“When you are acknowledging and working with your own core, you are working with the collective.” (Archangel Michael in a personal reading, May 9, 2014.)
Permit me to use this opportunity to discuss a few things about vasanas. Many pieces of the puzzle are falling into place for me and so, from my point of view, it’s a good time to review the subject.
Before I do, let me say that I feel clearer now than I ever have. The clearing that this vasana has brought about feels complete and has left me free of the subterranean feeling which I’ve carried around perhaps all my life.
Vasanas are persistent reaction patterns that go off in the present but are traceable to traumatic events in the far-distant past.
Other people have called vasanas engrams, records, files, patterns, numbers, rackets, trips, old baggage, and so on.
As the twig is bent, the tree inclines. The vasana often determines our future pattern of growth.
In my case, an infant was wheeled into the kitchen at night, tied to the slats of the crib and allowed to cry (and scream) himself to sleep. I lived with the ghosts (the car lights on the walls), with cold once I kicked off my blankets, with rage, hatred, impotence, a sense of abandonment, etc.
The vasana contains all the sensory memories of the original event. I even recall the Felix the Cat clock in the kitchen, which I saw again perhaps forty years later in my Dad’s apartment. I still feel uncomfortable seeing car lights go along a wall. And I have trouble sleeping to this day.
The vasana also contains conclusions and decisions reached either during or after the event.
I hear myself saying such things as “I don’t need anybody,” “in the end, we’re all on our own,” “no one really cares,” “what do I have to lose?” – and more phrases like these that all track back to that event.
I’d tell people that my core belief about myself is that I’m unloveable. Well, now I see where that belief comes from. An infant decided he hated the world. Would that not lead one after a time to see oneself as unloveable?
I honestly don’t know how I was able to accomplish as much as I have with such a disabling memory always running slightly below consciousness. I have few friends and many find my bluntness objectionable, detect a certain distance and coolness, find me too intense, etc. So it’s been a lonely life, all of my own making.
I’ve been at work on my vasanas since 1975 and still I’m only now getting down to the bare bones. And here’s the kicker: I’ve only been on Earth a few times. How could one get so embroiled after only a few lifetimes?
The vasana causes us to see life in certain ways. It closes us to other possibilities. It defines the possible, the plausible and the probable.
Over time, we still respond to the commands created at the time of the vasana’s creation – or after – without knowing why we’re doing what we’re doing.
I once ended a treasured relationship, purely acting out of the vasana’s thrown decisions, even knowing as I was doing so that it wasn’t what I wanted. But I could not see past the way the vasana told me life was or what needed to be.
It’s agonizing to see the result, know it wasn’t what we wanted, but be unable to see what else to do, so blinding are our vasanas.
That was perhaps the heaviest price I’ve paid for responding from a vasana.
Werner Erhard’s statement that what we resist persists has entered the language. Genele Boyce made the comment that what we perceive, we believe. Both very true, for me. Both relevant to understanding our vasanas.
A vasana is at heart resistance to life, designed to keep us from re-experiencing the painful situation that the vasana relates to.
And it defines how we perceive or define the situation we’re in. In all ways, it limits life and condemns us to live, appreciate and desire only a small part of what life has to offer.
My brother Paul is fond of quoting Will Rogers to the effect that he had seen many tragic things in life and some of them actually happened. So much of what we see only happens in our minds. And we multiply the unreality by telling and retelling our stories, until the polished versions we create stand in for what actually is.
We’re very seldom mad at the person who stands before us. Usually the cause of our annoyance lies in the distant past.
If we project our negativity onto the person standing before us (and I have), it energizes the vasana, which then goes back inside with even more command value over us than it did. If we swallow our anger, it still energizes it.
The only thing, as Jesus noted, (1) that causes a vasana to lift is to observe it dispassionately, objectively, and allow it to work its way through us and then be released into wherever energy goes.
And that process may need to be repeated again and again.
Awareness is not neutral. Awareness dissolves vasanas. It’s the only thing that will (short of giving it to the Mother).
It helps to name the feeling. In my case, naming the vague feeling I was experiencing wasn’t easy. Finally I got that it was dismay. How many people are familiar with dismay? I wasn’t.
It also helps to ask the mind to toss up a picture of the original incident. The mind is an obedient servant and will do that right away. We must grab that image as it flies by and accept it.
If we don’t grab the first image that flies by, a second may never come or it may be irrelevant.
If we say, “No, that can’t be it,” and reject the image, again we may have defeated the exercise.
Vasanas are not logical, not rational. The way the event in the present may resemble the event in the past may not at first be obvious. It may be a color, a peripheral object, a special date. It’s very difficult to “figure out” a vasana because it wasn’t built using the rules of logic. It was built in response to pain.
Our job is to remain with the feeling and image until the vasana breaks open.
When it does, there may be anger, tears, agony, all types of strong emotion. We’re to be with or remain with these feelings and everything that comes along with them, without projecting or interjecting, until the vasana completes itself.
At some point we may see the truth of it and that truth will set us free. We can guide ourselves in our processing by seeing whether we feel increasing release. If we do, we’re headed in the right direction. If we don’t, we’re not.
I would have thought we’d be through with vasanas by now. I certainly thought I was. But I couldn’t have been more mistaken.
Moreover, while Archangel Michael said that the Company of Heaven had taken away my anger connected to domestic violence, he also pointed out to me that the crib incident was much earlier. I should have guessed that the CoH may not have taken that piece of the puzzle away, or why would he have mentioned it?
The crib incident still had to be experienced. I’m going on the assumption that there may be more. It isn’t time yet to hang up my vasana shades.
Although I’ve seen the contours of this vasana, the layers of which it’s composed, some of the conclusions, decisions and commands that flowed from it, I’m still not completely through the re-experiencing of it. There hasn’t been release. I’m waiting for it to burst forth again and allow me the chance to really feel it, hear it, and “get it” down to my bones.
Each time we re-experience a vasana like this, it releases some of its hold on us, until finally it goes.
Because a vasana can only be experienced when up, when I see myself in the midst of a vasana I tend to say “whoopeee!” That’s my time to be clear of it. I welcome the opportunity.
That said, re-experiencing an upset does not feel any different than experiencing it in the first place. Either way we feel upset. So we have to remind ourselves that re-experiencing it is a good thing, even if it feels like hell.
What’s the point of going through all this agony of re-experiencing our distant trauma? Well, if we don’t, if we project it or introject it instead, we end up coralized, fozzilized, with a sclerotic heart and and an arthritic brain, if you’ll permit me.
But if we do re-experience them and cause them to lift, then we end up with renewed aliveness, tremendous satisfaction, restored self-expression, new buoyancy, more suppleness, joy, etc.
I can tell you that I’m experiencing more love at this moment than I have in months. I’m available to life, joyful, profoundly optimistic. If I didn’t expect it to be so, I wouldn’t have spent a lifetime studying vasanas and how to have them disappear.
Underneath our vasanas we’re always already well. Our vasanas are the overburden that prevents enlightenment in some cases, or, when it happens, causes our enlightenment experience to disappear.
All our vasanas will disappear with sahaja samadhi, which is the level of enlightenment reached at full Ascension. But I’m no longer convinced that the Ascension we’ll experience on entering the Fifth Dimension is sahaja.
I actually think, based on knowledge of the Mental Plane, the name given to the Fifth Dimension on the other side of life, (2) that sahaja comes at a higher subplane of the Fifth Dimension than the first. But we’ll see.
I also say that because most people’s bodies probably could not withstand the energy that sahaja would bring. After all, we’re doing this for the first time in the universe – ascending en masse in the physical body. And that has to have special conditions attached to it, such as not burning up the body. But of that, I know little and am watching to see how events unfold as we all are. (3)
Footnotes
(1) “Jeshua via Pamela Kribbe: The Third Way, ” Jan. 26, 2014, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2014/01/26/jeshua-the-third-way/.
(2) See the sections of “New Maps of Heaven” on the Mental Plane at https://goldengaiadb.com/New_Maps_of_Heaven.
(3) For more on vasanas, see “On Processing Vasanas” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/on-processing-vasanas/.