Paul, right, and adoring younger bro
I continue to feel the need to contextualize my life so as to get the sweep of what’s currently happening for me.
I’m in the midst of a transition from being an old grump to being happy.
A lot of it seems foreign to me. I need to get my bearings.
Hopefully the article will resonate with some people who are also going through transitions, as all of us will, eventually.
I recently came across a photo album belonging to my Dad in which he wrote: “1946 Birth of my second son, Stephen, who had excema when he was a baby. ‘Waaaah!’ When were we going to be able to get some sleep?”
They tied me to the sides of the crib and wheeled me into the kitchen every night, there to be left overnight.
It represented my first psychic break – how can I trust anyone if I can’t trust my own parents to take care of me?
Dad was demeaning and rough. It turned out later in life that my older brother did not receive the same treatment. When I asked Dad why that was, he replied, “I don’t know, Stephen. I guess you looked like your Mother.” Oh my. Cold comfort, that.
The next psychic break came when Dad shouted at me from mere inches from my face. I shattered into a thousand pieces and became what I later called the Humpty Dumpty Man. I had no firm ground under my feet, no solid and stable personality.
Much violence, many threats, and much disrespect and disempowerment later, having by this time learned karate, I was given the opportunity to make the bad behavior stop.
My brother arranged for us to go to a gym together and asked me to show my Dad my karate.
I threw a sidekick at him that stopped an inch from his nose. Never again did I have to face his roughness or disrespect.
I did not know I was dissociated until age 40. It was at Expo 86 in Vancouver that my then-girlfriend (the “Manitoba farmgirl”) suddenly said to me, “Do you know you have the profile of an abused child?”
Two sides of me rose at once, looked at each other, so to speak, and said, simultaneously, “Who are you?”
I erupted in anger and stayed angry for perhaps two to three weeks. A river of fire was coming out of me. I kept to myself.
By this time I’d already begun an in-depth study of human behavior to get to the bottom of what “my problems” seemed to be.
Starting with Eric Berne’s Games People Play and going from psychology to anthropology, sociology, linguistics, history, and every other social science I could think of, I looked for what was “wrong” with me.
Everyone around me could see what it was. I was only invisible to myself.
In the course of it, I always made note of books referenced in the footnotes of sources I studied. I kept going to them. It didn’t take long before my nose was in the Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, and New Testament.
At the same time as this research was going on, I did growth work at Cold Mountain Institute, in the est Training, and in enlightenment intensives. While others were buying houses, I was buying workshops.
I’d met a stone wall in having cultural history accepted at the University of Toronto and ended up moving back to Vancouver and switching from History to Sociology.
You already know that, in the midst of my Sociology work, I had a vision of the total journey of an individual Soul or Child of God, from God to God. (1) That ended my university studies once and for all. After that, I only wanted to study enlightenment.
For the next ten years, I read only the works of enlightened authors. For ten years after that, I took what they wrote and composed the dictionary called From Darkness Unto Light (2) and the book The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment. (3)
Workwise, I wandered from pillar to post until I was offered a position as a Member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. There followed eight of the most meaningful years of my work life. That was an eye-opening introduction to what was happening in my world.
It wasn’t till age 58 that I finally put Humpty Dumpty together again. My brother Paul in Victoria allowed me to get furious at my Dad via long distance and I fused back together in the white heat I reached.
Interestingly one thing that made anger productive for me over the years was that I usually fused back together again for a short time when I got angry. It would be decades after the first time I noticed this before I recognized its significance.
Many spiritual experiences followed my first meeting with Archangel Michael in late 2010. Everything about my life picked up in tempo and depth. If the experiences weren’t written down, I’d never remember them.
But at age 68, in 2o15, I had the first experience I’m willing to call “enlightenment.”
It happened three hours before a reading with AAM. The kundalini began running up my leg. When it reached the fourth chakra, my heart exploded. (4)
An inner tsunami of love raced through me. NOW, for the first time in my life, I KNEW what love is. It took me till age 68. 68. Makes me want to cry.
During all the previous years, I’d had no idea what love was. I gave no love to anyone. Laughs, warmth, generosity. But, totally, no love.
Moreover, from earliest age, I’d been a complainer, an opponent, a scrapper – an all-round unpleasant character to wrangle with.
I didn’t cultivate the ways of happiness. Now I arrive at a time when I value love above all else. I no longer want to be creating drama and trauma. I want to be inviting and creating happiness.
I’ve also had experiences of higher-level peace, bliss, abundance, etc. I need no more convincing. I’m in my transition from sad to glad.
So you see me now cultivating the ways of happiness, reparenting myself in the area. And doing so has me engage in activities that are utterly new and foreign to me. Pardon me if I fumble along.
Gosh, I needed to say all that in one sitting, to put it all out there on the table, to get a bird’s-eye view.
I feel clear again about what’s happening for me and where I’m headed. Thank you for giving me a listening.
Footnotes
(1) “The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment – Ch. 13 – Epilogue,” at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2011/08/13/the-purpose-of-life-is-enlightenment-ch-13-epilogue/
(2) See https://goldengaiadb.com/index.php?title=From_Darkness_to_Light
(3) The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment, at https://gaog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Purpose-of-Life-is-Enlightenment.pdf
(4) Fourth-chakra experience = first enlightenment = spiritual awakening (Hindu), stream-entering (Buddhist).
Even though I knew my spiritual heart had exploded when the kundalini reached the fourth chakra, it wasn’t until a year later that I realized the significance of it. AAM revealed it, after I asked him where my kundalini was now:
Archangel Michael: I am suggesting that you are probably between the fourth and fifth [chakras].
Steve Beckow: But I haven’t had an experience of the fourth chakra [i.e., an enlightenment experience] that I’m aware of. Have I?
AAM: Oh, yes, you have!
SB: What would it have been? … The heart opening?
AAM: The heart opening is the blessing in which you became more clearly aware of your infinite, eternal Self.
SB: It didn’t happen in a blinding light or anything [as I expected].
AAM: No, it did not. (Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Apr. 24, 2015.)
On the experience itself, see “Submerged in Love,” March 14, 2015, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/03/14/submerged-in-love/
For a account of Bright’s Star’s heart opening, see “Bright Star: An Account of a Heart Opening,” December 29, 2017, https://goldenageofgaia.com/2017/12/29/bright-star-an-account-of-a-heart-opening/.