Every parent or spouse abusing another invites a circumstance of maladaptation in the one abused. We start out in life as angels and we may at some point become fallen angels, so to speak, in our own minds and in those of some in society.
This invites such additional circumstances as low self-esteem, increasing denial, and losing touch with ourselves. This we have to recover from.
To emerge from the circumstance of maladaptation invites a process of dawning awareness leading to a further process of progressive realization.
Werner Erhard called realization “getting it.” (1) When we “get” our number, our act, our mechanicalness in a process of realization, we have a chance to be free of it.
The truth is not trivial. It has the power to set us free. The process I’m about to describe is how we may escape that quagmire – the maladaptation, core issue, or head vasana we’ve created. As always, I illustrate the process by sharing about myself.
I call the self that arises when we maladapt the “constructed self.” And this series of essays is about escaping it. I’m relating to you the process I followed.
This is part of my lightworker service – to illustrate emerging from core issues, the constructed self, etc., as part of collective healing. The overall process in which this takes place I call “emergence” (2) and I’m following the path of awareness. (3)
The Start of the Process in the Guides’ Reading Through Andrea
The process of dawning awareness and progressive realization was set off by Andrea Scully’s guides saying I had a “split” that I needed to heal. Here is what they said:
“Inside the box of ‘Steve’s story’ and history … is a split concerning both gender and also the desire for intimacy and his longing to fulfill his completeness with physical intimacy. …
“The ability to be intimate is boxed in by these sort of beliefs and will only interfere with the highest potential of what partnership has to offer. This will be so until the inappropriate splitting is released.
“There is a new way forward for all in these times and the challenges are such that the old ideas about relations of all types can and should be shed for creating new ways of being.” (4)
They might have called the split a “split personality” and it would have been true. When we split our personality, our awareness decreases and we may not be aware of the split.
I’ve been relentlessly pursuing that split ever since that reading, as I said I would. It’s been helped by the kind ministrations of friends who gave me feedback.
We’re only invisible to ourselves. Everyone else sees us.
The Jekyll-and-Hyde Split
The present split is is not the first I‘ve had in my life. The original occurred when my Dad shouted at me from within inches of my face at around age 7-10. (5) I shattered into a million pieces and became the Humpty Dumpty Man for the next fifty years of my life. That was not a split personality but a shattered one, leaving me with no solid ground to build on.
But out of that I now see gradually developed another split. We all have a love of drama so let me be dramatic about it and call it my Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, my good side and my dark side. That may bring a bit of notoriety, and I don’t wish the metaphor to be carried too far, but the metaphor is well-understood and it’s useful.
Some people have killed themselves before they expose their core issue. Other people would rather yield to blackmail than risk the exposure of theirs. So core issues are nothing to laugh about, except in distant retrospect.
I personally would just rather say it and be done with it. It only hurts for a second and then there is peace.
Jekyll was the side of me that was unnecessarily obsequious. Its desire was to fly low under the radar of abuse, to be undetected and unobserved. It was needy, bent over backwards to please and placate, and could not stand its ground very well.
Hyde was the brute that came out in the face of perceived slight, being ignored, getting frustrated, and getting angry. Hyde was always justified, saw itself as standing on principle, and threw caution to the wind.
There was a choicepoint between the two and it has now become the most important thing in my life to see that choicepoint, stop at it, and not venture past it.
The typification of Jekyll and Hyde is accurate on some levels, though it cannot be taken too far without losing its truth value. No, I didn’t haunt taverns or do bad things to people. But I was a fearsome creature and people had to walk on eggshells around me.
You remember the story of the karate dojo? I shaved off my beard one day in perhaps 1973, went to the dojo and a fellow student who had always kept a respectable distance began crowding me in sparring.
I asked him where he suddenly had developed these skills and he replied: “Steve, Steve, is that you? If I’d have known, I would never have crowded you.” That this excellent sparring partner had, unknown to me, revealed that he had been keeping his distance gave me a measure of how fearsome I was in those days.
I’m using the Jekyll and Hyde motif as a metaphor. I’m standing “etherically naked” (6) before you. A dash of drama seldom hurts if it makes the point and helps the medicine go down. And this is the way to be deeply known. I want to be known.
Calling it that also emphasizes how the two sides would morph almost seamlessly, one having one effect and the other having an entirely different effect. They morphed at the choicepoint.
(To be continued tomorrow.)
Footnotes
(1) “Every position or point of view we have can be said to have a ‘cost’ (reckoned in terms of aliveness) and a ‘payoff.’ ‘Getting it’ means being able to discover when you have been maintaining (or are stuck with) a position which costs you more in aliveness than it is worth, realizing that you are the source of that position, and being able to choose to give up that position or hold it in a way that expands the quality of your life.
“Living becomes a continuing and expanding discovery of positions or barriers to your and others’ aliveness, with the attendant opportunity to handle those positions and barriers. The result of this continuing process of choosing or ‘getting it’ is an expanded experience of happiness, love, health, and full self-expression.” (Questions people ask about the est Training. est, 1977, n.p.)
(2) See the essays under “Emergence” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/emergence-2/.
(3) See the Essays under “The Path of Awareness” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/the-path-of-awareness/.
(4) “Healing the Primary Break and Becoming Whole Again,” Jan. 1, 2013, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2013/01/01/healing-the-primary-break-and-becoming-whole-again/
(5) Personal reading with Steve Beckow and his guides through Andrea Scully, Sept. 9, 2014.
(6) “Archangel Michael: I See You! I Love You! I Will Engage,” Nov. 7, 2013, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/spiritual-essays/the-role-of-twin-flames/archangel-michael-i-see-you-i-love-you-i-will-engage/.