Are You Going to Ascend Soon?

Some time ago I had a person come to me for some spiritual counseling. Let's call him Jack, and he was about forty years old. Jack was not a happy chap. He hated his job and was planning his escape, a nice trip around the world. In particular he was going to visit all the great spiritual destinations out there. 

Nothing wrong with that, you might say. Good on him for having the goolies, so to speak. Yet as I spoke to Jack it became quite clear to me that he was living a fundamental delusion. This delusion is common in alternative spiritual circles, so I am going to discuss it briefly here today. It also mirrors a psycho-spiritual delusion that is the foundation of many religions across the world.

Jack had been told by a certain spiritual teacher that he was going to ascend one day, and this formed the basis of his spiritual belief structure. 'Ascension' is the idea that you are going to be pulled up and out of the body and into a higher dimension. This other place is trypically seen as having a higher vibration, being more blissful, and generally just a lot nore groovy than the mundane world of the earth plane. Sound familiar? Well, to me this other place sounds a lot like the Heaven or paradise of most religious philosophies.

Here's the problem. Ascension is a false teaching. It is not going to happen. There are two reasons why this is vitally important to understand.

Firstly, what generally lies behind the belief in ascension (and Heaven) is the rejection of what is here now. There is a subtle desire to escape. In this sense ascension entails a rejection of the life that is before you, and also the 'you' that you are now. You are saying that this life is not good enough, this 'me' is not acceptable.

Secondly, this rejection of your life makes it impossible for you to be fully present, and it is in presence that the true joy and love of "God" is found. If you speak to those who have experienced strong transcendent experiences they will tell you that they almost always emerge when the mind is in a deeply embodied state of silent presence. Thus the great irony is that the belief in ascension actually cuts you off from presence, from God, and from Heaven on earth.

What is now before you is the truth of life. There is tremendous simple joy to be found in just being here now, in the body. You were not put here to escape. You were put here to be here.

What drives the delusion of ascension is the dissociation of mind, body and spirit - and the trauma this entails. Your mind feels this pain at all times, but it doesn't know quite what is wrong. In fact if you stop and become fully present, you may actually find yourself falling into a state where you begin to feel this pain within you. If you have the courage to give it a voice, it rises from belly and into the throat, expressing itself as a sad whining sound, like a lost child which cannot find its mother. It is the fundamental feeling of being lost and unloved. Empty. This is how I have experienced it.

The mind, in its dissociated state, is unable to recognise that it has created the pain by itself, by not being here fully. Instead of stopping to be here, it runs. It tries to escape. It finds solace in entertainment, fiddling with gadgets, 'romance', eating, drugs and alcohol, sex, gossip, reading blogs like this... Or going on a spiritual journey. It might even believe that it is going to be lifted out of the body and beyond the mundane world into a better place. In this endless seeking it turns toward a hoped-for better future, and away from itself. Yet in all this there is no relief. The pain does not heal.

The quest is doomed to failure, for it merely perpetuates the split, the separation. 

This is what I told Jack. I told him that he was already a being of light, love and compassion. There was no need for him to ascend, merely to deepen into presence. In that moment Jack didn't understand. He didn't want to. His final words to me where that he had arranged the meeting to check to see if my knowledge was coming from a higher plane. But alas my understanding is not higher, merely deeper. He decided to keep aiming for the higher place.

Yet one day, one lifetime, Jack will get it. Maybe that little seed God planted in him that day as we talked will find fruition soon. It is not for me to judge.

The only way to heal your pain is to be here now. That's it. One of the great mysteries of our species is that this is so very, very simple. Yet only a few extraordinary individuals have ever been able to master the process.

Marcus

Killing Minds

Have you ever noticed that you can only think of one thing at a time? You can't think of your mother and the Chinese economy at the same time. You can flip between them, but you can't actually simultaneously bring both to attention. This is a very simple, powerful and liberating realisation. It means that when you are lost in negative thinking, all you have to do is bring to attention something positive and preferable, and the negative focus dissipates.

There are of course many kinds of ‘negative’ thinking that are embedded in deeper psycho-spiritual issues that will definitely not go away simply because you change your focus. If you carry a deep hurt about your relationship with your mother for example, then just thinking about your kind father will not change the underlying pain. To heal that pain, you have to allow it to express itself, to be heard and honoured.

But an awful lot of rubbish thinking doesn’t fall into that category.

I hate this job.
Mary is so immature.
Christians are delusional.

I hate atheists.
Why do we pay so much tax?
What the hell is wrong with this place (office, city, country, planet)?
My eyes are too small and my nose too big.

And so on. Note most of this kind of thinking is about what is wrong. What passes as ‘thinking’ for most people is rarely constructive, and most of the time there is no intention to come to a deeper understanding of the problem being thrashed over and over again.

It is not difficult to change such thinking. You just have to be willing to pay the price: allowing the ‘mind’ to die - at least for as long as you commit to the alternatives.

The alternatives are to focus upon something positive; or even better, to bring the mind into presence, where it is silent and still. When you experience being fully present, it is absolutely clear that the mind is a well of delusion. It is a world of phantasms and fantasy. It is not real.

Try this. Bring your attention to an object close by you, say a pen, a notepad, your shoe etc. Without moving your eyes AT ALL, keep your full attention on that thing. Then, without moving your eyes or taking your attention away from the object, try thinking of what is wrong with the US economy. Go on, do it before reading the next paragraph. Remember, YOU MUST NOT MOVE YOUR EYES AT ALL.

Do it now for thirty seconds.

Did you notice that you cannot analyse, abstract, or think of past or future while your attention is on the object? The mental world of illusion disappears.

It disappears because it was never real.

When you focus on what is actually here, when you are present, the ‘mind’ dissolves.

Next time you find yourself in some silly online argument, arguing with the other side of the ‘issue’, or fretting over something that has no meaning, just bring yourself to attention... and watch the illusion disappear. The only question then remains is whether you will choose to return to the world of illusion, or in what way.

Of course your mind will try to draw you back into the delusion, because you are attached to it.

Some time ago I attended a conference on transhumanism - people who want to upload their consciousness onto computers so they don't die. However as I observed the speakers I realised that they did not understand the nature of consciousness at all. What they were trying to preserve was not consciousness, but their attachments. 

It's the same agenda all minds have.

Marcus

Is Your Spirituality Delusional?

Several days ago on Rob and Trish Macgregor’s synchronicity blog there was a post entitled “Synchronicity or delusion?" . That blog post received a large number of responses, including one from me. I thought it would be good to elaborate on the answer that I gave there. I am also going to expand the topic a little, and talk not just about synchronicity, but about the idea of spiritual guidance in general (as synchronicity could be interpreted as a sub-category of the ‘spiritual’).

The post-rational stages of cognitive development have often been confused with the lower, prepersonal stages. Philosopher Ken Wilber makes this point, and he's right. One of the commonalities is seeing and hearing things that others don't perceive. How is anybody else supposed to know whethrer the person is a compete loony, or a prophet? How is the person perceiving the spiritual guidance to know whether he/she is a complete loony? Many sceptics would not even bother to make the distinction, but as someone who has had many spiritual experiences, I think it is not only worthwhile, but extremely important. We don’t want to spend time going down the wrong track in life because we followed the advice of some guidance that was nothing more than a delusion. And we don’t want to dismiss all guidance out of hand, because it can be very helpful

First a distinction that anyone who deals with intuitive or psychic realms has to know.

We Attract Not What We Want, But Who We Are

 Marcus T Anthony's new web site and blog can be found at www.mind-futures.com.

BTW, I wrote my most recent take on the law of attraction in an ebook called "A More Attractive Law of Attraction", which covers some of the ideas written here, but in much more detail. Marcus


The idea of the law of attraction is as popular today as ever. The most recent successful version is found in the phenomenally successful The Secret video and books. To generalize, it is assumed that the law of attraction permits one to ‘manifest’ in one’s life what one desires, through focused concentration, or simply believing it enough. Although the mechanism is never clearly explained, the idea is that “God” or “the universe” will give you whatever you want, as long as you get your shit together. I call this the naïve law of attraction, because quite simply, it is delusional.

One of the most successful law of attraction teachers is Dr Wayne Dyer. I read Dyer’s You’ll See It When You Believe It nearly two decades ago. Dyer may well be the most successful New Age writer/philosopher in history. Certainly he is right up there with Deepak Chopra, Louise Hay and a few others. For years Dyer has been teaching that one can manifest one 's intention.

However in recent years Wayne Dyer has suffered several rather large ego falls.