Credit: upliftconnect.com
On Sept. 23, 2016, Archangel Michael and I had the following exchange in a reading through Linda Dillon:
Steve Beckow: Lord, what is the difference between consciousness and love? None right?
Archangel Michael: None. You are correct.
Steve: How are we going to get our heads around this Lord…hearts … or anything else? How are we going to understand these things? They are so much higher than we can get our heads around.
AAM: It is not something … there has been this slow dawning and that has been underway for some time. You’ve had this experience. There is this slow dawning so that expansion, expansion, expansion, expansion [occurs] and then you reach the point of that expansion – that’s stretching – but then you [become] capable of having that “aha” moment. And that “aha” moment is what many have referred to as “turning on the switch.”
Steve: Yes, realizational knowledge….
AAM: Yes.
Steve: Self-Realization is just a bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger realization but these “aha” moments are still realization.
AAM: That is correct.
Steve: Interesting, the whole thing is so interesting. (1)
Archangel Michael here describes the process of what I think of as “dawning awareness.” If intense enough, it’s been known to trigger enlightenment.
He chooses to focus on the expansion, expansion, expansion that occurs in the individual until, as he puts it, they are “capable of having that ‘aha’ moment.” I call that “Aha!” moment “realization” and he calls it “turning on the switch.” Same thing.
I choose not to focus on that aspect of the experience – the expansion – as much as on the levels of knowledge we go through. Someone else might choose to focus on how it feels, etc. We’ll all choose the aspect of such an important topic we want to look at.
Back to me. The levels of knowledge we go through are (A) intellectual, (B) experiential, and (C) realizational. (2) Let me illustrate it from our exchange above. I can understand at an intellectual level that an “Aha!” moment is just as much a realization as, say, Self-Realization, if lesser in intensity. (3)
But as long as it resides as only intellectual knowledge, its impact on me is superficial; my grasp of it is not deep. There’s little significance brought to my life by “knowing” it. It remains, as I said, “interesting.”
If I can feel that an “Aha!” moment is every bit as much realization as Self-Realization, different only in intensity, that would be more memorable for me. I describe it elsewhere as being “juicier” than merely intellectual knowledge. The experiential level is the first at which I could say I’ve stopped eating the menu and I’m now eating the meal.
If I can realize the commonality of an “Aha!” moment and a moment of Self-Realization, it would likely have the power to knock me off my feet for a period of time and definitely totally reorient my life – as my 1987 vision of a soul’s journey did.
Footnotes
(1) Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Sept. 23, 2016.
(2) Folks familiar with Werner Erhard’s levels of certainty (also called dimensions of knowing) from the est Training will recognize my debt to it. My levels of knowledge are the same as Werner’s movement up the ladder of certainty from thoughts to feelings to natural knowing (realization).
(3) Let me use the term “Self-Realization” here to refer to Brahmajnana, God-Realization, Kevalya Nirvikalpa Samadhi, or seventh-chakra enlightenment.