CONVERSATIONS WITH RAJ
APRIL 1985
Vol. 2 No. 4

QUESTION: I would like to know if you can help me find out what my basic anger is? I'm kind of an angry person all the time, and I have been told that I need to find out why I'm angry so I don't upset my husband all the time--don't yell at him all the time.

RAJ: Basically it arises out of a frustration around the subject of control. I mean this in a larger sense than just the relationship with your husband. There is a very strong feeling of the need to be able to be in charge, and it arises out of a very "responsible" attitude. It is not one of simply wanting to be manipulative, but one of not wanting to be at the mercy of events, situations, circumstances, and time.

To be in charge, to be orderly, and, above all, to be in charge in a responsible manner, is an attitude or ethic, which you learned and acquired as a child. But, life itself seems to be thwarting your ability to maintain order, and thus it seems to have become a war, or an ongoing struggle, which you are losing. This is infuriating and insulting, and, of course, grows into greater and greater anger.

It is as though you have not been able to exercise an authority over your experience, which you were led to believe you would have, and that you would have the responsibility to exercise as an adult. Therefore, when circumstances or individuals seem to cause you to experience a feeling of having no power whatsoever, you naturally become quite judgmental and critical of the role they play in thwarting your ability to extract some sense of order out of disorder. And the judgment and criticism add to the chaos, rather than helping to eliminate it.

Now, the fundamental mistake in the very premise that you have a responsibility to bring order into the picture is that it presupposes that order is not natural; that disorder is what will naturally occur if orderliness is not imposed upon it. This is a fundamental oversight, which mankind has not discovered throughout the centuries. Thus, he does not take time to open himself up to and align himself with the underlying Universal order of everything. Rather, he busies himself with attempting to establish order and maintain it according to concepts of right and wrong, which have been acquired and taught and which vary from society to society, from culture to culture.

With everyone running around trying to maintain orderliness in different ways and with different standards, the very chaos, which he is trying to avoid, is brought into play. And most usually it comes into play at the level of personal relationships, unless it gets to a national level, wherein it often leads to war.

Specifically, the necessity here, for you, is to realize that indeed there is an underlying Orderliness, which is functioning right where you are, and is functioning in your relationship, and that it needs to have your attention. It needs you to be willing to set aside the false assumption that YOU must establish the order. In this way, you may become quiet enough and calm enough and free of guilt enough to sense into and be open to that underlying Orderliness.

The guilt will come into play because you will be inclined to believe that if you stop attempting to bring order out of chaos, you will be being irresponsible, and that is not acceptable. But, that is part of the ethic of needing to create order as though it didn't already exist.

Now, fundamentally, at the very center of your Being, there is functioning right now an ultimate Orderliness. Another way of describing it is Harmony. The nature of that Harmony is Love. This is what is at the center of everything. This is the reason that there is a universal orderliness or harmony going on that may be perceived if one is not bound to the ethic of having to create it out of his own efforts.

If you will be willing to relax, if you will be willing to assume that everything will not go to pot if you don't exercise some conscious authoritative control, you will first of all be able to move into that area of your Self, which is constituted of Love. And you will be able to experience It, and you will then be in a position of being able to share It. But, as long as you are obligating yourself to a task, which you cannot accomplish because it doesn't need to be done, you will keep yourself in the level of frustration and anger, and you will become a part of the problem you are trying to solve.

So you see, you are not at a loss here unless you insist on attempting to manipulatively or authoritatively create order as though there would be none otherwise. Your husband, in his own way, has the same task, although the details are different and unique to him.

There needs to be a real sense that there IS a God; that there is a universal Life-Principle, which has infinite and ultimate Authority, and that this Life-Principle constitutes a universal Movement, which has as its very nature, Love. Everything which appears is ultimately that Movement, and there is, therefore, a substantial harmony for you to let go into, relax back into, and release the frustration and anger, which has evolved out of your not being able to create that order yourself. It was a task ignorantly given to you and ignorantly attempted by you because you didn't know that it wasn't necessary, and you didn't know that it wasn't a sign of being an adult to be able to exercise that authority.

Your maturity will come in your discovery that you can let go, that you can open up and become sensitive to the underlying universal Orderliness as It is manifesting Itself right where you are. And then, with love, act in harmony with that Orderliness.

As long as you are attempting to do the impossible and are frustrating yourself, it will be impossible for you to feel love fully and express it easily. And yet, it is the one element, which has apparently transforming power, healing power. It is the one element, which is needed here. But, one cannot just jump from anger to love when one doesn't know why or how he can do it, and why it is reasonable to let go of the very thing, which is causing the anger.

You are not faced with an impossible situation, one without a solution. But, the solution does not lie in the direction you have been raised to think it does. It really lies in your ability to relax your personal effort to bring order to your life, bring order to your husband's activities, to bring order to disorderly thoughts wherever they might occur. And begin, rather to relax--literally to relax back into the arms of divine Love--and say, "I will listen for your direction. I will flow with your guidance. I want to feel the love that constitutes the substance of my Being. I no longer want to cover it up with the anger and the frustration, and I want to feel it strongly enough to be able to share it with others, even if they are distressed by the circumstances they find themselves in."

QUESTION: I would also like to know why I'm so afraid of everything?

RAJ: It basically stems from the same source. If there is no sense of the orderliness of things above and beyond anyone's personal effort, then, it means that if men are not able to bring order to an otherwise chaotic world, the disorder will take over, and you will not be safe. It is incredibly impossible to feel safe if there is no awareness of there being a power at work that is greater than the puny little human minds that are governing the economy and the governments of the world and of the community that you live in.

It is not necessary to "believe in God," but it is essential to realize that there is a universe here, which puny little human minds did not create; a universe of such vast orderliness that it evidences the presence of Intelligence-some intelligent, orderly, harmonizing Life-Force. It would be impossible for something of the magnitude of the universe to function in an orderly way by accident!

When you find yourself feeling frightened to the point where it is disturbing your equilibrium and rendering you less effective than you would like, I would suggest to you that you step outside on a clear night and just stand there for awhile looking at the stars and the moon. And let your attention move away from the details of your local experience and their fear-inducing dynamics long enough to connect with your awareness of the absolute, steady orderliness of the movement of all of these heavenly bodies. So that, you may have this feeling that your planet is a part of a vast universal movement of harmony and intelligence, a universe in which chaos is not occurring.

In this way, it will be easier for you to stabilize your fearful emotions. It will allow you to understand and reason that, if that orderliness is functioning in such a universal scope, and that not only your planet, but you, are existing in this universe, then somehow there must be the same kind of harmonious order (and therefore safety) for you right where you are.

What happens is, especially when we get terribly frightened, that Our attention gets narrowed down so small that all we can let in are the dynamics that are of concern to us. We lose the larger perspective. And, without that perspective it is literally impossible to be at peace. It is like children who go through a haunted house or a ride on a pier. They go through the doors and are immediately confronted with darkness and scary events. They forget that they are on a pier. They forget that they are in a world where these things do not exist, and their attention closes down to the immediate dynamics of the ride, and they can be easily scared.

You will find yourself feeling more secure on a more consistent basis as you begin to consider what we talked about in the first answer, and as you sincerely begin to let yourself relax back into the arms of this ongoing, unchanging universal Harmony.

QUESTION: I would like to understand about patience, and why it is so important.

RAJ: Impatience is almost the more important word. Impatience is something which keeps you from being able to be present in the Now. When you think of the word "patience," it is like an interminable putting up with something unpleasant or undesirable.

Properly understood, patience means allowing yourself to be fully present in the Now. There is nothing interminable about it. To whatever degree you succumb to impatience, your energy and focus is pulled away from where you are, and as a result you are less able to function appropriately or well.

At the bottom line, the practice of patience, the practice of being fully present in the Now, constitutes peace, constitutes the absence of conflict, anxiety, fear. Do you have to be patient with your children? No. You need to be able to be present with them in the Now at any given moment when you are relating to each other; and by virtue of being present with them, having the perspective needed to be able to be appropriate. Being appropriate may well mean saying, "Absolutely not!"

The way you use the word "patience" is incorrect, because the word you are really meaning is "tolerance." "Do I need to be tolerant?" "Do I have to tolerate this?" If you want to find the way to resolve the thing you feel like you are being required to tolerate, then be patient! Be willing to be fully in the Now, so that all of you is present to connect with the Now fully--in all of its meanings. Then you will know how to respond in the Now and not sacrifice anything.

QUESTION: What is the significance of being in the present? Why is that stressed so much?

RAJ: Because there literally is nothing else, except in the imagination. When one spends all one's time in one's imagination, one is institutionalized. It really is not complicated. Now is all there is--right now!

QUESTION: So, why is it so easy to get into the impatience?

RAJ: Your use of your memory, and the buildup of a sense of past continuity, allows you to create in your imagination a sense of ongoing continuity, especially since you can arrange to meet someone at 12 o'clock tomorrow afternoon, and then, in all likelihood, succeed in doing so. As a result, you can envision what will be happening for the next seven or ten days. But, the fact is that the only moment in which you can ACT or be conscious is the Now.

QUESTION: How do I get in touch with my personal power? I have been vomiting quite a bit lately. And I know it relates to work I have been doing in my sexual abuse class. And getting in touch with the difference between being a victim and being who I am, and things I could do to support myself in moving from being a victim to having more personal power.

RAJ: What you are calling "personal power" will amount to your experience of your integrity, your experience of your Wholeness. This will feel like strength. However, it will not feel like strength or power OVER anything. It will simply feel like the inviolable cohesiveness of You. It will feel like "having your act together."

You will go down unnecessary paths or byways if you are looking for your personal power and strength to be something you exert over your world or your environment. Your attention will be in the wrong place, because it will specifically relate to things apparently external to you, when, in actuality, your power is really constituted of your PRESENCE, in all of its facets. Your power is something that will emerge in the quietness of your Being, rather than in your environment, in a spatial or three-dimensional way. It will constitute a self-assurance, which will know that there is no need to be defensive or offensive. It is something that has been ever present with you. You are not going to have to create it, because it is inseparable from you.

You have bought into the idea or concept that it has been violated and disrupted and that it has, indeed, been disassembled, and therefore is not present and functional in your life. Yet, it has been present, unchanged in any way, just beyond the limit of your concept. You will find that as the experience of it emerges at the level of your conscious awareness, your world will seem to reflect back to you less and less need for defensiveness, because you will not be approaching it as an adversary. This is why it is important for you to understand what constitutes this personal power, so that you do not seek it as a better way to deal in an adversary stance with your world. But rather seek it as a fundamental, essential aspect of your Being, which is entirely within you, an aspect which NEVER WENT ANYWHERE!

Part of the regurgitation of the food is tied in with the adversary sense and an underlying need to protect or defend yourself against a potentially hostile environment. As you connect more significantly with the inviolable and ever-present PRESENCE of your Wholeness within, and the need for standing in an adversary position diminishes, you will not defend yourself against the food you are taking in, and the regurgitation will diminish. In other words, you will not seem to be presented with "proof" that there are some parts of your world that are not in harmony with you, and the Oneness of you and your world will become more obvious. The need for personal power in the way you have been looking at it will become somewhat ridiculous.

Your power will be more and more present as it becomes obvious to you that it is not needed in a defensive way, when you begin to realize that it is an inherent part of your Being because your Being is Whole--is not fragmented, and therefore is not vulnerable.

QUESTION: You spoke about "emerging in the quietness of my being." I feel like I'm in a transition between letting go of a lot of that old stuff and emerging in a new way. I tend to be a "doer," and what I'm getting in touch with, is that, I've always felt I had to "do more." What I'm realizing is that there isn't anything I need to "do." I want to know what I can do to support myself in letting go of all that busyness, all that "doing"? The whole question has to do with allowing vs. doing.

RAJ: I am going to suggest that what you specifically need is to realize that you need do nothing with any sense of intensity or anxiety. In other words, let there be, in addition to your meditation, an insistence on your part on doing everything out of the greatest sense of peace you can muster. Refuse categorically to do anything with a high level of excitement or intensity or drive or obligation or, responsibility. You will not find yourself sitting idle as a result. But, your insistence in these areas will cause you to be relaxed to a far greater degree than you presently are, and it will cut through, more effectively than anything else, your tendency to actively accomplish and "do" things.

Realize that the word "Being" is a verb, and Being is What You Are. Therefore, you will always be being something. It is the ego, which takes the very movement of your Being and turns it into a process of accomplishment, responsibility, and potential guilt if the responsibility is not carried well. Therefore, the shift will not be a shift from activity to inactivity. It will be a shift from doing things as an object accomplishing something to the fundamental, natural unfolding of your Being in the process of eternally fulfilling Itself, which involves Joy, but not excitement.

Excitement always involves an element of fear. Excitement is the way the ego experiences the Joy of your Being, because the ego sees itself as working outside the boundaries of your Being, on its own. This violates the very integrity of your Being. Therefore, from first to last, It (the ego) is an assumption of disobedient activity, because everything it does, it does in violation of What you Really Are, and therefore everything it does involves the element of fear of discovery!

What happens is, that mankind treats this excitement as though it constitutes the vitality of life, the essential aliveness of life--which is totally fallacious.

Again, the simple way to cut through this is to recognize that you actually have the option AND THE NECESSITY of flowing with whatever needs to be done in a peaceful way, and a corresponding insistence on your part to not do anything out of a sense of urgent necessity.

Being is One--infinite, but One. Therefore, the infinitude of your Being is absolutely Harmonious. Harmony is Peace. Physically speaking, it is Health. Financially speaking, it is Wealth. But, no matter what name you give it, it is the Harmony and Peace of your Being consciously lived right here in the world.

QUESTION: What can be done about my mother's arthritis?

RAJ: The problem is inflammation, which is the evidence of fear. She is afraid that her body can deteriorate and ultimately collapse around her, in spite of her. She does not realize it is her image, and that therefore SHE is its source, that it is HER reflection and is therefore incapable of acting independently.

Her BELIEF that it can act or function against her, and her consequent fear, is disruptive, and that disruption is imaged forth as arthritic inflammation.

She needs to consciously embrace her body and her joints AS HER ALLIES, replacing her fear with a confident appreciation (love) of their intent to reflect her perfectly. This replacement will bring to a halt the distorting effect of her belief and fear, and she will begin to experience healing.

She will have to consciously override her conviction that her body is an organism, which is a HOST to her consciousness, which can kick her out when it chooses. It is the visibility and tangibility that which images forth her Presence. Therefore, it is an extension of herself, and like an image in a mirror, it has no means to act on its own.

Once it is seen that her fear is like the distorting interference of a passing airplane to one's TV picture, which does not cause one to assume that the TV set is faulty, she will no longer assume that her body is faulty, and will address herself properly to replacing the belief and its fear, which are causing the distortion.

As long as she feels she is a RESIDENT in her body, she will be insecure and fearful. But, once she sees that it is her image and likeness, she will handle HERSELF, rather than treating the body, and her body will reflect the harmony and peace which she INSISTS on entertaining consciously, rather than the distorting fear, which she is allowing to occupy her thought.