ASCENSION FROM ASCENSION
Ascension, or enlightenment, or spiritual awakening, is a transformative process leading to a profound understanding of one’s true nature and the interconnectedness of reality. It is the self-realisation at an already present state, rather than you achieving a new one.
Spiritual practices are the primary tools for creating the necessary conditions for this self-realisation, although these practices are only preparatory and not the direct cause of enlightenment itself. They can prepare the way, but you will have to make the connection to Source yourself.
Main Spiritual Practices
Spiritual practices serve to quieten the mind, reduce your ego attachments, and open one to a much deeper and expanded awareness.
Meditation & Mindfulness
By focusing on the breath, or a mantra, or simply just being present with your awareness to quiet your mental noise. To become the attractor of Source frequencies.
Self-Awareness & Reflection
Engaging in introspection, journaling, or self-inquiry to understand one’s thoughts, emotions, and underlying beliefs. To be able to see the weather or climate of thoughts passing through and evaluate their importance or not. To see things like, if thoughts are past tense or future tense, the strength of feelings for things, looking at your triggers and what causes strong responses. All to be viewed as the more expanded observer of self.
Cultivating Compassion
Practicing empathy, love, forgiveness, and acts of kindness towards oneself and others. To realise that holding anger or bitterness for others or self is also self-destructive. To realise that you hold the power to forgive others and they hold no powers to forgive you, so you don’t wait for their choices and instead realise it’s you holding the power to release unwanted thoughts, feelings and emotions. You have the power to forgive them and let them go, they then no longer have hold over you. To be compassionate about yourself in the process of change as well as for others.
Physical/Sacred Practices
Practices like yoga postures (hatha yoga), chanting, prayer, or specific rituals, forest bathing, swimming in live water, finding your joy, sound baths, tantra, tai chi, chi gong and many more practices can help bring on a spiritual epiphany.
Letting Go
Consciously releasing the ego (the “false self”), material attachments, judgments, and opinions. Learning to detach from what no longer serves you, forgiveness, cleansing ceremonies, tears, sounding out, using flame or waters to release old energies. Removing the false personality construct masks to reveal the authentic self.
The Role of Guidance and Integration
Spiritual Teachers:
Finding a mentor or guide can offer you invaluable insights, help navigate challenges (like the “dark night of the soul”), and provide support, though the inner work that must be, and can only be done, by the individual.
Integration:
True spiritual growth involves applying these insights into everyday life, embodying principles such as mindfulness, gratitude, and presence in all activities. Integrating both your light and dark and folding them into the neutral to gain the 3rd power.
Different Perspectives
Process vs. Event:
Many traditions view enlightenment as a gradual, lifelong journey of growth. Others describe it as a sudden, total realization that happens all at once, which the mind/body then adjusts to over time. The answer as you will find in spirituality is not one or the other but invariably tends to be both at the same time. You can become enlightened or ascended as a gradual process, or you can suddenly have an awakening into enlightenment and ascend rapidly. Both are possible.
Effort vs. Grace:
While most will agree on the necessity of disciplined practice (sadhana), some enlightened individuals will explain that their practices were preparatory, and the final awakening happened spontaneously or through “grace”.
To be just doing spiritual practice is not enough, because it is the application of the mind that make the connection to source, not the practice alone but the application of one’s consciousness actively engaged in the practices that makes the final connection/self-realisation.
Ultimately, the spiritual path is deeply personal, and for seekers of enlightenment or ascension, I encourage you to explore different methods to find what works best for you. The ways and tools to achieve an ascended state of enlightenment are well known, it is no longer a hidden mystery.
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