Alice in Wonderland is all about vasanas
A revised and recast compilation of Preparing for Ascension by Clearing Old Issues is available here.
This book proposes one way of clearing what Ramana Maharshi called “vasanas” and what Linda Dillon calls “core issues.” Linda and the Company of Heaven propose other ways. Kathleen Mary Willis is working on a book that proposes others.
These vasanas, plus the conditioned behavior and the false front or constructed self that result from them, are all that separate us from our natural selves, which we’ll know upon Ascension.
I’m guessing that how deeply we’ll know it probably depends on how much of our overburden we clear away.
For those who say that only a quiet mind can result in salvation, I’d respond that clearing our vasanas is one way to still the mind.
Other disciplines like Vipassana still the waves (or vrittis) that remain. As Krishna noted, the path to meditation is made easier in later life for the man of action (karma yogi or lightworker). (1)
Here’s the book’s “Introduction.”
Copyright declined; please copy freely.
Introduction
by Steve Beckow
My interest in the subject of vasanas or core issues started with the study of Transactional Analysis back in the early 1970s: Games people played, scripts people lived, ego states, etc.
After I left graduate school in History, I felt an unquenchable thirst to study everything I could lay my hands on in Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology – significant posturing and gesturing, spacing and positioning, dramaturgical analysis and motifemic analysis – everything I could soak up on patterns in human behavior.
And then I attended my first human-growth workshop.
That initial workshop led me to enroll in a three-month encounter group at Cold Mountain Institute and what was merely intellectual knowledge now became experiential knowledge and a little bit of realized knowledge as well – my first transformational experience occurred in an Enlightenment Intensive at CMI.
After that, the est Training introduced me to the study of what Werner Erhard called “records” – which were identical to what I was later to call “vasanas.” And more spiritual experiences followed.
Let me quote from a contemporary depiction of the est Training on what a record (or what I now call a vasana) is and how the mind acts:
“The mind is a linear arrangement of multisensory, total records of successive moments of now. Its purpose, its design function, is survival: the survival of the being and anything which it considers itself to be.
“When the being identifies itself with its mind, we call this state of affairs the ego and it means that the mind’s purpose becomes the survival of the mind itself.
“For the mind to survive, it tries to keep itself intact, it seeks agreement, and tries to avoid disagreement. It wants to dominate and to avoid domination, it wants to justify its points of view, conclusions, decisions, and avoid invalidation. It wants to be right. Running through it all, over it all, is the unending effort of the mind to prove itself right.” (2)
Perfect description of a vasana.
After the est Training, I went to India. What est called “records” now became what Vedanta called “vasanas.” Both words point to the same thing, which Linda Dillon calls “core issues,” perhaps the best term of all. Other terms are rackets, routines, numbers, competing agendas, plays, ploys, and so on.
Some are describing the elephant’s trunk, some its tail, some its leg, but all are pointing at the same animal.
Basically vasanas are the places where we’re stuck. They’re the memory of traumatic events as a result of which we reached a conclusion about life, made a decision, and constructed a conditioned pattern of response designed to save us from the same traumatic circumstances again.
Usually we refused, at the time of the original trauma, to experience the unpleasant and unwanted conditions that confronted us. We drew back. We resisted.
When we, in the present moment, re-experience those unwanted feelings through to completion, the vasana begins to unwind and eventually lifts.
Our vasanas, our conditioned responses, and the constructed self we fashion as a result of being inclined in these ways are the major obstacles to knowledge of ourselves.
Knowledge of ourselves is what physical incarnation is designed to produce. The purpose of life is for us to realize ourselves in a moment of enlightenment, at which time God meets God.
Once we experience our vasanas through to completion, let go of our conditioned responses, and demolish our constructed self, we stand revealed underneath all this overburden. The natural self is unconcealed. We stand revealed as what we’re looking for.
My work in this area has been dedicated to providing insight into how to extract ourselves from this primary existential trap in which almost all of us find ourselves, which Kathleen Mary Willis happily called “the binds that tie us.”
Thank you for taking an interest in the subject. And, if you go past that interest, use the upset clearing process as described here, and actually “source” your vasanas, I’ll be ecstatic.
It’s impossible to thank all the people who’ve assisted me, directly and indirectly, with this book. But I’d like to extend special thanks to Linda, Suzi, Karen, Sara, Kathleen, Paul, and Fran.
This book and all others I’ve written are copyright-free. Please copy and distribute freely.
Footnotes
(1) Let him who would climb
In meditation
To heights of the highest
Union with Brahman
Take for his path
The yoga of action:
Then when he nears
That height of oneness
His acts will fall from him,
His path will be tranquil.
(Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 63.)
(2) Luke Rhineheart, The Book of est. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976, 174.