I sometimes think that we don’t understand a great deal about awareness. Awareness is an attribute of God or divine quality. To say “divine qualities” is to say the “new paradigm.” Working with awareness can pay rich dividends and learning about its properties can assist us as we prepare for Ascension.
In this article we’ll look at what I believe is for some the primary obstacle to Ascension, for others the primary element that could cause a rough rather than a smooth Ascension. I call that obstacle “vasanas.” Before I look at vasanas, I’d like to look at awareness itself.
Awareness is the universal solvent. With love added it may be twice as effective, but bare awareness will dissolve as well. Nothing that’s not of God in its absolute or transcendent identity is permanent. Awareness is permanent because it’s an attribute of God, but upsets, unwanted conditions, thoughts, feelings, and moods are products of the mind and, though some may be very persistent, they’re not permanent.
Any mood we have eventually lifts. Any thought that comes into our mind eventually leaves our mind. Any feeling also comes and goes. The more we resist some circumstance, the longer our thoughts and feelings persist but they do eventually subside, lift, or disappear.
The purpose of life, as we’ve discussed on other occasions, is enlightenment. The purpose of life is that we know our true identity and that true identity is God. All of us are God clothed in flesh. All of us have cosmic amnesia and don’t remember who we are. All of us exist on a lower dimension than God in its purest form. And all of us are mounting Jacob’s ladder of consciousness, on our return to God – or Home.
We’ve been set the task of remembering our real identity as God and, when we do, God meets God in a moment of our enlightenment. For that meeting was life created.
The prime obstacle to enlightenment, to sahaja samadhi, which is the level of enlightenment that Ascension is, to unitive consciousness, to liberation from the need to be reborn, or to Ascension itself is what I call our “vasanas.”
Our vasanas are our reaction patterns which lie dormant until something triggers them, sets them off, reactivates us, etc. Because they’re usually dormant and then explode, they’re called “sleeping volcanoes” by many spiritual teachers.
They cannot be seen or treated until they go off. Otherwise they’re invisible, unknown, unsuspected. We often call them the shadow self. Sometimes we make the mistake of calling them our “true colors,” which they’re not. They’re add-ons to our original nature, the precipitate of our trauma and drama, but they’re not true or essential in any sense of the word.
They consist of a persistent and resisted memory of an earlier traumatic incident. We were sexually assaulted. We were conned. We were abandoned by a lover. In some way we were hurt, sometimes shocklingly, and we never forgot it.
Our whole personality becomes oriented around seeing that that kind of thing never, ever happens to us again. So we create a vasana or a programmed reaction to things that incorporates the best plans and procedures we can think of to ward off ever having to experience a similar event again.
Added to the traumatic memory are the decisions we made following that event (“I will never be hurt again,” “… be conned again,” “… be abandoned again,” etc.). The motto of our vasanas, no matter who, no matter where or when, is “Never again!”
And added to these decisions are the plans and procedures we formulate to see that we’re never hurt, conned or abandoned ever again. We don’t risk, or we never travel down a dark street, or we keep checking to see whether our partner loves us to help see that they never leave us, etc.
And added to these plans and procedures are the repeated incidents down through time that look like the earlier, similar incident and see us react by exploding, adding one layer after another of lava to our personality, which gradually turns to stone.
You can also think of vasanas as layers and layers of paint on a board. Or you can think of them as the broken chains, cookies, and corrupted files that slow a computer down or make it stop working.
If you think of vasanas as layers and layers of paint, then painting them with awareness is the same as brushing on paint remover. We let the paint remover sit and the paint bubbles up, making it easily removed by a scraper.
Or if you think of vasanas as broken links, cookies, and scattered or corrupted files, then painting them with awareness is like using a combination cleanup utility and disc defragger on our computer.
After we use paint remover, the board we’re removing the paint from is pristine and clean again; after we’ve removed the problem files from our computer, it works quickly and without freezing. In both cases, the board or machine is restored to its original working condition.
And when we paint our vasanas with awareness, our mind is returned to its original working condition and hums along without freezing or being encumbered by endless layers and broken links.
The alternative to painting our vasanas with awareness is to put them on like a mask and speak from them. We then project our feelings onto others, blaming them, attacking them, and generally alienating them.
The famous mime, Marcel Marceau, was renowned for his act in which he tried on various masks and found one that he liked, which he frequently used. He discovered after a while that he couldn’t get the mask off his face. He tried and tried, but couldn’t remove it. Here is that video:
A vasana is like that. It’s an act that we rehearse again and again until it becomes a mask we can’t remove. Eventually, we cannot escape from the programmed ways a vasana has us respond to events.
Various growth movement leaders have called vasanas scripts, acts, records, numbers, and rackets. They have us be “on rails,” automatic, acting like robots, being conditioned or programmed and unable to escape from our conditioned responses.
Why are they the primary obstacle to Ascension? Because they cost us all the divine qualities: They cost us love, spontaneity, vulnerability, transparency, aliveness, and full-self-expression – in fact, everything that makes life exciting, refreshing and nourishing. What we gain is protection from harm, invulnerability, and safety.
They embroil us in conflict; they never stop; and they overwhelm the enlightened state and make it temporary rather than permanent (as in sahaja).
When a vasana explodes, we typically think we’re reacting to the present, not knowing that the true matter we’re reacting to lies in the past. And not until we go back and remember the original event and just be with the feelings that arise when we become aware of it do we see the vasana loosen its grip and fade away into the nothingness, if you like, or the universal energy pool, if you prefer, from which it came.
Exploding as the vasana directs us to, projecting our anger onto others, blaming and attacking, etc., all energize the vasana and cause it to persist. Simply painting it with awareness and observing it causes it to dissipate and disappear.
But we think that observing it is doing nothing. We can’t see what painting anything with awareness can possibly do for it – because we don’t understand how awareness works or what it does.
It’s the same with breathing. We wonder why so many people, when we’re getting mad, ask us to breathe. It’s because breathing breaks the muscular tension patterns in our body. We can’t get angry unless we hold on to our muscular tension and build our anger. If we breathe through it, the muscular tension patterns are broken from within and anger cannot build.
Same with vasanas and awareness. We don’t actually understand that awareness, observing something, is not a neutral act. It causes the dissolution of that which is observed.
It allows that something to play itself out in a neutral space; it denies it the energizing that reacting gives it; and it sees the unwanted condition lift a lot sooner than it would otherwise, without giving it a new lease on life from the burst of negative energy that comes with exploding. So observing our vasanas, painting them with awareness causes them to subside, lift, or disappear.
There is much more to the ways we can deal with vasanas as you can see from this section of the blogsite. (1) But we have only three weeks left to Ascension, it being Dec. 1, 2012 today, and so I want to boil the process down to its barest essentials so that people can use it in these times of deep clearing that follow 11/11 and are slated to end, I’m told, on 12/12.
We must have some way of dealing with our vasanas. Painting them with awareness is the barest, most essential way of dealing with them that I know of so that they subside, lift, or disappear.
Footnotes
See “On Processing Vasanas” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/ascension/on-processing-vasanas/