But I AM Entitled

But I AM Entitled

By Steve Beckow

Posted on December 7, 2023

But I AM entitled!

I’m staring at this huge vein of entitlement that I have. White, male, college-educated, lives in a supposedly democratic country, on and on. I’m entitled.

You may say, well, just wake up. But it goes far deeper than the conscious mind.

I described these earlier as automatic behavior patterns that are habitual. They’re the precipitate of our core issues, or vasanas, the residue. (1)

It takes considerable concentration and commitment to catch ourselves acting one out. And even more to raise it to awareness, acknowledge it, and then stop acting on it.

One element of entitlement is complaining. I caught myself acting entitled at the drug store a few hours ago, when I shared that I’d purchased 40 batteries from Costco, whose best-before date was March 2025, and not one of the forty worked.

It wasn’t what I said. It was the sense of entitlement I felt below what I said. Following those instincts, one ends up a snob. Uhhhh…. I’d better check that one out!

***

The ultimate mystery here is that our society gets across the message, in movies and television, that no one likes a snob. And yet people choose to be snobbish.  And not just lords and ladies. Celebrities, financiers, academics, even doctors.

The only explanation for that that I can find, when I consult my own memory bank, is that snobbishness feels good.  Feeling important, feeling needed, feeling able all feel good. And we seek the pleasurable, feel-good feelings.

One of the themes of Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America was a young African prince, who had everything, and yet continually rose above temptation and saw beyond the ephemeral feel-good moment. Most of us have as many temptations we yield to as some people have bottles of liquor. We’re entitled. We don’t rise above temptation. We cater to it.

I haven’t risen above temptation, I say snacking on a bowl of chocolate ice cream. I’m not detached. I give in to the temptation to consider myself entitled to respect, good service, a reliable product, whatever.

And I attempt to force my will on the other person … and predictably everything goes off the rails. And I look stupid. And I eat crow.

But I do it again and again. Just a bit better at it. Until I don’t.

Arrogance, self-righteousness, privilege all feel good. Hermann Goering, before his execution, said, “Oh well. I had twelve good years.” Can you imagine? He felt good by  and while murdering millions. That’s how deeply some people want to feel good, to enjoy themselves on a purely physical level (possessions, experiences, adventures), no matter how many people they harm. Unrestrained pleasure-seeking.

Our desire to feel good, to enjoy ourselves, to feel pleasure, if we don’t weigh it against our reasons for being here, sends us off on one “scenic detour” after another.  And then we … OK, I … wonder why I’m ineffectual.

***

Entitlement is constrictive, constraining, densifying. It’s insulting to the person we’re being entitled with. It invites short-term resistance and long-term karma. It has no relationship to love, which is on a different plane of consciousness. (2)

I really have to get so sick of it and myself for going that route that I stop the minute I catch a whiff of it.

Or laugh about it. Or love it and apologize to it for giving it such a miserable assignment. Or ask the Mother to repurpose the energy. I could do a hundred things.

Of them all, the one that moves me to action is realizing that very soon I’ll be a CEO and it’ll be harder with all that wealth to do the work needed to end this behavior pattern.

My sense of entitlement could mushroom.  And what used to hold me back will in large measure be absent. Things then will very much depend on which wolf I feed.

Do it now. Don’t play with your future and that of a lot of others. Do the work while it’s still manageable….

Footnotes

(1) See Vasanas: Preparing For Ascension by Clearing Old Issues at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Vasanas-Preparing-for-Ascension-R8.pages.pdf

(2)  Steve: The space that I call transformative love, what dimension is it?

Archangel Michael: It is the seventh dimension.  (Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Jan. 20, 2016.)

Steve Beckow 

• 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

• https://goldenageofgaia.com/

I, Robot: The Mechanism of Self-Interest

I, Robot: The Mechanism of Self-Interest

By Steve Beckow

Posted on May 3, 2023

I’m watching how deeply my self-serving bias goes and, oh, my, it goes right down to basic, vote-changing, decision-making level.

Prime Directive: All decisions must support me.

Everything else flows from that.

Of course I assume that everyone else acts in the same self-serving way.

I treat people differently: When I see a friend acting self-servingly, I turn away. But when I see a “foe,” I watch closely and mentally take notes.

And afterwards, if there’s any fallout from my self-serving actions, I apply a goodly dose of guilt and shame that cements over the cracks in the constructed self that emerges.

How can I look out there and see corruption when I corrupt myself many times a day? I even watch myself listen self-servingly to myself saying that. What self-serving use can I make of that admission?

Everything, everything is seen through this self-serving lens.

It’s true to say that way, way below it lies self-love. I can feel it now whereas a decade ago I could not.

But that love of self has to come up through many layers (bodies, dimensions, whatever) to be felt at the surface. Or one has had a heart opening and so there is some back-and-forth communication of love.

By the time it reaches the surface, it’s overwhelmed by superficial but strong currents of self-interest. In the past, it has never been expressed. It hasn’t reached that level.

So, therefore, I cannot say I’m fully self-expressed. My self-servingness limits my expression to only what serves me. It shapes my expression in that I subject the “truth” to expression which serves me – words, inflection, timing, etc.

All of this is done with high intention. I might call it “making a good impression.” Or “putting my best face on.” Or “putting my best foot forward.”

I have in reserve justifications, excuses, and denials to buttress my position if challenged.

Rather than being an urban monk, I’m really more like a Ninja Turtle.

***

The worst part of the self-serving bias is that it requires me to hide.  And that triggers off a whole array of mechanisms – withholding, deflecting, redirecting, etc. – to keep what’s hidden hidden as well as hiding the fact that I’m hiding.

I no longer present myself. I present my “mechanism,” I, Robot.

None of this will fly on the Fifth Dimension, where the truth can be seen in our aura. Mind you, we won’t “need” anything on the Fifth Dimension either, so the need to be self-serving (to serve our survival) will go away.

I think a person ages over time – for however much longer we do age over time – in great measure because they become more and more narrowly self-serving.

That’s one experiment I don’t intend to run to find out.

Steve Beckow

• https://goldenageofgaia.com/