QA176 QUESTION: My question has to do with the substance I’m holding in my hand – mercury – and I think in many ways it relates to conditions in my life that I would like to transcend.
ANSWER: And how do you relate this to your life?
QUESTION: Well, I’m not quite sure, except there are many things that I’m investigating and searching to change. It seems to be a basic ingredient. Change is never resolved in any particular way. It comes eventually to a standstill. I’d like to know more about how mercury as a symbol for me.
ANSWER: Yes, there is a point in what you’re saying. Mercury, perhaps we can say, symbolizes itself by a very restlessness, by a quick back and forth and not going all the way, in a sense. And that would be exactly how it expresses something in you and why you cannot come to meaningful, deep and significant answers about yourself.
You go a certain way, and then you stop. And you start a different approach, and you stop again. But there is something that holds you back from really committing yourself to the innermost being you are, to the truth within you, even if this temporary truth is finding negativities and destructive emotions.
For that is the only way you can transcend them and come to the more abiding truth. A real commitment to this is a realization that this is the only way problems can be eliminated, and would give your life a substance and a direction that is now missing, where you’re going all different ways – changing.
QUESTION: I feel there’s a certain structure that I do hope to be able to establish.
ANSWER: Well, you may have the need at this moment to go through this period of restless seeking until you really can see in what direction the search and the commitment must be if you truly want to fulfill yourself. It is often that one arrives at such a juncture only by trial and error.
In that sense, you may be right that many approaches have to be sought before you can make this deep commitment to your own total unfoldment.
QUESTION: There’s also a fascination in substances. It’s very hard for me to explain what the importance of that externalization is. I wonder what substance you might know of that would be more stable.
ANSWER: Well, this is really not the important thing here, because your preoccupation with the substances is in itself – as you even put it – an externalization. It is in itself a getting away from the real, so you’d rather symbolize it all the time. Too much symbolization on a volitional basis is losing the actual core of things. So if you really want to get to your core, get to your core without symbolizing it.
QUESTION: Through understanding it?
ANSWER: Yes, through committing yourself to your own inner truth, and finding a way to this, and giving your best to it, and going through the highways and byways and the difficulties and the mazes that exist before you can really get to the light that is deep within.
