Kahlil Gibran could have been speaking of these times when he said:
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast. (1)
One minute we’re high as can be and the next minute we’re stretched beyond belief. One minute we’re full of energy and the next minute we can’t stand on our feet. We’re being kneaded like dough, or so it seems.
What’s the purpose of it?
Well, I don’t know the divine purpose of it, but I certainly can guess at some of the psychological purposes.
I’ve said on other occasions that our vasanas (reaction patterns) make up our constructed self. But the precipitate of our vasanas is what Wilhelm Reich called “character armor” and Eckhart Tolle called “the pain body.” (2) We store our upsets in the body as bands of muscular tension (character armoring) and we also store pain in our etheric bodies. The aggregate consciousness of pain is the “pain body.”
Holding the memories of our pain has several effects. Awareness varies, I believe, inversely with the level of tension in the body. The tension we feel from the memory of pain lowers our awareness.
Crying and laughing both release tension, as do bioenergetics, rebirthing, Rolfing, yoga, stretching, and many other practices. The tension that these practices release is often the really solidly-packed-in tension.
Relaxation also releases stress, which is one of the causes of tension, along with our belief systems or vasanas. Music, walks in nature, a hot drink, massage and other practices such as these relax us, lower stress levels, and heighten awareness.
Love, such as we’ve been feeling this past week as the Mother pours her clarity energy out to us, rids us of stress as well, but exposes the holding patterns in the body and therefore can raise vasanas to the surface in the same way that lowering the water in a river exposes rocks.
The raising of vasanas to the surface is not a sign of defeat. I think you’ve heard me say often: Oh, boy, here comes a vasana. Whoopee! I get a chance to complete it!
You cannot complete a vasana unless it’s up so, when one is up, that’s our big chance. Not to project it onto someone else, but to experience it through to completion, at which point it lifts.
Everyone has vasanas, even supposedly enlightened masters. Our vasanas aren’t burned to a crisp until after sahaja samadhi, which lies perhaps a year out in front of us. We have a ways to go and you can rely on the energies to pull us like taffee until the preponderant part of our vasanas are gone. Whatever is left will be forgiven us by the Law of Grace. (3)
What to do?
There are many approaches to ridding ourselves of vasanas, or what Echkhart calls “strong emotional reactions.” A whole portion of this blog is dedicated to exploring those paths. (4) But the very best way I know to complete a vasana is to paint it with awareness – what Eckhart calls “presence.”
Remain aware of the vasana as it arises. Follow your breath if you need something to help you stay present (remain as presence) as the vasana moves through you. As I said the other day, awareness (or presence) is decidedly not neutral. Awareness is a divine solvent. Knots in consciousness cannot persist through simple, bare awareness.
Project them onto others and they grow. Resist them and they persist. But remain in bare awareness of them and they cannot remain. This too will pass and it does – most readily – in the face of bare awareness.
So much of what we need to do in the spiritual realm is counterintuitive. Our first impulse is to DO something. We push and lift and strain ourselves to accomplish useful work.
But the Divine does not move. The Divine is still. And the Divine is ultimate awareness. If we want to become men and women who move without moving, do without doing, then we need to rest in awareness.
We need to understand and accept that what applies in the Third-Dimensional world of matter is not ultimate and that things like awareness are much more powerful than what we think of as action.
Remember how the Divine Mother said in her interview on An Hour with an Angel that we could be a wayshower without leaving our bedroom? (5) Well, yes, because lightwork does not have to be active. We also serve who only stand and watch.
So whether we’re in a chaotic node or bathed in delicious energies, we need to entertain the counterintuitive spiritual disciplines and cultivate such things as standing still, resting in simple awareness, accepting the tumultuous and just observing it. We need to “be with” our upsets and listen to what our body tells us. And, above all, we need to relax and allow the knots in consciousness to lift from the solvent of bare awareness.
Footnotes
(1) Excerpts from The Prophet by Khalil Gibran at https://www.selfdiscoveryportal.com/poetry_gibran.htm.
(2) Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, at https://wilhelmreichtrust.org/character_analysis.pdf. Eckhart Tolle, “Living in Presence With Your Emotional Pain” at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/eckhart-tolle/living-in-presence-with-y_b_753114.html.
(3) “With the end times rapidly drawing so near, many souls have elected to take on all remaining karmic experiences. For many it is therefore a hectic time, particularly at a personal level. When you ascend karma will have been cleared by you or ‘written off’ through the Law of Grace.” (SaLuSa, Aug. 3, 2011 at https://www.treeofthegoldenlight.com/First_Contact/Channeled_Messages_by_Mike_Quinsey.htm.)
(4) “On Processing Vasanas” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/on-processing-vasanas/.
(5) “You can be a way-shower in your bedroom.” (“The Divine Mother: The Role of Clarity” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/the-nature-of-the-divine-mother/the-divine-mother-the-role-of-clarity/.)