Any given incarnation can run the gamut of just dealing with pre-programmed catalyst and unconsciously repeating the same painful patterns, tо dealing with it effectively and even going above and beyond by absorbing more lessons than were intended, to consciously recognizing why you’re here and resolving to not just tag along your catalyst, but to balance it quickly and then to take upon oneself the mantle of commitment to live your highest possible purpose — or even mission. Every incarnation has this last possibility available, however slim the chances might be that the person in incarnation will decide to overcome the strongest force in the universe — inertia — and claim the highest path as his true and only path.
Now, hypothetically, one of course does not have to experience catalyst to grow. Catalyst creates conditions that allow us to choose our responses and to hopefully grow in spirit, mind, and body as a result. However, it is usually only at the latter stages of one’s evolution that a person is so aware and his experience is so transparent that he starts creating his own conditions for his growth (in archetypal terms, when one is mature enough as a seeker to work more and more with the Transformation archetypes). Until then, however, catalyst is virtually unavoidable.
And some catalyst can be extremely difficult to work through. A violent, untimely, and unjust death, being forced to leave behind loved ones who depend on you in so many ways, can engender a powerful spirit of animosity towards the killer that in a future life will appear irrational and unexplainable — and yet cannot be brushed aside by any means. Given the rather troubled history of human civilization on this planet, virtually every person currently alive will have pretty significant baggage that must be dealt with.
And this is where things turn troublesome. How do you deal with something that pisses you off, possibly daily, and just won’t go away, no matter what you do?
Fortunately, there are, in fact, a few ways.
First of all, for the unaware muggle barely making psychological ends meet, with no conception of spiritual growth, the situation will seem to be utterly beyond his control — which, for the unaware, it is. He will repeat the same patterns over and over and over again, until he either tires of the struggling and accepts both his anger (envy, fear, unhealthy attachment, etc. etc.) and its object, or dies without having resolved it, basically setting himself up for another lifetime of more of the same. Hardly the most efficient approach.
The second way involves balancing the stuck emotion, either according to Ra’s instructions or in some other similar way, by amplifying the emotion until it overwhelms the senses and then allowing its opposite to come in instead. A strong past-life trigger may require multiple excursions into balancing until it subsides enough to finally be able to accept the situation, the offender, and oneself. I personally could never get this method to work satisfactorily, perhaps because of impatience — or, possibly, because of understanding that there are more efficient ways to do this.
Another approach is to use dreams to get to the hidden root of the problem. I never tried it myself, but cannot think of a reason why a determined, firm, and consistent request to one’s subconsciousness just before going to bed would not, sooner or later, yield the much needed help or information.
The fourth — and even more efficient, at least to me — approach involves a past-life regression to get to the root cause of the issue. There may be multiple triggers of the same type across multiple incarnations, and you need to get to the very first instance, but if you do (and you are guided by a skilled hypnotherapist), the catharsis is immediate and permanent. A variation on this is a psychic reading from someone who truly possesses the gift and truly wishes to serve: their words will ring viscerally true and will have the same cathartic effect as a regression would.
And the final approach to dealing with difficult catalyst is described in the characteristically compact Ra manner in Ra Contact 41.22:
[…] The self, if conscious to a great enough extent of the workings of this catalyst and the techniques of programming, may, through concentration of the will and the faculty of faith alone, cause reprogramming without the analogy of the fasting, the diet, or other analogous body complex disciplines.
The meaning of this is precisely as stated. If you are aware of a particular catalytic situation and understand what it’s meant to accomplish, you can, in fact, express a determined intention to yourself to rid yourself of this catalyst and to balance it — and if you have the faith and strength of will, it can happen immediately. There is a caveat to this method — besides the obligatory need to understand the purpose of the catalyst and to possess sufficient willpower and faith to make it happen — and it has to do with the fact that our repeated behaviors and thinking patterns form a certain mental groove, along which our thoughts and actions move naturally easier through force of habit. Once the catalyst is stopped, it’s very important to pay careful attention to our thoughts and actions, to ensure that they don’t fall back into the previous patterns and gradually suck us back into the original negative mental/emotional reactions. With this in mind, however, this is a very doable method and one that works.
There’s probably as many approaches to dealing with catalyst as people can imagine, however, these five (four, rather) are worth some contemplation. Why suffer through a catalyst when you can enjoy every minute of it?