73 QUESTION: At one time, you said that you could hear the soul scream. Does that also work between the different subconscious minds of two separate human beings? Does one subconscious hear the screaming of the other? Is that why one feels the hostility emanating from the other person?
ANSWER: Yes. That is why I always say that your subconscious affects the subconscious of the other person. You go through life resenting other people because they do not respond to your outer actions. You yourself are unaware of what your inner actions are.
Your inner actions or reactions are accurately perceived by your fellow human beings, and they react to that part of yourself. Their souls hear that voice or perceive it with other inner sense organs of hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting. That is why the subconscious of one affects the subconscious of the other.
So often, people feel unjustly treated when they know their actions were quite all right. They concentrate on all their outer right actions but leave out the inner unconscious motivations which exist in addition to the conscious and proper outer ones. If you learn to be utterly honest with yourself and acknowledge your hidden motivations and feelings, you will then understand why other people react to you as they do, and you will no longer consider yourself the victim of injustice.
QUESTION: How can I make the distinction as to whether the other person provoked me or I the other person?
ANSWER: It is not necessary to find who started it, for this is a chain reaction, a vicious circle. It is useful to start by finding your own provocation, perhaps in response to an open or hidden provocation of the other person. Thus you will realize that because you were provoked, you provoke the other person. And because you do so, the other again responds in kind.
As you examine your real reason, not the superficial one, the reason why you were hurt in the first place and therefore provoked, according to tonight’s lecture you will no longer regard this hurt as disastrous. You will have a different reaction to the hurt, and, as a consequence, the hurt will diminish automatically. Therefore, you will no longer feel the need to provoke the other person. Also, as the need to reproduce the childhood situation decreases, you will become less withdrawn and you will hurt others less and less, so that they will not have to provoke you.
If they do, you will now also understand that they reacted out of the same childish blind needs as you did. Now you can see how you ascribe different motivations to the other person’s provocation than to your own, even if and when you actually realize that you initiated the provocation. As you gain a different view on your own hurt, understanding its real origin, you will gain the same detachment from the reaction of the other person. You will find exactly the same reactions in yourself and in the other.
As long as the child’s conflict remains unresolved in you, the difference seems enormous. But when you perceive reality, you begin to break the repetitive vicious circle.
As you truly perceive such a mutual interplay, it will relieve the feeling of isolation and guilt you all are burdened with. You are constantly fluctuating between your guilt and your accusation of injustice you direct at those around you. The child in you feels itself entirely different from others, in a world of its own. It lives in such a damaging illusion.
As you solve this conflict, your awareness of other people will increase. As yet, you are so unaware of the reality of other people. On the one hand, you accuse them and are inordinately hurt by them because you do not understand yourself and therefore do not understand the other person.
On the other hand, and at the same time, you refuse to become aware when you are hurt. This seems paradoxical yet is not. As you experience for yourself the interactions set forth tonight, you will find this to be true. While sometimes you may exaggerate a hurt, at other times you do not allow yourself to know that it happened at all, because it may not fit the picture you have of the situation.
It may spoil your self-constructed idea, or it may not correspond to your desire at the time. If the situation seems otherwise favorable and fits into your preconceived idea, you leave out all that jars you, allowing it to fester underneath and create unconscious hostility. This entire reaction inhibits your intuitive faculties, at least in this particular respect.
The constant provocation that goes on among human beings, while it is hidden from your awareness now, is a reality you will come to perceive very clearly. This will have a very liberating effect on you and your surroundings. But you cannot perceive it unless you understand the patterns in yourself which I discussed tonight.
QUESTION: Is it possible in some way to make a truce, for even two or three minutes, between one’s own subconscious and the subconscious of the other person? Sometimes you see the reality intellectually, but by the time you order your subconscious to do something, it is already in revolt and has made the other person unhappy and then you are unhappy too. It might all have been avoided if there had been a few minutes of truce.
ANSWER: You see my dear, in the first place it is not a question of ordering your subconscious. You cannot order it. That is impossible. As long as you attempt such commands, it will be very resistant. Or it may deceive you, so that you deceive yourself. The subconscious can only be reeducated by the slow and gradual process pursued in our work.
Most important is that you become fully aware of what you really feel. Actually, you are only half aware of it most of the time and resort to superimposing another set of feelings upon your real reactions. These may be other negative emotions; if they are positive, you are deceiving yourself even more.
Only by stripping away all these superimpositions can you understand the reason why your subconscious is often so stubborn. If it continues to resist your good efforts, there must be something present that you have not understood and not connected with. Then it is a question of finding the block that causes this particular obstruction.
When this happens, you will not need a short truce. You will have real peace with yourself and therefore with others. While you may command a truce in your outer actions, in your words, and even in your thoughts, the subconscious does not respond to such discipline. Truce, as you see it, cannot really work. It is as unreal as the effect of attempting to command it would be.
QUESTION: Suppose we are able to put our own house in order. Will we then eliminate provocations in the other person?
ANSWER: You do not even have to put your house in order to the extent that you are fully mature and more or less perfect. This perfection hardly ever exists in the human sphere. But the awareness of your immaturity, a real insight into and understanding of your reactions and feelings that cause provocation, will weaken the habit of provocation sufficiently until you finally will cease bringing on provocations, and will in turn not be provoked by others.
As you gain a certain detachment from yourself in a very healthy way, the smoldering, unhealthy drive and force will be taken out of your emotional reactions. In fact, I would even say that this is the only kind of valid truce that can be accomplished.
Allow yourself to see what you really feel and why. And when you have an overall view, without any further subterfuge and self-deception, such knowledge will no longer disquiet you. It will have a very calming effect. You will have made peace with yourself by accepting your still existing imperfections, and will no longer harrow yourself trying for a perfection that you cannot possibly attain at the moment.
Once you accept the reality of your imperfect self, the resulting hurts will no longer be so serious and tragic. You will accept them as a consequence of your accepted imperfections which you can now observe calmly, while gaining more understanding about them and thus nearing perfection and maturity.
In this way, your hostility will vanish and your provocations will too. Relapses will surely occur, but you will accept them with a realistic outlook. You will gain further insight from them, knowing that they are possible because something has not penetrated deeply enough, and has to be found anew so as to be assimilated on deeper levels of your being.
Hostility exists in you because you are unaware that you are hurt and why you are hurt. Just think of times when you are really aware of a hurt without anger and without feeling hostile. You may feel sad, but feeling sad seems to many people so humiliating that they prefer to be angry and therefore hostile.
That is a particular kind of childishness existing in everyone. You think it is superior to be angry and hostile than to be sad, so you suppress the real hurt. But the hostility has to be hidden too, because it makes you feel guilty for other reasons, so it comes out in a devious, hidden way, which in turn brings on further provocation. Provocation is a result of unconscious and suppressed hostility, and the hostility results from unconscious and suppressed hurt.
77 QUESTION: Isn’t it that sometimes we want to nurse our resentments for certain people and that’s why we seek their faults? What do we do about that?
ANSWER: This is a very constructive question. When you want to have resentments, the most obvious and first question would be, why? Once you realize that you want to have such resentments, it will not be so difficult to find out why. As always, this should be approached as dispassionately and with as new an outlook as though questions of this sort had never been asked.
Disregard the ready answer that would say, because of this or that fault in the other person. This is not the reason. You have to find out what your imagined advantage is when you are aggressive and hostile.
QUESTION: An armor, so as not to be on the defensive?
ANSWER: If you are afraid of being on the defensive, you must find yourself guilty, otherwise you would not have to protect yourself by going on the offensive.
QUESTION: Yes, but it also gives self-confidence and self-trust.
ANSWER: Actually, it does not give you self-confidence if you resent another person and you are helplessly caught in the resentment. Your emotions become so strong that you cannot handle them anymore. This does not make for self-confidence.
In your unreality you may believe it does, simply by avoiding looking for what you feel guilty about. If you attack in order to hide something, it will make you as helpless as the object of your attack. Thus you are caught in a whirlpool, losing self-government.
It is often the case that one resents in the other what one actually resents in oneself. If you look at what particularly irritates you, you will inevitably find that, perhaps in a distorted or modified way, you have a very similar aspect or attitude. The stronger you dislike it in yourself, the more you project the dislike on others. The more it is hidden, the more you may overcompensate for it by going in the opposite extreme outwardly.
Since any ungenuine solution has a negative effect, so must this, too. One of the symptoms is that you particularly resent the same thing in others. The remedy, therefore, lies in finding that in you which is still hidden and then, through understanding its imagined necessity, dissolving it. In that moment, you will no longer have such strong reactions toward others.
97 QUESTION: If you have an aggressive feeling and you don’t like it, but it is very strong, your common sense is telling you that you shouldn’t feel this way. You understand with your mind that perhaps the person with whom you are angry has problems himself, but that doesn’t help. How do you handle that?
ANSWER: The first step is the realization that you cannot yet feel differently. Here, perfectionism comes in, because something in you says, “I should not have these feelings of aggression. I should know better because he acts out of his own unresolved problems.” All this may be true, yet in it is contained the “I should not” of perfectionism.
However, if you say to yourself, “I cannot help feeling this way because I grope in the dark, and I, as a human being, often grope in the dark. I do not know many answers. I do not understand other people,” then you are in truth. But because somehow you all feel, “I really should understand everyone, everyone else should understand me, and I should know all the answers concerning my life and my personal human relationships,” you express the very attitude that makes it so difficult.
Only by accepting your human limitations will the aggressiveness and hostility vanish. Because underneath you will discover and become aware of being hurt, of feeling rejected. Your shame and fear of these emotions make you superimpose the hard and much more unpleasant feelings of aggressiveness.
Once you become aware of the hurt, which is a more genuine element, it is easier to cope with your feelings, and soon the hurt will dissolve and make room for even more genuine feelings which are still closer to the real you. But first of all, you have to accept your human limitations; you have to dispense with the expectation that you, as well as others, should always understand and know.
If you can own up to groping in the dark, you might be able to pinpoint in your mind what it is that you are unclear about. Accept that the lack of clarity may remain, or it may even clear up by itself, simply because your resistance against it has disappeared. Accept also your still existing aggressiveness, asking yourself whether it is not a distortion of hurt. Then own up to the hurt. This way you may find the answer much sooner than through the cramped and compulsive drive that says that you already “should not have aggressiveness.”
QA119 QUESTION: When one rids oneself of a hostility but is fearful of losing this hostility, then does he transfer it perhaps to another object?
ANSWER: In order to be dissolved?
QUESTION: The psyche is fearful of losing his hostility, because within it he has found security; he holds onto it by transferring it to another object, which in reality he has no hostility for?
ANSWER: Oh yes, certainly; this is what happens all the time, particularly in connection with this work. And this is why it is so important for you, my friends, to become aware of this and not to find hitching posts, but to express the raw these feelings, no matter how justifiable the causes you may find or believe to find. This is very true – that is it exactly.
Sometimes it may be directed to someone completely different. There too it is very important to examine this in the work. Is the actual thing you feel hostile about commensurate with the intensity of your feelings? The words may often seem to justify it, but when you truly look at the intensity of your feelings, it may often be quite obvious that it is not – that there is a tremendous discrepancy.
And I would like to say a word here about the fear of giving up hostility. Again this is something that may be of general use. The fear to give up hostility may, of course, have several reasons. One of the important ones is that hostility is believed to be a substantial something to hold onto – like the control, the reins you hold. If you have no hostility, you have nothing. And you feel defenseless. And this, of course, is an illusion.
Another thing I want to say is if such is the case, there is always something that hasn’t been quite understood yet about the nature of the hostility, about the nature of guilts and shames and fears. If you go on looking for what is there, look at each hostility and examine it, you will find that something, so that it will then become easier and easier to dissolve it.
QA121 QUESTION: You spoke of the passion of anger. I know in my own life experience, I handled a great many of my difficulties by blocking out my anger. I’ve also learned that many times in the process of actually facing one’s anger, there’s no longer anger there. Still, I have a great deal of difficulty with this particular kind of passion.
ANSWER: I think you will be able to get a little further if you look at the emotion behind the anger. Maybe anger is there, although it may not have been difficult for you to accept, and you’re now beginning to accept your anger. There may be still other emotions that may be even more difficult to accept. Perhaps hurt.
Perhaps there is also a puzzlement of not understanding. It may be even more painful for the grown man to come to terms with not understanding something. This would follow the category of what I said before: face the issues within yourself – old relationships you cannot quite understand. Determine what is it you do not understand and why. And perhaps then the anger you are learning to accept can find an outlet because you see what is behind it.
If you look behind the anger of certain hurts and in connection with certain hurts, you will find circumstances in your early environment which, to the intellect, may be perfectly explainable. But to the emotions, they are confusing and unexplainable, not only your own ambivalent feelings of love versus hate, of affection versus anger, but also at certain ambivalences in your own environment and certain things that confuse your psychic life, your emotional life. This has to be faced; then you will be able to come to terms with the anger.
QA121 QUESTION: May I ask you about a specific difficulty I find now. I know I have a lot of aggression and hostility toward my parents, especially toward my mother, which I should bring out. But first of all I repress them for some reason of my own, which I am not so clear of yet. But also in this I am very much aided by the knowledge that, first of all, I was born into this environment just so, because I have certain difficulties, and they also have the similar difficulties – especially my mother – so this can be brought out. Secondly, they were brought up in a specific way, which made them the way they are to a great extent, so how can I blame them. If I can’t blame them, I excuse them so much that I am unable to bring out my aggression.
ANSWER: The breaking point in this problem is that, difficult as negative feelings may be to accept, certain positive feelings are even harder to accept. I think you should now try and search in yourself that certain love feelings you had made you feel perhaps even more guilty than the hate feelings.
Once you can see this, feel this – in an indirect way perhaps only at the beginning, because this is very subtle – then investigate your entire attitude to your instinctual nature. You will and must find the way out, and it will no longer be a conflict between either repression or accusation.
You will be, then and then only, able to see your ambivalent feelings toward both of them, each in a different way: your resentment for what seemed very understandable on the one hand for the child to resent; on the other hand, the more grown up ego cannot accept your resentment.
You will then be able to accept your own ambivalent feelings and resentments, and therefore you will accept your parents in a real way. But this can only happen if you first come to terms with a completely opposite, reverse side of feelings behind the hostility.
QUESTION: I have felt lately that I have much love in me which was maybe of a too-passionate nature to fit into this world in which I was brought up and that this was repressed. And so much else was repressed.
ANSWER: Quite. That is quite right. You are on the right track, and it is wonderful you can immediately connect this, because this will show you the way how to go on.
QA128 QUESTION: I would like some clarification on hostilities or irritations. When I try to understand someone who irritates me and the cause of it, I get confused because I don’t have any natural responses left to judge my own desires.
ANSWER: In the first place, I would advise the following approach here. Ask yourself the question: when you are irritated and therefore hostile, do not feel frustrated regarding a certain desire? Whether that desire be something important or an immediate little thing makes no difference.
So often hostility of the sort you describe arises out of a sense of frustration, and underneath that frustration exists a conclusion, a feeling of, “If I do not get what I want immediately and exactly the way I want, I must suffer, and this is final, and nothing can ever change.”
It is the feeling of, “Whatever does not happen now, will never happen.” It has to be established exactly what the frustration is at the moment and what you would really want. There is a belief somehow that the fact that you are frustrated means, in your emotions, that you will never get what you really want. There is the idea, or the fear, that you will never get what you really want.
Once you bring this out into the open, chances are that the irritation will immediately lessen if you can quietly observe the false fear of permanent frustration. Because you are at the moment frustrated and the frustration may be that the other person does not at the moment fulfill or understand or do or think or say or feel what you would want him to feel or do.
By the same token, the frustration exists with yourself. And there, of course, ultimately you must bring it home to yourself – where it is most important – that you are confused about your own desires and are not quite clear about them. Not knowing them, you expect the other person to know them.
You are impatient, not because the other person does not do what you want, but because you do not even know what you really want. You do not really know what you want, because so often you are torn between this very, very strict, forbidding and rigid superimposed conscience of environment and public opinion – or what you think it is – on the one hand, and a childish, strong emotional, untamed side of your instinctual self.
Both these areas issue forth commands and demands, and you squelch them – the one because you are afraid of them, and the other because you do not want them really. You merely think you ought to want them. And this creates such a confusion that the other person is expected to know. And that frustration and confusion then manifests as irritation and hostility.
Now, by quietly observing these reactions and learning to pronounce them simply, without adornment, without apology, that will relieve you and furnish you with more clarity about yourself. You have been used to stuffing these reactions deep into yourself, and then what you feel is a strong sense of impatience and irritation and frustration and consequently hostility. So much hostility could be removed and dissolved if it is analyzed in such a way.
First of all, the hostility has to be recognized. Here you have gained a very important step and insight, for so many people do not even know that underneath either an apathy or depression or paralysis lies a strong hostility they do not dare to acknowledge. So the acknowledging of hostility is a vital step in the right direction, whereupon the next step I proposed here can then be worked for.
QUESTION: What creates constant resentment towards certain individuals only?
ANSWER: Generalizing, of course, I would say that if the a person you resent is not a parent, it is displacement from an original situation existing in childhood, where very conflicting feelings toward that parent have not been fully understood. The irritation may be resentment for feeling let down, disappointed, not being loved or paid attention to or understood as one wanted to when one was a child.
It may be, at the same time, unconscious, unjustified, impossible demands one makes of that other person in a childish way, and at the same time guilt feelings for resentments and perhaps even hate at times. At the same time, you may not know how to cope when similar exaggerated demands from that person are being made on the self.
So there is a whole cluster of confusing emotions that need to be painstakingly looked at and understood, so that the feeling can give way to a more calm, relaxed and realistic perception of the other person.
This, of course, is the manifestation or the symptom of a deep involvement one has not come to terms with, whether the reaction exists with the original parent or whether it is transferred on a substitute.
QUESTION: How does one cope with the emotion of hate?
ANSWER: Hate is only painful because wherever there is hate, there is at the same time a strong need. There is no hate if there is no need. Understanding this double facet of the emotion of hate is of tremendous importance. One can quietly reject a person or not accept a person without involved feelings that cause discomfort if there is no need, if it is merely an objective feeling of “I do not want this or that kind of person for this or that reason.”
But if there is hate, there must always be wanting something from that person. This, incidentally, as you rightly say, is connected with the last question here. Resentment may also be looked at if there is not this wanting something from that person. The moment you find what is your need, demand, or expectation of the person you hate, you are already in a greater possession of truth about yourself – of understanding – and therefore you can come to terms with the feeling within you.
And then you can come to the point of regarding and questioning yourself, “What are these demands?” The more exorbitant the demands are, the greater the hate, because the less it is possible to fulfill the demands and the more incongruous these demands are with the adult position you have assumed in your life.
These demands may be commensurate with a helpless being, a child. When an adult is helpless, he must hate and he must have demands, for he is not supposed to be helpless. You may then proceed in your work to question yourself where you feel helpless and therefore dependent that your demands be fulfilled – to investigate how could you obtain what it is you really want by your own endeavors, and what attitudes within yourself would have to change.
Let us take a very specific example. Let us take love. If you very desperately need love and demand love, and hate because you do not feel you get it in the manner you sit and wait unconsciously for that love to be given, you feel your hands are tied; you feel exactly as a child feels. “There is nothing I can do in order to be loved. It is something I cannot control.”
The only way one occasionally tries to control it is by using a forcing current – in other words, the safest measure to defeat it. What would be the realistic way? How could you really obtain the love you desire and that should be yours without trying to control by force and by domination, nor needing to be helpless and waiting helplessly and hopelessly for someone to decide to love you?
What is it you can do in order to obtain love, as opposed to what you have done? Does anyone know an answer to this question? Can you, on this level I am talking, see where there is the crucial point, where you can change from helplessness toward relaxed self-government so as to obtain what you should experience. Who knows an answer?
QUESTION: By giving love.
ANSWER: Yes. And?
QUESTION: Letting go.
ANSWER: Also, that is right. The two things that have been said are really the two facets where the person enmeshed in this conflict reacts exactly in the opposite: he, on the one hand, in order to protect himself, rejects loving, while on the other hand, he clutches and wants to dominate and control – perhaps in a very subtle way.
If this process is reversed, you are no longer helpless – if you let go, trustingly, trusting in the universe that where you feel negative and poor and defenseless, you must become fulfilled if you are whole. You can only be whole if you dare to love and commit yourself deeply.
Now, loving does not mean clutching. Loving means the very simple act of real concern with the other person, and this is so often overlooked. Need is too often taken as love. If you stop to clutch and need, but look – begin to merely look at the other person – and want to perceive the other person’s needs, the other person’s personality, then you love. It is not a great dramatic or melodramatic thing.
This you can learn when you truly seek the contact with the higher forces within and around yourself – if you so pronounce this desire, if you assert this desire, if you truly issue forth into the life substance permeating and surrounding you, “Instead of needing, I want to see, understand, perceive, have a well-functioning intuition about the need of the other person. Instead of forcing, I want to let go, trusting I will get what is mine, if not in this way, then in that way; if not by this person, then by another person.”
In other words, if the how is being let go of, while the fulfillment as such is assumed and known to be possible and compatible with divine law – when you know it is in the scheme of things that you be loved – you will not insist on when, how, where, by whom, in what manner.
You will learn to be flexible and to let go. If you know that this is good and right, and by being loved you are not selfish because you learn to be concerned with the real self of the other person, you will not feel guilty, you will not defeat it.
If this attitude is cultivated in meditation and self-observation, in the intention of getting to this point in growth, hate will dissolve. For the paralyzing need, arising out of the false idea that you are helpless and have to wait till you are favored by fate, no longer exists in such an attitude.
QA128 QUESTION: Regarding hate, what happens to the one who is hated?
ANSWER: Here I have to repeat what is the essence of all these lectures and all this teaching and what you will sooner or later always find to be so when you are deeply involved with your self-development: there is no innocent victim.
The apparent victim must have a wrong conclusion, a weakness, a distortion, an image, or something that makes him or her compatible to such a misunderstanding. For if a person is truly beyond and has resolved these problems and is free of such misunderstanding, he will not be involved with a person who must hate in such a way.
If it occasionally happens, the hate will not affect this person and his health will be the stronger and, for the moment, he will remove or dissolve the hate. Where there is such an involvement, there must be a mutuality of inter-effect, so that both can learn from it, even if only one is on the Path.
QA134 QUESTION: I realize that injustice provokes intense hatred in me. What should my attitude be when this emotion comes up?
ANSWER: In the first place, invite the feeling to come to the surface, while asserting the fact that you do not have to live it out but you rather want to observe it and look at the feeling. In that way, be in the Now, wanting to understand its deeper cause.
Then perhaps you are ready to know and look for where you are unjust, for you hate the injustice in the world exactly again to the same extent of your own injustice. So what you hate in the world you really hate in yourself.
QA135 QUESTION: In this duality that developed in The Fall [Lecture #21], how does it develop into this animal-type of expression, his animal nature, which man is capable of expressing?
ANSWER: We are always saying man is separated from God or from truth or from love, but let us even be more specific and say he is separated from the knowledge of truth, which is that all is in him. The more man is separated from that, the more destructive elements automatically develop. This can be very exactly noticed in your personal life, in your personal Pathwork.
For example, in the course of such self-discovery, a person, for the first time, realizes he has hostility. For years and years he may have ignored this. The hostility may have been covered up behind all sorts of other notions, fears, hurts, numbness, what have you. Through the truth of this work, he now realizes he is hostile. As he analyzes this hostility, he may come to the further verification that he’s hostile because he is afraid of others – afraid others may reject and hurt him.
He then realizes he’s in a vicious circle. Because he is afraid, he’s hostile, and because he’s hostile, he is confused. In reality he rejects it, and because he is rejected, he is afraid. You cannot break this vicious circle, because this vicious circle is still a duality – he versus the other person, his fear of what the other may do to him.
The vicious circle can be broken only when he comes into the unitive principle, which, in this particular case would be as follows: he’s not only afraid of others but primarily of his own hostility. When he brings this fear back to himself, even while he’s still dealing with a negative appearance, he begins to enter into the unitive principle, and with that, fear dissolves and hostility dissolves. And therefore what you choose to call animalistic dissolves.
Let us, for the sake of avoiding confusions, call the undesirable “destructive” rather than animalistic. The destructive dissolves the moment fear and hostility dissolves. Fear and hostility can only truly dissolve when the individual truly comprehends that the outer experience can be no more and no less than what is in him.
The fear of others must be in direct ratio with the fear of himself. The more man is separated from this truth, the more destructive feelings come forth. First it will be a fear, then hostility, then hate, then cruelty, and more and more separateness. But then there comes the state when he completely ignores the sameness of the other and himself; he is all alone, surrounded with a wall of isolation.
When you observe yourself, and you detect only a slight inner disturbance, do not cover it up, do not overlook it, do not explain it away. Look at it and understand that it cannot be what you want to believe it is – namely, a factor induced from the outside. It must be in you. Once you see this, you must be in peace.
QA141 QUESTION: I have a lot of negative feelings for people; I have learned in my private work that this is connected with the hate I have for my parents, which surprised me. I seem to be very reluctant to give up this hatred for my parents. I’m told it must be very deeply entrenched in me, since I have such resistance. Perhaps you might say something about that?
ANSWER: The answer can be given to this as well as to many other questions on many levels and in many different terms. You felt yourself, as a child, unloved – which, of course, is not true, but in the terms of your subjective experience as a child, this is what you felt. Therefore, you did not find an identity, a firm hold, a grip on life in love.
The only way you could get a firm grip on life – or so your innermost unconscious psyche believed – was on hate. Then you felt firm ground. You had something to stand on, as it seemed. Giving up that hate seems to leave you with nothing. Therefore you seem to be utterly annihilated, because what will take its place? What emotion? And it is even more than emotion. It is very difficult to find the right word for it, because it is much more than emotion. It is a whole climate in which you live, on which you lean – the ground on which you stand.
Now, if a child feels partly loved and partly rejected, then there is some kind of an imbalance. If the child feels predominantly loved and accepted, its firm ground will be on constructive, positive feelings. But if the child feels predominantly unloved and rejected – and this has not anything to do necessarily with the real fact; it’s sufficient that the child feels this to be so – then the only thing it knows is the climate of hate and rebellion against what happened.
And that is the way it lives. There is nothing else. And this is in a deep, deep climate of your psyche, where you feel so reluctant to give up hate. Because you fear “what else is then,” since you cannot conceive of living in love and trust and constructiveness and affirmation. You can only conceive of a life in negation. It seems as though you have to give up your life and your identity and your very existence if you give up negation and hate. That is why you must resist.
If you can make that conscious, you can come to the crossroads, the threshold in which you can say, “Now, all right, I fear there is nothing else but hate and negation, and therefore if I give this up, I have nothing else. I have to first of all envisage that I am possibly wrong in this assumption. I must question that my assumption – what is so far a hidden and unconscious assumption, an assumption I was not consciously aware of, but I now recognize that it nevertheless exists. It not only exists, it has actually dominated my life, which can be borne out by the very simple fact of looking at the manifestation of my life: the way I have lived, the way I conducted my life.
There’s a very great proof that I am dominated and governed and motivated by this inner assumption that there is nothing firm and reliable to lean on but hate and negation. And this, what I have leant on and believed so, although it was unconscious in the past, this belief I have to question now.”
This is why I say, my friends – I mean this, of course, for every one of you – you cannot find, question and let go of a belief unless you first discover that a belief exists in your unconscious that has nothing to do with your conscious belief. And it can only be found indirectly and inversely by looking at the life manifestation.
If your life manifestation is an unhappy one, you can be certain that a negative and destructive belief must exist underneath. Once you know that, you can set about to find it. In your case, you have now found this hate for your parents, which you do not want to let go. And if you do not want to let go of it – it would be quite easy for you to determine, especially with the hints I have given you here – there must be a belief in you that makes the giving up of hate appear perilous, while the holding on to hate appears desirable.
Now, once you discover that you are governed by such a belief, the willingness to question the validity of this belief must truly be undertaken. Once you let go of this belief, you can find out – and only then can you find out – that your belief was erroneous. Because, you see, this thing in you says, “I better believe in hate and live, than not believe in hate and not live.”
Such a belief, carried to its extreme, may even bring about the paradox that because life is so important, that one rather adheres to hate – that one even has to give up life because the self-destructiveness then brings this about anyhow.
So here the question comes. Make conscious now your belief underneath the unwillingness to give up hate. Bring the belief clearly out in the open – which should be not too difficult, my friend, because you have established one inroad to your innermost being that furnishes you with answers. This is why your progress is relative to the deep-rooted negative belief, and also to your goodwill in which you work.
So it should not be too difficult for you to establish the exact nature of the negative belief, and once it is out in the open, your willingness to question the validity of that belief and your willingness to give it up if it is untruthful. Then and then only do you have the opportunity of really finding that the positive is a reality.
QA175 QUESTION: My problem is in struggling with this bottomless well of anger that I feel for my parents, still, even though I don’t consciously feel it most of the time. I sort of blow off steam in various tricky ways in connection with it. I seem to get rid of a certain amount of it, but it always seems to all be back again.
ANSWER: It is perhaps of the utmost importance at this period that you recognize the many, many concealed ways in which your anger comes out. You have begun to do that. But there are many, many more, and the subtleties of this concealed anger are very great indeed.
I would suggest in your case that you, first of all, commit yourself to wanting to see the many subtleties of concealed anger and how it manifests. Become attuned to it, conscious of it, rather than what you have done all your life that you couldn’t see. It was so ingrained. It had been so much second nature that you could not confront it really. So this would be the first step before the commitment could be meaningful.
The whole displacement of your anger has to be more direct, has to be more aware. So the commitment should be in your case, first of all, to wanting to see the many indirect and subtle ways in which it permeates your being and your expressions.
Most of all, for example, you need to see the not wanting to have good feelings. On the one hand, you do, but on the other hand, you also know that there is a great resistance in that. This too is a manifestation of anger. Then each time, as you see this manifestation, as you can connect with it, you can then make a commitment – if you feel this right at the moment. At other times, you have to be more in contact with what is concealed.
QA175 QUESTION: Lately, I feel almost happy every moment of my day. I do not have so many chores, and I really enjoy and fulfill these tasks. But I cannot relax. I feel that all of a sudden I am too tense, and I just can’t stop going.
ANSWER: What has happened in your case was that through many years of hard work, you have finally removed that over-layer of passivity, stagnation and inertia which seemed like a relaxed state – but that is far from being true.
Underneath you experienced only anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, because you were not connected with the anger, the rebellion, the resentments and the hostility that is in the tension. The fact that you have removed much of this over-layer has brought forth the joyfulness.
But in that tension is still a great amount of anger that you also have to bring forth. Then more joy will come while you are being relaxed, really relaxed, and energetic.
QA240A QUESTION: My wife and I live in a new house, and while I enjoy the house very much, it seems that my pain has intensified. I’m very aware of my hate. And I’m very aware of the part of me that does not want to change. I feel tremendous stubbornness and pride in me. This part of me makes me feel undeserving of the house. {Yes} And the alternative problem is the amount of frustration this work will involve. I identify more with the idea that I deserve this but I don’t feel as though I deserve the house. [Laughter]
ANSWER: The answer is implicit in what you said. You live in this vicious circle in which you are stubborn and unyielding and retain the stiffness of the hate on this inner level because of the frustrations. And then you believe you deserve the frustrations because of that part in you.
At the same time, I also say to you that your path is progressing exactly as it should be, for until quite recently you had not even been aware of this part of you. It was so overshadowed by a false mask of weakness and passivity and submissiveness that served the purpose of making you unaware of this lower-self hatred. And now you explore it.
You see it, you recognize it, you allow yourself to see its effects on you, the creation it executes. Then it is up to your conscious decision to want to give it up. Again, realize that that conscious decision cannot and will not make it immediately disappear. But the conscious decision has to be reiterated and deepened from level to level, until all of the involuntary processes accept the conscious decision.
QA254 QUESTION: One of my sons has been in a lot of trouble for several years now. He has powerful lower-self currents that lead to great destructiveness. He wrecks cars, gets drunk frequently, fights a lot, cannot hold a job or a relationship with a woman. When he first came to live with me, I was quite neglectful of him. For the past several years, I have tried to give to him, and I feel a great frustration about my apparent inability to help him change. Can you help me to a deeper understanding of the meaning of him being my son, of what he has to teach me, and of how I can help him?
ANSWER: Apart from karmic ties that bind you together, there is a dynamic now between you. Actually, it would be more accurate to state that this dynamic is connected with these karmic ties, which have also created life circumstances in this incarnation that foster these dynamics. It is as follows: there is such a tremendous amount of rage and anger in your son – which I am sure you are well aware of – that he cannot handle. It makes him practically explode into destructive behavior that puzzles him perhaps every bit as much as it does others.
This rage, with its destructive acting out, creates a great deal of guilt. This is a vicious circle – the more rage, the greater guilt; and guilt makes a person angry and enraged. Now, you contain a similar vicious circle within you, which becomes a magnetic field for him, as his vicious circle becomes a magnetic field for you. In this way, you are now tied together – karmically and dynamically.
The only difference is that you are better able to contain this rage and deal with it – although it too has destructive results such as closing your heart. You fear that by opening your heart, your rage can no longer be contained. It is true that opening one’s heart requires a total shedding of all hidden feelings and attitudes.
So you must learn to let out the rage, to connect with it consciously and express it constructively. This is what your son has to learn. Then you can both forgive – not only each other, but anyone who has ever transgressed toward you, or him.