70 QUESTION: In your answer to my question after the last lecture, about the right way toward the love we all desire, you described the work process of realizing, observing and finally abandoning the wrong way, in order to clear the path for the right way. You ended with the sentence: “Then you are on the road upward.” I would now like to ask you to describe that road upward, the right way, the healthy approach that should follow the work of letting go of the compulsive wrong way.

ANSWER: As I said, the first step is to constantly recognize the emotions substituted for the desire to receive love. These emotions will not disappear the moment you first detect them. It is, therefore, part of the road upward to observe them as they live in you, and then to deal with them by analyzing their significance.

We also discussed that inner, subtle, and very devious current with which you try to force others to love you – mostly by trying to make an impression on them, and by proving yourself in one way or another. Once you become fully aware of them, you will be able to translate such feelings into clear-cut language.

You will then see how far-reaching their significance is. For instance, you will recognize that due to the very existence of this forcing current, you cannot help being subjective. You respond favorably to those who agree with you, who appreciate, admire or love you. In those who please you, you see the good in disproportionately stronger light than their shortcomings. You may be aware of their faults but, emotionally, you minimize them.

On the other hand, when someone displeases, hurts or disappoints you – or you believe so – you will develop resentment and contempt toward that person. What you see may be correct. Nevertheless, you put things out of proportion when you overemphasize the good or the bad, according to the person’s reaction to you. That is a distortion.

At first you are unaware that you are distorting. You are even less aware why. As you become aware of these emotions and their deeper significance, you weaken their impact. In this way you keep moving upward toward the solution of the problem. You will increasingly realize how subjective your emotions are, no matter how much you may pride yourself on your objectivity in other and outer areas of your life.

The time will have to come when you not only recognize these reactions, but also see how they block you from receiving that which you yearn for. By recognizing your hidden subjectivity, you automatically approach objectivity – and thereby truth and reality. You may not be able to feel differently as yet, but the remaining wrong reactions will already have a different effect on you and on others, for now you have become your own observer.

With continued practice, you will fully understand that when you are subjective, you do not know the meaning of love. You do not respect the other person for his or her own sake. Oh, you know all the right answers and theories; you know all the truth teachings. You may even be convinced that you follow these universal truths – and may very well be doing so. But it is necessary to start searching in areas deeply hidden within that you may not yet have reached.

Let us examine in depth the significance of the inner universal process I have just described. You long to be loved, while you are unable to give love – certainly not to the degree you desire to get it for yourself. Your love will function only if people do right by you, at best. This means that you request others to give you something that you are inwardly unwilling to give them. You request unconditional love. You expect to be so well understood that people love you in spite of your shortcomings and various weaknesses.

You do not realize that with these very weaknesses you inadvertently hurt and disappoint them just as often as others inadvertently hurt and disappoint you due to their weakness. You want to be understood and loved in spite of your shortcomings, but you are not willing to do the same when other people’s weaknesses affect you negatively.

This request – though unspoken and unconscious – is unfair; it amounts to pride. For you claim an extra special position for yourself that you are not willing to concede to others. This attitude is highly subjective and unrealistic, and affects others more strongly than you can possibly realize. It is easy to see that the effect of such an attitude will not be in your favor.

Thus, it is necessary that you learn to love, for only then will your attitude affect others in a way that will result in their loving you.

In learning how to love, the first step is to eliminate your personal subjectivity. Love is objectivity, among many other things. Subjectivity is self-centered, and love and self-centeredness cannot exist side by side. This is an important aspect of love. You all know, love cannot be forced, but love will grow organically as you remove the obstacles. Your inherent self-concern and subjectivity is one of the greatest blocks to giving and receiving love, especially so because it is submerged.

No human being is ever completely capable of real love and real objectivity. But there are degrees. To the degree you observe your lack of objectivity, you approach objectivity and, thereby, the capacity to love. Your capacity to love, in turn, increases steadily as your willingness to love increases.

The willingness to love will increase proportionately as you no longer dread the abyss of not being loved in return – or as much as you desire it, or as fast as you would have it. Recognize your fright of every little hurt and disappointment. As you focus your inner view in that direction, you will surely come to see the terror as total illusion, as overgrown imagination. Because of this, you are unwilling to love. Therefore, your capacity to love is constantly diminished and paralyzed.

The capacity to have an objective and detached view of the person who you think has slighted you, cannot possibly be reconciled with the current misconception that the masochistic tendency to allow the unhealthy instincts of others to hurt you is proof of your real love. But in order to have an objective and detached view, you have to be rid of the illusion that every slight, hurt or disappointment is a tragedy to guard against.

The solution of this problem demands therefore that you recognize 1) your substitute emotions which find gratification through the subtle current of forcing others to love you, 2) your subjective outlook, hidden in your emotional reactions, that makes you unable to give love, 3) your world of illusion wherein you are in terror of being rejected, and 4) the effect of all this on your personality and on your surroundings.

Full recognition of these elements takes time, perseverance, and very effective willpower to face anything that is within yourself, without reservation. As you experience the truth of these words, alive in you to a much stronger degree than you can possibly realize now, you are bound gradually to change these elements and attitudes, slowly but surely.

You will realize that you can never receive the exclusive, unreasonable, one-sided love that the child in you requests. But as you steadily convince yourself that not receiving it is no abyss, you will be able to give up the request. Hence, you will be without terror. Being without the terror of being slighted or rejected, you will become willing to love others, often by quietly withdrawing and simply respecting them as human beings, even though they do not please you.

Since there is no terror, there is no need to be unwilling to give love. With this willingness, your capacity to love will increase. You will show discrimination in the kind of love to give others, and you will be undisturbed also in the realization that not all people love you to the degree and in the way the child in you would demand. When some people do not love you, or even disapprove of you, it will no longer be a tragedy – which is how your emotions register such incidents at present.

As you thus grow and mature, not being loved – or being disapproved of – will not upset you. And as it does not upset you, it will not bring out the worst in you. You will take life’s disappointments with a certain equanimity. You will become capable in a real way, deep down in your emotions, not superficially or by pretense, of having sympathy and an objective, undistorted view of those who anger you.

In this process, you will also learn to evaluate the manifestation of your love-capacity. The two extremes are always close by. You either withdraw completely from allowing yourself to love to your utmost capability, or you give your love full force to those who may still be afraid of it – not because they reject you, but because this same process goes on in them also.

When they are reluctant to reciprocate, you use the forcing current. In doing so, you refuse to see the truth. And when their reluctance becomes evident, you take it personally. You do not understand it and turn against the person in question. Living in the illusion that the other rejects you and that this is a tragedy, you then swing to the other extreme of locking your heart in fear of giving love because of the hurt that may result.

In the process of growth all this will change, not only because of the reasons stated, but also because you will see, observe and discriminate. For those who are unafraid of loving and receiving love in a mature fashion, you will have a store of love in reserve. From those who are reluctant to love because they are still living in this illusory world, you will quietly withdraw, without losing your basic respect for the other as a child of God.

You will not distort his or her negative side due to your own hurts and resentments. In its own fashion, this kind of love is as good and valuable as the former kind. The child in you knows only one kind, and if this one kind is, or seems, impossible, you lock your heart altogether. The mature person will distinguish between many kinds of love, because he or she is liberated from the abyss of illusion that not being loved spells terror.

Broadly speaking, this is the way upward. Of course, there are many details which I cannot go into now. They could only be discussed personally, as they apply to the individual.

89 QUESTION: [Child] How can you be sure that I mean it when I say I love a person?

ANSWER: My little son, I have this to say. The human being is not cut from one piece. Very many contradictory emotions are possible. You may love a particular person and then, perhaps in the next moment, you may feel hatred or resentment. The fact that you do does not make it untrue that you also love that person. It is not true that if you occasionally feel hate, you never love, or that you do not feel real love in other moments. Both are possible.

You see, it is very important for people to understand why they occasionally feel hate, while also loving. The reason for such occasional hate is always a hurt. If you are hurt, know it. Know why. It will not harm you. Because the next step in your development will be that you realize that your own lack of understanding causes the hurt and therefore the hatred. Then the next step will be, as you grow still more mature, that you will gain the understanding, and therefore you will no longer be hurt and will not hate.

If, for the moment, you merely understand that your hate does not annul your love, you will not feel guilty. You will know that you are hurt and why, and therefore you will be able to say to yourself, “I love and I mean it, but I also hate because I feel hurt.”

As you grow in the way of this Path, little by little the negative emotions will disappear. But while they are still present, you must forgive yourself. You can easily do so when you realize that you still love even while you hate, and that you hate only because you are hurt. You need not expect of yourself that you always love and understand. No one can do that. But it can gradually come, very gradually. Hurt will grow less and therefore love will grow more.

QUESTION: [Another person] In your answer to this young man, and from what you said previously, it would seem that the emotions are a tremendous power factor, raging violently unless channeled. They use the word sublimation in modern psychology. Does it not seem that sublimation is a way of channeling these energies along paths that will not be destructive and then, as a result, we would stop reacting emotionally to circumstances and situations around us, sublimating them into the creative channels which you mentioned earlier?

ANSWER: Yes, of course this is true. But sublimation is very often a dangerous process because it is misunderstood, misused, and leads to and often actually means repression. The necessity of channeling powerful destructive emotions exists, of course. But, unfortunately, mostly the wrong means are used.

As I explained today, the means are those of repression, and therefore obstruction of growth occurs. That you call it sublimation because certain energies are constructively used does not matter. It is still growth-inhibiting if destructive energies are not dissolved, but rather rechanneled, so that they work constructively. This happens, for instance, if a creative and artistic person, whose ability is already freed to a degree, uses repressed, unresolved emotional energies for a constructive purpose.

It is true that this constitutes a lesser evil, but in terms of the maximum potential of the person in question, he or she will still function way below normal ability until the difficulties and wrong conclusions are resolved, and the person grows out of the powerful negative emotions. Then there will be no sublimation necessary. It will all be an organic, natural process.

It is very easy to have the wrong approach when it comes to controlling negative emotions. With a good intent to channel and to neutralize, one often resorts to repression and the crippling of an essential part of one’s human nature.

100 QUESTION: In the process of my work, I have, of late, occasionally felt the need to give love, and not only to receive. But this feeling goes away again. How can I learn to always feel the need to give?

ANSWER: My dear friend, it would be very misleading to say you can learn it. This is something you cannot learn by a voluntary act. Attempting that would amount to a manipulation of your feelings, and, in the last analysis, this would be dishonest. If it is real, it happens naturally and by itself, as you have already noticed.

This will come more often and last longer and become stronger, but only if you do not force it directly. The best way to get to this point of growth, maturity and productive living, is by simply observing your emotions. Note how they are still geared to the one-sided, childish desire to merely receive.

The more you observe yourself objectively, the more you will find the underlying causes for such an imbalance, and the more you will speed the process of growth that finally will enable you not only to experience the need to give as much as the need to receive love, but eventually also to find the necessary outlet.

I must repeat again and again that inner growth cannot happen suddenly. First you have a glimpse, a momentary experience of a new way of feeling. Then it goes away again. If, at such a time, you are not discouraged and do not give way to the feeling that it is of no use because you have apparently relapsed into the old way, but persevere instead, the periods of healthy, good feeling will come more often and will last longer.

Each relapse seems to lead you to the same old tunnel, but it does not. It is a new one. If you pass through it, the momentary glimpse of strength, love and light will come again, until it finally becomes a part of you.

102 QUESTION: This question pertains to the “one and only love.” The mature person, it seems, gives love very easily and certainly would want something in return. If a person is, let’s say, seventy-five percent mature and gets this wonderful feeling from giving love, then it seems that the object of the love is not so important. How could such a mature person who needs and wants to give love, who is able to give it, reconcile this with what romantics say about two people coming together, and then, suddenly, this is it!

ANSWER: There is a great deal of confusion here. In the first place, there are many different kinds of love. It is perfectly true that a mature person can love many people in many different ways. For clarity’s sake, let us use the words “warmth” and “understanding.”

These feelings can even be felt for people who do not actively love this mature person in return. Yet, this very same mature person will certainly not harbor erotic love – the love between the sexes – when it is not reciprocated. A mature, rewarding relationship is mutual. It cannot be one-sided. It would be a crass misunderstanding to believe that mature men and women can love when they are hated.

The best that can be expected is that they will not hate in return, because they are not defensive. They are uninvolved and objective, and therefore they sense why the other person hates. However, they will not seek a relationship in such a case, not even one of casual friendship. Mature men and women will have understanding and warmth in different degrees for different people. They will relate to many people in different ways.

But in marital, committed love, mutuality is a prerequisite for a mature relationship. This does not mean that both always feel the same way and with the same intensity; marital love cannot be measured in such terms. Relationships change and fluctuate, but on the whole there must be reciprocity. You bring two different kinds of love together here – general human relationship and erotic love – and this is why you are confused.

QUESTION: In marital love, is it possible that perhaps the husband loves more at first, and then the wife, and then it changes again?

ANSWER: Of course. But this may also have to do with something other than love in its true sense. It may be that at one time the need and insecurity of one person may be greater, and then that person manifests dependency. When the need is satisfied, the picture may change.

QUESTION: Isn’t the greatest and best adjusting factor in a marital relationship the ability to slowly grow into seeing God in the other partner?

ANSWER: This applies to any kind of human relationship.

QUESTION: I’m becoming aware of a new kind of feeling. As depressions, fears and repressions dissolve, there emerges a personality that has no personal involvement and feelings, so that one first realizes that love has two sides: a kind of negation and a positiveness, both in a personal involvement with the self as the object.

Thereby love becomes an understanding and a non-personal involvement, such a you may feel for a stranger whom you do not like particularly and with whom you have no personal involvement. It is just an acceptance. In a personal relationship, this becomes a process of growing between two people, without questions like “who loves most.” It is a deep personal giving, a most interesting feeling. You feel as though you have lost your body.

ANSWER: Yes, it is as though someone else spread this feeling through you. As though some new being took hold of you inwardly. You may perhaps experience the same with thoughts, as though a thought is thought in you, as though it is not your own thought process that thinks. And yet it is very much your own, but it comes from a new and unaccustomed area of your being. It is something calmer and wiser that thinks and feels through you.

This is what I talk about again and again. It is the real self that is slowly coming to the fore, emerging out of all the layers of disturbance. As you learn to understand and accept yourself the way you are, and therefore resolve conflicts – not by repression and escaping from them, not by pseudosolutions and defenses, but by squarely facing all that is in you, understanding it and comparing it with reality and truthful concepts, as you go through this Pathwork – this real self begins to manifest.

What you describe is the manifestation of the real self. Now, this does not come in all areas of living and being at once. It may first appear in the areas where conflicts of lesser seriousness have been resolved. The next step will be to resolve the more serious problems which reveal the existence of a deep, subjective and destructive involvement, even if non-involvement is being used as superficial pseudosolution.

In the new state of the real self there is indeed a deep involvement, but in an entirely different way – in a way that does not weaken and confuse. This involvement is productive for all concerned, and fills you and those in touch with you with a meaningfulness you could not experience in non-involvement or in childish dependency and over-involvement.

From a certain point on the Path, you may find yourself on a plateau where you experience, as the result of your efforts, the manifestation of the real self. Yet, you may have to come away from it again, as you tackle the still unresolved problems, repeating the cycles you have gone through on a deeper level, until you reach the next plateau.

At a time like this, as you describe it, the feelings I spoke about before, the awe of God and the realization of one’s own limitation to grasp the Creator, may come simultaneously. A divine aspect in yourself begins to fill you, first with a feeling as though it were something else, and then penetrating, enveloping you from inside out, until you know it is an integral part of you: your real self.

115 QUESTION: Would the acceptance of reality be a prerequisite for love?

ANSWER: Yes, indeed. I think this very lecture dealt with this very point [Lecture #115 Perceptions, Determination, Love as Aspects of Consciousness]. I would say, it works both ways. If you can accept reality, you are surely more capable of loving. And if, through your inner growth, through facing yourself in complete candor, through dispensing with all defenses and resistances, you reach a point of love-capacity, you simultaneously become much better equipped to accept reality.

Your resistance to accept what seems to you unpleasant reality is the same energy-current that, if released, is the power of love. Negative emotions are a result of closing the door to reality and to loving. That they are interdependent is evident, for they are really both the same.

Faulty perception means not being in, or not seeing, reality. Warm, outgoing feelings of affection, concern, understanding are an outcome of the true perception of reality-factors, and they simultaneously lead to an increase in perceiving reality in an ever-widening circle in width and depth. The more this is the case, the less can such productive feelings be replaced by a false and weakening sentimentality.

When fear of true deep feelings vanishes, the psyche no longer needs to produce falsely positive feelings. Such fear is a result of self-centeredness, which is the opposite of love. And the same self-centeredness is therefore responsible for creating false, unreal good feelings. This is another angle that shows you how the equation has to come out, from any way you look at it.

One of the most important aspects of faulty perception of reality is the belief that one may be quite healthy in one respect, while one is in conflict and has problems in another area of one’s personality. This is quite impossible. One affliction must, to some degree, affect other personality areas. One thing is intimately connected with another.

If you have, for instance, difficulty in making decisions, believing yourself very limited in scope, while perhaps overestimating your possibilities in other respects, such an impaired determination must definitely affect all other personality traits and attitudes. If you have difficulty in relating and coping with certain types of people, avoiding them will not remove the problem, because the difficulty, expressed in your discomfort, affects all other manifestations and expressions of your life.

It is for that reason that you should heed all discomforts as warning signals, rather than avoiding them. Avoiding discomfort proves that you are still convinced that your psyche, your entire personality in fact, is divided into little compartments, some of them healthy and fine, others distorted and conflicted. This faulty perception surely shows how limited your view of reality is.

The connection and interdependence has to be established if you want to grow out of your blindness and enslavement. Of course, in some aspects of life you function relatively well, but you do not realize how the obvious problems affect even the healthy areas, because the only way you can judge is by comparison with sicker areas. You cannot imagine the feeling of joy, peace and security that is the result of a full and thorough will to face oneself. Then the interconnections will gradually afford a clearer view of reality as it concerns you. And this is the only way you can begin.

All this should not be misinterpreted to mean that you have to reach a stage of utter health before you can function well, love, perceive and determine. You can reach a stage of relative advancement in this respect by recognizing your problems in their entire significance – and that, of course, is not easy.

This realization must not be confused with a quick, glib formulation of a part of the problem you have found. It must be a deep awareness, a transcending experience of comprehension of all your outer problems, hurts, unfulfillments, frustrations as a result of your inner misconceptions and subsequent faulty responses to other people and to life. When this goal has been achieved, the building-up process can begin.

Long before you have truly shed the faulty reactions that are so ingrained, you will be in control of your fate because you now really and profoundly perceive yourself in relationship to your life. By such understanding, you bring fresh, clean air into all the channels that have been clogged up for so long with error and confusion. This is the real security I am talking about.

QA115 QUESTION: I would like to ask a question in reference to Lecture 115 [Perceptions, Determination, Love as Aspects of Consciousness], where you speak of the stages of love. I’m a little confused at this level in which these different aspects of love occur. You’ve put the love of art – I’m thinking of paintings and such – in one level, and then the love of living things in a higher level, with the love of individuals at the highest level. At times I feel that when I am in the country or in nature, I am very much involved with communicating into the high level. With an individual I will be feeling – and sometimes I also feel when I’m painting – that I am at as high a level as I was the day before in the country.

ANSWER: You see, my dear, here again I think we have a misunderstanding, and this is a subtle misunderstanding, because what I explained here cannot be taken in a rigid form. Now, of course it is true that in loving art, whether it be painting or music or anything else, that you should not approach it from a point of view that this is no good and this is on an inferior level. Because a truly integrated person can indeed love all these things – and it is not one to the exclusion of the other.

I am talking of a case, let us say, where a person uses his entire love faculty – his potential for loving – for an art or a science because he is too afraid of coping with the difficulties, or the apparent difficulties, of involvement. So the natural tendencies that are destined to go to human love, or to love for nature, or to love for other living creatures are all squeezed into the one channel that is appropriate for love of art – because of a fear he evades – and he pushes everything where it does not belong.

The truly healthy person is a very manifold and rich being that is capable of many outlets of various sorts, and none needs to suffer because of the other. I am only talking if one fears the greater involvement and uses the capacity originally destined for it for the lesser involvement. Do you understand that?

QUESTION: Yes, ideally it would be a healthy attitude to be able to flow from one stage to the other.

ANSWER: That is right. Eventually it would be a wrong conclusion, a wrong interpretation of what I said if you would say, “Now, my love for painting is unhealthy; therefore I will stop painting.” This would be a very wrong conclusion. Of course you should not stop your creative impulses. Quite to the contrary! You should only think whether or not you do not put more into this because you fear other involvements. Now this may not be true in your case; I’m merely saying this in principle.

QA128 QUESTION: I found the sort of love I was looking and waiting for and really needed, but when I found it and had it, it seemed that I could not respond the same way. I try to give love but on the other hand, I cannot let go. I don’t know what to do in that sense.

ANSWER: This work will bring you to the realization that you are afraid and tense, and this you have to specifically find, not the general wrong conclusions I mentioned before. Some of them may be the same, but they have a particular meaning for you and will have a meaning only when you concretely encounter them within yourself.

This can only be done through this Pathwork, painstakingly, little by little. Step by step, investigate what you fear, how you fear, what you do in order to avoid this fear, and why you fear. First of all, the fear itself has to become conscious, and I do not think you are as yet quite conscious of the fear of really letting go. So the fear has to be pinpointed.

You have to become aware, first in very subtle ways. Perhaps you will not feel it yet as fear but as a hesitancy perhaps or as an inhibition or as anxiety or as withdrawal or as tension. Observe perhaps a tension first, something goes tense like this. And when you see this tension, observe it calmly. Pinpoint it.

Then when you are by yourself, ask yourself calmly, “What is it that I am tense about? What is behind it? Why am I tense? What do I fear? What do I want? What do I expect?” Compare the reality with your wishful dream situation and you may get a lot of material out of that.

146 QUESTION: You relate death to a lack of love. How can you then explain physical death?

ANSWER: The manifestation of physical death in this sphere of human existence is precisely the result of duality. Duality is a result of erroneous concepts. Error means, in the last analysis, a misunderstanding of life and of the universe.

Therefore the individual believes life to be dangerous, hostile, a force against which one needs to defend. This defense must exclude all attitudes of openness, inclusion, movement toward the other – that is, love. When this movement is lacking, stagnation, stasis and nonlife ensue – that is, death.

Error equates with nonlove. Nonlove is directly opposed to life as it really is, in its potential, in its waiting readiness to unfold whenever it is allowed to, wherever appropriate and truthful concepts do not block the way. This life is a continuum, an eternally moving process, that can be sensed only when the personal psyche follows its own life-movement. This is a mathematical equation.

QUESTION: I can see that, but I know that I am destined to die, even if I am able to love.

ANSWER: No, this is a matter of degree. Humans are an interim stage of evolution. The entity does not come from a state of total nonlove where there is a very small amount of life. Inorganic life would be closest to that state of life with no love.

Total love, on the other hand, where there is no longer any split, any division, any false concept, is where the universal consciousness is completely realized. Where there is no duality, there is no life versus death. To get there, the human entity has to go through very slow stages of evolution.

146 QUESTION: In my work on the Path I found out that I never loved anything or anyone; my only way of loving is neurotic. Listening to your lecture [Lecture #146 The Positive Concept of Life – Fearlessness to Love – the Balance Between Activity and Passivity], I am interested to find my real self in this respect. Can you give me some help?

ANSWER: I would advise you to ask yourself specifically to what extent you believe that life is against you, so that you do not dare to love. Put down the very specific ideas you have. In what particular respects do you assume that life is against you?

QUESTION: In all ways.

ANSWER: Nevertheless, it does not suffice to admit this so generally, for that is not quite accurate either. It has to be made specific. After this is done, look at the written statements, then begin to wonder. Tell yourself, “Maybe I am mistaken, maybe it is not that way.” You have to make allowances for the possibility that you may be mistaken.

So often people remain in a bottleneck on their path because they do not move away from the wrong conclusion. They have found it, they know in principle that it is wrong, but they remain with it, telling themselves, “This is the way I feel,” waiting to feel differently without any effort on their part.

Resolution can come only when you seriously question your conclusions and admit that things could be different. You must challenge an assumption, once it is put into precise words, such as “I expect life to be this or that way, at least as far as I am concerned.” Then you make room for truth that could never enter into the closed chambers of your dark, dismal misconceptions about life and your own innermost nature.

QA173 QUESTION: In your last lecture [Lecture #173 Basic Attitudes and Practices to Open the Centers – The Right Attitude Toward Frustration], you spoke of the need for particular gratifications in us. I recognize that feeling in connection with very strong emotions I’m going through right now. Can you comment on that, please?

ANSWER: Yes. Can you be more specific about the emotions you experience at this time?

QUESTION: Love!

ANSWER: Yes. What I would like to say to you is this. The emotion of love – of loving and the desire to be loved – is one of the most important and legitimate emotions and feelings in the universe. It is that which holds everything together and makes it meaningful and alive.

The problem in the evolution of the human personality is that human beings have very ambivalent feelings about this. One side says, “Yes, I want to,” and the other side says, “No, I am afraid of it; I’m afraid of the consequences,” with all the misconceptions that are embedded in every fear and every other negative emotion that exists.

To come out of this ambivalence or duality, a human being has to develop and make both sides conscious. In doing so, he will determine the beliefs that keep him bound to a No, which might first be quite unconscious. You may be aware only of the side that says Yes.

The only way you can determine the No side in you is by the manifestation of your life that for one reason or another makes the realization impossible. This includes perhaps your choices, or perhaps the very conditions you have brought about and that you then believe hinder you – rather than using these very conditions in order to unfold what you are looking for.

You are constantly hindered by the conditions that are a product of your own choosing, and that in themselves, need not be a hindrance at all, if there were not another side in you that denies – in typically human fashion, the dualistic human condition – what the other side claims and strives for. As long as the two sides are not combined – or at least both conscious – it is impossible to bridge the gap.

There are many human beings who are only aware of their longing – and therefore believe they’re all ready for it – and are not aware of the side that says, “No, I do not dare to really let go.” All they can feel or experience is conditions in their lives that seem to justify why, at this moment and with this partner or in these conditions, it cannot be done.

If they were really as ready as they think, they would either change the partner, if it is indeed impossible, or they would put all their efforts and all their attention and all the best faculties they have into cultivating the relationship they have. The out-picturing of what is in a life is the key – is the proof of where one is inwardly.

On the other hand, there are many people who are only aware of the fact that they do not need, as they believe, love. They think they have risen above it or that it would be a hindrance to them. Then their longing is unconscious.

For if the fulfillment is not there, there must be a corresponding voice, and I would say to you – and this answer holds true for everyone, and therefore it must also hold true for you – to look beyond the consciously experienced longing. Look for the side that denies, because it must be there, otherwise you would be fulfilled.

QA207 QUESTION: I was going to ask a question, but I just want to say something. The feeling I have is that I have loving feelings for you. I just want to say to you that I love you.

ANSWER: That is a wonderful, wonderful feeling. And it means your shell is breaking and you’re coming into life. Enjoy it. For the loving universe is all around and within you, within every pore, within every cell, within every molecule, within every breath you take. It is a living, pulsating, conscious universe in which no particle, no smallest particle, is meaningless or unconscious or without consciousness or without love or without eternal life.

There is nothing that is not eternally alive, beautifully alive, and mankind has made a contract to permanently go into a shell where you forget this. It is your task to bring this knowledge into matter. You are all very blessed, very blessed, and the life of truth will unfold in its fuller beauty with every step you take into your core, into your self center. Be blessed.

QA238 GUIDE COMMENT: The word love means so much more than you can possibly perceive as yet. The shadings of love are infinite, the kinds of love are infinite, and the depths of the experience of loving cannot be conveyed in words.

When you are in a state of loving, you taste life differently. Life then tastes sweet, exciting, interesting and golden. So to achieve the state of lovingness, you need to travel through the state of unlovingness and alienation.

But more and more, my dearest ones, do you gain this experience, first only to some degree, and little by little you discover the wealth, the richness, the desirability, not of being loved – that is a pleasant, inevitable byproduct – but of loving.

Next Topic