The Inner Path To Christ 22
Ascension
Some of the great explorers of human consciousness have said that:
“We forget that just as sleep claims us, so God claims us, not we it. You cannot think sleep, imagine it, meditate it, contrive it, chant it or concentrate it. You can only be it. So, you cannot think, imagine, contrive, chant, meditate or concentrate the Life you are, you can only be It. To take up this attitude we have in regard to sleep, and do it consciously, while staying awake, is the story of the whole journey from Anna and Joachim to Resurrection and Ascension. But just as there are depths of sleep, so there are landmarks in this nothingness we experience in sleep.”
In making our surface consciousness open – we do not fall into the deeps – the deeps rise up to us! Put another way, during surrender, consciousness does not drop into the depths and lose itself. The depths rise to consciousness and become aware to the individual self. But the surface has to be open to allow the process to go on and on. Thought after thought, fear after fear, level after level will rise and hit consciousness. And Jesus upon the cross lets it, and yields. ‘Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit.’ For this openness must be maintained throughout this rising of the depths, for during it our ego dies to what it was and is born again.
“Even as the man of today with words and technology to broadcast my CRY or my SONG, I still feel I am expressing so little of the wonder I am. I know myself as life, yet I still am so incapable in so many ways. I am still so inarticulate of what I am. Actually, it strikes me as I write about the meaning of Christianity, I see it is suggested that a human is capable of apotheosis or ascension, in which the body is completely transformed. That is what I felt, that this body can be completely transformed, but there were historical reasons I didn’t do so. In other words, the acts of past generations had built in certain limitations and attitudes which needed to be consciously realised and changed. These old attitudes were still operative within me, and so the transformation was not yet realised.
As life I want to love. I want my love to be like a beautiful but passionate song. I want it to be an art form that leads people to flower and discover their own Life.
I realised through feeling it as a truth within me, that I am a priest of a strange sort. I am a priest without a temple. The God I am lives in the temple of my body. It needs no other place of worship, though people might gather to collectively honour this. There is no teachings or dogma with this God. There is no proselytising. The ‘way’ is to live the fact of one’s own godhead. It is to drop the need or dependence upon the things upon which one might previously have held on to.
This if done this leads on to ascension. So, my problem-solving apparatus goes to work on this. Bit by bit, over the years, it puts piece to piece as well as it can. And don’t forget that I live in a Christian community. So, at some time a piece clicks in, and there is a, Wow, this is what the Bible is saying. My grandmother has been lifted up to heaven. My God. Ascension it is called, isn’t it? Ascension. Yes. My grandmother has ascended.
Ascension. So, I set out on this long crusade. I was going to find God. After all, I believe that’s where my grandma was – with God. If I could find God, I could get back to my grandma. Never having been helped to accept the real facts of death – whatever they are – I was going to make it to heaven. But I could have faced seeing her dead body. As a child I had that wonderful innocence that is a gift of that age, because not seeing her dead body I was told, “Nana has gone to heaven.” So, I wouldn’t have complicated it with all the heavenly shit. That was how I started my quest for the Holy Grail.
That was a hard one. Really that was shit for me. It was a shit time of life. I was chasing an illusion.
It was good as well though. The more I chased the illusion, the more I cut away the crap. I got nearer and nearer, until eventually I faced the fact of my grandmother’s death. I met it. But I was an older man at the time, in my fifties. It took me all those years to dig that deep. I suppose some people looking at me would wonder what the hell I was doing digging that bloody great hole in my backyard. Holy Grail stuff I suppose.
The only reason I met it, was because it was getting in the way at that time of my life. It was standing between me and things I needed to do and ways I needed to grow. It wasn’t like it was a huge painful hindrance, just a tangle of feelings and concepts. It was something I had to meet to go on growing. It was in fact wonderful to know what I felt like as that young child. Real education is to understand things, and the experience gained, the understanding of the profound links of love and dependency makes as a child. To feel all the complications of relationship that existed for myself as that child.
Of course, we are all amnesiacs. Most of can’t remember our childhood. We can’t remember what it was like to be a child. We can’t remember what it was like to be a baby. We can’t remember what it was like in the womb. Meanwhile, here am I remembering the fragile sensitive baby who is actually connected with the rest of the world, looking around. I realised that to love meant facing the pain of losing my grandmother and I was trying to love. See Remembering My Birth
It seemed as if it were a pain I couldn’t cope with. At one point I couldn’t breathe for ages, so I had to cut off. While remembering being a baby, I realised that I’m not ready to eat. Don’t you understand? I cannot eat. I’m hungry all the time. I couldn’t digest milk properly because I hadn’t properly finished development because I was two months behind in my development. So, I’m starving. I feel like I’m dying because my body wasn’t ready for life outside the womb. I realised as the observing adult that with today’s technology I would probably have been intravenously fed. But then I was left to survive or die.
I continued to be hungry for so long. It was so painful. The fucking pain. I want to be reconnected so I can be fed. If only I could be fed. If only I could be.” In the midst of this feeling of being alone, disconnected, not bonded with my mother, and starving to death, suddenly there was a change. I had the sense of a higher being understanding my condition, trying to help me. They engulfed me in a feeling of love. I felt this right through to the root of my being and immediately responded. The response was several loud cries of what sounded like a baby bawling. But as the baby I knew I was giving a signal that I was bonding. The cries were a bonding signal. I wouldn’t cry until I was in the presence of someone I could bond with. I felt my mother had been frightened of my weakness, had thought I was dying and had not opened her heart to me. So, only now did I bond.
My Grandmother
I knew someone loved me. I knew they understood what pain was and were not afraid of it or of death. This pierced me right through. It was my grandmother, but to me it felt like some higher being who had reached out of the unknown to help me. (Actually, my grandmother had lived with physical injury all her life and given birth to thirteen children. She died when I was about eighteen months old. She took over my rearing one day when she found I had fallen out of bed and my mother had not known it. I was completely cold, and she never let my mother care for me after that. So, I have been told.)
The bonding cry was a signal to say “I recognise you! I recognise you! I’m bonding to you. I’m bonding to you! Someone recognises me. I can cry now because I am in the presence of love.”
During this remembering, as the adult I felt there are instinctive things that have been built into us over millions of years. The baby must not cry out while lost or abandoned as that would attract the predators. Only when it is touched by the love of the bonded person can it cry its pain, because then there is no danger. Possibly this became built in because these are the babies who survived.”
Yes, again it is love that transforms us, love that was born in us as powerful as the urge to survive, called out by grandmother’s wonderful wise love, for my infant body had been thrown aside lifeless by the doctor, because at that time in the 1930’s there was little hope that such a weak child would survive. But my grandmother took my tiny body and bathed it in hot and cold water and marked cross on my forehead, and I survived. And through that survival I knew I had experienced resurrection from death and had been ascended beyond death by a higher being – my grandmothers love – and love had been called out my depths in answer. [i]
“It is the heavenly work of Love Triumphant: energising love, which is the life of God within the heart. That Mercury of the Wise, the vital principle of growth and change, working in secret, has subdued all things to the measure of its glory: has turned the raw stuff of human nature into alchemic gold.” [ii]
“Dante found in the freshness and beauty of the Earthly Paradise no continuing city, but sought at once the Ladder to the Stars; and so it is with every pilgrim of the Infinite who has at last attained the summit of the purging mount of prayer. He too goes up in order that he may “lose himself upon the heights.” His newly-anointed senses demand some unalloyed objective; the fire of his all-conquering love demands eternal union with a greater flame. “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,” and nothing less than this total self-loss in Him can suffice them. He who is here discerned beneath veils, and because discerned, so passionately desired, the mystic would encounter face to face. “Thou hast made us for Thyself and our heart is restless.” From God we came: to God we must return.” [iii]
“What is that fruition? The mystics try in vain to tell us: for a mighty gulf is fixed between their mind and ours. “Above all knowledge,” says Ruysbroeck, of that summit of the soul’s transcendence—even the high language of poetry breaking as it were in his hands” I feel, I discover, I surprise a bottomless and limitless abyss of darkness, that transcends all qualities, that transcends the names of all created things, that transcends the very names of God. Behold! this is that death, that ecstasy of transcendence, that evanishment of all that is most sublime into the One Eternal Mystery, that hoped-for peace which we discern in the deeps of our being, far superior to all external worlds.” This is the “Divine Dark” of the great mystics, The Cloud of Unknowing: dim to the earth-trained intellect, most radiant to the heavenward-tending heart. It is the “peace that passeth understanding” of the saints: the dim silence where all lovers lose themselves. Even in our exile we may sometimes look at it, as Plato’s prisoners peeping from their cave. But the spirit whose education is finished, who has trod the long way in faith and hope and love, shall come out from this cave to that sunlight “dark with excess of bright” to find that it is no mere Vision, but a Home.” [iv]
A summary of those words seen in a vision –
“I looked up at the wall above the bed. It was an unlikely shade of green, but what was remarkable was that on the clear expanse of the wall I could see a huge circle, alive and full of movement. My attention was riveted by this amazing circle. At its centre was an unmoving emptiness, nothingness. Yet of this nothingness poured forms of living creatures, mountains and landscapes all moving and dancing out from the centre in time with each other – though making different movements. They were constantly emerging from the pool of emptiness, dancing in time to music. All this stream of emerging life moved in weaving in time with the sound, in and out of each other to the periphery of the great circle. Here it turned and with equal complexity and rhythm moved back to the void. At its return it was lost, dissolved, in that unmoving emptiness, but at the same moment new life emerged. As I witnessed the whole moving circle, I realised it portrayed a great truth of life. [v]
As humans we are so interested in the light, maybe because we can see where we are going and are frightened of the dark. But there in the darkness is the Hugeness that lies behind our small self. But the vision of the hole was not actually dark, it was simply nothing, a void, yet that nothingness was creating everything.
The Hebrew term for God was Ain Soph – The Unknown God. I know in the Western word we continually refer to God as Him, but that doesn’t make sense, because the creative force behind us, the world, the cosmos is Everything – the known, the unknown, the Greatest Mystery, or as Ruysbroeck calls it, One Eternal Mystery. The Creative Power that has been called God was in darkness until it created light. Even the Big Bang tells us that despite its immense temperature the creation was in darkness and it was after 300,000 years light appeared.
So, do not be afraid of darkness or of the void, for within them both they hold Everything. Everything if it was visible would be a thing, so would not be Everything – and ascension is a move toward Everything.
A Woman Clothed with the Sun
But to understand this we must see how we move toward it. Crucifixion is said to have taken place at Golgotha, the place of the skull – the top of the body and even the top of the skull. But our journey starts at the bottom and gradually move onto the higher. Deep within us, when we have opened to Life itself as a virgin, in the cellar or cave of our unconscious, among the beasts of our instincts, and physical energies, the New Life tentatively begins its growth to consciousness, to birth. The star and the stable are the highest and the lowest in us uniting in this wonderful task. Joseph, our intellect and outer creativeness, difficult though he finds it to believe in this miracle, listens to his intuitions and dreams, and protects and cares for the childlike mother within us.
But that holy mother gives birth to the child that has the power to redeem us, who can transform our personal miseries and lostness into a new insight, a new connection with our Source, our Life. This wonderful new life that is born within us has to pass through stages of growth or discovery though and these have been described by many different cultures in different ways. In Christian terms they can be seen as the seven churches:
Church of Ephesus ——- SEX GLANDS ———- Seal 1 – Church of Smyrna ——- LYDEN GLAND ——- Seal 2 – Church of Pergamos —- ADRENAL GLANDS — Seal 3 – Church of Thyatira —– THYMUS GLAND —— Seal 4 – Church of Sardis ——– THYROID GLAND —– Seal 5 – Church of Philadelphia – PINEAL GLAND ——- Seal 6 – Church of Laodicea —– PITUITARY GLAND — Seal 7.
The different cultural descriptions also see them as seven regions of the human body – the body as the temple of the soul. But their action is described as a release of an energy other than that expended by walking or working, and so can be described as a flow of energy, like a river, that has a purpose other than that of the personality. Each of us is in fact immersed in a ‘river’ of constant change. If you think about it you have been carried, pushed, impelled by this current as you were moved through babyhood, childhood, teenage and adulthood, and there are more stages of growth beyond adulthood. And as we passed through these changes, we died to our old self in order to change to the new. It is the current of Life. This current then carries us on through old age and through the gates of death and on into rebirth. All the time we are faced by decisions, and each decision directs us on a different path, helping to create our future.
Another example of this is the way electricity exists in a house. First, we have the supply of electricity into the house. The wires carrying the supply to the house are not in themselves the electricity. The current is invisible, but it has great potential for good or harm. So, we usually deal with it carefully, and have means of controlling it via insulation, fuses and switches. When the electricity is wired into the house, its potential can be expressed in a huge variety of ways. It can manifest as heat, light, and power to move or do things, such as with a drill or vacuum cleaner. It can produce sound or images as with television, and can, via programs for the computer, manifest in almost magical ways, storing and retrieving huge amounts of information and manipulating it.
The usefulness of this image of the house with its electricity is that we can use it as an analogy of energy expressing as your own life. This enormous potential can express as cellular activity, or physical movement. You can experience it as sexual drive and its pleasure or pain, as emotions, as sight, hearing, sensation, smell and taste. You can express it as thinking, and vocalising in speech or singing, or as the creation of a personal virtual reality, as you do in fantasy and dreams. Some psychic experiences even suggest that part of your potential is to extend your awareness over huge distances or gain penetrating insight into another person’s state of mind or body. But all these are expressions of it, and are not IT.
In ancient Indian teachings the seven centers are called chakras, and the energy is named Kundalini. It is often depicted or symbolised as a snake coiled up at the base of the spine with seven heads. At first it is just the latent potential locked within them. As the snake emerges and is released it start the climb up the other chakras/centers.
We have been told again and again that the Life Force or Kundalini, when released from its old patterns of instinctive animal expressions such as the urge for sex, the urge to over eat, or even to grab as much of the worlds treasure as we can and hold onto, it rises up the trunk awakening other centers until it reaches the top of the head. But each level when opened act as sense organs sensing beyond what the physical senses show us.
2 – The first level after the latent potential is sexual reproduction. We may mix up this reproduction with producing something physical, although physical activity may be a part of it; but is about giving and sharing who and what you are. However it is not about teaching others facts, but showing something of yourself which enters another and comes to life in them.
A conversation I heard may be an example of this. The person was saying, “So not only did and do you play a large part in me discovering my inner strength my dear old Friend. You helped me move beyond my fear of powerful men.”
3 – Digestion is the next level; but when we digest, whether it is an idea, something we have read or learned, it has to be first surrendered to the life process. We can see this in our body – it is first chewed and swallowed, then broken down into parts and the useful stuff, the building stuff, can be taken into us and the rest is passed out. The important thing is that even if it is dead or living food, it is transformed into our own living being – in other words our living understanding. If it has not been transformed through digestion it is like something dead inside us. But to be capable of such digestion we must swallow the experience and allow our unknown self to do its work.
But excretion is also a part of digestion. Considering that passing faeces is a natural function, in our inner life it can suggest getting rid of emotions, traumas or toxins that need to be released or let go of. Like digested food, faeces can represent experience that was relevant but now need to be let go of.
In nature these excretions are all helpful parts of the natural order. In our life – our inner life – we constantly take in various experiences in relationships, traumas experienced, ideas presented in the media or personal meetings; we are constantly bombarded with fearful ideas or things that are designed to stimulate our innate responses, like sexual images, videos of war and advertising that work on fears we have. We all have an inner digestive process that sorts out what we can usefully integrate, or we should shit out. But unfortunately, many of us are so stressed or without natural responses we interfere with our inner digestive function and so experience all manner of neurotic symptoms – such as worry, fear, using drugs such as alcohol, nicotine and hard drugs, as escapes from actual experience. See Secrets the Body Knows – Life’s Little Secrets
4 – The chest area. Its function is to take in and give out, as in breathing. In work that I have done, this is very much the emotional centre. Any blocks here when you lack emotional responsiveness or deny them can cause chest pain, feelings of loneliness or not being able to connect with others. The heart center.
All that potential, when in the chest, if it is lifted up, we give it form. In the chest it takes in the world, just as we take in the air through our lungs. It draws from our relationship with the world and with other people. It takes what one is receiving and begins to form it into a new moving expression. In the chest questions arise as to what shape we wish to give it? What we want to do with it? Where do we want to take that life? What do we want to do with life? We may express it as feelings to somebody else through love or care. We may give it as support to another being. We may give it as admiration that is perhaps a stimulus to another being.
5 – The throat center. It deals with speech and communication. Also, the expression of passionate feelings as in singing. We can express ourselves easily if this segment is unblocked – that does not apply to people who constantly talk. Often our expression may come from below rather from the head. At such time we may feel we are being inspired to express deep things spontaneously.
6 – The brow center, and it is, when awoken, the site of great intuition and insight into life and people. A woman said that, “My experience has shown me that when I still the mind completely, at least at a conscious level, at the end I reach a sudden profound realisation that has nothing to do with cogitation or reasoning. This has helped me to date to discover innovative techniques to help my patients…and myself. These realisations come “out of the blue” and are amazing. Perhaps another manifestation of this universality of consciousness is a spontaneous ability to intuit my patients’ deep-seated problems and thoughts. They often say: ‘How did you know?’”
7 – This is Golgotha, the place of the skull and in Christian beliefs was the place where Jesus was crucified. But the Bible stories can also be seen as mythology with a symbolic interpretation. In that view when our energy has worked its way up through the body to the top of the head, we go through a transformation in which we are no longer lost in one’s personality/ego with its fear of death and its self-centred interests. We face death and see through it into a vision of beauty. We experience enlightenment.
This is the Woman Clothed in the Sun, for White is the combination of all the rays, implies full illumination and intuition of God, the symbol of which is the sun, and is the symbol of initiation. Attaining to this state, the soul is the mystical “Woman clothed with the Sun”. It is a woman because our opening began with the Virgin Prayer, that was the beginning of true intuition, and it is the same inner woman who has been taken in Assumption into being at one with God.
And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.
“My consciousness was lifted up, causing me to feel as if my awareness also spread over the immensity of time, and from this condition I was shown the beginning of things.
I cannot say I saw this, more that I experienced the condition of the beginning. And this condition was the gathering together of what I understood to be a whole universe that had previously existed. All that had existed had come to such unity that although this beginning was physical, it was also, in its unity, a being. It had awareness.
As I experienced this I felt as if a resolution between science and religion had taken place in me. For here was something like the condition science suggests preceded the ‘big bang’ a condition beyond space and time. But what had been left out, I realised, was this consciousness, this immense being. For all life had here found a unity in one immense being beyond my comprehension. It was, in fact, difficult to grasp because I was overcome by emotion as I witnessed this.
As I opened to this enormous perception, there was a deepening of understanding, in which a great being aided my comprehension, who I felt must be the Christ. For I realised that the oneness or unity of this being was unbroken. It was everything, and nothing could exist outside of it. Even if it were to create anything, that thing would not have existence outside of the one.
This condition of ‘all-one’ I felt had led to a form of aloneness. This was as near as my human understanding could grasp. In this state it was explained to me – ‘You must understand, this is your perception of it.’
Out of this aloneness, this great consciousness had longed that other beings might exist. But in its present form this was impossible. Then I understood something that tore my heart to pieces, as it still does today when I dwell on the memory of the experience. This being purposefully went about destroying itself so that our present universe – we – might have existence. It was such a wondrous action for it was done in such a way, with such skill, with such love and self-sacrifice, such art and science, that its very death was a magnificent creative act. In other words, its death struck into action forces and effects that created our universe in all its variety. This death is what we know as the ‘big bang’. The very special circumstances of the ‘death’ set in motion the forces that brought about a very particular universe. Without the particular influences set in motion there could easily have been a universe without any ‘space’ for individual awareness. It could have been a universe where everything was purely automated. It could have been many things.
As I experienced this, I realised that everything that exists is a part of that wondrous being. There is nothing that is not of its love. So that whatever arises in the universe arises out of, and as, THAT. Every grain of sand, every particle of dust floating in a beam of sunlight, everything we take into us is God. The human sense of God is a realisation of the very substance of our own existence. The awe we might feel is from an intuition of what has been given us as our own being.
And as that great unity of energy and consciousness died, its very last impulse was for those new beings that might arise from its death. The impulse that flashed out we call love. It flashed through the universe permeating its every particle, in a way that we cannot yet perceive, but which is like a touch upon the pulsating chaotic movements of particles and lives.
We are the seeds of that love. We are God. And in our small portion of the universe, we face a particular lesson through the shortness of our bodily lives. We face death. Yet that is the greatest of things. For that is the heart of everything, the very act of love out of which our lives have been formed. If we discover the secret of that, we discover our creator and eternal nature.
Because we emerge from a timeless and spaceless reality, there is no beginning or ending – now is the moment of creation – the first day is always with us.
But I saw that there are other creators, for many have evolved to the point of unity and creation, so there are many different universes. Unfortunately, I did not see these others.
A comment: Hi Tony, my name is Rodrigo, from Mexico, and I just read your description of the Big Bang.
“Two and a half years ago, I basically experienced in a dream what you describe in your “archetype of the big Bang” article. It was really strange, but I was a bodiless entity floating in a completely black vacuum. I was just consciousness; since I don’t remember thinking “I’m still me”. I just was aware that I was aware. I was completely calm and in peace.
I was not alone. There was another entity there (if it can be called “there”), though it was also bodiless, and even though it didn’t talk to me, I knew it was there.
Then, the explosion out of that being, almost exactly as you describe… and for two seconds I experienced an indescribable bliss and this entity talked to me in a language different to words, just directly to my awareness. Did you ever have an experience where you understood a concept but couldn’t put in words and then the understanding and grasping of the concept you had just vanishes away in seconds? Well, this is what happened to me, but the concept I’m talking about was this: for two seconds, the entity made me understand the purpose of everything in the universe, the purpose of humanity, of all things, it all made so much sense… But I could only grasp the concept for those two seconds… and it was so overwhelming that I awake after that.
I haven’t talked much about this since then, since I don’t want to sound pretentious, and the few people I told didn’t quite grasp how I felt.
It left an important mark on me, and I have been trying to remember those 2 seconds since then, with no result… Why would anyone be told the purpose of the universe?? My guess is that deep within us, we all have it.”
I wrote and asked Rodrigo if he could add anything to what he had written.
“Hi Tony, its Rodrigo again… being trying to put it into words ever since… sorry I didn’t get in touch, of course you can use it any way you seem fit. What I can remember in my thoughts was:
- It has a LOT, if not everything to do, with love, as you also say. just not passion or lust, something way beyond that.
- Learning is also very important. Every single day has something to learn from. Lastly, in order to continue learning, we WILL reach the stars.
- The whole purpose of it actually isn’t that complex… what I remember thinking was that “Its so simple yet it couldn’t be any other way”
I wish I had more info, but I don’t want to extrapolate on vague feelings, the statements above are what I recall for sure.”
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YES, THIS IS THE NEXT STEP IN OUR EVOLUTION – IT STARTED THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO – BUT THERE HAS BEEN A WAR AGAINST KNOWING IT AND SO IT WAS SUPPRESSED BY FORCES AGAINST IT
[i] From Tony’s Journal
[ii] Evelyn Underhill. The Spiral Way: Being Meditations upon the Fifteen Mysteries of the Soul’s Ascent, Aeterna Press. Kindle Edition.
[iii] Evelyn Underhill. The Spiral Way: Being Meditations upon the Fifteen Mysteries of the Soul’s Ascent (Illustrated). Aeterna Press. Kindle Edition.
[iv] Evelyn Underhill. The Spiral Way: Being Meditations upon the Fifteen Mysteries of the Soul’s Ascent (Illustrated). Aeterna Press. Kindle Edition.
[v] Tony’s Journal