Workshop area at Cold Mountain Institute
My life is a workshop in awareness.
My agreement is to remain aware of myself.
My process involves observing, noticing, and sharing.
Viewed from a cultural-historical standpoint, my notes are an Ascension ethnography – a biography or narrative of one person’s slow and gradual, and sometimes sudden, Ascension process.
Right now, I’m noticing the impact of the “hollowing-out” event I just went through. So flattened was I that I could see what I’d been building, below awareness, in what Werner Erhard called “the background of obviousness.”
I saw my self-importance, arrogance, and pretense. I couldn’t stand the sight of it.
And it’s the impact of that sudden awareness of facade, of empty posturing that I wanted to write about.
There’s been a change in me as a result of this dawning awareness. It’s very hard to put in words. I feel more self-confident. I feel more capable. I feel more down-to-Earth, grounded, present.
A lot of the flutters in my stomach are gone. I’m not protecting an image now. Doing so sets up an elaborate network of inner sensors and analysts that make the mind busy and noisy forever.
I’m not seeking anything. Large amounts of money will be passing through my hands (as through yours) on their way to fund – in my case – universal basic incomes in countries that want them. The Reval is just the beginning, apparently.
And I don’t feel a desire for anything in return, more than my living expenses. There’s nothing (very much) I want.
Grief took me to such a low level that nothing mattered any more. I got to see my striving for security, recognition, validation, etc., in relief and it was all empty and vain.
None of it had the inherent value that, for instance, love and bliss do.
On the awareness path, the focus of activity lies in raising things to awareness. Once they’re up to awareness, they usually take care of themselves.
I theorize that awareness is not neutral, as we may think it is; it’s dissolutive (apparently I invented the word). It dissolves emotional blockages and muscular tension. The truth has set us free.
When my self-importance was raised to awareness, I had a conscious experience of it. That was freeing.
And I got to see its downside as well, like the way I felt when I was behaving self-importantly. I certainly didn’t feel loving. I felt self-righteous, brittle. If awareness is dissolutive, self-importance is corrosive.
As the realization unfolded, I felt an increased degree of genuine self-confidence. It was a deep and solid feeling. Don’t ask me how it’s all connected. The “upgrade” didn’t come with a manual.
Please see the irony in this: The less self-important I am, the more confident I am. Should it not be the other way around? The more self-important I am, the more self-confident I am, right?
It turns out not to be the case. The more I stand aside and get out of my own way, the greater my sense of competence and capability. It makes sense. The more the ego stands aside, the more the Self, the Higher Self, our guides, etc., can reach and guide the everyday consciousness (the spirit operator of the body).
Michael once asked me to “dream big.” (1) I feel more capable of doing that after being hollowed out.
He also said: “You have reached a point in your heart, in your being, in your life, in your consciousness where you are realizing … the magnitude of our partnership.” (2)
Yes, I am.
So a diminution of the ego results in an increase in self-confidence, which allows us to take on the exact same assignments that the ego craved. The ego would not have been able to meet the demands of those assignments whereas the everyday consciousness freed of the ego can. (3)
I now feel comfortable contemplating the road ahead where two weeks ago I’d have felt nervous. If you’d have asked me a month ago how I’d get to this place from where I was, I wouldn’t have had any idea.
There’s less of me around now and I feel much better for it. (4)
Footnotes
(1) “We want you to dream big.” (Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, July 1, 2016.)
(2) Ibid., Aug. 17, 2018.
(3) As much as anyone can ever be free of the ego.
(4) This process is an instance of personal cleansing, from which I’ve emerged with less of myself around.