51 GUIDE COMMENT: An entity going from one incarnation into another with an attitude in which self-will and self-pity prevail, tries to force the world to his or her own liking. When this cannot be done by power, other means are sought, such as sickness or a breakdown. Thus the entity violates his or her soul currents to such an extent that finally, in the incarnation in which this attitude culminates, the person will be predisposed to insanity.

This is one of the basic reasons for insanity. I do not say it is the only one, but I might add that all other conditions creating insanity are, to some degree at least, connected with it. We wish that this truth about the background of insanity would be more fully recognized in your world.

The less you adjust to the world around you, to conditions that you cannot change, the more your life force goes into the wrong channel, becoming destructive instead of creative and regenerating – and therefore the unhappier and more disharmonious you are bound to become. It begins with very disharmonious and rebellious moods, encasing you more and more in a wall of separateness, egocentricity and blindness.

These qualities make you commit deeds and think thoughts that are bound to bring you unfavorable results, which create a vicious circle as you rebel even more strongly against the world around you – blind to how you caused the negative results. The next step might be continuous tantrums in one form or another, and finally a breakdown in the hidden hope that this will change people and circumstances. And when you come back to the Earth plane, life after life, to learn just that, but do not, insanity will finally result.

The principle of insanity is the same as that of the mild tantrum. The basic attitude is the same, both from a spiritual and psychological viewpoint – only the degree varies. The direction of the soul currents and the thoughts and emotions are the same in essence.

QA197 QUESTION: I’ve been very self-destructive and self-hating, to the point that I think I’m really quite sick, and so does everyone else around me. It’s been suggested to me that I go live in an institution and try to get some help. I really don’t have faith that anyone can help me – but I wanted to ask you if you thought that would be wise? And also, the person that I’m in love with, I seem to be impeding his growth because of my sickness, and I was wondering if I should just let him go. Even though we have a good thing, I think that maybe for his sake – I don’t know if that can be specifically answered.

ANSWER: No. You know, I never give advice of this sort, because that would cripple you if I would tell you what you should do. I can only answer such a question in principle, and the principle is that no one person can impede another person’s growth. You can allow another person to impede your growth, but he or she cannot actually impede another person’s growth.

What you said about the institution, again it is shifting the responsibility. I would not usually answer Yes or No, ever, to such a question, but I will say to you the spiritual view of mental and emotional disturbances is – and the spiritual view is a more truthful and a more total view than the human one – that it is always self-chosen.

If you can, with the help of this Pathwork, come to the area where you make yourself helpless, where you make yourself sick, then you have your key – for you do not need this illness. You do not need an institution, if you can come to see what makes you desire it and how you cheat yourself and life and others by choosing illness.

Are you yet aware of doing so at all? That you choose it, that you make yourself helpless, that you are not helpless, that you can choose health; you can choose courage; you can choose truth; you can choose the integrity of dealing with life openly and honestly, and not asking that others sustain you, but use your energies – instead of pushing them onto others – onto your own resources. That you can do.

If you truly commit yourself to this, this Pathwork can help you better than anything else in the traditional approach. I would also say the way you ask these questions is perhaps precisely an expression of where the problem lies, because you want to shift the responsibility away from yourself. And that is why you want, on the deepest level, to be ill – because you do not want to assume the responsibility for yourself. And that is one of the greatest stumbling blocks. For the moment, it is the first thing to really solve and see and solve.

If you activate your own inner resources by focusing on them, by saying, “I have it in me to become self-sustaining and self-responsible,” you will indeed find these strengths, these powers in you with the help being given you. But the help you receive here is always the one that aims at finding your own strength, your own inner authority, with all the integrity that this requires.

That is the help here. And you can get this help if you want it, if you want to find yourself and be responsible for yourself. This does not mean being unloved and alone because this misconception stands in your way. You still think love means that you are being taken care of, but that is not really love. Do you understand? {I guess} The understanding will come.

QUESTION: Yeah, I don’t believe it.

ANSWER: What do you not believe?

QUESTION: About the, you know, responsibility – that I give it to everyone else.

ANSWER: You do not see that you do this?

QUESTION: Yes, I see I do that, but…

ANSWER: What do you not believe? That you can be self-responsible.

QUESTION: Right! Everyone says that no one can help, you have to help yourself, and I don’t believe that’s true. I mean, I don’t have any faith that I can do it.

ANSWER: Why do you not have faith that you can do it?

QUESTION: Because I haven’t changed in thirty-two years.

ANSWER: Nobody says you should not have help. Of course you need help! Everyone needs help, but that does not exclude the truth that you have everything in you that you need to live well and fruitfully. Now, if you do not believe that you have these capacities, I say there is still unconsciously a negative intentionality there, that you do not want to believe that – that you have a stake in not believing that. And that is the problem.

You have everything you need, and the help given you must go to that you realize that, and that you find why you do not want to even know that you have what you need. This misconception is very strong in you – that being self-sustaining would mean abysmal loneliness, being unloved, and having no one.

With this misconception, you cannot want to be self-sustaining, and you have to realize and work out that it is a misconception and how it is a misconception and how, as a matter of fact, it is just the other way. You can truly be fulfilled and love and be loved only to the degree you are self-responsible.

QA214 QUESTION: There are times when I perceive the social interaction between people as manifestations of pure abstraction, and I get so far into this that I think perhaps stripping away of the physicalness of these social interactions is a kind of madness in myself. And then I think that perhaps I’m seeking to understand that which I should not understand – that I’m, in a sense, playing God and that I don’t have the right. I face a feeling of madness, and I call it being too much into my head. Could you please comment on this?

ANSWER: It is the following way. There are basically – to perhaps oversimplify it a little bit here – two alternatives, two possibilities. There is the one possibility – and I think that is the one you think about and mention – when a person has a great deal of difficulties in understanding and dealing with his own inner processes. He may then pick up fragments of interactions, of thoughts and mutual exchanges that may, however, be misinterpreted or taken out of context as a result of one’s own difficulty to deal with the inner processes.

Then that feeling you described arises – the feeling that you are dealing in an area where you do not belong, or it comes then from the head. It is a judgement that can almost at times be an escape from yourself. However, there is also another alternative, another possibility, where a similar thing takes place, but it is an altogether different experience.

That is when you have dealt with yourself in a very deep and very intense way, and when you have really lost all fear of yourself and you are therefore not anxious, not afraid, not threatened by other people’s reactions to you. Then there comes a state where you truly perceive the thoughts and interactions of others. But then it is a deeply intuitive knowledge that has a very positive and quieting and calming effect, where it is a deep truth where you understand the beauty of a divine law.

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