Each time a vasana (or sleeping volcano) goes off, I learn a little more about the process of clearing.
The disappointment I felt yesterday when NASA scientists joked about extraterrestrials in their interview when ETs surround our planet and are about to change the course of human history triggered a vasana.
Were I unaware of how the process worked, I would probably rail on and on about NASA and make it the new bogeyman.
But I know how vasanas work. This one is connected to other disappointments in my life and connected by the common thread of disappointment itself. The largest upset in this connection was the discovery in 2000 that my own spiritual teacher of 25 years was a child molester.
But before that was a spiritual teacher that I worked for at a school for children sent by the state for rehabilitation. That teacher was sleeping with the female students who were trapped at his school by court order.
And before that lay one teacher after another who had in some way violated a trust – beating students, demanding money from them, spreading AIDS among them, on and on the thread went.
Back I went through high school encounters with teachers, vice-principals and principals who had, according to me, disappointed me. Back I went until reaching again, not surprisingly, my father.
And with that the vasana stopped.
This Werner Erhard would have called “sourcing” the vasana – he actually would have called it a “record.”
I am returned to peace again and NASA will not become a constant theme of these pages. Moreover, the rightful contours of what just happened are visible now. I’ve stopped my forward motion, saved myself from becoming more of a reactivation machine, and saved you hearing endlessly about this issue. I’m “returned to Self.”
And of course reactivation is only going to happen more and more commonly in the weeks and months ahead. So if I fool myself that any one incident I face is the source of my upset, rather than a string of earlier, similar incidents, then I become more and more self-righteous and more and more imprisoned in my vasanas.
This way I get to complete each incident and move on without being trapped in the quicksand of my reactivity.
OK, enough said. Time to pick up where we left off. NASA does not become a new focal point and I do not become more sclerotic.