Acuity of Awareness Increasing | Steve Beckow

I “just wake up” grumpy

By Steve Beckow, February 3, 2022

(Golden Age of Gaia)

I’m aware of things happening within me in much greater detail than I have been before. I don’t know why.

Like the suddenness of noticing peace on Jan. 14, (1) I just noticed today that I have the ability to focus my attention like a microscope and “see inside myself ” in greater detail. My acuity of awareness seems to have gone up a notch.

For instance, I watched myself at a basic crossroads that our minds meet when they emerge from one situation and prepare to enter into another.

I have to emphasize: This is me at the very moment of starting to frame an action. I seem to be able to slow events down.

What emerges from so basic an operation is what I’ve called elsewhere a “grand motif.” (2) Mine is not so grand, but….

One road was skeptical, cautious, and defensive and the second road was loving, peaceful, and generous.

The first road was definitely more travelled. It was a groove, a rutted road. I caught myself … it was almost like slowing down the camera … gearing up to be grumbly without anything I was aware of causing it.

There was a cause. I’d had nothing but interruptions all morning and I was trying to concentrate on work. But it was more than that. It was a pattern, formed out of many traumatic incidents I’m sure.

I watched myself, first, perceiving the crossroad; second, perceiving the need to make a choice; and third, making that choice. Each was an individual operation though carried out at lightning speed.

As I breathe into myself at this moment, I feel resistance to my breathing, tension in my body. I wonder how much of it is traceable to this?

No wonder I felt, before, that love was somehow foreign to me. My body resists feeling it and instead feels standoffish. Keep your distance. I really have created a suit of armor and now I live in it. And it’s inimical to love.

***

There is seldom if ever an inquiry into why I choose the negative road. I don’t ask myself why I feel grumbly.

Purely on the basis of what I feel like doing or want to do, I make my choice.

Since the rutted road goes to a grumbly place, I eventually become an old grump.

Repeated choices to go down the negative road(I almost said via negativa) form “character.” (3) The rut feels familiar. I know where I’ll end up – alone, with space, finally.

Finally? Why finally? I look and see myself in 1974 – fighting for space to study in my Ph.D. program. I’m actually trembling, thinking of the frustration of those days. A life of constant frustration doing what I don’t love.

I sit with the experience and allow it to complete itself. It triggers the release of generalized stress. My body trembles. My heart pounds. And then it passes.

Isn’t that interesting. The crossroads I saw is part of the process whereby I enter into a situation. I make a decision right at the outset of whether to be grumpy or not … and it turns out I routinely choose grumpy. It may have nothing to do with what it is I’m looking at in real time.

I apologize to everyone in my life with whom I’ve been an energetic drag and a pain in the ass.

I do it to myself. I do it repeatedly, automatically. You do not “make me” anything. Here I am, caught in the act of deciding to be a grump. Here I am confirming by my action the foundations of my “character.”

Footnotes

(1) See “Spiritual Exploration,” January 17, 2022, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2022/01/17/spiritual-exploration/

(2) “The Grand Motif,” October 13, 2019, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2019/10/13/the-grand-motif/

(3) The via negativa is a non-dual concept of one path to Realization. “Not this, not this, not this” or neti, neti, neti disqualifies one thing after another until all one is left with is the experience of God. I am not my body. I am not my thoughts. I am not my feelings.

The opposite is also true – that God is everything. If I may say so, I experience this as a much warmer, more social path.

I prefer both. I don’t leave the saw out of my toolbox because it’s different than the hammer. I take them both.