QA162 QUESTION: Listening to you answering these questions, I see myself as being a perfect example of negative feelings and being encrusted in laziness all the time. Once in a while I get this overflow of feelings, and I had one of those last time I was here. Unfortunately, these things are too much overflowing, and this is where I lose all my energy and then go back to the encrustment again. {Yes} I don’t know what it is.

ANSWER: Well, I can explain this. You see, usually you keep the energies frozen into immobility because there is too much fear of the good feelings as well as of the bad feelings. You have to systematically release these energy blocks and let the feeling flow in you.

If it’s frozen and petrified, then the time will come when the life force will hit out, as it were, and it will suddenly come out like an explosion, and in a completely over-exaggerated and unchanneled way.

It will then not be at all integrated with your reason, with the inner intuition, with the faculties of your higher self that guides you properly. It just wildly comes out. Then, of course, it is not satisfactory.

It creates further disappointment, which only threatens and convinces you more, and you shrink back even more into the petrification of the feeling as a safeguard. As long as at least it comes out occasionally, although it is a reaction to the frozen state, it is still better that it still comes out, because otherwise your feelings would atrophy.

So I advise very seriously engaging in very systematic work on these emotions and these energy blocks, and to get in touch with these emotions and to express them in physical movement.

QUESTION: Can you give me a point as to the origin of all this?

ANSWER: Fear, as it always must be. Fear that your good feelings would not be accepted. There’s a tremendous fear in you that good feelings weaken you. You have a misconception that bad feelings strengthen and good feelings weaken.

Then there is this sense that if you’re weak, then you are not a man. It is this kind of distortion that exists in you. The good feeling would therefore seem, according to this misconception, to diminish your masculinity, which, of course, is completely wrong. It is absolutely the opposite.

But as you get in touch with these irrational emotions, then you will see and understand the misconceptions and what they are. I would very strongly advise you, since you are so eager to improve this, to heed these inhibitions and these contractions in you – that you avail yourself of all the opportunities that can help you to do so.

For instance, one way to do so would be by joining a small group. Yet the fear in you is so strong that you avoid this. It is precisely because of this reaction that a group would help you, indeed, much more than you realize.

It is always exactly what one resists most that is the greatest and most direct key to breaking the lock. That you will find very helpful. And also, it would help to do more physical work in connection with the exploration in the psychological work you are doing. This is my advice.

QA163 QUESTION: My question has to do, once more, with my apathy and laziness. I am getting impatient about it, and I’ve reached the point where I can’t even think of making any plan to get out of it, because I’m sure that I’m not going to follow my plan. I’m in a very bad situation where I don’t really know what to do. I’d like to get a personal answer.

ANSWER: Yes. The answer will be twofold. In the first place, I would like you to understand that here is, once again, one of those imbalances I have discussed in other matters.

It is that the laziness, the apathy, is a distortion of the recommendable and so necessary attitude of letting oneself be lived, as it were, from within – of not being overactive with the little mind and the outer will, but giving one’s self to the stream of life, as it comes from within.

But this is a distortion. And so is your impatience a distortion of meaningful activity and taking initiative into your hands, and realizing that you have all the power you need, all the possibilities of expansion you need, and therefore the activity necessary. Now, the understanding of this imbalance in itself will not suffice, but it will give you some clearer understanding. For whenever one is in such conflict as you just described, one imbalance increases the other.

In other words, the more the apathy grows, the more frantic does a wrong kind of activity become. And the more the wrong kind of activity of impatience and pushing oneself grows, the more exhausted the energies become, and therefore the greater the laziness will be.

Now, the second part of my answer is that there is, of course, something in you that prevents you from really wanting to move into life, to expand toward life. There is a very definite fear in you connected with that. This fear must be made conscious for you to be able to overcome its power that keeps you chained.

I can give you a few hints as to this fear, and this may, at the moment, even somewhat give you an echo and may be therefore helpful to elicit a certain amount of stamina in you. But it is not sufficient. This can and must only be taken as an incentive for you to really connect with this fear.

One can put it in several ways – perhaps I will put it in the following way. Fear of expansion seems like danger. It seems like losing yourself in something greater than you are, which of course, in a way, is true. Only there is no danger attached to it.

Whenever man realizes his true being and he finds himself in this state of what we call here self-realization – the realization of his true self – it feels as though he is all the world and all the world is him, and life carries him from within. Now, this, of course, is a state much, much further still than you can possibly realize at this moment.

But it is as though something in you blocks the way – not only in you, but I would say, in one way or another, in all human beings – toward this release from the prison of the narrow confines of the ego.

If you can sense this fear and listen into yourself and see in what ways it comes out, you will see there are several areas in which you might sense it already now – this letting yourself float and be and be lived by a power within you, by surrendering yourself to something that comes from deep within you – that you block.

It is almost as though you say, “It is too good to trust. Then I lose my selfhood.” And, of course, it is not so, for the selfhood is not to be found in the little self. The selfhood is to be found in that larger self that lives you from within. Now, does that answer mean anything to you?

QUESTION: It did bring up something. I felt for a moment that I was losing myself in feelings. And then I connected with something else – I can’t remember now. But it makes sense.

ANSWER: Well, I would just say one last word about this. Systematic approach to this will perhaps now become easier. You can systematically learn, step by step, to let go, to trust something within you, and to perhaps learn that even if first things come out of you that seem everything but trustworthy – and they must come out, inevitably so – that this too does not hold a power over you, if you follow this Path in a systematic way, which I do not have to enumerate here.

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