Enlightened sages in past years did not understand or explain higher dimensionality, I recall Archangel Michael saying.

Their descriptions of enlightenment were more restricted than the conversations the Company of Heaven have had with us recently. (1)

Where they approached the subject of “purification,” it was predominantly to counsel abstinence from sensual pleasures.

With the exception of Plotinus, Ramana Maharshi and a very few others, they didn’t really seem to get into how to lift the primary impediment to Self-Knowledge – what the Council of Love calls “core issues” and what Ramana Maharshi called “vasanas.”

Removing the overburden of our core issues or vasanas – and their effects, chiefly, our conditioning – is all that needs to be done to unconceal the innocent, natural, and original Self.

Plotinus called purification polishing or “working at” the statue:

“Do as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be beautified: he cuts away here, he smooths it there, he makes this line lighter, this other one purer, until he disengages beautiful lineaments in the marble. You do this, too.

“Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one radiance of beauty. Never cease ‘working at the statue’ until there shines out upon you from it the divine sheen of virtue….

“Have you become like this? Do you see yourself, abiding within yourself, in pure solitude? Does nothing now remain to shatter that interior unity, nor anything cling to your authentic self? Are you entirely that sole true light which is not contained by space, not confined to any circumscribed form, not diffused as something without term, but ever immeasurable as something greater than all measure and something more than all quantity? Do you see yourself in this state? Then you have become vision itself.

“Be of good heart. Remaining here, you have ascended aloft. You need a guide no longer. Strain and see.” (2)

This passage is the clearest reference to the removal of vasanas that I’ve seen.

These days I’ve seen the discussion of vasanas go on under many different names, using many different approaches to cleansing ourselves of them. It’s clear that the Company of Heaven has been inspiring the knowledge in many. (3)

It’s as if our level of comprehension has gone beyond a simple introduction to the motor vehicle to instructions on how to drive it.

But we need to actually take one of those methods of clearing away vasanas and actually dig into our core issues.

I meet so many people who’ve read articles on purification or cleansing, but who have not and do not use the upset clearing process to eradicate their vasanas.

It’s like what meditation master S.N. Goenka once said. It does no good to put the medicine bottle on the mantle and worship it, saying, “O medicine bottle, take away the causes of my illness.” We need to take the medicine.

We need to  start cleansing ourselves – if we haven’t already begun – if we want to emerge from our darker moods and attitudes.

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Any clearing process makes the basic distinction between being triggered and projecting our anger onto the person we face and what Kathleen and Byron Katie have called “turnaround” – turning our attention around from the other we face to ourselves, to discover where this pattern originated.

They also are agreed on the next step being what Kathleen calls “feel to heal” or what I call “experiencing the original trauma through to completion.”  (4)

All feelings pass, but what causes some unpleasant ones to stick around longer than necessary is that we resist them. As Werner Erhard observed decades ago, what we resist persists. And so we dance with these rejected feelings seemingly forever.

When we agree to actually feel to completion the emotions we refused to experience after the original trauma, we begin the process of cleansing ourselves of them. It may take repeated washings with the detergent of our awareness but at last they will lift.

Their lifting is like us taking a rain coat off ourselves. Underneath we’re perfectly dry.

Similarly, underneath the mantle of our vasanas, we’re perfectly loving.

Footnotes

(1) Michael said:

“There was not earlier, in the time of these sages, who are very sacred individuals, the same framework of understanding of inter-dimensionality or multidimensionality. It was more the sense that there was the Self and then there was the universe and the bridge of enlightenment.

“So it was not viewed as a complete unified field through which human beings and all realities had access. It was considered a somewhat arduous undertaking and it was not termed ‘shifting dimensions’ because the science, the culture, the framework within which one operated, even in the higher states, shall we say, was not open and available. …

“Now the sages [also] did not think of this, of their journey as a process of entrainment of bringing the entire collective along. You do. And when I say ‘you’ I mean the current thinking and body of understanding and knowing in the lightworker community. So the fundamental premises have changed.” (Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow, through Linda Dillon, Feb. 17, 2017.)

(2) Plotinus in Elmer O’Brien, ed., The Essential Plotinus. Representative Treatises from the Enneads. Toronto: New American Library, 1964, 40-3.

(2) Just as knowledge of the bow and arrow, for instance, was dispersed through many people in the ancient world.

(3) My own upset clearing process is written up here: 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/

Jesus also outlines essentially the same process here: Jeshua: The Third Way at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/on-processing-vasanas/jeshua-the-third-way/>.