I have to acknowledge that I’m embedded in a process, which won’t even wait for a two-day rest break to be over. The work goes on around the clock. It doesn’t let up.
Actually this is not work. Writing is not work. Administering is work. Corresponding is work. Writing is paradise.
Guess what my mission is?
Today I experienced the epitome of conditioning and I saw it in the moment.
I caught myself preparing to board a bus that was headed in the wrong direction – back to the place I lived at and not to the place I live at now.
And it took a real shake of the head to wake me up from the seeming rightness of heading east instead of west. “Steve doesn’t live here any more.” Oh my heavens, yes.
That is deep unconsciousness, something so deeply accepted that it’s second nature and questioning it takes willpower. “No, I live down there.” No, you don’t. You live up here.
Then on the way home, I had a huge vasana go off, right in the middle of the bus. Naturally if you saw me, you wouldn’t know that anything was happening.
But inside of me, one of the really mammoth, core vasanas in my life had just exploded into life.
The recent email incident, which was only one of a number that happened last week (and has been sourced, by the way), triggered something deep and subterranean in me, something huge. And it chose the moment on the bus to show itself.
I call this a social vasana because it’s a vasana that’s triggered by social interaction. I really don’t want to take a page to relate it.
It tracks back to an incident in which I asked a biker, who lived across the street from me in Toronto, to turn his music down and instead of doing that he turned his speakers up and positioned them to project the sound right onto my front porch. And he did so for three months. The whole front of the building was totally unusable.
The police couldn’t help me. Nothing deterred him. Yada yada. Story is story.
Along came a second incident shortly after in which a really-large-sized plumber left a huge mess behind him which he simply added to when I protested.
Kathleen’s comment was that it was vasanas being flushed up by the increase in the Tsunami of Love.
This vasana is tied to a sense of powerlessness, humiliation, and it’s about as large a volcanic eruption as I can imagine happening in my life. If there’s another, I’m not aware of it.
The common thread that holds everything together is an imagined conflict between fairness and entitlement. Fairness usually exists except where one is entitled to break the rules. Everyone stands in line but the Queen of England is entitled to go to the head of the line. But, in our society, entitlement is rigorously scrutinized and often contested.
I spent my day wrestling with people in Christmas lineups over issues that turned on entitlement. It’s as if our senses of entitlement squared off against each other and had a go at it.
When my sense of entitlement and the original core issue became clear to me, the vasana blew. And it raged, though inside of me, until it was spent and then it left.
Yes, we are creators of our own feelings and moods. I created how I saw the biker and the plumber. I created how I reacted. I created what I did with the incident since that time. I create it governing my behaviour now. I create being crabby. I create myself being so frank that people want to start a fight with me. I create. I create. I am always creating.
A vasana is an interruption in well-being but that doesn’t mean it isn’t my creation. It is.
So now social vasanas are arising as we begin to work together.
I’m treating them the same way I did the intensely-personal ones – naming the feeling associated with it, allowing it to express itself fully, experiencing it completely and then letting it go.
Once I’ve really allowed the vasana full expression and full experiencing, I feel myself “stand down.” I begin to relax again and look around to see what damage I may have done while I’ve been deeply asleep and dreaming the vasana.
“Steve, wake up! Wake up! You’re having a bad vasana!”
I “return to myself.” No, the vasana is not who I really am. It’s what I created. But who and what I am is beyond all vasanas.
So as we begin to awaken to what might need to be done to build Nova Earth, as we gather in small groups and just see who’s out there, as we begin to feel each other out and see that not many people are interested in what we are, we wonder how we’re going to build Nova Earth together.
I don’t know. The story is unknown. We’re writing the manual as we speak.