Faint At Heart

This all sounds very much like Carlos Castaneda’s discussion of death, where Don Juan says death comes and smashes you again and again into a fog of crystals. The after-death Bardo scenario is going to take the form that’s going to best manifest the feelings that you had as the thirty-year-old that you don’t want to face. You’re dead now, and the sense of you at thirty who felt bound by circumstance and had no optionsthe sense of you who was pulled in a whole bunch of difference directions, and the sense of you that you never facedappears as a Wrathful Deity in the after-death state, who ties six horses to you to pull you apart. And that’s what you were experiencing when you were thirty years old: being pulled apart by your attachment to circumstances.

With the tools of your Deity Yoga Practice and your connection with Divine Radiance, you have ways to help this guy. Part of the reason that we don’t want to face these aspects of ourselves, is that we don’t know what to do with them. We’re overwhelmed by those aspects, so we run away from them. I’m trying to say that you can’t run away from your past. If you try, it’s going to come and bite you in the ass. And it’s either going to do it in this life, or in the after-life.
You can run, but eventually whatever you’re running and hiding from is going to raise its head right in your face.

We hear all of these stories about people confronting something they’ve run away from in some crisisfor example, 9/11, or a deadly cancer that nearly kills someone, or a terrible, near fatal traffic accident. I often read and hear stories of folks finally facing something they’ve been running away from their whole life. And this is exactly what we’re talking about. We’re actually talking about being proactive and going in there with the Deity helping you. It’s not even that hard.

In fact you can use all kinds of practices to connect with these aspects of yourself. There’s a kind of therapythough its practitioners say, “Don’t call it a therapy”called Voice Dialogue. Voice Dialogue was actually developed by a Vedic practitioner. Basically, that practice sees the various selves in the psyche of the person, and finds ways to allow them to come forth. The therapist acts as a facilitator to help the adult sitting in front of him to begin to connect with these varying aspects of self, within the psyche of the adult.

Yogi Sean is the student of Swami Ramananda and the author of Dancing in the Fire of Transformation and The Everyday Sanyasin.