION: I’ve recently encountered a difficult frustration. I find that I am terrifically sensitive to the noises of the modern world, and I feel in this sensitivity a refusal to live in this world. Also it seems that noise is the thing that makes it hard for me to focus. I feel that there’s a very important issue here since my reaction is so severe. I wonder if you could help me.

ANSWER: On one level, what you already said is quite true. There is rejection of reality, rejection of the world, rejection of anything that is inconvenient – that childish attitude that I have discussed before. But there is also another aspect to the answer here and that is, why this particular manifestation is so disturbing to you, and that is the following.

There is a great deal of inner noise in you that you project outwardly, that you do not want to listen to, that you do not want to deal with. There is the agitation of different levels that express contradictory messages to you. What is necessary here is the discipline and the willingness to discern these different desires, these different messages, and these different directions the personality is exposed to from within.

For example, there is the lower self that screams and protests about all sorts of things – simultaneously contradictory things – and this is literally driving you crazy. You do not want to hear it, and therefore the noise is projected outwardly and the outer noise takes on a new dimension.

Then there is also activated the voice of your higher self that speaks to you. It is activated indirectly through the goodwill and the progress you have made on the Path. But you turn your ear away from that too. Then the different levels of the rationalizations and the mask self mix with contradictory aspects of the lower self – totally different, opposite views of it – and the voice of the higher self.

All of that together intermingles, confuses, becomes a chaos and confuses the issue so that one gets mixed up with the other, and the different levels can no longer be discerned. So the painstaking work has to be undertaken by your translating these voices. This is not such a subliminal process as you may imagine. In fact, it is quite easy. It is the various thoughts that go on in your mind every day, every hour, every minute.

So what you need to do is just observe these thoughts and put them down in writing. That is the way you will focus them and give them form and shape and make it possible for you to deal with them. Do you understand? {Yes}

An order must be put to the thoughts you usually do not pay attention to, you take for granted, you pass by as unimportant – it is precisely these thoughts that go on and on and on, on all sorts of levels. You need to recognize them and specifically deal with them.

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