Emerging from Emerging

Emerging from Emerging

By Steve Beckow

Posted on October 29, 2024

Part 1/2

In the course of writing this article about emergence, I myself emerged.

Emergence is an ongoing process and one I regard as best adapted to lightworkers’ needs.

The books I wrote on emergence (1) came largely out of the work I did in the growth movement. (2)

The mainstream media did character assassinations back in the late Seventies as much as they do now. We just weren’t aware of the full picture, as we are becoming aware now.

They typified Werner Erhard and the est Training in the same way the MSM attacks people of heart and President Trump. Werner was one of the Twentieth Century’s human-growth geniuses, in my view.

If someone comes up with a great way to emerge from our woes, the MSM will annihilate it.  This is not a new plan.

We may not like the turmoil we’re  going through, but I think it speeds up growth.

It presents so many important choices. On a normal day, when peace reigns, we’ll have ordinary choices, but not choices that affect the heart of our character.

After Helene and Milton, while there was a tussle going on between the monk and the warrior, the warrior unto himself is becoming firmly set.

[I have not fully emerged yet, but the process has started.]

I know this may offend some folks. They’re not on this site to hear about war. (3)

Neither am I, by the way, but it’s here. Mass murder by hurricanes was not in my thoughts.

That I may disappoint you I just have to deal with because the fuller form that I’m emerging into is more me than what I now see as the suppressed other side of myself.

[I am slowly emerging.]

In fact, if you’ll allow me the privilege of introspection when the world is under seige, looking back, I see the whole of my life until this point as being about emerging from the suppression of my character in early childhood.

Not like that was special to me; the whole neighborhood followed the same drill-sergeant child-rearing patterns. It was the universal way of parenting in that post-war generation.

But I’m feeling a strength and solidity in my belly and chest that is both foreign and familiar to me. Foreign because I usually suppress myself before reaching this place. Familiar because the effect of emergence is that I feel more me than I did.

(Concluded in Part 2, below.)

Footnotes

(1)  See:

• Let’s Go! Let’s Grow! Vol. 4. Emergence at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Lets-Go-Lets-Grow-V4-Emergence-R6.pdf
• Lightworkers: Creating a World that Works for Everyone. Vol. 3: Emergence and Service at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Lightworkers-3-Emergence-and-Service-R7.pdf

What these books were about is what’s happening for me right now”: Emergence. It doesn’t only happen once. It’s a progressive process – more and more and more. The whole of the growth movement could be said to have been about emergence.

(2) The three main elements of which were (A) a three-month residential encounter group at Cold Mountain Institute, (B) the est Training and its affiliated programs, and (C) enlightenment intensives.

(3) In my lifetime, I’ve always served in the role of protector. In Toronto, in 1970, I was stabbed in the back protecting an old man who was being robbed.

This kamikaze behavior can again be seen as resulting from an early vasana (core issue) born of domestic violence.  Having promised to protect my Mother in the future some day (I was seven) when she was struck by my Dad, I was now protecting as a consistent response.

You might say it’s my dharma (felt duty) to be a protector.  As testimony to that, this blog was born as a cabal-fighting blog.  Having just come out from presiding over a hearing room on discrimination and persecution (the refugee determination process), I could not stand what the cabal was doing.

On that, see “How It All Began!” July 2, 2024, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2024/07/02/how-it-all-began/

Now of course, as Suzi says, we prefer peace.  At least I do, unless and until we’re hit by two manmade, weather-warfare hurricanes.  Then I stand up and take notice. We need both.

The Growth Movement Meets Business - 2

The Growth Movement Meets Business…. – Part 2/2

By Steve Beckow

Posted on April 29, 2024

Villain or saint?

(Concluded from Part 1, yesterday.)

I’ve never forgotten what psychotherapist and workshop leader John Enright used to say, that you can’t get from Victim to Hero except by going through Saint or Villain. (1)

Victims don’t get what they want and are unhappy.

Saints don’t get what they want and are happy.

Villains get what they want but are unhappy.

Heroes get what they want and are happy.

You know the moral of the story: “The way out of Villain or Saint is to accept where you are. Do it and dig it and, five minutes later, you’re a Hero.” (1)

Very clever.

As we go higher and higher in vibration the roles are being sorted out.

Villains won’t reach Hero this lifetime. Saints will reach much higher than that.

I’m feeling drawn to the latter path.

***

Meanwhile, the split between a private and a public self must be the most challenging to heal satisfactorily.

On the one hand, a house divided against itself cannot stand and this split is a definite division. Moreover, I’ve always valued transparency over hiding one’s cards.

On the other hand, boundaries can be a good thing at times, especially for a writer.

I’m not ready to go in the direction of full resolution of public/private self just yet – full transparency.  Due diligence means looking first for unintended consequences and hidden pitfalls. Like the impact on the necessary keeping of secrets.

However, I acknowledge being drawn to the idea.  It would be a definite benefit to a CEO.

I’ll need to “be with it” for a while…. And then we’ll see….

The growth movement meets business….

Footnotes

(1) John Enright in Awareness, Responsibility, and Communication Workshop, Cold Mountain Institute, April 16, 1976.

Steve Beckow

• goldenageofgaia.com/

 

 

No Need to Wither Away

No Need to Wither Away

by Steve Beckow

Posted on March 9, 2024

I’ve just had a conversation with someone whose son is having emotional difficulties. I don’t want to go into details because (A) I don’t want to identify the person and (B) I don’t want to create an impression that I somehow have credentials to be dispensing advice.

We all contribute what we have. Mine is philosophical speculation.

Interestingly, my life history does give me some first-hand experience in the area I’m about to venture into.

It’s my philosophical speculation that, when criticized repeatedly at a young age, we go inward. I imagine that statement shows up as obvious to most people.

We hide. We erect walls of excuses, denials, and justifications for self-protection. We don’t ask for help or join in team efforts. Etc.

I was criticized in a hurtful manner by a man who was criticized himself. It helped along a tendency, which I can see in past lives, of seeking solitude, concentration and independence – monk, mathematical philosopher, etc.

When my Dad shouted at me from inches away from my face and I dissociated, it just sealed the bargain.  I had no confidence after that to sally forth.

I’m describing this for this person, as an instance of how it can arise that a person could let go of society and turn inwards.

This isolated condition does not stop a person. It just makes things harder and colors our performance. (1) It also keeps us from experiencing our own love.

It results in loneliness, awkwardness, hopelessness, and more.  And getting out of it can be a long process if you don’t know what’s happening or what can help.

***

OK, Act 1, Scene 2.

As a thoroughly-unqualified individual expressing his unasked-for opinion, I call this condition a problem with emergence. (See downloads, below.) A problem with standing forth, showing up, being here now.

We’re adult now, with a need to solve our problems more quickly than we might have had as a child. I see the need of the moment as being to re-emerge, to come out from the fortress we’ve erected and to do it more quickly than we might have if we were still a child.

We also may find we need to re-parent ourselves. More on that on another occasion.

Emergence is not a process taught in school. It was only taught in expensive growth courses in the 1970s!

As a person who went through the process, one of the best ways to do it for me was the Outward-Bound model. I didn’t do Outward Bound itself. I did what was then the est Six Day Course, which had many of the same features (and then some). (2)

This kind of physically-challenging course can cause a breakthrough and emergence. We say “we found ourselves.”  We’ve emerged from our shell. We now know how we did it – once. We resolve to do it again. And again.

A second way was the give-and-take of an encounter group. That could bring about a mental and emotional breakthrough, an inner/outer emergence.  (3)

The Growth Movement was full of breakthrough processes. Whether that literature still exists somewhere (perhaps the Library of Congress) is an open question.

While we may not at present have many elements of the Growth Movement around, after the Reval, I’ll be starting them up again in my local community (Vancouver).  With that, we’ll have more of the mechanisms we need to help people emerge from their psychic wounds. (4)

Whether the prod is physical as in the Outward-Bound model or mental and emotional as in encounter groups, what happens is the circumstances are created for our Adult consciousness to stand forth, to call itself forth, and take charge.

***

Act 1, Scene 3.

I said “Adult” consciousness. What do I mean by that term? Let me explain.

The state that’s called forth is going to be increasingly more of our Higher Self.

But let me use, instead, the terminology which Eric Berne, founder of Transactional Analysis, coined in the Sixties to refer to it.

He saw three “ego states.” I prefer to call them “consciousness states”: Parent, Adult, and Child. I refer you to his numerous books on Transactional Analysis itself on the Parent and Child consciousness states. I want to zero in here on the “Adult” consciousness state.

The “Adult” consciousness state is everything we’ve been discussing in these pages. It’s balanced, centered, grounded, etc. It’s the Higher Self making itself known and felt, as far as I can see.

What emerges is, by definition, what was already there. We already are and have all we’ll ever need.

When we’re in this Adult/emerged state, as Werner Erhard said, we do what works and what we do works.  This state starts out friendly to the divine qualities and ends up immersed in them.

***

Act 1, Scene 4.

Emergence, to take a large subject and squeeze the juice out of it, is the very act of standing forth, of accessing our Adult and allowing it to take charge.

The Adult that stands forth will not allow itself to be confined. It insists on truth and compassion in its own treatment of others and asks it of others as well.

This Adult state loves, listens, and learns as it moves through life. Eventually it taps into the artesian well of love that eternally arises in the opened heart.

That spring cannot flow freely in us when we’re walled off and turned away from others. It has nowhere to go and love must flow. It awaits our opening up.

This just in! An even more hopeful avenue is on the verge of opening up: med beds.  Are they not being presently used on children who were more than just criticized? And do they not erase negative memories?

Finally, in the background to all this is what gives us the most hope: the continually-ascending energies. The very ones bringing all this to the surface are also the very ones that will dissipate it, if we only hang tight.

Curtain falls. End of story. Resumption of life.

---

On the subject of emergence, see  Let’s Go! Let’s Grow! Vol. 4. Emergence at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Lets-Go-Lets-Grow-V4-Emergence-R4.pdf

See also Vasanas: Preparing For Ascension by Clearing Old Issues at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Vasanas-Preparing-for-Ascension-R11.pdf

Footnotes

(1) I was helped in making refugee decisions by “knowing what it felt like.”

(2) There are many more personally-challenging growth programs that I’m not aware of.   When people say the armed forces builds character, emergence is the process they’re pointing at. That pre-supposes the armed forces themselves being honorable which, as we know, is regrettably not the case everywhere on Earth.

(3) A third way would be Enlightenment Intensives. That’s too large a subject for me to get into here.

(4) That “more” would include bodywork, bioenergetics, psychodrama, rule reconstruction, etc. However, all of this may now be pre-empted by med beds! We’ll have to see!

 

Steve Beckow

• goldenageofgaia.com/

 

 

Introduction to Let’s Go! Let’s Grow!

Introduction to Let’s Go!

Let’s Grow!

by Steve Beckow

Posted on January 26, 2024

 

I’ve long missed the influence of what we in the 1970s called the “human growth movement” or the “human potential movement.”

It revolved around what enlightened psychologist John Enright called “awareness, responsibility, and communication.”

I’d like to kickstart it again, if it were in my power to do so. No matter what’s happening outside, we as a planet are moving ever closer to being a global family. And the skills of the growth movement will be needed.

---

Download Let’s Go! Let’s Grow! Vol. 1 Awareness here: https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Lets-Go-Lets-Grow-V1-Awareness-R3.pdf

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The growth movement followed the stormy Sixties, when a “counter culture” of youth tried to stop the Vietnam War and pull down the deep state, exactly as we’re doing now.

We owe a great deal of our political character as lightworkers to the civil-rights workers of the Fifties, feminists and anti-war activists of the Sixties, and the growth movement of the Seventies.

I cannot put a value on what I learned from Cold Mountain Institute, the est Training, Vipassana meditations, and Enlightenment Intensives. Inestimable. Their influence saturates and colors my writing.

Paradise ended in 1982 when the deep state engineered a recession, followed by the first “jobless recovery” I know of. Instead of offering employees severance packages, etc., corporations simply laid them off and did not rehire them later.

What the economic downturn masked was the automation of the workforce. Automation created a buyer’s market for labor wherever it was applied. It saw the withering of labor unions, the disappearance of secure employment with a benefits plan, and the loss to our youth of their economic future.

In exchange for cellphones and video games.

Work was automated; jobs, careers, professions – all went into the automation paper shredder without a thought being given to supporting the affected people through their transition or what would become of our children’s future.

It left a working and middle class prostrate from financial and economic body blows.

It left our children bereft of the life/adaptive skills of working as part of a stable company, with opportunities for expansion (advancement), and a secure future.

Of course, the deep state offered itself as our economic saviour with such nonsensical notions as “trickle-down” economics.

Nothing trickled down, except attempts to control. This was an economy based solely on greed. You could have whatever you could get away with. What we see today is the result.

***

Meanwhile, the growth movement died on the vine in 1982. No one had money any more for courses or travel.

A Canadian journalist, David Olive, summed up the attitude:

“Stop finding yourself, pal. It’s time to get back to work — if you still have a job, that is.” (1)

Many people did not have a job and were in effect abandoned. And their situation was not covered by a complicit press.

The tone of business discussion, which I monitored during this period, was highly competitive: us against them; we have to pounce first; he who hesitates is lunch; etc. (2)

Now we see the outcome of all that, yet we don’t pin the responsibility where it belongs: On what we call the deep state, the cabal, the New World Order. The puppet masters behind the curtain.

We think of them as our saviors when what they seek is control over us.

***

The Earth Alliance of white-hat military and civilians is dismantling their operations as we speak. (3) We can afford to leave that to them. Warfare today is not what it was. We’d probably be in the way; hence the desire to have us be indoors when the takedown of deep-state actors occurs. (4)

Wrap all of that up in leftover Christmas paper and put that aside. All of that is prelude to awakening the desire in me to create a renaissance (in my case, on the Internet) of the growth movement.

I’d like to have the communicational skills of the Seventies back. We already spoke from our hearts then. We valued being in touch with our feelings and were much more in touch than people are now. We had momentum in the direction of what turns out to be the purpose of life: Self-Knowledge.

We just need to recover it. Right now, there’s only me doing the work of rebirthing, as well as running a busy blog and … you know the story. So I have to restrict myself to mostly commentary.

But I invite anyone still around who remembers to join me in the effort.

---

Download Let’s Go! Let’s Grow! Vol. 1 Awareness here: https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Lets-Go-Lets-Grow-V1-Awareness-R3.pdf

Let’s Go! Let’s Grow!

Let’s Go! Let’s Grow!

by Steve Beckow

Posted on January 17, 2024

Part 1 (Part 2 below)

Long and reflective.

A lot of interesting conversations going on backstage, stirred up by Matthew’s last message.  One piece of feedback that arose was that I’m being too intellectual in trying to understand spiritual states.

While we’re all recovering from the holidays, maybe it’s a good time to push back the chair and reflect. And here I’m about to be intellectual. This is the exploration that the comment raised. Just a reflection.

For me, as you know, there are three levels of knowledge: the intellectual, the experiential, and the realized.  (1)

Let me just dwell on one part of that division for a moment.

I have no control over realization. I freely wander into cognitive dissonance to court paradigmatic breakthrough. (2) I ask for realization. I meditate. But that state is bestowed by the Mother, her archangels, our guides, the masters, etc.

I can describe aspects of it. Realization brings release plus bliss. It’s the bliss that lifts us up to a place where simple knowledge there is seen as realization here.

But I have to be careful. My excursions into higher states do not make me a spiritual teacher. Nor do I want to be one. I’m a writer.

***

I still feel reflective. May I unwind?

When I enter a new field, I say to you that I’m establishing a beachhead of understanding about that field. (3) The beachhead is just a landing zone and may be totally abandoned later on.

If I were a non-dualist, I’d jump for joy that I know nothing and have an empty mind. I would just allow things to be rather than establish a beachhead of understanding, which would be seen as limiting me.

But I’m a dualist this lifetime. I serve the Divine Mother. For that I need understanding and the ability to communicate. Sitting in the cloud of unknowing is not appropriate for me in this go-round.

I need to communicate. To do that I need to stay within the universe of discourse of you, the reader I serve. That can mean reducing the ineffable into the language of the day.

I won’t for instance suddenly lapse into an erudite explanation of quantum physics, even if I knew anything about the subject, which I don’t. (I think this article is erudite enough for folks who are working and raising children.)

As a writer I deal in ideas and the ideas need to be comprehensible to my readers.

But the heart of the feedback was that I was being too intellectual. In spirituality it seems either to boil down to a matter of the heart or a matter of balance. Either way you end up in the same place: The tsunami of love that flows in the heart.

If I can develop that feedback, however, it means, to me, staying too much within the orbit of ideas; never escaping and going higher. It means too often reducing living, breathing entities to ideas, which is a task beyond delicate and perhaps impossible.

The emphasis is on the “too much.”  The emphasis is on leaving the center,  the balance point, the heart and wandering off into the extremes of passion, clouded judgment, and abandoned caution.

That’s fine if you’re a young person breaking free of your parents – whoopee!  But a lightworker committed to service? I think we agree to give up those.

If I want to pierce through the cloud of ideas to the experience of it, no matter what we’re looking at, I have to feel into it with the heart.

(Concluded in Part 2, below.)

Footnotes

(1) See:

• “Realization is Simply Seeing from a Higher Level of Consciousness,” February 25, 2022, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2022/02/25/realization-is-simply-seeing-from-a-higher-level-of-consciousness/.
• “Who’s Behind the Curtain?” February 13, 2023, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/category/news/spirituality/intellectual-experiential-realized-knowledge/

NB:

“Truth begins as intellectual knowledge, but can never manifest into expression until realized.” (“The Arcturian Group via Marilyn Raffaele. January 10, 2016,” January 11, 2016, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2016/01/11/the-arcturian-group-via-marilyn-raffaele-january-10-2016/.)

(2) See Paradigmatic Breakthrough: Essays in New-Age Philosophy at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Paradigmatic-Breakthrough-4.pages.pdf and “Paradigmatic Breakthrough as a Type of Spiritual Realization,” October 11, 2020, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/?p=313922.

(3)  See:

• “A Beachhead of Understanding,” August 16, 2013, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2013/08/16/a-beachhead-of-understanding/
• “Establishing a Beachhead of Understanding,” February 10, 2014, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2014/02/10/establishing-a-beachhead-of-understanding/.
• “Establishing a Beachhead of Understanding in a New Context,” January 13, 2019, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2019/01/13/establishing-a-beachhead-of-understanding-in-a-new-context/

OK, OK, some abandon is healthy!

(Concluded from Part 1, above.)

A word about awareness and “getting in touch with” something.

In a three-month residential encounter group I did in 1975-6, even critics who were habitually driven to point out blemishes “got in touch with” what was driving them  And it turned out they were just like everyone else except starved for listening and validation.

Getting in touch with a matter frees us from it. Feedback is what assists us with the process.

Awareness has that property, as Jesus tells us here:

Jesus: You have to realize that consciousness is something very powerful. It is much more than a passive registering of an emotion – consciousness is an intense creative force. …

Consciousness is not something static; things do not remain as they are. You will notice that if you do not nourish the energy of the emotion or of your judgment about it, they will gradually dissipate. …

Awareness transforms – it is the major instrument for change. (1)

We’re talking about simple, bare awareness. We’re not talking about having a good idea or analyzing the unanalyzable (love, for instance). And we’re certainly not talking about arguing over something, which, multiplied, leads us to where we are now, in a war of exchange, reduced to arguments, compressed into memes. Not many signs of intelligent life here, as the comedian said.

As a social movement, the path of awareness became “consciousness raising.” We need to re-acquire their tools we left behind some time ago (1982, to be exact). (2)

Raise something to simple, bare, non-judgmental awareness and allow it to be while observing it and you’ll see the issue leave more quickly than otherwise, because of our awareness.

Additionally, you, sitting there passively, paying attention to it but allowing it to do its own thing, is like raising your hand when greeting. It shows you have no (intellectual) weapon in it.

You’re not wrestling with the issue; if you were, it’d remain forever. What we resist persists, as Werner Erhard said. What we allow leaves under its own steam.

***

Well, that was a rewarding stock-taking for me. Yes, I am very intellectual.

I’m dealing with whole-system interpretations and analyses. What experiential knowledge would look like at this level of generality, I’m not sure I know. I find myself chuckling at the assignment.

As I look at my intellectuality, turning it like a diamond in my mind, I see it has a quality of maleness to it. Pushing through to the heart of the matter, wrapping my  arms around a subject, etc. Very male.

I think someone raised female might do a better job. (3)

Either way, let’s settle back, into the task. Put on the coffee.

Let’s go! Let’s grow!

Footnotes

(1) “Jeshua: The Third Way” at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2014/01/jeshua-the-third-way/.

(2) The recession of 1982 was the first instance I’m aware of of a “jobless recovery.” The forces promoting automation used the recession to shed now-obsolescent labor.

They instantly created a buyer’s market for labor, not only comprised of large numbers of people who had lost their jobs, but also large numbers of people who had lost their careers, professions, etc. Unions collapsed.

The attitude was uncaring, much like the mood of the vaccination discourse today.

“Stop finding yourself, pal,” one commentator chimed in; “It’s time to get back to work — if you still have a job, that is.” (David Olive, “The New Hard Line,” Report on Business Magazine, Oct. 1991, 15.)

Masking it as the depradations of a recession allowed it all to happen with no thought being given to the welfare and wellbeing of the people affected.

Now the QFS will automate the financiers and the circle will be complete: The automators will have been automated.

(3) Having written this and looked it over, I see the point. I am intellectual. Hopefully not so much that I create what Michael was worried about – I lose my reader.

Archangel Michael: If you venture, as you would often like, too far ahead of the crowd, then who are you speaking to? (Archangel Michael in. a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Aug. 21, 2015.)

Steve Beckow 

• goldenageofgaia.com/