Long, long ago, Wilhelm Reich characterized the precipitate of our resistance patterns (our latent reaction patterns or vasanas) as “character armoring.”
By that term he meant the patterns of muscular tension in our body that we built up through our ways of thinking over many years, that found their roots in the distant past, often of our childhood.
We were sexually assaulted and so we’ve developed patterns of muscular resistance to a sexual overture and resist a sexual advance now. We were batted about as children and developed patterns of anger whenever anyone appeared to be attacking us again.
We could multiply the examples but they would all be along these lines. We developed patterns of muscular rigidity that appeared as armor-plating in our body to resist a repeat of what we had endured long ago.
Eckhart Tolle called this our “pain body.” Others in the growth movement called it stress or tension patterns. I’m sure bioenergetics had a name for it, enlightenment intensives, and so on.
Werner Erhard called the memories of these incidents “records.” Claude Steiner called the ways we devised to avoid recurrence of the incidents “scripts people live.” Eric Berne called them “games people play.” All psychotherapuetic scholars, whether in academia or the growth movement, have known about these common coping mechanisms and patterns of resistance.
But the interpretation of life that lies at their root (the records or vasanas), the coping patterns themselves (games and scripts), and the patterns of muscular tension that arose out of them (character armoring or the pain body) are what now present themselves to us as the predominant resistance to physical Ascension, the predominant obstacle to a smooth Ascension.
We energize these patterns and drive them more deeply into our body’s musculature when we project them outwards in bouts of anger or fits of fear, etc. Werner would have said we multiply our records thereby. Others would say we make the bands of muscular tension tighter and stronger.
We drill down through these bands and cause them to disappear when, as Werner said, we “sit with them like a brick in our lap.” When we simply become aware of them and abide as that awareness, we come to insights about where they were formed; we allow ourselves to understand the history of their formation; and we allow them to play themselves out in our field of awareness and thereby lift.
In my own way of thinking, it appears to take a long time to learn to detect a vasana playing and even longer to learn how to be with it so as to cause it to lift. We no longer have a long time and I’m ill-equipped to teach completely and leisurely the method of causing vasanas to lift.
It’d be better if we simply kept in mind a few principles and allowed the work of the unseen actors who are directing light and love at us at this time of Ascension to do their work and assist us to emerge from our shells.
However it would be counterproductive if, under the influence of our vasanas, we blamed others for the way we feel and projected our fear or anger outwards.
I feel a sense of urgency about communicating these matters now because I think they’re so central to making our physical Ascension smooth and easy. So I may be writing more articles than I usually do and making more demands on your time than I would ordinarily make.
In general the way to release a vasana is to use the following strategy.
(1) Name the feeling you feel. The various incidents that caused it are arranged in our memory file according to the emotions we feel: anger, fear, anxiety, etc.
(2) Find the originating incident. Simply ask your mind to throw up to you some indication (a thought, a picture, a word) that indicates the historical incident the vasana is attached to. We cannot experience the vasana through to completion until we know where it originates and thus what its original contours were.
But we cannot edit what our mind throws up to us. We cannot say “No, it could not have been that incident.” We must take the first indication the mind throws up. The mind will be a willing servant if we allow it to do its work.
(3) Allow the story of the vasana to unfold within our neutral field of awareness. The vasana will have an incident at the heart of it, a decision as to how we’ll live life from that moment on so as not to suffer the same incident again, strategies such as holding patterns in our body that seem to promise an adequate defense against pain and suffering, and then memories of future incidents when we escaped suffering or suffered for exactly the same reasons.
Our task is to paint all of these recollections with awareness: to allow them to unfold and be seen and experienced through within the field of our awareness because that causes the vasana, not to be energized as projecting them onto others and acting them out does, but to be completed and allowed to dissipate. Our awareness is a natural solvent that liquidates vasanas.
The last thing we must do is to be aware that most vasanas remain unseen because we convince ourselves that what is causing us to react in the present moment is an issue of principle rather than a memory from the past. We “stand on principle” and become upset to “teach others a lesson.”
As my brother Paul says: Seldom does the reason for the reaction we have attach to present circumstances. Usually the cause is from the long-remembered past. We need to detach ourselves from the tendency to see that cause in the present and begin to explore the real, long-buried reasons for our reaction if we want to complete the upset and its attendant reaction pattern.
This process need not take a long time, but it does require our knowing what to do.
Perhaps I should stop here because I realize this process is counter-intuitive and I don’t want to overload us in the retelling of it.
Yet it now becomes more important to approach matters in a more realistic fashion because, if we don’t, we may transform what could be a smooth and easy process of physical Ascension into a bumpy ride.