I said some years ago that I needed to make some distinctions to help underpin a rebirth of personal development.

Here I’d like to distinguish between two classic avenues of unfoldment of our human potential: human growth and spirituality.

The first is body-centered as well as intellectual and manifested most clearly, in the West, in the human growth or human potential movement of the 1960-70s.

It sought to raise our sights from the merely intellectual to (the intellectual plus) the emotional/experiential. Remember the ladder of the dimensions of knowledge: intellectual, experiential, and realizational.

From the experiential, we were deemed to be well-positioned for realization. We were standing at the bus stop, so to speak. The rest was deemed to be up to God.

Bernadette Roberts: At a certain point, when we have done all we can (to bring about an abiding union with the divine), the divine steps in and takes over. (1)

Sri Ramana Maharshi: Your efforts can extend only thus far. Then the Beyond will take care of itself. You are helpless there. No effort can reach it. (2)

Looking back on that viewpoint, it isn’t that it’s wrong. But it seems now very incomplete. (3)

Cold Mountain Institute, whose three-month resident fellowship I attended in 1975-76, specialized in deepening our experiential knowledge by showing us how to release bodily and intellectual blocks.

They said they didn’t work with sick people getting well – per se. They weren’t (all) doctors and nutritionists. They worked with well people getting better.

They didn’t emphasize spiritual inquiry or practices as such. They might in passing and they might include a meditation or a “psychic” workshop in their residential retreats. But what they contributed to the pool of human knowledge by and large was the art of grounding us in our bodies and releasing our muscular and intellectual blocks.

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The next stage after the experiential is the realizational.

The spiritual or realizational picks up where human growth leaves off.  It focuses on that which is in and operates the body – the unseen spirit.

It takes those “better” people, who still hunger for even more, and introduces them to the “even more.”

Courses might be offered in spiritual centers or a live-in option may be available at an ashram.

An ashram would specialize in deepening our consciousness state, through instruction in such spiritual pursuits as meditation or yoga.

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“The spirit” turns out to be a Babushka doll: each dimension – and beyond – has a “body.”  Having gotten to know our own physical bodies in the human-growth work, we now get to know our other “bodies.” (4)

When it’s time, the spiritual calling happens in many ways. When I meditated on an Indian guru, whom I was later to visit, I experienced shaktipat, which I’m told translates as the bestowal of grace upon a follower.  His face came speeding out of the distance and hit my third eye.

I left the bedroom, dazed, and went into the kitchen and said to my then girlfriend, “Wow, you should see what just happened to me.” And she replied, “I can see. Go look in the mirror.” And, when I looked, my hair was standing on end.

It can start with a book falling off the shelf, a stray mention of a website, a sudden opening or vision. When your guides, archangel, and the Mother want to wake you up, they will. Well, they already have because you’re here and this is both a growth and a spiritual site. And we don’t advertise. We let Michael and the Mother bring whom they will.

And what about spiritual teachings on enlightenment? Social media has changed the spiritual landscape. We don’t have to travel to India or Japan any more.  And they don’t have to travel to us.  And, besides, with the Ring of Fire or Wave of Love, everyone’s heart will be opened – for a while. What life will be like then I can hardly imagine. Imagine the whole world in deep, deep love.

I’m deeply grateful to my guides who arranged to have me do intensive human-growth work first and then introduced me to the spiritual.  I’d been reading spiritual books before this time but these days saw my first intentional actions, which were taken in growth.

I hope to see a return of the human growth movement after G/NESARA. Without it, spiritual work can sometimes, in the beginning phases at least, feel superficial.

If I skipped working with my body, I’d feel a lack of depth. I’d remain on the surface. But all that’s another article!

Footnotes

(1) Bernadette Roberts, “The Path to No-Self” in Stephan Bodian, ed. Timeless Visions, Healing Voices. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1991, 131.

(2) Sri Ramana Maharshi, Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Question 197. Downloaded from https://www.ramana-maharshi.org/books.htm, 31 August 2005.

(3) For instance, we know more about the partnership that enlightenment involves. See Grandeur Beyond Grandeur: 
Toward a Cross-Cultural Spirituality Vol. 6: Our Enlightenment and Co-Creative Partnership at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Grandeur-Beyond-Grandeur-Enlightenment-and-Co-Creative-Partnership-6-4.pdf

(4) You could say we have no body above the Tenth or in the Transcendental. That’s also a way of seeing things that works. It ends up in the same place.

When I was in the Ocean of Love (seventh-dimensional), I was aware of myself as a point of awareness. This point of awareness that I was was differentiated from the Ocean of Love – which “I” was “in.”

That individuated point of awareness I still consider and refer to as a “body.”  On the Ocean of Love, search on that term in An Ascension Ethnography – Part 1 at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/An-Ascension-Ethnography-V1-R2.pdf  Michael has verified that the tsunami of love I was in after the fourth-chakra heart opening on March 13, 1987 opened into the seventh dimension. I assume that the Ocean of Love that I ended up in at the end of that particular experience was at least seventh-dimensional. (There were no road signs.)

Michael says;

Steve: The space that I call transformative love, what dimension is it?

Archangel Michael: It is the seventh dimension.

Steve: Then what dimension is bliss?

AAM: It is between eight and nine.

Steve: And ecstasy?

AAM: Twelfth.

Steve: And what about exaltation?

AAM: Then you have moved beyond. (Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Jan. 20, 2016.)