My beloved brother Paul on the right
Whenever I feel guilt or shame or dismay, I can say with certainty that my Wounded Child is in the driver’s seat.
I can say this with certainty because of what I saw and felt in a meditation I did at Xenia Retreat Center on Sept. 18, 2018.
I saw the Self in the depths of my heart (1) and the feeling that totally took me over was that of being a pure and innocent individual.
We’re all pure underneath this overburden of guilt, shame, etc. It was clear to me in that moment that this purity reflected our being a spark of God.
I had arrived at one destination on the endless journey – our future and our past – and it was blameless.
Surely that says – among other things – that I, who was so much blamed in my early life, was here being given the knowledge that the being we’re unveiling by our efforts is in fact not reprehensible.
We used to call the reprehensible being we were the “deeper self.” Our “dark side.” We had very little knowledge of vasanas or core issues (3) back then.
In my experience at Xenia, I saw that the vasanas were only skin deep.
The me that was shaped by early-childhood events (4) – my personality, shall we say – is vasana-driven. It’s a reaction machine, on autopilot, following instructions that were out-of-date decades ago.
I must look crazy when my vasana is triggered and off I go, acting out the generational pattern.
Gosh, it takes a lot of digging (self-observation) to get below the vasanas in everyday life rather than just in a quiet state of meditation.
Footnotes
(1) Here’s a description of that experience:
“At Xenia Retreat Center, I dove deeply into my heart, in meditation, to find out what the origin was of the feeling of dismay I was experiencing. I thought I’d get to the original incident and experience it through to completion. Instead I went way past the level of the vasanas and kept on going.
“I finally reached what resembled a tunnel and at the end of it was the Light of the Self. And in the presence of the Self I felt innocent and pure.
“I had penetrated through the hridayam, the heart aperture, into the open heart and down, down, down to “the seat of the soul.” So I can vouch for the fact that the seat of the soul is in the heart. That no longer sounds like a far-fetched notion to me, but something I’ve experienced and realized.” (“The Heart is ‘the Seat of the Soul’,” December 17, 2018, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2018/12/17/the-heart-is-the-seat-of-the-soul/. )
I thought of the depths of my heart as “the seat of the Soul.” On the Xenia experience, see “Original Innocence,” Sept. 21, 2018, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2018/09/21/original-innocence-2/
“I Now Know How the Play Ends,” Sept. 22, 2018, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2018/09/22/i-now-know-how-the-play-ends/
“Archangel Michael Explains What Happened at Xenia,” Sept. 22, 2018, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2018/09/22/archangel-michael-explains-what-happened-at-xenia/
I had this conversation with Archangel Michael about the Xenia experience. He said things about enlightenment that I wasn’t aware of, after ten years of reading the works of enlightened masters:
Steve: Was the sight of the self at the Xenia retreat a fourth-chakra event?
Archangel Michael: Yes, it was.
Steve: So it’s possible to have two fourth-chakra events or maybe even more possibly?
AAM: It is possible to have multiple chakra events throughout your lifetimes, sweet one. Again, what you are thinking of is a limitation. Something is activated or not activated. Think in terms of open, open, open, open, bigger, bigger, bigger. So yes, you might have several events. You should have several events! (Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, June 12, 2019.)
(4) On one occasion, when I was yelled at from inches away from my face, I shattered into a million pieces. It took a little more than fifty years to become whole again, so to speak. Once I knew I was dissociated, I used to call myself the “Humpty Dumpty Man.”