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

Verschenen in yoga international magazine, mei 2019

Column door Taetske Kleijn verschenen in het tijdschrift InZicht september 2017

Interview verschenen in Djoj Programmakrant, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Childhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friends

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lovers

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

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

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

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

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

The Perfect Mother

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sex

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

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

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

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

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

So…anybody like to argue?

Discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth is not in memory

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

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

The difference between movie and reality

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

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

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

Be aware of the fine line

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

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

You can’t change the past

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

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

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

Waking up

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

The movie is not relevant

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

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

Balance

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

This moment is all you have

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

Stop giving them juice

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

Our work has two parts

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

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

It’s your computer

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

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

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

Programs are memories

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

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

You can use the mind to clear the mind

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

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

Hardware and software

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

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

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

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

The map is not the territory

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

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

The problem doesn’t exist

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

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

There are no adults here

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

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

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

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

Don’t repress memories

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

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

Anger is a program

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

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

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

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

Reprogramming is very useful

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

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

Deprogramming

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

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

Regression work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.