The electricity is still off. Evidently a transformer is down. The thought of climbing up twelve flights of stairs has me decide to remain here in the darkness.
I’ve resolved to use this time to complete the experience of the fear of being wrong. If I put a dent in fear itself in the process, I’ll be happy. I’ll be doing it in stream of consciousness.
I feel the fear as if it were in every cell of my body. I give it my full and undivided attention.
I breathe into it and fill myself up with it. I massage any chakras or areas where I feel resistance to fully opening to it.
I’m now as open as I ever will be to the full experience of fearing being wrong. Fearing making a mistake. Fear of screwing up. This is part of the chaos arising that Michael talked about (1)
***
Having remained with it for as long as it took, I now feel the space emptied of the fear of being wrong. This may be the first time in my life I’ve felt clear of it.
It’s been there at a subterranean level since forever.
I marvel at what it feels like to take a breath without fear being there.
I can’t overlook the fact that this reparenting I’m doing is recovery from child abuse. Physical and emotional. This length of time is what it’s taken me to recover. And I’m one of the lucky ones who experienced no sexual abuse. That would be a number of times more difficult to come back from. Nonetheless, it’s been a long road, from the Humpty Dumpty Man to here…. (2)
***
The electricity is still off. Once my laptop and cellphone run out of juice, I’m a caveman again.
Becoming aware of the vasana around fear of being wrong, I next uncovered another vasana – fear of failing. I experienced that through to completion as well. Again a space opened up.
I haven’t explored that space yet because I broke off to write this. Since my laptop has only so much juice left in it, I’m trying to make best use of it every time I turn it back on.
I find that I keep focusing on what the Buddha said: Do only wholesome action; refrain from unwholesome action; and purify the mind.
Purifying the mind is experiencing the vasana through to completion – on all levels – mental, emotional, realizational. That’s what I’ve been doing since 1974. (3)
Refraining from unwholesome action is letting go of the behavior patterns that arose from our vasanas, the things “we always do.”
Just stop them. And not put a replacement action in unless it’s wholesome – that is, of love.
It’s helpful to know I only have to stop the unwholesome stuff. I don’t have to have something to put in its place. I can put love in for good measure. Otherwise I can leave the space open for love to arise by itself.
Working on this area of myself is new to me.
The way I feel now? It isn’t blissful. Not joyful. Just open. I think of this as “normal.” For all these years I have not been acting at all what you could call “normally.” I have always been compensating for my fear of being wrong and failing.
***
Probably because I feel normal now, I saw the ego last night when it arose. Having observed it, I think I now have a pretty good idea of what it feels like when the ego is talking.
At those times, my speaking has an edge and there’s a grim laugh to it and a desire for vengeance. Getting even with everyone and everything for what I suffered, I suppose.
I experience this new vasana through to completion as well. I let every pore of my body breathe in this desire for vengeance.
Let me allow it to overmaster me and feel it deeply. Let me allow it to reshape my face, set my posture. Hard, dictatorial.
Ok, I now can identify it. And don’t act on its behalf. Just stop. I can do that too.
No more unprocessed fear. As soon as fear arises, experience it completely and let it go. Do not act on the basis of it unless you feel you must.
***
I’m walking around free of fear at this moment. It’s just absent.
I breathe consciously and cannot, on the inbreath or outbreath, which are like two sweeps of the radar, pick up a trace of fear.
I breathe in and concentrate on my interior field of experience and I find no trace there as well.
And now love rushes in to fill the vacuum. And bliss.
I am, at this moment, a hollow bamboo, through which the winds of love whistle.
Footnotes
(1) “The Kryptonite of Being Wrong: Getting to the Heart of Fear,”
“The reason why I speak of this is that many of you – and you, beloved, included – look at situations and you say, ‘Well, how can it get much worse?’ That is because you, and many, come from a place of love and purity of intent.
“But you also know that everything that has need to be eliminated, everything that has need to be relinquished, everything that needs to be healed in this cesspool that we call ‘chaos’ has need to come to the surface.
“Otherwise – and this has happened many, many times in human history – what happens is there is a belief, there is a healing, an accommodation, a remedy, and then the human collective tends to think, ‘Okay, now it is cleaned up. Now it is healed. Now it is done.’ But the core – the core issues [i.e., the vasanas] – of the collective, and of course of the individuals, have not been addressed, and therefore it simply settles in and it festers.
“In this part of the infinite, eternal unfoldment of our Mother’s Plan, it all has need to be surfaced so that this subtle and actual festering, until it again boils over, cannot happen. It is simply, in your time and in the Mother’s time, the juncture at which this has to be healed. So it continues to rise to the surface.” (“Archangel Michael: Victory is at Hand!”
It adds weight to my beliefs that:
(1) Vasanas must be triggered before they can be processed.
(2) They must be completely re-experienced before they will not simply disappear but lift. Kathleen calls it “feel it to heal it.”
(3) We think that, when the vasana disappears from sight, the problem is solved: It isn’t. The vasana is still there and can be re-triggered.
What Michael says here is very important to one like me who studies vasanas.
(2) I dissociated at age 7 when my Dad yelled at me from inches in front of my face. I shattered into a thousand pieces; hence the Humpty Dumpty Man, as I thought of myself later in life.
(3) When I first read Eric Berne’s Games People Play and saw that there were patterns in human behavior that could be studied. The apogee of that study would be Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Goffman’s other books. Vasanas Werner Erhard called “records.” I owe much to Werner. The term “vasanas” comes from Hinduism, especially Ramana Maharshi.