QA159 QUESTION: Am I deluding myself because I feel so peaceful and almost a little sense of contentment at this stage? Do you find me ready for an involvement in a relationship?

ANSWER: Yes, I find that there is a beginning readiness. Before I come back to that question, let me answer the first part of your question first. No, it is not a delusion. But I would say that your reaction to this peace that you find now is very typical and points to the fact how you have rejected peace.

Now, in your case, the rejection of happiness was less, as with some people, the rejection of excitement. But you rejected more the peace of it. You artificially created a negative excitability. You kept in such tension, you kept yourself in such harassment, for many reasons.

Partly, you confused peace with deadness, and therefore you rejected it. You too are suffering in that dualistic split in which you cannot unify peace with stimulation, excitement with serenity. And people usually fluctuate more toward one side and others toward the other side of this duality.

If you have reached now a certain level of peace, it is retrospectively and retroactively certain you have been affected by some of your past work in this respect. This is a very good time to proceed and open up, because in the state you were usually in, it was almost impossible to penetrate people, because you were too impatient.

You hastily jumped from one thing to the next thing. You would not settle down and sit in the problem, as it were. This may sound confusing, but I do not mean it in a negative sense. I mean in a sense of really taking your time and looking at it; and this is necessary.

Now, as to your question regarding readiness for an involvement, I think you are much readier for an involvement than you were before. But of course, you are still not aware of several elements of your inner blocks in this respect.

But if you can go ahead, it would be wonderful. If you could really open up in that respect and move toward a fulfillment and toward another person and toward unfolding yourself in this respect, it will be much easier for you to then become aware of what is going on in you – where your fears and blocks are still lodged in your psychic substance.

And you know, it is a great mistake when people – in a perhaps subtle way, but nevertheless quite distinctly – approach this problem from the point of view that they expect that first all the problems must be resolved and then they can go full steam ahead. It does not work that way.

Do not wait for the resolution of your problems before you can begin moving toward another person, looking for a fulfillment. Find, rather, in the relationship, as it comes to pass, how you can grow. In no other way can you learn and grow as fast as when you truly and honestly observe yourself in a relationship, in an involvement. This is my suggestion.

QA161 QUESTION: I would like to ask for guidance with regard to my need to build a relationship, which I feel as though I’m not ready for – and yet I think I’m ready for it.

ANSWER: Here is the conflict: there is one conscious side in you, as well as the unconscious side in you, that longs for this natural fulfillment that should be yours, that is part of life, and that is the greatest expression of spiritual reality – the love between two mates.

Yet, there’s another side in you that is so much afraid of this. Now, you cover up the side that fears it, because the side that wants it is so eager and the side that wants it is afraid of facing the side that fears and rejects it, and therefore thinks, “If I do not know that I fear and go against it, it will not exist; I will over-concentrate on the side that wants it.”

Thereby, you never see yourself acting and reacting out of the side that fears it. Do you follow me so far? {Yes} Therefore, it is extremely important that you relax inwardly and make up your mind to say, “Now let us see: Why do I fear it? In what respect do I reject such an experience?”

First of all, you will recognize very fleeting thoughts and feelings and impressions that cover and color your behavior in which you say No. This is so subtle that it might very easily be overlooked. As you become more aware of the subtlety of saying No to the experience – the more you see this No in you – the better you will be able to question it.

I can give you, of course, all the general reasons why people fear, and you have heard quite a number of them and read quite a number of them. But this is not the same as finding them within yourself, experiencing your own fear of loving, your own misconception that love is dangerous, that you are only safe when you keep yourself from loving.

These fleeting fragments of impression in you must be taken out, and you must allow yourself to really experience this fear. Then you can question the misconceptions behind it and can replace the misconception with the truth that love is the great freedom of the universe – and not at all as so many of you believe, enslavement and entrapment.

Love is the great safety – not, as you believe, danger and bondage. Love is the great independence – and not as you are all prone to misinterpret and believe, confusing love with possession and ownership, where if you love you would be enslaved.

This is only so because this is what you wish of those whose love you desire – to rule over them by having your will at all times. Therefore you enslave yourself with your own rulership.

This is again the spiritual law and truth that every deviation that is meant to be an advantage for the self, at the expense of others, must fall back upon yourself. For you cannot ever deceive or cheat yourself.

You wish in the childish, irrational self that is hidden in your being, to rule supreme over those whose discipleship and worship you desire – namely, that they serve you, that they obey you, that they prove their love to you by fulfilling all your whims. This is your idea of love. It may not be your conscious idea, certainly, but it is truly your unconscious, childish aim – more than an idea, it is your aim. And I am not only talking to you here, I’m talking to everyone.

So get this child out that wants rulership and magic and absolute control over others. Then you will understand why you must reject loving as dangerous. You must believe – quite understandably and logically – that if this is your idea of love, the same would be demanded of you, expected of you, and this would indeed be fair. And this you must reject, indeed, as dangerous.

So the child that makes absolutely unreasonable demands in you must come to the surface. It must be allowed into your consciousness. It must be allowed to express itself with all its unreasonable, irrational, unjustified aims. Then you will understand why you must reject loving – and why you entrap and enslave yourself by demanding rulership over others, as it were. This sits like a cancer in the soul of a person who’s fearful of loving and closes himself up. It is one of the very important reasons.

Love will cease to appear to be a danger when one can allow the other person the freedom – and can stand a little frustration and a little pain here and a little disappointment there and not having your will here at all times. If your failures can prevail, you will not ever fear love, and will never be entrapped and enslaved by it.

You will step into the great freedom with a raised head and a fully intact dignity – the great freedom that love and life are. This freedom grants you the right to be yourself, and grants you the right not always to say Yes and always to obey the wills and unreasonable, childish demands of others, that they are bound to advance to you and that you are powerless to reject, as long as you advance those unreasonable demands on others.

Many a relationship is spoiled and polluted by this impurity that creeps in unbeknown to the people involved. Each in their own quiet way submits and obeys the other – not out of true love, for true love does not ever obey. True love gives of itself, freely and proudly, but it submits and obeys with the unholy motive, “If I do so, I will have rulership over you. And I have to submit and obey, because after all, this is what I ask of you. So I do not have the right to reject your unjustified demands, since I do not brook contradiction and denial of my demands.”

This tangles up the human hearts and psyches so that the true freedom and bliss of mutuality is fraught with danger and loss of freedom and must be rejected. Do you see that?

QUESTION: Well, it’s interesting. I’ve been aware of the fear, but I haven’t been aware of the kind of fear you express, which is domination. I’ve been afraid of making mistakes. That’s my conscious fear.

ANSWER: What mistakes?

QUESTION: That I make mistakes in giving, that I make mistakes in love.

ANSWER: That is very much common. Now you see here the mistake of choice, the mistake of judgement – any kind of mistake is very much related with this topic – and since it is so general and universal, I will say a few words about that.

When you make such unreasonable childish demands and have such expectations, you cannot afford to objectively and calmly look at the reality of the other person. You are constantly blind to others. You cannot ever see them as they are. You cannot afford the luxury, as it were, for this luxury of really allowing yourself to see others can only come when you are willing to give them the human right of freedom, even the right to not love you.

If you cede this right to them, you can afford to look truth and reality in the face. Therefore your good observation, your awareness and awakeness and intelligence, and last but not least, your deep intuition, will make you aware of what you see. The more you see yourself in truth, the more infallibly you perceive the truth in others.

Therefore, your mistakes will come down to a minimum – your mistakes of choice. While, as it is, you must almost deliberately make yourself blind in wishful thinking or fear. These are the two poles.

The wishful thinking is “I hope this person will love me in this way, to completely fulfill my will and my demands, and give me everything I want.” This is wishful thinking – notwithstanding what his reality is, what his needs are – in that no human being, in fact, could be asked to do this and would ever comply with it.

Since something deep inside knows this, there must inevitably be fear that you will not find what you want. So this fear and this wishful thinking create an obsessive, compulsive blindness. The blindness is supposed to safeguard you from the truth that you cannot possibly find the creature who is that kind of slave – and even if you enslave yourself in order to make this slave, you will not find it.

That is the gnawing fear of not meeting your demands, of the mistake you made in hoping this will be it and knowing it will not be it – this person or that person. That is the one aspect of it.

And the other aspect, the fear of making mistakes, this absolute terror that you have of that – and not only you, again – is precisely connected with what I said before, namely, that you demand a perfection of the other person and you cannot stand disappointment.

You demand a kind of perfection for your own life that everything must go with your will. Now, if you cannot accept a disappointment or a pain or a frustration, how can you accept that you make mistakes whose consequences you have to be willing to take on.

You put yourself in an extremely precarious position by not brooking any disappointment or frustration, because this demands of you a lack of limitation – or an unlimited perfection – so as not to pay the consequences of mistakes.

So there is a very direct connection between the ability to flexibly and unexaggeratedly experience a frustration, and the fact that you accept your own limitations and have the willingness to learn and grow from them and pay the consequences for them.

You can only say, “Yes, I may make mistakes; I will make mistakes. I inevitably must make mistakes. And this is not a tragedy. There will be something to learn from it, and there will be a price to be paid from it. But this is my life. This is the way life is; this is the way I am, and I’m willing and courageous enough to meet these mistakes I will inevitably make – and learn and grow from them.”

In that relaxed attitude, you will also allow others imperfections. You will reduce your fear to such an extent and institute a relaxed state of soul as you cannot imagine.

Next Topic