As the vasanas continue to go off as the rising energies continue to smoke us out, I find conditioned behavior arising that alarms me, that I need to stop.
The current pattern of conditioned behavior I’m observing is self-righteousness.
This is one that I have to be clear of, the sooner the better. But it runs very deep and is deeply protective.
I’ve told the story many times. If you were wrong in my family, that could get you a slap – the lesson being that you needed to be right, to be more careful in determining whether you were right or not, and … I can almost hear my Dad thinking … “to not endanger the crew.”
So there was survival value in being right, which makes it melt into what Werner Erhard called “the background of obviousness.” Wanting to avoid a slap (wanting to survive) is so obvious and universal that one may not see the pattern of being right that results from it as anything unusual.
But as the twig is bent, the tree inclines. A bent twig called “self-righteousness” yields an inclined trunk that automatically chooses excessive, alienating, and sometimes-rejecting behavior.
There are two ways we can be with our core issues or vasanas. One is to blow up and project them onto others. “You made me mad,” we say, which isn’t true and hides from us what may be really happening.
The other way is to name the unwanted feeling, seek the original incident behind it, and be with that incident till the traumatic memories associated with it complete themselves.
I call the first way of being – blowing up and projecting our vasanas onto the outside world – “Third Dimentia.” Truly it’s a warped and never-productive way of being and I just do it and do it and do it, unthinkingly, coming from unconscious awareness. (1) It’s various elements become habitual – judging, blaming, attacking, protecting.
I said some time ago that a friend is introducing me to being happy rather than being right. But apart from that friend’s help, there’s no other instructions in how to deal with our habitual behavior.
There’s no handbook on how to do the deep cleansing that we’re doing. The articles I wrote on vasanas I did by observing myself and borrowing from the few teachers who discuss the matter.
Aside from stopping the minute I feel irritated, I don’t know at this moment how I’ll put a stop to my troublesome behavior pattern.
Just on the way home from shopping, I saw myself again and again judging people on the bus, making someone wrong, getting irritated at what I deemed to be their mistaken behavior, etc.
It hasn’t escaped my attention that I’m still dealing with residue, fallout from my relationship with my Father. After all these years…. Unless I cleanse myself of it, I won’t be able to serve successfully.
Footnotes
(1) Werner Erhard used to distinguish between two states: unconscious and conscious awareness. The difference is similar in degree to that between ordinary and transformative love. Today we’d probably call the latter a higher-dimensional state. Most of us live in unconscious awareness, save for the occasional peak experience.