132 QUESTION: I suffer from occasional heart palpitations that have no organic cause. I have found in my work that this is due to repressed guilt. Is there self-punishment involved?

ANSWER: Yes. It is self-punishment, at the same time fear of punishment, and also fear of and resistance to giving up what causes the guilt in the first place. You have made good progress in your work. Now, if you uncover a level where you do not want to give up any of the facets that create the guilt, you will have a profound understanding and experience of your basic problem.

The self-punishment is a substitute for giving up the guilt-producing attitudes. By doing so, you unconsciously believe that it is possible to maintain these attitudes yet absolve yourself of the guilt. Therefore you go on punishing yourself, believing that this makes up for the fact that you do not give up the destructive patterns.

If you say often enough how bad you are, if you suffer enough from your guilt, you feel you are still a nice person, in spite of maintaining what is, in actuality, of no conceivable advantage to you and to others. The specific realization of this level will come to the degree that you truly wish to find it. Your ego faculties will help you to shed the guilt-producing patterns.

Even if something in you doubts, you may shed the patterns anyway in the understanding that at any time you have the right to reassume them, should you so desire. This will strengthen your ego. Then you will succeed. You will no longer be a helpless prey. You then take hold of yourself by using your ego in the proper way.

QA204 QUESTION: I have felt terrible contracting pains in my heart. I know that part of me wants to open and the other part says No, I won’t. I would like to have help to get in touch with that “won’t” more.

ANSWER: You believe the cramp and the pain is a result of your opening up, while in reality it is a result of the struggle and the holding. I would suggest that, in the first place, when you meditate, you instruct your unconscious with this truth. You really speak into your psychic substance and formulate the truth that you are contracted because you say “I won’t,” and not because you say “I want to.”

This is a false belief, and maybe you can get that false belief out into the open, which is not too difficult. It is your fear of opening up which you’re quite conscious of. So if you are afraid of being opened up, it is because you fear or believe some kind of pain will result. The cramp is a pain and it is your false belief that makes you cramp up and that makes the false belief seem true.

That is really the answer why you do not want to open up. It is not so difficult to get in touch with this by listening into yourself, by getting in touch, by tuning in, by having a dialogue with yourself, by impressing – using your mind to impress the resistant, ignorant part of your inner being, on the one hand, and by letting your conscious being listen to the truth of your divine self so that it can come forth and help you to eliminate the block.

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