Emotional Growth And Its Function

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings, my dearest friends, God bless each one of you, blessed is this lecture.

In order to know yourself on a deeper level, it becomes increasingly necessary to allow all the emotions to reach surface awareness so as to understand these emotions and to mature them. This has been discussed before and your individual work points more and more in that direction. Most of you also know the great resistance that you have to overcome. Some of you have tasted the difficulties that you have to face in order to overcome this resistance. You all stand more or less on different vantage points in this respect. Some of you recognize your own resistance for what it is and therefore consciously battle against it. You recognize the signs. 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 that you put in your way. Hence it is necessary that I discuss the mechanism of this resistance.

In order to understand it, let us first be clear about the unit of the human personality. A human being who functions harmoniously has developed the physical, the mental, and the emotional side of his nature. These three spheres are supposed to function harmoniously with one another, each helping the other, rather than one faculty being used in order to subdue the other, as is so often the case. If one function is underdeveloped, then disharmony in the entire human structure results and also a crippling of the entire personality.

This much you know from our previous talks and from your own previous findings. Now let us further understand what causes man to particularly neglect, repress, and cripple the growth of his emotional nature. This is universal. Most human beings look after the physical self. They do more or less what is necessary in order to make it grow and remain healthy. And a good portion of mankind -- comparatively speaking -- cultivates the mental side. In order to do so, you learn, you use your brain, you use your thinking capacity, you absorb, you train your memory, you train your faculty of logical deduction. All this furthers mental growth.

But why then is there such a general neglect of man's emotional nature? There are good reasons for that, my friends. In order to gain more clarity about this subject, let us first understand the function of the emotional nature in man. It includes, first of all, the capacity to feel. The capacity to experience feeling is synonymous with the capacity to give and to receive happiness. To the degree that you shy away from any kind of emotional experience, to that extent you also close the door to the experience of happiness. Moreover, when fuctioning the emotional side of your nature contains creative ability. To the degree that you close yourself off from emotional experience, to that very degree the full potential of your creative ability is hindered from manifesting itself. Contrary to what many of you believe, the unfolding of the creative ability is not a mere mental process. In fact, the intellect and the mentality have much less to do with it than may appear at first glance, in spite of the fact that technical skill also becomes a necesssity in order to represent the creative outflow and to give it full justice. Creative unfoldment is an intuitive process. And intuition can function only to the degree that your emotional life is strong, healthy, and mature.

Therefore, the intuitive powers will be hindered to the degree that you have neglected your emotional growth and to the degree that you have discouraged allowing yourself to experience the world of feeling. I repeat: Why is there such a predominant emphasis in your world today on physical growth and on mental growth and a predominant 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 mental registration, such emotional experience really touches you. Since man's struggle is primarily for happiness and since immature emotions lead to unhappiness, then his secondary aim becomes the struggle to avoid unhappiness. This creates the early and mostly unconscious conclusion: "If I do not feel, then I will not be unhappy." In other words, instead of taking the courageous and adequate step to live through the negative, immature emotions in order to afford them the opportunity to grow and thus to become mature and constructive, the childish emotions are suppressed, they are put out of awareness and buried, so that they remain inadequate and destructive, even though the person is unaware of their existence.

In every child's life unhappy circumstances exist, pain and disappointment exist. The less concisely such pain and such disappointment is a conscious experience, and the more it lies in a vague, dull climate that you cannot even put your finger on -- and is thus something to be taken for granted -- the greater is the danger that unconsciously the following resolution will be made: "If I wish to prevent pain and the experience of unhappiness, then I must not allow myself to feel."

In the past we have discussed why this is a wrong conclusion and a false solution. But I may briefly recapitulate. Although it may be true that you dull your capacity for emotional experience, as in anaesthesia, and therefore cannot feel the immediate pain right now, it is equally true that you also dull your capacity for happiness and your capacity for pleasure, while not really avoiding the dreaded unhappiness, not in the long run. That is, the unhappiness that you seem to avoid comes to you in a different and much more painful but indirect way: the bitter hurt of isolation, of loneliness, the gnawing feeling of having passed by life without experiencing its heights and its depths, without developing yourself to the most and the best that you can be. All this is the result of such cowardly evasion, which is the result of such a wrong conclusion.

By such evasion 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 -- you may never remember the conscious intent -- your solution was this: "In order to avoid pain, then I'll dull my capacity to feel." And from that moment onward you withdrew from living, you withdrew from loving, you withdrew from experiencing. In other words, you withdrew from everything that makes life rich and rewarding. The result is that both your intuitive powers and your creative faculties are dulled. You only function to a tiny degree of your potential. The damage that you have inflicted upon yourself with this solution, and that you go on inflicting upon yourself as long as you adhere to this pseudo solution, is one that eludes your comprehension and your evaluation at the present time.

Since this was your defense mechanism against unhappiness to begin with, then it is understandable that unconsciously you fight tooth and nail against giving up what seems to be a vital protection. You do not realize that not only do you miss out on life's riches, on life's rewards, and on your own potentials, but that you do not really avoid unhappiness. This painful isolation was not chosen willingly 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. With this defense mechanism at work the child in you hopes to receive, and hence 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 you thereby prohibit yourself from truly loving others. Yes, you may need others and this need may appear as love to you, but you now know that this is not the same. Deep inside you hope and you believe that it possible to have union with others -- in other words, 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, then you are busy hiding such feelings from yourself and from 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, but the child in you never wants to accept that.

Since you protect yourself in such a foolish manner, you isolate yourself, thus 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 also miss out on all that you could have if only you would not run away from living. For living and feeling are one. Then the lack of the love and the lack of the fulfillment that you must increasingly crave makes you blame others, blame circumstances, blame the fates, or blame bad luck, instead of seeing how you yourself are responsible for it. The reason you resist such insight is because you sense that the moment you see it fully, then you will have to change. When you do, then you can no longer cling to the comfortable but unrealizable hope that you can have what you want without fulfilling the necessary conditions to get it. If you want happiness, then you must be willing to give it. How can you give it if you are unwilling and unable to feel to the degree of your capability? Realize that it is you who caused this state of unfulfillment, and therefore 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 either mature and constructive or immature and destructive. As a child, you possessed an immature body and and an immature mind, and quite naturally also an immature emotional structure. Most of you gave your body and your mind a chance to grow out of the immaturity and to reach a certain physical and mental maturity by allowing yourself the luxury to grow out of the immature state. Let me give you an example on the physical level: an infant will feel the strong urge to use its vocal chords. This is an instinct with the function that certain organic matter grows through a strong use of the vocal chords. While the baby screams it is not pleasant. It is a period of transition that leads to strong and healthy organs in this particular respect. Not going through this unpleasant time by suppressing the instinctual urge to scream would eventually damage and weaken the respective organs. By the same token, the urge to indulge in strong physical exercise has the same function. Or the urge at times to eat perhaps more than necessary. All this is part of the growing process. To stop this growing process with the excuse that there exists the danger of over-exertion and over-eating would be foolish and damaging. I do not mean a reasonable halt to something that is obviously harmful. I mean the actual ceasing to use the muscles at all, to feed the child at all with the rationalization that such exercise and food per se might lead to painful experiences.

Yet the same is done with your emotional self. You stop its functioning as such because you consider the growing transitional period to be so dangerous that you proceed to atrophy its growth altogether. Not only do you hinder excesses by your reasoning process, 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 everyone of you, the period has to be gone through now. It simply cannot be skipped altogether. If you continue to skip it, then your overall development will be lopsided. As a result, your personality structure will be crippled.

When you mature your mental processes, then you have to go through transitory periods too. You not only learn, you are also bound to make mistakes. In younger years you often hold opinions which later you grow out of. While later you see that these opinions are not as right as they seemed to you during your youth, while later you see another side that earlier you had neglected to see, nevertheless it was beneficial to you to go through these times of error. How could you appreciate truth if you had not gone through error? You can never gain truth by trying to avoid error. It strengthens your mental faculties, your logic, your power of deduction, and your range. Without being allowed to make mistakes in your thinking and in your opinions, then your mental faculties could not grow.

Strangely enough, there is much less resistance in human nature against the necessary growing pains of the physical side and the mental side of the personality than there is against the growth of the emotional nature. In this respect it is entirely overlooked that growing pains are necessary, too, and therefore that they are constructive and beneficial. Without consciously thinking about it in these terms, it is believed that the process of emotional growth should come about without any growing pains. Most of the time it is altogether overlooked that this area exists at all, let alone that it needs growth and how such growth is to be accomplished. You who are on this Path ought to begin to understand this most thoroughly. If you do, then your resistance to remain stale in this respect -- in other words, to remain 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, so that you can understand their meaning and their significance, will you finally reach a point when you will no longer need such immature emotions. This will not happen by a process of will, by an outer mental decision which thereby represses what is still a part of your emotional being, but an organic proces of emotional growth will occur wherein the feelings will change their direction, their aim, their intensity, and their nature naturally. But this can be done only if you experience your emotions as they happen to exist in you now.

When you were hurt as a child, then your reactions were anger, resentment, and hate -- sometimes to a very strong degree. If you prevent yourself from experiencing these emotions, then you will not get rid of them -- therefore you will not enable healthy, mature emotions to follow suit -- but you will simply repress these existing feelings. You bury them, and then you deceive yourself that you do not have what you actually still do have. 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 and some less, with feelings that are not genuinely yours. In other words, with feelings that you think you ought to have, but which you do not really have. Underneath something entirely different is taking place. Only in times of extreme crisis do these actual feelings reach the surface. Then you believe that it is the crisis that has caused these reactions in you. You ignore the fact that the crisis only made it impossible for you to deceive yourself. And the crisis reactivated the still-immature emotions. That the crisis itself is the effect of the hidden emotional immaturity itself, as well as of the existing self-deception, just does not want to penetrate your mind.

The fact that you merely put the raw, destructive immature emotions out of sight, instead of growing out of them -- and then you deceive yourself into believing that you are a much more integrated and mature person than you actually are -- is not only dishonesty, hypocrisy, and self-deception; it also leads you into more isolation, into more unhappiness, into more alienation from yourself, into more unsuccessful, unrewarding patterns that you repeat over and over again. The result of all this seems to confirm your pseudo solution and your defense mechanism. But this is a very misleading conclusion.

The immature emotions have earned you punishment as a child. By expressing them, an undesired result occurred. In other words, when you expressed what you really felt, then you either you lost something you wanted, such as the affection of certain people, or a desired goal was made impossible. Then this became an additional reason why you hindered your self-expression. So, as you perceived such emotions to be undesirable, you proceeded to whisk them out of your sight. This shows that on the one hand you found it necessary to do so because you did not want to be hurt, that you did not wish to experience the pain of feeling unhappiness. On the other hand you found it necessary to repress your existing emotions because the expression of the negative emotions resulted in an undesirable end.

You might say that just because the latter is true, then your procedure is valid, necessary, and self-preserving. You will rightly say that if you live out your negative emotions, then the world will punish you in one form or another. Yes, my friends, this is true. Immature emotions are indeed destructive and will bring you disadvantages. But your error lies in the thought (either conscious or unconscious) that to be aware of what you feel and to give vent to it in action are one and the same. In other words, you cannot discriminate between these two courses of action. Nor can you discriminate between: (1) A constructive aim in which it is necessary to express and talk about what you feel at the right place and with the right people; and (2) the destructiveness of heedlessly letting go of all control. In other words, of not choosing the right aim, the right place, and the right people, of not wanting to use such expressions in order to gain insight into yourself. If you merely let go out of a lack of discipline, without an aim, and you expose the negative emotions, then it is indeed destructive. But if you can distinguish between the constructive aim and the destructive aim, if you realize the purpose of such self-expression, and if you then develop the courage and the humility to: (1) Allow yourself to be aware of what you really feel, and (2) to express it when it is meaningful, then 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 any aim or meaning; and the purposeful activity of re-experiencing all the feelings that once existed in you -- and that still exist in you (even if you are convinced that this is no longer the case). What has not been properly assimilated in emotional experience, but has instead been repressed, will constantly be reactivated by present situations that remind you, in one way or another, of what 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. But as you learn to become aware of what is really going on in you, you will also become aware of such reminders. You will also become aware of the fact that you often actually feel the opposite of what you force yourself to feel.

As the first tentative steps are taken in the direction of becoming aware of what you feel, and then of expressing it in a direct way -- namely, without finding reasons and excuses, without rationalizing it -- you will gain an understanding about yourself such as you never had before. You will actively feel the growing process at work, because you participate actively -- with your innermost self, not merely with outer gestures. Not only will you begin to understand what brought on many undesired results, but also how it is in your power to change it. You will also understand the interaction between yourself and others: how your unconscious distorted pattern has affected others in the exact opposite way from the way that you originally wanted. This will give you an inner understanding about the process of communication.

This is the only way in which your emotions can mature. By going through the period that was missed in childhood and in adolescence, the emotions will finally mature. As a result, you will no longer need to fear the power of those of your emotions which you cannot control when you merely put them out of your awareness. You will be able to trust them, and you will allow yourself 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 occasionally, at least to some degree. In other words, there are times when you allow yourself to be guided by the power of your intuition. But it happens more as an exception than as a rule. It cannot happen as a rule as long as your emotions remain childish, and are therefore destructive. For in that state they are unreliable. Since you discourage their growth, then you live by your mental faculties only. And they are secondary in efficiency. When they are healthy, then your emotions will make your intuition reliable. Hence, there will be a mutual harmony between the mental faculties and the emotional faculties. One will not contradict the other. As long as you cannot rely on your intuitive processes, then you must be insecure, and therefore lacking in self-confidence. You try to make up for this by relying on others and on false religion. This makes you weak, and therefore helpless. But if you have mature and strong emotions, then you will trust yourself and thereby find a security that you never dreamed existed.

After the first painful release of your 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, either for you or for others. After having thus gained insight and understanding, then new warm, good emotions will come out of you that could not express themselves as long as the negative emotions were being held in check. You will also learn to discriminate between genuine good feelings and false good feelings that you superimpose out of the need to maintain your idealized self image that says: "This is the way I should be." And because you cling to this idealized self image, you cannot find your real self. And because this is so, you do not have the courage to accept the fact 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 idea that if you acknowledge the fallacy, you are thereby destroyed. You never realize that this is the first step necessary to destroy your destructive processes and then to build the real solid self that will stand on firm ground. For only in the mature emotions -- in the courage to make this maturity and this growth possible -- will you gain the security within yourself that you so ardently hunt for elsewhere. You constantly reach for false solutions in order to create the illusion of a security that can be pulled from under your feet at the slightest provocation because it is unreal.

So, build your security, my dear friends. You have nothing to fear out of becoming aware of what is already in you anyway. By looking away from what is, it does not cease to exist. Therefore, it is wise on your part to want to look at, to face, and to acknowledge that which is in you -- no more and no less! To believe that it harms you more to know what you feel and what you are than not to know it is extremely foolish. Yet, to some degree that is exactly what you all do. That is the nature of your resistance to first facing and then accepting what is in you. Only after facing 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 like 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 both the key to growing up and the key to becoming integrated into a whole, healthy human being. You will soon discover the fallacy of the belief that there is danger if you let it go without control. In other words, without the discipline of doing it with the specific aim of gaining from it a meaningful experience. It is not enough to say that there is no danger in such a constructive activity. It must be added that 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 shake because you know it and you think you defend it by continuing to close your eyes to it. You think that 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, owning up to it. Only then can you build a genuine self that you can trust and rely on. Then you no longer have to fear exposure.

And now let us consider this subject in the light of spirituality. You all have come with the original idea of growing spiritually. And I might say that more or less all of you in addition to the genuine wish for spiritual growth hope to accomplish this without tending to your emotional growth. You want to believe that the one is possible without the other. This is a complete impossibility. In the course of this work, and as a result of the considerable success that you have accomplished in the hard work of self-facing, 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 whether you still want to cling to the childish hope that spiritual growth is possible while you continue to neglect the world of feeling by allowing it to lie dormant, thereby not giving it the opportunity to grow. Let us examine this for a moment, my friends.

You all know that love is the first and the greatest power. In the last analysis, it is the only power. Most of you have used this saying many times. But I wonder whether you have realized that you have spoken just words all along, never knowing that you have used empty words, while all the time you have veered away from feeling, you have veered away from experiencing, you have veered away from the world of emotional reaction and experience! 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. It means that you do not risk pain, that you do not risk disappointment, that you do not risk personal involvement. Can you love in such a comfortable way? If you numb your faculty of feeling, then how can you truly experience love? Is love an intellectual process? Is love a lukewarm matter of laws, of letters, of regulations, and of rules that you talk about? Or is love not a feeling that comes from deep within the soul, a warmth of flowing impact that cannot leave you indifferent and untouched? Is love not foremost a feeling, and only after the feeling has been 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 your personal involvement in the world of feelings out of it. After you see this clearly, then you will comprehend how preposterous this attitude is. Your conscious or unconscious rationalizations in still denying the awareness and the 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 do what is 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 feelings in you to reach your surface awareness, then how can healthy, strong emotions fill your being? If you cannot deal with the negative because it is out of your awareness, then this same negative element will stand in the way of the positive.

Those of you who follow this Path and do what is necessary will at first experience a host of negative feelings. But after these are dealt with and properly understood, then the warm, mature, and constructive feelings will evolve. You will feel warmth, you will feel compassion, you will feel good involvement such as you never thought possible. You will no longer feel yourself being isolated. You will begin to truly relate to others -- in truth and reality, not in falsehood and self-deception. When this happens, then a new security and a new respect for yourself will become part of you. You will begin to trust yourself and to like yourself.

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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 having emotional maturity?

QUESTION: A faith in God and love, without emotional maturity?

ANSWER: That is impossible, if we speak about real love, namely 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 for real, genuine faith to exist, then emotional maturity is a necessary basis. Love and faith without emotional maturity are mutually exclusive, my child. The ability to love is a direct outcome of emotional maturity and of growth. And true faith in God, in the sense of true religion as opposed to false religion, is also a matter of emotional maturity, because true religion is self-dependent. In other words, 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, out of self-reliance, and out of self-responsibility. All these are attributes of emotional maturity. And only with strength, with self-reliance, and with self-responsibility are true love, true involvement, and true faith possible. Anyone who ever attained spiritual growth, whether known or unknown in history, had to have emotional maturity.

QUESTION: If someone in this work finds very wild emotions going back to childhood, how is it possible to handle this and substitute it and let it disintegrate if one does not happen to have with him the other person who helps in this work? At the time, let us say twice a month, when we have the opportunity to express it, 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 it at the brink of the moment, when these emotions come up?

ANSWER: In the first place, it is significant if the emotions come up only 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 made up to face the self in its entirety, then the 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 aim. This state points to resistance, to repression, and to the fact that inwardly struggle and hate still exist. Hence, it points to the underlying belief that the manifest conflicts can be resolved while the basic defense mechanism is left untouched. If destructive emotions should govern you -- instead of your being able to govern them without repression -- then it is a form of temper tantrum in which the psyche says: "You see, you have forced me to do this, and now do you see where this leads to?" If such subtle hidden emotions can be detected, then it will alleviate the 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, then the strength of your negative emotions will abate. Yes, you will experience negative emotions, but you will never fear that they can lead you to a lack of self-control. Let me put it this way: The strong impact of your negative emotions -- to the degree of fearing that you are unable to handle them -- is due not so much to their existence per se, but 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 would not cling to the idealized self, struggling against giving it up. Once you have accepted yourself as you happen to be now and have made the inner decision to part with the illusion of yourself, then you will feel much more at ease. You will become capable of experiencing negative emotions in a meaningful way that is growth-producing. You will derive insight from them, even if you are alone at the moment. Moreover, your 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 factor. If you truly absorb it, if you wish to understand it, and if you go on from there, then it will help you a great deal. This is addressed to all of you.

QUESTION: That means that the emotions as such are not dangerous, but that our disappointment in ourselves makes them so powerful or dangerous.

ANSWER: Yes, that is right. But they need not be so dangerous if you do not want them to be. If inner anger is not properly understood and released in a constructive way, as you learn to do on this Path, then a so-called temper tantrum will take place and the child in you will lash out, destroying both others and the self. Find this lashing-out child and you will be in control of your 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. Once you are aware of the reason for all this anger, then 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. This is a very crucial and decisive milestone on your road. When you get over this particular hump, then the work will proceed much more easily. Again I repeat, this is a general explanation for all who may find this answer useful to their own problem. When you are afraid of losing control, then I advise you to think of the image which you have of yourself, of what you think you should be, as opposed to the emotions that come to the fore. The moment you see this discrepancy, then you will no longer feel threatened by your negative emotions. You will be able to handle them. This is the best advice for you in this respect. Find in yourself the element where you are angry at the world for not allowing you to be your idealized self image. In other words, where you feel that the world prevents you from being what you feel you could be without its interference. Once you are aware of such emotional reactions, then you will take a great step forward once again.

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 and from the blame that you throw into the world for not allowing you to be what you feel you could be if only 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 I be sure that I mean it when I say that I love a person? (A child asked this question)

ANSWER: My little son, I have this to say. You see, the human being is not cut out of just one piece. There are many contradictory emotions possible. You may love one particular person and then, perhaps in the very 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 can occasionally feel hate, then you never love and that you do not really feel love in other moments. Both are possible. You see, it is very important that a person understands why he occasionally feels hate, while he also loves. The reason for such occasional hate is always a hurt. If you are hurt, then know it. In other words, 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 more mature, that you will gain the understanding, and therefore you will no longer be hurt, and you will therefore not hate.

If for the moment you merely understand that your hate does not annul your love, then 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, then the negative emotions will disappear little by little. But while they are still present, then you must forgive yourself. You can do so easily 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 must always love and always understand. No one can do that. But it can come gradually, 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, and sublimate them into the creative channels which you mentioned earlier?

ANSWER: Yes, of course, this is true. But in the past I discussed the question of sublimation and I want to say briefly again: Sublimation is often a dangerous process because it is misunderstood, misused, and it leads to, and often actually means, repression. The necessity of channeling powerful destructive emotions does exist, of course. But unfortunately predominantly the wrong means are used. As I explained today, the means are those of repression, and therefore a hindrance to growth occurs. Calling it sublimation just because certain energies are constructively used does not matter. It is still growth-inhibiting if destructive energies are not resolved but are re-channeled, so that they work constructively. This happens, for instance, if a creative and artistic person (whose ability is free to a degree any way) uses his previously repressed -- but now released -- unresolved emotional energies for constructive purposes. It is true that this constitutes a lesser evil, but in terms of the maximum potential of the person in question, he still functions way below his normal faculties, as he would if he truly were to resolve his difficulties, to dissolve his wrong conclusions, and to grow out of his powerful negative emotions. Then there will be no sublimation necessary. It will be an organic, natural process.

It is easy to have the wrong approach in the question of controlling the negative emotions. In the face of the good intent to channel them and to neutralize them, one often resorts to repression, and, consequently, to the crippling of an essential part of man's nature.

You have a wonderful opportunity here to make grow a side in you that has been neglected. With some to a greater degree than with others, but all of you have to persist in working on this particular phase. You have caused entirely unnecessary hindrances in your life. You have a wonderful opportunity to remedy this unfortunate mistake that infects the entire human race.

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With this, my dearest, dearest friends, I go from you. Blessings for each one of you. May you all gain further strength and further wisdom to conduct your life and your inner growth in such a way that you do not wish to stand still. 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.