QA166 QUESTION: Could you explain to me why I elicit such great anger and hostility in the group – so much so that I want to run away? I can’t bear it. It’s almost a repetition of my life, and sometimes I feel I don’t see how it’s going to help me.
ANSWER: Yes. Yes. Yes. Now you see here, my dear, is such an important point. Why do people generally fear this group work so particularly? Because it is bound to bring forth precisely the problem that they encounter again and again and again in their lives, if only they wish to see it. So you’re quite correct in stating it this way.
But it is precisely by meeting it in the group that you can get out of the problem, because in life it is very difficult to do so with the actual people one is involved with and who do not have the understanding and do not give you the possibility to work it through. In life, therefore, people run away from their problems in one form or another.
One can even do this while one is on a path – even a very successful path, even a very good path. But this one area one can shy away from for years and years and years. And one can go through a whole life and many lifetimes, as a matter of fact, without meeting the problem.
Now, if you have the courage of meeting it, you will not want to run away, or your wanting to run away will not get the better over you. You will then make blessed use of this possibility. And my advice to you is to meditate in this way.
Say, “Here is an opportunity where I can finally really and truly understand what it is.” Much better and more effective than if I would tell you, I would suggest that you ask every individual participant of your group to tell you very frankly, to try to put into words, what it is.
If you are not defensive inwardly, if you pray and meditate that you will not be defensive, but open your heart because you are in no danger – the danger is entirely illusory – they will tell you. If people do react that way, they possibly feel endangered by you – again falsely, because you mean no harm to them.
You defend yourself against what you fear, and this produces fear in them, and their reaction to you produces fear in you. Now, your fear is as unjustified as their fear of you. Ask in meditation to see and understand that you do not mean them any harm and that possibly they do not mean you any harm either.
Once you see it this way, you will realize that your fear is illusion and therefore your running away is a waste of a very precious opportunity to understand something vital in yourself. And I wish your daughter would hear the same and perhaps can listen to this.
QUESTION: She has the same problem.
ANSWER: Yes, exactly.
QUESTION: But I did, as you suggest, ask what it is that elicits this hate. And I think I even got more hate after that. I didn’t get satisfaction.
ANSWER: Yes, because there wasn’t enough time, or perhaps openness, to go into it on all levels concerned – because you were all defensive about it. When one is defensive, truth cannot come.
If you inwardly relax, open up and send the thought into yourself, “I want the truth. I have nothing to fear of truth,” and then ask in a spirit of “help me to understand; I feel frightened; I feel attacked; I do not know why; What is it? Explain it to me,” something else will happen. You would get a wonderful liberation and a sense of truth about yourself that will transcend the intellectual understanding of many other things you have found already on your path.
QUESTION: I’ll try that.
ANSWER: Listen to these words again together with your child and work it out perhaps together – that inner spirit. Open up and let go of the fear. Realize the fear is illusory, just as their fear of you is illusory.
