The past
October 10, 2007hmmm – OK, first thing to touch on is about personalities. From a higher perspective, we discover that the “person” we thought we were is really just a series of personalities, each with their own story. As we move through life, we shift them according to circumstances. We pop up with the dad model, then the worker, then the jock, then lover… Each building on our past.
As we become more self-aware, we may follow the thread back to where these stories originated. Parental experiences. First relationships. Where we had positive or negative feedback, and so forth. But we also may find certain themes show up that are disproportional to circumstance. Where the personality kind of latched onto an experience as justification for a background theme. Something older and deeper. We also may find circumstances in our life that make little sense. Like the pacifist working for the police or an attraction to obviously undesirable mates.
To solve those oddities, we have to look to the deep past. Older stories we’ve carried forward through many lifetimes. Fortunately, its not really necessary to dive into the old muck. Only to understand its there. No need to believe or anything. Just allow the possibility.
If we explore the deep past, we find themes running through them that appear repeatedly. Perhaps certain people, a common nickname (in several languages), or an orientation. But underlying it, many of us carry a kind of shadow theme.
To understand the shadow, we have to take a broader look at the nature of time. In the west, we tend to see time as linear and on an upward growth line. Humans are evolving up from more primitive forms. We are the pinnacle of civilization. In actual fact, time flows in more of a spiral, in cycles. More like our clocks and calendars. Cycles that reflect the growth and retraction of consciousness. Quite a long time ago, there was a downward shift in awareness that was fairly precipitous. It took place during a global conflict and one of the consequences was a kind of “capturing” of our individual emotional states at the time. We felt bad about events, then the consciousness dropped, saving the file as it where. With the new lower value of awareness, the opportunity to resolve the experience was lost and it was held. This mood cast a shadow over our lives since. Understanding that the mind likes to justify its experiences, we then can make the connection. It monitors for experiences that justify this shadow, latching onto circumstances to confirm its beliefs. For many people I know, there is usually some event that happens somewhere around ages 8 to 11 that the mind latches onto that way to justify this background sense. It may be self-blame, anger, guilt, or whatever. But it casts its shadow as usual.
What is happening today in our growing consciousness is the opportunity has returned to release not only some of our old baggage but the thread that binds us to our old drama. The opportunity to resolve that captured shadow. Its not necessary that you go back and relive anything. Simply to come at it from a higher awareness and understand what is is and to allow it, thus resolving it and letting it go.
We may discover that there are interconnecting threads running through our lives with nodes appearing periodically, manifesting the common experience again. A kind of mesh of interconnecting stories that support the personalities and bind us to our self-generated illusion. Each of those past lives turn out to be just another personality.
And we may find that all of those personalities collapse down into the present moment. That time as a linear process is an illusion and that all lives are lived in the current moment. The threads are not threads at all but simply nodes of connection between the personalities. Its rather like Norman McLarens’s film Pas de Deux, especially the second half. All of it is happening concurrently in the now.
We can release the nodes by resolving the old experience or releasing what we may experience as knots of stress letting go in the present. When a node dissolves, its support of the mesh is broken and that part of the illusion collapses. Each of its interconnections is affected. Interestingly, this actually changes events in the past, changes our history. The anger resolved, the lives that follow are no longer as violent. People who died don’t then, children are born that were not in the prior story and so forth.
But I don’t mean were changing causality. What we’re collapsing and changing is the illusion that floats over reality. That masks whats really at play. We’re changing the history of our stories but the causality flows beneath time and is unaffected by changes in the illusion. Loosing the stories allows us to settle back into the flow of true causality. And to step out of the noisy and pointless dramas that so often have engulfed our lives.
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