QA191 QUESTION: Regarding the man’s question about throat contractions, I was wondering about my fear of sex and my extreme throat contractions. Is there some connection there?

ANSWER: Yes, this fear is, of course, very much connected with being defenseless, being vulnerable, accepting where you are and what your feelings are now, letting go, letting yourself be out of control, trusting that process, learning to trust it, and therefore the holding, the contracting.

It originally comes from not saying, not even to yourself, what you really felt – defending against what you really felt and then defending against that defense, and still alternatively defending against that defense of the defense. And that is all bottled up inside.

QUESTION: I have been letting go to a degree in areas like fear and guilt and anger. And I have experienced new avenues of feelings as a result of it. Some of them pervade my entire being. I’m a little confused now about when it applies to loving feelings. It feels to me like a metaphysical feeling of love, rather than the old sexual feelings. I’m afraid that when I apply this to another person and I want to maintain that feeling, that it would dissipate itself somehow.

ANSWER: You see, it may very well dissipate, for you know that all progress comes and goes. It comes and goes until the periods of health and unity stay longer, and the interruptions are less often and each interruption you fully explore to its total meaning. If you are afraid you may lose it, you already lose it before you have it.

I would suggest, in the first place, that you go into your feelings and let them be as long as they last, fully expectant that you will lose the feeling again. Say into yourself, “When the time comes that I inevitably will lose this beautiful feeling, I want to really explore the reason. I want to get to deeper layers of understanding and experiencing. I want to let out more of what is still there in the residual reservoir. I want to tie it up with my understanding and my acceptance of myself now. I am prepared to lose it. I will not be afraid of losing it. I will not manipulate myself that I will not lose it,” for in that very manipulation, you kill it before it starts. That is one thing I’ll say in answer to your question.

The other thing I want to say is that there is a swinging of the pendulum, a fluctuation. In the past, whatever capacity of feeling you had, you put in the sexual channel, killing off the tender feelings which you experience as metaphysical feelings – the heart feelings, the love feelings, the tenderness, the warmth. At this period, the pendulum swings a little bit in the other direction, so that you experience those soft, tender feelings with less of a sexual nature, because there’s still fear in you of the total feeling – unity.

So there’s always some safeguard. It’s either this without that or that without this. Which always preserves a certain amount of control. But you have to go through this. You cannot expect to immediately go from experiencing a very cut-off state in which you allowed only a certain amount of purely genital sexual feelings, with very little other feelings, to a state where you immediately become whole.

You have to also observe the process in its wisdom and graduation in you, how you go into this other period. Only as you fully accept this – and do not pressure yourself – explore it and allow it, will you gradually let go, and the whole of you will unify. You will have total feelings.

Under the right circumstances, there will be heart and sexual feelings, and in other circumstances there will be just a total, what you call metaphysical feelings, heart feelings, tender feelings, without the genitality involved. Does that answer your question?

QUESTION: Yes. I would like to see everything combined.

ANSWER: Yes. That is the goal, of course. It’s the inevitable goal of accepting the feeling self. But do not ever forget, my friends, that the feeling self at its best and most integrated cannot take place unless you first fully accept it as it now exists, partially at its worse – with the anger and the fear and the pain and the childishness and the childish demands that are embedded in the feelings.

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