Looking back on my life, now, (1) I wondered again and again to myself, as I mentioned the other day, “Is this all? Are you kidding me? There has to be more.”
I said goodbye to wealth, many years ago. And again as recently as about a year ago. I have no real use or desire for wealth. Which could make handling it easier.
How much sex do you need before you’ve had enough? Sex without love is no big deal. (2) This couldn’t be what life is about.
Power over others? Had I not had enough of someone holding power over me? Indeed I had, enough to flush those vasanas out of my mind rather than pass them on.
And flushing them out liberated more personal power, built on rock rather than sand, than what power over others or control would have brought.
***
I’m a follower of the awareness path, but awareness is only one of the tools I used in this decades-long journey.
I used it because awareness is dissolutive. If I were to compare it to a detergent, I’d say it’s fast-acting, gobbles up negative emotions, and even lifts hard, baked-on negative thoughts.
Yes, we need to use awareness with neutrality, but awareness itself is anything but neutral.
If we maintain awareness of ourselves, watching each negative thought or emotion, in my view, we’re doing what Plotinus called “polishing the statue.” (3)
***
Awareness is a wonderful tool. It’s my first tool of choice.
But if we want to uproot a vasana, we need to draw on more of our innate capabilities than just passive awareness. (4)
In uprooting a vasana, a few active steps are also needed before we return to the use of awareness again.
The will needs to be involved, to stop the mind from simply responding in a knee-jerk fashion (5) and blaming people around us for how we feel (“You made me mad”). (6)
We need to restrain ourselves out of courtesy (I hear one of my ex-partners laughing loudly; he’s writing this?) but also because the nature of vasanas is such that the cause of our upset is usually not the person standing in front of us. So we’re never going to get to the bottom of the matter arguing with present company.
The mind as emotional register needs to be involved, to name the feeling.
The files in our memory are arranged according to feelings. Once we’ve identified the feeling, we need to involve the mind as memory, to cast up a picture of the original incident. Who is the upset really associated with?
***
Once we have this information, which we can only get when the vasana has become active (has erupted), we have what we need to process the vasana.
Now, we as the witness need to experience the original incident through to completion, without reactivity, deflection, turning aside, self-serving minimization, etc.
We need to remain neutral and balanced in the face of what we see, hear, and feel during this phase.
This is the return to awareness. We’ve come full circle. Now that we’ve used our other capabilities to get at the heart of the matter, we use our awareness to dissolve it.
We simply rest again in bare, dissolutive awareness, which will ultimately dissolve trigger, issue, sorrow, and the rest.
Their confidence in awareness’ power to dissolve is why I think some sages say, “This too shall pass.”
There’s nothing hid that shall not be known, Jesus said. It seems to me that anything that impedes our easy Ascension passage is being raised to our awareness to be “known.”
We can do the job now, before the energies oblige us to, by regularly sweeping our field with our awareness and looking for any remaining triggers. If we find any, we process them. If not, we move on.
At first I took up this practice because I felt I had to. But now I love it. Maybe almost as much as writing.
Footnotes
(1) Why anyone in their right mind would want to do that, I don’t know. Only to complete.
(2) Sex with love is a very big deal.
(3) Our character was the statue that Plotinus polished.
(4) If we were seeking enlightenment, passive awareness would be an ample tool unto itself. But lightworkers, as I see the picture, are (1) already enlightened, ascended masters (embodied), mostly angels, and (2) are mostly here to serve Gaia and her people; much fewer of them are here to seek enlightenment. Some among us are meant to serve in the area of enlightenment. But I believe most lightworkers are meant to follow the pattern of the bodhisattva, who put aside the idea of enlightenment to serve.
(5) Conditioned behavior.
(6) No one makes us mad but ourselves. The means by which we do that is our vasanas or core issues, with their triggers and booby traps. They result in conditioned behavior, designed to keep us safe from a traumatizing recurrence.
Moreover, to say that someone else caused us to feel the way we do is to take a victim position and is not inherently powerful because it isn’t inherently true. Taking personal responsibility for one’s upsets is both powerful and true.