Never Fear The Past
Generally, people start meditating and do fairly well in the beginning, for their great desire to unfold spiritually propels them within themselves. But when the subconscious mind begins to upheave its layers—as it naturally must for the unfoldment process to continue beyond an elementary stage—meditators become afraid to look at the subconscious patterns of their seemingly not-so-perfect past. To avoid facing themselves, they stop meditating, and the subconscious subsides. The once-meditating seeker returns more fully to the conscious mind and becomes distracted again in order to forget “all those terrible things.” At the time, the remembered past seemed to be terrible because the impressions were strong, magnified by sensitivities awakened through meditation.
For many years thereafter the one-time meditator can be heard to say, “I’d like to meditate, and I do sometimes, but I don’t have time, really, to meditate.” What he is actually saying is, “Most of my time is used up distracting myself so that I won’t have to meditate anymore and won’t have to face my bothersome subconscious.” On the path to enlightenment, you have to face everything that has gone into the subconscious, not only in this life, but what has been registered in past lives. Until you do, you will never attain Self Realization. Your final obstacle will be that last subconscious area that you were afraid to face, looming up before you in the form of worries, fears and repressions that you will wish to push away, hide from, so that neither you nor anyone else can see them.
To hear of the Self is a great blessing, indeed, but to desire to realize the Self means that in this and your past lives you have gone through all of the experiences that this Earth consciousness has to offer. You have died all of the deaths and had all of the emotional experiences. You have had the good of the world and the bad of the world, and the mixed good and bad of the world through all of your many lives before you come to the life where you say, “I want to realize the Self in this life.” Now you begin to tie up all the loose ends of past experiences that have not been fulfilled or resolved, because those loose ends are what bring you back to birth.