The Text - Section 73
73. COMPULSION TO RECREATE AND OVERCOME CHILDHOOD HURTS
Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless all of you. May the divine blessings extended to
every one of you help you assimilate the words I speak tonight, so that this will be a fruitful evening
for you.
Our last discussion was about the fear of loving. The subject of love was presented at great
length and from various angles in past sessions. You will remember that I frequently mentioned
how the child desires to be loved exclusively and without limits. In other words, the child's desire to
be loved is unrealistic. Yet it is also true that the child would be very satisfied with real mature love.
In fact, if it were given, the unrealistic demand for exclusive love would be diminished considerably.
However, the capacity for tendering genuine mature love is rare.
Since children so seldom receive sufficient mature love and warmth, they continue to hunger
for it throughout life unless this lack and hurt is recognized and properly dealt with. If not, as adults
they will go through life unconsciously crying out for what they missed in childhood. This will make
them incapable of loving maturely. You can see how this condition continues from generation to
generation.
The remedy cannot be found by wishing that things were different and that people would
learn to practice mature love. The remedy lies solely in you. True, if you had received such love
from your parents, you would be without this problem of which you are not really and fully aware.
But this lack of receiving mature love need trouble neither you nor your life if you become aware of
it, see it, and rearrange your former unconscious wishes, regrets, thoughts and concepts by aligning
them to the reality of each situation. As a consequence, you will not only become a happier person,
but you will also be able to extend mature love to others -- to your children, if you have any, or to
other people in your environment -- so that a benign chain reaction can start. Such a realistic self-
correction is very contrary to your present inner behavior which we shall now consider.
All people, including even those few who have started to explore their own unconscious mind
and emotions, habitually overlook the strong link between the child's longing and unfulfillment and
the adult's present difficulties and problems, because only very few people experience personally --
and not just recognize in theory -- how strong this link is. Full awareness of it is essential.
There may be isolated, exceptional cases where one parent offers a sufficient degree of mature
love. Even if one parent has it to some measure, very likely the other does not. Since mature love
on this earth is only present to a degree, the child will suffer from the shortcomings of even a loving
parent.
More often, however, both parents are emotionally immature and cannot give the love the
child craves, or give it only in insufficient measure. During childhood, this need is rarely conscious.
Children have no way of putting their needs into thoughts. They cannot compare what they have
with what others have. They do not know that something else might exist. They believe this is the
way it should be. Or, in extreme cases, they feel especially isolated, believing their lot is like no one
else's. Both attitudes deviate from the truth. In both cases the real emotion is not conscious and
therefore cannot be properly evaluated and come to terms with. Thus, children grow up never quite
understanding why they are unhappy, nor even that they are unhappy. Many of you look back on
childhood convinced that you had all the love you wanted just because you actually did have some
love.
There are a number of parents who give great demonstrations of love. They may overindulge
their children. Such spoiling and pampering may be an overcompensation and a sort of apology for
a deeply suspected inability to love maturely. Children feel the truth very acutely. They may not
think it, or consciously observe it, but inwardly children keenly feel the difference between mature,
genuine love and the immature, over-demonstrative variety offered instead.
Proper guidance and security are the parents' responsibility and call for authority on their part.
There are parents who never dare to punish or exert a healthy authority. This failing is due to guilt
because real, giving, warming, comforting love is absent in their own immature personalities. Other
parents may be too severe, too strict. They thereby exert a domineering authority by bullying the
child, and not allowing its individuality to unfold. Both kinds fall short as parents, and their wrong
attitudes, absorbed by the child, will cause hurt and unfulfillment.
In children of the strict parents, the resentment and rebellion will be open, and therefore more
easily traced. In the other case, the rebellion is just as strong, but hidden, and therefore infinitely
harder to trace. If you had a parent who smothered you with affection or pseudo-affection, yet
lacked in genuine warmth, or if you had a parent who conscientiously did everything right but was
also lacking in real warmth, unconsciously you knew it as a child and you resented it. Consciously
you may not have been aware of it at all, because, when a child, you really could not put your finger
on what was lacking. You were outwardly given everything you wanted and needed. How could
you draw the subtle, fine borderline distinction between real affection and pseudo-affection with
your child's intellect? The fact that something bothered you without your being able to explain it
rationally made you feel guilty and uncomfortable. You therefore pushed it out of sight as far as
possible.
As long as the hurt, disappointment, and unfulfilled needs of your early years remain
unconscious, you cannot come to terms with them. No matter how much you may love your
parents, an unconscious resentment exists in you, which prevents you from forgiving them for the
hurt. You can only forgive and let go if you recognize your deeply hidden hurt and resentment. As
an adult human being you will see that your parents, too, are just human beings. They were not as
faultless and perfect as the child thought and hoped, yet they are not to be rejected now because
they had their own conflicts and immaturities. The light of conscious reasoning has to be applied to
these very emotions you never allowed yourself to be aware of fully.
As long as you are unaware of this conflict between your longing for a perfect love from your
parents and your resentment against them, you are bound to try remedying the situation in your later
years. This striving may manifest in various aspects of your life. You run constantly into problems
and repeated patterns which have their origin in your attempt to reproduce the childhood situation
so as to correct it. This unconscious compulsion is a very strong factor, but is so deeply hidden
from your conscious understanding!
The most frequent way of attempting to remedy the situation is in your choice of love
partners. Unconsciously you will know how to choose in the partner aspects of the parent who has
particularly fallen short in affection and love that is real and genuine. But you also seek in your
partner aspects of the other parent who has come closer to meeting your demands. Important as it
is to find both parents represented in your partners, it is even more important and more difficult to
find those aspects which represent the parent who has particularly disappointed and hurt you, the
one more resented or despised and for whom you had little or no love. So you seek the parents
again -- in a subtle way that is not always easy to detect, in your marital partners, in your friendships,
or in other human relationships. In your subconscious, the following reactions take place: since the
child in you cannot let go of the past, cannot come to terms with it, cannot forgive, cannot
understand and accept, this very child in you always creates similar conditions, trying to win out in
the end in order to finally master the situation instead of succumbing to it. Losing out means being
crushed -- this must be avoided at all costs. The costs are high indeed, for the entire strategy is
unfeasible. What the child in you sets out to accomplish cannot ever come to realization.
This entire procedure is utterly destructive. In the first place, it is an illusion that you were
defeated. Therefore, it is an illusion that you can now be victorious. Moreover, it is an illusion that
the lack of love, sad as that may have been when you were a child, is indeed the tragedy that your
subconscious still feels it to be. The only tragedy lies in the fact that you obstruct your future
happiness by continuing to reproduce the situation and then attempting to master it. My friends,
this process is a deeply unconscious one. Of course, nothing is further from your mind as you focus
on your conscious aims and wishes. It will take a great deal of digging to uncover the emotions that
lead you again and again into situations where your secret aim is to remedy childhood woes.
In trying to reproduce the childhood situation, you unconsciously choose a partner with
aspects similar to those of the parent. Yet it is these very aspects which will make it as impossible to
receive the mature love you rightfully long for now as it was then. Blindly, you believe that by
willing it more strongly and more forcefully, the parent-partner will now yield, whereas in reality love
cannot come that way. Only when you are free of this ever continuing repetition, will you no longer
cry to be loved by the parent. Instead, you will look for a partner or for other human relationships
with the aim of finding the maturity you really need and want. In not demanding to be loved as a
child, you will be equally willing to love. However, the child in you finds this impossible, no matter
how much you may otherwise be capable of it through development and progress. This hidden
conflict eclipses your otherwise growing soul.
If you already have a partner, the uncovering of this conflict may show you how he or she is
similar to your parents in certain immature aspects. But since you now know that there is hardly a
really mature person, these immaturities in your partner will no longer be the tragedy they were
while you constantly sought to find your parent or parents again, which of course could never come
to pass. With your existing immaturity and incapacity, you may nevertheless build a more mature
relationship, free of the childish compulsion to recreate and correct the past.
You have no idea how preoccupied your subconscious is with the process of reenacting the
play, so to speak, only hoping that "this time it will be different." And it never is! As time goes on,
each disappointment weighs heavier and your soul becomes more and more discouraged.
For those of my friends who have not yet reached certain depths of their unexplored
subconscious, this may sound quite preposterous and contrived. However, those of you who have
come to see the power of your hidden trends, compulsions, and images will not only readily believe
it, but will soon experience the truth of these words in their own personal lives. You already know
from other findings how potent are the workings of your subconscious mind, how shrewdly it goes
about its destructive and illogical ways.
If you learn to look at your problems and unfulfillment from this point of view and follow the
usual process of allowing your emotions to come to the fore, you will gain much further insight. But
it will be necessary, my friends, to reexperience the longing and the hurt of the crying child you were
once, even though you were also a happy one. Your happiness may have been valid and without
self-deception at all. For it is possible to be both happy and unhappy. You may now be perfectly
aware of the happy aspects of your childhood, but that which hurt deeply and that certain something
you greatly longed for -- you did not even quite know what -- you were not aware of. You took the
situation for granted. You did not know what was missing or even that there was anything missing.
This basic unhappiness has to come to awareness now, if you really want to proceed in inner
growth. You have to reexperience the acute pain you once suffered but you pushed out of sight.
Now you have to look at this pain conscious of the understanding you have gained. Only by doing
this will you grasp the reality value of your current problems and see them in their true light.
Now, how can you manage to reexperience the hurts of so long ago? There is only one way,
my friends. Take a current problem. Strip it of all the superimposed layers of your reactions. The
first and most handy layer is that of rationalization, that of "proving" that others, or situations are at
fault, not your innermost conflicts which make you adopt the wrong attitude to the actual problem
that confronts you. The next layer might be anger, resentment, anxiety, frustration. Behind all these
reactions you will find the hurt of not being loved. When you experience the hurt of not being
loved in your current dilemma, it will serve to reawaken the childhood hurt. While you face the
present hurt, think back and try to reconsider the situation with your parents: what they gave you,
how you really felt about them. You will become aware that in many ways you lacked a certain
something you never clearly saw before -- you did not want to see it. You will find that this must
have hurt you when you were a child, but you may have forgotten this hurt on a conscious level.
Yet it is not forgotten at all. The hurt of your current problem is the very same hurt. Now,
reevaluate your present hurt, comparing it with the childhood hurt. At last you will clearly see how
it is one and the same. No matter how true and understandable your present pain is, it is
nevertheless the same childhood pain. A little later you will come to see how you contributed to
bringing about the present pain because of your desire to correct the childhood hurt. But at first
you only have to feel the similarity of the pain. However, this requires considerable effort, for there
are many overlaying emotions that cover the present pain as well as the past one. Before you have
succeeded in crystallizing the pain you are experiencing, you cannot understand anything further in
this respect.
Once you can synchronize these two pains and realize that they are one and the same, the next
step is much easier. Then, by looking over the repetitious pattern in your various difficulties, you
will learn to recognize the similarities between your parents and the people who have caused you
hurt or are causing you pain now. Experiencing these similarities emotionally will carry you further
on the particular road toward dissolving this basic conflict. Mere intellectual evaluation will not yield
any benefit. When you feel the similarities, while at the same time experiencing the pain of now and
the pain of then, you will slowly come to understand how you thought you had to choose the
current situation because deep inside you could not possibly admit "defeat."
It goes without saying that many people are not even aware of any pain, past or present. They
busily push it out of sight. Their problems do not appear as "pain." For them, the very first step is
to become aware that this pain is present and that it hurts infinitely more as long as they have not
become aware of it. Many people are afraid of this pain and like to believe that by ignoring it they
can make it disappear. They chose such a means of relief only because their conflicts have become
too great for them. How much more wonderful it is for a person to choose this path with the
wisdom and conviction that a hidden conflict, in the long run, does as much damage as a manifest
one. They will not fear to uncover the real emotion and will feel, even in the temporary experience
of acute pain, that in that moment it turns into a healthy growing pain, free of bitterness, tension,
anxiety, and frustration.
There are also those who tolerate the pain, but in a negative way, always expecting it to be
remedied from the outside. Such people are in a way nearer to the solution because for them it will
be quite easy to see how the childish process still operates. The outside is the offending parent, or
both parents, projected onto other human beings. They have only to redirect the approach to their
pains. They do not have to find it.
Only after experiencing all these emotions, and synchronizing the "now" and the "then," will
you become aware of how you tried to correct the situation. You will further see the folly of the
unconscious desire to recreate the childhood hurt, the frustrating uselessness of it. You will survey
all your actions and reactions with this new understanding and insight, whereupon you will release
your parents. You will leave your childhood truly behind and start a new inner behavior pattern that
will be infinitely more constructive and rewarding for you and for others. You will no longer seek to
master the situation you could not master as a child. You will go on from where you are, forgetting
and forgiving truly inside of you, without even thinking that you have done so. You will no longer
need to be loved as you needed to be loved when you were a child. First you become aware that this
is what you still wish, and then you no longer seek this kind of love. Since you are no longer a child,
you will seek love in a different way, by giving it instead of expecting it. It must always be
emphasized, however, that many people are not aware that they do expect it. Since the childish,
unconscious expectation was so often disappointed, they made themselves give up all expectations
and all desire for love. Needless to say, this is neither genuine nor healthy, for it is a wrong extreme.
To be fruitful and bring real results, the process of giving up the recreation must go beyond
mere intellectual knowledge. You have to allow yourself to feel the pain of certain unfulfillments
now and also the pain of the unfulfillment of your childhood, then compare the two until, like two
separate picture slides, they gradually move into focus and become one. Once this happens, the
insight you gain, the experience you feel exactly as I say here, will enable you to take the further
steps indicated.
To work on this inner conflict is of great importance for some of my friends who have made
sufficient progress on this path. They need these instructions to give them a new outlook, and gain
further clarification beyond the point at which they have arrived. My words will enable them to
proceed in the proper direction. For others who are not yet that far advanced or for those who have
not really begun a self-search, these words may perhaps be somewhat obscure. Intellectually you
may understand quite well, but you will be unable as yet to apply them to your own emotions and
life problems. Nevertheless, I urge you all to think about this: the time will come when you will
glean a new understanding about yourself from these words. Perhaps an occasional glimpse even
now, a temporary flickering emotion that these words may cause in you, will be of help and open a
door toward knowing yourself better, toward evaluating your life with a more realistic and more
mature outlook.
Now, are there any questions in connection with this lecture?
QUESTION: It is very difficult for me to understand that one continually chooses a love
object who has exactly the same negative trends that one or the other parent had. Is it reality that
this particular person has these trends? Or is it projection and response?
ANSWER: It can be both and it can be either. In fact, most of the time it is a combination.
Certain aspects are unconsciously looked for and found and they are actually similar. But the
existing similarities are enhanced by the person who is doing the recreation. They are not only
projected qualities, "seen" while they are not really there, but are latent in some degree without being
manifested. These are encouraged and strongly brought to the fore by the attitude of the person
with the unrecognized inner problem. He or she fosters something in the other person by
provoking the reaction that is similar to the parent's. The provocation, which of course is entirely
unconscious, is a very strong factor here.
The sum total of a human personality consists of many aspects. Out of these, let us say three
or four may be actually similar to some traits in the recreator's parent. The most outstanding would
be a similar kind of immaturity and incapacity to love. That alone is sufficient and potent enough in
essence to reproduce the same situation.
The same person would not react to others as he or she reacts to you because it is you who
constantly do the provoking, thereby reproducing conditions similar to your childhood for you to
correct. Your fear, your self-punishment, your frustration, your anger, your hostility, your
withdrawal from giving out love and affection, all these trends of the child in you constantly
provoke the other person and enhance a response coming from that part which is weak and
immature. However, a more mature person will affect others differently and will bring out that in
them which is mature and whole, for there is no person who does not have some mature aspects.
QUESTION: I am very confused about thought control. I find it terribly tiring to be
constantly alert during the entire day and to live in the immediate here and now. Yet, in my work I
am entirely submerged, absorbed, and wholly concentrated. I can remain concentrated even for
hours. But afterwards I find it relaxing to let my mind wander and not use it like a spotlight beam
on everything that happens around me.
ANSWER: This is a great misunderstanding. I never implied that you should constantly have
your mind poised, let alone be tense in your mind. You do not have to steadily concentrate on a
particular subject. That is not the way to go about it. If you can bring yourself to engage in this
five-minute exercise every day in the most relaxed way, you will find that gradually you will naturally
become more alert and more awake in an unforced way. It is a gradual process of growth that
happens without direct volition, without forcing. If you relax and let your mind wander after a
strain, that is fine. There is nothing wrong in that. I never said that you should do these
concentration exercises for twenty-four hours a day. I said you should try it for about five minutes a
day. There is a great difference in that. After becoming a little proficient, you will automatically and
without strain be more alert and concentrated without fatigue. You will then begin to function
better in many ways. The fact that it makes you tired to be "right here, in the now" and that your
spirit has to wander away is a sign of some mismanagement in your inner makeup. Every person
needs an occasional rest during which the spirit leaves the body. This happens regularly during
sleep. But if the spirit has to half wander away during waking hours in order to be relaxed, it means
that there is something that is not properly managed between the spirit, the body, and the mind. It
has many damaging effects in making you miss out on life, in your not seeing and perceiving reality
and people around you. In order to remedy the situation, you should not forcefully concentrate
during all your waking hours.
Many psychological factors play a role and bring about this mismanagement. Your further
development in that direction will be of major importance. But, in addition, the five-minute exercise
will be of help.
One of the psychological factors responsible for the tendency to let the spirit wander away is
fear: fear of life, therefore fear of being in the present reality of life, and fear of coping with life.
Another factor is a certain egocentricity, a lack of interest in what is really going on and a feeling that
it is more pleasant to wander in the clouds. But, I repeat, this process should not and cannot be
changed by constantly forcing yourself to occupy your thoughts and mind with things that do not
interest you. This must be a natural process which develops organically. In doing the concentration
exercises, you will eventually discover a very gradual and slow change. You will become naturally
more alert to the present and more observant. You will take an interest in what is around you
without feeling tension within yourself.
QUESTION: You have stated that emotional maturity is the willingness and the capability to
love. It seems to me that intellectual maturity must mean something else. How do the two interplay
and influence each other?
ANSWER: Both are necessary functions of the healthy individual. As I once put it, they are
like the two legs you need in order to walk through life. Intellectual maturity is your capacity to
think, to judge, to evaluate, to discriminate, to form concepts, to plan, to use your will, to use your
mind, to make decisions, to utilize your assets, to direct your life and, last but not least, to educate or
reeducate the childish emotions by implanting your own concepts that you have arrived at
independently, by thinking things through. Not because others have said so, but because you
deliberated on them and thereby made them your own. Thus your intellect can influence your
emotions through your capacity to think. On the other hand, unchecked and childish emotions can
influence your thinking capacity by coloring your views and making you lose objectivity. Your
capacity to think is intellectual maturity. And the way you manage your emotional reactions,
feelings, and instincts determines your emotional maturity or lack of it.
QUESTION: Might one be developed much further in one direction than in the other?
ANSWER: Indeed, very often there is an imbalance between these two legs, with one leg
more developed than the other. This imbalance hinders the integration of the human being.
Among other aspects, the purpose and aim in this work is to achieve a proper balance. In many
instances a person is more developed in one direction or one area of the personality with a weakness
in the other. Many who do not pursue a path such as yours continue to nurse and cultivate the
already overdeveloped aspect. That, of course, is not healthy; it does not bring the desired harmony
and balance. It is done because people prefer to think of their strengths rather than of their
weaknesses.
QUESTION: Would you say that emotional immaturity is indicated by an emphasis on
strong likes and dislikes without discriminating as to what the values are? We use the wrong
yardstick. Instead of measuring and discriminating, we are either for or against something, because
we like or dislike it, regardless of its intrinsic merit.
ANSWER: Exactly. That is the subjectivity that arises out of childish emotions. Of course, a
halfway intellectually mature person will find adequate reasons to hide this emotional reaction and
subjectivity. That is what is called rationalization. Thus an intellectually mature person will find
reasons and explanations for his irrational, emotional, subjective behavior or attitude.
QUESTION: At one time, you said that you could hear the soul scream. Does that also
work between the different subconscious minds of two separate human beings? Does one
subconscious hear the screaming of the other? Is that why one feels the hostility emanating from the
other person?
ANSWER: Yes. That is why I always say that your subconscious affects the subconscious of
the other person. You go through life resenting other people because they do not respond to your
outer actions. You yourself are unaware of what your inner actions are. Your inner actions or
reactions are accurately perceived by your fellow human beings and they react to that part of
yourself. Their souls hear that voice or perceive it with other inner sense organs of hearing, seeing,
smelling, tasting. That is why the subconscious of one affects the subconscious of the other.
So often, people feel unjustly treated when they know their actions were quite all right. They
concentrate on all their outer right actions but leave out the inner unconscious motivations which
exist in addition to the conscious and proper outer ones. If you learn to be utterly honest with
yourself and acknowledge your hidden motivations and feelings, you will then understand why other
people react to you as they do and you will no longer consider yourself the victim of injustice.
QUESTION: How can I make the distinction as to whether the other person provoked me
or I the other person?
ANSWER: It is not necessary to find who started it, for this is a chain reaction, a vicious
circle. It is useful to start by finding your own provocation, perhaps in response to an open or
hidden provocation of the other person. Thus you will realize that because you were provoked, you
provoke the other person. And because you do so, the other again responds in kind. But as you
examine your real reason, not the superficial one, the reason why you were hurt in the first place and
therefore provoked, according to tonight's lecture you will no longer regard this hurt as disastrous.
You will have a different reaction to the hurt, and, as a consequence, the hurt will diminish
automatically. Therefore, you will no longer feel the need to provoke the other person. Also, as the
need to reproduce the childhood situation decreases, you will become less withdrawn and you will
hurt others less and less so that they will not have to provoke you. If they do, you will now also
understand that they reacted out of the same childish blind needs as you did. Now you can see how
you ascribe different motivations to the other person's provocation than to your own, even if and
when you actually realize that you initiated the provocation. As you gain a different view on your
own hurt, understanding its real origin, you will gain the same detachment from the reaction of the
other person. You will find exactly the same reactions in yourself and in the other. As long as the
child's conflict remains unresolved in you, the difference seems enormous, but when you perceive
reality, you begin to break the repetitive vicious circle.
As you truly perceive such a mutual interplay, it will relieve the feeling of isolation and guilt
you all are burdened with. You are constantly fluctuating between your guilt and your accusation of
injustice you direct at those around you. The child in you feels itself entirely different from others,
in a world of its own. It lives in such a damaging illusion. As you solve this conflict, your awareness
of other people will increase. As yet, you are so unaware of the reality of other people. On the one
hand you accuse them and are inordinately hurt by them because you do not understand yourself
and therefore do not understand the other person. On the other hand, and at the same time, you
refuse to become aware when you are hurt. This seems paradoxical yet is not. As you experience
for yourself the interactions set forth tonight, you will find this to be true. While sometimes you
may exaggerate a hurt, at other times you do not allow yourself to know that it happened at all,
because it may not fit the picture you have of the situation. It may spoil your self-constructed idea,
or it may not correspond to your desire at the time. If the situation seems otherwise favorable and
fits into your preconceived idea, you leave out all that jars you, allowing it to fester underneath and
create unconscious hostility. This entire reaction inhibits your intuitive faculties, at least in this
particular respect.
The constant provocation that goes on among human beings, while it is hidden from your
awareness now, is a reality you will come to perceive very clearly. This will have a very liberating
effect on you and your surroundings. But you cannot perceive it unless you understand the patterns
in yourself which I discussed tonight.
QUESTION: Is it possible in some way to make a truce, for even two or three minutes,
between one's own subconscious and the subconscious of the other person? Sometimes you see the
reality intellectually, but by the time you order your subconscious to do something, it is already in
revolt and has made the other person unhappy and then you are unhappy too. It might all have
been avoided if there had been a few minutes of truce.
ANSWER: You see my dear, in the first place it is not a question of ordering your
subconscious. You cannot order it. That is impossible. As long as you attempt such commands, it
will be very resistant. Or it may deceive you, so that you deceive yourself. The subconscious can
only be reeducated by the slow and gradual process pursued in our work. Most important is that
you become fully aware of what you really feel. Actually, you are only half aware of it most of the
time and resort to superimposing another set of feelings upon your real reactions. These may be
other negative emotions; if they are positive, you are deceiving yourself even more. Only by
stripping away all these superimpositions can you understand the reason why your subconscious is
often so stubborn. If it continues to resist your good efforts, there must be something present that
you have not understood and not connected with. Then it is a question of finding the block that
causes this particular obstruction. When this happens, you will not need a short truce. You will
have real peace with yourself and therefore with others. While you may command a truce in your
outer actions, in your words, and even in your thoughts, the subconscious does not respond to such
discipline. Truce, as you see it, cannot really work. It is as unreal as the effect of attempting to
command it would be.
QUESTION: Suppose we are able to put our own house in order. Will we then eliminate
provocations in the other person?
ANSWER: You do not even have to put your house in order to the extent that you are fully
mature and more or less perfect. This perfection hardly ever exists in the human sphere. But the
awareness of your immaturity, a real insight into and understanding of your reactions and feelings
that cause provocation will weaken the habit of provocation sufficiently until you finally will cease
bringing on provocations and will in turn not be provoked by others. As you gain a certain
detachment from yourself in a very healthy way, the smoldering, unhealthy drive and force will be
taken out of your emotional reactions. In fact, I would even say that this is the only kind of valid
truce that can be accomplished.
Allow yourself to see what you really feel and why. And when you have an overall view,
without any further subterfuge and self-deception, such knowledge will no longer disquiet you. It
will have a very calming effect. You will have made peace with yourself by accepting your still
existing imperfections and will no longer harrow yourself trying for a perfection that you cannot
possibly attain at the moment. Once you accept the reality of your imperfect self, the resulting hurts
will no longer be so serious and tragic. You will accept them as a consequence of your accepted
imperfections which you can now observe calmly, while gaining more understanding about them
and thus nearing perfection and maturity. In this way, your hostility will vanish and your
provocations will too. Relapses will surely occur, but you will accept them with a realistic outlook.
You will gain further insight from them, knowing that they are possible because something has not
penetrated deeply enough and has to be found anew so as to be assimilated on deeper levels of your
being.
Hostility exists in you because you are unaware that you are hurt and why you are hurt. Just
think of times when you are really aware of a hurt without anger and without feeling hostile. You
may feel sad, but feeling sad seems to many people so humiliating that they prefer to be angry and
therefore hostile. That is a particular kind of childishness existing in everyone. You think it is
superior to be angry and hostile than to be sad, so you suppress the real hurt. But the hostility has
to be hidden, too, because it makes you feel guilty for other reasons, so it comes out in a devious,
hidden way, which in turn brings on further provocation. Provocation is a result of unconscious
and suppressed hostility, and the hostility results from unconscious and suppressed hurt.
Go your way, my dearest ones, and may the blessings we bring to all of you envelop and
penetrate your body, soul, and spirit, so that you open up your soul and become your real self, your
own real self. Be blessed, my friends, be in peace, be in God.