I’ve been fortunate in my readings with Archangel Michael in that he’s been engaging in consciousness raising with me. Each reading he raises one of my qualities or attributes to my awareness and that sets a process in motion.
It’s commonly said of a centipede that, once it becomes aware of its 100 legs and goes walking, it trips all over itself. It cannot do its rhythmic walk when it’s aware of all its individual legs.
Similarly, if there is a vasana (VAH-sa-na) or archaic reaction pattern that we have, when it’s raised to awareness, it becomes orders of magnitude more difficult to run without almost tripping over ourselves. We now know what we’re doing and we know that others know.
In earlier years, we called this form of consciousness raising “the awareness game.” We wanted to see how much of ourselves we could become aware of.
There was an open invitation for people to say what they saw or thought they saw in us. The invitation on us was to try on what they said, test it out, and see if it fit. If it did, we acknowledged it and completed the feedback loop. That is a capsule description of the awareness game.
Every vasana has a silver lining, however. We perfect certain qualities as a result of our vasanas. And once we’re the master of our vasanas instead of their servant, (1) we can put those qualities to use, rather than have them use us. Perhaps I can illustrate that here with the work that AAM has been doing with me.
A long time ago – perhaps 2011 – he drew my attention to the very large amount of literature that I’ve produced over the course of my life. Before he mentioned it, I was sort of aware of it. A little bit. But mostly I considered that it was just what I do: when I finish one piece of writing, I start another. If you do that long enough, you produce a lot. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Nonetheless if you think about any one stint at work, the pattern becomes obvious. The amount of work I did at the National Museum of Man in 1973-4 was, looking back on it, amazing. Creating a collection that in one year became the largest at the museum, writing articles on Anglo-Saxon racism, culture, popular culture, artifact studies, etc., arguing for new approaches in several disciplines, designing exhibits, making slide-and-text kits, the list just goes on and on. People around me were typically astonished. I just considered it normal.
At the Immigration and Refugee Board, I sat on the full complement of claims, then took claims from other people (who were generally overworked), wrote numerous dictionaries on country conditions or points of refugee law, sat on committees, and outside of work wrote as “Brother Anonymous,” creating a dictionary of enlightenment, any number of books and articles, again on and on. And I just considered it me doing what I liked to do. Others preferred golf.
I do know that this tendency comes from my Dad calling me a lazy, no-good good-for-nothing. I was showing him.
But the full extent of the pattern came up to realized knowledge (in other words, I got it) when Archangel Michael said it. I’m sure he invested his words with celestial potency.
He did it again when he talked to me about the stamina that I have. I keep going and going and going. Yes, I had noticed that. It was up to intellectual knowledge. I mentioned to you earlier that someone said that I had enough energy to light up the State of Washington. I amaze myself with my stamina … at times.
But when he said it, I got it at a very much deeper level and that stamina now came alive for me. And I grew bigger as a result of that realization. I came a little bit more in touch with my own power.
We also agreed, by the way, that I really do need to take a vacation. I bop till I drop but I’ll soon drop without one.
Consequently I’ll be taking two weeks off in a short while and going to a deserted tropical island (OK, an undisclosed location) and just flopping.
But, yes, stamina? I didn’t really get it deeply till he said it. Again, I just thought it was normal.
How do we know something is not normal? We only see through our eyes, feel through our bodies, think through our minds. How do we know what the world looks, feels and seems like to another person? (Unless they tell us.)
Now, in my latest reading, he’s talked to me at length about my persistence. I know the three sound like the same thing but they have slightly different characters. Endless producing is having an active or busy cast of mind (Hindus call it rajasic). Stamina is boundless energy, handy when you’re rajasic, like I am. But persistence is intention to remain to the end, to stick it out and remain at our post.
When he made that comment, that side of me now came alive. If I wasn’t persistent before he said it, I sure as heck am now, such is the resolving power of his magnetic words. I felt revivified having this expanded sense of myself.
Again I think it was the archangelic touch. It was like the gardener watering a flower. Up it blooms. He’s moulding me and I’m willing putty. But he can mould anyone else as well.
When I raise something to awareness, or he does, I can no longer do it unconsciously or automatically. What happens is that anything that’s of the constructed self, the mask, the act, the routine, the number falls away or gets torn away and what’s left is the part of me that’s consciously productive, energetic, and persistent.
So I only lose the falsity, the constructed self, the carefully-preened image. What I’m left with is the normal space, the native state, my original face. What is left is conscious awareness and transformative love. I can vouch for the fact that this is a space dearly to be desired. (2)
So this is how Archangel Michael is playing the awareness game with me, how he’s raising my consciousness and expanding my powers. Any of us can work with him, of course. I’m just suggesting some ways he works with me to inspire your own work with him or Gabrielle or Raphael, etc.
He raises a pattern of my behavior to my awareness. I feel recognized and that pattern comes alive for me in the next while after the reading. I cannot run it now without tripping over my feet. Whatever in it is false or automatic falls away and I emerge with the native quality – productiveness, stamina or persistence – freed from its husk of automaticity.
This is what I’ve elsewhere called “emergence.” (3) It’s what we used to call the awareness game. It’s a form of consciousness raising and, in my opinion, consciousness raising is the order of the day on this planet.
Footnotes
(1) That is, we’ve stopped projecting them onto others or introjecting them ourselves (swallowing them, accusing and sentencing ourselves to a jail of our own making). We now observe our vasanas as they arise, feel the feelings they bring with them, and experience the original scenario they’re connected to to completion. Having been heard in all their native splendor, they then release their grip.
(2) “I am all that a man may desire
Without transgressing
The law of his nature.”
(Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 71.)
Desire for God and Her qualities is all that a person can desire and not harm themselves. So conscious awareness and transformative love can be deeply desired and the desire does not hurt us.
(3) A search on the word in the site’s search box will pull up … yes, you guessed it … a long list of articles on the subject.