Untangling Ascension from the Orders
A lot of us hold ideas of Spirituality, Mastery and Enlightenment that have nothing to do with Spirit, God or Divinity. They can be a little hard to pin-point and notice as they can fall into our blind-spots.
I’ve noticed this often as a relational or cognitive dissonance between how I feel within - especially after times of peace, realization, remembrance or elevating from trauma - and interaction with the world and all her people.
It’s akin to a moment where we may awaken in the morning emblissed and deeply in love with Life and with Self. The fire within drives us to purpose because we know ourself and our day ahead is laid out at our feet. It is perfection.
And then as we step out onto the street, we get pushed and yanked at while getting on transit. Our coworkers look at us and say ‘What the hell are you so happy about?!’ in a brusque way. The entire day passes and we are pushing and pulled by deadlines, text messages, misunderstandings and harshness.
This can evoke a range of emotions, from confusion and anger to frustration and grief. It is a very different texture of difficult - the relationship we have with life and the world, based on our changing Self.
Through the repeated challenge of this, I realized that I even thought I experienced these profound and intense moments, coming out of them wasn’t the end of that journey. There is this additional work required to digest and synthesize the experience through all our bodies so that we can uncoupling from ideas and beliefs that run unconsciously as a background programs in the layer of un/consciousness.
For me, some of these had roots in ideas and beliefs I held about Spirituality and even religion, even though I do not follow any one particular religious order.
Holy People & Religious Orders
One of these ideas I held was the divide between a Holy people and me.
This was particularly hard for me, because it was unconscious and if you asked me flat out in a conversation, I wouldn’t have spoken to it. It lay unknown within my consciousness, but not dormant.
The belief was that I am simple and basic and couldn’t possibly be worthy to experience Divine Beauty and Love. The extended belief was that only certain people, i.e. holy ordained people, can and should do this work and somehow I was wrong for seeking it.
Generally, this is being trapped in our own glass house, created by the mind.
This belief actually caused me pain, and so in my behaviours, I would argue or rebel against Masters and Gurus and Spiritual Teachers.
When I was deeply entrenched here, I lived in constant comparison and unworthiness.
When I did access states of Bliss, Peace and Remembrance, it felt like a short-lived trip and I couldn’t really maintain or integrate it fully.
Unbeknownst to me, I still held on to a reality of everyday-material-mundane 3D life as separate from the miraculous-spiritual-blissful 5D plane. And because I still sourced my beliefs from here, I still classified life’s moments, people and experiences into either basic or ‘spiritual’.
This made Holy People and Masters the source of my resentment for a while. As I reacted to this notion common in organized religions that in order to seek the Divine, we require an ordained intermediary.
Others experience this differently, but for me it was about self-worth.
The word Spirit, comes from the Latin world Spirare. It means ‘breathe’.
And so the Ascension path in Spiritual terms, it is not any more complicated than One who Breathes.
Everything else, is one way in a web of infinite pathways to the Divine.
Maybe a book changed your life, but that same book means nothing to your friend. Theirs is another path.
Although we are One, we are also unique expressions of Spirit.
To me, every human that breathes, holds the potential seed for their own Mastery.
And so this is possible for each and every one of us - if we choose it and will it.
We are held back from this for a lot of weird, old and complicated reasons. To me, those reasons come more from archetypes of greed, control and warped power, than they do from an individual human reaching within to know God.
While almost every culture and religion has stories around Ascension of humanity in one way or another, Ascension is not owned by any one religious order or a group of people.
And so this idea we have that we are too insignificant or unworthy of walking a path that is Spirit-illuminated, may have some roots that are tangled with old religious orders created in a completely different time and context.
It need not be true anymore, if we do not will it so.
And so on the paths that are religion and spirituality, they may overlay onto each other and become one-path for some of us. For others they may diverge for a time before merging back as one, or they may diverge and never merge again.
Through this path, we may completely abandon the cosmology that we grew up with. We may have to face our issues with God and Religions, especially the divisive narrative most of us have inherited. At some point, we all come to resolution and integration with Faith - all Faiths.
Ours and that of others.
Holier-Than-Thou
Most of us to do love the experience of being wrong, devalued or feeling less than.
As such, the experience of interacting with someone who gives us the sense that they are holier-than-us can make us apathetic, anger or closed off.
I’ve certainly felt that way, so I was really surprised to find out that I was also on the giving end of this relationship.
Sometimes, when we are moved by our epic Will-power and Soul-passion, we roar with our Spirit-fire. This is a truly awesome place to be.
Some of us more than others, can become rigidly righteous for a while.
Since empathy is my natural gift, I thought I was above righteousness and that I’d never have to work through it. This was not the case.
Driven by the desire to be seen and uplift others - whether they wanted me to or not - I was very lovingly shown how the tone of my voice, my intention and my words when speaking to others, carried the energy of being holier-than-thou.
This can come up during a one on one conversation, likely with a person who has a completely different experience and belief system of reality, Self and Divinity, or just simply is in a different place in their life. Alternatively, it can come up towards a group of people who behave differently in the world, have different values and express behaviours divergent and incompatible from ours.
Either way, we believe our way, our path to be the supreme one.
I find the energy of righteousness shuts down another person. So even though we mean well, it doesn’t actually help us or the other person.
This required me to get quite real with why and how I shared my truth and my vulnerabilities. When I shared them because I really wanted to be see and valued, it didn’t leave room for another person. When I shared because I wanted to help another person and feel like a ‘guide or healer’, it worked for a while, but not consistently.
It boiled down to who it was serving.
Was I sharing something to serve Love, Humanity, Truth, Friendship?
Or, was I sharing it because I wanted to fill an ego-created need of being loved or seen as elevated or just needing to be correct?
So, if we desire true deep Heart and Soul connection, then righteousness is not a helpful tool.
Righteousness as a virtue is not the same as being holier-than-thou.
As a virtue it can be the guiding principle that keeps our words, actions and behaviours in alignment with and our Soul. It could also be our expression of integrity and how we ground into the Present Moment, while being cosmically connected to Divine Flow.
We are absolutely able to walk with imbued with virtue of Righteousness - knowing that we walk the Divine path of our Soul’s Perfection - while also allowing others their truths, their choices and their realities, without making it about us.
This way, we honour the Garden of Creation that is our world and our planet and celebrate every unique and diverse flower, trusting in the rightness of Divine expression.