FACING YOURSELF
Trying to work with impossible people?
Things that you cannot face in yourself you will hate when you see them in someone else. To counteract this, your universal love, the platform for Self Realization, must be awakened into the emotions of the instinctive mind and filter out into the conscious mind. So, as you are meditating and the various aspects of your subconscious come up, face them positively, reprogram them beautifully, and they will settle back into simply a memory pattern, resolved and incapable of disturbing you again.§
If you see something in someone else you do not like and it is affecting you emotionally, sit down and face it within your own subconscious mind. The sore spot is located there. If you feel someone is doing something that you do not think he should be doing, and this really gets on your nerves, just know that under the right circumstances you may do the same thing, because the tendency to react to it is there in your subconscious. Get into yourself and reprogram that area of your subconscious with good, positive affirmations. Firm up your lifestyle, be more strict with yourself, use your willpower and think positively. Do not allow a weak link in a chain of habit patterns to bar your spiritual unfoldment even for a moment. Sometimes we detect the weak link in our own chain by looking into the lives of other people.§
If your parents are living the type of life that grates on your nerves, begin to realize now that perhaps when you become their age you may live a similar life. The grating effect that you feel indicates that the seeds of that kind of life are just coming up, and you are trying to suppress them by criticizing your parents; whereas what you should be doing is strengthening yourself through having compassion toward them.§
One of the biggest barriers on the spiritual path is to dislike our own subconscious as we become familiar with it. We must watch this pitfall very closely. The subconscious mind is not an enemy. It is just a well-used piece of equipment that we are renewing. If we make an enemy out of the subconscious mind and walk around hanging our head wondering why this happened and why that happened, and “If it were not for the subconscious I would be farther along the path,” we are simply programming the subconscious to become an even more formidable barrier. Instead, we have to bless the subconscious mind and look at it as a vital tool to help us in our spiritual evolution.§
Take a mountaintop attitude. If you are having a difficult day, tell yourself, “I’m working with my subconscious mind. Admittedly, things are not working out very well for me today, but I think I will have it all adjusted by evening.” Run to the store, buy a lot of paper, do a lot of writing and burning and clear up various subconscious areas and release awareness to soar within again. This is called the vasana daha tantra.§