QA204 QUESTION: I had accumulated many feelings of fear in regards to living here in the city, and then last Wednesday night I was attacked. It was, in many ways, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I could use it to build cases, as I discussed with my Helpers today. I really feel like there was a very great purpose in what happened, and I want to use it to find out what it reveals about myself.

ANSWER: Well, I actually think you have already answered it. There is no event that comes to pass in a person’s life that is not, on a deep level, wanted, permitted, and where the person does not have, in some way, a stake in and a belief in and gives energy to it. Now, there is also a displacement here in a denial of certain sexual feelings in this respect. Because they’re denied, they come out in this way.

QUESTION: Am I on the right path in trying to overcome this cycle of which this is a definite aspect?

ANSWER: I would say the best attitude to take is to really open up yourself to your wanting it, sexually and otherwise. For your case is on different levels. On a more superficial, psychological level, you want to build cases, as you said. But on a deeper emotional level, it is a sexual condition, which in turn comes from not assuming responsibility for your feelings.

It also comes from your own negative, violent feelings being turned against you and projected outwardly. And maybe it’s important for you to get more in touch with how you want to be violent. That is also important here too.

QA214 QUESTION: Tonight, coming to the lecture, we were walking down the street and we heard shots. We looked in a store window and we saw a man being dragged across the floor, and it was very shocking. I feel very upset about seeing it. Can tell us what meaning it has for us to see something like that, if possible?

ANSWER: There is violence locked inside, in all human beings, and maybe your approaching readiness on your path not to be afraid of your own locked-in violence, and your trust and your confidence in having learned how to deal with it – and therefore being ready to deal with it – out-pictured this fact. It can be a reminder that there is something within you that waits to be faced.

Now, the upset that you feel is understandable. It would not be thinkable otherwise. At the same time, violence is a fact of life of a certain state of consciousness. Your willingness to look at it, to face it, to understand it, to deal with it, as you learn on this Path, will diminish your fear of it, and therefore will not make you a magnetic energy field in any form or shape. In other words, your fear of the violence outside must lead you to the covert inner violence that does not dare to make itself known.

If you deny the knowledge of it as your own Pathwork accelerates, it out-pictures itself in some way. You can use it very constructively – to take the fear and commit yourself to go through the fear and dissolve it.

The meditation you might cultivate in this respect could be in the following vein: “I will not fear what is in me. I will face what is in me. It need not present a problem. It can be expressed without destroying anything. I can use this energy for beautiful, constructive purposes, and I commit myself to that particular road.” That is my advice.

QA253 QUESTION: After a harrowing incident last evening, I feel moved to ask the following of the Guide, and pray for guidance and clarification in his answer. As I met with the Communications Committee over dinner, my mother, as she drove home from work, was fired upon by an apparent sniper from the rooftop of a building near her own apartment.

Miraculously, she was unharmed, even though a rifle shot exploded the window directly behind her left ear and sent glass flying through the back seat of the car. Several other people had also been fired upon at the same location only minutes before my mother arrived at that spot. One man had been wounded, and all of the cars involved had their windows smashed. All outward indications pointed to the random selection of targets by some deranged person.

When I heard this news after arriving home later from the Question & Answer and the deeply moving commitment ceremonies, I felt many things simultaneously: initial shock, immense relief that she was not hurt, deep concern for her emotional state and that of my father as well, and also intense anger.

The anger did not come immediately, but grew within me gradually as I pondered this incredible incident, and thought about the frightening possibility that my mother could have been killed. But it was not so much directly at the assailant. Rather, I became aware that the anger was truly the result of frustration and confusion over deeper issues.

Having just come from my personal commitment to stage two, I was acutely sensitized to the conflict I felt. It clearly had to do with your teachings on self-responsibility and the falsehood of victimization, and my inability to experience the truth of these concepts in the face of this seeming random assault on my mother. Where is her self-responsibility in this act? Where is the responsibility of the other people who were also shot at indiscriminately, without rhyme or reason?

I have often pondered these conceptual issues before. In fact, it came up recently in group around the issue of the Holocaust. I have privately struggled with my resistance to accepting the stated truth that no one is a victim and that we attract negative actions against us. Yet, it has always been more abstract for me, until this incident brought it very close to home. In light of this, can you please help me to understand the meaning of such an outer experience and where the connections between cause and effect can be made?

ANSWER: Although this incident is now well behind you and your family, the questions you raise are still as relevant as they were at the time this happened. It is indeed sometimes exceedingly difficult to establish the connection between cause and effect, because the cause may lie back in previous incarnations and may be deeply imbedded in the soul substance. In order to truly understand this issue, it is also necessary for you to not see self-responsibility as a kind of blame and punishment.

I might say that perhaps there is violence in your mother’s soul substance that she is more frightened of than any outer violence, and that she has deeply buried. This might then become a magnetic force field. Your own fury and anger is directly related to the last lecture I have given [Lecture #253 Continue Your Struggle and Cease All Struggle]. It is the existential anger against a fate that manifests as obscure, as unjust, as meaningless. To get in touch with these feelings is very important.

Often a person joining this, or any other path, has irrational and inarticulate hopes that through the work and striving that the path in question prescribes, and through the teacher of the particular path, these dreaded aspects of life will be eliminated. Death, sickness, pain, apparently unjust fate, will be magically removed as a reward for all efforts undertaken. When this hope proves false, the anger that already existed against God and life to begin with, is then turned toward the teacher or leader of the path.

Any true and realistic path must help you to go through these feelings and experiences, because this is the only way to genuinely finding out the eternal life and well-being beyond the level of consciousness you are now connected with. Faith in the Creator can become complete only when the opposite is met and dealt with.

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