This emotionally charged U.S. presidential election- when harnessed as a meditative self-inquiry practice- has the power to expose and release us from our go-to styles of aversion and reactivate the sublime, soul-seeing awareness that we truly are. Here’s the practice:
Step One: Exaggerate your disdain
As you watch, listen to or speak about the candidates, pause periodically to notice which of the first 4 types of aversion (listed below) you are indulging in. Then, just for a moment, exaggerate your disdain. Allow yourself to fully feel its predatory darkness. Hurt yourself just a little bit more with your hate. Why? Because, as Carl Jung said, “All neurosis is born from a failure to endure legitimate suffering.”
Step two: Hit Bottom
Now that you are more lucidly aversive and, perhaps, a bit humbled by your capacity for disdain, allow yourself to thoroughly give up hope in Hillary, Donald, politics, the planet, and the whole bloody journey of incarnation. All governments, doomed. All minds: mangled. All futures: flattened. Only one itsy-bitsy thing left to care about: how you inhabit your consciousness right now, in this tender, mystifying moment. Then, in this hushed, postmortem state, be honest: “Did I ever really know any more than this?”
Step three: Read “Aversion Transformed”
Next, take a moment to meditate on the short description of the fifth style of aversion, “Aversion Transformed” (see below). Then consider: “What if there is no Hilary, Donald or any other hard-edged ego? Just divinity, cloaked in automated synaptic activity– riddled with archetypal bias, socially-engineered opinion and the inevitable empathic failures that these produce.”
Step four: Welcome your new allies
Ask: “Could this opportunity for accelerated evolution from aversion to divine embrace be the reason I invited ‘The Hilary and Donald Show’ into my life? Could their greatest offense be that they are pushing me to give up on the ghetto of separate somebodys so I can see through the eyes of storyless presence, where there really isn’t that much difference between sophisticated and crude, polite and pissy?” Congratulations: you have just populated your world with two more allies in awakening.
Aversion Checklist
What’s your go-to style of aversion?
1) Dinosaur Aversion
Blurted or acted-out, in a spirit of war.
2) Mild-mannered Aversion
Emotionally glossed over and twisted into a classist, “we know better” nod or glance.
3) Exasperated Aversion
An exasperated look that says, “Join me in a moment of violent dumbfoundedness that such a creature prowls the planet.”
4) Spiritualized Aversion
A pity-tainted “compassion” that refuses to “own” how the judged qualities in another show up in oneself.
5) Aversion Transformed
A heartbroken, on-the-spot recognition that all automated, believed-in expressions of personality (aversive or admirable) are “continuity of government” protocols for a desperately dying mind.
Warning: In your attempt to transform the ego’s aversive reactivity please do not throw out the clarity of principled conviction!
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