It was in the early 1990s that MSI (Maharishi Saddashiva Isham) started to teach the Ishayas’ Ascension and he continued until his death in 1997.
By that time The Society For Ascension had over 100 teachers operating out of its teacher training academy in the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina and there were and are many thousands of people practicing the techniques all over the world.
So, where does this tradition come from? Did MSI just make the Ascension Attitudes up? Did he journey to the Indian Himalayas to receive them from a secret order of monks who had preserved them undistorted since the time of Christ?
These questions have often puzzled the Ascension community and as far as I am aware there are no definitive answers. However it’s possible to explore them at several different levels, ranging from an outer historical level, to an esoteric level where there are frequent tantalising reports of people remembering practicing the techniques in other lives, to the level of personal experience.
To many people, myself included, the historical level of enquiry can be most frustrating.
Such facts as there are seem to vanish like a mirage the moment we get close to them. Very quickly I reached a point of wondering, “what’s going on here?” My sense of attention and care increased sharply as I listened very carefully to what I was being told, checking inside for an inner resonance of truth at every step. The effect, actually, was to drive my enquiry to deeper levels inside myself.
| | Several aspects of the modern Ishaya tradition have been drawn from T.M. and adapted for use with Ascension. These include the Puja ceremony, some of the guidelines for using the techniques correctly and scientific studies on the effects of meditation.
The better-known story is that he travelled to India and was taught the techniques by an Ishaya monk. A fictionalised account of this journey is given in his
book First Thunder. Though this journey has sometimes been presented as an historical occurrence, there is little question that the journey was undertaken physically since he seems to have been travelling around the United States at the time he was supposed to have been in India.
If some of the outer forms of the tradition have obvious roots in T.M., the same cannot be said of the Ascension Attitudes themselves. Where did they come from?
Frequent reports from people who feel that they have “done this before” are intriguing, but don’t shed much light on the origin of the techniques.
The link with the Himalayas that MSI portrays comes up quite often.
One teacher I spoke to reported childhood experiences of regularly travelling in a non-physical way to a magnificent underground building, which she understood to be deep beneath the Himalayas. Here she was taught the techniques of Praise, Gratitude and Love long before hearing of MSI or the Ishayas and some 20 years before MSI started teaching them as part of the First Sphere of Ascension attitudes.
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