QA204 QUESTION: Could you comment more specifically on why I’m so afraid of opening up?
ANSWER: Yes. It is a fear ultimately of extinction. And the fear of opening up contains the misconception that if you do, your consciousness will be extinguished. This is really basically at the root of every soul’s division in consciousness of reality, the disconnection from reality. Your consciousness, you think, is only that which you know now, and whatever you do not know is speculation and has no reality for you, as yet.
As you go deeper into yourself and you discover realms of your being which you have ignored before – attitudes, realities of connections that you could not see and could not comprehend – little by little you begin to see deeper connections of life and of circumstances that first appeared haphazardly.
When you gain these insights about these deeper connections of your life – of where you are and why you are at any given time, at any given place – when you understand the intrinsic meaningfulness of these connections, then it will come to dawn on you that the end of physical life could not possibly extinguish these connections. These connections remain.
Since the connections remain, the realities that are embedded in these connections remain as well. And if these realities exist and do not just cease with physical life, life itself for the human consciousness is bound to continue. In that moment the fear of extinction will disappear from your heart and from your mind.
So the best way to work toward this aim is to explore the causes and effects of your own present life. This is not a faraway, speculative thing at all. It is completely ascertainable. If you are afraid, there must be negativity in you, for example.
If you have the courage and the honesty to completely own up to this negativity and make the connection between the cause of your negativity and the effect of your inability to accept pleasure, then you will understand the ongoing, inextinguishable reality of life – yours as well as anyone else’s. The curtain will thin that separates you – your present limited consciousness – from the greater consciousness that you are, from the all-consciousness that includes your ego consciousness.
It is possible that these words may not immediately strike an echo in you, for your question has, of course, many answers on many levels. But many of the answers on the more immediate, direct level have been given already, and you are working on them. So perhaps the answer on this deeper level I gave you will ripen in you if you open your heart to it.
I will also say here that the work of the Path will increasingly, with your progress, make it possible to adopt, to find new approaches, new methods in which to use meditation and other ways to transform negative attitudes into positive ones, negative energy into positive energy; especially your work at the Center will be extremely well adapted for this, and this work has not really begun.
It is about to begin, when the initial difficulties will be overcome, when you have found a basic way of making a real start in the work at the Center. The help will be given; the inspiration will flow through this instrument [Eva] as well as through others.
You cannot yet imagine how the force that can be generated there can be used directly for overcoming blocks of this sort. But it requires a time when you can be all together, more together, uninterruptedly together, and where you have peace and quiet. This is my answer.
