QA222 QUESTION: I would like to ask about cultural differences and to understand more about racism.
ANSWER: Souls incarnate together who have certain aspects in common that may be representative in a race. Of course, there are always exceptions. There are sometimes individuals who do not have these aspects that belong to the rest of the race. But there is a specific task attached to being born in this race, and therefore they come into this race anyway.
Your particular difficulty is a very indirect process that is not easy to explain. It is, on the one hand, a projection of your own feeling of being different, so that when others are being different, you project that on them. It is not necessarily in a racial sense that you feel different from other people, but you have a sense of “if only they would know” and “I feel inferior.”
There is a hiding and a pretending and a sense of differentness in you, as opposed to the world around you. This, of course, is an illusion. But you feel very sensitive on that. And because you have not really completely dealt with this, it is projected outwardly. And then you feel differentness in others and constrained in dealing with them. Can you connect with that in any way?
QUESTION: Very much so.
ANSWER: Yes. Now, people, for example, of the so-called black race, are very concerned at this state of their development with aspects of creating a place in a world where they were discriminated against and put down.
A lot of energy must go into this stage of their development, and only in a future time when this task has been fulfilled, will the emphasis go into an inner growth, such as this Path. The inner growth must not come through other ways, through this outer battle in life that is for now, for them.
Of course, again, there may be exceptions here or there, but that is the rule. While the people who are working on this Path do not have to deal with these outer problems, they can give their whole total attention to the inner growth.
QA255 QUESTION: On the Open Weekend, I was upset because there were no other black people. I realize also that I have been avoiding this particular task. Please help me to begin to understand why I refuse to communicate with black people about the Pathwork.
ANSWER: You have a resistance to being associated with black people, in a certain way. Of course, you do know that you are black yourself, but there is a part in you that confuses being black with being bad. So you want to belong to the white race, which you associate on this primitive childish level with being good. It is not just the Pathwork, it is a general thing.
On the other hand, there is a positive aspect that also plays a role here, which is that you do not have a prejudice against the white race, at least not in the major part of your inner being. There may be some such hidden feeling exactly where you feel very guilty about what you believe is a betrayal of your own race.
This is, of course, nourished and distorted by your family, which has a stake in this belief. I would like to release you from this guilt, so that you can face this distortion and begin to approach all human beings without any distorted generalizations, without misconceptions, and see each one for what he or she is as a divine expression, truly regardless of all other circumstances.