I’m an awareness writer whose mission it is to go up along with everyone else and write about it.
What awareness communicators usually share about is what they’ve noticed, experienced, remembered, realized, discovered, etc. – about themselves.
They don’t talk about others, except others’ awarenesses if they assisted us. They share about themselves and “compare notes” with others.
Because they focus on Self-Knowledge, which is the purpose of life, the mainstream media of the day dismissed them as “the Me Generation.” They were regarded as narcissists even though they were working consciously on the one request that God makes of us: Know Thyself. Lie down on your bed (meditate) and know that you are God.
There are things we don’t share and, as a class of things in the est Training, we called those “withholds.” Some withholds are necessary – for national security, proprietary secrecy, etc.
Others are too traumatic or controversial to share. But we pay a cost for not sharing them. We drag them around, fashion our lives about keeping them secret, “pass” in our society and remain unknown to others.
I’ve carried a secret around since 1978 because I’ve felt too abashed to share it. It sounds like a poor-little-rich-guy kind of thing whereas I just consider it interesting and something I have to deal with. If I knew someone to whom these events happened to, I’d want to hear their story. But they happened to me.
***
I was 31 and moving from job to job. This is when there were jobs, upward mobility in a company, pension plans, medical plans, paid vacations, the whole nine yards. And one university course cost, maybe, $300.
AND this was before the computer came into general use (I had an IBM Selectric Typewriter. In my mind, I was already a writer.)
Pretty snazzy, eh? 98 words a minute. Who cared about a fast car?
My mother was having coffee with an old friend, Ida, who happened to work for Employment Canada. They were discussing what might be having me move from job to job and company to company. So Ida arranged for me to have fourteen one-night-a-week tests to see what was happening.
For ten weeks, I wrote tests which asked me if I’d rather be a social worker or an airplane pilot. Then in the tenth week, it all changed. After that it seemed to be all IQ tests.
When we were finished, Dr. Brian Ferris, my psychological vocational consultant, called me in for a debriefing. I brought my then girlfriend and we recorded it. It’s really hard for me to share passages from the transcript. I don’t like being this visible, but it goes with the territory of being an awareness writer and a pathfinder.
Dr. Brian Ferris: I wanted to take a look at your capacity. So we began to do a series of tests. … Interestingly enough … your capacity for further learning where words are the key to the teaching is very strong, which you must have known. It’s higher than 97% of all university graduates … and you and I both know that we’ve lost a lot of people along the way. …
I decided we’d try to get away from test scores where your training or education in university could help you. … So what I did was I gave you the advanced form of the Raven Progressive Matrices. This is an intelligence test that I can give to an aborigine in Africa … or a UBC graduate and it will tell me their intelligence,
Steve Beckow: Was that the pattern recognition test?
BF: It isn’t pattern recognition. …
OK. Let me see if I can explain this to you. You did perfect. … This test has been given 55,000 times and you’re only the second person in history to score perfect. (His wife, Mary Ferris, later corrected him; the other person made one error.)
My best guess is that your IQ is over the 160 range. I want you to understand that Einstein’s true intelligence was 160. True intelligence is not what you have, but what you do with what you have. …
I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. [I must have looked glazed.]
SB: Maybe not. Can you put it in other words?
BF: I want you to understand….
What happens when IQ gets way out here, like this, is that your intelligence compared to most normals is so far out there that it surpasses what a normal’s would be like if they were in a home for retarded people who couldn’t control their bowels.
Now almost always three things happen to you when you’re that bright. Problem one is that you pick up the difference in yourself and other people very early in life. … And you translate that into a neat word like “abnormal” in your head which quickly means that you’re f—ed in some way. [SB: “What’s wrong with me?”] Pardon my language.
And so … social relationships start disintegrating because people that you talk to don’t share your interests. They’re marching to a different drum. And instead of reading it for what it is – capacity – you read it for abnormality. What it really should be read for is unique. …
Your real potential is so high that it’s an absurdity, really, in terms of most jobs. There’s going to be no boss you’re going to work for who’s going to be brighter than you. There’s going to be no job in the world that’s going to challenge you intellectually – they don’t make it – OK?
Einstein had to go and play with his mathematics when he worked in the Patent Office because even seeing new patents and trying to figure them out every day didn’t keep him going …
What I want you to understand is that if there is any program or any job anywhere of any sort, anywhere in the world, you can do it. There are no limitations whatsoever. None. … [Except interest.]
My best guess is that you’re probably one of the five brightest people in North America. I’m not kidding. I spend my life assessing people. I think I’m good at it.
Etc.
OK, OK, Brian Ferris. I’m going to check your findings out. You could be completely daft.
I got it! I’m going to send your test results to Mensa and see what they have to say. …
Here’s their response.
Dear Mr. Beckow,
The results of the IQ tests that you have submitted as evidence that your IQ is in the top 2% of the general population have now been reviewed and we are pleased to tell you that you are eligible for MENSA membership. etc.
Handwritten note: Congratulations!
Etc. (1)
Say what?
Now at last I knew what was going on with me that I seemed not to fit in anywhere, that I stuck out. I could have listened to what my workmate Don said when he launched a banana peel over our mutual divider: “Steve! Peter Rabbit English!” I could have gotten it then.
Instead, I continued to “pass,” over the years – doing what was acceptable and avoiding what was not. I now followed Brian Ferris’s advice that I’d never have a job that would interest me for long and so I always needed to have an outside project (like a database? A book? A website?) .
Attending Mensa meetings did not do it for me. Writing a newsletter for them (Amen) also didn’t do it.
Only participation in the growth movement did (and later the fourth-chakra heart opening). (1) It had to be more rounded than just intellectual. It had to honor emotionality, breakthrough, realization, etc.
I focused on the growth movement until 1987, when I had a vision of the purpose of life (2) and my direction in life was, by that experience, now reset.
Add retiring in 2006, starting a blog to pass time during an illness in 2009, and meeting an archangel in 2011 …
And here we are.
Footnotes
(1) On the heart opening, see:
- “Submerged in Love,” March 14, 2015, in An Ascension Ethnography at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/An-Ascension-Ethnography-5.pdf, and after.
- “Activating the Wellspring – Part 1/2,” March 14, 2015, in An Ascension Ethnography, ibid., at 87-93
(2) See “Chapter 13. Epilogue” in The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Purpose-of-Life-is-Enlightenment-6.pdf
(2) Attached:
