(Concluded from Part 1, above.)
The vasana is a gigantic GRRRRR! to all the opposition I met along the way – opposition to doing what I’m happily doing right now. Why can’t we be allowed to do what we love and be financially supported? (Just wait for the Reval!)
But then I realized that, without the opposition, my life would have been totally different and none of this might have happened.
Instead of my first dissertation not being accepted, it could have been accepted and I could be delivering boring lectures in some small institution somewhere now, dining at the Faculty Club and wanting to blow my brains out.
Instead of my second dissertation not being accepted and me leaving university to pursue enlightenment studies, I could have fought the battle from inside and alienated all my colleagues. Again off to some small institution delivering boring lectures, etc.
All the closed doors behind me got me here, right where I’ve always wanted to be. I’m not sure I would have gotten here without those closed doors.
***
It’s done. The jubilance may not last, but I got here, in this moment – by my declaration. I’m standing on the mountain top.
Dad, I believe I’ve passed a hundred books now. Does that prove I’m not a lazy, no-good good-for-nothing?
Can I stop now?
Yes, I can. Everything I set out to do is done.
That doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing. I don’t really know what it does mean.
In actually means a number of things.
It means I no longer have to write, need to write, must write. It means I’ll write from a place of causality rather than reactivity now. The driving issue below it is gone.
I’m now no longer serving a self-driven agenda of proving myself to my Dad (1) but am available now to serve the Mother … and others in a more complete manner than I have been until now.
I have nothing at this moment that I’m aware of to prove. I feel more still in my everyday life than I ever have before. (2)
Dad expressed his frustration over me not jumping to his post-World-War-II commands and called me a name. That’s all that really happened.
Yes, the insult got in. As the twig was bent, the tree inclined and I became an over-producer.
I see what I did with his careless words. Seeing it, my automaticity is now gone and I find, as in all similar cases with me and others, that I benefit from the skills I learned along the way.
I learned to work on my own, at the frontiers of knowledge. I learned to stage my research – first databases; then articles; then books, in a natural flow. I learned to say what was only being whispered and not to be dissuaded by criticism. Most of all I learned to produce.
In the course of enacting our escape plan or coping mechanism at the heart of a vasana, we may find we learn new skills. Thus we learn a great lesson about ourselves in the course of processing the vasana plus we’re left with skills.
And we’re now stronger and more stable for having “wrestled with our demons” or “listened to the siren’s song.” (3) Another layer of superficial noise is removed and we find ourselves at a deeper, quieter level.
Footnotes
(1) An agenda Dad and I probably set before I was born – to make sure I got here!
(2) At Cold Mountain Institute, we’d say “I arrived.” Yes, that is what it feels like.
(3) Odysseus lashed himself to the mast so that he could listen to the sirens’ bewitching song. We look for the origin of our vasana and listen to it, which is like lashing ourselves to the mast.
