There’s too much to be learned from this recent completion (or forgiveness) of a vasana of elder-male hatred to leave it just yet.
I acknowledge that Kathleen’s counsel has greatly deepened the work I did.
Here’s another angle from which to view what just happened.
There are three levels of knowledge, as you know:
(1) The intellectual
(2) The experiential, and
(3) The realizational.
Consider the levels I went through.
At each point along the way, I received the information from inside that I needed to conduct my investigation of the origins of what I originally thought of as “financial stress.”
All of what follows in the next few paragraphs represents processing at the intellectual level.
I listened for the various things I was saying to myself about my situation.
But then I glimpsed fear below it. When I investigated the fear, I saw it was a fear of catastrophic loss and that, as such, tracked back to a spell of homelessness in or around 2007.
When I looked at fear itself, I saw that that tracked back to the shouting incident with my Father, when I exploded into a million pieces and became the Humpty Dumpty man. Around age seven.
Extreme fear was the last emotional response I had to my Father shouting at me from inches away from my face, before my personality exploded. Until with my brother’s help, what remained dissociated fused back together again in the white heat of anger, fifty years later.
When I looked at what was fearful in all that, it was the extent of my Father’s anger. I began now to focus on my Father.
I found a deep vein of hatred towards him … and towards his Father. Both of them used their money in manipulative, controlling ways.
I could not get past hating the two of them – my elder-male line. All roads led to them. This was the head vampire.
***
OK, stop the camera. I now have gathered all the information I need to actually “process” or “experience” this root vasana or core issue of what has turned out to be hatred.
We’re now about to leave the intellectual level of exploration and investigation and enter the experiential domain of trying things on and testing them out, of feeling these states I go into (stress, fear, hatred, etc.), of reaction to our hypothetical version of things.
I begin to experience hatred and it feels and looks so familiar.
I see a sequence of events I went through from loving my Dad to hating him.
Once I’ve experienced hatred until it loses its grip, I begin to go back in time from that hatred and reach a place of love again.
This is all imaginative but experiential. I’m feeling the various states.
***
I then passed into realizational knowledge. In a flash of insight, I realized that my hatred did in fact track back to my Father and Grandfather.
So I got it now not just as an idea or an experience, but as realized truth, as actuality. Granted that this was a relatively minor realization (that is, it wasn’t enlightenment), it was still realized knowledge. At est, we’d have said: “I got it.”
I saw hatred as a black pearl, which arose from a grain of sand in an oyster – that is, from an original irritating thought or memory in me.
At first I was simply irritated with Dad’s roughness and criticism and began to accrete a layer of protection against him.
Then I felt impatience, waiting for him to get it. Then I felt a series of other feelings, culminating in hatred. These are all the layers of the black pearl.
To transcend it, I went backwards through time, back through those layers, and reached a time before all the mayhem started.
I reconnected with my love for my Father and Grandfather. Again, at all three levels: Intellectual, experiential, and realizational.
I reached a choicepoint, a time to rechoose if I wanted to: To either affirm my original decision to hate them both or remember our love and let the rest go.
I remembered our love and let the rest go.
I definitely completed my experience of hating the elder-male line and have forgiven them and me.
And we see how that process was done here, for all three levels of knowledge.
Kathleen has introduced me to a “mantra”:
I Love you and myself.
I forgive you and myself.
I apologize to you and myself.
I Am the Infinite Flow of Gratitude.
I Am the Eternal Flow of Forgiveness.