By rejecting what is so for us in the present moment, we are rejecting ourselves. We are out of touch with our Being. Aiming toward the future, we sacrifice the present. By looking outside ourselves for what is missing, we subject ourselves, our souls, to the pain of abandonment. – Spacecruiser Inquiry, ch. 1
Almost everyone is continually dealing with rejection in some form. Most people constantly reject their emotions: “I’m feeling anger now . . . I shouldn’t feel anger. I’m feeling weak . . . oh, that’s terrible. I’m feeling love . . . I definitely can’t feel that; that person’s married!” Whatever’s arising that we think we don’t want, we reject it—we don’t want to experience it. And we want to be casual about it, too; we’d like to deal with those feelings as though we were sweeping dirt off a floor. But what we think of as the dirt is us. That’s because nothing exists outside of our experience, our own consciousness. Your experience is not like the contents of a purse that you can throw away. Experience is the actual fabric of the purse—so if you try to throw part of your experience away, you are tearing yourself apart.
The more you reject something in yourself, the more you tear yourself apart—because that something is you. It doesn’t matter what it is—hatred, or frustration, or love, or grandiosity, or anything else; if you’re trying to push it away, sweep it away, get rid of it, what results is a tremendous tearing apart of the soul. It affects you that way even though you don’t know it. – The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence, Ch. 8
There were times when we felt rejected as little kids, or not loved, or punished, or abused. That was part of the truth of the situation. At those times, it was too much for the young soul to take, so the heart closed down in order not to feel the pain, the hurt, and the fear. This will manifest at some point as a limitation in our love for the truth. So we don’t want our love for the truth to open fully because it will reveal the particular truth that we know unconsciously we’re unprepared for or are afraid of experiencing. That’s why the process of opening to truth is challenging—because it requires us to feel our various resistances. – Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey, Ch. 9
Because you believe there is some truth in a judgment, it generates self-rejection rather than self-defense. The judgment rejects you, but you can’t stop it because, on some level, you believe what it is saying. Then you are not only attacked by the statement itself but further betrayed as the judgment turns you against yourself. Unconsciously, you begin to feel more threatened by the deficient feelings and beliefs waiting to arise in you than by the attacker and thus cannot defend yourself against the actual attack. – Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within, Ch. 4
We dull our awareness and thicken it in a manner that opposes and pushes away whatever element is arising in our experience that we prefer not to have. And when we do that, it becomes very difficult just to be present. How are we going to be there, how are we going to be ourselves, if we are fighting something in our experience? We are trying to divide ourselves; yet, as we have seen, we are indivisible. We are trying to partition ourselves, but our consciousness doesn’t have parts. So, all that happens is that we get thick and dull, and our awareness loses its lightness and lucidity and clarity. In fact, our normal awareness has already lost its clarity and lucidity because we are dividing ourselves in so many ways automatically, consciously or unconsciously. – A. H. Almaas, The Unfolding Now: Realizing Your True Nature through the Practice of Presence