I said some time ago that I thought we needed to complete our vasanas, or latent reaction patterns, if we wanted a smooth and easy Ascension.
Now that the process of physical Ascension has apparently begun, we may find our uncompleted vasanas or unfinished business going off. I know mine is and are. So I’ll be completing some of mine publicly as they go off to show how the process works. See On Processing Vasanas for more on this subject.
As we begin the physical Ascension process, the characters that we have constructed over the years as a result of going through incidents that traumatized us will resist the upliftment process.
The rigid attitudinal skeletons, built out of decisions on how we would meet life, will not yield to transformation easily. We’ll find ourselves, at some level, resisting the Ascension process and fielding Ascension symptoms like vertigo, anxiety, etc.
Yesterday (Dec. 15, 2012) I experienced a high degree of vertigo which only lifted when I saw that at the center of the character I created for myself lay my desire to avenge myself on my Father for his violence towards my Mother.
In the middle of the night on Dec. 16, 2012, I awoke to see that a second vasana was going off. So just to be clear about that: I was irritated in the middle of my sleep and knew a vasana was going off.
Having been through the first vasana the day before and remembering that the Divine Mother and others had said that we had already begun our physical Ascension process, I was by now alerted to what was occurring and “sourced” (or got to the bottom of) this second vasana with much less discomfort.
Now I sped right to the message underlying the vasana and began to observe it – what I’ve called “painting it with awareness.” Doing so acts as a solvent and begins the process of making the vasana disappear.
Most people, when a vasana goes off, project it outwards and indeed I had also projected mine outwards on Dec. 15. It was only with the experience of tremendous vertigo afterwards and the recollection that we’ve been told that the Ascension process has begun that I finally suspected and located an unprocessed vasana.
Now this second vasana going off in my sleep, for reasons I can’t recover – but they may have been related to something I was dreaming – is easier to see. And I also see that I believe I was right in thinking that our unprocessed vasanas are what will make our Ascension difficult or smooth.
So I don’t need this time to go through a long narrative in sourcing this one. I can say straight out that it’s captured by the sentence “Stop telling me what to do.”
Again as with so many of my vasanas, it’s connected with my father, who was forever telling me what to do and emphasizing it with a kick or a slap if I didn’t move fast enough.
What I hadn’t seen until now was how deeply this vasana had sunk into me, how rooted it was in the fabric of my character, and what a drag it exerted on my process of upliftment.
My consciousness feels as if it wants to expand and the thing that keeps it from doing so easily is this resolve not to be ordered around, which manifests as muscular tension in the body.
In my case, if I try to breathe easily, I feel that muscular tension as a limiting factor on how expanded I can make my chest become. I cannot breathe easily or deeply because of it. My breathing is shallow and inhibited by it.
There’s no time to ring up a psychiatrist, lie on a couch for a few weeks and explore the issue. There’s no time to go to a chiropractor or a massage therapist and be treated. There’s only time to paint the vasana with awareness and complete it on the spot.
So I begin to focus on this no longer latent but now simmering vasana of anger and irritation I feel, triggered unconsciously in my sleep but triggered in a deeper way because my body is already in the beginning stages of physical Ascension and is making demands on those ways of being that hold my body in tightly-coiled bands of tension.
I close my eyes in meditation and breathe, watching for contact with this vasana of resisting being ordered around. Contact surfaces as a feeling of my breath being retarded when I breathe in. I encounter resistance on the in-breath and feel that resistance as non-directed or generalized anger.
Even though no one has told me what to do, nonetheless the vasana is going off. And so I look more deeply into the past to see what incident it’s connected with.
I haven’t long to wait. The incident impresses itself on my consciousness. I am around eight or nine years old and I see my Dad’s face a few inches from mine and he’s yelling at me like an army sergeant. It’s as if his voice sends the rust on my being flying.
In the process my resistance to him, my natural defenses and my sense of well-being are all broken into a thousand pieces and I lose completely the delicate composition that my personality is.
I intuitively feel the history of the next 45-50 years as being a long, long struggle to get those natural defenses and that character back – to roll back the hands of time and be whole and healed again from that assault on me.
And I feel the skew on my character that that incident caused – the anger I feel whenever anyone tries to order me around. And I see the character I built in resistance to ever being assaulted in that way again.
I see the edge to my personality. I see the pride at learning karate so that no one could ever assault me in that way again. I see my brother, Paul, at a gymnasium with my Dad and I, asking me to show my Dad my karate skills. And I see myself throwing a side kick at my Dad and stopping an inch from his face.
I know that incident as the time when I’m released from his authoritarian tendency. His face breaks into a big smile, ostensibly at my accomplishment but in reality acknowledging that the baton has been passed.
But what a baton! By now my character has been formed on ferocity and people are scared of the look on my face when I become angry. I have by now become like my father when riled. The generational inheritance is complete and I now have not only healing to complete but also a tremendous amount of undoing as well.
I see that one reason for my anger was that, in the face of it, I would feel a temporary coalescence of my otherwise-fractured character. It felt good to fuse, if even for a short time, under the blowtorch influence of my anger.
I then flash on the healing work my brother has done with me, by now a psychotherapist – the intense and prolonged anger, which I characterized as white hot at this moment we worked together. I feel the Humpty Dumpty man fuse back together again under the skilled hand of my brother.
Fast forward to this moment. Seeing all this I feel my anger diminish. I’ve seen the root cause of this vasana. I’ve painted it with awareness and allowed it to play itself out from the moment it was created until the moment it was fused.
In between those 45-50 years, I see flotsam and jetsam, the wreckage of many relationships, brought about because I am a shattered personality that can only fuse itself for a while under the influence of anger.
I remember the accomplishments made by focusing my anger on issues of social justice. But I also see the people wounded from having to endure it.
The vasana subsides and my life returns to normal – until the next vasana goes off, which I can almost guarantee will occur now that the physical process of Ascension has begun.