QA137 QUESTION: I have a rather personal question. I hope it isn’t too personal.
ANSWER: Nothing is too personal.
QUESTION: In relationship with women, I usually find myself in the position of the receiving child. I would like to know specifically how I might become more able to give to the woman, to my partner.
ANSWER: Yes. Now you see, you would have to discover first in very, very exact terms – and you are on the way to do so – why giving seems so dangerous and why there is such a disinclination to do so, and why you have to remain on the level of the receiving child – and it is partly true, of course, partly to make up for what you thought you missed. This is one very important component of it: that you must make up. You think the only way you can make up for it is by remaining in the state of the infant. That is one aspect.
The other aspect which is equally important is that somewhere deep in your psyche, you too, just as many other people, feel that when you give, you deprive yourself. Or that this is dangerous, or that harm comes to you.
Now, you have to see these two elements very clearly – the one of the idea that only by remaining in the receiving state can you make up for what you missed, and the other that you fear giving because you believe it is dangerous.
Then as you are utterly aware of these two facets, you can proceed to the next stage when you can discover that these are truly wrong conclusions and why they are wrong conclusions – not just vaguely and theoretically because you know somehow it ought to be wrong, but you cannot really feel its wrongness.
You have to come through this – partly through meditation, partly through wanting to see the truth, and partly through talking about what is damaging and why this is a wrong conclusion and what would be the right conclusion. And the more you do so, the more you will lose 1) your insistence on making up in this way, and 2) your fear of giving.
You will then come to a state when you will realize your need, but you will know that the need can only be filled when you give, that only then can you receive as well. And that giving is not only not dangerous, but in fact it is the only security and safety and freedom and independence.
Once you feel this to be so, you will have reached the goal in this particular aspect of your life. You will come to see that you must make up for what you missed, but you cannot make up by withholding yourself. You can only make up and receive and fill your needs when you forget inwardly the past, when you are done with it, when you start on a new clean slate as an adult and grown-up, when you discover the great freedom and strength of giving love. Then you are healed; your psyche is healed.
These steps come about by observation, by awareness, by discussing and expressing these levels the right and the wrong way, and by meditation, by expressing your will to do so. For instance, you can now discover when you express the will to give love that you will feel almost a cringing, fearful, anxious No in you.
Examine this No, and you will see that in this No are embedded many, many false ideas – not only about details and side issues of life, but also about the very essence of life. Therefore your basic approach to life is completely opposite from the way it would be good and productive for you and your surroundings.
For the basic approach now is “I cannot give, I must not give. But please give me, give me, give me.” And this is an imbalance. It is illusion in every possible way. It is illusion that this is safe, and it is illusion that it can be had. You still insist on this illusion, because you still fight for this goal – to get everything and give nothing. You think this will be, unconsciously, your cure. But it cannot be.
QA167 QUESTION: I’m having a very hard time getting to good feelings. I noticed tonight that I have irrational, negative feelings about people in the group. I feel trapped again. I’m just not sure of really what I have to do or what might be done.
ANSWER: First of all, do not struggle so hard and fight so much in this particular way against the negative feelings and for the good feelings. Because in the inner movement of fighting, you do what a dog would do when he tears at the leash. It gets tighter, and he becomes more strangulated.
Rather, the inner situation should be to relax into what you now said and see yourself doing it. See yourself and observe yourself and acknowledge to yourself in concise thoughts, “Oh yes, here I am, clinging to negative feelings as though they were more secure than the positive ones. Here I am in error.
“Here I am not yet able to let go of this error, but I would like that the greater power within me helps me to acclimatize myself and sustain the good feelings and become a loving person rather than a hating one, to become a giving person rather than a demanding one. In order to be able to do this, I will see myself each time I want something from the other rather than to give something to the other.”
This is what essentially weakens man. It is this reversal in this particular respect. As you see it and utter in a relaxed way the wish to do the other – the wish to perceive that giving is not being impoverished, but it means being enriched, truly – to that extent the power can work in you.
But you must stop straining and accept your error, as it is in general this human error – namely, the inability to give – which weakens man to such a tremendous degree. The weaker he becomes, the more he wants to obtain the strength from others.
So your struggle must lie, not in tearing and fighting yourself, but in first seeing this movement in you and then saying, “I cannot do it with the ego but with the greater power that presides in me, by wanting to be able to give and love, and then realize my right to receive from life as well.”
For it does not mean to sacrifice and be deprived. That misconception, that duality in man, is still so strong and it is also in you: “If I give, I will be poor; if I receive, I will be rich. Therefore, I cannot love first, and only perhaps if I am being given can I be strengthened.” That is the misconception.
The more you work in that direction, as you’re already doing in a very good way, the more you will find little by little the truth I’m saying here – that loving represents absolutely no danger. And the meditation in a relaxed way, not pushing yourself but in a relaxed way, will also help here.
QUESTION: I might also mention that there’s a lot of fear and almost paranoia as a matter of fact, bound up in the hostility and in the denying of hostility.
ANSWER: Yes, exactly. The moment you see it, the edges are taken off. The danger is weakened by your objective understanding of it and your knowing yourself to be in error – even though you cannot feel it yet.
But when you can see yourself, “Here I know one thing, but my feeling is in error,” you fulfill the condition of self-acceptance as you are now, and at the same time not pushing at yourself or fighting yourself while also activating those powers in you that are capable to help because they are the greater self.