QA191 QUESTION: I’m partially blind, and I’m starting some exercises I’ve been doing for about a month which I seem to be very hopeful about, but I think that I have some doubts about it.
ANSWER: In other words, you’re in conflict. You have both hope and doubt? Is that it?
QUESTION: Yes, I think I’m committed to it, but I know that there’s some doubt there.
ANSWER: What are your doubts, and can you be more specific?
QUESTION: I don’t know exactly. I think the doubt is that I’m just going to spend all my time doing it. I spend a lot of time doing it and committing myself to it. I guess the feeling of disappointment, maybe.
ANSWER: Have you done any deep inner search within yourself in order to explore your deepest unconscious, and have you searched for answers why this is happening to you?
QUESTION: Yes.
ANSWER: What answers have you come to?
QUESTION: Well, I guess there’s a negative part that’s stopping me.
ANSWER: Are you aware of any voice in you that does not want to see, perhaps in a different way, see?
QUESTION: Yes, I’m in contact with that too.
ANSWER: I do not believe that you just simply doubt specific exercises, but you probably doubt the very possibility that you might see and get well again. Is that possible, that you doubt this as a whole? Or is it just the specific exercises that you doubt?
QUESTION: I guess both things exist.
ANSWER: Yes. I think it is important for you to emphasize the doubt as a whole, and the doubt in your very hope or possibility to reinstitute your eyesight may have to do with your not quite being in contact, that there is still some voice in you that says, “I do not want to see. I do not want to see all of it. I do not want to see the whole of it.”
If you could commit yourself totally – in your meditation, in your soul-searching work – to really see all of it, you will have hopes to see also with your physical eyesight. And then, whether these particular exercises will be what you need and if that’s what it is, you will have confidence in them. If it’s something else you need, you will be guided to something else.
But this is where you have to put the main emphasis. To what extent do you still refuse to see? Are you still blocking? Are you still resisting something in yourself? Are you still not committed totally and let go totally toward what is in you? This is the question. This is the problem.
QA241 QUESTION: A few months ago, a doctor told me I have a problem with my eyes which I have had since I was a child. I take in very little information with my eyes but somehow by using my brain, I deduce the rest of the information and end up with 20/20 vision. This has affected my ability to read well and has apparently influenced me to study science. Another effect has been the overtaxing of my brain in using it for seeing rather than for other things. I also have a lot of tension in my body and tiredness. I realize I’m telling this story backwards, in Pathwork terms – the cart before the horse. I would like you to comment on this and its relevance to my life task.
ANSWER: I will comment on it in larger terms. There are other life manifestations in your development in which you have, in what you call the past, had a contrary overemphasis. Integration and evolution is a constant back and forth, a balancing factor of finding new levels of balance where the scale has to go once more in this direction and once more in the other direction.
There was for a considerable time – over lifetimes – an under-emphasis of an essentially very good and well-developed brain, where there was a laziness there. That has created the need to create a new balance in which you have given yourself this impediment in order to use your brain more.
Now the time has come, however, where re-creation of the balance system on the higher level can occur. You can then integrate the deductive brain functioning – the good intellect with the deeper intuitive faculties of inner and outer vision in the receptive centers. Your conscious emphasis on this will help you.
You can then tune into yourself, in which you can perhaps glean both these tendencies in you – the one from way in the past where there was a desire to not use your brain, to be lazy in your thinking, which then has created the overemphasis. You may really be able to connect with this feeling, and then subsequently connect with the feeling how you can now create more integration with the brain function you have succeeded in developing well, and now bring in the visionary function.
Now, I could also say to you, by putting it from the other side, that each of the parts that lags behind at any given period implies an unwillingness to accept and face certain things in self and life. And that is quite obvious. I do not believe you have, at this point, too much difficulty in understanding this, at least theoretically and, to quite a degree, specifically and personally.
As you now make more recognitions about yourself – when you overcome resistance, when you see more of what you did not want to see – you can then understand quite clearly how either of the two approaches – either the brain (the deduction, reason, the understanding) or the vision – could be used in a constructive way or in an exclusive way that makes deeper insight impossible. Both abilities can be used positively or they can be abused. Is that clear?
QUESTION: Yes. When you speak of vision are you speaking of vision through the eyes only?
ANSWER: No, the inner vision.