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

Jeru: During the past few days, you have been getting acquainted with your four year old, this inner child that basically directs your life.  After meeting the four year old, the next step is learning how to live with the four year old.  This is what we would like to look at this morning.

It’s as if you take a new child into your house.  Let’s suppose that you adopt an orphan.  And when you adopt this orphan, you don’t know his background.  And you notice, of course, that this child has certain patterns, certain habits, certain fears, certain desires, and you may not know where they came from, but they obviously came from someplace.  It is also going to be obvious to you that this child is not going to be able to meet your expectations immediately, or to be what you want him to be immediately.

Let’s suppose also that this child has been in some way abused or hurt, and that something caused this child to contract in some way – maybe not totally – but in some aspects.  So you start noticing those aspects that are contracted or afraid.  You may say to the child, “It’s okay now, you don’t have to be afraid of such-and-such.  You are staying with me now.”  And the child will hear what you are saying, but may not be able to let it in.  If this child has been in a place where it is not okay to go to the fridge, and you recognize that the child would like to do that but  is afraid to, and you say, “It’s okay here to go to the fridge if you want to,” this child may not be able to do that immediately, because of past conditioning.

What you learn to do is to be very patient with this child.  You learn to try to see the world through the eyes of this child, not trying to push the child around, not trying to dominate the child, but rather trying to go into the inner core of this child, to understand this child, and then re-educate this child from his or her inner core, and not just because you want the child to be a certain way.  Because if you push this child too much, the child will contract even more.  Even if you are trying to push the child into being happy, into being free, into being creative, into being open, this can cause the child to contract, because of past experience and past conditioning.

Remember that the way to be with your four-year-old is not to be arrogant, not to be pushy, but to be understanding.  Do what you can do to open the doors so that the four-year-old wants to come out of them.  But don’t pound on the door and say, “Come out!  Come out!  I want you to be free!”  It won’t work.  A lot of people, when they are doing these processes, start talking to their four-year-old the way their parents talked to them.  At first perhaps rather lovingly and gently, and then if that doesn’t work, a bit condescendingly, and when that doesn’t work, getting firm, and when that doesn’t work, getting angry.  That is not the way to do it.  It didn’t work with you, and it won’t work with your four-year-old.  The thing to do is listen, listen, always listen.  Allow your four-year-old to express itself.

The four-year-old is dreaming.  But just because the four year old is dreaming, doesn’t mean you should say to the four year old, “Shut up.  You are just dreaming.”  You say, “Tell me what you think is happening.”  And then listen, all the way to the end.  When you do this, you will see for yourself that what the four year old thinks is happening is not happening – because it is memory, it is a projection.  And when you see that it is not happening, then you will also see that the four year old is actually dreaming.

The way to help the four year old come out of the dream is not to say, “It’s just a dream,” but to ask the four year old to compare what it thinks is happening with what is really happening.  This takes some time.  Sometimes it is very easy, and sometimes it is a little more difficult.  But you want to find out what the four year old thinks is happening.  Then you will see that the four year old is having some kind of nightmare, and then you do whatever you need to do to help your four year old come out of the nightmare.

Let’s just suppose that you have a three-year-old.  And in the middle of the night the three-year-old comes into your bedroom, and is crying and frightened, and says, “There’s a dragon under my bed.”  Now the first thing that you think about, of course, is that he has had a nightmare.  But if you say to this child, “You just had a bad dream.  There are no such things as dragons.  Go back to bed.”  Then you are going to scare the child.  He is not going to be able to go back to bed.  If he does, he is going to be in panic all night long.  It’s not very loving to do that.

But you also want to help this child to come out of this idea, come away from this idea that there is a dragon under the bed.  So you use whatever you might use with a three-year-old.  You might say, “Oh, a dragon.  That is really something.  What color is it?  Oh, a green one.  How big is it?”  And you keep talking about it, and you keep listening.  And you say, “Okay, you stay here, and I am going to go look at it.  I haven’t seen a green dragon in a long time.  And anyway, I know how to get rid of green dragons.”  So you go and look, and say, “Oh, yes, a green dragon.  But I know how to get rid of him.  I’ll just say these four words, and then look, he is gone.”  And you let the child look, and the dragon is gone.

Maybe you will find some other way to do this.  But you don’t say, “Come on, silly, there are no such things as dragons, especially green ones.”  You let the child know that you are willing to listen.  And at the same time that you are listening to the child tell about the dragon, you don’t get caught up in it.  This is very important.  While you are listening to the child talk about the dragon, you don’t start believing in the dragon, otherwise you are no help.

You want to listen so that it all comes out.  The more you listen, the easier it is for you to see that it is all a dream.  When you talk to the four-year-old, you say, “How are you feeling?”  And he says, “I am angry.  I am angry at so-and-so.”  You might think that is the end of it, but keep listening, and keep asking questions.  “So you are angry at so-and-so.  Why are you angry?  What are you angry about?  How does that make you feel?”

Then the next level of questions which are the most important are, “What does that remind you of?  Does that remind you of something from your childhood?  How were you feeling then?”  Because if your anger is being caused by a memory, then you don’t know what the cause of it is until you go into the memory.  You can’t say, “My girlfriend makes me angry.”  If that anger is coming from a memory, then it is not the girlfriend that is making you angry.  You have to listen to the four-year-old, keep asking questions, and keep listening.

But as you listen, you stay in touch with reality, you stay in touch with the here and now, you stay in touch with the moment.  And you recognize that what the four-year-old is telling you is not happening now.  It is a memory already.  Or maybe a memory for years and years.  Always try to see the difference between memory and reality.  This is what we are trying to share with you.  This is the first big step.  See the difference between reality and memory.

You divide the work up tremendously when you do that.  Because you deal with reality one way, and you deal with fantasy or memory in another way.  So the first thing, before you start adjusting your life, before you start solving your problems, you see what is memory and what is reality.  See what is the past, and see what is the present.

This is what you want to do in your conversations with your four-year-old.  Let the four-year-old represent memory.  It does anyway.  Let the four-year-old represent conditioning, represent the past.  Let the adult that you are be the adult body, in the here and now, with all of your capabilities, all of your strengths, all of your ability to take care of yourself.  And see in the moment that your survival is not in danger.

Remember that the four-year-old thinks that his survival is in danger, or that the danger is just around the corner.  Maybe momentarily it is okay, but how about tomorrow?

You can almost always be certain of these two things being true.  That the adult, the real you, will not be in danger.  It is very, very rare that an adult is in danger.  But the four-year-old is always going to feel in danger.  So you have these two givens that you can start with.  You always have to be careful, realizing that the four-year-old thinks that he is in danger.  You will become schizophrenic.  As a matter of fact you already are schizophrenic, and it is best to admit it.  And once you admit it, you can use it in a very positive way.

You have this child inside of you that feels weak, and helpless, and vulnerable, and feels that he is dependent and won’t survive unless the other takes care of him.  And at the same time, you have your real being, your physical body which is strong, capable, and adequate, able to take care of itself, able to interact with other people.  And these are two totally different things, two totally different kinds of people.  And yet, up until now, these two have been all mixed up together.  One moment you feel like an infant, the next moment you feel like a three-year-old, the next moment you feel like a ten-year-old, the next moment you feel like a thirty-three-year old, and it goes up and down until you don’t really know who you are.

Separate these two aspects of yourself.  The four year old with all of its experiences – your core personality plus its experiences on the one hand – and the here and now on the other.  Try to keep those two as separate as you can.  Then be in the here and now as the adult.  You want to re-educate this child.  You want to say to this child, “Look, regardless of what you have learned in the past, regardless of what you have been through, regardless of what fears you have experienced, and what desires you have created, regardless of what strategies you felt you had to practice in order to stay alive, I want you to know now that you live with me, I want you to know that you are safe.  I want you to know now that there is someone with you twenty-four hours a day.  And I can take care of you better than anyone else in the world.  I am big and strong, I can earn a living, I can fix lunch, I can take care of us.”  This is what the adult is saying.  And you are re-educating the child.

But in the meantime let’s shift our analogies for a moment from the four year old to the computer.  The four year old, as you recall, is the programs in the bio-computer.  But we can teach the bio-computer that it is not a four year old any longer, that it is not a helpless infant any longer.  We can teach the bio-computer to be in the here and now.  We can teach the bio-computer that it is now in the body of a full-grown adult.

In dealing with the bio-computer, or the four-year-old, you want to be sure that you don’t deal with it in such a way that you activate defensive programs.  You want to deal with it in such a way that the computer does not shut down, so that it doesn’t say, “This is too much for me,” or “I decided never to do that.” You have to be very, very patient and understanding, and that means that you have to understand where the four-year-old is coming from, you have to understand the programs that are in the bio-computer.

So it’s a matter of going into the computer.  In some places you can go rather openly, and in some places you have to go very gently.  Just like in a normal computer, there are some switches that are very big, and easy to manipulate, and there are some things that have little, tiny wires, and you just have to go in there very slowly and gently to get the right one.  But you have to adjust yourself to the bio-computer, you have to influence the bio-computer.  This is the way you change it – you influence it, you convince it, you don’t dominate it, you don’t force it.  You cannot force this computer the size of Texas and a hundred stories high – it just doesn’t work.  But you can influence it.  You can re-educate it, you can teach it.

In changing a program or a pattern, you have to find out what works.  You have to find out why the computer believes that this particular defense mechanism is important, and help it to see that those old dangers, or whatever was there originally, are not there now, and that it is okay to let go of them.  You can’t just say to your four-year-old, “I command you, drop your armor.”  But if you can take a little more gentle approach, “Oh, that is a nice suit of armor you have there.  Where did you get that?  You have been carrying it a long time, haven’t you?  What are you wearing it for?  Oh, it protects you from dragons – green dragons.  Have you seen any lately?”  And you keep talking about the need for the armor, and comparing it to reality.  Is that armor still needed?  What do you think the chances are of seeing another green dragon?  And you just keep talking, until the four year old becomes aware that the armor is heavy, and maybe not needed.  It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t needed originally, but maybe it isn’t needed now.

In the winter time, if you put on a heavy overcoat to protect you from the cold, that’s great.  But suppose you work for a company that moves you to the middle of the Sahara Desert.  You must have done something good.  But it’s the middle of the winter, and you are still wearing your overcoat.  You are going to get very uncomfortable, and you are going to look around and see that you don’t need the overcoat anymore.  And no one is going to have to convince you to take the overcoat off.  It’s a drag.  And once you see that you don’t need it, you take it off.  But as long as you think you need it, you are going to keep it on.

And that is the way it is with our psychological armor, our psychological defense system.  As long as the computer thinks we need it, we have to have it.  So the thing to do is not to try to convince the four year old or the biocomputer to get rid of armor which it thinks it needs, but rather, help it to see that it doesn’t need that armor any longer.  Then it is willing to let go of it, and it wants to let go of it.

But you can’t pull the armor off.  There are a lot of therapies, especially some groups, that try to pull people’s armor off.  Sometimes it works.  But as soon as the group is over, the person says, “I am never going to let that happen again.”  And they put the armor back on, and they screw on the screws a little more tightly.

Once in a great while, if it is done very carefully, you can pull the armor off, and the person sees that it is okay.  But it usually doesn’t work that way, because people who want to pull your armor off, they usually don’t do it gently.  They just want you to look at your trips and admit that you are this way.  And that is very threatening.

Remember that your attitude toward the four-year-old is one of understanding that what the four-year-old has created is a defense system.  It believes that it needs that defense system because there was a time when it actually did need it.  Now it no longer needs the defense system, but it doesn’t know that yet.  And that is your job.

You need to help the bio-computer understand that it is not being threatened the way it was when you were an infant, that your life is not in danger the way it was when you were born, that you don’t need the strategies that you developed as a young child.  But you have to go into the computer and convince the computer of that.  And once you learn the knack of that, it goes quite quickly.  But as long as you hammer on the armor and demand that the four year old let go of the armor and let go of the defense system, you will find that you don’t make much progress.

That is what a lot of people do.  They are trying to force themselves to change, and it doesn’t really work.  When you can convince the biocomputer that you don’t need the old programs, they start falling away.  And we have techniques to speed that process up.  But even without those techniques, the falling away will happen, because the intelligence is there to see that if you don’t need it, and that it is okay to let go of it.

Therefore, listening to your four-year-old is the important thing.  It is the way to find out what is going on.  It is the way to find out why the armor has been put there in the first place, why these strategies were needed in the first place, why these attitudes developed in the first place.  When you can get to the core of things, and then help your four- year-old to compare these memories to the reality of the here and now, your four-year-old will also see that the old memories are not relevant, that they are not real, they are not true.

Our work consists of bringing things up from the bio-computer in the subconscious, bringing things up to the surface so that we can see them, comparing those things to the here and now, so that we can see that the memories are false, and that the here and now is real.  We keep doing that, bringing things up to the surface and comparing them to the here and now, and seeing what is real, letting go of the unreal.  That is all. This is the way to clear out.  Not being afraid to let these things come up, and as a matter of fact, encouraging them to come up, and comparing them always to the here and now.

A lot of people do one or the other.  A lot of people will get into regression work, but they don’t compare that to the here and now.  They don’t compare what comes up to the here and now.  So they live in their nightmare, thinking it is real, and thinking that they are working on themselves, but they are just torturing themselves.  They are just creating more nightmares.

There are a lot of therapies that do this.  They work with the dream, but they don’t work with reality.  They will tell you that your problems are real, but your problems are not real.  They keep the problems alive by telling you that they are real.  There are other disciplines or approaches that try to get you in the here and now, but they don’t deal with the green dragon at the subconscious level.  So it doesn’t work.  The green dragon keeps breaking through.

But if you will do both of these things, if you will bring the stuff up from the subconscious, expose it to the sunlight, compare it to the here and now, then it dissolves.  And when it dissolves, it leaves space for something else to come up.  This is the process, repeating one thing after the other.  Letting old stuff come up, exposing it to the here and now, and letting it dissolve.  Pretty soon, you start getting lighter and lighter, because you are not carrying these old fears.  And as you get lighter, it gets easier and easier to actually be in the here and now, to be in the moment.  You become more relaxed, your energy is more flowing, your aura actually expands.  You are more intuitive, more present, and more alive.  The more you clean up the past, the more you will be in the present.

You don’t have to work at being in the present, but it does require awareness.  Either of these, if you do them separately, won’t really help you that much.  You have to do both.  Bring it up, and compare it to the here and now.  For example, in the intuitive dialogue, that is what we do.  We let the four-year-old express itself, bring it up, and as we are being the adult, we compare it to the here and now.

In the intuitive dialogue, when you are being the adult, the idea is not to be the parent, and say, “Look, how many times have I told you that you are not weak and helpless anymore?” and “How many times do I have to tell you that you can trust me?”  It doesn’t work like that.  Don’t talk to your four-year-old the way your mother talked to you.  Listen.  Listening is like a vacuum that needs to be filled.  You listen, and the four-year-old starts talking to you.  And it’s all this stuff from the subconscious that will start coming up.  When I say listen, I mean allow space for emotions, for fears, for desires, or whatever is there, provide space for it.  You provide the space, and the four-year-old will fill that space with his old stuff.  And then you compare it to the here and now.  Comparison will help dissolve it.

It does take patience.  This process of re-educating your four-year-old is re-educating your bio-computer.  The bio-computer has the programs put there by your four-year-old, which say, “I am helpless.  I am weak.  I am inadequate.”  Now you want to tell the bio-computer, “Hey, that is not true any longer.  You are now in a body that is big and strong.”  You want to re-educate.  Remember that the process of re-education is the same as the process of re-learning.  Actually what we are aiming for is unlearning.  We want to unlearn these old patterns, unlearn these old attitudes.

The process of unlearning is basically the same as the process of learning, and one important thing about learning is repetition.  There are different ways that we can learn.  One is that we can learn from a very strong experience, like when you put your hand on a hot stove, you usually don’t repeat it.  You can learn from authority.  If your mother, Mrs. God, says, “Don’t put your hand on the stove because it will burn,” and if you accept her as an authority, you don’t put your hand on the stove.  You have learned that it is hot.  And the other way is through repetition.  We learn through repetition.

Most of our learning is through repetition, especially as adults.  We repeat, repeat, and repeat, until we can do it.  Whether we are learning to type, learning to drive a car, or learning to brush our teeth, or learning to tie our shoes, it is repetition that solidifies that learning process.  So the unlearning process is the same way.  To unlearn these old habits requires repetition.  So be patient with your four-year-old.  Understand that it is going to take repetition, going over the same things again, and again, and again.  Just like being with this child that comes to live with you. “It’s okay for you to go to the fridge, you don’t have to be afraid,” or “It’s okay for you to do this, I am not going to punish you.”  You have to repeat, repeat, repeat.  So give yourself time for that.  Understand that it is necessary.  You can be patient.

And always be respectful and grateful to your four-year-old.  If you are using the pendulum, ask your four-year-old as the first question, “To what degree are you willing to talk with me right now?”  Don’t just assume that you can barge in there and ask your questions.  Be respectful.  You will get a lot more cooperation.  Once the child realizes that you are not going to be pushing him around, and that you can become friends, you will get results.  And that is what you want, you want to be friends.

But go from the space of understanding, go from the space of respect.  You respect the child that you used to be.  It’s not that you respect the movie, it’s not that you respect the nightmare, it’s not that you respect the dream.  But you have to respect this bio-computer, because it is just too big to push around.  So if this huge computer says, “I am afraid of brass buttons,” you say, “Oh, that is interesting.  Will you tell me more about it?  How big are the brass buttons that you are afraid of?  When did you first become afraid of them?”  Go into it, instead of just saying, “Oh, that is stupid.”

It’s the attitude that is important in this work.  And a lot of this will depend on what you experienced during your first four years.  You might have experienced that it was not safe to trust, so you have programs in the biocomputer that say, “Don’t trust.”  Today you are trying to do something, and those programs will still be there.  And you will have to deal with them.

There might be another person who is full of programs that say it is okay to trust.  And that person will be totally different.  But you have to deal with the programs that you have in your bio-computer, remembering that when you put them there, they made good sense. And today, now that you are not helpless and dependent any longer, they may not make any sense.  They may be detrimental to you.  But that is what you have to decide, once they come up to the surface.

Let this relationship with your four-year-old be a friendship.  First it is going to be a relationship with a frightened child, a child who has created armor, a child who has created strategies, a child who has certain attitudes about life, a child that was born totally helpless.  These programs are now in the computer, and what you want to do is help the computer see that these old programs are not relevant any longer.  And in that process, you are going to change this bio-computer the size of Texas from being full of programs of being a helpless infant, to having the programs of being a strong and capable adult who will be a friend.  And believe me, once you have turned that computer around, you are going to have a real friend.  And then miracles are possible.

Question:  “Twice now, in the final stages of a transformation, I have had the experience that how I was describing the event and the transformation was the way that it actually had been on some level, and that it had really been something really wonderful, and I am wondering if that would seem to be significant information, if that can be considered real in the sense of being an adult in the here and now.”

Jeru:  Let me see if I understood you.  You have had an experience which you would call a positive experience, as you are remembering.  And you are asking, what relevancy does that have now?  Is that it?

Question:  “Even though I had been beaten up, when I transformed the beating up session, I saw it on a different level, in a different way, so that it was better than just getting beaten up.”

Jeru:  Well, the main thing is, whatever it was, it was a memory.  That is really the main thing we are trying to share with you.  Whatever it was, it isn’t now, and it is okay to let go of it.  And we do the transformation technique because it makes it easier to let go of those things.  That is the purpose of it.  We transform the negative energy into positive, and that is easier to let go of than the negative.  Because the negative causes us to contract, and the positive causes us to relax.  So that is why we do this, so that we can let go of it.

And of course, with the transformation technique, when you do the positive side of things, very often you see aspects of the original experience that you hadn’t seen before.  That is another one of the advantages of that.  But again, it is not that we are trying to analyze the past, but to let go of it.  And we do what we can to bring the memories up, to make it easier to let go of them.  It is not so necessary to understand them, or analyze them, or whatever.  So I would just keep looking at it.  I wouldn’t give too much significance to any single thing, but just keep plugging away, one step after the other.  The only thing that is real is the here and now.

Question:  “When something happens in the moment, something practical, like it happened to me last night that all of a sudden I felt angry because something happened, and I had a reason to be angry.  How do I deal with that, in order to get back to being with myself?”

Jeru:  This is a problem that everyone has – what to do when something makes you angry.  Well, nothing makes you angry.  You make yourself angry.  You always have a choice whether to be angry or not.  And there are some things that are more difficult, but still you have a choice.  But as long as you think that it is something else that makes you angry, you are never going to make the attempt to take responsibility for that.

Question:  “What I mean is, I see something, and I get angry.  And so what do I do with this anger?”

Jeru:  Well, the first thing to do is to watch your language.  You said, “Something made me angry.”  That is a totally different story than saying, “I made myself angry.”  If you say, “I made myself angry,” okay, that is where you start to look at things.  That is where the cause is.  So why do you make yourself angry, that is the question.  The answer usually is that whatever has happened is reminding you of a memory, or activating a memory of a time when you were helpless and dependent, and frustrated.

If you will start seeing that, you will get angry less often, and when you are angry, you will get over it more quickly.  Because you will see that what you are doing is you are re-running an old movie.  Find out how old you are in the movie, and deal with the movie as a movie.  Intuitive dialogue is a way, and we will be showing you other ways later on.

But if something happens, and you see that, and you sort of push a certain button inside of yourself, it activates a certain movie.  The movie is a memory of a much earlier time.  And a key element of that movie will be your helplessness, your dependency, and your frustration about it.  That is why you get angry.  But deal with it as a memory, because that is what it is.  And we will be learning to do that.

Question:  “My experience yesterday from doing the rebirthing was that when you activate this computer, basically almost all thinking comes from this fear space.  I can’t actually see any thought that happens in myself that doesn’t root itself in fear.  And what you are saying is, that as the adult, when you are looking at the computer, you are saying, “Okay, this is the present, and there is no reason to fear,” and basically you are just de-activating the defense system.  But the awareness, when you are saying, “Be present,” that is not even conditioned in any way, that is even separate from the adult.  It’s not anything.  So the watcher is just the awareness, just learning about this defense system, so it doesn’t go off in all situations.”

Jeru:  Yes, you said it beautifully.  The important thing is to see that all of your thoughts are coming from this fear space.  If you don’t see it now, don’t be upset.  But you will experience it, that is the case, that all of your thoughts are coming from fear.  And the fear space is coming because you felt helpless.  Now that you are no longer helpless, by any means, you also don’t need this fear space, and all of the strategies and defense mechanisms that you have created because of it.

Question:  “Yesterday I had the experience that someone shouted at me, and I had immediately this impulse to shout back, because I know from experience that I get rid of this tension, and I am feeling strong, and that I got back at her, and this will teach her a lesson, and this kind of feeling.  And then I didn’t do it, and I felt in that moment like this energy was still in me, because I am much more used to giving back, to actually venting myself if I am feeling weak and helpless.  It’s like in society, or if you see these Italian movies, it’s really great, they have these big scenes, and then they hug again and everything is great.  And then you think that this is the way it is supposed to be done.  And if you just don’t react, then it is somehow strange, it is not natural.  And so I have this whole thing happening.”

Jeru:  Well, two things are probably happening there, and both of them are memories.  One was a memory of wanting to strike back, and the other was a memory of telling yourself that it’s not okay to do that.  The key is the fact that something made you angry.  How did you make yourself angry?  Why did you choose to be angry?  That is the key question – not what you did about it, but what created it.  And it is a memory that created it.  That is what you have to see.  The fact that someone is saying something to you in a loud voice is no reason to get upset.  It’s just someone saying something to you in a loud voice, that’s all.  The fact that you choose to take that and activate an old memory with it, and in that old memory you are weak and helpless, and defenseless, that is another issue.

But that is what actually happens.  You set off a certain movie, an old movie of anger, of frustration, of helplessness, and you lived in it.  But instead of fighting back the way you usually do, you didn’t say anything, and then became frustrated by that.  But either of those two things are not really the best way to do it.  The best way to do it is to see that you are creating a nightmare inside yourself, that is the first thing, that you are creating the nightmare.  And then of course what you do about it is another story, but first see that you are creating the nightmare, that you are the one making yourself angry.

See that you have a choice not to do that – and that is not repression.  It is not like being angry and then saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t be angry.”  That is repression.  What it really means is to look at it, at what is actually happening.  What is actually happening if someone shouts at you?  What is actually happening?  You hear sounds, you see a distorted face, there is some air being moved in your direction.  So what?  Suppose that you are an acting coach, and you are trying to teach someone how to be angry.  And you have been practicing, and finally it happens, they get it.  You hear a loud noise, you see a distorted face, there is air being moved in your direction, and you don’t feel threatened, you feel happy.  So what is the difference?

Question:  “I think it’s about the intention coming from that person.  I think it’s about refusing to accept the content of that intention.”

Jeru:  Be as realistic as you can.  That is the point.  Is your life being threatened just because someone is raising their voice?  Do you need to feel weak, and helpless, and frustrated, just because someone is raising their voice?  Do you need to regress just because someone else is regressed?  That is the point.

Question: “But when you are angry, you can’t see it, because you are living in it.”

Jeru:  Yes, but it is your responsibility to see why you are creating your own anger.  Where is the anger coming from?  Is it coming from what the other person is doing, or is it coming from you?  If you think that it is coming from the other person, then of course you are just a helpless victim.  But if you can see that the anger is coming from you, then you can change it.  You can do something about it.

Question:  “I am in the same situation.  I am in a beautiful space, no problems, and then someone comes and slaps me.”

Jeru:  Okay, fine.  So what happened there?  You feel an impact.  But has your life been threatened?  That is the thing to do.  Be realistic about it.  Maybe you are in danger.  And if you are in danger, then fine, respond accordingly.  But the question is, are you in danger?  Is your life threatened?  Do you need to respond to that situation like a helpless, frustrated infant, or like a strong and capable adult?  That is the question.  That is what we are trying to see.

Question:  “I think that it is really important to respect what your four-year-old is saying in that situation, and not push it away.  I have had the thought also that you don’t want to live as a slave to your four-year-old, and always do only what he wants you to do.  I am wondering about the idea of discipline.  Because an example in my own life is that I do martial arts, and there are some times when my kid just doesn’t want to go to class, and there are situations when my adult wants something, and my four-year-old doesn’t want to.”

Jeru:  That is a very good question.  There will be times when you feel like there is a limit.  And you have to use that with tender loving care.  And very often, there will be certain things that if you talk to the four-year-old, he will concede.  If you say, “Look, I know we feel this way sometimes, and we don’t really want to go.  But haven’t you noticed that every time we go, we feel better?”  Get the four-year-old to say, “Yes, that is true.  We do feel better.”  In other words, talk to your four-year-old about it.  Hear why he doesn’t want to go.  Maybe he has a reason.  It has nothing to do with that.  You are not to become a slave to your four- year-old.  But you will learn that by being open to your four year old, he will become a lot more cooperative than when you are trying to push him around.  That is really the main point.

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.

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…

Artikel verschenen in InZicht mei 2003
Dit artikel is samengesteld door Taetske Kleijn uit diverse lezingen die Jeru Kabbal over dit onderwerp heeft gehouden tijdens Clarity Process workshops.

Artikel verschenen in InZicht Mei 2003
Themanummer Relaties

Leidsch Dagblad 9 maart 2002
door Ilse Keuenhof