The Path of Self-Awareness

The Path of Self-Awareness

By Steve Beckow

Posted on August 11, 2024

 

There’s so much we … OK, OK, I … don’t understand.

For instance, take awareness. Awareness transforms. It does so, first of all, in ways I don’t understand or even suspect. Put those aside for the moment with a simple acknowledgment.

Second of all, it transforms by allowing the unpleasant sensation or emotion to play out, unmolested, after which, it, having no independent energy source, disappears.

We look at that and call it “transformation.” It is in when one is distinguishing between “change” and “transformation.”

“Change” just moves the pieces around the board. It takes place at a superficial level of consciousness – unconscious awareness. Nothing in the end may really change. It just gets postponed.

“Transformation” sees the condition disappear – either at once as when the truth sets us free or over time. Anger, fear, jealousy – experience it through to completion and we’ve lessened its chances of reappearing.

We’re definitely now on the road to upset disappearance rather than upset creation. If we’re into loving kindness instead of orneriness, this is a basic and welcome shift.

And awareness of what? Of the only thing in creation we are responsible for and the very thing we’re charged with knowing: Our self, in its many guises and at whatever level it appears.

I so like what Jesus said about us and wanting others to change. It’s material to what we’re charged with being aware of:

“It is characteristic of lightworkers that they let themselves be carried away by this [spiritual] anger and that they go beyond their limits in this regard. They lose themselves in their desire to change and improve the world. This can be a passion to change things on the political or social level or it may emerge as a desire to help people on a personal level, as a profession or in your private life.

“The desire to help and change things often contains a form of spiritual anger although this may not be noticeable. After all you seem to simply ‘want the best’ for someone else or for society. But surely there is anger inside you when you feel inclined to force somebody – no matter how subtly – to change their behavior or their emotions. Often you do not notice that the time is not yet ripe for it.

“Each time when you feel an intense indignation or an enormous passion to change things or when you have feelings of powerlessness and anger towards things as they are, you are in the pitfall of spiritual anger. You want too much at once. You are heedless of reality as it is for you and are seized by an emotion, the emotion of anger. I ask you to be aware of this and to let it go, for this kind of inspiration that is charged with anger takes you away from your center. It will not offer you the true inspiration, the peace and quiet in your emotional body that help you embody your light on Earth.

“You achieve the state of truly embodying your light on Earth by being entirely centered in your own being, in a pure and calm state of mind. In this state you can feel that you are in the world but not of it. Being of the world means that you attach value to everything you observe with your senses: violence, war, illness, destruction. If you regard these with your physical senses only you can easily get angry. Therefore we ask you to take a step backwards and to feel inwardly what spiritual dynamics are taking place in the things that upset you.” (1)

Darnation! I wish I’d written that.

Beautifully and completely put. How clearly he sees the human condition.

As for the awareness path itself, which I’ve looked at elsewhere, (2) I’d say that self-awareness is the alternative to “changing” people.

Its only requirement is to remain aware of oneself. In my view, its principles are to love, which draws us towards God; to use our awareness of the self, in any guise and on any level, as our vehicle; and to look to the truth to progressively reveal our Destination to us and set us free.

Easy? Not necessarily, in a world of distractions. Absorbing and beneficial? Truly.

Footnotes

(1) Pamela Kribbe, “Jeshua: The Gatekeepers,” Aug. 9, 2024, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2024/08/09/jeshua-the-gatekeepers/.

(2) See:

• Let’s Go! Let’s Grow! Vol. 1 Awareness at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Lets-Go-Lets-Grow-V1-Awareness-R13.pdf
• On Transformative Awareness at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Transformative-Awareness-R11.pdf

Steve Beckow

• goldenageofgaia.com/

Happiness is a Choice

Happiness is a Choice

by Steve Beckow

Posted on January 18, 2024

I came across this column on my daily read. I totally agree with what she says, though I’m just a newbie in the area Sarah points to.

Happiness is a Choice

Sarah Perron, Frontline News, Dec. 5, 2023

https://frontline.news/post/back-to-center-how-can-anyone-possibly-be-happy

Your level of happiness is 100% up to you. It does not have to depend on anything external — not the state of the world, not your spouse, not your children, not your job. True happiness can’t be about what’s going on outside of you. If that’s how you look at it, you will constantly be running around, desperately reaching out for something to be that thing that makes you feel okay. And that “something” will always ultimately disappoint.

You’re right — this world is a hard place to live a lot of the time…terror and tragedy abound these days…spouses forget that important thing you asked them to do…children misbehave…your boss doesn’t acknowledge all the hard work you’re doing. If we make these people and circumstances responsible for making us happy, we will be waiting a long time. This doesn’t work.

True happiness is something you create within yourself. How? I can’t answer that for you, but I can tell you some of the things that work for me:

• Connecting with something higher — Deepening my relationship with God and belief that things happen for a reason as part of a higher plan for the world.
• Practicing self care — Making a conscious choice to allocate time in my day to things I enjoy that make me feel nourished.
• Choosing my thoughts — Making healthy decisions about how I want to think about myself, others, and situations in life. Focusing on empowering ideas.
• Getting into action — Choosing to focus on ways I can do something positive and helpful to others, especially when I feel unhappiness or despair creeping in. This also helps me feel good about myself.

What could this look like for you? How could you shift away from the feeling that the circumstances you see in the world are preventing you from being happy, and find a way to own the process of creating some happiness for yourself?

Yes, extremely difficult things may happen in life, but it’s amazing when we can realize how much of our experience of those hard things — and of life in general — is actually up to us. We don’t always have control over what happens to us, but we can always control how we choose to view it, and harnessing that power can change everything for us.

The more happiness you choose to create, the more it keeps growing. I truly hope you can allow yourself to go on a journey of discovering what brings you true happiness that stands the test of challenging times!

Steve Beckow 

• goldenageofgaia.com/

 

Love and Awareness as a Path Home

Love and Awareness as a Path Home

by Steve Beckow

Posted on January 10, 2024

 

An awareness writer writes about what’s right here, right now. One who is not an awareness writer might gloss over it, censor themselves, and so on.

In many occupations – such as the military, surgical, aeronautical – it won’t be appropriate to be dwelling on how we feel about something, what we notice about our behavior, etc.  We need to have our attention on the external world.

But the awareness writer has freed themself, it’s hoped, from working-world obligations and dedicated their life to unfolding publicly, as their contribution to building Nova Earth.

***

To what end do we focus on and employ awareness?

God is awareness, just as God is also existence and love (Sat-Chit-Ananda). I am Steve. I’m also human and male.

Since God is everything, there’s nothing that God or love is not.

Like scissors and paper, love and awareness triumph over (dispel) hate and ignorance.

My love and awareness is in fact my sadhana or spiritual practice. It involves correspondingly expanding what I’m prepared to be responsible for.

And it brings me closer and closer to the middle, the center, the balance point. (Which is itself a portal to the higher dimensions.)

***

In practicing self-awareness, I seem to always come back to the purpose of life. It has always been my starting point since 1987. (1)

The purpose of life is know ourselves as we truly are. And who we truly are is God.

Why that purpose? I’ve said it many times and never tire of saying it again: When one of us realizes who we are, God meets God. For that meeting was all of this created.

(You may write that on my tombstone. Oh, no tombstone this lifetime? Ooooooooh-Kay!)

Love and awareness are the tools of this sadhana.

Love draws us inexorably to our destination.  And, apparently, love coming up from our hearts draws the divine to us as well  Psalm 91:14:

“Because he hath set his love upon me, I will set him on high, because he hath known my name. He shall call upon me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him.”

Sri Ramakrishna agrees:

“The means of realizing God are ecstasy of love and devotion — that is, one must love God. … One realizes God easily through devotion.” (2)

One can feel the truth of this statement. When I draw love up from my heart and send it to the Mother, I feel a blissful response that uplifts me. Nothing I do gets a more immediate response than sending love to God. (3)

And I end up feeling closer to Mother/Father One in the process. I can see a person losing themselves in ecstatic love for God. (4) And I can see them being drawn to the Divine as if by a magnet, a magnet of love.

The purpose of life is in the end an act of recognition, of knowing, “I am God.” (5) The final act is one in the domain of knowledge … and “unknowing.” Awareness has us develop the discrimination needed to distinguish the Real from the unreal.

Love and awareness are both vital tools on the path and the journey back Home.

---

Download Transformative Awareness here:  https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Transformative-Awareness-R11.pdf

Footnotes

(1) On March 13, 1987, I experienced a vision of the purpose of life. See The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Purpose-of-Life-is-Enlightenment-3.pdf, especially “Ch. 13. Epilogue.”

(2) Paramahansa Ramakrishna in GSR, 107.

(3) With one exception: When the Mother or Michael gives me a direct signal (previously agreed upon).

(4) Not in the cards for me, who needs to stay present to what’s happening.

(5) “I am God” is Brahmajnana and still within the 3rd/4th Dimension. Ascension for me, is further on, and here I may differ from Matthew. For me, Ascension as an event, at the culmination of Ascension as a process, is marked by the onset of Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi, a full and permanent heart opening. It may be gentle or it may happen as a snap or ignition, according to the sources I follow.

The Divine Mother expresses her agreement here on one point:

Steve Beckow: I’m trying to understand what level of enlightenment Ascension corresponds to. And I think it’s beyond the normal seventh-chakra enlightenment. I think it is what is called — and I’ll make this clear to readers — sahaja samadhi. Am I correct?

Divine Mother: Yes, it is beyond what you think of with your seven chakras. … We have emerged from the Third-Dimensional realm, which is that reference point for the chakra system, into the new. So yes, you are correct, in this question and in this statement. (“The Divine Mother: Come to Me as I Come to You – Part 1/2,” Oct. 17, 2012, at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2012/10/17/the-divine-mother-come-to-me-as-i-come-to-you-part-12/.)

Steve Beckow 

• goldenageofgaia.com/

 

Even a Bad Day can be Rich in Understandings

Even a Bad Day can be Rich in Understandings

By Steve Beckow

Posted on December 20, 2023

Punch comes in. Credit: sandovalkarate.net

I’m not sure I can say “all martial arts exercises,” but I can say “all karate exercises” begin with a defensive move, never an offensive move. Always with a block, never with a kick or punch.

A karate student is taught only to use the minimum force needed to subdue the opponent. And never to become emotionally entangled with or triggered by the attacker.

It was always designed to protect the unarmed and defenseless against tyranny, but never to tyrannize.

Come to think of it, in all the fights I was in, I never punched or kicked a single person. I always stopped my punches or kicks an inch in front of their faces and whipped it back. (That was my training.)  And I always found that enough to decide the issue.

I wrote about this earlier under the topic, the absence of evil intention.  (1)

I’m especially speaking to men, but I wish I were speaking to more and more women because of the security and confidence that knowing how to defend ourselves brings.

***

Interestingly I was just looking at this yesterday, noticing as I shopped that I was still a seething mass of likes and dislikes. Leave me alone. Get out of my way. Etc.

In no way do I demonstrate an absence of evil intention.  I’m only up to being honest about not demonstrating it!!!!

Someone else would say, “I’m having a bad day.”  But I see it as much more than that.

I have a residual troll in me – I wouldn’t even glorify it by calling it a “bad boy.” I don’t even get up to “bad boy.” Just a grumpy old f@rt.

This being Christmastime, you could call it a domesticated grinch.

And when he comes out from under the bridge, life is one big grumble. Grumble this, grumble that. Gaaawwwddd….. Give me a break.

I watched myself the other day, having a chat with a friend. I was framing one ego-based, self-serving comment after another or else I was grumbling about something. It was one or the other. That’s all that was on the menu.

Oh, and listening. I did a lot more listening, which is more satisfying anyways.

Both kinds of comments were ego-based, survival-oriented. I just didn’t say them. But it took work and commitment to walk by the opportunity to trot out my best lines. Seventy-seven years of saying these meaningless, self-serving comments is hard to break.

Maintaining one’s everyday self – whatever you want to call it – in the positive, non-victimized, creative space takes work. Being a troll, as I’m seeing in my everyday interactions, takes no work. Just let it fly.

I see the troll as a puppet of the ego, one of the many roles or faces the ego may assume in everyday interaction.

***

So, yes, I’ve moved my house from negative territory to positive, but the furniture is still the same.

And there’s nothing to do. No reason to panic. Awareness does it all.

Just keep raising it to awareness and let awareness dissolve it. Or let it go on its own pace and time, without prolonging its stay by wrestling with it.

Note to self: Even a bad day can be rich in understandings.

Footnotes

(1) “The Absence of Evil Intention, the Fullness of Empty Mind,” November 26, 2023, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2023/11/26/the-absence-of-evil-intention-the-fullness-of-empty-mind/

Steve Beckow 

• goldenageofgaia.com/

 

Using Awareness to Experience Self-Worth

Using Awareness to Experience Self-Worth

By Steve Beckow

Posted on November 11, 2023

Part 1

 

Divine Mother, may we find blessed relief this 11/11 from the oppressive conditions that beset our world.

I think courting a breakthrough in self-worth is a fitting subject for 11/11. I hope you agree.

I’m not a spiritual teacher nor do I have ambitions to be anything but a writer. But I also would like to see a re-awakening of the growth movement. And I’m tired of waiting for someone else to do it. If not me, who?

Cast the Question

I think spiritual and growth commentators might agree with me that our primary affliction as a world is a lack of self-worth.

In my opinion, it isn’t a lack of strength, imagination, resources, or any of the skills and faculties that can be “cultivated.” It’s a failure to appreciate ourselves, who we are, and what we might be capable of if we recognized and empowered our self.

Without that, our sense of self-worth lies neglected and hidden. Behind a locked door, so to speak. I’d like to talk about how to use our self-awareness to unlock that door.

A lot of the growth movement has to do with increasing and using our self-awareness. How many sages say we can’t know the Self until we know the self? My own me is God and I recognize no other God than me. (A conundrum.)  Seek the Self inwards. Etc. (1)

Why are we seeking Self-Realization if not through self-awareness?  What other awareness would lead to realization of the Self?

Being aware of others is not what it’s about, although that may happen incidentally.

If you want to take a step on the path of awareness towards a fuller appreciation of self -worth with me, then I recommend a simple but powerful exercise adapted from Enlightenment Intensives and widely used in workshops.

I believe they in turn adapted it from Ramana Maharshi, whose original question was “Who am I?” (2)

I’d like to adapt that and make the question: “What is my self-worth?” The exercise is to ask the question repeatedly and take the first answer you get.

Just “cast” the question as you would a fishing line and await an answer. And cast it again, and again, with intervals, intending that you as your Higher Self, or your archangel, or the Mother answer.

You may want to invoke the Mother and the universal laws of as above so below, change, and sacred purpose to give you an experience of your self-worth.

We are God.  This is strictly a family matter

We’re freeing up our sense of self-worth from the hammerlock that all our core issues and upsets, resentments and rules have on it. And from our ignorance that all of us are God.

I, the Self, have been underneath all the overburden.  My experience of the purity and innocence of the Self at Xenia Retreat Center let yet another cat out of the bag.  (3)

It happened on Sept. 18, 2018. I saw the Self and felt my own native, natural purity and innocence, an experience that I’ll never forget and that no one can take from me.

What I saw and felt was deeply personal. Let’s put that deeply-personal affirmation of self-worth at one end of the spectrum. At the extreme other end is the fact that each of us is God.

How can that be, you ask?  How can it not be?

Could there be God, who is everything, and Steve Beckow, who is… uhhh…. No, God is everything including you and me. (4)

Therefore, ultimately, our self-worth is beyond estimation. On one level, the questioning very quickly reaches a point of ridiculousness. How do we measure God’s worth? In dollars? You see what I mean?

So we’re now both clearing away the obstructions to an experience of self worth by casting the question but we’re also clearing up our misunderstanding. We are God.  This is strictly a family matter.

But notice that in getting there, we had fun casting the question and seeing what the response was.  And we cleared away numerous obstacles to feeling our self-worth. We’ve sharpened our awareness, probably gotten rid of a lot of lethargy. (5) This is better than push-ups.

Burrow down through the barriers

So we’re casting the question and we got a barrier? We burst into tears.

Great. Observe it, get its message – really get it – and bless it. Then let it depart on its own time and at its own speed.

Ask the question again. Another barrier? Great. And on we go.

The awareness path is portable. You can do it while cooking, on the bus, at the supermarket. And doing it sharpens your awareness rather than dulling it with outside attractions.

Burrow down through the barriers. What is my self-worth?   Take the first answer you get.

Observing, understanding, blessing, and letting go of any barrier that arises. Not this, not this, not this. (6)

You got an experience? Great. Be with it. Allow it to expand.

And keep going regardless. You’ll know when to stop. I guarantee: You won’t have to ask anybody.

A voyage of self-discovery

When I discovered that I was, underneath all my issues and upsets, pure and innocent. I was so relieved!!! I was not born in sin. I was born in innocence. That issue was now decided.

A restoration of that purity and innocence is where we’re headed.

In part 2, I’d like to quote Plotinus’ description of an alternate awareness process to the same destination, which will demonstrate, I hope, that we terrestrials have been walking the awareness path to Self-Realization for millennia.

Thank you for coming along with me on a voyage of self-discovery.

(Concluded in Part 2, below.)

Footnotes

(1) Our job in all our lives is one of discrimination: We are discriminating out from all that is unreal the one thing that is real – God. Physical life is where we develop our discrimination to the level where we can do that.

(2) See Anon., Who Am I? The Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. Sarasota, FL: Ramana Publications, 1990 and Arthur Osborne, ed., The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi. http://www.ramana-maharshi.org. Downloaded 10 Sept. 2005.

(3) The original cast out of the bag was discovering I was not my body in the 1977 OOBE. Another cat out of the bag was learning the nature of transformative love in the 2015 heart opening.  We also call these realizations.

(4) Let’s leave aside the matter that, if I am God as you are, then by extension I must be everyone else. Archangel Michael Me, Mother Me, I like St. Germaine Me.

Feet on the ground, Steve. No senior enlightenment experiences until the guests have been served. Just saying….

(5) (What Hindus know as the guna of thamas.

(6) Neti, net, neti (not this, not this, not this) – the practice of non-dualism.

“As long as one has not realized God, one should renounce the world, following the process of ‘Neti, neti.'” (Paramahansa Ramakrishna in Swami Nikhilananda, trans., The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1978; c1942, 328.)

Brahmajnana, Jnana = Seventh-chakra enlightenment; still in Third Dimension

Ascension, Vijnana = Beyond the 3D chakra system. Full and permanent heart opening, portal to higher dimensions

For more, see:

• The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Purpose-of-Life-is-Enlightenment-3.pdf
• Gateway to Higher Dimensionality Vol. 1: Introduction to Ascension at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Gateway-to-Higher-Dimensionality-V1-R4.pdf
• Grandeur Beyond Grandeur:
 Toward a Cross-Cultural Spirituality Vol. 2: What is the Divine Plan? at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Grandeur-Beyond-Grandeur-2-5.pdf

Maintaining the Connection: Therein Lies the Work

Maintaining the Connection:

Therein Lies the Work

By Steve Beckow

Posted on September 1, 2023

The best representation of my Higher Self as he appeared to me (1)

The degree of influence of the Higher (Seventh-Dimensional) Self, the Oversoul, on us seems to determine the degree to which we can be stalwart, valiant, determined.

The extent of courage of the Higher Self is such that we can “import it” or “borrow from it” – perhaps, “draw on it” may be a better metaphor.

I say this after a few days of observing myself following my experience of drawing my Higher Self to me. My Higher Self is blissful, relaxed, finished with all harmful thoughts, philosophical about all the fumbles and lapses I’ve made in this lifetime.

I’ve seen one person in documentaries that resembles him but he was a wartime personality and I don’t want to stir up old passions by mentioning him. I have him in mind when I want to draw on an example.  (I just remembered a second.)

His example seems to suggest that it’s possible for the Higher Self to shine through these dense bodies.

And certainly the emergencies of wartime would offer ample motivation to reach back into our heights or depths to find our courage. Witness Medal of Honor winners. (2)

***

After Lahaina, the rumor is that we’re now officially at war with the deep-state faction of government and the military. Let this be the opportunity for so many of us to reach back and find our Higher Self.

Our doing that, I believe, signals our Board of Directors (3) that we’re ready to experience the closer influence of our Higher Self.

I saw my Higher Self in vision in 2017 (one of two experiences) and merged with it. I described that experience as being like water soaking into blotting paper. (4)

I don’t think it was by my efforts that that happened. In my opinion, my Board of Directors determined the time was right.  And then they metered out my contact and everything else about it so that I wouldn’t fly off to another planet.

That’s my hunch, based on past performance.

Now it’s a matter of identification. Just as with love and bliss or anything else, if I forget about my Higher Self and don’t keep polishing my armor, so to speak, my Higher Self will gradually disappear from my experience.

It’s up to me to identify with him and come from him if I want the connection, eventually, to be permanent.

Therein lies the work.

That is, if not for the fact that we’ll all ascend and thereafter have, if my understanding is correct, unimpeded access to our Higher Self.

Footnotes

(1) He appeared to me as a knight in shining armor, seated on a white horse, with a lance. Kathleen had a similar vision. I felt incredibly privileged to have been given such a sight.

For an account of the vision, see “Is This What You’re Looking for?” – Part 1/2″ in An Ascension Ethnography at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/An-Ascension-Ethnography-12.pdf

(2)  A third example: Hacksaw Ridge, the story of a pacifist medic and Medal of Honor winner.

(3) My Board of Directors includes the Divine Mother, Archangel Michael, the Lord Arcturus, my Guides, and my Higher Self.

See Our Enlightenment Partnership at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Our-Enlightenment-Partnership-3.pdf

(4) Here’s Michael discussing the variables that went into giving me a heart opening:

Archangel Michael: This [heart opening] occurs, not merely because you have asked for it, but because you (and this does apply to the collective) have done your, can we say, your homework, your due diligence….

When one is clinging to core issues, to fear, to lack, to limitation – you know the list – there is not that sense, not only of spaciousness, but of acceptance, allowance, readiness and even permission. Because as you know, we continually say that we will never override your free will.

So, if the will, either actively or subconsciously, is actually choosing to still engage in the issues or the drama, then although we are standing at readiness and still penetrating you, that open door is not there. ( Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, March 13, 2015. Also “Activating the Wellspring – Part 1/2,” March 14, 2015, in An Ascension Ethnography at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/An-Ascension-Ethnography-12.pdf, 87-93.)

Steve Beckow

• goldenageofgaia.com/

The Challenge and the Response; or, Caught in the Trap of Awareness

The Challenge and the Response; or, Caught in the Trap of Awareness

By Steve Beckow

Posted on June 11, 2023

Trumpets please!

Several voices arise in response to the challenge that the Compelling Thought (“Make every moment sacred”) brings. (1)

The first voice to rise is lethargic, what Hindus call thamasic. I can’t be bothered. Ahhhh, go away. Honey, what’s on the other channels?

The second voice is curious.

Hmmmm…. One agrees or declines. No fault, no blame. Just not our stop (yet) on the overall adventure. But i n t e r e s t i n n n n g g g g g….

The third voice is inquisitive. We  begin to enquire….

So, OK, let’s see. Make every moment sacred.  What is “sacred”? Never mind looking it up. What is “sacred” to you?

I can imagine the Mother walking beside me every moment and me not doing anything improper, disrespectful, unworthy, etc. That would make every moment sacred.

Well, she always walks “beside” each and every one of us anyways so it’s really a matter of having the courage to recognize it rather than wanting it or not.

To be clear, whether we recognize that the Mother walks with each and every one of us or not, she does.

But recognizing that threatens all my investments and interests that are not of a sacred nature. This is cutting right to the quick.

However, even having the thought and not letting it fly by starts the process. Insidious. It eats away at you.

Watch me now wrestle with it. Well, this moment is sacred, but not that moment. Not while you’re driving, romancing, charming the boss, etc. Around and around I go, dancing with the awareness of how I spend every moment.

I’m caught in the trap of awareness. Once we know, we cannot unknow. Awareness begins its work.

Footnotes

(1) See “Make Every Moment Sacred,” June 10, 2023, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/?p=345483

Steve Beckow

• https://goldenageofgaia.com/

Breaking the Self-Serving Cycle

Breaking the Self-Serving Cycle

By Steve Beckow

Posted on May 6, 2023

Peter the Great

Long. A little technical, maybe complicated. I’m OK if you skip it and go on to the next article.

As living, breathing beings, while in human form (as opposed to angelic form), (1) in my view, we create ourselves.

Some people call what we create a “personality” or an “ego.” (“Ego” means “I.”) I think of it as a constructed self, a product of our own conditioning.

As human beings, we don’t act by stimulus/response. Because we’re cultural animals, (2) we act by stimulus/thought/response. I think of thought as the cultural gap.

The way we condition ourselves is that we observe the stimulus, in the cultural gap, make conclusions about it, and decide how we’ll respond now and in the future. Then we act.

If we were lions, we’d never catch anything. We’d probably sit around and talk about it.

Some of these components may happen in a fraction of a second. What we decide becomes the planks out of which we build our personality

Every element of what I’ve just said deserves separate study.

***

The stimulus of our thought and action – the motivator – is usually our feelings. The Buddha called the principal troublemakers the polar opposites “craving and aversion.”

Like/don’t like, love/hate, want/detest decide the matter and then we ransack Heaven and Earth for “reasons” to explain and justify why we just thought and acted the way we did.

Meanwhile we go back and forth between avoiding what we don’t like and getting what we like. Life becomes a continual cycling between the two.

Trauma-based reactions I’ve called vasanas, (3) to link it up with Vedanta (4) generally and Sri Ramana Maharshi in particular. (5) Vasanas (VAH-sa-nas) are our core issues, old baggage, resentments, gunnysack, whatever you want to call our unfinished business.

These fear-based responses, especially, chisel the form of the statue, our David, our masterpiece, that we become. (I think I’m a master at being me.) Some like our creation; others don’t.

***

You may call the self we project onto the world the personality, the constructed self, or the ego. It’s all about survival.

As it works its way through life and the world, it creates a self-serving story of its own exploits and misfortunes.

It tries its story out on all and sundry, modifies the parts that don’t fly, and then presents the final product to the world.

“Here’s why I didn’t get my Ph.d. at the University of Toronto. Here’s why I didn’t get my Ph.d. at the University of BC. It wasn’t me,. Empirical materialism. Couldn’t live with restraints. Went on to write many books.”

We glorify ourselves in our own story. Where we vanquished our foe, our input was crucial.  Where we faltered or lost, we couldn’t help it. Praise us; under no circumstances blame us.

Marcel the Man Crusher

Blame us and you “cross the line.” You’re now not a friend but an enemy and we switch to a different protocol.

How much learning can there be in a life constructed and constricted in this way? How much real love, which doesn’t show up in a lie? How does such a life line up with the purpose of life?

I’ll come to the latter in a moment.

I notice that we spend our conscious years undoing all these conclusions, decisions, and constructions that form our personality. Try something new, the Company of Heaven invites us. Creak, creak, creak. We move painfully in that direction.

***

So there I am, a walking stimulus/thought/response machine, constructing his self-serving story telling the world how he saved it from its peril. I explain my misfortunes as the subtly-implied incompetence of others and the group’s rise to success and fame as a result of my own contribution.

Ah me. Another day, another douleur (pain … in the rear). (6)

How to break this cycle and become a free and spontaneous human being? Well, first of all, fear not. Ascension will do it and every day we draw closer to that.

So, as with so many other things these days, we’re only talking about the time between now and then.

What to do?

Too good for the likes of you

Remember what Krishnamurti said: “Without first knowing yourself, how can you know that which is true? Illusion is inevitable without self-knowledge.” (7)

He wasn’t talking about Self-Knowledge. He was talking about getting to know the ways of the personality, the small-s self.

Because those are what you are not.

On the path of awareness? Watch. Observe the ways of the personality. It can be fun. “Oh, here I am being self-serving. What will I say this time?” (8)

What else to observe? One critical thing is our vasanas – our trauma-based reactions, as I mentioned earlier.

Vedantists like Sri Ramana consider vasanas to be the seeds of future action (karma).

Ascension, which is Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi, burns those seeds to a crisp. We’re freed from our karma or need to act.

Without observing and understanding the personality or constructed self and its ways, there’s no way to be able to distinguish the real Self out from it when we encounter it.

***

Krishna said: “Lose discrimination, and you miss life’s only purpose.” (9)  Why would he say that?

I said we’d come to it: Well, what is life’s purpose? To realize who we are. Why? When one of us realizes its true identity, in that moment, God meets God. And for that meeting was all of this created. (10)

If that’s life’s purpose, how is it accomplished? Well, in the tradition to which Krishna was directing his remarks, he was saying that we accomplish life’s purpose by discriminating between the Real and the unreal (neti, neti – not this, not this), detaching from the unreal, and attaching to the Real.

We begin to piece together  the “seeds” of our action. We begin to see the personality, the statue, the constructed self and its modes of operation. That is not who we are. Neti, neti. Not this, not this.

In a moment of our seeing and distinguishing it out, I predict we’ll realize the Self behind the personality. (11)

***

One desire does not hurt us, Krishna says:

I am all that a man may desire

Without transgressing

The law of his nature. (12)

When we desire God and contribute that to the makeup of our constructed self, it frees us rather than restraining us. By the Law of Attraction, we draw closer and closer to the One and Realization.

We help that along by first discriminating between everything unreal and the Real.  Life helps us do that.

We discover a very well-planned life, with soul contracts and missions, (13) that keeps us moving toward Self-Realization and conscious Re-union with the One. (14)

That’s the spiritual alternative to dressing up our created, constructed self, selling our story of its accomplishments to the world, and having a “very good life.” Going this route, we may never awaken to the alternative.

Hopefully we’re leaving self-servingness behind. When we’re washed by the love in the higher realms – the real River Jordan – we’ll forget about it completely.

Footnotes

(1) Divine Mother: Let me be clear. There is not one being – human, starseed, hybrid or earthkeeper – that is not one of my Angelic Beings. And it matters not whether you belong to the Legion of Michael or the Tribe of Uriel, the Praisers of Metatron or the Truth Speakers of Gabrielle. It does not matter your colour, your hue. You are my Angels, birthed from my being – birthed not only from my womb, but from my heart. (“The Mother’s Clarion Call to All of Humanity!” April 20, 2020, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2020/04/20/the-mothers-clarion-call-to-all-of-humanity/.)

See An Explosion in the Meaning of Humanness at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/An-Explosion-in-the-Meaning-of-Humanness-11.pdf

(2) As a cultural historian by profession,  I define culture as an organization of ideas, manifest in act and artifact though consisting of neither, by means of which Third-Dimensional humans make sense of their world and take purposeful action.

(3) On vasanas or core issues, see Vasanas: Preparing For Ascension by Clearing Old Issues at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Vasanas-Preparing-for-Ascension-R2.pdf.

(4) Vedanta refers to the Vedas, the non-dual portion of the Hindu scripture, the Upanishads.

(5) See for example “Vasanas (Latent Tendencies)” at https://goldengaiadb.com/index.php?title=V#Vasanas_.28Latent_Tendencies.29

(6) I have to stop saying that. That’s probably how I got arthritis in the hip in the first place.

(7) J. Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living. First Series. Bombay, etc.: B.I. Publications, 1972; c1974, 1, 20.

(8) I love the icebreaker exercise group leader John Enright used in his workshops: Turn to the person on your right and tell him or her how you’re going to manage your impression in here today – what manipulations you’ll use, what qualities you’ll project.

(9) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 42.

(10) See The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Purpose-of-Life-is-Enlightenment-3.pdf

(11) Not like I have any basis for predicting such an outcome. I am not an enlightened man and hence not a spiritual teacher. I just love to write.

Sri Ramakrishna compared the situation of an aspirant who chooses an unqualified teacher to a garter snake trying to swallow a frog. The garter snake cannot swallow it but won’t let go; the frog is not swallowed and they both die.

However, if a king cobra (a qualified spiritual teacher) comes along, it swallows the frog in one gulp.

(12) Sri Krishna in Bhagavad-Gita, ibid., 71.

(13) See What is a Soul Contract? at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/What-is-a-Soul-Contract.pdf

(14) As if we could ever leave the One, where would we go?

Steve Beckow

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