QA162 QUESTION: I have pride in working with the medium. I had a dream and out of it came that it was still my pride versus feelings. Could you help me with this? And also is there any connection with that and my spasm in my neck?

ANSWER: Yes.

QUESTION: There is?

ANSWER: Yes. First of all, your pride versus the good feelings is the result of believing – and almost consciously, I think – that good feelings are somehow shameful, humiliating. This is not completely unconscious at all, my dear. If you just look a little closer, focus your attention on certain of your reactions, you will see that this is so. And this has been so all your life.

All your life you have believed it is shameful and it is belittling to you. Of course, underneath this are other fears and other threats, which I do not wish to go into at this time, for it would be premature. This you can feel at the moment – this wrong conclusion you can feel. So therefore, concentrate on it.

Now, as to your neck as well as other parts of your body, I would like to say this, and this is really quite logical. If a person would let nature prevail instead of consistently strangulating himself, then all the feelings he has would flow through him and he would be in a relaxed state and the body would be in flux, would be fluid. It would be loose; it would be resilient.

But by strangulating yourself constantly, manipulating your feelings, putting them into straight jackets – if I may use this word – and hardening them, how can you not harden also all possible parts of your physical structure. That is inevitable. This always goes hand in hand.

By holding yourself back, by putting yourself into this straight jacket that prevents you from all kinds of feelings, you inflict this upon yourself. It is the price you pay for choosing to believe that the protection of the little mind, with its very insufficient knowledge about life, is more reliable than your innermost nature.

Now, it is true that your innermost nature remains inaccessible as long as you do not have the courage to let the negative feelings come into your field of vision, so to speak. If you allow these feelings to come out of you, to admit them, to deal with them, then the ultimate nature of who you really are must unfold.

This ultimate nature does not require your intellectual manipulation of the streamings of your feelings. Not at all. It has its own greater wisdom that you can trust into. And this is where you are here, in this respect. Do you understand?

QUESTION: Yes, I understand. I’ve been struggling with that so long and I’m still there.

ANSWER: Well, you have made great progress, my dear, because you could not have come to this point, as you know very well, for your vision was so blocked. Your awareness of yourself was so dim, and this is very good that you have come to this particular crossroad where you can come to terms with yourself on this question, “Do you want to be true to yourself?” – which means be true to the feelings as they come unwatched, unmanipulated, unguarded, denied and strangled. Then you are true to yourself. Otherwise you must put yourself into a painful conflict.

Here I would like to add once again what I have said many times before and what is so often forgotten. There are two basic or very important fears why man does not want to let his feelings come to the fore.

One is the misconception that he is forced to act upon these feelings by recognizing them. And the other is that by letting them come to the surface, he loses control over himself, which is actually almost the same. But there is a slight, subtle difference in approach on these two aspects.

Now, nothing could be further from the truth. You need not lose yourself, and you cannot lose yourself if you want to look at the truth, and want to use your good judgement by observing yourself in honesty. Then you can determine and choose in what way you act upon what you have found out about yourself.

You are not forced into any action, but you are forced into actions you cannot control when you strangulate your inner nature and your feelings. For then it comes out indirectly and without you knowing it. And you do not know why you do certain things, even if you do not wish to acknowledge it.

For instance, with apathy, you eventually lose the power to act because you have forfeited your power to act. In a voluntary spirit say, “What is in me, I let it be, and then I can choose my decisions and my actions. I can even choose what I believe in. But I cannot have such a free choice if I deny myself awareness of what I feel and think.”

QUESTION: I may even say this in a silly kind of way, but it seems of late that I have been very aware of my feelings, and I think I’m sort of connected with them, if I may be so bold. And so, why doesn’t something really nice happen?

ANSWER: Well, I would say, in the first place, you are right that there is a very decided progress there in you in the sense that you are more aware of your feelings. There’s no question. But you are not yet aware of certain other feelings.

For instance, there exists, still now, as much of a fear of the nice things to happen as you have a desire for them to happen. That causes in you a sort of short circuit. It annuls itself. That is one answer, and in order to proceed with this, I would suggest you see in indirect ways where and how this fear still exists in you.

Acknowledge the fear to yourself, say it to yourself. It will not become bigger as it is so often feared. Man’s vision in this is so shortsighted, for he thinks the moment he makes such an acknowledgement, then this takes hold over him – it becomes bigger. While, if he looks away from it and does not recognize, for example, such a fear, that the fear is small simply because he does not know it. That is a very, very shortsighted, childish way of treating your own self.

The more you recognize the fear and can say it and acknowledge it and know it – and also that it is not the only feeling in you – the more you can accept the fact that you fear and wish at the same time. Then, the more in truth you are about yourself, for you are not cut out of one piece.

Now, you may pay lip service to this because you have heard these words or read these words. But to accept this for yourself – that you may want two contradictory things simultaneously – is a very important step in a person’s development.

It is a tremendously important juncture when he can say this, “Yes, I want and I fear.” And by the very fact that you say it, you inactivate the negative force to some degree. And only then can you also proceed further and look at the reason why you fear what you want so much. This is one thing I have to answer.

Another thing I have to answer is the following. There is a sort of perhaps childish approach here to cause and effect. You know you have lived a number of years with certain attitudes. These attitudes have created certain tracks in your soul substance, certain grooves, perhaps.

Now, they run their course for a while. Merely because you have begun to recognize some of them and have become aware of some of your feelings does not mean that these grooves are immediately annulled. It here requires also, for the sake of bringing yourself to the fulfillment that is your birthright, that you also develop an attitude that is compatible with the greatness of your divine nature deep within you – and that is, for instance, a certain humility.

I do not mean humility in a false sense. I mean in a sense of knowing that you are part of a great universe with its laws. And it is not that here a little child comes and says, “Now, I want this. Now, I was a good girl and I’ve recognized this and I instantly want the result.”

The wisdom and humility that lies in a sort of waiting attitude that says, “Well, if what I want does not come, there must be some other barriers in me either from the past and/or that still exist in me in the present; then I will be able to find them.”

But by saying, “Well, now I was good, and now I already expect the result,” this presupposes a completely self-alienated state in which you believe there is an outer authority that rewards you for having been good and found certain truth about yourself. It is you – the universe is you.

Life outside of you is the same as inside of you. Now, I know I have said this before, but you do not know it when you approach the processes of your own life in this fashion. Therefore, the wisdom and humility to wait and inquire, “What is it in me” will be very helpful and will give you peace, even while you still unfold further.

I would like to say, do not stop in your work, for you have come across a certain threshold, and it is exceedingly important that you make use of the fruits that you have gathered here.

QA190 QUESTION: I have continuing pain in my neck and I’d really like to get to the bottom of this and face the whole truth about it, if I can. Is it something that I’m doing to myself and I just either won’t look at it or stop doing it, or is it really a break that simply is required in order that I make further progress?

ANSWER: The way I see it is the following way. It isn’t so much a question of a specific new insight or new awareness that you have not had. I would say you have the insight, but you have not made the emotional connections and tie-ins, and you are not aware completely yet – and this is, more or less, where many of my friends in the work now find themselves, in this inner spot – that there is a tremendously strong will in you that cannot accept No for an answer.

The No of much of your suffering in the past, you cannot accept, you do not accept, you will not accept. Something of you says, “Still and still and still – I must make it different.” And by that attitude, you cannot live in the present. You cannot expand into the present, accept and even perceive and let come to you what wants to come to you.

You cannot even see what life can hold for you, because something in you is so preoccupied with deprivations of the past and the present which you have, only because you cannot accept the past. That stiffness of inner will, of tight inner will, manifests and symbolizes as a stiffneckedness, which is painful.

Only when this “something” lets go in you and truly accepts what you did not have, can you begin to live now in a more satisfactory way. But in order for this to happen, you have to connect more and focus more precisely with the fact that you rebel still against what you lacked in the past. And this rebellion is constantly carried over into your present life.

It is what sickens you literally and figuratively speaking – what prevents you – but you too have made very significant progress particularly relative to where you were. Can you, in any way, feel the words I said?

QUESTION: I believe I can. I’m trying to understand how actually I can connect with this repression, this childish destructiveness. I think in some ways I do it all the time. It surprises me, quite frankly, that I’m still under the penalty of this type of behavior, because I apparently am, but yet I can’t quite feel it and see how I am.

ANSWER: Yes, that is exactly where you have to focus: when you feel rebellious, that you know you are rebellious and that you know what it means and that there is almost a willfulness in your suffering now – that it becomes a tool, an instrument of pressure onto your environment, onto those of whom you demand to give you what you have not received as a child.

The awareness of this will help you to go into the next step and to literally pray and meditate, as I’ve said many times, for inner help that you can make this step of letting go, of giving up this battle that you are engaged in. There is also a misconception attached to this, and that is very important for you to focus on and become conscious of.

That misconception is, of course, a very familiar one – and in one way or another, many people have this – that the pain of the past you equate with being unacceptable, untouchable, unlovable, unredeemable because of past deprivations – as I said to you many years ago, as a matter of fact – still hangs on to you.

Its motor force is used in this battle of “I must have it now, because that is the only way I will become redeemable and acceptable to myself.” You still equate your self-acceptance with correcting the original situation – trying to recreate it and correcting it.

If you can feel that and question the premise that your value and your worth are not dependent on anyone else’s acceptance of you, but only and exclusively by dint of your own being; by dint of your existence; by dint of the strength of your feelings; by dint of the powers and the energies and the creative faculties that exist in you and that afford you to go any way you wish.

Therein lies your value as a human being – and your godlikeness – which includes the possibility to be destructive, strange as this may seem. When you can formulate these thoughts and question this possibility for yourself, something will begin to happen, gradually, little by little, where you will not absolutely need this ideal parental situation, because your own value seems to depend on that.

The compulsion will lessen to hunt for it, as it already has, because you know, as I’ve mentioned many times, that as one of the laws of growth, something has to have changed already indirectly – somewhat – before you can even fully recognize the condition. Is that clear?

QUESTION: I think so. What you’re really saying is that I’m kind of emulating myself on archetypes – I’ve been going back to a struggle that doesn’t exist in me, in a sense, which is really the key to the feelings of being unredeemable.

ANSWER: Yes, and to make your acceptability dependent on the ideal parental situation, which you try to recreate through other circumstances. This is why these circumstances are laden with anxiety for you – because always your life seemed to depend on them, on the acceptance and the reaction of others. That is why you simultaneously need them desperately, and fear and resent and reject them – equally desperately – because too much is at stake in the contacts. But this has improved, and just because of that, you can recognize it.

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