QA175 QUESTION: I’d like to ask about the energy in my body. I’ve been having a very tough time at work in terms of my mental energy, in my breathing, in my eyes. I’m doing close work and I practically strangle myself just by not taking in the air. I’m always gasping for air. This job involves a lot of straight mental work, and past noon, my head seems to freeze – I sort of become stupefied as the day goes on. I feel a mass of psychic energy hardening inside my head – right in my head itself, in the frontal lobes and behind the eyes. I guess this ties in with a misconception, this feeling that I’m being ground into pieces by this mental work I’m doing. I sort of stagger home at night, exhausted, except for certain days. Somehow I can muster quite a bit of energy and get through. But usually I’m beaten to pieces.
ANSWER: Yes. Now, in answering you, my dear friend, I would go directly to your most recent realizations and insights and take it up from there. As long as you are committed to part of your inner being functioning negatively, the life energy must be converted into a negative energy. That means it congests, it congeals, it stagnates, and it becomes poisonous, as it were.
Also, in connection with this, since you are committed to functioning negatively on a principle of hate and punishment, you cannot afford to feel your feelings, because these feelings would feel too unpleasurable. Hate does not feel pleasurable; revenge does not feel pleasurable. All negativity and deliberate distortions – or undeliberate, as it were – cannot feel pleasurable.
Therefore, feeling is a very unpleasant experience for you at this point. And therefore, you cannot breathe. For in breathing and in relaxing, feelings come immediately forth. Whatever feelings exist in you, they manifest. So here you have the whole chain reaction.
You are very near; your progress is very encouraging. The fact that you have been in all this pain recently is not only in spite of it, but because of it. Because you have to experience your own pain – the pain that is produced by a deliberate negativity you were unable to connect with until recently; you did not know it was deliberate. You were too alienated from it.
Now, you have to revive the pain. You have to take it out of this anesthesia. You have to come back to yourself, where you not only experience the pain but also where you know that it is deliberately instituted by a deliberate commitment to negativity, to destructive emotions. And that is a painful experience.
But unless you have gone through it and are going through it, you cannot reorient your inner will. You cannot decide inwardly that you now wish to commit yourself to a positive way of life, even though this may require more courage than the negative way – which is, of course, an error. But it may seem that way, off hand, because this is a way of life you are not used to.
To the degree this inner commitment – to being constructive, to love, to productiveness, to understanding and truth, to reality and nonexaggeration and nondramatization – is being made again and again, and the resistance to it overcome, to that degree good feelings will come into your body automatically.
A positive chain reaction can set in so that relaxing and breathing will not be threatening, because it will allow good feelings. Now you cannot tolerate good feelings, because your whole being is geared to a negative way of life. But once you commit yourself to a positive way of life, your feelings will respond.
You will be able to tolerate them, and you will also be able to relax and breathe. And energy will be self-renewing and enlivening. There will be so much energy in you as you cannot imagine yet, because all this energy that is now negatively engaged and congeals in you will be free flowing and self-renewing.
Now, many other problems, of course, are connected with it, including the problem of relationship. How can you enter into rewarding relationships when you cannot make room for love in the positive way of life within yourself? Therefore, you constantly frustrate yourself, and you constantly reactivate original frustration and its consequent anger.
The hate is then self-perpetuating as a result of that ongoing process within yourself. That the mind becomes a burden is also understandable, since it is overworked. The feelings are so discouraged; the feelings are so feared in view of what I have just said that there’s only mind activity.
It is just like when a person uses constantly only one leg and the other leg will atrophy eventually, unless it is revived. The leg that is used will become very tired, because there is no balance. So it is with your mind as opposed to your feelings. The feelings are there, but you do not dare to engage them positively. Do you understand?
QUESTION: Yes, I follow you. I must say I’m jumping with feelings, but they must all be negatively based, even though they often seem very positive.
ANSWER: Oh yes, you’re beginning; you’re beginning; you’re beginning. That is true.
QUESTION: And one more point about the commitment. It’s very important that I understand how to meditate, because I was told I have to make a specific, positive, meditative commitment. {Yes} I tried very hard last night to do this, but I feel resistance. I feel I’m being blocked off. There’s a portion in me that’s sabotaging the will.
ANSWER: Yes. Right. So the meditation should then be that you, first of all, express that part in you that knows there is only one way of life and that is commitment to the universal power of God, of love and truth – and that you also know that there is another side in you that obstructs this.
By saying, “I want this, but this other part in me is ignorant and does not want it. I do not want to squash this other part. I want its false ideas to express themselves into my consciousness so that I can eliminate them. And I request inner guidance that the unreasonable resistance and all its destructiveness can be overcome totally. This is what I want.”
In other words, what you also have to commit yourself to is the desire to overcome the resistance. Of course I would like to say that this goes for everyone on the Path, for there is no human being who does not have a destructive side that resists truth, health, happiness, pleasure. And therefore a commitment to overcome the resistance and an enlisting of the divine power to do so will bring forth wonderful results.
