Polishing the Statue | Steve Beckow

The Pieta – Finely-polished masterpiece by Michaelangelo

By Steve Beckow, May 23, 2020

How we see Ascension depends on what our goal, aim, or desire is.

If we want to get to the end (are we there yet?), then we’ll want the Ascension process over as soon as possible. We’re focused on reaching the destination.

If we’re focused on how we feel inside, and we’re feeling better and better, then getting there as an ultimate desire dissipates somewhat.

I’m focused entirely on how I feel inside. I’ve realized, over years of self-observation, that how I feel is really what motivates me.

If I feel lonely, I get moving. If I feel depressed, I start sharing about it. If I feel blissful, I just want to sit and enjoy it. In this case, I stop moving, which is closer to my ultimate state of stillness anyways.

I had an apparently-Seventh-Dimensional experience in a meditation workshop sometime prior to 2006. (1) It was at a three-day Vipassana workshop and, even though I hadn’t been in a workshop for years and three days is very short, I found myself rooted to the floor in an experience. To this day, I can only find one word for it: “regal.”

Everything around me was working but I was not moving a muscle. I was doing without doing, moving without moving. It wasn’t telepathy. It was deeper than that. The sensing was being done, the instructions being given at a level below words and images.

I appeared to be moving matters outside myself mainly through my feelings.

This was a significant validation of the importance of feelings. But it still took me years of more self-observation to feel confident in saying that my feelings were the chief motivators of my actions. Since forever, I’ve always thought it was my thoughts.

Knowing what I know now, I gradually arrive at the need to focus on creating things being such that I feel peaceful, blissful, and loving inside. If how I feel is so important, what am I doing about it?

That raises the bar significantly now in terms of what I want from life. I’m no longer waiting for the end – the Reval, Ascension, etc. I’m significantly at work every day, polishing the statue as Plotinus said, in a passage that has always guided me on the awareness path. (2)

Polishing the statue means watching every interaction and improving the way I handle things every time. Getting it right. Getting it right. And “right” means loving. I’m contributing to uplifting the way I feel.

All of a sudden everyday life becomes sacred. My here and now becomes a blessing – the laboratory, workshop, and experiment – and I’m no longer worried about or focused on reaching the destination. I want to improve the way I feel and then radiate out that enhanced energy to others.

Footnotes

(1) Steve Beckow: I had an experience at a meditation workshop in which I felt regal. It was a partial experience [no bliss]. Can you tell me what that part of me was that I accessed.

Archangel Michael: … Your highest Self, your Oversoul, is very regal.

SB: So that was an experience of the Oversoul.

AAM: Yes. (Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, Sept. 13, 2011.)

Sue Lie: Seventh [Dimension] is your Oversoul. (The Arcturians in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Sue Lie, March 17, 2013.)

As with so many of my experiences, this one was also truncated. Everything was as I described it, except there was no bliss. Bliss is what lifts us up to realization so, without bliss, no realization.

Nonetheless the experience of regalness and things operating without a word being said or an image being projected while I remained as still as a rock has always remained with me.

(2) These words mean more to me with each passing year:

“Let him who can, arise, withdraw into himself, forego all that is known by the eyes, turn aside forever from the bodily beauty that was once his joy. He must not hanker after the graceful shapes that appear in bodies, but know them for copies, for traceries, for shadows, and hasten away towards that which they bespeak. …

“Withdraw into yourself and look. … Do as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be beautified: he cuts away here, he smooths it there, he makes this line lighter, this other one purer, until he disengages beautiful lineaments in the marble. Do you this, too. Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one radiance of beauty. Never cease ‘working at the statue’ until there shines out upon you from it the divine sheen of virtue….

“Have you become like this? Do you see yourself, abiding within yourself, in pure solitude? Does nothing now remain to shatter that interior unity, nor anything cling to your authentic self? Are you entirely that sole true light which is not contained by space, not confined to any circumscribed form, not diffused as something without term, but ever immeasurable as something greater than all measure and something more than all quantity? Do you see yourself in this state? Then you have become vision itself.

“Be of good heart. Remaining here, you have ascended aloft. You need a guide no longer. Strain and see.” (Plotinus in Elmer O’Brien, ed., The Essential Plotinus. Representative Treatises from the Enneads. Toronto: New American Library, 1964, 40-3.)

Source: Golden Age of Gaia