The Text - Section 89
89. EMOTIONAL GROWTH AND ITS FUNCTION
Greetings, my dearest friends. God bless each one of you, blessed is this hour.
In order to know yourself on a deeper level, it becomes increasingly necessary to allow all
emotions to reach surface awareness, so as to understand these emotions and to enable them to
mature. Most of you also know how great the resistance is to letting this happen. Some of you have
tasted the difficulties you have to face in order to overcome the resistance. You all stand more or
less at different vantage points in this respect. Some of you recognize the signs of your own
resistance and consciously battle against it. You recognize the evasion and the escape-mechanism at
work. But some of you are still so involved in the resistance itself that you are unaware of the
obstructions you put in the way of your own growth. Hence it is necessary that I discuss the
mechanism of this resistance.
Let us first be clear about the unity of the human personality. Human beings who function
harmoniously have developed the physical, mental, and emotional sides of their nature. These three
spheres are supposed to function harmoniously with one another, each helping the other, rather
than one subduing the other. If one function is underdeveloped, it causes a disharmony in the
human structure, and also cripples the entire personality.
This much you know from our previous talks and your own previous findings. Now let us
further understand what causes human beings to particularly neglect, repress, and cripple the growth
of their emotional nature. This neglect is universal. Most human beings look mainly after the
physical self. They do more or less what is necessary to make it grow and remain healthy. A good
portion of humanity cultivates the mental side. In order to do so you learn, you use your brain, your
thinking capacity; you absorb, you train your memory and your logical reasoning. All this furthers
mental growth.
But why is the emotional nature generally neglected? There are good reasons for that, my
friends. To gain more clarity, let us first understand the function of the emotional nature in human
beings. It includes, first of all, the capacity to feel. The capacity to experience feeling is synonymous
with the capacity to give and receive happiness. To the degree you shy away from any kind of
emotional experience, to that extent you also close the door to the experience of happiness.
Moreover, the emotional side of your nature, when functioning, possesses creative ability. To the
degree you close yourself off from emotional experience, to that very degree the full potential of
your creative ability is hindered in manifesting itself. Contrary to what many of you may believe, the
unfolding of creative ability is not a mere mental process. In fact, the intellect has much less to do
with it than may appear at first glance, in spite of the fact that technical skill also becomes a necessity
in order to give the creative outflow full expression. Creative unfoldment is an intuitive process.
Needless to say, intuition can function only to the degree that your emotional life is strong, healthy,
and mature.
Therefore, your intuitive powers will be hindered if you have neglected emotional growth and
discouraged yourself from experiencing the world of feeling. Why is there such a predominant
emphasis in your world today on physical and mental growth and a conspicuous neglect of
emotional growth? Several general explanations could be advanced, but I would like to go
immediately to the root of the problem, bypassing the outer, general causes which are only
symptoms of the root anyway.
In the world of feeling you experience the good and the bad, the happy and the unhappy,
pleasure and pain. Contrary to just registering such impressions mentally, emotional experience
really touches you. Since your struggle is primarily for happiness, and since immature emotions lead
to unhappiness, your secondary aim becomes the avoidance of unhappiness. This creates the early,
mostly unconscious conclusion: "If I do not feel, then I will not be unhappy." In other words,
instead of taking the courageous and appropriate step to live through negative, immature emotions
in order to afford them the opportunity to grow and thus become mature and constructive, the
childish emotions are suppressed, put out of awareness and buried, so that they remain inadequate
and destructive, even though the person is unaware of their existence.
Unhappy circumstances exist in every child's life; pain and disappointment are common. If
such pains and disappointments are not experienced consciously, they are allowed to stagnate in a
vague, dull climate you cannot even name but take for granted. Then the danger is that an
unconscious resolution will be formed saying, "I must not allow myself to feel if I wish to prevent
the pain and the experience of unhappiness."
In the past we have discussed why this is a wrong conclusion and solution. But may I briefly
recapitulate? Although it may be true that you can anaesthetize your capacity for emotional
experience, and therefore cannot feel immediate pain, it is also true that you dull your capacity for
happiness and pleasure while not really avoiding the dreaded unhappiness in the long run. The
unhappiness you seem to avoid will come to you in a different and much more painful, but indirect
way. The bitter hurt of isolation, of loneliness, of the gnawing feeling of having passed through life
without experiencing its heights and depths, without developing yourself to the most and best you
can be, is the result of such cowardly evasion, such a wrong solution.
Using such evasive tactics you do not experience life at its fullest. By withdrawing from pain,
you withdraw from happiness and, most of all, you withdraw from experience. At one time or
another -- and you may never remember the conscious declaration of intent -- your solution was to
dull the capacity to feel in order to avoid pain. From that moment onward, you withdrew from
living, loving, and experiencing -- from everything that makes life rich and rewarding. In addition,
the result is that your intuitive powers are dulled together with your creative faculties. You only
function to a fraction of your potential. The damage you have inflicted upon yourself with this
pseudo-solution, and go on inflicting upon yourself as long as you adhere to it, is one that eludes
your comprehension and evaluation at the present time.
Since this was your defense against unhappiness to begin with, it is understandable that
unconsciously you fight tooth and nail against giving up what seems to you a vital protection. You
do not realize that not only do you miss out on life's richness, life's rewards, your own full potential,
but you do not really avoid unhappiness, as already indicated. This painful isolation was not
willingly chosen by you and therefore it is not accepted as a price to be paid. Rather, it came as a
necessary byproduct of your pseudo-solution, and with this defense mechanism at work the child in
you hopes and fights for receiving what you cannot possibly receive. In other words, somewhere
deep inside, you hope and believe that it is possible to belong and to be loved while you dull your
world of feeling into a state of numbness and thereby prohibit yourself from truly loving others.
Yes, you may need others and this need may appear as love to you, but now you know that it is not
the same. Inside, you hope and believe it possible to unite with others, to communicate in a
rewarding and satisfying way with the world around you, while you put up a wall of false protection
against the impact of emotional experience. If and when you cannot help but feel, you are busy
hiding such feelings from yourself and others. How can you receive what you yearn for -- love,
belonging, communication -- if you neither feel nor express the occasional glimpses of feelings that
the still healthy part in you strives for? You cannot have it both ways, though the child in you never
wants to accept that.
Since you "protect" yourself in this foolish manner, you isolate yourself, which means
exposing yourself much more to that which you strive to avoid. Hence you miss out doubly: you
do not avoid that which you fear -- not really and not in the long run -- and you miss out on all you
could have if you would not run away from living. For living and feeling are one. The love and
fulfillment you must increasingly crave for makes you blame others, circumstances, the fates, or bad
luck, instead of seeing how you are responsible for it. You resist such insight because you sense that
the moment you see it fully you will have to change and you can no longer cling to the comfortable,
but unrealizable hope that you can have what you want without meeting the necessary conditions to
get it. If you want happiness you must be willing to give it. How can you give it if you are unwilling
and unable to feel as much as you are capable of feeling? Realize that it is you who caused this state
of unfulfillment, and it is you who can still change it, regardless of your physical age.
Another reason for resorting to this unsuccessful pseudo-solution is the following: as in
everything else, feeling and emotional expression can be mature and constructive or immature and
destructive. As a child you possessed an immature body and mind and therefore, quite naturally, an
immature emotional structure. Most of you gave your body and mind a chance to grow out of the
immaturity and to reach a certain physical and mental maturity. Let me give you an example on the
physical level: an infant will feel the strong urge to use its vocal cords. It has an instinct with the
function of promoting the growth of certain organic matter through strong use of the vocal chords.
It is not pleasant to hear a baby screaming, but this period of transition leads to strong healthy
organs in this particular respect. For the baby, not going through this unpleasant time by
suppressing the instinctual urge to scream, would eventually damage and weaken the respective
organs. The urge to indulge in strong physical exercise has the same function. The same is true of
the urge at times to eat perhaps more than necessary. All this is part of the growing process. To
stop the growing process with the excuse that there is a danger in overexertion and overeating would
be foolish and damaging. I do not mean a reasonable halt to something that is obviously harmful; I
mean ceasing to use the muscles at all, to feel the child's emotions at all, with the rationalization that
such exercise and eating, in itself, might lead to painful experiences.
Yet this is done with your emotional self. You stop its functioning because you consider the
growing transitional period so dangerous that you proceed to stop growth altogether. You not only
hinder excesses as a result of this reasoning, but you also hinder all the transitory functioning which
alone can lead to constructive mature emotions. Since this is more or less the case with every one of
you, the growth period of experiencing and maturing has to happen now. It just cannot be skipped
altogether; if you do, your overall development will be lopsided, leaving your personality structure
crippled.
When your mental processes mature, you have to go through transition periods too. You not
only learn, you are also bound to make mistakes. In your younger years you often hold opinions
which you later grow out of. While later you perceive that these opinions are not as "right" as they
seemed to you during your youth and see another side that earlier eluded you, it was nevertheless
beneficial for you to go through those times of error. How could you appreciate truth if you had
not gone through error? You can never gain truth by avoiding error. It strengthens your mental
faculties, your logic, as well as your range and power of deduction. Without being allowed to make
mistakes in your thinking or your opinions, your mental faculties could not grow.
Strangely enough, there is much less resistance in human nature to the necessary growing
pains of the physical and mental sides of the personality than to the growth of the emotional nature.
Hardly anyone recognizes that emotional growing pains are necessary too, and that they are
constructive and beneficial. Without consciously thinking about it in these terms, you believe that
the emotional growth process should come about without growing pains. Most of the time it is
completely ignored that this area exists at all, let alone that it needs growth; neither do you know
how such growth is to be accomplished. You who are on this path ought to begin to understand
this. If you do, your insistence on remaining deadened and dulled will finally give way and you will
no longer object to going through a period of growth now.
In this growing period, immature emotions have to express themselves. Only as they are
allowed expression for the purpose of understanding their significance will you finally reach a point
when you no longer need such immature emotions. This will not happen through a process of will,
an outer mental decision which represses what is still a part of your emotional being, but through an
organic process of emotional growth wherein feelings will naturally change their direction, their aim,
their intensity, their nature. But this can only be done if you experience your emotions as they exist
in you now.
When you were hurt as a child, your reactions were anger, resentment, hate -- sometimes to a
very strong degree. If you prevent yourself now from consciously experiencing these emotions, you
will not get rid of them; you will not enable healthy mature emotions to follow in their place, but
you will simply repress existing feelings. You will bury them and deceive yourself that you do not
feel what you actually still feel. Since you dull your capacity to feel, you become unaware of what
exists underneath. Then you superimpose feelings that you think you ought to have but which you
do not really and truly have.
You all operate -- some more, some less -- with feelings that are not genuinely yours, with
feelings you think you ought to have but do not have. Underneath, something entirely different is
taking place. Only in times of extreme crisis do these actual feelings reach the surface. Then you
believe it is the crisis that has caused these reactions in you. You wish to ignore the fact that the
crisis only made it impossible for you to deceive yourself, that the crisis reactivated the still
immature emotions. It just does not penetrate your mind that the crisis itself is the effect of the
hidden emotional immaturity, as well as of the existing self-deception.
The fact that you put raw, destructive, immature emotions out of sight instead of growing out
of them and then deceive yourself, believing you are a much more integrated and mature person
than you actually are, is not only dishonesty, hypocrisy and self-deception, but it also leads you more
deeply into isolation, unhappiness, alienation from yourself, and unsuccessful, unrewarding patterns
that you repeat over and over again. The result of all this seems to confirm your pseudo-solution,
your defense mechanism, but this is a very misleading conclusion.
Immature emotions earned you punishment as a child; either they caused you actual pain, or
produced an undesired result when you expressed them. You lost something you wanted, such as
the affection of certain people, or a desired object which became unattainable when you expressed
what you really felt. This then became an additional reason for you to hinder self-expression.
Consequently, as you perceived such emotions to be undesirable, you proceeded to whisk them also
out of your own sight. You found it necessary to do so because you did not want to be hurt, you
did not wish to experience the pain of feeling unhappy. You also found it necessary to repress
existing emotions because the expression of the negative produced an undesirable result.
You might say that because the latter is true, your procedure is therefore valid, necessary, and
self-preserving. You will rightly say that if you live out your negative emotions, the world will
punish you in one form or another. Yes, my friends, this is true. Immature emotions are indeed
destructive and will indeed bring you disadvantages. But your error lies in the conscious or
unconscious thought that to be aware of what you feel and to give vent to it in action are one and
the same. You cannot discriminate between the two courses. Neither can you discriminate between
a constructive aim for which it is necessary to express and talk about what you feel, at the right
place, with the right people, and the destructiveness of heedlessly letting go all control, of not
choosing the right aim, the right place, and the right people, of not wanting to use such expression
as would yield you insight into yourself. If you merely let go because you lack discipline or an aim,
and expose your negative emotions, that is indeed destructive.
Try to distinguish between constructive and destructive aims, try to realize the purpose of
exposing your emotions, and then develop the courage and humility to allow yourself to be aware of
what you really feel, and to express it when it is meaningful. If you do this, you will see the
tremendous difference between merely allowing immature and destructive emotions to come to the
fore in order to relieve yourself of pressure and give them an outlet without aim or meaning, and the
purposeful activity of reexperiencing all the feelings that once existed in you and that still exist in
you -- even if you are convinced that this is no longer so. What has not been properly assimilated in
emotional experience but has instead been repressed will constantly be reactivated by present
situations. These remind you in one way or another of the original "solution" that brought on such
unassimilated experience in the first place. Such a reminder may not be factual. It can be an
emotional climate, a symbolic association that lodges exclusively in the subconscious. As you learn
to become aware of what is really going on in you, you will also notice such reminders. With this
may come the realization that you often actually feel very much the opposite of what you force
yourself to feel.
As the first few tentative steps are taken in the direction of becoming aware of what you feel
and expressing it in a direct way without finding reasons and excuses, you will gain an understanding
about yourself such as you never had before. You will feel the growing process at work, because
you are actively engaged in it with your innermost self, not merely with outer gestures. You will not
only come to understand what brought on many unwelcome results, but how it is in your power to
change them. Understanding the interaction between yourself and others will show you how your
unconscious distorted pattern has affected others in exactly the opposite way to what you originally
wanted. This will give you an inner understanding about the process of communication.
This is the only way emotions can mature. By going through the period that was missed in
childhood and adolescence, the emotions will finally mature and you will no longer need to fear the
power of those emotions which you cannot control by merely putting them out of awareness. You
will be able to trust them, and to be guided by them -- for that is the final aim of the mature and
well-functioning person. I might say that this has happened to all of you to some degree. There are
times when you allow yourself to be guided by your power of intuition. But it happens more as an
exception than as a rule. It cannot happen as a rule as long as your emotions remain destructive and
childish; they are unreliable in this state. Since you discourage their growth, you live by your mental
faculties only -- and they are secondary in efficiency. When healthy emotions make your intuition
reliable, there will be a mutual harmony between the mental and emotional faculties. One will not
contradict the other. As long as you cannot rely on your intuitive processes, you must be insecure
and lacking in self-confidence. You try to make up for this by relying on others, or on false religion.
This makes you weak and helpless. But if you have mature, strong emotions, you will trust yourself
and therein find a security you never dreamed existed.
After the first painful release of negative emotions, you will find a certain relief in the
realization that poisonous matter has left your system in a manner that was not destructive for you
or for others. After thus having gained insight and understanding, new warm, good emotions will
come out of you that could not express themselves as long as the negative emotions were held in
check. You will also learn to discriminate between genuine good feelings and the false good feelings
that you superimpose out of the need to maintain your idealized self-image: "This is the way I
should be." Because you cling to this idealized self-image, you cannot find your real self, and do not
have the courage to accept that a comparatively large area of your personality is still childish,
incomplete, and imperfect. It falls considerably short of what you want to appear to be.
You hold on to the illusion of yourself, in the wrong belief that if you acknowledge the fallacy,
you will be destroyed. You never realize that this is the first necessary step to destroy your
destructive processes and to build a real solid self that will stand on firm ground. For only in the
mature emotions, in the courage to make this maturity and growth possible, will you gain the
security within yourself you so ardently hunt for elsewhere. But you constantly reach for false
solutions in order to create an illusion of security that can be pulled from under your feet at the
slightest provocation because it is unreal.
So, build your true security. You have nothing to fear from becoming aware of what is
already in you. Looking away from what is does not cause it to cease to exist. Therefore, it is wise
on your part to want to look at, to face, and to acknowledge what is in you -- no more and no less!
To believe that it harms you more to know what you feel and are than not to know is extremely
foolish. Yet to some degree that is exactly what you all do. That is the nature of your resistance to
accepting and facing yourself. Only after you face what is in you will your much more mature
intellect be able to make the decision as to whether these inner behavior patterns are worth keeping
or not. You are not forced to give up what seems a protection to you, but look at it with the clear
and lucid eyes of truth. That is all I ask you to do. You have nothing to fear from it.
After you have evaluated the childish emotions, you will hold in your hand the key to growing
up and becoming a wholly integrated and healthy human being. You will soon discover the fallacy
that there is a danger in becoming aware of and expressing childish emotions. There is danger only
if you let them get out of control and express them without the discipline of having a specific aim,
namely that of gaining insights about your inner self in a meaningful experience. It is not enough to
say that there is no danger in such a constructive activity: it is the only way to alleviate the danger of
your insecurity and of your pretense which you sense all the time and which makes you even more
insecure and fearful of exposure. Deep inside you know of your pretense, of your false maturity, of
your idealized self-image. And you tremble because you know it and you think you defend it by
continuing to close your eyes to it. You think you can whisk away the falsity by not acknowledging
it. Actually, the truth is that you can grow out of the falsity only by first of all accepting its existence
at the present time and owning up to it. Then and then only can you build a genuine self you can
trust and rely on. Then you do not have to fear exposure.
And now, my friends, let us consider this subject in the light of spirituality. You all have come
originally with the idea of growing spiritually. I might say that more or less all of you hope to
accomplish this without tending to your emotional growth. You want to believe that the one is
possible without the other. Needless to say, this is a complete impossibility. Because of the
considerable success you have already accomplished through the hard work of facing yourself,
sooner or later all of you will reach the point where you have to make up your mind as to whether
you really want emotional growth or you still want to cling to the childish hope that spiritual growth
is possible while you neglect the world of feeling and allow it to lie dormant without giving it the
opportunity to grow. Let us examine this for a moment, my friends.
You all know, regardless of what religion or spiritual philosophy or teaching you follow, that
love is the first and the greatest power. In the last analysis, it is the only power. Most of you have
used this maxim many times, but I wonder, my friends, if you ever knew that you were using empty
words, always veering away from feeling, reacting, and experiencing. Now, how can you love if you
do not let yourself feel? How can you love and at the same time remain what you choose to call
"detached"? That means remaining personally uninvolved, not risking pain, disappointment,
personal involvement. Can you love in such a comfortable way? If you numb your faculty of
feeling, how can you truly experience love? Is love an intellectual process? Is love a lukewarm
matter of laws, words, letters, regulations, and rules you talk about? Or is love a feeling that comes
from deep within the soul, a warmth of flowing impact that cannot leave you indifferent and
untouched? Is it not foremost a feeling, and only after the feeling is fully experienced and expressed,
will wisdom, and perhaps even intellectual insight -- as a byproduct, so to speak -- result from it?
How can you hope to gain spirituality -- and spirituality, religion, and love are one -- by
neglecting your emotional processes? Think about this, my friends. Begin to see how you all sit
back, hoping for a comfortable spirituality that leaves out your personal involvement in the world of
feelings. After you see this clearly, you will comprehend how preposterous this attitude is. Your
conscious or unconscious rationalizations in still denying the awareness and expression of your
emotions, even though they are at the moment still destructive to quite a degree, will take on a
different light in your own eyes. You will look upon your resistance to doing what is so necessary
with a little more understanding and truth. Any spiritual development is a farce if you deny this part
of your being. If you do not have the courage to allow the negative in you to reach your surface
awareness, how can healthy, strong emotions fill your being? If you cannot deal with the negative
because it is out of your awareness, this very same negative element will stand in the way of the
positive.
Those of you who now follow this path and do what is so necessary will first experience a
host of negative feelings. But after these are dealt with and properly understood, mature,
constructive feelings will evolve. You will feel warmth, compassion, and good involvement such as
you never thought possible. You will no longer feel yourself isolated. You will begin to relate to
others in truth and reality, not in falsehood and self-deception. When this happens, a new security
and respect for yourself will become part of you. You will begin to trust and like yourself.
QUESTION: I would like to ask, how about the prophets or other holy people? Were they
grown emotionally? Wasn't it just love they gave?
ANSWER: Just love they gave? Could love be given without emotional maturity?
QUESTION: Is a faith in God and love without emotional maturity possible?
ANSWER: That is impossible, if we speak about real love, the willingness to be personally
involved, and not about the childish need to be loved and cherished which is so often confused with
love. For real love and real, genuine faith to exist, emotional maturity is a necessary basis. Love and
faith and emotional immaturity are mutually exclusive, my child. The ability to love is a direct
outcome of emotional maturity and growth. True faith in God, in the sense of true religion as
opposed to false religion, is again a matter of emotional maturity because true religion is self-
dependent. It does not cling to a father-authority out of the need to be protected. False faith and
false love always have the strong emotional connotation of need. True love and true faith come out
of strength, self-reliance, and self-responsibility. All these are attributes of emotional maturity. And
only with strength, self-reliance, and self-responsibility are true love, involvement, and faith possible.
Anyone who ever attained spiritual growth, known or unknown in history, had to have emotional
maturity.
QUESTION: If someone doing this work finds wild emotions going back to childhood, how
is it possible to handle them and substitute for them and let them disintegrate without the person
who helps in this work right there? At the time, let us say twice a month, when we have the
opportunity to express them with a helper present, we may not feel such emotions, while we
strongly feel them at other times. If one is on one's own, what is the right way to handle these
emotions at the moment they come up?
ANSWER: In the first place, it is significant if emotions only come out when one is not
actively doing this work with the so-called helper. This in itself points to a strong resistance. It is
the long, drawn-out result of consistent repression. Due to such repression, the emotions that come
out first will appear at inopportune moments and will be so strong as to confuse the person. But
after a comparatively short time, with the inner will truly determined to face the self in its entirety,
destructive emotions will not only appear at the proper time and in the proper place, but you will be
able to handle them with a meaningful result. The state of resistance points to the fact that inward
struggle and hate still exist along with the child's desire that manifest conflicts should be resolved
while the basic defense-mechanism is left untouched. If destructive emotions govern you, instead of
your being able to govern them without repression, it is a form of temper tantrum in which the
psyche says, "You see, you have forced me to do this, and now see where this leads to." If such
subtle hidden emotions can be detected, it will alleviate any danger of negative emotions taking on a
power that the personality cannot handle.
In the second place, it is important that you do not feel guilty about the existence of such
emotions which are probably incompatible with the image you have of yourself. If you learn to
accept the reality of yourself instead of your mistaken self-image, the strength of negative emotions
will abate. Yes, you will, of course, experience negative emotions, but you will never fear that they
can lead you into losing self-control. Let me put it this way: the strong impact of negative
emotions, to the point where you fear that you are unable to handle them, is due not so much to
their existence per se but due to the lack of acceptance on your part of the fact that you are not
your idealized self. The negative emotions in themselves would be much less disturbing if you did
not cling to the idealized self while struggling to give it up. Once you have accepted yourself as you
now happen to be, and have made the inner decision to part with the illusion of yourself, you will
feel much more at ease. You will become capable of experiencing negative emotions in a way that
promotes growth. You will derive insight from them, even if you are alone at the moment.
Moreover, emotions will come up during working sessions and will yield even greater insight if they
are expressed and worked with.
So, I cannot give you rules to observe. I can only point to the reason behind this
manifestation. If you truly absorb it, wish to understand it, and go on from there, this will help you
a great deal. Of course, this is addressed to all of my friends.
QUESTION: That means that the emotions as such are not dangerous, but it is our
disappointment in ourselves that makes them so powerful or dangerous?
ANSWER: Yes, that is right. But they need not be dangerous, if you do not want them to be.
If inner anger is not properly understood and released in a constructive way, such as you learn on
this path, a so-called temper tantrum takes place and the child in you lashes out, destroying others
and the self. Find the child who wants to strike out and you will be in control of evolving negative
emotions without repressing them, but expressing them constructively and learning from them.
Find the area in which you resent not being taken care of, not being given all you want. Once you
are aware of the reason for all this anger, you will be able to humor yourself because you will see the
preposterous demands of the child in you. This is the work you have to do in this particular phase.
It is a crucial and decisive milestone on your road. When you get over this particular hump, the
work will proceed much more easily. Whenever you are afraid of losing control, I advise to think of
the image you have of yourself, of what you think you should be, as opposed to the emotions that
actually come to the fore. The moment you see this discrepancy, you will no longer feel threatened
by the negative emotions. You will be able to handle them. This is the best advice for you in this
respect. Find in yourself where you are angry at the world for not allowing you to be your idealized
self-image, where you feel it prevents you from being what you could be without its interference.
Once you are aware of such emotional reactions, you will again come a great step forward.
You see, my friends, your misunderstanding is that you think the harm comes from the
existence of the negative emotions as such. It does not. It comes from your non-acceptance of
your real self, from the blame you throw into the world for not allowing you to be what you feel you
could be if the world would let you. This is the nature of such strong, powerful emotions, and they
can endanger you only as long as you are unaware of their nature. Therefore, seek their meaning.
Seek their true message and you will never have to fear.
QUESTION: How can you be sure that I mean it when I say I love a person? (A child asked
this question.)
ANSWER: My little son, I have this to say. The human being is not cut from one piece.
Very many contradictory emotions are possible. You may love a particular person and then, perhaps
in the next moment, you may feel hatred or resentment. The fact that you do does not make it
untrue that you also love that person. It is not true that if you occasionally feel hate, you never love,
or that you do not feel real love in other moments. Both are possible. You see, it is very important
for people to understand why they occasionally feel hate, while also loving. The reason for such
occasional hate is always a hurt. If you are hurt, know it. Know why. It will not harm you, because
the next step in your development will be that you realize that your own lack of understanding
causes the hurt and therefore the hatred. Then the next step will be, as you grow still more mature,
that you will gain the understanding and therefore you will no longer be hurt and will not hate.
If, for the moment, you merely understand that your hate does not annul your love, you will
not feel guilty. You will know that you are hurt and why and therefore you will be able to say to
yourself, "I love and I mean it, but I also hate because I feel hurt."
As you grow in the way of this path, little by little the negative emotions will disappear. But
while they are still present, you must forgive yourself. You can easily do so when you realize that
you still love, even while you hate and that you hate only because you are hurt. You need not expect
of yourself that you always love and understand. No one can do that. But it can gradually come,
very gradually. Hurt will grow less and therefore love will grow more.
QUESTION: In your answer to this young man, and from what you said previously, it would
seem that the emotions are a tremendous power factor, raging violently unless channeled. They use
the word sublimation in modern psychology. Does it not seem that sublimation is a way of
channeling these energies along paths that will not be destructive and then, as a result, we would
stop reacting emotionally to circumstances and situations around us, sublimating them into the
creative channels which you mentioned earlier?
ANSWER: Yes, of course this is true. But sublimation is very often a dangerous process
because it is misunderstood, misused, and leads to and often actually means repression. The
necessity of channeling powerful destructive emotions exists, of course. But, unfortunately, mostly
the wrong means are used. As I explained today, the means are those of repression and therefore
obstruction of growth occurs. That you call it sublimation because certain energies are
constructively used does not matter. It is still growth-inhibiting if destructive energies are not
dissolved, but rather rechanneled, so that they work constructively. This happens, for instance, if a
creative and artistic person whose ability is already freed to a degree uses repressed, unresolved
emotional energies for a constructive purpose. It is true that this constitutes a lesser evil, but in
terms of the maximum potential of the person in question, he or she will still function way below
normal ability until the difficulties and wrong conclusions are resolved and the person grows out of
the powerful negative emotions. Then there will be no sublimation necessary. It will all be an
organic, natural process.
It is very easy to have the wrong approach when it comes to controlling negative emotions.
With a good intent to channel and to neutralize, one often resorts to repression and the crippling of
an essential part of one's human nature.
You have a wonderful opportunity here, my friends, to foster the growth of a side in you that
has been neglected. This is true of some to a greater degree than of others, but all of you have to
persist in working on this particular phase. You now have caused entirely unnecessary hindrances in
your life. You have a wonderful opportunity to remedy this very unfortunate mistake that infects
the entire human race.
With this, my dearest, dearest friends, I go from you. Blessings for each one of you. May you
all gain further strength, further wisdom to conduct your life and your inner growth so that you do
not stand still. For this is the only thing that gives meaning to life -- continuous growth. The better
you accomplish this, the more you will be at peace with yourself. Blessings with all strength, love,
and warmth are given unto you. Be blessed, be in peace, be in God.