QA171 QUESTION: I’d like to ask a question about a physical symptom, if I may. It appeared for the first time about six or seven years ago – long before I started on the Path. At that time I was in a very highly neurotic state and I became convinced that I was going to die. About that time, I developed a small numb spot on my wrist. Doctors said at the time that this didn’t have any meaning medically. But I wonder if that was a symbol somehow of my condition.
ANSWER: Yes. Yes, indeed. You see, if the person has fears and desires in the unconscious of wanting to avoid life – and what is life but his own feelings? – he numbs himself. You know this. This is what we are concerned with in this work. The person who does not feel is numb. He’s anesthetized.
QUESTION: So that by numbing a small patch is somehow, really…[Laughter]
ANSWER: Well, it is actually much more. You had numbed more than this small patch.
QUESTION: Yeah. Yeah.
ANSWER: It is something much more important. This small little spot is like a symbolic representation of some much larger areas, if you want to call it that, which you have numbed, out of your fears. Feelings is living. Life is feeling. You cannot live without feeling.
Most human beings go around three-quarters dead at least and often more so because three-quarters of their best faculties, their feelings – and therefore their whole creative organism – is numb.
QUESTION: I was born with a slight heart murmur too. Could this be related to the same?
ANSWER: Well, yes, the entity comes into this life with his problems and that, of course, was a manifestation of the same thing. But you do not have to go through life with such things. On the contrary. Your life is here to dissolve the state of frozenness, the state of numbness, and the state of deadness. That is what it is all about – life in general and such a Path in particular.
For life can only be worthwhile to the degree you are alive. And to the degree you are alive, you will experience joy, not otherwise. You cannot experience joy and bliss through mental concepts and elaborations, through intellectualizing anything.
Joy and bliss are expressions and exist to the degree you can let yourself feel deeply – and that requires the courage of facing and dealing with those feelings in you that you reject yourself for first, that you do not approve of.
