Maybe you can't have all of the items with which you pay in advance all at once. Maybe you can give up the entire false personality all at once. Maybe you just have to focus continually on opening yourself to being willing to pay. I think that the first step towards healing ourselves and paying in this way is to really focus on self-observation. We have to make it our single goal, and realise that there is no other goal more important. It has to be the first thing you remind yourself of when you wake up in the morning and the last thing you think about before sleep. And of course, all through the day too.
By self-observing, that is, bringing our attention back to the present moment and what's going on inside us at every opportunity, we have a much better chance of catching ourselves before an emotional reaction can overwhelm us and before the energy can be stolen by the intellect and turned into theory-making and projection and blaming everything outside of ourselves. Cursing another person or the universe or life or whatever. Self-observation can in this way help to recognise emotions before they get repressed or intellectualised.
Self-observing focuses the attention on us, on the little details of what is going through our minds at any point during the day. For sure, when we experience an emotional reaction to something, it is HARD to deal with it, and maybe even harder to express precisely how we feel. Here's the problem. If you are in the long term habit of denying your emotions, you have a problem.
That emotional energy HAS to go somewhere. If you don't use it in expressing the emotion as it is, then most often the energy gets used up by the intellect, which goes into overdrive to explain what you are feeling and what to do about it. Now remember, you deny emotions, have done so for a long time. You deny your childish feelings and what they tell you. Like, "I am scared", "I am vulnerable", "I feel like you don't love me". "I WANT MY MOMMY!" Smiley
So when the intellect uses this emotional energy to tell you what is going on, it is NOT going to tell you what you are really feeling, first because its job is to "protect" you from hurt and pain (which it has decided from past experience is what happens when you show your emotions), second, because it is not going to admit anything about you that conflicts with the 'perfect' image you have of yourself. And third because it can't really access your emotions because that is not its job.
So what happens? Your intellect uses this emotional energy, that it has effectively stolen, and it makes theories about the emotional shock you have just experienced, but remember, it cannot blame you or show you up as having any "childish" feelings etc (because it has learned that is bad!) so it projects outwards. This person is bad, that person is bad, this situation is bad, life is bad, Oh! if only....blah blah blah. Meanwhile, all that needed to happen was for the original feeling that was provoked in you to be expressed as you felt it. These feelings are buried deep. So we have to find a way to access them.
It's like having a bunch of symbols in your belly that represent the various different feelings you experienced as a child, usually as a result of trauma, and for one reason or another, you learned that they were bad and should be hidden away. So there they sit. Every now and then, someone says or does something, or something happens that creates in you a distinct echo of that original trauma-based emotion, and it lights up like a bulb and starts hopping up and down inside you.
So what should happen on such an occasion? Obviously we should re-experience the emotion and trauma, let it out and let it go. One down, a bunch to go. But what usually happens is that we cannot bear to re-experience these old feelings of hurt, so, like I said above, we have a well-built mechanism to deal with them and it basically works by projecting the feelings outside of ourselves onto people or things.
Obviously though, there are real consequences from this.
First, we spend our lives with these old feelings sitting inside of us. We don't release them, but they certainly colour our thinking and view of life because they are very much a part of us. They often remind us to be distrustful of life and people in it. That people hurt us and are generally not to be trusted with anything that could threaten our hurt inner selves and our fragile and unrealistic image of ourselves that we project outwards.
Second, every time these old feelings "light up" in response to a perceived similar dynamic as the original, we blame someone else for (deliberately, or so we believe) "making us feel that way". Imagine we had an old war wound that was painful to touch but not visible. We meet someone and they accidentally touch the wound with knowing anything about it. Then imagine that we get really angry, shout at the person or just walk off in a huff and continue to hold a grudge against them for ages and convince ourselves that they really did that on purpose.
In short, we blame other people for something that has nothing to do with them and everything to do with us. This is easy to do because that belief in the inherent untrustworthiness of life and people in it that is generated by these old emotions (or wounds) is always there. Basically, these old wounds and emotions effectively create the situation where we get apparent "evidence" that what the old wounds are telling us is in fact true! It's a circular argument to beat them all because it can govern our entire lives! The reality that we created the entire dynamic and perpetuate it ourselves is what we have to understand.
Needless to say, all of this will likely have a very bad effect on our hopes for fulfilling and loving relationships with others.
Third, we remain with a non-functioning emotional center, since it is clogged up with 'stuck' old trauma. This lack of a properly working feeling center has serious consequences not only for really connecting with other people and giving and receiving true love, but also for our ability to connect to the deeper reality we live in.
Fourth, according to Mouravieff, without three properly functioning lower centers, we cannot expect the formation of a "magnetic center" and the access to higher centers.
But we've got plenty to work on before thinking about higher centers. We can all decide today to make it our singular goal - to observe ourselves in every moment with the aim of making conscious awareness a permanent aspect of our beings. By doing this, we progressively gain control over our thinking and turn the attention inwards to rediscover our lost emotions and the broader lost world of pure emotions.
