QA193 QUESTION: I have a problem with not being able to give. I anticipate people rejecting me, so I punish them before they can reject me. I now actually make myself sick so I can have some justification to myself for not giving. I don’t know what to do.
ANSWER: You probably wish, maybe consciously or unconsciously, that I can give you a formula in which I can guarantee you that there will not be rejection and pain if thus and thus happens or if you do so and so. This is precisely what cannot and must not be. It is the opposite route you must choose, and in that route, you have to learn to accept what you fear.
You have to bank on your own as yet unexperienced resources, that you can be capable of dealing with rejection and stop brainwashing yourself again and again, and saying “the rejection is unbearable, I cannot bear it.” Because the more you tell yourself that, the more unbearable it will indeed seem.
It is very good and indicates excellent progress on your part that you are even aware of it, that you no longer camouflage your not giving, which was, until quite recently, the case, when you produced all other things instead. But now you are exactly where you need to be.
By dealing with your not wanting to give, you have to make now the next step. In the first place, dealing with your hate – really seeing the hate – and in the second place, dealing with the misconception that the hurt will kill you or that the hurt will be the final and only reality you have to experience if you once give in to it.
You have to see also how you distort and exaggerate out of all proportion any little hurt, almost as if you were to prove to life, “You see, it is too much. Save me from it.” I also advise you to very specifically follow through the suggestion I said before: How much do you want to give to life as opposed to how much you want to receive? If you can very specifically see the discrepancy here, maybe you will become more willing to give.
Then the wisdom will grow in you that the more willing you are to give, the less you actually risk, and the less you want to give, the more you risk – in fact, the more certain you are to court misery and isolation and self-hate. If you can see this, your choice can be made on this inner level. Even if you do not know you will immediately succeed, that is all right. You do not have to; you cannot.
But you can choose in wanting this and in being ready to slowly go with the Path in this particular way of trial and error – of trying and failing again, and of more and more giving yourself, surrendering yourself to the divine intelligence in you that is, indeed, capable to, little by little, come through and help you make the change. For without it, you cannot, indeed. The little ego is much too limited to do this.
I will talk again about this subject in the next lecture on meditation [Lecture #194 Meditation: Its Laws and Various Approaches – A Summary (Meditation as Positive Life Creation)].
QA204 QUESTION: I’ve come to a stumbling block in my relationship with women, and I just don’t want to accept, or I don’t comprehend, the fact that I don’t want to give them anything.
ANSWER: You do not comprehend why?
QUESTION: I don’t exactly know what I’m doing, and I’m in a fog now. I know I refuse to give in to any kind of anything because I don’t want to compromise.
ANSWER: What do you mean by compromise? Do you mean by compromise that you get everything and give nothing?
QUESTION: [Laughter] Sounds good that way.
ANSWER: Do you feel you want to give to the woman?
QUESTION: I don’t know. It’s really a problem. I kill myself with my thinking about it.
ANSWER: Do you sincerely want to give to the woman or to anyone?
QUESTION: I don’t know.
ANSWER: Don’t you? You do know!
QUESTION: No, I see it more like I want to receive. That’s clear.
ANSWER: Well, there’s no doubt about that. But let us look at the other side. Do you want to give?
QUESTION: No, what’s happening is that I don’t even know when it is clear to give.
ANSWER: Exactly! Well, maybe we can begin from right here. If you very simply raise this question within you: “What does giving mean? Do I give? In what way could I give and therefore perhaps gain a glimmer how I do not give?” Simply deal with these questions, my son, and the answer will come very clearly. You are confused because you are doing quite a number of things – which you are really doing very grudgingly – as a necessary price in order to receive.
Then when it does not come out exactly as you planned and hoped, then you’re getting very angry. And you do not admit this anger, so you become more and more confused. And then you think the price of your giving is real giving. It is not real giving – yet.
In order to give, you have to pray that you want to give, that you really want to give in loving, compassionate generosity. And when you can do this, you will not be so frustrated anymore. Now you’re dealing with your immense frustration, which you believe entitles you to be resentful and spiteful and ungiving and punishing.
You do not want to see that the frustration is something you inflict upon yourself by your not wanting to give, not really. Once you can deal with this and be honest about it, at least you will know where your frustrations come from rather than blaming them onto others. You will cease being confused and taking the actual ungivingness of the other person as the cause for your frustration. The ungivingness of others can never be your frustration, because you would not suffer from it if you were giving. And everything would fall into place.
Then you can come to the second phase of declaring your new, positive intentionality of opening your mind and your heart to the grace of God within you to fill you with the ability to love, to be generous, and to be giving. Unless you can do so, you cannot come into clarity; you must stay in confusion. You cannot come into a guiltless, clean state in which you feel you have every right to reach out into the abundance of the universe, ready to fill you with every conceivable joy.
QA238 QUESTION: I’ve been in the city for five months now and the most consistent and unresolved problem for me has been to make the commitment to getting a job. Lately I’ve been working in my sessions and in my group on my inability to give – either to myself or to others. I see how this relates to my problem with a job. I feel very stuck in a place where I won’t let myself give. I hope you might be able to help me with this.
ANSWER: Your difficulty in giving is a tremendous misconception, which in turn is regenerated by a certain attitude of the lower self. Now, the misconception is that you believe that when you give, you will be deprived, you will be impoverished, and you will have nothing left; people will abuse you, take advantage of you, and you will remain empty. Now, are you aware of this misconception? {Yes, very much}
Now then, this misconception is steadily reinforced – inadvertently, as it were, without you knowing of this connection quite yet – by a very infantile attitude in you that wants to get and get and get, and does not care about those from whom you take. Are you aware of that attitude? {Yes} Are you aware of the fact that this attitude directly creates your fear of giving? {I think so}
ANSWER: Well, if you are aware of this connection, then you have the key. I do not really believe that you are aware of this connection. I know you’re aware of both attitudes, but you do not see the causal connection between the two. For in that causal connection you have the key.
The key is: “Just because I want to take and take and take, and give nothing, that does not mean that giving always means that. I, in the first place, can give and refuse those who want to do what I am doing now. I have a right to refuse such a one-sided, unfair, exploitative attitude in others. And I also give the right to others to refuse this to me.”
As you give others the right not to be exploited by you, so will you know you have the right not to be exploited should you encounter equally destructive attitudes in others. Do you see the logic of this twofoldness?
QUESTION: Yes. So by transforming that attitude of mine, I would be able to give more.
ANSWER: Yes. You would not have to be afraid that when you give you will be impoverished. Because what you really fear is encountering people who do what you are doing now. Since you do not give them the right to say No to you, you cannot imagine that you would have the right to say No to anyone. You always have to give, no matter what.
QA241 QUESTION: I have been living in a kind of fog and I have a lot of anxiety in my relationship. I want to specifically ask something about my difficulty in giving. I’m even afraid to admit that part of me doesn’t want to give. I demand a lot of my mate and it has created a crisis between us. Very often I am not really conscious of my demands and I am afraid that it is all of me. And then when I do give, I’m afraid that it is false and that I only give to get love – which is also true, very often. So this makes it harder for me to give anything at all. I feel a lot of pain about this. I feel stuck here.
ANSWER: You are particularly struggling here in regard to the mask self that wants to give, and the lower self that does not want to give anything. You are in self-rejection about both, and forcing yourself to be already in the higher self, when this cannot yet be.
You have to accept these other two levels fully, and indeed, joyfully that you have finally encountered them, that you are on your path, exactly where you have to be. Do not create artificially this despair in you. For this despair is creating much more of a hindrance – much, much more than you need have.
The despair is futile, for you are exactly dealing with what you have to deal with: your mask that wants to do the right thing, and your lower self that does not want to give. You have to allow this more to the surface before you can truly come to the real giving. And share this, for you put a tremendous amount of pressure on yourself and on each other.
If you could share together your not wanting to give, and accept it in yourself and in each other, you would come to the givingness much easier. And there would more energy. The numbness is a creation because you do not accept that aspect, both of you. Share the not-givingness, and you give already.
QA249 QUESTION: Recently I had an experience in which I felt an overwhelming fear. I thought there was something wrong with me physically and that I was going to die. It seemed as if I was seeing people for the last time and felt very sad too. Can you help me understand this experience?
ANSWER: The fear you describe is primarily based on a deep inner dependency. This dependency is based on a vast illusion on your part. The illusion, in turn, is based on an attitude of not wanting to give your best – all the best that is in you – to the world, to your environment, to people, and finally to yourself.
This ungivingness stems from a sense of inadequacy – you do not believe that you have anything to give. At the same time, the sense of inadequacy is the result of the ungivingness. You demand that others give to you, that others make no demands on you whatsoever, and this makes you lose touch with how much you would have to give, if only you truly wanted to.
The basic ungivingness in your personality freezes your awareness of self, of your already-existing qualities, and of your potentials that wait to be unfolded. So you find yourself in a vicious circle: the less you believe you have to give, the more you depend on others to give you what cannot be fulfilled from the outside. This makes you more anxious, more resentful, hence less loving and less willing to give.
This, in turn, creates guilt and a sense of unworthiness, so that you cannot receive all the riches that surround you, that God wants you to have. So you feel more and more impoverished, more dependent, while at the same time you know that what you believe you depend on cannot be given you. This obviously creates a lot of fear. The more this vicious circle goes on, the more energy it accelerates, and the darker the fear becomes.
Your soul is desperately ready to transform this attitude. It aches for this change. It truly needs this change. It can no longer live in the old way which you have outgrown as a total entity. Your experience is a message from your inner self, telling you this old attitude needs to die, you need to say farewell to it. But you do not wish to let go of it.
You feel tragic about it, so that the sense of dying exists on two levels. The one I already explained, it is the positive message conveyed to your consciousness. The other is the level of confusion, in which you believe that if you give up the old attitude of ungivingness, you will die. To the distorted part of the self, it seems that giving means giving up all expectancy of being loved.
To you, being loved and appreciated and valued means that no one should expect any effort from you, any expenditure of your assets, talents, abilities, energies. You want to be given all you ever need in life, spiritually, emotionally and materially, without paying the price. This misconception creates inadequacy, dependency, fear and finally, terror of life and death.
It is of the greatest importance for your path that you deeply work with this attitude and that you realize the folly of it, the damage and the hopelessness that it incurs. You need to make every effort to transform this distortion into truth and thus to want to give your best to life, to others, to God. This will enable you to give to yourself and to believe in your value. This will also totally abolish your fears.