Column door Taetske Kleijn verschenen in het tijdschrift InZicht mei 2022 – Themanummer Verwondering

Verschenen in yoga international magazine, mei 2019

Column door Taetske Kleijn verschenen in het tijdschrift InZicht september 2017

Interview verschenen in Djoj Programmakrant, 2017

The following talk by Jeru Kabbal was recorded live and is part of a Clarity Process training offered by the APT Institute.

The one thing that we constantly put a lot of energy into and have probably since the beginning of mankind is relationships. Now relationships can be very very rewarding in your search for clarity or they can be just the opposite. They can be very crippling.

Now whether they’re crippling or helpful, everybody is relating. I know we use the word ‘relationship’ to mean a certain kind of relationship, what we might call a ‘love relationship’ but in reality everyone is relating all the time. You can’t not relate. And this will be helpful for you if you can see that you are in a relationship even if you don’t have what we normally call a lover or a partner or a mate or whatever. You’re constantly relating to people, even if you run away from them you’re relating to them. This is your way to relate is to run away, to avoid; if you’re running toward people, this is your way to relate.

It’s really important for you to, if you want to use relationships as a way to help yourself become clearer and more free, is important first to see what’s behind the relationship. Now, to a large degree, we think that sex is behind relationships but actually sex plays a minor role. We use it in a different way but if you really look at it it plays a relatively minor role.

Basically the traditional relationship is a rerun of your childhood. And, even if you’re not in a relationship or you don’t have relationships or you have anti-relationships, they’re also reruns of your childhood if you’ll really look at it. And these relationships can be traced back to our first relationships with people, with others and with ourselves.

Remember that when you were born you were helpless. I have to keep coming back to that because it is so fundamental. And you were not complete at that time without the other because without the other you would have died. You needed someone to take care of you. If there was no one there to take care of you, you would have died. It’s just very simple.

So you experienced this idea that I’m not complete without the other. Without the other I’m in trouble. And this idea is basically still present. And this gives a feeling of completion that we think the other is going to give us. If only I can find the right other person, then I’ll be complete, then I’ll be safe, then I can be happy and so forth. Until then, it’s a kind of frustration because a part of us feel I need the other in order to survive and I don’t have the other so of course you have to put a lot of energy into that.

Childhood

Now it can be that in childhood you experienced that the other which you needed let’s say rejects you. But if that’s the case, then that’s your relationship. Your relationship is one of being rejected by the other which you need in order to be complete.

Now I said a moment ago that relationships are basically reruns of childhood. So if as a child your relationship was one of rejection, of being rejected, then that’s the kind of relationships you’re apt to have as an adult. You’re going to be in relationships where people reject you. You’re going to follow the old script that you wrote as a child. And it’s going to go around and around and around.

If you’re with somebody and it looks like you’re going to complete something, that something is going to change, usually it doesn’t happen, unfortunately. What changes is your lover. In other words, you get a new one. The moment you feel like something really is going to change which isn’t in the script you don’t change and you don’t change the script. You change lovers. And you start all over again because it’s safe. And it’s familiar and that’s just the way it works.

So we keep playing again and again the relationships of our childhood. And actually as a child you had more than just one relationship. You had several. You had a relationship to your mother, a relationship to your father, relationship to your older brothers and sisters, relationship to your grandmother, grandfather if they were there, relationship to an aunt or an uncle that might have lived in the house with you, or whatever.

But you had several relationships, close relatives perhaps also. And these few people were your world when you were a young child. And they formed the major people in your script. They were the major actors in your script. So there’s your mother, your father, let’s say your grandmother and your older sister. This was the family you were born into, let’s just say.

Basically everybody else in the world didn’t count. Like everybody else in the world were really minor actors: the postman, the milkman, neighbors. They weren’t really important in your life. The people who were important were your mother, your father, your grandmother, and your older sister. Now you might have loved your grandmother, hated your sister, let’s just say. You’re going to find women who represent your grandmother that you can love in that way, in that grandmotherly way. And it doesn’t mean that the person that you find to play that role is going to be an old woman. That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the case at all.

But you’ll find that there will be certain women that remind you of this relationship to your grandmother and that relationship or those relationships will be a part of your life. You’ll find other women that you’ll hate in the same way that you hated your sister and then you’ll find women that will play the role of your mother and there will be those three kinds of women in your life: your mother, your grandmother and your sister. Other women won’t be important at all. You’ll never have any kind of close relationship with any other kind of woman. They’ll just be minor actors in your life.

Friends

So if you’re a women and you are looking for a woman friend, you’re probably going to choose someone like your grandmother. And you will also find that a big part of your life are those women that somehow come into your life that you hate, playing the role of your sister. You won’t be able to ignore them. You’ll attract them. You’ll be fascinated with them, but you will pull them into your life somehow. And other women just won’t be important, just as if they’re not there. And the same with all the other members of your family- the people that you experienced as a child.

And it can be that as a child your family was visiting friends one day and there just happens to be a stranger who is present visiting the friends of your family. And it can be that this person makes a very deep impression on you. And that person becomes a main actor in your life. It isn’t necessary that these people are there constantly, but it’s whoever made an impression on you in those early years. And you’ll find that there aren’t a lot of people. It’s a relatively small number.

And now today what you’re doing is you’re looking for people to play those roles again for you. And then you’ll relate to them basically the way you were relating to the people in your childhood. Of course the most dramatic of all these are the so-called love relationships because it is from these relationships that we expect to be fulfilled, that we expect to be satisfied, that we expect to blossom. And sometimes it happens and when it happens it is because we feel like all the circumstances are right. But if we didn’t really blossom as a child, it is very difficult for us to allow ourselves to blossom as an adult. If we blossomed to some degree, relatively speaking, as a child then that can happen again as an adult through relationships.

But you have to be able to see that in most relationships the predominant feeling is “I’m not o.k. without you”, “I’m not o.k. as I am”, “I’m not complete without you”. And behind that actually is a feeling of the infant, “I won’t survive without you”. And this is what makes us needy. This is what makes us jealous. Jealousy is just a fear that the other is going to go away and leave us and we’re going to die. It has nothing to do with love. It’s fear, plain old fear. And of course it is a fear of the infant who can’t take care of himself or herself.

A good test of love in a relationship is whether your love is directed to the other. If your love is directed to the other, it’s a kind of investment. You’re investing all your love in the other so that you get something back. But the focus is on getting something back. If your focus is on giving and you are not expecting anything back, then there’s a good chance that that is love. But if you’re giving without giving anything back or expecting anything back, then probably you are not focusing your love on one person. You are simply love.

True love is like a light bulb that’s turned on. It just shines. And the love is coming from within and doesn’t depend on what is happening outside. This is a pretty hard test. Most relationships don’t pass it because in more relationships we want something from the other and our happiness depends on whether or not we get it. But if we want to be free we also have to free ourselves from these patterns because it is what it is. It is a pattern of helplessness, it is a pattern of inadequacy, it is a pattern of dependency.

Lovers

There are such things as adult relationships, I’ve heard. But they will look totally different than the average relationship because in the average relationship both partners are taking turns playing the infant. Both are thinking the other is going is going to take care of me, the other is going to make me happy, the other is going to complete me. And sometimes the patterns to two people fit so closely together that they do become in a sense one and they do in a sense complement each other and they do spend their whole lives together being happy. But usually they also spend their entire lives being infantile, playing house in a sense. But they never really get any real freedom. Both of them are like a person with only one leg and saying “I can’t walk unless my partner is here and that way I have two legs.”

And that is great. You might make a great dance team if you can call two legs a dance team. But you might develop a great act and everybody is impressed with your harmony and your synchronicity and so forth, but you still only have one leg. And you still aren’t free because you have to compromise constantly with the other. And you can do that. And if you are satisfied with that that’s fine, perfect. But once you become really aware you’ll see that this is still just an old pattern from your childhood. And if you are really going to be free it means learning to enjoy dancing in your own independence, in your own freedom. Then when you relate to somebody from freedom, from your own strength your relationship is a totally different kind of relationship. It is a relationship of respect in which you allow the other do do what the other wants to do, whatever it is, even if it means leaving you. You respect that. You don’t try to cling because when you cling, you are really saying “my life depends on you and if you leave me I am going to die.”

Now that is a pretty heavy statement to make to somebody. In the old days when passion and jealousy were considered high ideals the greatest compliment was to have someone say to you, “I can’t live without you.” But if you are a relatively adult person and someone says “I can’t without you” you realize what a drag that is. That means they are saying that unless you do what they want you to do, they are going to go kill themselves. And that is a drag. Nobody wants that responsibility.

And the game of lovers in relationships is very often a game of the hunter and the hunted. And the successful relationship consists of two people who know when to switch from the hunter to the hunted and from the hunted to the hunter. Otherwise it gets boring.

But there is always this sort of tension, that one is supposed to be running away from the other and the other is supposed to be chasing. This is what makes it fun? But this is also still just a duplication of what was happening in childhood. So if you are interested at all in true freedom, true strength, true happiness then it will be very useful for you just to look at your patterns that you have with other people– all of your ways of relating to all kinds of people. And included among those ways to relating looking specifically at your love relationships or your one to one partner relationships.

The Perfect Mother

There is a kind of relationship which on the surface doesn’t look like a rerun of your childhood but it is important just to mention. And that is your relationship with your ideal that you formed in childhood. You might have had a certain experience with your mother and out of this experience with your mother you formed the idea of the perfect mother. And later when you become an adult still looking for the perfect mother you find the perfect woman who may not be like your mother at all. She may be just the opposite of your mother. But see that it is till coming from your relationship with your mother. It is just let’s say a revolution against that. But still you will be tied to your mother as long as you are with this woman because you are tied to this ideal that you started as a child.

And then you’ll make life probably hell for this woman because then you will require her to fit this ideal. And the moment she varies from the ideal, which you call ideal, then you will accuse her of not being honest, not being fair, not being what she claimed to be and maybe she did not claim anything. Maybe you did it all yourself because that is one of the characteristics of falling in love is we look for someone who more or less fits out script and we project the whole script on them whether they like it or not. If we want to think great things about them then we think great things about them and totally ignore the reality. And this is what we call falling in love. It is like suddenly somebody comes along that totally fits our patterns or almost totally fits our patterns. And then we give up seeing the real person and we fall in love with our old ideal.

And then it comes as a shock six months later when we start slowly slowly seeing the person that really is there. And then we accuse them of lying to us and being false and putting on false airs and all that sort of thing. But actually the main problem was that we projected onto them. They had just enough qualities to qualify and then all the other qualities we gave to them because we wanted them to have them and then felt disappointed later on when we discovered that actually they didn’t have them. And then we are angry and hurt and disappointed and we feel cheated.

But all of this again can be traced back to what we experienced as a child. We all put a lot of energy into relationships. Even if you haven’t actually been with a lover let’s say for months or for years, you are still relating and you are relating according to a pattern. And you can free yourself from those patterns so that you can really genuinely relate to people, relating as an adult. Because you have to see that one of the most important things when you relate to other people as you did when you were a child, this keeps you regressed. It keeps you childish. You can’t grow up and hang on to these old patterns. And the old patterns will keep you in those childish attitudes. That is just the way it is. And being in a childish attitude means also that at the subconscious level you feel weak and helpless and dependent.

So it is going to take all your power away from you. You may feel strong as long as a substitute mommy or a substitute daddy is there but at a real deeper level you’re going to still be feeing dependent. And when you can see that you are not dependent that it is alright for the other to leave you any moment and if you really love them and they want to leave then you’re going want for them to leave if that’s what they want and if you love them. But any kind of holding on your part indicates that you feel you need them and that need in turn represents a kind of dependency, a kind of helplessness.

This is not very easy for us to look at in our culture because for one thing religions have made much of relationships, have established the whole institution of marriage based on this sort of thing so it is very difficult for us also to separate one thing from the other. And I’ve only briefly mentioned sex which comes in. But sex is actually a different issue which we won’t get into today. But you can have a sexual relationship as a child as with the mother or you can have a sexual relationship as an adult with another adult. But the sex itself as such is not the issue in relationships. It sometimes seems a way, seems an excuse; it is part of the game, yes; but it is not the real thing. There is a kind of you might even call it sometimes sexual energy. It is just energy of aliveness which attracts the baby to the mother or the baby to any sort of alive warm human being and this could be called sexual but at that age it is not usually what we would call sexual. It is just energy, it is life energy being attracted to other life energy.

Sex

But sex is a different issue and of course when you put the two of them together then you multiply the complexities and sometimes the fun but like I say that’s another issue.

From experience I know that when I say that relationships are basically reruns of your relationships from childhood many people feel threatened. They’re like one-legged dancers feeling like I’m pulling out the other leg from under them and they don’t really like to hear that. But that is the way it is so the best thing to do is just to openly, honestly look at the way you relate to people and especially the way you relate to close friends, to lovers, people who really play an important part in your life and just see how much of the way you relate is actually a repeat or a pattern, a rerun of the way you related to people when you were a child and when you were an infant. And if you want to you can free yourself from those things. If you don’t want to then you can enjoy them–either way. But let yourself have that choice, that’s the main thing.

Do what you do from awareness and not just as a pattern, not just as a habit because habits always if you use them with unawareness will make you slaves, keep you from really being free. If you can use your patterns with awareness, consciously, then that is something different.

But our relationships to people are a part of our relationship to our self. You can’t have a true relationship to yourself unless you are clear about your relationship to other people. So you owe it to yourself somehow to become clear about relating because it is through relating as a child that you have the feeling about who you are, whether you are lovable, whether you are worthwhile, whether you are worthy, whether it is all right to be free, whether it is all right to be creative, to be joyous. All this comes from other people.

So if you really want to discover yourself it is really important to see how much of what you think you are, who you think you are, has come through your relationships to other people in your infancy and childhood.

So…anybody like to argue?

Discussion

Question: “I almost said I’m scared but that’s not true. Actually I am very curious. I have been without a partner for quite a long time and I have had the experience of these dependent relationships a few times, long times, short times, and now I see that I am in the process of, now I start connecting more deeply again with one person.

I don’t know how far it goes but I feel I connect truly and I am more open to give and take and also I see so many things popping up and I see I could fall right back in to it again and I just catch myself and ‘oops’ and go back with myself and get myself some space and look at it and breathe and say wow that was just a …(?). And it is every day, I mean every moment it is like the old thing or something new and it’s like hot and cold. I feel really very excited about it.

It is like as if it is not possible to make a decision like I want this love relationship. It is not possible. It is just that it has to be, it is work every day. And I don’t see that it is changing. I cannot say from tomorrow on I will be in a deep love relationship and it will be forever. It is like every day, every morning, I wake up. I have been dreaming and I have to say to myself, ‘well it is today. He is not my daddy even if he looks like him and his son is not my brother and I don’t need to be jealous about my brother. Every day.”

Jeru: “O.k. It is work. But this is also the way to get clarity. And you do bring up something which I wanted to mention and didn’t at least not so clearly. And that is relationships can really be a tool for you, if you will use them that way, to see your patterns, to see what you cling to.

And two people can help each other tremendously if they will learn to be open and just help each other see those patterns, help each other become free of those patterns. So I am not suggesting for example by any means that you just simply drop relationships. Rather the best thing to do is to go into them but with as much awareness as you can manage, not with the idea of clinging to each other but helping each other or allowing the other to help you see where you are stuck, to see where you are somehow crippling yourself by feeling dependent on the other, and learning to give the other more and more freedom and learning to take the freedom that the other gives you.

That way respect grows. And neediness begins to disappear. You help each other truly become an adult. And then you have a really beautiful adult friendship. Who knows where it will go to but at least it can be very very rewarding, very nourishing.

Question: “I keep telling myself there is another way. I even got it from a master but I may have misunderstood him, in that if you have had lots of relationships and you have had a lot of time in practice and you see your child in every relationship and so you decide “I don’t want those scripts anymore” so I’ll just pull away and take the path of meditation or whatever. And some people can make progress on their solitary path. Perhaps they’re afraid but if they have seen that everything leads to chaos, why not choose the solitary path of peace and …(?) just when you can?

Jeru: “There’s nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with that at all. The only thing that would be a little bit tricky is whether or not at a deeper level, the subconscious level, you still do feel dependent on the other. That would be the thing you would have to check because if you do then it is like running away from something that you really want, settling for something that seems to be second best, then rationalizing that it is what you really wanted.

On the surface it can look exactly the same. Someone who has, let’s say, transcended dependency and is relatively satisfied to be alone and that doesn’t mean not being with people but not being with any one single person, can look exactly like someone who is afraid of relationships or who wants relationship but feels like it is never going to work out so why don’t I drop the whole mess but actually at a deeper level still wanting it. So that is something that everybody just has to look at, to see whether or not the child within them still wants someone but because they’re afraid of being hurt or afraid of being disappointed or afraid it is never going to work out anyway or whatever, they turn their back on that.

It is a kind of resignation, rather than freedom. And that is something that everybody has to answer for themselves and you answer that basically by looking into the subconscious. The conscious mind doesn’t know these things but the subconscious has a very precise idea about it all. And this does happen very often in mediation, that people go into meditation as a kind of sour grapes thing and that is why you get a lot of sour meditators. They say ‘well who wanted it anyway you know, who wants to be successful anyway, who wants to be happy anyway, who wants to famous anyway, who wants to have whatever?’

So then they go into meditation but it doesn’t really work for them. And, again, when they are sitting they may look just somebody who is sitting there because it is the greatest joy in their life but inside one person is squirming and discontented and the other is flowering. So, from the outside you may not tell the difference at all and it is up to every individual to look inside and see actually why they are doing what they are doing.

Question: “I grew up in a family where I was surrounded by men. I had a father and two brothers and with my mother was the only woman. And I find today that I have very beautiful and deep friendships with women, women my age or women younger, and I cannot with what you explained about it being you know a kind of a reproduction or a continuation from the special relationships you had in childhood because I don’t recall having any relationship with women outside of my mother and these women don’t at all seem to have anything to do with my mother for the most part.

Jeru: “You would have to look into the subconscious for that. It has nothing to do with younger or older. But my guess is that if you will look you will see that in your relationships with women either they represent your mother, whatever that relationship was, or they represent the incidental women in your life as a child. In other words, somehow not so important.

And it isn’t only the mother. It might be somebody else in your family that you related to as a child, other woman I mean. And like I say it doesn’t have to be someone that’s there all the time; it could be just someone that you met once but you felt so relaxed, so open, or something that you’re always sort of looking for that kind of a woman again and finding her. But I would suggest using the pendulum. Make a list of the women in your life what have been somehow important to you and then just ask to what degree does this woman represent someone from my childhood?

To what degree is she representing or reminding me of someone from my childhood? And include in that list your ideal woman, your ideal mother that you formed in childhood. Because on the surface people can look very different but at the subconscious level the subconscious is seeing something similar there. Maybe it is their attitude about you, the way they accept you; maybe it is a certain quality that they have that is important for you. The other qualities may be totally different. But the main thing is that you would actually have to check out the subconscious, the subconscious level, that is where it is really and truly happening.”

Question: (cont.): “It has nothing to do with the sex(?) because I found out that you were my mother and ??? was also my mother.”

Jeru: “See. I bet her mother didn’t have a beard, you see, So it is a quality that we look for, not necessarily the outer features. And sometimes it can be the outer features, sometimes that is what does it. But you just have to look to see where it is coming from. You may be attracted to someone because they smell a certain way. You may never suspect that it is just the smell. Or the way a person walks may turn you on or remind you of an old familiar pattern or whatever. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a photograph that does it.”

Question: ” Once you realize that basically you are relating to others through these old kind of movies, could you say something about communicating from that space once you have seen that pattern, communicate in that new light?”

Jeru: “Well, one thing you could do is you could say to the other when you want something from the other, “My four year old would like this, or my four year old gets angry when you do this or my four year old feels threatened when you don’t do this and blah, blah, blah. If you really want to go for it you can call your lover “daddy” or if your lover doesn’t represent daddy like hers perhaps then you can call your male lover “mommy” and let yourself exaggerate to some degree what it is you want, let yourself be childish about it at times.

It is best to have some kind of agreement about this, however. Like Monday to Wednesdays and Fridays you can play mommy and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays your partner can play daddy. And then just allow yourself in a way to feel childish if the other agrees to that, to play the daddy and you play the little girl and then just let those roles be there like that and then see what it feels like and see what you do once you realize it’s o.k. to be a little girl.

See what you demand, see what you want, see what you give, see what you expect. And then other days you be the mommy, strong and capable and all that sort of thing and let your partner be the little boy, let him allow his childish side to come out, his dependency side to come out. That is one way to do it. I mean it is a bit shattering but it can also be fun if you do it lighthearted and you have nothing better to do because in your relationships you are doing that anyway but you put so much energy into trying to appear adult and trying to appear rational and trying to avoid responsibility and that sort of thing so often.

So it really is easier if you can recognize this in each other and play it as a game and not take it very seriously. And it is fine if you play the little girl on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and let him be the daddy and tell you bedtime stories or whatever it is that comes out for you. That will be the thing. Just give yourself permission to express that which is there. You don’t have to pretend. It is not a matter of pretending to be a little girl, but rather just expressing what is there, saying what you want, and saying what you don’t want, how you don’t want to have any responsibility basically for everything.

You want the other to take that responsibility because after all I am just a little girl and you are the big daddy. And then the next day do the same for your partner, reverse that. You take care of your partner, you play the role of mommy and let your partner be the little boy and see what comes from that.

Question: “The problem with that seems to be that changes so fast like my girl friend wants to be a little girl sometimes and I say ‘fine, go for it’ and as soon as she starts doing it my four year old goes ‘I don’t like this’. He listens to her for a little while and the whole time he is going ‘when is she going to be finished?’ So he complains like immediately, as soon as she wants to regress, he agrees and says ‘go for ii, do it’ and then he gets bummed out.

Jeru: “It sounds like you have a contract in which you are allowed to be the child all the time and then when she wants to be the child just for a break, you know, that your child can only handle that for two or three seconds. And if you see that, that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that.”

Question: (cont.): “She doesn’t feel fine with it.”

Jeru: “Well, she doesn’t feel fine with it but she does. She does. She does feel fine with it, otherwise she wouldn’t be doing it. She’ll find in her childhood a similar pattern of some kind. Now it might sound like in her childhood that she was playing father but that’s not, or excuse me mother, but that’s not really the case because her relationship probably is with the father if you represent her father who himself wanted to be taken care of, maybe her mother was taking care of her father, you understand, allowing her father to be the four year old and her relationship to her father might have been one of having to let him have his way in order to get any attention from him.

Even so she will find if she looks she will find a pattern there and part of her pattern will be frustration, not liking it and yet that’s what she went through and that is what she is going to repeat until she becomes free of it. So part of her pattern will be the frustration of trying to have someone give her attention even though she is doing what she wants to do. Do you follow that? In other words, her pattern probably is she had to play second fiddle, she had to place her own desires and so forth in second place in order to get any attention.

Maybe she in a sense flirted with her daddy playing the little girl but at the same time the real thing would be that she had the feeling she couldn’t really truly be herself with him and that he demanded whatever it was he was demanding. I am just saying these words but I am sure if she looks she will find a pattern there and even though now she says she doesn’t like it it is a familiar pattern and it is easy for her to be in it. If you should turn around by some miracle and totally drop the four year old and totally be there for her and just say ‘whatever you want I’ll do it, whatever you, you know, you just say the word and I’ll do it, I’ll take care of it. You can be totally childish and I’m totally adult for you.

I am the big strong daddy and I’m giving you total freedom.’ You do that for a couple of days and she would lose interest in you totally. Now we’re going to get the other side.”

Jeru: “…I have had the opposite case. And I was running away. I was working hard to get into that position and as he was like that, he was a real daddy …I am liking it.” J.: “This is exactly the way it is. The moment you come out of the pattern you feel uncomfortable and you say about this guy that you have been trying to train to be with perfect daddy when he finally the perfect daddy, then you say “he’s not the man I thought he was. He has changed. He is not what he used to be.” And then you go out and say “now what I want is I want a real man, not one of these fuddy-duddies that let’s me do what I want to do.” It is good that you’ve seen that.”

Question: “There is really no clear absolute way of doing this. You just have to work with it basically.”

Jeru: “You mean is there like one set formula that you can follow?”

Question: (cont): “Not one set formula but I mean …clear, I know basically that all the patterns are different in some ways and yet they are all the same in other ways so I’m … means you can basically use one way.”

Jeru: “Yes, I understand your question. The patterns can be totally different in all kinds of people but there is one thing that they all have in common. They are all based on the dream. They are all based on memory. They are not based on the here and now. They are not based on truth. They are not based on reality. In other words, all of these things are still coming from the dream that is happening at the subconscious level, based on your feelings of inadequacy at birth.

So, the knife that can cut through all of these things, it doesn’t matter what patterns they are, the knife that can cut through all of them is focusing on the here and now on the one hand but allowing the memory to come to the surface so that you can see that it is just a memory, which is the same with everything. The whole subject of relationships for somebody who is on the Path is no different than any other subject. It is still a matter of trying to see the difference between memory, how it is affecting you, how it is creating patterns, and the truth, the reality of the here and now. And in the here and now you are not a helpless infant.

In your memory you are. In the here and now you just live and experience that which is happening. And if another person is in your presence then you try to experience them if you are an adult. You just experience them then in the here and now. You see their beauty, you see their intelligence, you see their harmony and you see, if you are really in the here and now that they are a divine being, a divine creature, and that you are too. And you also see that you don’t need that person for survival. Otherwise you wouldn’t be alive right now probably, you see.

But you have to understand that at the subconscious level what you are dreaming is that you need the other and that your idea of the other has become fixed by your experiences of infancy and childhood. It can even be talking about the mother and the father many people have very strong attitudes about let’s say men based on the way the doctor if it was a male doctor handled them at birth. This can be a very very strong influence. That is the strongest moment of your life and if you got some male person handling you as if you are a bag of beans or something, slapping you around and all that kind of thing then it can be a certain attitude that you will have towards men. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be your father but definitely experiences from your infancy and your childhood. But the secret will be and for those of you who sort of consider yourself on the Path, people who are trying to find out who you really are, understand that relationships in that sense are no different from anything else. They definitely can be used because relationships represent our deepest attitudes about ourselves. That is the important thing. The way we relate to other people says something about us.

That is the most significant thing and if your relationship indicates that you need the other then that means you are saying about yourself ‘I can’t take care of myself. I am not o.k. as I am. I am not complete as I am. So see that the important thing about relationships is that it tells you something about your relationship with yourself.”

The following talk was recorded live by Jeru Kabbal, and is part of a Clarity Process training offered by the APT Institute.

Truth is not in memory

This morning I would like to review the basic principles that we are trying to get acquainted with. I know at this stage in your process, it’s very easy for you to get totally wrapped up in working on your movie. And that is as it should be. But at the same time, remember that it is a movie, remember that it is fantasy. The reason why we are working on it so much, is so that you can see that it is fantasy. We are not working on it because it is so important. We are not working on it because it is going to give you the key to life, or the key to happiness, because it won’t do that. You are never going to wake up by looking at your movie. You are never going to discover truth digging around in memory. If you haven’t discovered truth during the original experience, going back to it in memory certainly isn’t going to be any more illuminating.

So don’t make the mistake of thinking that when you are working on the movie that you are working on truth – because you are not. We have to work on the movie so that we can start separating the movie from reality. This is what we are trying to do – to help you separate the movie from reality, so that when you are experiencing something, you can learn to ask yourself, “Am I experiencing this because of something that is real, or am I experiencing this because of the movie?”

The difference between movie and reality

Once you start seeing the difference between the movie and reality, you will start separating them. You will start seeing that the movie is ridiculous. You will also start seeing that reality is nourishing, intelligent, and supportive. When we look at the movie, we are going back and looking at a dream that you had, a dream that you still believe in. And we are looking at the dream so that you can stop believing in it, so that you can recognize that it is a dream, and that now you can let go of it.

When the dream happened, it was real. But as you get older, even those things that you think happened are less and less real, because they are more and more a projection of your memories. As you get older, you are projecting more and more memories onto a given experience, so that after a while, you are not really experiencing anything, you are just experiencing your memories projected onto that experience.

Whatever was real that actually happened, once it has happened, has also disappeared. That occurrence, that experience, is gone forever. You can’t do anything about any experience except one that is happening right now. The only thing that you can do anything about is now. You cannot change your childhood. You don’t even have a childhood. You have memories of a childhood, but the memories of the childhood are not the childhood. If you are allowing these memories, which are just like photographs, to make you miserable, then to be very blunt, you are stupid. You are torturing yourself unnecessarily. This may be difficult for you to digest, and I appreciate that. But some of you are at the stage now where you can start making that distinction, and that is why I want to make it clear to you. The only thing to gain by going back into memory is to see that it is not real. If you go back into the memory with the purpose of changing it, with the purpose of becoming a better person, with the purpose of becoming better adjusted, with the purpose of understanding why you have done the things that you have done, or why you are the way you are – if you get caught up in that, then what you are actually doing is believing in the dream, and you are perpetuating it.

Be aware of the fine line

There is a fine line someplace between going into the dream so that you can see that it is not real, and continuing to believe in the dream after a certain point. So don’t worry about it, but I want you to be aware of it. You are going into your memories so that you can gradually see that these memories are all fantasy, and that you are leading your life according to fantasy, not reality. The more you can start seeing these memories, and seeing that they are fantasies, and the more you compare them to the here and now, to reality, the more you will start gravitating toward the here and now, and the less juice you are going to put into your memories.

It is literally like having a dream in which you do something strange. You wake up the next day and you want to figure out why you did that strange thing in your dream. The best thing to see is that it was a dream, and that you don’t have to do anything about it. Just let it be, and focus on what is real. So your emphasis should gradually start shifting. For some of you it is still too early, but some of you are ready to do that. Your emphasis should start shifting more and more to the question, “What is real right now?” and less and less to, “What did my mother do to me,” or “What did my father not do to me,” and so forth.

You can’t change the past

You are not going to change that which has already happened. You can’t change it, you can’t touch it, and you can’t even look at it. The only thing you can look at are the photographs that you took at that time. The photographs are not life, your memories are not life. Don’t let your memories torture you. Your subconscious believes that these memories are actually happening now.

Let me repeat that. Your subconscious believes that your memories are not memories, but that they are actually happening right now. That means that your subconscious actually believes that you are being born right now, unless you have done some work on this. Your subconscious actually feels that your father is criticizing you because you have broken the rules of toilet training. Your subconscious is actually believing that your mother has totally abandoned you for that new, ugly baby in the other room. Your subconscious actually believes that you still live in a weak and helpless body. Your subconscious still believes that your survival depends on someone else taking care of you.

Your subconscious may still believe in all of these things, but you don’t believe them with your conscious mind. With your conscious mind you can see the difference between fantasy and reality. You can see the difference between memory and the here and now. Now you have to help the subconscious see this. It’s not going to happen automatically. Somehow the subconscious has to understand this also. But let’s be clear about the task. The task is that we are trying to help the subconscious learn the difference between fantasy and reality, the difference between memories and the here and now. Only then can you start coming out of the world of fantasy – sometimes called the ego, sometimes called the mind, sometimes called the past – it is all the same.

Waking up

What the mystics call “waking up,” is waking up from this dream created by your memories. Waking up means to stop living in those memories as if they are real, and beginning to be in the present moment. It is only in the present moment that you are going to discover truth. Truth can only be in the present moment, because there is only the present moment, there isn’t any other moment. You are not going to discover truth by looking into memories, and you are not going to discover it in the future, because just as there is no past, there is also no future. And as you start doing this, as you start seeing the difference between memories and reality, you are going to gradually stop living in hell, and start getting glimpses of heaven. Right now you are afraid. You live with a constant level of tension. So constant that you don’t even notice it. But fear is there always. And the fear is created by the dream, and nothing else. It is not created by reality. The reality of the moment is not frightening you. It’s the fact that your subconscious still believes that you are a helpless creature, totally dependent. And this is what is creating fear.

The movie is not relevant

As you start seeing that this whole fear movie is not real, it is not relevant. You don’t even have to deal with it. You just have to see that it is not real. Stop giving it juice, stop living in it, stop feeding it. And then you will find that you have energy, that you have time, that you have enthusiasm for the here and now. You can’t force yourself to be in the here and now if your subconscious is totally uptight with fear. It doesn’t work. So any attempt to be in the here and now, without dealing with the movie, is very seldom successful.

And attempting to deal only with the movie is also very seldom successful, because you are not giving yourself anything positive. You are dealing only with the movie, you are dealing only with horrors, only with tension. You are not giving yourself anything that is nourishing. It feels like you are only taking away, and taking away. But if you can start balancing your efforts between looking at the movie, and looking at reality, you will find that both things get easier. It gets easier for you to look at the movie, and see that it is a movie, and it also gets easier for you to be in the here and now.

Balance

So keep that balance. I know that it is very easy, once you start getting into regression work, to get immersed in the movie, and to think that is life. But it isn’t life. Always remember to open your eyes and compare the movie to the here and now. That’s where life is – here and now. So again, remember our direction. Remember what we are trying to do. Even though we may not have reached certain levels, our direction and our way of working is to look at the movie, bring the movie up, including the repressed parts of the movie – bringing those parts up to the surface so that we can see them – and comparing those movies with reality, so that we can see that the dream is just a fantasy. When we see that with the conscious mind, and we use the conscious mind to help the subconscious to also see that, we re-educate the computer, we reprogram – or even better, deprogram the computer. The more we do that, the more we are then available to the here and now, because all of our energy is not wrapped up in fear and tension created by these memories.

This moment is all you have

So keep this in mind, regardless of what we are doing. Remember that we are working on the movie so that you can see the movie for what it is, so that you can start becoming clearer and clearer about the fact that the movie is not real, that the memories are just photographs of something that no longer exists. And you will become clearer and clearer about the fact that what you have is this moment. That is all you have. You don’t have anything else. If you don’t have it right now, you don’t have it. So you might as well start living with what you have right now, being open to what you have. And as you become less tense, and less afraid, you will open up to the moment, you will open up to Existence, and you will start expanding. Your consciousness will expand automatically. You will be more connected with Existence. You will be more nourished by the mystery. You will be more one with Existence. And you will start understanding more and more what the mystics have been talking about through the ages.

Stop giving them juice

The main thing is for you to divorce yourself from your memories. Instead of believing in them, divorce yourself from them. They are harmless, and you don’t have to be afraid of them. But stop giving them juice. Your memories have power only to the degree that you give them juice. If you will stop believing in them, then they will stop having any kind of power over you. They have no energy of their own, just like a photograph has no energy of its own. It is only your memory, your imagination, that can turn that photograph into something frightening.

Our work has two parts

Remember that what we are doing has two parts. We are working to allow the memories to come to the surface, and that is part one. Then we are comparing these memories to the here and now, so that we can see that the memories are not real, and that we actually don’t need to do anything about them. We can do such things as transformation techniques, but this is just a part of the initial process. We do the transformation technique to lighten the load, to see certain movies more clearly, but we are not transforming these old memories because we want to live in memories. That is not the reason why we do that.

Again, try to keep these two points in mind. As you work on yourself, don’t get caught up in only working on the movie. This is quite common, and very easy to do, but I am advising you very strongly to always balance your work on the movie with openness to the here and now. It’s like shaking yourself loose from a nightmare. Don’t get caught up in the nightmare. Look at it, that’s fine, but don’t let it hook you. Whenever you are feeling miserable, or upset, or confused, or whatever, don’t blame it on reality. It’s your movie. Look at the movie, but then balance it out by comparing it to the here and now.

It’s your computer

Question: “The four year old, is he a memory? I get confused with the technique, because every time I feel depressed or something, I say, “Okay, how old am I now?” and I am referring to my four year old, and I am aware that I am talking to my memory.”

Jeru: That is actually what you are doing. What we call the four year old, are all of the experiences in the form of memories. Not the real experiences, but the memories that are filed away in the computer. This computer has been programmed by an infant, by a child. So the computer seems to have a certain mentality. The two year old put into the computer, “Never do such-and-such.” Then the three year old put into the computer, “Always do such-and-such.” At three and a half you put in a different program, “Always avoid such-and-such, and pretend to do the opposite.” In other words, the programs are there.

Your computer has the mentality of an infant, of a child. Different programs have different mentalities, and they were put there at different ages. But the sum result of it is that your computer acts like a child, and that is what we call the four year old. It’s your computer that is afraid to do this, it’s your computer that is afraid to that. It’s your computer that always does this. Because of programs put there by the child, by the infant that you used to be.

Programs are memories

But now these programs are themselves memories. So what you are dealing with, when you deal with the four year old, is memory. The computer itself is a very real thing. These programs which are in the computer are also very real just like any program in a computer can be real. But the reasons for putting those programs into the computer don’t exist any longer.

Let’s say you have a computer that makes your coffee for you in the morning, turns the radio on, turns the heater on, puts your clothes out for you, the whole business. Then you can have a heart attack and be totally dead. And if no one turns that computer off, it goes on making coffee every morning, even though there is no one there to drink it. And that is what has happened with our computers. We are still following programs that don’t make any sense. Because there is no baby there any longer. That baby is totally gone, it doesn’t exist any more. But you will find the computer full of programs put there by that baby, and those programs are leading your life today. Those programs tell you when to be afraid, and that is the problem.

You can use the mind to clear the mind

Question: “When I’m having a problem with enjoying reality, I refer to the memories to remind myself that I am not actually having a problem, that it is a memory of a problem. But I guess I am having trouble going back to the memory, and using the memory to try to get back to reality.”

Jeru: We are using the memory. We are using the mind to clear up the mind. That is the only thing you can do if you are going to work on yourself. You use the mind to clear up the mind. It’s the only thing you can do if you are going to try to do it yourself. If you depend on Existence to do it for you, that is a different story – you fall out of an airplane and maybe get a Satori on the way down. But if you are going to do it yourself, the only thing you can do is use the mind. Because you are deciding to do these things, and whatever you decide, your mind is deciding. You can even decide that you will go to a guru, or go to a master. It is still your mind doing this. And it is your mind agreeing to stay with that master, or not to stay with that master. So the only thing that you can do to become clear is to use your mind. And that is what we are doing, including working with memories. The computer is part of the mind. And there is also the conscious mind that is not necessarily part of the computer.

Hardware and software

Question: “Is the computer only those memories and those programs?”

Jeru: No. The computer is a computer. What you put in the computer is something else, that is what we call software. Hardware is not the same as software. If you are going to have a computer, it doesn’t matter whether you have memories or don’t have memories. Whether you take the memories out, or not, you are still going to have a computer. After you get enlightened, you are still going to have a computer. You will also still have memories. But those memories will be without fear. You will see those memories just as information that you can use, but you won’t identify with them, you won’t believe in them, and you won’t think that they are you.

Question: “What is the sense of having a computer without having the software, because if the computer doesn’t make the coffee or put the toast in the toaster, then what is the sense of having a computer that is not functioning?”

Jeru: Well, you will have to ask God about that. I really can’t answer why we even have computers. You can have the software in the computer, and there is nothing wrong with that. The only thing that is wrong with that is when you think that you are the software. That is the problem, when you think that you are the memories. You are believing in the memory, and you are encouraging false memories to continue as if they are real. You are continuing to give juice and life to programs that are not useful to you.

The map is not the territory

There is nothing wrong with the computer, and there is nothing wrong with the software – if you are in charge of the software, if you are the boss, and not the other way around. The way it is now, the software tells you what to do. I am not saying that all memories are useless, I am saying that all memories are dead. I already used the example of talking about where to go for a picnic. You can get out the map, and look on the map, and say, “Oh, there is a nice place for a picnic,”and draw a circle around it. You could put the map on the floor of your living room, and have the picnic where the circle is.

But you don’t do that, you use the map to go and find the reality. The map is like a memory of reality, it is not really reality, it is like a photograph of reality. So you can use that to go and find the reality of where you have your picnic. But the problem is confusing the map with reality, confusing memories with reality, that is the difference. That is what we want to learn. Memories are okay, as long as you let them be memories, and don’t give them life, thinking that this is something real that you have to deal with.

The problem doesn’t exist

Question: “Yesterday I experienced in the intuitive dialogue that my four year old is pretty much with me all the time, and she is much smarter than my adult. Then we had the positive fantasy transformation, and a memory came up of when I was a child. I was playing in the garden and having fun with the other kids. When I came home my mother said, “You are not going to have anything to eat tonight. You can go to bed without dinner.” I was very hungry, and I went to my father and I said, “Please daddy, would you give me something to eat.” I was very attentive in this moment, and he looked at me and he said, “Yes, sure, I will give you something to eat.” And he did not hit me. For me, this experience was very beautiful, and it gave me a lot of strength. So it shocked me this morning when you said that what you get out of your memories is not nourishing, and is not positive. Because I experienced it in the other way. It was very nourishing to me.”

Jeru: Yes, but at the time that you did it, it wasn’t a memory. And now that you remember it, you are living in dead memories. It was nourishing then, but now it is only nourishing because you are trying to overcome a problem that you don’t have now. You are not a little girl now, and your survival does not depend on somebody else giving you food. The problem doesn’t exist, therefore the solution to it is irrelevant. And what you probably have done is you created a strategy out of that, and it is only useful as long as you believe that you have a problem. And you can only believe that you have a problem as long as you live in memory.

There are no adults here

Question: “It seems to happen that when I have a strategy, the problem disappears. For example, my problem is that when I go to lunch or dinner, I don’t dare to speak. Because when I was a child, if I said something, I got punished. And this appears each time. And what I am doing now, is that I just look at what other people are doing. I think that if I discover a strategy of when I can talk, and how to talk, the problem will disappear. ”

Jeru: That’s the way the mind works, that is true. And that is the way we do a lot of things. But if you can understand that you learned this attitude because you were helpless and dependent, and you had to obey, and if you can now look and see that you are not helpless, then it all becomes irrelevant. If you are trying to approach it the way you just described, you are still believing that you have to do it right, you have to fit in with what other people are telling you. In other words, you still keep yourself an infant, with that attitude. The best thing to do is to look and see that your computer thinks that you are a helpless infant, surrounded by adults. In the first place, don’t worry about it, because there are no adults here. So you don’t have to worry about what the other adults are doing. But go to the heart of that. Really go to the heart of it. Why were you afraid of your parents?

Question: “My four year old wants to tell me this. Just listen and watch, and realize that it is all fantasy and memory. But I think when I go a little bit forward, I can see the picture of the fantasy more clearly.”

Jeru: Definitely do that. But the process will consist of looking to see where the root of this attitude comes from, and the root of it comes from your fear of your parents. You were afraid of them because your survival depended on them, because you were helpless. It’s that simple. And you felt, “They have to like me, or else they won’t take care of me, and I will die. So I have to do what they tell me.” In addition, at that age you are very impressionable, very vulnerable. And they told you that children should be seen and not heard, and to obey what they tell you. All of this is coming because of the fact that you were born helpless. And you are not helpless now.

Don’t repress memories

Question: “I know this with my conscious mind, but what I want to know is, is it better to experience this helplessness? When I am down there, and I just start seeing things that are very uncomfortable to me, I really experience feeling helpless. Is this better for the process?”

Jeru: Absolutely. Let me say that to all of you. Don’t repress these memories. Don’t let anything I am saying be turned around in your mind to permit you to repress the memories. I haven’t said anything to indicate that you should do that. But I know that the mind, because these things are repressed, doesn’t want to get into them. So the moment we start talking about the here and now, part of your mind wants to say, “Oh, that is just a memory, that is just a movie, so I don’t want to go into it. I will just focus on the here and now.” Don’t repress. The best way to get rid of these old memories is to let them come to the surface. They can’t stand the light of day. So let them come up. Don’t repress them.

Anger is a program

Question: “When I am angry, and I express myself, I have the feeling that I dump shit all over people. And if I do it with my pendulum, for example, if I try to be aware of where it is coming from, sometimes it fluctuates, but I repress. Because still some of it is inside.”

Jeru: This is another matter – what you do with your anger. If you can be aware that it is coming from a memory, then you are not so apt to dump it on somebody else. You can always say, “My four year old is very angry right now.” That is perfectly acceptable. Or you can say, “Right now I am going to be a four year old,” and you can start screaming. That is basically alright. As long as you take responsibility for it. That is the main thing, for you to take responsibility for your feelings. You may have to compromise at certain times. But then the anger is there anyway, it’s not going to go away – it’s a program. So you can always get in touch with it. You are not going to lose it.

Question: “But I have experienced that I lose it.”

Jeru: No, you don’t lose it. The program is still there. If somebody the next day does the same thing, you will be angry again all over.

Reprogramming is very useful

Question: “So far, I clearly experience that when I see a program, I can see that it is gone at this moment. And I also see what I can do now that would be in this moment. But it would not be just being fresh and new – it’s basically the opposite of the program, that which I can experience as nourishing. Let’s say I had the fear of the positive. I would now allow myself to take certain chances, and I would now allow myself to be happy. So it’s not so much letting Existence nourish me, it’s more like me putting something into Existence. It’s more like a reprogramming, and that is fun. And I am really enjoying it. But when I get into this deprogramming, the world looks very gray.”

Jeru: That is fine. You are at that stage where the reprogramming is very useful. But if you keep reprogramming, your programs will get shorter and shorter, and you will find that you are in the moment anyway. And if Existence right now looks dull, it’s because you are really not experiencing it yet. That’s okay, you can’t force these things. You can move at a certain pace, and this is probably the way it is with most of you right now. It’s fine to reprogram. It’s fine if you have this program that you are not allowed to do such-and-such, that you go ahead and do those things.

Deprogramming

Later on in the course we will get into what we call experiential reprogramming or deprogramming. This is where you take certain patterns that you have, and you consciously do the opposite. You work it out with your computer, so that your computer is not afraid of it anymore, and then you actually do the opposite, so that you can feel that it is actually fine, that the world doesn’t come to an end just because I have done such-and-such. And that is very useful. We will be getting into that in a more organized way later on in the course.

But ultimately, you will start discovering that the more you relax, and the more you open up to the mystery of life, the bigger the show gets. And then Existence itself is constantly entertaining you, nourishing you, and supporting you. You will see that. That can’t happen right away because you are still in the movie. And that is fine. So it is helpful for you to give yourself permission to do the opposite, especially with the fear of the positive. But the time will also come when you won’t have to push yourself that way. It will come to you by itself, without forcing anything.

Regression work

Question: “I have a question about regression work. Since yesterday, I was regressed a lot according to the pendulum, and I was slowly feeling more disconnected, like nobody could reach me, and lost. And this morning, somehow I managed to pinpoint it to being in the birth canal. Is it necessary for me to go into regression and re-experience that, or is it enough to just see that’s what is happening.”

Jeru: Well, as I said before, it’s good for you to experience these things, realizing that you are experiencing a memory. Go into that, especially if it’s the birth canal. The earlier the memory, the better it is for you to go into it.

Question: “And do you have a reprogramming for jealousy?”

Jeru: Just trace jealousy to its root, and see what jealousy feeds on. It feeds on the fact that you think you are dependent, that you feel that you are helpless. Once you realize that you are an independent human being, then you can’t be panic-stricken because somebody walks out the door to go to the bathroom. And you can’t be panic-stricken because some woman that you like says hello to somebody else. It isn’t going to be relevant, once you realize that you can take care of yourself, once your subconscious realizes that.

Question: “I had an experience where I did a regression, and I really got into feelings, both negative and positive. And since that time, she is having incredible difficulty letting me experience both – like really going into the pain, or else really going into the positive. Is this something I should try to work out with the pendulum, or should I try to talk to her with intuitive dialogue?”

Jeru: Are you saying that she is afraid to go into memories?

Question: “Yes, she doesn’t want to experience the really young ones right now.”

Jeru: Okay. So she believes that these memories are real, and she doesn’t want to deal with them. In a case like that, always go back to the pendulum questions about memories being real (memories as photographs) and help her remember that all these memories are actually harmless, they are just photographs. And it will be easier. Any time that you feel like your computer doesn’t want to get into certain memories, then try to help the computer to understand that those memories are just photographs. They are not real life, and they are not really happening now. So it’s fine to go into them totally…

What we usually call a relationship is the artificial need in the mind for the other. When using the word “relationship,” we talk about a one-to-one type of relationship, usually male-female. This is coming from the mind.

Then there’s the whole phenomenon of sex. Sex is an instinct of the body, an urge of the body. An urge, not a need. It is a need of the race, not of the individual.

Love is that state of overflowing where you need nothing.

Relationships, Sex and Love

In our culture, we tend to mix these three things together and stir them around until we no longer know what is what. We call our urge for sex “love.” We call the thing that results from that a “relationship.” Or because of the mind’s artificial need for the other, we call that “love,” and so forth. We stir it around, and we get very confused sometimes about what it actually is that we are dealing with.

A relationship is a need from the mind.

So, let’s look at these things in more detail, and start at the beginning. One of your first and strongest impressions occurred at birth, and that was when you recognized that your survival depended on the other. That other became life itself. You didn’t think of yourself as complete, and in a way you were not complete, because you wouldn’t survive by yourself. You couldn’t dress yourself; you couldn’t feed yourself; you couldn’t clean yourself. It was impossible for you to fulfill your own needs. So you looked outside for fulfillment right from the very beginning. Therefore, almost everyone has this deep, deep feeling: in order to be fulfilled, in order to be happy and safe, I need the other. But this is not realistic. It is just a reflection of the helpless infant and its survival needs, still imprinted in your mind.

Consciously, we wouldn’t agree with that. Consciously we would say, “No, of course my survival doesn’t depend on the other, but life would be boring if I were all by myself,” or you’ll find all kinds of reasons to need another.

But the real reason is that at deeper level you honestly believe that you need someone else in order to be happy and fulfilled—even in order to live.

This creates an almost constant state of anguish. If you don’t have someone, then all you can do is look around, and struggle, and manipulate, until you finally get someone. Then once you get the other, you worry about keeping him or her. So it goes on and on and on. And it is not just a game played by two people, because on a subconscious level you are an infant struggling for survival. And of course this infant is delighted when it succeeds. Especially if it can get the other to sign a piece of paper saying that he or she is going to stick around forever, and promises to take care of you for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. Amen. The most beautiful day of one’s life.

So we have this deep, artificial need for the other. And it actually doesn’t have much to do with the other. It has to do with our survival, and that usually makes us very selfish. We want to arrange things so that our survival is guaranteed, and we are willing then to compromise in order to keep the other there.

Sex is a need of the race.

See that you were born with the reality, “I need the other in order to survive.” This realization engraved itself deep into your mind. Then someplace along the way—let’s keep it simple and call it puberty—arises this phenomenon called sex, which is a need of the race, not a need of the individual. Be very clear about that. Sex is not a need of the individual. Air is a need of the individual, water is a need of the individual, rest is a need of the individual, food is a need of the individual. Without these things the individual dies, and that is what defines a need. If you don’t get it, you die.

You don’t need sex. People have lived their whole life without sex, and lived to be very old—sometimes older than those who enjoy sex. But sex is a need of the race. The species will die out if there is no sex. So everybody is given a little bit of it, and the idea is to spread it around, and then the race continues. But it is not a need of the individual. Still, it is a very strong urge.

So when this urge arises, and mixes with your artificial need for the other, of course you are attracted even more strongly than before to someone else. And then you start sliding into the patterns established by our society about how two people relate to each other. The conditioning of the culture, colored by those of your childhood, comes in the mix. Saying that men should do this, women should do that, this is the way to act, this is the way to be, these are the games to play, and these are the rules of the game, and so forth. It’s all conditioning.

Quite obviously, the combination of this physical urge for sex with the need for the other creates a very, very strong impulse to be with the other. Most people want to call this love. And this is where a lot of the confusion comes from.

We call it love, and it isn’t love. It is the opposite of love. It is coming from neediness, not from overflowing. It is coming from concern for yourself, and a need to survive.

Not that that is wrong, because you do need to survive, and it is fine to care of yourself. But not with the attitude of an infant. As long as you believe that your survival, or your happiness or wellbeing, depends on the other, you keep yourself in that state of regression. And as long as you hold on to that, you will always feel incomplete as a person.

It makes us possessive, jealous, and even suspicious of the other. Afraid that we are going to lose the other. And we are afraid, because deep down we think our survival depends on the other. It is not uncommon to feel that one of the deepest expressions of love is to say to someone, “I can’t live without you.” This is just plain stupid. If anyone ever says this to you, you are going to feel like you are in prison. They are making you responsible for them. They are actually saying, “Without you I am going to die. If you go away and leave me, my life ends. My survival depends on you.”

That is the infant coming out in its purest form. It is not a nice thing at all. This so called deepest expression of love is actually total regression. It has nothing whatsoever to do with love.

What can happen, however, is that the internal infant in the one person feels fulfilled by the presence of the other person, and vice versa. One is feeling, “Ah, I have mommy,” and the other is feeling, “Ah, I have mommy,” and so now both have mommies and they can relax. And because they relax, something beautiful can happen—but it is the relaxation that causes something beautiful to happen, not the fact of being with each other. If they could relax through some other method, then they would achieve the same thing. It is the relaxation that causes the beautiful space to be there, not the presence of the other. We can achieve that same kind of thing by learning to relax by ourselves, by seeing that we are fulfilled as we are.

Love is complete in itself

Love is total fulfillment. Love is like an overflowing; it is an expansion. I am using love in this sense, and not mixing it up with sex, and the need of the mind. Love is non-directive. It is not directed toward anyone. Relationships are usually directed. What we call love in relationships is directed to one person as an investment, hoping to get something back, even if it is just the feeling of inner fulfillment. True love doesn’t expect anything back, because it doesn’t need anything. It is already complete in itself.

True love is like a light bulb shining in a room. It doesn’t shine just on one specific person. It simply shines, and it doesn’t matter if anyone is even there; the light is shining. The light is complete in itself and doesn’t need to feed on anyone in the room to be bright. That is the way love is. Love is an overflowing, love is a giving, love is a feeling of completion, of fulfillment. When you are in love, in true love, you are not just in love, you are love.

This experience—love—is most apt to come to you when you are relaxed. This can come in meditation; this can come in yoga, in dance; this can come anyplace, actually. It is something that you experience when the ego—the mind, memory—is not tormenting you, not contracting you.

Many people are looking for love through sex and through relationships, and they don’t find it. Which isn’t to say you can’t find love through a relationship with another. You can use it perhaps as a doorway. But real love will be with yourself and existence, and that will include everybody else in existence. Yet the moment your love is directed to one person, be very clear about the fact that this is the mind saying, “I need this other for survival,” and then it is not love, it is a need.

If you can see that, you will save yourself a lot of anguish. You will save yourself a lot of trouble and effort. Because if we use the word love to refer to that which happens when the need of the mind combines with the need of the species for sex, we experience a lot of confusion. It is very easy to confuse what sages and wise people say about love—when they are talking about the overflowing kind of love—with the kind of love that we learn about on the Hollywood movie screen, which is not love at all. We use the same word to mean two totally opposite states of being. If we can separate these things, see them as different elements, different states, then we can move beyond the states that are crippling us, and be open to those states that expand us.

Relationships are clarifying

Looking at your relationships is a wonderful device to help you get clear. A relationship will help you see how childish you are, how dependent you are on the other, how you still are projecting onto the other your mother, your father, or other people that were taking care of you in your infancy. You can see how you make the other responsible for your happiness, for your relaxation, for your well being.

Watch your relationships with people. This includes not only your so-called love and sexual relationships, but also your relationships with friends and casual acquaintances. See how much you also make them responsible for your happiness, for your well-being, your fulfillment. And how much you blame them if things don’t go right for you.

Once you start seeing this and start seeing that you don’t need to live that way, then you can begin to feel completion and fulfillment with life itself, with you yourself. You can feel love wherever you are. Then you will be love.

But you will never experience yourself as love as long as you need the other. It is a contradiction. It cannot possibly happen.

There is nothing wrong with being with another—that is beautiful. But if you make the other responsible for your survival, it gets ugly. If you blame the other for your unhappiness, it is ugly. If you cling to the other and limit the freedom of the other, it is ugly. It is not love.

Be open to what you mean each time you say or hear the word love, how you interpret it, how you translate it in your own mind. Let your relationships help you to find out more about yourself. Be careful about calling your relationships “love.” If your focus is on giving without expecting anything in return, if you feel that the other is free to walk out of your life, knowing that you are going to remain complete yourself, then you can call that love. But if any part of you is clinging to the other, understand that it is a need coming from the helpless infant you no longer are.

Sex can be confusing, because if the physical urge for sex is being realized and released, the body relaxes. And if at the same time the need of the mind for the other is being satisfied, everything can seem perfect. Maybe that’s why we call it “making love.” But sometimes the next morning you recognize that it wasn’t love. You fall back into neediness.

What we normally call love is just a mind trip. It keeps us in the mind, it keeps us regressed, keeps us frustrated, keeps us in a state of turmoil. And it is also something that we have to let go of, if we ever want to become clear. The moment you can let go of it, you probably will enter a state of love.

The following talk by Jeru Kabbal was recorded live and is part of a Clarity Process training offered by the APT Institute.

Now that you have quite a few tools, and now that you have the big picture and are starting to fill in of the details of the big picture, you are in a position to use almost everything to help you become clear.  Some people feel like they are working on themselves only when they do an individual session, or when they do a group, and I suppose in those cases that it is true.  But you can actually be working on yourself, to use that expression, all the time.

And once you reach a certain place, if you are not working on yourself, you are working against yourself.  Because there are only two states – the state of awareness, and the state of unawareness.  And when you are unaware, that means you are on automatic pilot.  And then you are working against yourself, because your old patterns are beginning to take over again.

Awareness, unfortunately, is not something that you can build up a reserve of.  You cannot say, “I will be very aware all day today, and then tomorrow I don’t have to make an effort, and I will still be aware because I am so full of awareness today”  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.  The moment you lose your awareness, you are just simply unaware, that’s all.  It doesn’t take even five seconds for it to run down.  Awareness can stop immediately.  It’s not like riding a bicycle – when you stop peddling, and the bicycle continues.  With awareness, the moment you stop peddling, the bicycle stops.  And you are on automatic pilot again.  Being on automatic pilot has certain useful aspects.  But you need to decide when you want to be on automatic pilot, and what activities you want to practice on automatic pilot.

For example, driving your car may sometimes be okay to do through the subconscious, because your awareness is someplace else.  But your awareness should always be someplace.  You can’t be aware of everything all the time.  That’s not what is meant by awareness.  Awareness means that your conscious mind is not acting automatically.  The subconscious will act automatically – that is it’s function.

However, if you turn everything over to your subconscious, then you are going to be a victim of your subconscious.  So you have to keep your conscious mind aware.  You have to be watching all the time, if you are really interested in becoming clear, in waking up, in finding out who you are – whatever expression you want to use for that.

Many people in the growth movement, or the spiritual movement, are still operating under old habits, one of which is, “Somebody with authority should do it for me.  Somebody should tell me what to do.  Someone should supervise me.  I can only do this with help.”  You have to be very careful of that pattern, of that attitude.

Because this is just another attitude of the child that you used to be.  So even if you are on the spiritual path, you may not be getting anyplace.  Because another part of you is reinforcing this old attitude of,  “Somebody else should do it for me.”

Having this kind of an attitude, you may arrange to do groups, or to find a teacher, and then feel like you are going to get it from that group, or you are going to get it from that teacher.  And these things can very definitely serve a useful purpose.  But once you get a few insights, once you get the big picture, then it becomes your responsibility to get out of that whatever you can.  And if you don’t take that responsibility, then somehow you are slipping back into those regressed states where you had to depend on somebody else.

All of you now have enough of the big picture, you have enough experience, and you have specific tools that you can use, so now you really have to examine whether or not you are waiting for somebody or something to do it for you.  And if you are, that’s not uncommon.  There is nothing unusual about it.  But you have to know that you are holding yourself back, if that attitude should be there.

There are many people who will take a group, waiting to be pushed.  Because this is their habit.  They haven’t budged probably since the age of three, unless they were pushed.  So this is their way to progress, to put themselves in a position where someone is going to push them.  Again, if you have that attitude, you are going to do yourself a disservice.  A part of you has to decide whether or not you really want to go through this, whether or not you really want to wake up, whether or not you really want to become clear.

And if you do, you have to see that waking up is not like adding a little silver star to your costume.  It means giving up one life totally, in exchange for a better life, a different life.  And maybe you don’t really want to do that.  Maybe you aren’t ready for that.  And that’s alright.  But the point I am trying to make is that this process of waking up is also the process of dying.  Because you are not going to wake up unless you are ready to let go of the person that you are dreaming you are.

If you are asleep, and you are dreaming that you are in Tahiti, and somehow in that sleep you decide that you want to wake up, then you have to let go of Tahiti, because you don’t know if you are going to be there when you wake up.  You have to let go of that person in Tahiti, because that person isn’t going to be there when you wake up.

Once you become clear about this process of waking up, then you have to really decide if that is what you want to do.  Because if you want to do it, it’s a full time job.  It’s a difficult job.  It’s the most difficult job that any human being can possibly undertake.  Going to the moon is nothing in comparison.  Climbing Everest is nothing in comparison.

So you have reached the point now where you need to decide whether or not you really want to do this process of waking up, or whether or not you have done what you have done so far as a kind of strategy.  And it may be that you have done what you have done as a kind of strategy.  But regardless of what motivation you had to get you where you are now, it may be that now you can look at things and decide that you do want to wake up, that you do want to discover who you are, in which case you will truly be on the spiritual path.

If you should decide that, then you will have to watch everything that you do – literally watch everything you do.  You have to ask yourself, am I automatic now?  Am I coming from a dream when I do this?  Is this my movie dictating to me how I see this?  Or am I actually experiencing reality?  It is something requiring constant awareness, because the moment you stop being aware, the moment you stop making that effort, you go right back on automatic pilot, and you are right back in the movie again.

The spiritual practice, the practice of waking up, is not just sitting and meditating with crossed legs and your hands in your lap.  It’s a matter of watching yourself constantly, watching constantly to see where you are stuck in patterns.  Watching to see where you are identifying with your old habits.  Once you become clear about this, then everything you do can help you on your spiritual path.  It doesn’t matter so much what you do, as long as you are watching.  Once you have the basic concepts, and the big picture, you can have any kind of job anyplace in the world and learn from it.  You may not stay in that job, but you can benefit from it.  You can be with any kind of person and benefit from it.

A lot of people on the so-called spiritual path try to protect themselves.  And some of them, for example some of the yogis in India, go so far as to live in caves away from everybody else.  And if you do this, you can achieve a certain kind of calmness.  Because there is nothing there to irritate you.  You get your little world set up the way you want it to be, and you can be calm and peaceful in that little world.

But this doesn’t mean that you are clear.  It only means that you have arranged your patterns so that no one is bugging you.  The question is, how many patterns do you still have?  Because every  pattern is a potential for irritation, a potential for tension.  Every pattern.  Whether it’s a negative pattern, or a positive one.  It means you are automatic, and you are setting yourself up for irritation, because the moment you slip out of the pattern, you feel uncomfortable.

It would be good if you can learn to be open to all kinds of situations, and all kinds of people.  If you do this, people will be constantly pushing your buttons.  And every time a button gets pushed, you know you have a pattern.  You know that you are stuck.  And knowing you are stuck, you can then look and see where this pattern started.  Then you can also clear this pattern up.  You should bless those who push your buttons.  They are giving you a chance to look at yourself.  Because when they push your buttons, they are just touching something that is already present in you, something that probably you don’t want to see.

If you can be around someone who pushes your buttons a lot, I would say go for it.  Be aware of what is actually happening.  See what it is in you that is being irritated.  Because it is in you, it is not in the other person.  And actually, no one can really push your buttons.  You are the one that pushes the buttons.  You are saying, “I don’t like this.  This is dangerous.  This is not in harmony with my script, with my blueprint.  This isn’t the way I want it to be.”  You are the one that pushes your buttons.

If you can find somebody that pushes your buttons,  you can learn after a while not to repress the feelings, but to see that they are coming from patterns from your childhood, and that those patterns are based on dependency.  If you can see that, then you can let go of the patterns.  And the more patterns you can let go of, the more free you are going to be.  And that is the only way you are going to be free, by letting go of your patterns.  You don’t become free by holding on to your patterns and trying to rearrange the world.  You become free by letting go of your patterns.  Then the whole world is your playground.

So in your daily life, use everything.  For example, if you are working in the kitchen, don’t think that you are losing an opportunity to work on yourself.  You probably have more opportunities to watch patterns, to watch habits, to watch attitudes.  We make a subtle distinction sometimes between things like doing a group, and having a normal job.  We think that doing a group is going to bring clarity, and doing a normal job is a waste of time.  And usually that is true.  But once  you reach a certain stage in your development, it isn’t true any longer.  You can do anything as long as you are watching, and it will help you on your path to clarity.  You can be in a group and be unaware, and it won’t help you at all on your path to clarity.  So the secret is being aware, using every opportunity that you have to see where you have patterns, where you have fixed attitudes, and to see if you can let go of them.

This means watching everything you do, whatever you do.  And you will also see that as you watch, you realize that if you object to something, if you say that something is unpleasant, it is really an attitude.  It’s not that the activity itself is unpleasant, it is your attitude about it that makes it seem unpleasant to you.  And when you realize that it is your attitude that makes it seem unpleasant, then you can do something about that, because you can change your attitude.  Maybe you can’t change whatever it is that you are doing, but you can change your attitude.

And once you drop your attitude, then everything is just activity.  And everything can also be a celebration, because you are not tense about what you are doing, you are just doing something.  And if you are aware, you are aware that you are alive, you are aware that you are able to do this, and you are aware that you are able to have fun doing it.  So use everything that comes your way, everything that is happening to you, use it as a method, use it as a device.  Don’t try to arrange your life to make it meditative, but rather let go of your attitudes.

Much of this attitude that we have, that certain activities are good for us, and certain activities are not good for us, probably comes from traditional religion.  And since this has been going on for millennia, it is probably very deep in our collective unconscious now, that we need someone else to give us the answers, we need someone else to tell us what to do and what not to do.  Be very, very careful of that now.  There is really only one thing, and that is, are you coming from the dream, from memory, or are you coming from the here and now?  It’s really all there is to be careful about.

And the more you are in the here and now, the more the old movie is going to fade away, because you won’t be giving it any juice.  But the more you believe in the movie, the more you fight with the movie, the more you try to improve the movie, the more juice you are giving it, and the more you keep it alive.  It is not a complicated thing at all.  It’s just a simple question.  Am I actually in the moment right now, or am I in my movie?  It is made a bit difficult by the fact that the subconscious is the deciding factor.  But that is just something you have to work with.  And you will become more and more aware of what is in your subconscious, as you open yourself up to this.

What I have noticed with groups in general is that during sessions, very often people make an effort to be aware, make an effort to be open, make an effort to be courageous, and the moment the session is over, they let down the curtain as if the show is over, and go right back to being the way they used to be.  They feel safe now.  And then when the next session comes along, they make an effort to open this rusty door, and be more open, more courageous, more honest, more aware, and so forth.

Try not to make that distinction.  Realize that when you are having lunch, you are working on yourself either positively or negatively, whether you like it or not.  When you are going for a walk, you are working on yourself either positively or negatively, whether you like it or not.  When you do practical play, you are working on yourself, whether you like it or not.  If you are not working on yourself in a positive way, you are working on yourself in a negative way.  That is just the way it is.  There is nothing in between.

After the afternoon session, you may have the feeling that, “Now I have nothing to do.  Now I don’t have to be aware.  Now I don’t have to be open.  I don’t have to be courageous.  Now I don’t have to break any patterns.”  And if you take that attitude, you are going to be missing a lot.  Because if you are not using what you have, and you slip back into automatic pilot, then you go in reverse.  And the next day when the session starts, you have to start from someplace further back again.

So stay with it – if you want to.  It’s not for me to decide whether you should stay with it or not.  But if you want to do anything on this so-called spiritual path, if you want to wake up, if you want to find out who you are, there are just certain realities.  And one of those realities is that if you are not aware, you are unaware.  And if you are unaware, you are on automatic pilot.  Another reality is that life will constantly be giving you something to experience.  And then it is for you to decide how you respond to that, or how you react to that.  Whether you react automatically, or if you respond with innocence.

If you see this whole thing as a tremendous effort, if you see this as not being worthwhile, then I would say stop torturing yourself, and go back to a so-called straight life.  Or at least forget trying to wake up.  Because you will just be torturing yourself.  Do something that is easy instead, and maybe the next time around you will be more in the mood.  If you don’t really want to be waking up, then forget it.  Really forget it.  Because you are just torturing yourself, that is all.

It could be that you are not really ready this time around.  Not everybody is.  Many people go into the spiritual path for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with spirituality, that have nothing to do with waking up.  Some people will become part of a religious movement just because they like to be around people.  Or perhaps there is a teacher or guru that is a father figure, and they are still waiting for daddy to tell them what to do, or waiting for daddy to love them.  There are lots of different reasons why people get into this, but it is something that requires tremendous awareness.  It requires a tremendous longing.  And if you don’t have that, you are just going to make life difficult for yourself.  Because a part of you will be pulling in one way, and another part of you will be pulling in another way.

So it would be good for you if you can decide, now that you know what the issue is – perhaps more than you did before – whether or not this is really and truly something that you want to be doing.  Because if it is, believe me, it is a full time job.  When I say that it is a full time job, if you see it as something negative, if you have the feeling that you are giving up something beautiful in order to do this terrible job, then you have missed the point someplace.  And that is what creates torture.

It’s not that it is a lot of work, it isn’t that.  It is only that you have to be clear about whether or not it is what you want.  And if you are clear that it is what you want, then it is not a lot of work.  It requires effort, it requires awareness, but that doesn’t mean that it is work.  Work is not an activity.  Work is an attitude. Usually when we say ‘work’, it’s like saying, “This is something that I don’t want to do.”  Not always, but usually.

You know yourself that some things you call ‘work’ are a lot easier than some things you call ‘play’.  Some things that you call play require a lot more energy, a lot more effort, a lot more concentration, and yet you call them play, because your attitude about it is different.  So be clear about that, that what we call work is not an activity, it is a state of mind.  You can make anything negative by calling it work.  It doesn’t matter what it is.  You may love to play basketball, and you m,ay become a professional basketball player, but if you call it work, you are going to ruin the fun.  You are going to stop enjoying it.  Because it’s work.

So be clear about whether or not you want to wake up, and be also clear about whether or not you feel like you are giving up something beautiful in order to wake up.  If you feel that way, you are not really clear yet about the whole situation.  It’s like discussing with yourself whether or not you want to go on a vacation, or take a trip.  If every time you think about it, you think, “What a nuisance, what a bother,” then be clear about the fact that you probably don’t want to take that trip.  You probably don’t want to go.

But see how you are torturing yourself.  Because a part of you doesn’t want to go, and a part of you says that you should go, for whatever reason.  And it’s the same thing with the spiritual path, the spiritual trip.  Be sure you want to go.  And if you don’t want to go, this doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with that.  But if a part of you thinks you want to go, and another part of you thinks you are giving up something valuable and beautiful in order to make the spiritual trip, then you will just be torturing yourself.  And you won’t get very far – two steps forward, two steps back……..two steps forward, two steps back.

You have to be ready to let go of what you think is your present life, you have to be ready to let go of what you think is your present personality.  You literally have to let go of your life, the life that you are dreaming that you have, because when you wake up, that person that you think you are right now isn’t going to be there.  Somebody else will be there.  Now I am not saying any of these things to make anybody feel bad, or feel guilty, or anything like that.  But don’t just automatically assume that you really want to be on the path.  Maybe you don’t.  And if you don’t, that’s fine.  You will only be making yourself miserable if you are trying to move forward, and at the same time trying to stand still.  You put yourself in conflict constantly.

This process is not so difficult if you are willing to let go of the old.  What makes it difficult is holding on to the old patterns, attitudes, fears, desires – and wanting to have the new in addition to the old.  That doesn’t really work.  If you are going to swim out into the middle of the lake, you have to let go of the pier.  You can’t cling to the pier.  There is no way to do it.  You can try moving the pier into the middle of the lake, and all kinds of other things.  But it still won’t work.  If you are clinging to the pier, you are never going to experience the freedom of swimming without support.

Once you get ready to swim, you feel that you are ready, and you have whatever you need to do that, then you have to let go of the pier.  But you can’t do both.  I don’t mean to make this sound serious.  It probably sounds serious, and I don’t want it to sound that way.  I am only suggesting that you really get clear about what you want.  Because if you are really clear that you want to wake up, then you won’t see anything as being unpleasant, you will only see it as something that is helping you become more clear about yourself.  Every time someone pushes your buttons, you will be grateful to them.  Because it has helped you to see something.  Every time you are in a situation that helps you to see your patterns or habits or attitudes, you will be grateful to that situation.  And every day you will be grateful that Existence is helping you to see where you are stuck.  And by seeing where you are stuck, there is potential for you to become unstuck, to become free.  So use everything.

Everything can be a positive device.  Every time you meet resistance in your life, know that you are the one creating the resistance.  Every time you find something unpleasant, realize that you are the one that is making it unpleasant.  Every time you are frustrated, realize that you are the one that has created that frustration, because you had expectations.  Once you start seeing that, you will see that life is just constantly helping you to wake up.  It is only when you are clinging to the past, and you feel like you need to give it up, that you are in conflict.

My suggestion would be, look very deeply into yourself.  See if this is really what you want, and get as clear about this as you can.  If it feels like you are grateful for all the devices that life is giving you, that is a good sign.  But if your idea of the spiritual path is that it has to be this way, and that way, and not this way, and not that way, then you are just coming from your own patterns.

Once you can get over this psychological hurdle, once you can realize, “What I really want to do is give up my old ideas,” then life will become so light.  Because all you want to do is get rid of things.  Every chance you get, you say, “Okay, I am dropping that one.  I am letting go of this fixed idea.”  And every day you become lighter.  Every day you have learned to relax under some new situation.

But it is only when you have the attitude of letting go that you are going to feel this way.  If you want to hold on to the past and wake up, then you are constantly trying to rearrange things, and it’s very difficult.  You are trying to rearrange your inner self so that it fits the outside, or you are trying to arrange the outside so that it fits the inside.  It is very, very difficult.  But once you become clear that what you want to do is take your clothes off, then with every piece of clothing that you take off, you feel lighter, you feel more free, and that’s all this spiritual path is about – it is just taking off the old clothes that you don’t need any longer.

Question:  “It triggered something for me, about something that happened in the course, when we were talking about being connected to Existence.  One of the strongest things for me while being in nature was seeing that the dead tree is just as much in balance as the living tree, and that death and life are in this balance.  And I feel like in that exercise we weren’t seeing that in ourselves, and I wonder how we can be aware of our own physical death, and be in the moment.  Not just projecting forward and thinking – but a kind of awareness of accepting that we will die, that is very important.”

Jeru:  What happened for you is that in that moment, you were more in the here and now than you are sometimes.  This is one of the advantages of being in the here and now.  You start being open to the messages that the here and now will give you.  Truth is everyplace.  By being open to the moment, you see a dead tree, and you realize that the dead tree is totally in balance, that it is part of a process, and it becomes a teaching for you.  You wouldn’t have gotten that teaching, if at that moment you had been in your head thinking about what you are going to say to so-and-so tomorrow.

So because you were open to that moment, it gave you a teaching, and this will happen.  Your question will also be answered, the question that you just asked, if you can stay in the moment.  And that is not an intellectual thing, it is more of an experiential thing, based on what you actually observe, what you actually experience.  This is typical of what will happen if you can stop trying to figure it out with your mind, and be open to experience, which can only happen in the here and now.

So it left you with a question, but it also gave you a tremendous insight.  And that question that is still there will also be answered, if you can stay in the here and now with it.

So many of our questions are just words, and the whole issue of death is basically just words, not experience.  I doubt that anyone has come back from death and said to any of you, “Man, if you can avoid it, try to avoid it, because it’s hell.”  I doubt that anyone has had that experience of someone coming back to you and telling you how bad death is.  For all we know, it’s the greatest thing that could possibly ever happen to us.  Something that we could really be looking forward to every moment.  Or it may be nothing.  Who knows?  But at least right now, our idea of death is just words – not experiences.

A lot of our ideas about death have been given to us by religions, perhaps as a way to manipulate us.  So even with that, you have to look and see how much this fear of death – if that’s what it is – is just a matter of words, and even a matter of conditioning, and maybe not something that you need to worry about at all.  It may be that you don’t need an answer.  I think the significant thing is that you have an insight by being in the here and now, rather than in your mind.  And if you can be open to that sort of thing, then Existence will give you more and more insights, and more and more answers.

Right now you can only think about death by going into your mind.  And then if you go into your mind to think about death, you are just dealing with words.  You have no genuine experience.  It’s not the same as when you sit on the hot stove with no clothes on – that’s an experience.  And you can say, “I think I’ll avoid that one in the future.”  That’s experience.  Even though that experience in the meantime has become a memory, at least you have an experience.

But with death we don’t have an experience.  So we don’t have any idea whether it’s something to be afraid of or not.  And if you can see that these things happen in nature, that they are in balance, then perhaps we can also say, “Then why should I be afraid of death?”  Death is going to happen.  That’s for sure.  Even though we are projecting, it’s quite sure that it is going to happen.  So why live in fear of it?  If you live eighty years in fear of death, that’s just eighty years of torture.

Question:  “There is something that I don’t quite get.  When you say yes, totally yes, to letting go of your past, it’s something I don’t get – because if I would have a total yes, then I would be enlightened instantly.  But isn’t it like passing through a stage of fear, and clinging, and getting totally lost in it, that is also a part of waking up?”

Jeru:  No.  You have to be clear about whether or not you want to take your clothes off.  If you do, then putting on more clothes isn’t helping you take your clothes off.  And to make the decision to wake up doesn’t mean that you are automatically awake.  If you can say yes to everything, and I mean literally yes, you could say that you would be enlightened.  But it is not the same thing as saying yes to the process of waking up.  If you say yes to the process of waking up, you are saying, “Yes, I would like to be in the position to be able to say yes to everything.”  But that doesn’t mean that you are saying yes to everything.  You are still saying no, even though you say, “I want to say yes.”  Recognize the fact that you are still saying no.  This doesn’t mean that you are awake.  It means that you have recognized the fact that you are asleep, and that you want to get out of that sleep and wake up.

It’s like saying, “Yes, I want to go to town.”  By saying yes to going to town, it doesn’t mean that you are in town.  But by saying “Yes” to going, really saying “Yes” to going, then you are ready to start putting one foot in front of the other, and every moment you are a little bit closer.  But if part of you is saying, “Yes, I want to go to town,” and another part is saying, “No, I don’t want to go,” then you can spend all day shifting from one foot to the other and not getting anyplace.

Question:  “Can it really be that I can influence my four year old so much, that she would support me in this?  Because I think my adult says yes, but then she is saying, I am scared.”

Jeru:  Yes, that is a good question.  That is why you have to help the four year old, or the subconscious, to see that what she is afraid of is not real, that it is irrelevant.  She is afraid of old memories.   She is trying to defend herself.  And because she is trying to defend herself, she is very occupied with trying to fulfill strategies.  But when you can help her see that she doesn’t need to fulfill these strategies, when you can help her see that her fears are unfounded now, that she doesn’t need to defend herself, then she will be willing to relax.  She will be willing to be in the moment.  Because her interest is still your interest.

But as long as she has the feeling that there is a danger there, and that you have to be defended, then she has an obligation to defend you.  And therefore she can’t waste time on this luxury of waking up, because she has to watch out for you, she has to protect you.  But if you don’t help her see that those fears are only fantasy fears, then she has to protect herself, and you, from those things.

So the job is not trying to force her to wake up, but rather to help her, namely your subconscious, understand that what she is afraid of is not real.  It’s just imagination now.  And once she starts seeing that it’s just imagination, it’s just fantasy, then she starts to relax.  And the more this happens, the more energy you have for the present, for the here and now.  And it’s in that space that you are going to be waking up.

Question:  “I wonder, for example, the fellow who is clinging to the dock and doesn’t want to let go, because maybe he doesn’t know any swimming strokes – he has a point in a small way.  And maybe, if the child who has an obligation to protect me doesn’t have a sense of what it would be like in the moment, and can’t get around those fears, in that case wouldn’t it be a good thing to teach us a few strokes, or to invite us to invest in some positive understanding of what it might be like to live in the moment, for example, that Existence will support me.  Merely hearing that I’m going to die isn’t going to satisfy my child at all.  Hearing that Existence will support him will calm him down, and I think make him more able to live in the moment.  Or that I am my experience, and that when I eliminate the movie, this will support me, and I will be thoroughly grounded in Existence.  And other things of that kind.  Rather than merely having to let go of the dock being the only thing I hear.”

Jeru:  So, you would like for us to say these things to you.  Okay, so consider them said.  I would like to think that we have been saying these things, and I would like to think that we have been inviting you to taste the here and now.  The point, however, about being afraid to leave the dock, is well taken.  You cling to the dock because of fear.   And this fear basically is your worry about survival.  And your worry about survival comes because you feel that you are a helpless infant.  And for this reason we do all of the regression work that we do, so that you can see why you are clinging to the dock.

Now we can use another story if you like.  And that is, suppose you were born in the water, and because you were only about a foot long, and the water was relatively deep, you couldn’t swim.  You couldn’t support yourself, because you couldn’t touch bottom.  So you needed somebody to support you, to hold you up.  You have devoted a whole lifestyle now to having someone there to hold you up.  But that was a few years ago.  In the meantime this body, which was a foot long, has become five feet long.  And the water is only three feet deep.  So then it’s just a matter of seeing that in the meantime you are touching bottom, you are standing on firm ground yourself.  There may still be water there, but you certainly don’t need someone to hold you up.  And that is actually a more accurate, a more relevant story.  It’s for you to see that in the meantime you have grown, and that now your feet are touching the bottom, and that the water is only three feet deep.  When you were a foot long, three feet of water was a lot of water.  But now that you are five feet long, three feet is nothing, and your own feet are on solid ground.

But going back to the story of the person clinging to the dock, it is fine to help that person gain some confidence.  And it is fine to help that person learn to swim in shallow water.  That’s not so much the issue.  The issue is whether or not you are clinging to the dock.  That’s the issue.  If you are not ready to swim out into the ocean, that’s fine.  Recognize that.  See that this is what you.  But the best way to let go of the dock is to realize that you don’t need to be clinging to it.

That’s the main thing.
The best way to do that – more specifically, in our work – is to see that you are not a helpless infant, and that you don’t need to cling to the old strategies that you started as an infant.  You don’t need to still feel dependent, inadequate, inferior, and vulnerable.  You don’t need to feel that way anymore.  And there is really  not a lot that you have to learn.  It’s a matter of unlearning, learning that you don’t need to worry.  And for that you will have to look at things carefully enough so that you can see that you don’t have to worry about them.  Existence will take care of the rest.  You need to get to the place, if you are going to continue this journey, where you are clear about the fact that you really and truly want to be on the journey.  And if you don’t want to be, that is fine.  But you are only torturing yourself, if part of you says that you want to be on the journey, and part of you is resisting it all the way.  Really watch that.  See if you can become clear about it.  Once you get clear about it, everything will be so much easier.

Question:  “When you say that you need to be clear, do you mean that the conscious mind has to be clear?”

Jeru:  You have to start with the conscious mind.  That’s what you use to clear up the subconscious mind.  But the conscious mind has to be clear that it wants to do this.  If it doesn’t want to do this, if you are not clear at that level, then your subconscious is going to manipulate you.  So it’s the conscious mind that has to be clear first, because the subconscious isn’t clear.  You have to use the conscious mind to clear up the subconscious…

The following talk by Jeru Kabbal was recorded live and is part of a Clarity Process training offered by the APT Institute.

Today we will be talking about love, sex, and relationship. Perhaps we can define all three of these things from the beginning, and then go back and look at them in more detail. What we usually call a relationship is the artificial need in the mind for the other. Now when I use the word relationship, I am talking about a male-female, one-to-one type of relationship. We are relating all the time obviously, but that’s not what we usually mean when we mention relationships. This is something coming from the mind.

Then we have the whole phenomenon of sex. Sex is an instinct of the body, an urge of the body. It is not a need of the individual, it is a need of the race. Real love is that state of overflowing where you need nothing. Especially in our culture, we tend to mix all these three things up together, stir them around, and we don’t know what’s what. We call our urge for sex love. We call the thing that results from that a relationship. Or because of the mind’s artificial need for the other, we call that love, and so forth. We stir it around, and we get very confused sometimes about what it actually is that we are dealing with.

So let’s back up now, and look at these things in more detail. Remember that one of your first and strongest impressions occurred at birth, and that was when you recognized that your survival depended on the other. The ‘other’ became life itself. You didn’t think of yourself as complete, and in a way you were not complete, because you wouldn’t survive by yourself. You learned to look outside of yourself for fulfillment. You couldn’t fulfill yourself. You couldn’t satisfy yourself.

So you looked outside for fulfillment right from the very beginning. Therefore almost everyone has this deep, deep, deep feeling – that in order to be fulfilled, I need the other. But this is just an expression of the helpless infant and its survival needs. But because of that, because it is so deep-seated, because we have lived with it for such a long time, we go through life still believing that our survival depends on the other.

Consciously we wouldn’t agree with that. Consciously we would say, “No, of course my survival doesn’t depend on the other, but life would be boring if I were all by myself,” or you’ll find all kinds of reasons. But the real reason is that the subconscious honestly believes that you need someone else in order to be fulfilled – even in order to live.

This creates an almost constant state of anguish. If you don’t have someone, then your subconscious thinks you’re in danger of dying any moment, and all you can do is look around, and struggle, and manipulate, until you finally get the other. Then once you get the other, you worry about keeping the other. So it goes on and on and on. And it is not just a game played by two people, because on a subconscious level, you are an infant struggling for survival.

And of course this infant is delighted when it gets the other, especially if it can get the other to sign a piece of paper saying that he or she is going to stay around for life, or forever. Then this gives the subconscious a deeper feeling of security. It is not a real feeling of security, but at least it is a promise of security. That’s why marriage very often is such an important thing.

So we have this artificial need, this deep need for the other. And it actually doesn’t have much to do with the other. It has something to do with our survival, and that usually makes us very selfish. We want to arrange things so that our survival is guaranteed, and we are also willing to then compromise in order to keep the other there, in order to survive.

This doesn’t mean to say that you can’t have a more adult relationship with someone. You can. You can have an adult relationship, and we will talk about that a little bit later. But even that has to be examined, in order to see how much of it is rooted in the idea,”I need the other. I need the other for happiness, for fulfillment, for survival.”

See that you were born with the idea, “I need the other in order to survive.” Then someplace along the way – let’s keep it simple and call it puberty – arises this phenomenon called sex, which is a need of the race, not a need of the individual. Be very clear about that. Sex is not a need of the individual. Air is a need of the individual, water is a need of the individual, rest is a need of the individual, food is a need of the individual. Without these things the individual dies, and that is what defines a need. If you don’t get it, you die.

You don’t need sex. People have lived their whole life without sex, and lived to be very old, sometimes older than those who enjoy sex. People have been confined in a prison for years and years and years without sex, and they don’t die. Sex is not a need of the individual.

But sex is a need of the race. It is a way that the race has of perpetuating itself. The species will die out if there is no sex, so everybody is given a little bit of it, and the idea is to spread it around, and then the race continues. But it is not a need of the individual. Still it is a very strong urge.

So when this urge arises, and mixes with your artificial need for the other, of course you are attracted even more strongly than before to someone else. And because of the sexual urge, you are usually directed to someone of the opposite sex – not always, but usually – and then you start sliding into the patterns established by our society about how two people relate to each other.

Then the whole conditioning of the culture comes in and says that men should do this, women should do that, this is the way to act, this is the way to be, these are the games to play, and these are the rules of the game. It is all conditioning.

Quite obviously we have combined this physical urge for sex with the need for the other, and so out of that then comes a very, very strong impulse, a strong attraction to be with the other. Neither of these things have anything to do with love, nothing whatsoever to do with love. The need for survival is nothing compared to what it was when you were an infant. We have grown far beyond that, but we still have inside us the idea, “If I can only find the other, then I’ll be happy, then life will be complete, then I will be fulfilled.” Because this is what the infant thought. “When mother is there, then I am fulfilled, then I am taken care of, then I am safe, then I can relax.”

Therefore everybody is still looking for someone else so that they can relax, without noticing that in the meantime they are actually taking care of themselves. But this need for the other, coming from this program, is not love. It is the opposite of love. It is the exact opposite of love. It is coming from neediness, not from overflowing. It is coming not from love for the other, but from concern for yourself, and a need to survive. Not that that is wrong, because you do need to survive, and it is fine to care for yourself. But it is the attitude of an infant.

And as long as you believe that your survival, or your happiness, or your well-being depends on the other, then you yourself remain incomplete as a person. You will always feel incomplete as long as you believe that. Most people want to call this need for sex, this need of the race, this urge for sex, and this artificial need of the mind for the other, “love”. And this is where alot of the confusion comes from – because we call it love, and it isn’t love. It is usually the opposite.

We talk about falling in love. When you ‘fall in love’, you basically fall into regression. Something in you says, “Ah, at last, mommy is here.” Or, “At last, daddy is here.” And the moment that happens, you are projecting onto the other everything that you always wanted from the other. You don’t even see the other, but you project on to the other what you want to see in the other, what you want to have for yourself.

Of course the other has to have certain attributes which will allow you to do that. The other person has to at least approach the general direction of your ideal, of what you want, wherever that is coming from. But once you decide that this could be the one, then you – ‘clunk’ – fall in love, and project onto the other everything that you want. But because the other is doing more or less the same to you, after a while you start getting this uneasy feeling that the other isn’t all he or she is cracked up to be, that the other is not living up to the advertising.

And once this little crack appears, then you start having doubts, which get more serious all along. Then after a while you start accusing the other of lying to you. “If I had known you had been like this, I never would have gotten involved with you in the first place.” Or, “You led me on, you made me believe this about you.” And maybe the other didn’t say anything like that, or didn’t do anything like that. It was your own projection. You were promising yourself that this person was going to be a certain way, not them. And they were doing the same thing toward you.

So then comes the period where we see that this person is not what we were expecting them to be. Then we turn the whole energy around and accuse them of lying to us, of deceiving us, of being dishonest – and what was ‘love’ before, now turns into something like hate and disappointment. And it is all self-induced. It is a game, it is a drama, it is a movie that we have produced, that we wanted to believe in, that we wanted to live in. And then when it doesn’t work, we don’t take responsibility for it, but we blame the other. And then we go on looking for someone new, and we do exactly the same thing again. We look around for someone that we can lay our trip on, that this is the ideal person, this is the most beautiful person in the world, this person will give me everything I want. And at the subconscious level we are thinking that this person will save my life, this person will fulfill me. My life will be complete because of this person.

And the whole thing starts all over again. We are often very possessive, very jealous, very suspicious of the other. We are afraid that we are going to lose the other, and we’re afraid because we think that our survival depends on the other. So too often what we call ‘relationship’ is just neediness. But it is an artificial neediness, because it is not a genuine need. It is an artificial need coming from the mind, the mind saying, “I need this person, or someone like this person, in order to fulfill me, to be fulfilled.” It is coming from a space of emptiness, it is coming from a space of regression.

What can happen – which gives hope – is that when the internal infant in the one person feels fulfilled by the presence of the other person, and vice versa, then they can both relax. The one is thinking, “Ah, I have mommy,” and the other is thinking, “Ah, I have mommy,” and so now both have mommies and they can relax. And because they relax, something beautiful can happen – but it is the relaxation that causes something beautiful to happen, not because they are with each other. If they could relax through some other method, then it would be the same thing. It is the relaxation that causes the beautiful space to be there, not the presence of the other. That does happen sometimes, that two people get together and somehow they both feel fulfilled, and something blossoms. If it lasts, it is rare, but still it can happen.

We can achieve that same kind of thing by learning to relax by ourselves, by seeing that we can fulfill ourselves without the other. If we learn that, then we can feel exactly the same way as two people feel who – theoretically, at least – are in love.

Let’s look for a moment at love. Love is more or less the opposite of both of these things. Love is total fulfillment. Love is like an overflowing, it is an expansion. I am using love in this sense, and not mixing it up with sex, and the need of the mind. Love is non-directive. It is not directed to anyone. Relationships usually are directed. What we call love in relationships is directed to one person as an investment, hoping to get something back, even if it is just this feeling of inner fulfillment.

True love doesn’t expect anything back, because it doesn’t need anything. It is already complete in itself. True love is like a light bulb shining in a room. It doesn’t shine just on one specific person. It simply shines and it doesn’t matter if anyone is even there, the light is shining. The light is complete in itself and doesn’t need to feed on anyone in the room in order to be bright. That is the way love is.

Love is an overflowing, love is a giving, love is an expansion, love is a feeling of completion, of fulfillment. And the result of that is an overflowing. When you are in love, in true love, you are not just in love, you are love. You are producing love, you are love, you are love itself.

This experience – love – is most apt to come to you when you are relaxed. This can come in meditation, this can come in dance, this can come anyplace actually. But it is a feeling of relaxation, of expansion, of trust. It is something that you experience when the ego – the mind, the memory – is not tormenting you, not contracting you.

Many people are looking for love through sex and through relationships, and they don’t find it – which doesn’t mean to say that you can’t find love through a relationship with another. You can use it perhaps as a doorway. But real love will be with yourself and Existence, and that will include everybody else in Existence. Yet the moment your love is directed to one person, then be very clear about the fact that this is the mind saying, “I need this other for survival,” and then it is not love, it is a need.

If you can see that, you will save yourself a lot of anguish. You will save yourself a lot of time and effort, if you are interested in love. But because we use the word love to refer to that which happens when the need of the mind combines with the need of the species for sex, we experience a lot of confusion. We talk about two people being in love when they’re not. And it is then very easy to confuse what sages and wise people say about love – when they are talking about the overflowing kind of love – with the kind of love that we learn about on the Hollywood movie screen, which is not love at all.

We use the same word to mean two totally opposite states of being, and we create a lot of confusion. If we can separate these things, see them as different elements, different states, then we can move beyond the states that are crippling us, and be open to those states which would expand us. Also by seeing these different phases and different states more clearly, we have a clearer choice as to what we want to do.

What we normally call love is just a mind trip, and it keeps us in the mind, it keeps us regressed, keeps us frustrated, keeps us in a state of turmoil. And it is also something that we have to let go of, if we ever want to become clear. The moment you can let go of it, you probably will enter a state of love.

You can use relationship just like you would use any device to help you get clear. You can use a relationship to help you see how childish you are, how dependent you are on the other, how you still are projecting onto the other your mother, your father, or other people that were taking care of you in your infancy. You can see how you make the other responsible for your happiness, for your relaxation, for your well-being, which simply isn’t fair.

Up until a few years ago, it used to be one of the greatest compliments you could give someone to say, “I can’t live without you.” To say this is stupid, just plain stupid. And if anyone ever says this to you, you are going to feel like you are in prison, because they are making you responsible for them. They are saying, “I can’t live without you. Without you I am going to die. If you go away and leave me, I’ll die. My life depends on you. My survival depends on you.”

That is the infant coming out in its purest form. It is not a compliment at all. That person just wants, someone to take care of them. It used to be considered the highest expression of love, “I can’t live without you. I’ll die if I can’t be with you.” This statement indicates total regression. It has nothing to do with love, absolutely nothing. It is the opposite, the exact opposite of love.

Yet because of language we mix these things up, and after a while we don’t know what we are talking about. The Christians hear Jesus talk about love, and they think that’s what they do between the sheets at night. And we call having sex, ‘making love.’ That’s so ridiculous. Sex can give a feeling of expansion, because this urge for sex is being realized or released. The need of the mind for the other is being satisfied, so everything can seem perfect. But it isn’t love. And sometimes the next morning you recognize that it isn’t love.

If we can keep these things separate, we can start learning from them. There is nothing wrong with being with another – that’s beautiful. But if you make the other responsible for your survival, it gets to be ugly. If you blame the other for your unhappiness, it is ugly. If you cling to the other and limit the freedom of the other, it is ugly. It is not love.

Be open to what you mean each time you say or hear the word love, how you interpret it, how you translate it in your own mind. Use your relationships to find out more about yourself. Be careful about calling your relationships love, unless you are prepared for the other to walk out of your life at any second. If you are giving the other complete freedom to walk out of your life, knowing that you are going to remain complete yourself, then you can call that love. But if any part of you is clinging to the other, understand that it’s a need coming from the infant that you used to be, that it’s an artificial need coming from a helpless infant which you no longer are.

So watch your relationships with people. This includes not only your so-called love and sexual relationships, but also your relationships with friends and acquaintances. See how much you make them responsible for your happiness, for your well-being, your fulfillment, how much you blame them if things don’t go right for you. Be aware of that.

As long as you believe that you need the other for survival – that you need the other for life, that you are incomplete – you are going to remain incomplete. As long as you allow this pattern to be operating at the subconscious level, you are going to remain incomplete. That is just the way it is. You are perpetuating the program by believing in it.

Once you can start seeing this, and start seeing that you don’t need to have it, then you can begin to get rid of it, and feel completion and fulfillment with life itself, with you yourself. You can feel love wherever you are. Then you will be love. But you will never experience yourself as love as long as you need the other. It is a contradiction. It cannot possibly happen.

I spoke earlier about the possibility of of an ‘adult’ type of relationship. This happens when two adults recognize their own completion, recognize their own fulfillment in being alone, recognize their relationship to Existence, and then by chance happen to be together, both giving the other total freedom, both respecting the other, both accepting responsibility for his or her own feelings.

An adult type of relationship happens when two people, who can dance beautifully alone, decide for whatever reason to dance together, both of them knowing that they can dance beautifully without the other, and both willing to once again dance separately when that happens. And perhaps they separate, perhaps they come back together again, perhaps they separate, perhaps they dance together again, perhaps – this goes on and on. But there will always be a feeling of freedom on the part of the two individuals, each knowing that I am complete as I am, and yet it is fun to dance with the other. I don’t need the other, but it is fun to be with the other. And when there is the slightest urge of the other to move away, then I let them go.

This sometimes happens when people start out with a sexual relationship, and over a period of years, or over a period of time, become friends. And they have their sexual relationships with other people, but they remain friends with each other. This is not exactly an adult relationship, but it is moving in that direction, because they respect each other, and give each other freedom.

Look at your own relationships, and the ones you have had in the past. You can look at the ones you have had in the past first. If you are in one now, of course it is undoubtedly the greatest thing that ever happened in the world, but the one that you just got out of, of course it was all a mean trick on the part of the other. So it is easy to look at the ones that are already over with. But believe me, they are no different than the one you are in right now, because you created both of them, or all of them. And when this one is over, you will feel the same way. And you know this, because you have been through it often enough.

The more you can respect the other, and the more you take responsibility for yourself while you are in a relationship, the more you are going to respect the other when it is over. That is a good test. But watch – especially if you are interested in ultimately becoming clear – and look to see how the mind clings to the idea, “I need the other.” As long as you allow that program to be there, you are going to be at some level in a regressed state, in an artificial state. Remember, an artificial state is going to keep you in the same space that you were in when you were an infant – helpless, dependent, inadequate and incomplete.

So I am sure I have stirred up a few questions, maybe even a little anger. Usually this stirs up a bit of anger. People feel that I am threatening their survival when I say these things. But I will also say that I am not the first one to have said these things.

Question: “When you were talking about this state of regression, in which we project mommy or daddy on the other…What did you mean?”

Jeru: A lot of people still don’t love their mother, even as adults. They are attached to her, they see her as the other part of them. As a child, we see our mother just like another heart outside of ourselves, which we need, so we are attached to it, we are involved with it, but it is not love. And so a lot of adults are still the same way. They are attached to their parents, but it is out of need, not love. Now of course that can change. You can soften your attitude, and you can start feeling a kind of affection. But you have to look at it yourself to see how much of it is affection, and how much of it is still attachment.

As long as you make your parents your parents, then it is the mind. When you can let go of them and let them become people, then you have a chance of experiencing yourself also as a person. Do you see that difference at all? What we call love is usually just attachment, you are still feeling like the umbilical cord is still there, do you understand?

Question: “What about the love between children and their parents? Do children love their parents?”

Jeru: They don’t. And if you have small children, you’ll see that they don’t love you. You’ll see that they need you. You see it like with little animals, like when you observe little piglets. They just walk all over the mother, you know. They’re only interested in one thing. They’re interested in eating, that’s all. They don’t even care what the tit is attached to. It is totally unimportant. And you’ll see this with Kids – that’s the way nature has made them. It is fine. It is the way it is. They have to survive, so that’s what they are worrying about…