http://the2012scenario.com/2012/07/being-clear-of-our-past/

Written by Steve Beckow

 

I suppose I should report on the aftermath of that volcanic eruption I had the other day, remembering all the stories of torture and rape I’d heard at the Refugee Board. (1)

 

The aftermath is quite unexpected and startling so it does make sense to record it.

 

Let me review first what occurred. A vasana erupted while I was standing at the bus stop.  A vasana is an habitual reaction pattern triggered by an event in the present that resembles an earlier, similar traumatic event in the past.

 

I suddenly found myself sobbing after having sat for perhaps half a day in the remembrance of all the stories of torture and rape I had heard at the Board. I was remembering them because I was called upon to deliberate over a thorny issue of weight and that took me right back again to my days hearing refugee claims.

 

Until that particular moment I had felt merely troubled and despondent. But at the bus stop everything rose to the surface and I simply sobbed, not quite uncontrollably, but deeply.

And, as I’ve suggested for many years, I didn’t try to contain the experience or blame it on another or stuff it down. I allowed myself to experience the experience completely. (2) I consciously accepted it and allowed it to play itself out in me.

 

And, after repeating that same process perhaps two or three times again in the next twelve hours or so, I felt myself released from the trauma that I’d eaten from having listened to so many refugee claims.

 

But that isn’t the end of the story. If it was, I might not be writing now. Here is the rest.

 

Consider that for eight years I had been an adjudicator, a presiding Member over a tribunal called to decide the merits of refugee claims. I had learned the statute law, caselaw or precedent, procedures of the Board, history and current affairs of refugee-producing nations, human-rights conventions and treaties, and whatever else I needed to know.

 

And I had applied all that theory in practice in the hearing room, delivering sometimes oral, sometimes written decisions after hearing 1,500 claims.

 

Now all that was available to me again in ways that it had not been before. Previously, on occasion, I would deny that knowledge because remembering it caused me the pain of remembering the stories I’d heard as well. On other occasions, I remembered it but my application of it was tainted by the traumatic memories that came with it.

 

But now I could remember and access it without the trauma. It was merely available to me without accompanying hesitation or disabling overlay.

 

It isn’t my intention to write a lot more about vasanas. I may have to but I personally am finished with the subject. A large literature exists on it in the righthand column. (3) But this case in point does show rather clearly one of the values of processing a vasana to completion, if handing it over to Archangel Raphael does not provide relief. (4)

 

That value is that we are not only finished with the trauma but that skills we may have had which were tainted by our vasanas are now available to be used without impediment.

There are other benefits of clearing our vasanas in this manner. Our ability to love is released. Our actions become dictated by deeper faculties than a superficial response to a traumatic memory brings. We feel peace and bliss whereas before we felt only various shades of reactivity. There are so many benefits from being clear and complete with our past – which is what it boils down to.

 

Whether we like it or not, if I’m correct, our past is going to come up for us round about now. And if we can just accept that it is, consent to experience it without resistance, just listen to it or feel it or whatever it demands of us, and get through the whole experience until it naturally lifts like a ghost that is finished with us, we can be free of it.

 

Footnotes

(1) “A Vasana Erupts” at http://the2012scenario.com/ascension/on-processing-vasanas/a-vasana-erupts/

(2) See ”Jeshua:  The Third Way,” by Pamela Kribbe, July 4, 2012, at http://jeshua.net/ http://jeshua.net/ and “The New Gospel of Jesus” at http://the2012scenario.com/2012/07/the-new-gospel-of-jesus/

(3) “On Processing Vasanas,” at http://the2012scenario.com/ascension/on-processing-vasanas/

(4) “Did the Caterpillar who Became a Butterfly Mourn the Butterfly?” athttp://the2012scenario.com/ascension/what-is-ascension/did-the-caterpillar-who-became-a-butterfly-mourn-the-caterpillar/