Satan: An Autobiography - Yehuda Berg 2010
Test Number Nine Do You Know When to Give And When to Receive?
The Tests
I am particularly skillful when it comes to messing up relationships. And, boy, do you let me push your buttons! It’s no wonder that most of the relationships in your life seem off-balanced, one-sided, and unfulfilling. You’re letting me play my games again. When will you learn?
How about starting now?
Here’s how it works: In every relationship, there is one person that is more giving and one that is more receiving. This is by design. Whether you are the giver (the Light) or the receiver (the Vessel), you need to find a way to stay a complete person in both roles. It’s about knowing when to be a Vessel and when to be the Light. Only by knowing how to operate in relationships and by being tested to find your correct role can your greatness be revealed.
In order to push your buttons and make you forget your job, I will:
• Convince you it’s best to be a taker and not a giver.
• Persuade you that being a teacher or parent means being a friend.
• Entice you into believing that setting boundaries with your child is something that only mean parents do.
• Lure you into leaning on your student, child, or employee as a trusted confidant instead of developing healthy adult relationships with others.
In response to my tactics—and because you don’t understand the duality of roles in relationships and the specific role you are meant to play—resentment will inevitably arise. If you are a parent or a teacher, or the dominant giver, I’ll make you feel that you are being taken advantage of, ripped off, or that you aren’t getting any return on your investment. I make you feel unappreciated and you, in turn, make the other person feel like crap.
You have expectations for the relationship that aren’t meant to be. And you fail to accept the role you are meant to play. No wonder you feel unfulfilled in your most important relationships. No wonder you’re always ticked off at someone.
In fact, most of people’s problems stem from unbalanced relationships. Parents have issues with their children, children with their parents, bosses with their employees, employees with their bosses. The reason for this is that it is your nature to seek balance, but, in truth, it is part of the very nature of relationships like parent/child or employer/employee that there will never be a balance. The nature of the relationship itself is imbalance. A child is not meant to parent his parent. She becomes a parent only when she has her own child.
Is this making sense?
THE PARENT/CHILD RELATIONSHIP
The test of being a parent can be especially challenging, for it is a direction representation of the relationship between you and your parent, the Creator. Just like you push back from the Creator every time you listen to me, children will test the giver/receiver dynamic of the parent/child relationship. That’s what kids do.
Here’s what I do:
I convince you that the role of the parent as the constant giver of Light and the child as the constant receiver is unbalanced, while in fact, that is the nature of the relationship. So, the test for you is to accept the “imbalance.” This is not only true for traditional parent/child relationships; it also holds true for employer/employee relationships, teacher/student relationships, or any type of relationship in which a person plays the role of nurturer or mentor. This is why I encourage you to do things like abandon your role as parent for a more enjoyable role as your child’s best friend.
Don’t buy into it.
By becoming friends with your child, employee, or student, you are forfeiting your role as the giver of Light. Even if you only give up your role a tiny bit, it doesn’t matter. The second you are on the same level, you’ve compromised the integrity of the giver/receiver relationship.
THE TEACHER/STUDENT RELATIONSHIP
The teacher/student relationship operates in the exact same way. It’s a relationship that can never be 50/50. That’s because the Creator didn’t design a universe that operates at 50 percent capacity. You have to be willing to offer 100 percent Light all the time to your student or child. Allow that individual to become a Creator to you, and the system collapses. Instead, the student must become a teacher to someone else, and the child must become a parent to his or her own child.
Being a parent or a teacher has its own reward; it reveals its own Light. But you can’t expect your Light to come from your kid or your student. Sure, I’ll make you feel needy for love and approval. Sure, I’ll make you want to take Light from the very person you are meant to give Light to. I thrive on neediness, unmet expectations, and disappointment. That is why the only way around me is to accept that some relationships are “imbalanced” for a reason—they allow you to reach your fullest potential. They allow you to reveal massive amounts of Light. They allow you to neutralize me.
FROM THE EYES OF THE CHILD
As the child or the student in a relationship, you’ve got to be your own person, while still respecting the space of the dominant giver in your life. As a child or a student, cultivating a sense of reverence is essential. After all, you could never repay your parents for bringing you to this Earth, or your teacher for putting your soul on a path toward God. That stuff is priceless.
I’ll try to convince you that it is time to “be your own person” (Sounds so empowering doesn’t it?). “Reject your mom; reject your dad; your teacher doesn’t know squat,” I’ll say. But you don’t have to reject anyone in order to feel fulfilled. Your fulfillment comes when you allow the Light and Vessel to coexist, the giver and the receiver to work together as one. You don’t need someone else to feel worthless in order for you to experience love. Just the opposite—when you see the value of your respective roles, that’s when the love starts pouring in. You become one. You eliminate the need for ego. You eliminate the need for me.
GOING FOR A WALK
Here’s another way I go after relationships. I make you totally forget what it means to be in the other person’s shoes. Understanding and compassion—yeah, right! I encourage you to talk to them from where you are spiritually and emotionally, instead of meeting them where they are. If you are in one of the unbalanced relationships I’m talking about here, and you’re trying to talk to the other person from your point of consciousness, forget ever being able to connect with that person. It’s not going to happen. The result? Frustration on both ends and no room for Light.
How can you change this dynamic? You start by taking a walk. A little stroll in their shoes. If they are the student, then that is the spiritual space that they occupy. Although you can’t simultaneously occupy the same space with them, you can use the tool of empathy. Empathy is free of judgment and scorn, which makes it free of me.
Another part of correcting the energy dynamic in relationships is “walking the walk”—in other words, being an ambassador of the Light. If you are a parent, your child is watching you. If you are a teacher, you’d better believe your student is taking in all that you say and do. Like a sponge. This is an enormous responsibility, but it is also a tremendous opportunity to model actions and behaviors that are in line with whom you really are (a being of pure love and Light, if you’ve already forgotten, when I’m not running the show).
Even if you think no one is watching, you still need to walk the walk. The walls are watching and that is all that matters. The Zohar—one of my least favorite books, because it is written in Aramaic and I cannot access it and because it reveals tremendous Light—explains that the walls of your house are the walls of your heart. So, even if your child’s eyes are not on you, behave as if they are.
PARTNER OF THE LIGHT
I knew a soul once whom I could not enter. There was just no room for me. But you wouldn’t have known it by looking on the outside. If you were a fly on the wall, you would have seen a guy who appeared to be a slave of mine. He worked like a madman, slept like a mummy, ate like an animal, and drank like a fish. Everything he did was to the extreme. But this was a guy who could heal people.
I had to know how he was making this work. Perhaps I could have guessed, but instead I chose to ask him, “How come if you work, sleep, and drink like a madman, I can’t get in? How can you heal others when you appear to be sick with compulsion yourself?”
He told me, “When I was a child, I made a deal with God that I would be God’s partner, so I do everything for God. I eat for God, I sleep for God, and I work for God, and, in return, God makes my blessings come true.”
This guy put in his 100 percent and God returned the favor. I couldn’t argue with that. It doesn’t matter which part of the relationship is your responsibility; you have a job to do, just as the other person in the relationship carries a burden to do his or her part. No one has more or less weight to carry from the perspective of the universe. A student doesn’t carry any less weight than a teacher. A parent doesn’t carry a heavier burden than a child. An employee doesn’t have less responsibility than his employer.
You are all equally responsible for one another. Are you catching on? This is important stuff. It is this consciousness that constantly creates the circuitry of the universe. You are never more or less than anyone else. You are the same in terms of what you bring to the table. Your job is just as vital as the next person’s. Whether you choose to believe this is entirely up to you. Everything is.
HERE I COME!
Before I move ahead, I need to establish one last expectation as it relates to test-taking in the context of God’s classroom. The challenges, tests, doubts, and fears that you experience on your path will come at you again but from different angles, and they’ll come at you harder and faster. But if you can use the info that I’m offering here in this book, each test that you pass will only serve to make you stronger. That’s because as you pass each test, you reveal more and more Light. When you have the power of the Light, you can overcome any single challenge or obstacle that I’ll throw in your face. Now I need to give you a sense of urgency. You can’t simply rest on your laurels anymore, because now, more than ever, time is of the essence. You’ve been asleep for way too long. The work you’ve done today is not enough for tomorrow. The person you are today isn’t enough for tomorrow, either. I will be stronger, so you must be stronger, too. Each day is a day for more preparation and more growth. This isn’t a 100-meter sprint we’re in. It’s a marathon, and we are on the final stretch.