QA225 QUESTION: I seem to be in a process for about the 900th time of going through a fairly heavy inner transformation. This time it feels particularly spacey. [Laughter] I feel it’s a good place, but it also feels quite strange, and there seems to be a lot of self-alienation or alienation from life. Could you identify the process more fully? I’m also becoming aware that I’m missing a lot of fulfillment in my life and it has to do with an emotional upsurge in me that’s been in hiding for many years. I feel the need to add so much more in my life, but it’s still not clear what I need to add.
ANSWER: You are indeed on another of the many, many thresholds that everyone on his or her path has to transverse. The transformation process is indeed a very oft-repeated one. It must be so. Each progressive time, however, becomes, as you surely can feel, a great deal easier and a great deal less fraught with difficulties, with terror and with illusion.
So, from threshold to threshold, you are more in reality and you are on firmer ground. What you experience now is the ever-existing battle between the old and the new way of being. Since the new is indeed new – and therefore frightening – there’s a tendency to stay back, to lean back, to embrace the old as the familiar and the secure. And this is what creates that feeling of self-alienation in you, because you cannot quite trust yet the new state. You are though, expanding into it, and that gives you a very strange, unfamiliar, and sometimes frightening feeling.
To be more specific about this particular threshold in your case, and what is still missing in your life, I want to say this, before I go into the problem. There is a tremendous progress and there is indeed already an experiencing of the new. You already have softened. You already are so much less defensive. You already trust, so much more, your inner life, and therefore your outer life as well.
But what is still missing here in order to really secure your new inner space is your trust in your own ability to be productive and to encounter difficulties and frustrations. You still fear them. And you only fear them because your mind has declared them to be fearful.
You still need to specifically meditate and visualize that there is no pain or frustration that could ever befall you that could not be a stepping stone, something that you can indeed cope with and that you can indeed use as a means to free yourself – forever more – of the necessity to experience pain and frustration.
As you learn this, you will not fear, you will not shy away from the necessary aspects of finding a place in life in which you can be productive and be truly the best you can be – also on the material level. You have found it already to a vast degree, inwardly, and that was not an easy matter to attain.
You do become much more aware of your spiritual strength and potentiality, but where you still lag behind is to apply this inner growing awareness onto your outer life, in your material manifestations. There you still doubt your ability to deal with strangers, to stand up, to know where you are in truth and where you are not in truth. These doubts still nag at you. Or let me put it this way. Your insecurity about dealing with people has very much to do with this doubt.
When is self-assertion appropriate? When is a flexible compromising attitude more appropriate? This is a very specific confusion that, once you focus on it, it will yield the results. You will see that in many instances, you already know. In other instances you do not yet know, and that is all right too. You have a right to be confused and to grope.
If you know that, if you do not pretend to know, a lot of anxiety will fall off the wayside. If you could truly say to yourself and those with whom you share your Pathwork, “I do not know. Is it right, here, to assert myself? Or am I in an illusion about it? Am I in an illusion that an injustice is being done to me?”
If you can raise that question and allow yourself time to find the answer, you can cope with the reality around you. If you take just this for a key, for a while, your ability to stand in life and fend for yourself and create material abundance as well as inner abundance will increase.
QA225 QUESTION: These days I feel split between the old and the new. I hold on to the old and want to go with the new. I feel stuck with that, and what I do is I try to make myself different in whatever group I’m with to hold on to the old. I wonder if you could comment on that.
ANSWER: Yes. Let me ask you, first, have you – in the last period of this life now, where you described this state – made a conscious commitment in your meditations that that is what you would want – to let go of the old and to accept the new? {Yes} And?
QUESTION: And it’s beginning to happen. I’m really excited about it. And I feel that’s the split in me, but I don’t know.
ANSWER: Yes. Now, are you aware of any specific misconceptions in regard to this letting go, to going with it?
QUESTION: Yes. One is I’m still very outer directed. In other words, I feel that if I ask for something in a meditation, I’m asking the universe to give it to me instead of wanting to create it. I’m not sure, maybe I’m doing that right now.
ANSWER: Well, not entirely, no, I would not say that. Because asking for help is a very integral part of anyone’s development, and it does require a certain overcoming here too. But I would say the following to you.
There is a tendency in you to indulge your whims and moods and resistances and to play them up, as it were, to make them more than they need be, in an almost willful or playful way. I do not know if you follow and understand what I’m trying to say to you. Do you? {Yes}
Now, this is what you need to watch out for – this playful exaggeration and indulging. You put your energy into this attitude. It is as though you fear what would you do with your energies, if you would not do this. It is almost as if you did not know how to direct and channel these particular energies.
Here I say very specifically to you that, in the first place, you should really try to become very much aware of this in your daily review, in your self-observations, how there is this momentary fraction of time or inner space or whatever you want to call it – of consciousness – in which you choose, and that choice is an exaggeration and an indulgence into the negative state.
As you observe this, even retrospectively, even if it be hours later, you can make a new choice and say, “I do not have to do this; I can take a chance and not even know in what way my energies will be occupied. They may flow in a way that my conscious mind does not know where and how to control.”
You can deliberately request your inner Christ to direct them – to direct these energies, to direct these forces that are strong and beautiful. And if you use them negatively, you distort them. But you can allow them to be used positively by the Christ-consciousness within you, for your mind does not know how to use them positively.
Your mind can make a commitment to it, but it has to allow the process from within by your God-consciousness to happen, learning to focus and to concentrate on these many, many choices you make every day and that you go by almost blindly because they are so habitual by now. You do not even know any longer that you do make these choices, and when you see this, you can make new choices, even hours later.
QA225 QUESTION: I too feel as though I’m on the threshold. I feel a movement going from the old into the new, and I’m very resistant to that. Specifically, I’m experiencing a problem in relation to my selfhood and standing up for what I believe is right. I’m having a problem both in my relations with my friends, and in relation to saying, “This is what I want,” asking for what I want. In my work, I’m having a problem saying what I want in relationship to the people who work for me. I’m afraid that if I say, “This is the way I want it,” I will lose everything. I don’t know if it’s coming from wanting it my own way and being controlling, or really having it come from my center. And I wonder if you can guide me.
ANSWER: Yes, I will be glad to. Here temporarily, as always, the pendulum has to swing a bit into the other direction in order to straighten out the disharmony and the confusion. For a long time you have been quite blind to your demands and you had rationalized them.
You had used a certain amount of energy and strength with which you are endowed in order to assert these demands and to rationalize them and to explain them and to justify them, without this often being really so. You have blinded yourself to the fact that it was often not so. So now you have to go through a period of uncertainty. It is something you have to literally and deliberately embrace.
For it is only through this uncertainty that you can, number one, learn the humility that is necessary in order to come to truth, and number two, to grope your way and find what is really your right and where is it off. What is the situation of reality with all its components and sometimes quite intricate interactions on many levels? That is not easy to find.
Only when one is extremely honest with oneself, after a protracted period of time, does one have the insight about the other person’s inner reality, and from what levels he comes from and reacts. So if you can accept that, for a while, you do not quite know – and trust that sometimes you may deliberately not assert something that you may think is possibly right, but you do not know it yet, you do not know other levels.
You need to deliberately accept a period of groping and learning new aspects of reality you had denied for quite a long time. Then the new reality will indeed come forth spontaneously and a new strength will come from within that will show you when and how to assert yourself without your mind deciding it.
QA238 QUESTION: Lately my energy has been very weird. I’ve been feeling very sick, like there’s a force in me that wants to constantly prevent me from giving my best. I feel I have a lot to give, but my lower self just succeeds to deny my inner authority. I constantly go into these states where my faculties are robbed of their clarity and their creativity. Tonight, I felt moments of ecstasy and now I feel again cramped. I go into these states where I have very severe doubts about the piano lessons I give. I feel sometimes I’m just an impostor – I don’t know enough. Other times I feel I really give.
ANSWER: What you go through now is very distinctly a transition. And transition always creates a state of crisis in one way or another. Here in this particular instance, I would say it is not even so much the Yes. In one way, it is true that it is the lower self. But you should not take it in a self-punishing way. It is a process of readjustment, of becoming familiar with a new energy level.
So your whole system is not used to it and creates a temporary state of contraction, at times, or of physical manifestations. It is normal. Do not push it away, but rather accept it in this understanding, trusting that it is a phase to go through. Realize and try to connect with that, on an inner level, it is a change of energy levels.
It is becoming acclimatized to a new inner climate, inner state, inner vibratory reality, and allow this to take its course. By scolding yourself, by rebelling against this, you make it worse. Rather go with it, flow with it, and trust it. At the same time, reinforce your commitment to your higher self. Do not be alarmed by it. It is a natural phase to go through.
QUESTION: I presume this applies also to my sexual difficulties.
ANSWER: Yes. Yes. It is a new level of functioning that will come on a different basis. Your sexuality has, until now, been very much governed by the lower self pushiness and the negative strength that was tinged with sadistic and hostile feelings. I think you are surely aware of this. You’re coming into a phase where your sexuality will be generated more in conjunction with your love feelings and tenderness, and it has not quite reached that state yet.
So there’s a fear in you that on a new basis, you cannot function. It is, of course, partially the fear itself that creates a stoppage. And partially it’s a readjustment of another way of functioning.