No Mask, No Box, No Path

Taking a step

The Master Hilarion made two statements recently which explain a lot for me at this time:

“Each of you are into the deep cleansing and purification of all remaining issues that have lain hidden and buried deeply within your subconscious minds, and a lot of these are issues that you thought had already been resolved. Understand, Beloved Ones, that this will continue to come up for your review until every facet of any remaining shadows rises to the surface to be seen in the Light of illuminated consciousness.” (1)

“The energies of these times are very intense and are galvanizing many of you to get deep within yourselves and seek a more conscious connection with your True Selves. There have been many layers and masks that you have donned during your current lifetime and from some previous lifetimes that are at this opportune time, coming up for acknowledgment and release. Many of these masks you have worn have been put on in self defense, as you learned early in your lives, that it was necessary in order that you live your lives in relative peace, turning the other cheek, so to speak, in order to gain approval from your family and loved ones.” (2)

In terms of my personal work, I’ve spent a great deal of time completing old issues, which show up out of my rejection of unwanted conditions like anger, hatred, frustration, irritation, and so on.

But much more needs to be cleared, I’m finding out, than just old issues and unwanted conditions.

In the face of an upset, especially if the original upset was traumatizing, we not only take the circumstances and imprint them on our consciousness as snapshots of things we wish to avoid in the future. We also make decisions and create avoidance patterns, all designed to keep us safe.

Whenever the workload gets out of proportion here, what I notice about myself is, yes, the issues do come up, but what lurks lower down in awareness, way down in the subconscious are the decisions and avoidance patterns that cause me to live inside a box of my own construction. Let me call that whole constructed self, that whole box I live in, a “mask,” as the Master Hilarion does, above.

Finding new ways of being in the present become difficult because I wear this mask or live in this box. For instance, faced with an anomalous situation around email – where I need to extricate myself from responding to so many emails while not cutting off the flow of article and video suggestions – I come up against the limits I impose on myself from inside my box or mask.

The decisions that are like the substance of the box or mask are of the very simplest nature: “Be nice,” “be kind,” “don’t fight with people,” etc. There’s nothing wrong with these standards unto themselves. But sometimes a situation requires me to take decisive action and, when I go to make move, I run up against these laid-on ways of being and can’t see a way forward that just may lie outside of them or which they obscure.

My decisions prevent an unfettered, spontaneous response to a situation. They are the walls of the box, the voiceover in the head, the “generalized other,” the”shoulds” that hem me in and prevent my responding to a situation with new approaches.

The usual way to meet this boxed-in situation is to have a showdown with one’s own values. But that, useful as it is, is also old paradigm and has only limited usefulness. Where we’re going, we cannot take a pillow and punch it or shout inside our car.

Rather, what I’m discovering is that the same need to “be with and observe,” to rest in passive awareness that I use with upsets needs to be used as well with the mask or box, constructed out of “shoulds.”

There is no really satisfying way I can think of to meet the predicament of having too little time to do my job. I’m going to have to do something that someone will not like and the clamorous voiceover is going to get triggered, until it no longer does.

But if I rest in awareness as these “shoulds” arise and simply allow them to be there without responding to them, then they register their clamor and disappear, leaving me to free to take whatever step then seems advisable. It’s almost like sneaking up on on a sleeping dog. You walk forward cautiously until it stirs, then remain there quietly until it goes back to sleep, and then take another step.

In doing so, I’m refusing to tangle with myself, refusing to fight with my “shoulds.” I just allow them to be there, become quiet and observant when they arise in the mind, and wait for their clamor to pass. To do otherwise is to risk a lapse into blame, burnout, personality disintegration, all manner of bad things that we call a “psychological crisis.”

So over this last day, rather than fitfully problem-solving, I’ve just been being with my decisions, values, or “shoulds,” and watching them rise and pass away, rise and pass away.

I intend to begin acting without reference to these “shoulds,” in the full faith that I am trustworthy, that I can trust that left to my own native devices I don’t harm, attack or do other bad things (any more). It’s time to make the leap from relying on “shoulds” that I’ve arrived at really as a plan to avoid the upsetting circumstances that traumatized me in early life to living from the moment of present time without rehearsal, without being guided by “shoulds,” just taking one step after another from native Being.

Truly I don’t know what I’ll do to handle my actual situation. I may not be consistent. I may try this and then that. I have no idea. But whatever path I take, it now must be, as a workshop leader described it once years ago, created by laying the heel of the leading foot down, followed by the heel of the other leading foot, one footstep at a time.

If I’m right, then in the new paradigm, there is no path laid out or laid down. There is only me taking the next step.