There seems to be a fair amount of upset going around at the moment. I’ve been verging on writing about it for several days now. Anger will probably be an occupational hazard as the energies continue rising. Rising energy reveals to us, in a manner that becomes increasingly hard to hide, the many incompletions we may have in our lives.
And often what we do with it is get behind our anger, find some reason in the conduct of others to get upset, and project the whole thing on to the poor unfortunate we happen to come across.
We can blame others or try to exert control over them on the premise that they “made us mad.” Since “every way of a man is right in his own eyes,” we usually find a way of justifying our outbursts.
The problem with projecting an upset is that it adds another sedimentary layer to the tension we’re already carrying in our bodies and eventually turns us into a piece of limestone. (Wilhelm Reich used to call this tension “character armoring.”)
It also loses us friends and brings us more karma. Not a pretty picture in the end. The fact that we feel justified doesn’t really weigh in the balance. We’re meant to be upset-free so the habit of projecting upsets and creating tension in ourselves is not something we’re meant to cultivate in any case, given its results for us and others. Sooner or later we’ll need to go another way.
We sometimes consider ourselves activists and believe that a habit of projecting our anger is justified in the pursuit of our activism. But in fact projecting our anger in the pursuit of activism is one of the worst things we can do because it makes us more petrified over time. It turns us into predictable lemmings. We can become less discriminating over time and more reactive. If it was a good thing, we’d be able to find it in Gandhi’s or Martin Luther King’s teachings and we don’t.
In fact, in my own opinion, the cabal plays upon us by feeding us stories, few of them true, that bring up our outrage. Obama was not born in America. Medicare is socialism. Muslims caused 9/11. We are regularly manipulated because of our known tendency as activists to respond to and project our self-righteousness and anger.
Rather than projecting our upsets on others, we may wish to consider a different path. It’ll save us friends but it’ll also clear the upset rather than recharging it and sending it back inside ourselves as another layer of muscular tension in the body.
In the section called “Preparing for Ascension” in the righthand column, I have a fair number of articles on what I call the “upset clearing process.” If you find yourself erupting like a volcano, especially in these times in which the water is being lowered in the river and problems revealed, perhaps have a read through those articles.
In general, the manner of clearing upsets there described involves stopping from projecting, remaining passively aware of the upset, naming the feeling, asking for an image of an earlier, similar incident that may actually be at the heart of the upset, and then experiencing through what arises as a result of seeing that incompleted event at the center of what’s happening.
Handling matters this way may feel the same, because we’re still “going through an upset,” but it begins to wear down the stack of records we have, rather than adding to them. Using a process like this, or rebirthing if you prefer, or shouting into a pillow, or Vipassana meditation, etc., is going to be ever more important to us as the energies rise and expose our “incompletions.”