QA119 QUESTION: I’m unable, on this Path, to go back before my eighth year, and I just cannot manage to get even a glimpse of what occurred. This bothers me no end and I was wondering whether you could help me, whether there is any way. I really try hard.

ANSWER: Well, I would perhaps say, first of all, perhaps you try a little bit too hard, because this sometimes does block. I do not mean to say that you should not try on the whole, but I mean in this particular area, do not try to force it. “I must! I must! I must find!”

Just be very relaxed about it and very diligent about this Pathwork as a whole, and observe your present reactions, or reactions from the past as far back as they come naturally. You see, my dearest, if you examine and really understand all the reactions you currently have, and begin to understand them on a deeper level, you will automatically not only find the memory again, but will also understand what has happened that caused this memory block.

Therefore, just be relaxed and look at all the things that happened since that time up to the present day. Whatever is most strong in your feelings, this would give you the clues you need, and eventually you will come to that. Rather than say, “Oh, I should remember this way – with the mind.” It does not work. It is the same way when something you had forgotten – a word or a name – if you try very hard to recapture it, you do not find it, but it comes back instantly when you relax about it.

QA137 QUESTION: I first want to say how helped I feel to work with somebody, and how wonderful it is when you realize, in a short while, how you change in a good way through the work. You realize how much better you feel in all the ways. I think it’s just a great help. Then I have a question. I have a big block in my childhood – I can’t remember any memory before I was ten or nine. What is the cause of it and how can I help it?

ANSWER: Yes. Well, in the first place, I would like to comment to what you said first. It is, indeed, the greatest thing man can undertake to work on such a path. And if man, generally speaking, would have an inkling of the importance of this, he would deeply, deeply regret every minute he has let gone by in which he has not looked at himself with honesty, and has not profited from every possible aspect offered to him to find the truth about himself.

For every other desirable aspect of life – every comfort, every happiness, every fulfillment, everything man can possibly wish for – is directly dependent on that. The freedom and the gladness of heart and the security that some of my friends begin to sense occasionally on this Path, proves the truth of these words which I have been saying to you for years.

By your very efforts, and only by these efforts, do you reap the confirmation of my words: that they are not empty promises, that they are not beautiful words or lovely religious or metaphysical or spiritual theory you have up here in your upper mind. But that this is stark reality – that the happiness and freedom is stark reality, accessible to you to the exact degree you overcome, you try, you get rid of your little shames in which you want to hide in separateness.

As you do so, you experience the truth. There are a number of my friends, some of them who started relatively late, recently, who have already begun to sense and experience this. Some of them who felt hopeless only a little while ago, who occasionally – not permanently yet, but occasionally – gain a foretaste of what life could really be, of how life is supposed to be. And this is the greatest man can possibly do.

Now, to your question, my dear. You see, instead of answering you, what caused this, I will begin to answer you in a more constructive way. Namely, that you can determine not only what caused this, but also what really went on in you at the time you have forgotten, by your very present life circumstances. You do not have to go back in memory. You can determine it from your immediate present circumstances, if you look at them.

You see, what is sometimes hardest for man – and most inconceivable – he cannot see the most immediate. He looks for something further away, either in the past or in the future, or even in the present, but not where he is now – but somewhere else.

In the situation, whatever trouble or problematic aspect you experience in your present situation, you have experienced in your childhood. In whatever way you do not quite want to see it the way it is now, in that way, as a child, you felt frightened of your own impulses, and guilty and bad. Therefore you chose to forget.

You will not find it by going back in memory and raking your brain for reestablishing a memory from the past. But look at all your emotions now as they really are, and see their significance from the point of view of the child. See the parent/child relationship in your present relationships, and you will know exactly what you experienced then – and why you chose to forget it. Does that mean anything to you?

QUESTION: A little bit, but I realize that I’ve changed now since I started working.

ANSWER: Yes, you have.

QUESTION: And secondly, my father died ten years ago.

ANSWER: I do not say you have to reestablish it with the parents themselves. You might reestablish similar feelings with other people you are involved with now. That is the way you will synchronize basically identical reactions. Not necessarily with the parents themselves, even though one may live.

It may not necessarily appear now in the relationship to your mother, and certainly not to your father, but with other people. They do not even have to have necessarily the same sex as the specific parent in question. In other words, you may experience your mother in a man, or your father in a woman, or both parents in one person. There are various possibilities.

When you examine the conflicts that are still troublesome at this time – where you are insecure, where you are anxious, where you’re feeling anything problematic in your present-day relationships – try to see it in the light of, “In what way does that correspond to a child/parent situation?” And then you will know what went on.

The moment you synchronize this and see it in this way, the emotional memory will come back, even though you may not remember actual outer pictures. Although they may fragmentarily reappear too.

Another advice I have is that – possibly best in your sessions – you really deliberately let your guards go and talk, talk, talk, whatever comes through your mind. Be unguarded and let go. You need more of that. Just ramble on. The less sense it makes, the better. Do not be so watchful with your mind, whether or not this is intelligent or makes sense or is just or is justified. Forget about watching it.

QA146 QUESTION: In the course of my work, I’ve found that I can’t remember the first seven years of my life at all. I feel that there was some very terrible experience and shock. I tried to meditate with it, but I still cannot find it.

ANSWER: It was not one shock; it was not one traumatic experience; it was a consistent climate that was the trauma. It was the everyday climate you breathed in, that was one of insecurity, of fear, of feeling rejected, of your personal feelings being rejected. Since that was a constant diet, as it were, trauma was the constant effect.

Now, of course, this is also a bit exaggerated, because with this I do not mean to imply that you only had this. There were also happy feelings and happy events and happy moods. But the times that you felt insecure and rejected were of deep enough an impact in you that they called a trauma that made you repress it.

Therefore, it is not a particular event. You work will perhaps stir up that memory of a mood and that will enable you to re-experience it, not in the past so much but in the Now, for it can still be experienced in the Now.

When you experience certain facets about your present life in greater awareness, you will see that they are as they always must be: an exact duplication of what you have experienced. And then you can do what I’ve suggested, again and again, in this work – the synchronization of the past with the present, which is the healing.

When this can be done, the healing takes place. Therefore, I also say, it is not really necessary that one actually remembers intellectual memory of certain visual recollections of the past. The emotional memory can be reconstructed by really looking at certain emotions as they exist in the present. These present emotions become immediately less painful when they are being recognized as reproductions of the past.

QUESTION: I have a bad memory of some terrible sex experiences, and this is where I’ve clammed up and never wanted to look at this again. If I could get it out, it would be very helpful.

ANSWER: If there was such an experience, it is secondary to the general guilt about these feelings you had. It is of primary importance only because of your guilt regarding this topic.

The guilt, of course, was a not result of an abuse that existed in your environment, but much rather because of your personal feelings being rejected. Therefore, having certain sexual feelings made you feel guilty. It is this guilt that is more important than any dark experience as such.

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