Releasing The Past
The older we get, the more memories we have, and those memories contain emotion—both positive emotion and negative emotion. Emotion takes many forms. We can have happy emotions, we can have sad emotions, we can have emotions of depression, we can have emotions of elation, we can have emotions of discouragement, we can have emotions of encouragement. As you go over your life, reliving it year by year, writing it all down from year one to the present, ten pages per year, you are the author of your own script. You are the star upon the stage of your own life. You may run into happy emotion, discouraging emotion, encouraging emotion. It’s good to get rid of it all. If you uncover a period of your life that makes you depressed, then you have been carrying that depression around with you for many, many years. Reliving the depression and the unhappy feelings as you write about the experiences in detail and burn the paper unwinds and releases the prāṇic emotional energy from each memory. You especially want to deal with the traumatic areas of the inner mind and release the discouragement, the regret, the depression, the loss of faith in humanity, the loss of faith in yourself and all those negative emotions that you’ve been carrying for so many years. They will go away like paper dragons. They will disappear.
You have three kinds of prāṇa inside of you: spiritual, intellectual and instinctive. When you think, you make or cause a motion in that prāṇa and create a form of prāṇa. You speak, laugh, cry, think and interact with others; all this is the use and movement of one kind of prāṇa or another, or a mixture of the three. In the inner mind, the subconscious prāṇic forms have a color and a corresponding sound when they vibrate with emotion, not unlike a Technicolor production. The purpose of this ancient tantra is to remove the color/sound from the memory pattern so that the memory would appear as a black-and-white silent movie when revisited, without the vivid, vibrating emotion. Your life, in moving and creating with the prāṇa inside of you, can be like writing on water. An experience happens and it just goes away, without residue, without attachment, without lingering emotion. Or your life can be like carving in stone; each experience remains with you, embedded in memory by the impact of emotion. As you look back through the pages of your life, you want to melt the stone, break it up and make it go away. That’s the whole idea, regardless of what the motion is of the mind. The stones in your past are generally the surprise things that come along in life. Living a routine life—you go to work and you come home, and one day is pretty much the same as another—does not produce memories with emotions so much. But then you come to a major change, such as moving to a new home, or some new person coming into your life. That makes a big impact, and you have to deal with it. Like many people, you may deal with these things by packing them away: “I don’t want to think about that anymore.” “I don’t like that person” or, “I like that person,” but you are married so you can’t like him or her too much; so you just pack it away and try not to think about it anymore. Those are some of the things you want to dig up and discharge, to break up the patterns.
Each of us has a story. You are the major actor on the stage of your life, playing the script that you wrote. You are the director and you are the lighting engineer, the stage manager, costume designer and make-up artist. When a particular experience or pattern of experience is repeated over a long period, it creates in the sub of the subconscious mind a latent tendency or propensity in that same direction. This is a vāsanā, which may be positive, śubha, or negative, aśubha. A negative vāsanā is like a subconscious motor that makes you do things you later wish you had not done. A positive vāsanā brings success and good fortune. Through the vāsanā daha tantra, we withdraw the energy from the memories, and in so doing weaken, even destroy, the pathways or vāsanās that led us to the experiences that created the negative memories and leave in place the pure, positive vāsanās that will continue to create a positive future.
NANDINATHA SŪTRA 124: NOT ATTENDING RITES OF PASSAGE
Śiva’s traditional priests require that divorced and widowed followers protect auspiciousness by not attending rites of passage, except funerals. However, they may help with preparations and participate in receptions. Aum