One of the psychological pitfalls we’ve encountered in this lifetime is thinking that our physical inheritance defines us.
Perhaps we were born into a particular religious or ethnic group or social class that we grew to dislike and so we don’t like ourselves, our religion, our ethnicity, or our class.
Perhaps we have leftover feelings of guilt or resentment and a desire to reform or change ourselves or our group, etc.
We may even feel it’s our mission to do so.
Well, maybe it is. I don’t know. But how we think about this and how we act can lead to several lingering difficulties.
We discussed a while back that we’d be mistaken if we think who we are is this physical body.
We’re not our physical body, whether we conceive of that as British or Japanese, or even Sirian or Pleiadian.
We’re not Catholic, Jewish, or anything else that comes along with the body.
Those are identifications that arise from our geneological family and personal choices but they aren’t who we are – not really.
We aren’t our etheric body, astral, mental, etc. We’re not any of our bodies. They’re just vehicles for experiencing.
We’re no more our body than the coat we’re wearing, but the belief that we are runs deep, much deeper than just the surface levels of the mind.
A corollary of this is that we’re not somehow duty-bound to deal with the things we don’t like about our family or group of origin – unless we want to or have agreed to.
But, as we look at this, we discover a second problem – our vasanas – that arise as the source and cause of the strong and persistent feelings like guilt and resentment that we may have.
A vasana is a complex of traumatic memories that upset us, triggered by an event in the present that resembles one in the past.
Werner Erhard called them “records.” Others have called them engrams, unfinished business, old baggage, games people play, and scripts people live.
If we go too far in the direction of resenting or hating others and wanting to change them, we’d best be looking for a vasana underneath the way we feel. And if we’re responding to a vasana, and consent to continue doing so, truly we’re embarked on an endless and fruitless journey.
A vasana is a ravenous monster. It grows by being expressed outwards and projected onto others. If we actually resent the other person, then we’d do far more good if we actually sourced or completed our vasana rather than blasting the person we think reactivated us.
And then we encounter a third problem. After a lifetime of working with this material, I have a deep and abiding sense that it’s a futile mission to try to change another person. I gave up trying to do that, I think, perhaps thirty years ago.
If you’re still thinking it can be done, welcome to a few more futile lifetimes trying.
One can inspire a person. One can listen to a person until the person discovers what vasana is running them. One can model behavior that’s more workable. But trying to change a person is like running on a treadmill.
Change doesn’t work from two vantage points. First simple change from one behavior pattern to another is just a reshuffling of the deck and does not result in any meaningful alteration of behavior, not at the deepest level where a shift in being occurs – what Werner Erhard would have called “transformation.” So even if we “change” a person, chances are what “changes” is not deep and significant.
If we want to alter our own behavior in deep and enduring ways, then we have to source or complete the vasana that lies at the basis of the behavior pattern.
To source a vasana means to realize what triggering incident and motivation lies at the basis of the vasana and then to remain with what’s seen until the entire complex that a vasana is lifts. It may take several passes to have a vasana lift.
Once the vasana is completed, the behavior pattern disappears. It may be wise to put in its place a pattern of love (nature abhorring a vacuum) but it may also not be necessary because love arises naturally in the space created when a vasana is sourced.
Love is who we are, never mind this class, ethnicity or religion.
Change does not work from a second vantage point. Everything about change shouts resistance. We’re resisting the notion of the way we’re being. We’re resisting the pattern itself. We’re resisting being seen doing it, being thought of as being “that kind of person,” etc.
And, thanks to Werner, we now know that what we resist persists. If we seek a fundamental shift by looking to change to cause it, we’re going to be disappointed.
Just as knowing at a mental level that we’re God does not cause enlightenment (we have to realize it), so also only working at the level of the mind to shift behavior is not powerful enough to cause what we think of as change.
Only the realization that comes from seeing the triggering incident and experiencing to completion the feelings that arise within us is powerful enough to shift matters for us.
Isn’t it interesting that up till now we’ve been cleansing ourselves of what Linda calls our false grids and what I call our vasanas because the energies were raising them to consciousness. Now we are cleansing them because our own impulse to social action or lightwork and our own first steps in it are raising more again to our consciousness.
And some of our sources say that the vasanas that are now coming up are even related not simply to this lifetime, but to others.
At each step of our work here, our vasanas arise again until they no longer do. I’d assume we’ll reach that point at Ascension because only sahaja samadhi (the level of enlightenment associated with Ascension) is powerful enough to destroy the seeds of future action that our vasanas are.
To my way of thinking, people with no vasanas have forgotten “original sin” and remembered original innocence. Such people, when they turn to greet us, show us their original face. They are equal to children fit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. (1) That’s where we’re headed whether or not we’re there yet.
Footnotes
(1) In classical times, the word “heaven” referred to the Mental Plane or Fifth Dimension.