Showing posts with label Releasing the Old Paradigm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Releasing the Old Paradigm. Show all posts

Saturday, July 6, 2024

Never Let Your Guard Down

Never Let Your Guard Down

By Steve Beckow

Posted on July 6, 2024


A graphic from my Dad’s “storyboard” or life story


Growing up under a parent who served in the Second World War offered its challenges to me. Discipline was the back of the hand. I may as well have been in boot camp.

I was a lazy no-good good-for-nothing because I liked to read rather than swim and golf and play tennis.

At this very moment, I’m in the midst of a most welcome and long-overdue breakthrough around my relationship with my Dad.

Until now I’ve always considered that I needed to love my Dad. Take him with me. Talk to him.

I could never “get” this. I didn’t feel love for my Dad. It was definitely a bridge too far.

And then, this morning, in the shower – out of reach of my computer! – I got it. I didn’t need to love my Dad. What I do best is to listen. I can listen to my Dad.

I’m not saying Dad talked. The words formed in my mind. And the pictures.

I saw a fireman in the hold of a merchant vessel in World War 2, sailing the Atlantic knowing full well that, if a torpedo hit, it’d be highly unlikely that anyone in the bowels of the ship would survive.

Dad was all about survival. And conspicuous survival was even better. I get why he was that way now.  “Look at me! I made it. Despite the odds. Despite no one believing in me.”

His Dad was violent with him.  He did a “storyboard” of his life once and one of the graphics was a frightened child saying, “What did I do now?” (See graphic above.) That said a lot.

His Dad finally kicked him out, probably as his own dad had done to Grandpa. (1) My Dad rode the rails, spent a night in jail, and then was back on the rails again. He worked his way up from what he probably considered to be nothing to owner of a company and moderately wealthy. He’d show his Dad that he was a worthy man, not like his youngest, the no-good good-for-nothing who just lay around reading books.

I did not want to be a father because the only movies I had in my head were movies of my own father. And who wanted to pass those along? I was determined to stop what Michael called “legacy behavior.” The way to do that was to not be a father.

Wow. I feel the first degree of release on this one – the truth will set you free. I’m still aware that there’s more holding in my solar plexus, my hara center.

Dad’s favorite sayings were things like “you have to keep your guard up. Never let your guard down. You can’t trust anyone,” etc.  Our family may as well have been on a wartime footing long, long after the war was over.

Yes, this is the appropriate way for me to handle this persistent vasana of father hatred. I have no trouble listening.  Probably when I hear more of his situation, the love may start to trickle.

Just a little. … Never let your guard down….

Footnotes

(1) Because Grandpa left home and migrated from Russia to America. It may have been opportunity or he may have been kicked out of the nest.



Steve Beckow


Monday, June 3, 2024

The “I” That Always Exists

The “I” That Always Exists

By Steve Beckow

Posted on June 3, 2024


Credit: Pinterest.se



I’m having a debate with myself around the “I” that always exists.

I know from being outside my body that that “I” continues to exist whereas the body does not.

If I am that “I” that always exists, then why don’t I act like it? What is there to fear? Why am I hesitant, drawn back, afraid?

Vasanas, or core issues, or traumatic memories supply the answer. (1)

But if my core issues get triggered, and the “I” always exists, why do I listen to my mind on that or any other subject? There is no absolute need to. And how much does it know, really? (2)

I just got the signal “yes” I’ve arranged with Michael and a separate one I arranged with the Mother.  They both went off together.

If I will continue to exist whatever the mind does or does not do, why do I listen to it so attentively?

I have to factor out the need for a writer to rehearse what they’re writing.

How might my life improve or degrade if I stop listening to the mind? I’ll have to see.

This is a lifelong conversation with my very best friend I’m giving up. For what it will produce….

Not forever, my friend.

Footnotes

(1) On that subject, see Vasanas: Preparing For Ascension by Clearing Old Issues at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Vasanas-Preparing-for-Ascension-R16.pdf

(2) When I had my vision of the purpose of life on March 13, 1987, at that moment, I knew that I now knew one thing. I knew the purpose of life and nothing else.

On that experience, see “Ch. 13 – Epilogue” in The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment at http://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Purpose-of-Life-is-Enlightenment.pdf

Steve Beckow


Friday, April 12, 2024

Making and Keeping Promises

Pre-Requisite to Exiting the Cycle of Conflict:

Making and Keeping Promises

By Steve Beckow

Posted on April 12, 2024



I’ve felt for a very long time that it’s unfortunate that we don’t have more widely disseminated approaches to everyday relationship conflict.

Of course I’m not in a relationship so I’m ignorant of current breakthroughs in that field.

I’m offering the analyses that cluster around the notion of “cycle of conflict” as a door in to exiting these repetitive arguments we have that are the major cause, in my view, of relationship breakdown.

And I mean any kind of relationship – working with, living with, or loving.

Anyone who’s gotten themselves into one needs to find a way out. Just allowing it to happen time after time after time weakens the bonds of connectedness and turns people against each other. It’s one repetitive activity that people usually don’t want to be part of but cannot find a way out. And it’s one that gets worse over time, especially with ordinarily mild-mannered people.

At the basis of it is fear. Father left when I was born. Mother died in a housefire. No one paid attention to me. No one listened to me.

So, beginning now, I’d like to suggest ways out of the cycle. The first one, today, is not only a way out but also a pre-requisite to engaging together in leaving the cycle. That is making and keeping promises.

I’m going to make you breakfast on Easter Sunday. “Promise?” I promise.

In the cycle of conflict, we often do what we want. We may not take account of others. We fear we won’t get what we want and so we’ve created an act, image, or persona that helps us get what we want it.

One element of that act can be: Don’t make any promises. Don’t let anyone pin you down. It’s dangerous.

Time to turn that one around. Not having a strong or dependable word is a pre-requisite for getting out of the cycle (and I’m in and out of it too). We have to be able to depend on you to do what you say or we have no basis for working together.

And making and keeping promises is also the first step in exiting the cycle of conflict.

I promise to make you dinner Easter Sunday by 10:00. How do you like your eggs?

Once we make and keep promises, we now have a basis for working together.

I’m going to need to do this impressionistically, moving from one step in the process to another.


Download There is no Greater Gift than Listening V3. Leaving the Cycle of Conflict here:  https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/There-is-No-Greater-Gift-than-Listening-V3-Leaving-the-Cycle-of-Conflict-R4.pdf

Steve Beckow

 
 

Thursday, August 10, 2023

How do I Feel after the Storm Subsides?

How do I Feel after the Storm Subsides?

Posted by Steve Beckow

on August 10, 2023


Well, no, not this! This is the storm.


My experience of dismay continues. (1)

As I remained with it and interacted with other people, I noticed a companion feeling to dismay and that was one of dread.

Boy, are deep-seated matters coming up now or what?

I have a dentist appointment at 3:30 today and I’m dreading not being ready for it.

I have several other things to get done and I’m dreading forgetting something.

Dread, dread, dread … I go around dreading something.

It’s not hard to see what it is – the back of my Dad’s hand, his putdowns, or his orders.  I lived in dread of the kick under the table, the angry outburst, etc.

I’m feeling Michael’s signal for “yes” go off repeatedly.  I’d best keep experiencing this….

The memories flood back.

I used to think of my Dad as a shark, who’d eat anyone when angered. He once rushed at the three of us with a knife raised over his head. My brother wrestled it out of his hand and threw him down the basement stairs. That was the end of that.

All of these memories arise. The experience needs to be at least seen and at best re-experienced to be released.

When I think of my dad, the only face I see, again and again, is a gif of him getting mad.  EBS going off. All bets are off. Everybody head for the hills.

I can breathe again.  A layer of muscular tension has lifted. I’m repeating myself but the truth has set me free. I need to keep emphasizing that as one of two principles that underlie this work. (2) The second principle is what you resist persists; what you re-experience disappears. (3)

And here is the ultimate irony of all this. How do I feel after the storm subsides? How do I feel as I release myself from traps I set for myself perhaps sixty-five years ago?  How, after a monumental piece of work, do I feel?

I feel normal.

Normal.

What does that say?

Footnotes

(1) See “Reminiscence Interrupted – Part 2/2,” 

(2) See Vasanas: Preparing For Ascension by Clearing Old Issues at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Vasanas-Preparing-for-Ascension-R3.pdf

(3) With acknowledgment on this subject to Werner Erhard.

Steve Beckow

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Bent Twigs Incline Trees

Bent Twigs Incline Trees

by Steve Beckow

Posted on July 26, 2023

 


When I look back on the differences between my father’s WWII generation and my own, their Depression and then their war experiences seem to have colored their demeanor.

Disciplined, cooperative, focused on a goal that everyone could get behind, they loved nothing more than to get together after work and cajole and reminisce.

They swaggered and lived in their stories. As far as they were concerned, what they achieved in the war was the pinnacle of their lives.

And it may very well have been.

And I don’t blame them. My Dad risked his life every day in the belly of a ship. No chance for survival if a torpedo hit.

What they knew about relationship they learned from the boys or from the services.

At night, I’d hear all the other boys on the block getting whacked by their sergeant-majors … uhhh, fathers. How could men who fought for liberty come home and enforce their will upon their children? That always escaped me.

They didn’t seem concerned with the Big Questions. They seemed just to want to live and enjoy life. The American Dream was born.

***

I’d have to leave it to someone else to describe some of the traits of my own generation, the boomers. Whatever I said about it would be heavily self-serving.

By the time historians turn to it, it won’t be necessary. We’ll have devices that will allow us to view historic events as they happened. (They already exist on the astral planes.) (1)

What did I learn from all that? I came out in favor of the underdog. I learned to respect free will. And I resolved that I was going to stop the intergenerational transfer of atrocious qualities (Michael calls them “learned lineage behaviours”) (2)  in my family.

Emergence from plotting, manipulating, and enforcing was my aim growing up. Fortunately at the same time I was emerging, we had the growth movement. I was able to benefit from encounter groups, est Trainings, and enlightenment intensives to expedite that process.

***

It wasn’t until I saw the purpose of life, on Feb. 13, 1987, (3) and came to know what love is, on March 13, 2015, (4) that all the suffering in our lives began to make sense to me.

With the vision of the purpose of life, I now knew where all this was going, where it was not going, and what my task in relation to it was.

The purpose? We travel from God to God for a fateful meeting. When we realize ourselves, God meets God. And for that meeting was all of this made.

My job is to do what I just did: Write about it!

With the heart opening, I had a taste of what awaited us at journey’s end. Just a hint. I see a Walt Disney chef flashing the OK sign and saying, between two fingers, “A soupçon!”

I’ve said repeatedly that my life started at that moment.  Think Scrooge on Christmas Day!  I got it! I got it! THIS is what we’re all looking for! And all we want to do when we find it is share it.

When I look back and ask myself, why all the suffering? I recall the story of the owner of the Hard Rock Cafe, asking his guru why it was necessary for him to suffer so many deaths in his family. The guru answered, “To open your heart.”

OK, I get that too. And it did. Hopefully it opened it enough to turn me into a useful humanitarian philanthropist.

***

Whenever I feel that love, my qualms and complaints disappear in an instant. But I’m weeping now when I look back on all my fumbling efforts, angry behavior, disappointment, and insularity.

All because of my wrong choices when growing up in the war zone my early family was. Vasanas (core issues) – bent twigs incline trees…. (5)

When I finish forgiving the outside world for imagined wrongs, I’ll have much to forgive in myself.

Footnotes

(1) All the quotes that follow are available in New Maps of Heaven at https://goldengaiadb.com/index.php?title=New_Maps_of_Heaven.

This is just one type of museum exhibit in the Higher Summerlands, Astral Planes:

“At length a blue mist began to fill the central space. Then a ray of light swept round the hall and rested on the globe which represented the earth. As it hovered about it the sphere appeared to absorb the ray and became luminous, and, after a time, the ray being withdrawn, we saw the earth globe was shining as if from within. Then another ray was sent on to it of a deeper and different kind and the globe slowly left the pedestal, or pivot, or whatever it rested on and began to float out from the wall.

“As it approached the centre of the space it entered the blue mist and immediately on contact began to enlarge until it became a great sphere glowing with its own light and floating in the blue space. It was exceedingly beautiful. Slowly, very slowly, it revolved on its own axis, evidently in the same way the earth does and we were able to see the oceans and continents. These were flat patterns, like those on the terrestrial globes used on earth. But as it revolved they began to assume a different aspect.

“The mountains and hills began to stand out and the waters to sway and ripple: and presently we saw minute models of the cities, and even details of the buildings. And still more detailed grew the model of the earth till we could see the people themselves, first the crowds and then the individuals. This will be hard for you to understand, that on a globe of some perhaps eighty to a hundred feet in diameter we are able to see individual men and animals. But that is part of the science of this institution – the enabling of these details being seen individually.

“Still more distinct grew these wonderful scenes, and, as the globe revolved, we saw men hurrying about the cities and working in the fields. We saw the wide spaces of prairie and desert and forest and the animals roaming in them. And as the globe slowly circled we saw the oceans and the seas, some placid and the others tossing and roaring, and here and there a ship. And all the life of earth passed before our eyes….

“Soon the scenes began to change on the revolving sphere and we were taken back thousands of years of the life of the earth and the generations of men and animals and plant life which had been from the present to the ages when men were just emerging from the forest to settle in colonies on the plains. … When we had satisfied our eyes for a while, the globe gradually became smaller and smaller and floated back to the niche in the wall and then the light faded out from it and it looked like an alabaster carving, just as we had seen it at first, set there as an ornament.” (The mother of G. Vale Owen quoted in Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, Many Mansions. (London, etc.: Rider and Co., n.d. , 57-9.)

In the libraries are books by famous people, in which they correct earthly accounts and say what really happened. Monsignor Hugh Benson tells us that:

“The histories of nations and events [are there], with the facts set down in strict accordance with the absolute truth written by men who now find that equivocation is impossible.” (Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson through Anthony Borgia, medium, Life in the World Unseen. M.A.P., 1993, 118.)

“The reader would be able to gain, for the first time, the truth about the history of his country. Every word contained in these books was the literal truth, Concealment is impossible, because nothing but truth can enter these realms.” (Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, ibid., 47.)

Their books are not like ours; theirs “come alive,” Monsignor Benson explains.

“The books thus produced are not dead things that require a concentration of the whole mind upon them. They live just as much as the paintings we saw were living. To pick up a book and begin reading it meant also to perceive with the mind, in a way not possible on earth, the whole story as it was being told, whether it be history or science, or the arts. The book, once taken in hand by the reader, instantly responds, in very much the same way as the flowers respond when one approaches close to them. The purpose is different of course.” (Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, ibid., 49-50.)

Rev. Mattson tells us:

“The time comes when you no longer want to go around in a regular library and get information in this way. Your own thinking and your own progress give you a desire to get information a quicker way. We can then go to memory-bank reference libraries, which contain records of everything that has ever happened.” (Ruth Mattson Taylor, ed., Witness from Beyond. New Cosmic Concepts on Death and Survival from the Late A.D. Mattson, S.T.D., through the Clairvoyant Margaret Flavell Tweddell. Portland, ME: Foreword Books, 1975, 86.)

(2) The whole quotation is noteworthy:

AAM: You fall into reactive, shall we say, learned lineage behaviours.

But even underneath that is that what you are truly afraid of is a deeper level of intimacy, a deeper level of exposure of your sacred self, of your heart, of your feelings.

So there is some fear and there is some defensiveness, self defence enough in this reactivity. So what you have done is you have allowed some old patterns, learned from your parents, to come to distract you from these fears.

And so what you do is you bring your attention to, “Oh, I don’t want to behave that way!” And you bring your attention to resolving that issue rather than looking at the underlying one which is truly the fear of greater intimacy and in that greater intimacy, the greater knowing and connection to your heart, to your being, to your purpose and to who you are.
 (AAM, March 28, 2018.)

(3) See 
“The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment – Ch. 13 – Epilogue” in The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment at http://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Purpose-of-Life-is-Enlightenment.pdf

(4)  See “Submerged in Love,” March 14, 2015, in An Ascension Ethnography at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/An-Ascension-Ethnography-5.pdf, and after.

(5) On the journey out from under our vasanas, see Vasanas: Preparing For Ascension by Clearing Old Issues at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Vasanas-Preparing-for-Ascension-R3.pdf

Steve Beckow