Watching Gabor Mate’s very helpful video of his Brazil TED talk, (1) it seems to me that we as a society may be missing a vital point about anger.
I now feel able to speak to the subject after recent clearings. (2) Not as an expert or a therapist, which I’m not, but as an “intelligent user” of this mind and body.
So often, I approached anger as if it itself was something I needed to manage. But what I found in this most recent processing of it was that my anger is not what needed to be addressed first: it was fear that did.
This insight arose because I addressed a fear my inner child had and saw, in the outcome, that, once it was addressed, my anger fell away.
The Company of Heaven has been saying all along that anger masks fear but I never got it. When Kathleen would quote the CoH, I’d say I just don’t get it. Well, now I do.
In my case my fear was of obliteration, born of my Dad’s having shouted at me inches away from my face when I was young and my personality having disintegrated in the face of it.
Let’s look at some of the relationships at play, one at a time.
What do we mean by “inner child”? What I mean by it is a vasana-born construction which I substitute for my genuine, natural, normal Self.
What is a vasana? A vasana is a core issue that was born in our earliest years as a result of shock or loss. It bent the young twig and determined how the tree would incline.
Rather than processing our vasanas, (3) what we more often do is obey their commands to get angry and defend ourselves by projecting our wounded feelings on to others.
We make ourselves the victims in any one situation and ignore the fact that 80% of what we’re saying is untrue and has no relationship to the present situation. It has more relationship to what happened to us in the distant past, when we were very young.
Left unaddressed, vasanas can result in addiction, abuse, and “sclerosis” of the heart (which I’ve also called coralization and fossilization).
By “construction” I mean that we “make up” an image of ourselves which we then sell to people ( “make [them] believe”) as being “us.”
If one image doesn’t work, we look at our repertoire and try something else until we find an image that people “buy.” Nothing about this is honest, authentic, or helpful.
Managed this way, our conflicts cause our anger to grow and grow.
But when we turn from protecting ourselves from further hurt by becoming angry with others to actually “sourcing” or completing our vasanas, based in fear, we find that anger melts away automatically. (Or at least it did for me.)
Anger is simply there to protect our fearful inner child. No fear because we processed it, no reason for anger.
In the week or two since these events occurred, I haven’t felt any anger. I was known for being an angry guy years ago (and made a career of it, directing it against persecutors as a refugee adjudicator and against the cabal as a journalist).
Now all that seems to have vanished into thin air.
Other advantages of it having gone? I seem to be much better able to remain in the middle when I’m not oscillating between fear and anger. I can access my more refined feelings and even feel compassion for others, whereas before I was like a corked bottle. Nothing was getting in and nothing was getting out.
I am in fact … well, I can’t avoid saying it … normal again, (4) after a lifetime lived in the extremes of passion, the peripheries of fear and anger. I can’t even remember what life was like in the bad old days. It’s completely out of sight and out of mind.
Footnotes
(1) Kathleen Mary Willis, “8 Minutes at 8PM: The Highest Vision for Nova Earth, Project Peace and Love, 11-18/19-17,”
(2) See “Sourcing a Vasana of Fear – Part 1/2” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2017/11/17/sourcing-a-vasana-of-fear-part-12/ and “Sourcing a Vasana of Fear – Part 2/2” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2017/11/17/sourcing-a-vasana-of-fear-part-22/
(3) On how to process vasanas, see:
- “How to Handle Unwanted Feelings: The Upset Clearing Process” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/on-processing-vasanas/how-to-handle-unwanted-feelings-the-upset-clearing-process
- “Jeshua: The Third Way” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/on-processing-vasanas/jeshua-the-third-way/”>
- “Addressing Key Vasanas” at https://gaog.wpengine.com/2016/01/18/commitment-vs-core-issue/
- “Untying the Knots that Bind Us” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2017/02/06/untying-knots-bind-us/
- “Trimming Down for Paradigm Shifts” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/on-processing-vasanas/trimming-down-for-paradigm-shifts/
- “OK, I Feel Upset. … Oh, Great!” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2010/09/17/ok-i-feel-upset-oh-great/
- From Reaction to Completion
- “Reading List on vasanas? You Bet!” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2012/01/10/reading-list-on-vasanas-you-bet/
(4) Returning to normalcy has been a theme for me as a result of processing vasanas. The first time this turn of events happened was at an Enlightenment Intensive when I processed a monster vasana and ended up, not feeling loving or blissful, but normal.