Searching The Truth Will Set Us Free: Swallowed Up by One Great Fish

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Swallowed Up by One Great Fish

By Steve Beckow

Posted on July 22, 2024

Spring 2007 EI. Casting the question. That’s me at the far right, last row.

In any kind of movement, its members bring all their experiences to it. I learned my basic lessons in the growth movement, yes, but I also brought my unique mix of experience and insights to it from other disciplines as well.

Some workshops I did contributed useful tools. Others became a path in themselves. Examples of workshops that contributed useful tools are bodywork, bioenergetics, and rebirthing. (1)

Examples of workshops that became a path for me are awareness workshops and enlightenment intensives (EIs).

There can sometimes be a struggle between the teacher, who may (understandably) want undivided attention on the subject being taught, at least for the moment, and the student who may want to see what happens when they bring already-learned techniques to the new material.

An example of the kinds of difficulties that can be encountered occurred for me in EIs that I took under a particular master.

He wanted me to follow the technique of burning a hole in our blanket of lethargy with our awareness to reveal the Light.

I’m not saying this technique was somehow not “good.” But I’d had many spiritual experiences by that time (2) and I didn’t want to use EIs to have one more.

I wanted to make some real mileage in terms of growth – cleansing, purification. I wanted to use EIs to process and complete my vasanas (or core issues) and I did use them for that.

Instead of a few more spiritual experiences, I felt myself emerge from being a pressure cooker of rejected experiences (vasanas) to being somewhat normal again. (3)

Five years later I “met” Archangel Michael through Linda Dillon. He said at one point that he’d been waiting for me to have had enough of the various disciplines to be ready for our work together.

I laugh when I look back on all the preliminaries to that work. My life up till then may as well have been boot camp. It was one challenge after another.

I’ve now chosen my disciplines – my tools – for their various utilities. My first love is the awareness path but that’s something I do alone – and all the time. My second love is karma yoga – the service of Michael and the Mother. That takes me out into the world.

Once I met Michael, the shopping around for a path ended. Sri Ramakrishna used to say that he wanted to be bait on a hook to be swallowed up by some great fish. I have been swallowed up by one great fish.

And I couldn’t be happier.

Footnotes

(1) Bodywork is a form of deep massage designed to press on muscles storing tension. The release of that tension increases awareness but it also usually results in insights.

Bioenergetics involves working with the body to move the energy past blocks in the hips, chest, throat, etc., so that the energy circuit of the body is clear and the kundalini can move.

(2) I’d counted 23 by, I think, around 1986.

(3) I’m always surprised when I emerge from some enormous growth process having wept and shouted and done everything else and how do I feel? Normal.

Do you know what that says? It says to me that I’ve been outside the average standard normal experience prior to that. Nowadays I’d define “normal” as centered, balanced, grounded. I don’t mean it in a normative sense. It says I’m wide of that mark.

I also hold that the true center, balance point, or heart is a portal to the higher dimensions. So the center has enormous unconsdered value.

Steve Beckow