QA162 QUESTION: How can one learn to cope with various hatreds and feelings of aggressiveness?

ANSWER: Yes. The best way is to, number one, clearly recognize it without finding justification or accusations, without building cases, without rationalization. Then, when you are capable of taking full responsibility for the emotion upon yourself, as I advise again and again, there should be a way in which you can physically express this, through some physical motion.

This is the most effective way of converting a negatively turned energy into positive energy. Otherwise it will remain a cerebral recognition that will not leave the physical system. It is a tremendous and important step to be able to say, “Yes, I hate; I have hostility; I have murderous rage in me,” as opposed to the former attitude when this was completely unconscious, when one has tried to explain it away by certain destructive reactions, and where the person himself is not even aware of in what ways it comes out.

But from there on it is also necessary and very advisable to seek a way to give physical expression, through physical movement, to these emotions. Then allow the feeling – through making room in oneself – to become positive. Ask yourself, “Am I willing to have good feelings? Do I want this very same hatred – after it has found its expression – to turn into good feelings?” You have to give yourself the honest answer.

You might find that you may fear the good feeling and may find safety in the negative feeling which then was found unsafe for other reasons and was then covered up. When it comes to these steps, you may feel, “I’d rather hate than love.”

If that is the case, you have to admit this to yourself. Then investigate what the misconceptions are in regard to love, for indeed many possibilities exist. Many misconceptions exist in the human heart, why man fears to love and therefore would rather hate. This hate then has to also be kept secret.

QA173 QUESTION: When I got up this morning I wasn’t feeling very well. Today, I sort of smashed up my car, and there’s a lot of anger and stagnation in me too, I think. It’s as if the anger isn’t getting out. What do you think of this?

ANSWER: I say the same thing to you as I said to the other person. Learn to express your anger, learn to not fear it, learn to cope with it without being violent and destructive, that this is possible to do. You will learn – if you go on that way – in your private and group sessions, to express openly your anger. Go from one person to the other and say how angry you are. Begin it! Do it! Let it out! Accept it!

As you can do that, you will find tremendous release, because this is what is truly stuck in you now. You will feel so much better. It is a great progress, indeed, that after such a short time on this Path, you already come across this awareness.

The fear you have of your own anger and of not being able to handle it – creates a stagnation that manifests in two distinct ways – on a physical and on a mental plane. The physical is the accumulation of fat, and the mental is a passivity. The metabolism is not functioning as it should, physically and mentally.

As this anger is coped with and accepted and not feared any longer, something vitally will change in your whole system – physical, mental and emotional. I can promise you that. A lot of inertia will have been overcome; a lot of passivity will no longer paralyze you.

QA185 QUESTION: In the exercises we do in the group to get rid of a certain amount of anger, some say it is artificial, thoroughly artificial. The anger is directed solely to this particular person and not to anybody in the group or towards the coach. Others say that after they have let go of their anger in group, that they won’t sleep all night because they are too upset. And yet others say when they have really made the connections with their anger from their childhood hurts, that their anger lessens more and more after doing the exercises. Now, this last one is the one which is seemingly right. Can you comment on this?

ANSWER: Of course, it exists that people pretend anger when they do not really feel angry, because this is part of what is expected of them. In such a case, it will be an empty gesture; and I think it is the groups themselves as well as the group leaders who might focus their inner intuitiveness in their observation, and if they are not clear about it, ask the person, “Did you really feel it?” If it is really genuinely felt, there will be an inner experience.

As to the next part of your question – why people do not sleep when they express their anger – this is almost entirely, without exception, as a result of not accepting their angriness. The idealized self-image is still so strong that it demands they not be angry. And if anger comes out, this is a terrible jolt to their illusions about themselves.

This is a gauge that they cannot let go of their self-illusions – and therefore they are not reconciled. In such cases, letting out the anger will be very upsetting even. Now, still the other alternative is an anger that never, never seems to stop. That too may exist.

And that is when the underlying causes for anger – the attitudes that create the anger – are not yet gotten to, or if they are gotten to and are aware, that the person is unwilling to give up destructive behavior. The constantly regenerated anger is the one we are concerned with, not the original anger in childhood. The original anger in childhood that was once repressed creates a pattern in which the individual constantly regenerates anger, which is then because of the conflict with the outer environment held back, denied, not admitted to the self as well as to others. But on the level where the anger is, it is a constantly regenerating process.

The destructiveness itself must be uncovered. So to let out anger by itself is not the end all. It is merely one phase of the Path, which permits the person to accept himself as he is, as an angry human being among many other aspects and emotions and attitudes he harbors.

He has to learn to shed his illusions about himself and to accept his negative aspects, his childish behavior, his deliberate destructiveness. Once he can accept it and let out this energy, he must go on from there and find what attitude regenerates it constantly.

QUESTION: Isn’t it childhood anger, though, that regenerates this?

ANSWER: Originally, but as I said, the childhood situation creates an attitude and inner conclusions and behavior patterns – emotional and thinking and acting behavior patterns – that must constantly recreate frustration, and therefore rage and anger. And it is that which must be explored.

But it is no good to explore it unless the person is first capable of meeting, accepting and expressing his anger in a meaningful, not destructive way – not acting it out but taking responsibility for the murderous rage that sits in all human beings – and really do this. Then he can come to insight about what it is that he’s doing constantly – not in the past, right now.

QA185 QUESTION: In group, when I find a connection to my anger, it can be a present connection or a past one. I’m beginning to find that as I start to act out the anger in group, I lose the connection and the feeling of anger. I’m suddenly cut off from it. I’m defended and don’t feel anything. In a few seconds or minutes, sometimes the original connection comes back and I can continue to act out the anger, but sometimes other connections, maybe two or three, come to my mind and intercept the original connection. Now, my first question is: Why am I suddenly cut off from my feelings with this fear? And the second question is: Should I go along with the new connections?

ANSWER: Yes. Yes. Go along with the new connections. Of course, you are often cut off because of fear and the restrictive admonitions of society that demands that you never be an angry person, which is a totally unrealistic demand. So this is very deeply ingrained, regardless of what you accept as an intellectual premise. Emotionally you are constricted in that. This is one reason why the connection cuts off.

Regarding the second part of your question, emotions are not static objects. They are constantly changing, fluctuating movements of life. So the anger is not just anger. It is many other things. It is not that you have other emotions and then there is anger – it is one and the same.

That anger emotion, just because you got in touch with it perhaps for but a minute, comes back to another feeling – maybe sadness, maybe hopelessness, maybe guilt, maybe fear, maybe sexual longings. All of this should be made room for. You do not have to stay rigidly on the one emotion because that is the program now.

You should give yourself full leeway to whatever comes and give it expression. As you learn to do this more and more, you will free yourself and the constricting voice in you that says, “You must not feel this and you must not feel that. And if I feel this, then that is sad and I do not want that. And I do not want to recognize my self-hate – this is another feeling that is unpleasant. But that particular kind of feeling, I would reject it for other people.”

So all this so-called “conscience” that has these restrictions will wear off, and you will begin to accept yourself as you are, even if these feelings are first not so pleasant. You will become the living, vibrant human being you are meant to be that can fully experience, because you will see that only as you fully go into the painful feelings will you become fully able to go into the pleasurable feelings – into love and enjoyment, into sexual ecstasy.

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