QA150 QUESTION: When I have allowed myself to open up and experience to some degree a feeling of being in the Now, it’s been a very beautiful experience. At the same time, I also experience a fear that this will overwhelm me, that it will be too good – it will, in a sense, almost incapacitate me. That I won’t want to do my obligations in terms of school or work. I sense very strongly that this is based on misconception. What is the nature of this misconception I have?
ANSWER: Yes! Now, my dear friend, here is a wonderful thing that you have become specifically aware of this condition, which, incidentally, I have discussed quite recently in one of the lectures [Lecture #149 Cosmic Pull Towards Union – Frustration]. You now express the general condition that exists in every human soul, and most human beings are not aware of this fear.
The way most human beings handle it is that they unconsciously destroy the possibility to realize this happiness. They always find good reasons for doing so, apparently, or they do not even see that they destroy it and how they do it. And then they lose contact with the link – the link is destroyed between the act and the realization that the act is committed, and why this act is committed.
So that fulfillment cannot come about, or can come about only in a very limited way, with the further result that then the person craves for the fulfillment. He yearns for it and is unable to do anything about it until the awareness is established that this is done and why. Now, whenever a person on a path of self-realization has reached this awareness you now describe, it is truly half the battle.
Now I will turn to the specific feeling – in addition to what I generally said in the lecture pertaining to this universal pull that everyone feels and yet stems against – of being annihilated when one is in this stream of life, when one gives oneself to it. Because the outer ego must give way and let the inner person take over, the real self. This is the fear.
It is an unjustified fear, because whenever the inner person takes over, things are right. The cosmic reality is conflictless, it is not something happening in time and space. It is happening right here and right now when one has the courage to give oneself over to this inner person.
Your outer ego is not the protection you think, once the outer ego is strong. Your particular path, from this point of view, led, first of all, to strengthen your ego. This may sound paradoxical, but in exact measure as your ego has become strengthened, you can use this ego strength in order to deliberately consult the inner being. As you do this, your fear of total pleasure and total fulfillment will vanish.
But first of all, your ego strength must be utilized with the courage that this requires to give yourself over to the inner being, the divine being, that is quite near and quite available and quite obvious if it is allowed to manifest – if it is deliberately called into play.
Man has a hundred possibilities to do so every day. But he is so conditioned and so used to operating in a different way that it doesn’t even occur to him. At best it occurs to him to consult this inner being when he meditates or prays at specific occasions. But he does not consult in the daily living, in the daily little and big problems.
It does not occur to him to think there is, right here and right there, the divine intelligence, the divine truth, the divine presence and power. The ego self then can say, “I give myself to it; I want to be lived by it, inspired by it. I use my ego self to let this ego self go with all its pride, with all its fear, with all its self-will, with all its self-vanity, with all its misconceptions,” and give oneself to this larger inner being.
That is the integration of the ego self with the divine self; that is an immediate reality. When this happens – gradually to the extent this happens – the fear vanishes, the fear you mentioned, the fear of the destiny of total fulfillment and total happiness and pleasure supreme that is every human being’s birthright.
The fear of it dissolves and therefore the conflicts dissolve in a most wonderful and right way, whether they be inner or outer conflicts or both. But this must be the way and everything else leads to erroneous solutions – solutions that can only breed more conflict and more unhappiness all around.
Here, as far as you are concerned, my friend, your growth has gone very much in the direction of strengthening your ego. I might even say the last few months have shown a most remarkable change in this respect.
But now the time comes when your ego can further be strengthened by the process just described here; by each moment when you have fear and anxiety, sending the thought into this inner being, “I give myself to the divine intelligence with its wider views. What is it I have to know in this particular situation about my fear?” Or, “How can I be inspired in order to be most constructive in this situation?” This is the way.
QUESTION: In the last week or two, I’ve experienced strange sensations of not feeling myself with my head. It’s hard to explain. I feel and know things in my body rather than in my head, and I was just curious, is this a manifestation of this?
ANSWER: Of course, of increasing health. Of course! Because in the past your fear has made you numb your feelings, withdraw from your feelings. Wherever you had feelings, there were more cerebral processes of the mind, because that seemed safer to you. But as you grow and shed your shackles and correct your misconceptions, you become alive.
Your feelings are something you feel as a reality in your body, in your whole being, in your whole person, not as a theory in your mind, not as a cerebral process. Therefore, this is an absolute sign that you are going in the right direction. You are going in the right direction in the deepest, most profound possible way.
For how can one really become alive if one is not understanding one’s own problems and misconception? That is precisely what you are doing, and that releases the numbness and the locking of your feelings that you have had.
QUESTION: I experience my fear now through memory. For instance, somehow I am afraid of something and then I’ll say, “I’m not feeling afraid,” but I remember that I was afraid, so I have to continue to be afraid. So, can you give me an explanation?
ANSWER: Yes, you hold on to your fear. Your fear is a protection against other feelings, good feelings, which you fear more than your fear.
QUESTION: Well, I’m beginning to become aware of that feeling. Also, I’m becoming more aware that I have too much hostility in me.
ANSWER: Yes, this is a wonderful thing that you do become aware of this. You have to allow this to really reach your total awareness in its full intensity. You have to grope and look and learn for a way in which you can express this hostility in a nondamaging, nondestructive way – that you do not act upon it blindly – but that you are aware of it and give it expression in a way that it cannot harm. The more you do that, the more you will eventually reconvert this energy into constructive channels.
QUESTION: My fear now, you see, is if I really let my hostility go, I will be into the depression.
ANSWER: No, you will not, if you do it in the right way and you have all the help, my friend. I would say, in any way possible, work as much as you can at this particular point, because you have reached a crossroad.
You have reached something that you have unconsciously striven for all these years on the Path without consciously knowing what it is you really expect, what it is you really have to encounter in order to get out of your difficulties. But this is where you are now, and therefore it is very important that you are as concentrated in this work as possible. Give up all resistance.
QUESTION: I’m completely resisting. I don’t understand.
ANSWER: Well, this is exactly why, because that is the crossroad, and you are afraid that these things will now come out. All your life was dedicated in the past to hem them in and to build the defenses which you know about. But now the time has come where it is really not any longer a theory but a reality where you can really make the change.
If you take yourself in hand and overcome the resistance and do everything you can, you will be all right. You have nothing to fear.
