QA149 QUESTION: In my journey of understanding myself, at certain times I get this surge of energy when an understanding comes – a very deep energy that’s inside me that I know is a good and healthy energy. It also produces all these thoughts that flow around in my mind and in my body. I see my body being able to do things at that time that it wasn’t able to do before. But some of the thoughts are very, very confused – they channel the good thoughts in a bad kind of way and it’s very hard to separate them.
ANSWER: You need help there. This is why such a path cannot ever be taken alone, without assistance, because one is often too involved and too confused to straighten it out. What you describe is an absolutely true and realistic and not imaginary phenomenon. For truth as love brings real energy; it dissolves knots. Anyone who has experienced this will confirm it to you.
Most people – in one form or another, to one degree or another – have experienced it, particularly those who work in this way. When a person is congested and anxious, it is usually because somewhere still a truth is warded off. But when it is fully looked at and the understanding comes, the negative thought form is dissolved, and therefore the healthy energy is released.
Since the Path is a spiral movement, as all energy currents are spiral movements, and the whole cosmic stream is a spiral movement, so each individual path is a spiral movement until it finds its total realization at one point, when the spiral becomes smaller and smaller.
Therefore, each realization brings forth material that needs to be assimilated, so as to come to the next circle in the spiral movement. Inevitably one cannot do it without help. Such help will come forth if it is desired – it always does. All one has to do is reach for it, want it, know that it can exist and is necessary.
QUESTION: Do you just concentrate on the help, and not allow yourself to live your daily life?
ANSWER: Of course you live your daily life. In fact, the only real help that is valid is taking your daily life as the material. You do not withdraw from life. Quite on the contrary! It just requires a certain amount of attention.
Think how many thoughts are wasted in idle, unproductive ruminations. If this is only utilized to some extent to concentrate in this Pathwork, then it will certainly not take you out of life, but make you better equipped to deal with life.
QA174 QUESTION: I have been feeling really marvelous for the past couple of weeks – full of joy and assertiveness, and positive – as a result of work I’ve been doing on myself and in some groups I’ve been in for eleven weeks. Then this week, I got involved in a combination of personal and business relationship the first part of the week. I’ve been getting more and more depressed about it. I’ve tried to confront the man, to keep my head above water. Finally today, I thought I could end it and win without confronting him, and he managed to still retain control of me and keep me on the hooked side. I felt depressed and shattered afterwards.
On top of that, a couple of hours later I was visited, one after the other, by two friends from AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] and found out from the second one that the first one, who seems to be getting more mentally ill by the minute, has been spreading personal details about my life around in AA, particularly to my ex-fiancée, whom I don’t want to know any of these things. I feel paranoid again and reduced back in my original state. I feel like I don’t trust people and I’m ashamed, and I feel exposed. I don’t understand how this could have happened, and I don’t want to feel terrified like this. I’ve been fighting with people all my life to prevent them hurting me. What’s happening and what can I do about it?
ANSWER: Well, I would say, first of all, that the good feeling that you experienced recently was primarily a result of an inner honesty and an inner intention to stand on your own two feet. But there’s, on the other hand, a tendency in you that is very unrealistic. You do not perceive the depth of the problem – there’s a certain superficiality there – which is that you do not go deep enough into the things.
The problem that you have to resolve requires a great deal more attention than you can give under the circumstances. You know, one cannot resolve a deep inner problem of this sort just like that. It takes a lot of hard work.
It takes a lot of perseverance. It takes a lot of sticking to facing yourself, to going gradually. And as good as group work is, without personal, individualized work, it is impossible to get everything you need. You need that attention.
I cannot give you an answer why this particular thing happened. All these things you described are manifestations of a problem you have. And if I could speak for two hours to you, that would not resolve the problem. You have to do it, and you can only do it by giving it very personal attention, which at the moment, is perhaps even more important for you – very personal attention – on a one-other-person basis. Because otherwise you cannot understand a lot.
You cannot understand your own misconceptions. You cannot confront and understand the fears and the emotions that are in you that make you blocked. You cannot understand why you choose people, constantly, in a pattern, with whom you have to experience such things – why your unconscious does not turn toward people with whom more rewarding relationships are possible. There is a pattern in this.
QA175 QUESTION: I have a question for my daughter who is having a terrible battle and struggle. On the one hand, she desires fulfillment and pleasure, yet immediately she sees herself destroying it. She’s in frantic fear of it happening and she’s stuck right there. Could you give her a little shove?
ANSWER: Put her attention to the fact that just as she is consciously afraid of destroying her own pleasure, she is even more afraid, on a deeper level, of really tackling the problem.
Much as she wants to – up to a degree – outwardly, the barrier of inhibition, the barrier of shame, the barrier of her idealized self-image, the barrier of everything that she has to appear, is very strong. To really make herself naked toward herself and others is extremely difficult for her.
Therefore, much as she has gained contact within herself – to the universal part – this contact is not operative on the problem that is most sorely in need of being tackled. There’s only one way – the total commitment to resolving this problem, regardless of how difficult it may seem.
She must reconcile herself to the fact that she either does this or she will not resolve this problem in this life. She has to live in other ways and find some kind of life other than that.
QUESTION: Well, she works hard at it.
ANSWER: Yes, but you see, her insistence on working on it by herself is exactly the problem. Not only can it not be done – no one can do it, regardless of how strongly the contact may be established where the personality is already free – but also it is exactly the same barrier of shame that keeps her from wanting to open up toward another person – of truly wanting it.
The pride and the necessity to maintain her image is too strong. It is exactly the same problem that she faces in the problem she wants to resolve itself. In other words, what prevents her from fulfilling herself is exactly the same nucleus of emotions and reactions that prevents her from seeking help where she cannot. Really, she cannot possibly do it by herself.
The only way that she could do it is total commitment to the truth in herself, to letting go of the barriers, to denuding herself, no matter how frightening this may appear at the moment. But this fright is always illusory. Once it is done, it feels very differently.
This total commitment, if she can really mean “no matter what, wherever it is most difficult, this is what I need; wherever the pain is greatest, this is where I am most vulnerable; wherever the fear is greatest, this is where I am most vulnerable.” If she can say this to herself, she can find fulfillment – but not by herself.
QA190 QUESTION: I want to ask about my difficulties in the last several months. I’ve been working through them and I thought I made progress, but still I ended up in a sort of neurotically withdrawn state. And I’d like you to comment on it.
ANSWER: I would say that under the particular difficulties and circumstances of your life where you have to do so much of this work completely on your own, it is not surprising that you could not go beyond a certain point at this time. But I will say that with a little help, once again, while you are here, it will be possible for you to make further progress.
What I say here specifically to you is: you have made progress to a certain point where you could make mental recognitions, and the feeling recognitions have just about begun. Then a few months ago, you were thrown back to being all on your own again. And you could not pursue this without help.
Then it became too frightening for you to go on with exploring and feeling and acknowledging and expressing the deeper feelings that are bottled up within you. And this is why you are stuck at the moment.
Perhaps if you can try to feel this, even feel the fear and acknowledge this fear, then you will be able to counteract it by the meaningful decision of your inner and outer being that will say, “I will not give into the fear; the fear is unreal. I will proceed and meditate and request the necessary guidance so that I can go on and on exploring the feelings that are responsible for making myself withdraw from life,” for that is a pattern that has always existed.
Therefore, you re-experience it, just when you’re about to begin to open up to the feeling world. It is almost inevitable, but would you not have been by yourself, would you have had the proper Helper with you or would you be with one, then that could have been recognized, and you could have avoided this stalemate for a while.
And yet, at the same time, such a stalemate can also become, in itself, the tool you need. And that can even become a greater motor force now that you are again at this threshold – and in a more determined and meaningful way, go into this level that you had avoided to explore and that remains to be explored.
QA207 QUESTION: There are many things that I want, that I know that I want, and I want very much to be part of the group.
ANSWER: You can be. You are.
QUESTION: But I keep myself away from my group.
ANSWER: Do you know why?
QUESTION: I don’t think it’s fear. Maybe it’s fear.
ANSWER: No, it is not really fear. It is your expectation of the group and, indirectly, the fear that these expectations might be disappointed. In one sense, on one level, there is the mixing. On one hand, your wanting to be in this group comes from a very deep and real and spiritual core of your being. And it’s following a guidance where you will indeed get the help that you need.
But on the other hand, there is another part of you who wants the help in a childish and distorted way, who wants the group to be what the parents are not and that the group cannot fulfill. Something in you knows that and is therefore afraid of the disillusionment. Now, the group can give you help; the group can give you love; the group can give you friendship and companionship, but the group cannot give you what you want on that childish level.
What you want from it is self-esteem and a feeling of worthiness. That, the group cannot give you. But the group can help you attain it for yourself. And since you feel very unworthy and very unlovable, you feel proportionately eager and impatient to get this immediately from the group, so as not to feel the pain of your self-rejection and self-doubt.
Take into consideration, my dear child, that you are so much more than meets the eye. You are a divine expression, a divine manifestation. Only a minute part of who you are manifests as an ego consciousness, and that ego consciousness is limited, much more limited than you need be. But it, in excess, professes attributes and attitudes and possibilities to come to realize more of who you really are.
Give yourself time to find that which must be loved and respected, no matter how much there are other things there that you are ashamed of – partially rightly and partially wrongly. Trust the group to expose what you are ashamed of. That in itself will give you the self-esteem that you think the group has to give you.
You are also a very fortunate human being for finding such a path in such young years where life is still in front of you. Of course, when I say fortunate, I do not mean that in the sense of chance or luck, for nothing happens like that.
QA233 QUESTION: This past year, I found myself changing in group, and I experienced myself as a coward, defensive, judgmental, and at times just cut off. I have made a commitment this year to go into those feelings, but I find I have great difficulty doing this. I wonder whether you can help me focus on how I can begin to unravel or unveil this wall?
ANSWER: It is perhaps a little bit similar to what I said to some of the friends here before. It is almost as though you take the last stronghold not to move. That particular reaction you describe is a voluntary intentional thing you do in order to stop going where you are ready to go.
You do not wish to trust going where you are ready to go. The next step for you would be to connect with that, and how deliberately you close yourself up and make yourself negative in order to prevent this.