“Even though we carry these three heavy burdens, they are not an obstacle but a learning process that will lead us to transcendence.”From El refugio del corazón
I decided to build my own family on the foundations of love. My son would sometimes cry for no apparent reason, to the point of making everyone around him feel desperate. If you have children, you know exactly what I mean.
One day, I picked him up with gestures completely alien to me, as if they had been dormant until that moment in my body memory, and I felt the urge to yell at him to make him stop. I immediately understood what was happening. I did not want to cause him any pain. So I decided to cradle him close to the warmth of my chest. He cried for a bit longer, and then he was fast asleep.
That impulse had not come from me. It was stored in my body memory, waiting for a similar situation in order to repeat itself.
A simple equation
In one of my books I summed it up with an equation. Domestication, added to cellular memory and karma, results in what the person is or represents within a community and at a particular moment in history: what we call personality.
Put more simply, the person is the sum of what we learned, of what we inherited and of the residues of energy we leave behind with our actions. And this happens because consciousness identifies with the ego. So we end up living in the mechanics of the human condition: we react and repeat, almost without noticing.
What we learned
Much as a horse is domesticated, or an elephant so that it will carry people or cargo on its immense back, or a dog or a parrot so that they learn to follow certain rules and live with their owners, so it is with human beings. We are domesticated through religion, beliefs, culture and family, and to that add the school and social system. So we reach adulthood molded to the system of the collective consciousness, where we are also taught that if we do not fit in, there is something wrong with us. It is almost a castration of innocence. And that is how we disconnect from Divinity: through religious domestication, we were convinced that we are unworthy of it.
Not everything we learned is negative. There is a positive domestication, which is education, and a negative domestication, which is manipulation and the robotization of life. That is why domesticating and educating are opposites. Domesticating imposes a pattern of behavior that is mechanized survival. Educating opens us to the intoxicating experience of existing: authentic, real contact with our true reality and with life, as the living experience of Being.
What we inherited
Many of the aspects that define our psyche—our mentality, our tendencies, our ways of thinking and feeling—are driven by the inheritance from our ancestors. When the soul enters the body at birth, the memories are already waiting for us. That is what I call cellular memory.
Think of a swimming pool. When something stirs the bottom, the sediment rises and muddies the water. That is how those memories are activated: they cloud and distort perception, and lead us to react much as our ancestors would have reacted in a similar situation.
That sediment is made of the actions they did not finish and of the experiences that found no resolution in their generation. The seeds of karma are stored there too: those residues of energy that are created every time we act without recognizing Divinity in every form of life.
All of this shapes the personality you grow up with; you can see it in small children, in their gestures, their ways and their manners. There are tendencies that move within the family consciousness, such as the tendency to be hot-tempered, which may not be latent in your whole lineage or in your siblings, yet may be latent in you. And the same happens with virtues.
The collective consciousness has a way of thinking that comes to us from all our ancestors, in addition to the domestication we receive at school and in the patterns of our upbringing. All of this leads us to reinforce the same forms of thought over and over again.
What was never domesticated
But there is something I want you to know. That conditioning falls on the character, and it is carried out by means of the mind, which is simply an instrument and, moreover, lacks essence. Domestication does not reach the soul, nor the Being, much less consciousness. On the contrary: consciousness becomes the bulwark and the protection of the soul, so that, even though it belongs to an era and a culture, it keeps the memory of its immortal nature.
Can the soul rebel against domestication? Of course it can. The soul's rebellion is the manifestation of consciousness questioning its surroundings.
All those ideas we learned and inherited are illusory, just as much as the personality that believes them; but both are arising within your own consciousness, and none of them defines you. Once you manage to transcend them, you will realize that those ideas keep flowing, but they no longer have any validity, because there is no God separate from you.
What you heal in yourself
If you lived in a home where there was violence, that does not mean it is your parents' fault. They too must have grown up just like you, learning that love is expressed through pain. That chain is precisely what we need to break in ourselves.
When we hurt our children, we are teaching them that love is connected to pain and suffering. Everything we teach them, everything we pass on to them, will define what they become in the future. That is why, if an imprint of pain was left in you during your upbringing, the time has come to accept it and transform it. And not only for the sake of your children: that same trait can manifest itself toward your partner, your peers and the other people in your life.
You do not need to connect with the memories of all your ancestors in order to heal. What matters is to heal in yourself what is in the present; that way you will be reprogramming your entire cellular memory. Through meditation, you gradually release those patterns. And there is something beautiful in all of this: whatever you heal in yourself, your descendants will be free of it.
That day, with my son crying in my arms, a gesture that was not mine wanted to repeat itself through me, and I chose the warmth of my chest. It was only an act of mindfulness, but in it I understood that love is stronger than pain, and that a new way of life can be created on the foundations of love.
That same possibility is available to you. What you learned and what you inherited is not what you are. You are the consciousness that can become aware, stop and choose love.
From Dr. Zuluan Orion's books: El refugio del corazón · Deshojando el Corazón de la Eternidad · Devoción · Illumination