QA240A GUIDE COMMENT: A specific message and key I would like to give you today is that any kind of pain you experience – whether this be pain on a physical, emotional or spiritual level, the pain of unfulfillment, the pain of vague longings, the pain of distinct longings that you do know you have and that are not being fulfilled, the pain of any obstructions imaginable – the pain is simultaneously cause, effect and medicine.

Let us see how this works. Take a simple example of a physical pain you have. If this physical pain is truly not fought against in a spirit of rebellion and anger, but is explored and accepted and fully, fully savored and experienced, you will see that not only does the pain dissolve, but before it can do so, you recognize what has created that pain. It is your attitude to that pain that creates it and not the other way around as you are used to thinking.

An attitude of anger and fear and rebellion and resistance is not created by the pain. But that attitude exists within you as a given that can come out any time when it seems appropriate, when something happens, which is exactly what creates the pain. So the pain, you see right here, is not only an effect of this attitude, but it is also the cause of it.

The attitude that exists unpurified, waiting in reserve, as it were, creates the pain. So it is cause and effect. As you use the pain in order to examine your attitude, in order to recognize it, it becomes the medicine. And as you thus dissolve the attitude in question, the effect will disappear along with the cause.

This is a very important key that you might find extremely useful. Perhaps you can, right at this present time, take any condition in your life – physical, emotional or whatever – and look at what is painful about it. Experience the pain of it. Experience the lack, the unfulfillment, or whatever it may be that is painful. And then question yourself: What is really your attitude to it?

In a very subtle way, you will find that underneath you may either gloss over it, disregard it, act as though it did not exist – which can sometimes be maintained for quite a while – until, as a result of the denial, the whole block of cause, effect and medicine – potentially medicine – grows and grows so that it can no longer be overlooked.

However, the connections become harder to make as you continue to deny the existence of a problem, of a painful condition in your life. The work becomes harder and at times this is delayed for incarnation after incarnation. But once, well launched on a path such as this, the time comes when you begin to see connections. You begin to gain awareness of your own attitudes, subtle as they may be.

So underneath the denial and the looking away and the repression, you often find angry temper tantrums against life because of this or that being amiss. It is that attitude that is the creator of the painful condition. In recognizing and changing and healing this attitude, you simultaneously heal the painful condition – not only this once, but perhaps for all time to come, provided this condition is no longer existing in you.

Part of the medicine, part of the lesson for you to learn, is that you cannot immediately eliminate it, even after recognition. For that is the period that is so necessary: for you to recognize, again and again, this new attitude. You have to practice it; you have to rediscover it in you; you have to search for it; you have to recognize when you lose it. And give up the angry rebellion against something you have created.

Oftentimes you will first recognize only this angry, rebellious attitude and not at all the thing itself. You may not even be aware there is a specific thing missing or painful. Nor can you be aware, then, of what is needed to eliminate it. But you can perhaps, gradually, through this work, distinctly feel and be conscious of an angry rebellion, you do not know against what.

Then perhaps you can feel against what. As you do so – and you do not even perhaps then know what specifically has created that condition – and as you go on, learning the patience, learning the trust, dissolving the stiff resistance against the painful condition, but sinking into it in a spirit of acceptance, you will then see, that is exactly the attitude you had to learn in an overall way for your whole personality.

When I speak of acceptance, we have to be very careful, for every divine attitude of beauty, truth, love and reality can be misunderstood and distorted. So acceptance can often be confused with a resignation and a giving up in despair. Please, my friends, do not confuse this.

Perhaps the best way to explain acceptance would be in a context with this key I gave you here, with this condition: “Yes, here I am in pain. I do not yet even know what the pain is all about or how I may have created it. But I fully accept it in trust and let myself experience it.” And then you feel the involuntary battle against experiencing it.

As you see yourself involuntarily battling against it, little by little you will maybe succeed for an instant to give up the battle. It is first a completely involuntary process. As you observe, these involuntary processes will eventually respond to this new attitude, but not immediately. There your faith and acceptance become so necessary.

I have often said the gap between cause and effect – when you institute a positive vibratory reality – cannot come immediately. It is exactly in that gap that you have so much to learn. It is exactly there where your lesson and your medicine is – even when you do not comprehend the nature of the pain, how you have caused it – that you accept it in faith; that you observe the involuntary responses not doing so.

Little by little your involuntary responses will comply with your overall consciousness and will then be open for the truth of the whole condition. It will all come together for you, so that this key will no longer be a theory. You will see the painful condition is cause, effect, and medicine or lesson. And when this all falls together, the pain truly dissolves.

Until such time, a great deal of your lesson consists in exactly this very finely calibrated balance of learning faith, of learning patience, of focusing your observation, of acceptance in a positive faith. This is neither the demand for immediate change so that the pain should disappear at once, nor a negative resignation and despair that you will always be in that condition.

In other words, acceptance and positive visualization are not mutually exclusive. In your human consciousness, these are often exclusives. Even spiritual teachings are based on either the one or the other. They are very extreme representatives of both these attitudes.

There’s the spiritual orientation that prescribes the acceptance of all pain and difficulty almost as an unavoidable prerequisite for spirituality, asceticism, the denial of joy, the denial of pleasure. And you have the other extreme spiritual orientation that completely concentrates only on the positive demonstrations, on visualization of the total denial of the need for acceptance.

Now, this can never lead to the unification and true connection on a deep level of consciousness where you comprehend your own creation. Neither one of these theories does. But both of these attitudes – acceptance and positive visualization – are necessary and need to be combined and can be combined and must be combined. And that is what I’m talking about.

QA241 QUESTION: In a recent lecture, you said that pain is cause, effect and medicine. I’d like your help in clarifying a persistent pain that begins in my left ear, travels down the left side of my neck into my left shoulder and then it shoots over to my lower right back.

ANSWER: Do you wish to know the emotional origin, or what is it exactly you would like to know?

QUESTION: Yes. I think I’m making a connection that I’m opening my receptive center on the left, and that’s why I’m feeling the pain. I’m not sure that that’s true.

ANSWER: The way I would like to answer you here, that I think would be most meaningful for you at this point, is that as you open up and become more aware, you also become more aware of the tensions and the pains that are already embedded in you, and that have existed before but that you have often numbed yourself too much to feel.

There is a whole process going on in the opening up. You cannot directly pinpoint that this pain in the ear is from this and the other part from that. It cannot be discussed on those terms. But it is an ongoing movement of energetic flows that find still obstructions that are partly awakening and conscious and experienced.

Other parts of your energetic system still block them so that they cannot come completely through. It may then change. It may go at different periods and phases into different parts of you. But the left side is certainly the emotional side that you have most neglected, which does not mean that it does not also affect the consciousness, as does the right side affect the intellect and the will and the mind.

For nothing that is distorted does not eventually affect everything else. Or nothing that is neglected or negated does not also affect other parts. So it is really an alive process now if you can use what I said in this lecture [Lecture #241 Dynamics of Movement and Resistance to Its Nature] to experience it fully. Experience your resistance to it, and as you become aware of the resistance, you will see that the pain is the resistance. And then it will become medicine.

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