“You know … it could be so easy with all that is going on to just become a recluse. Many feel this way and unless things change … the great ‘unpricked’ cannot go anywhere in public anyway, so reclusive lifestyle is suiting many. Just keeping themselves to themselves.” (1)
I just realized this morning that I’m going past simply responding to a lockdown. I’m cocooning. I’ve foregone almost all contact and I’m loving what’s coming from the relative solitude. (2)
I’m choosing to create the time for me to pause and, given this is an Ascension ethnography, reflect on where I’m at in my own Ascension and what the road has been to get here.
I’m reviewing some of the steps in my own emergence. I don’t intend this to be a complete history. It’s more what in a discussion group would have been called a thread.
First I need to dip back into history to set the stage.
My Dad, fresh back from World War II, travelling in the boiler rooms of ships that faced being torpedoed at any moment (certain death for him), was a rough and temperamental man.
When I was seven, he shouted at me from a few inches from my face and I shattered into a million pieces. All I remember from that moment is the sight of his face in my face.
I became the Humpty Dumpty Man, not sure of what happened to me, not sure of the ground under my feet, not sure of anything.
From what I know of my Dad’s past, he was traumatized by his father and so it probably went back through time, visiting the sins of the fathers on the children.
Once my Dad lunged at the whole family with a kitchen knife. My older brother grabbed his arm and threw him down the basement stairs. That was the end of that.
I grew up not wanting to be a father. These traumatic incidents were the only movies I had in my head and I did not want to visit them on anybody else. I dreaded the thought of being a father.
Meanwhile I grew up in a house of mirrors. With the women in my life who loved me, I mirrored back what I received. When it came my time to share, I had no idea of what to do and so the relationships failed.
But this is what guys do, right? They get married, have children, settle down. No. I didn’t want that. On the eve of my first marriage, I turned to my brother and said, I don’t want to do this. He replied, it’s just nerves. No, it wasn’t.
Within me there was a counter-current. I wanted to be studying, making notes, and writing about it. Just leave me alone. I’m organizing my card files. I just want to get my card files onto a mag card. I want to take my box of IBM punch cards down to the university print shop and print them off. Have you seen my floppy disks? I just want to study.
Why can’t I do both?
These have been the three struggles in my life: (A) To put Humpty together again; (B) To find out why my relationships always failed; and (C) To create a life where I’m free to do what I now see as my life’s work, my mission, my path in life, free of the boxes I myself create out of ignorance of the situation.
***
There have been so many women who’ve tried to get through to me and I bow to them all. I am flooded with thoughts of things I would have done differently.
At age 69, I came to know what it undoubtedly was that the women in my life had wanted.
On that day, because Michael decided that was the time (please note, all ye who seek it in the desert: ask and ye shall receive), my heart opened. Not like bambie and jingling bells, but like a battleship’s main guns.
I can only remember lingering impressions now, my memory is so bad (go, med beds!), but I was left awash in an inner tsunami of love that swept from me, well, everything that was not, in essence, me. I was swept clean. It was a hallelujah moment!
I was being bathed in the River Jordan. All of this is recorded on the blog, much better than I can remember it. (3)
My heart had been opened and I learned what real love was. Not what passes for it on this dimension, as good as that can get.
No, this was a world beyond. This is a world which is not dreamed of in our philosophy.
Our intellectual world cannot grasp it. But let me not make a detour.
Events led on and eventually I found myself in an Ocean of Love.
Here’s my description at the time of the first of two experiences of it:
“I’ve just had a spiritual experience that I made notes of as it happened. Thank heavens, I did. … Had I not written it down, I’m not sure that I’d have remembered it.
“The space of love and bliss that I was in then seemed unshakeable. I noticed that, while in it, I made choices, but had no preferences. I was in what [Lao-Tzu, Ramana] and Krishnamurti called choiceless awareness. (4) Just being here with nothing added. Acting without acting. Remaining centered. Doing what worked and whatever I did worked.
“I saw then, a little more strongly than I do now – since I’m not in that space any longer – that I’m entirely a form made by love from itself, immersed in a sea of love.
[I’d now characterize it as a point of awareness in a sea of love, the Father in matter, mater, Mother.]
“I saw all traces of ‘me and mine’ and ‘I want’ (ego and desire) disappear. All self-importance and strong desire left.
“The fact that I had no preferences was very important. It isn’t that preferences as preferences are bad. It’s that preference is a form of strong and persistent desire that takes us away from the the center point, the stillpoint, the heart.
“We distract ourselves endlessly from the love that we are and that’s present in our hearts. And then we wonder why we feel so low or down or awful.” (5)
(To be concluded in Part 2, tomorrow.)
Footnotes
(1) “The Federation of Light via Blossom Goodchild, Nov. 23, 2021,”
(2) I’m not cocooning from the blog. I’m taking it as far as I can, but practically speaking. Just increasing the quiet and allowing myself time to reflect, much as I’m doing here.
(3) See “Submerged in Love,” March 14, 2015, at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/03/14/submerged-in-love/
“Activating the Wellspring – Part 1/2,” March 14, 2015, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/03/14/activating-the-wellspring-part-1-2-2/
“Activating the Wellspring – Part 2/2,” March 15, 2015, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/03/15/activating-the-wellspring-part-2-2/
(4) Lao Tzu: “Let this monkey go. Let the senses go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go. Let ideas go. Let the fiction of life and death go. Just remain in the center, watching. And then forget that you are there.” (Lao-Tzu in Hua Hu Ching. The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu. trans. Brian Walker. San Francisco: Harper, 1992, 13.)
Ramana: “Effortless and choiceless awareness is our real state. If we can attain it or be in it, it is all right. But one cannot reach it without effort, the effort of deliberate meditation.” (Sri Ramana Maharshi, Gems from Bhagavan. Comp. A. Devaraja Mudaliar. Tiruvannamalai: Sri Ramanasramam, 1985, chapter 8.)
Krishnamurti: “Awareness, without any choice, of the ways of the mind, is the beginning of meditation.” (J. Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living. First Series. Bombay, etc.: B.I. Publications, 1972; c1974, 1, 84.)
(5) “Immersed in an Ocean of Love – Part 2/2,” May 17, 2015, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/05/17/immersed-ocean-love-part-22/.