One possibility is that MSI learnt the techniques in a similar way – if so one can perhaps see why he never bothered trying to get people to believe him.
Another suggestion I’ve come across is that the Ascension Attitudes are pure statements of truth from the very fabric of life and that anyone with sufficiently refined consciousness can “cognise” them.
This is immediately obvious with the First Sphere, and in time starts to become clear with the higher spheres as well. Perhaps this is what MSI did. This doesn’t necessarily mean that someone else intuiting the attitudes would come up with exactly the same form of words; nevertheless all the aspects of consciousness covered by the attitudes would be covered by anyone else who cognised them accurately.
The Puja ceremony has more obvious roots beyond T.M., being made up of
ancient Sanscrit verses that have been in use in India for a very long time. The Puja is regarded by the Ishayas as a vehicle for conveying the pure essence of the teaching and is briefly discussed towards the end of First Thunder.
The ceremony connects participants with the love and wisdom of masters of all traditions, the lineage of teachers who have gone before us, making themselves available to anyone willing to open their hearts.
People regularly report
the presence of angels and other helpful beings at the Puja ceremony. My own experience is one of a powerful sense of connection and inner guidance. Wherever the outer form came from, there is something deeply authentic about the experience of this ceremony.
The connection with the lineage of past teachers focuses in particular on Jesus, who is said to have been the last person to teach the attitudes until modern times. At the outer level there is no historical evidence for
this, and yet many people, myself included, have a deep sense of connection with Jesus through this teaching. Some have powerful memories of that time, a time when hopes of igniting the flame of unconditional love in every human soul were perhaps two thousand years premature. We have another chance now, though there is no room for complacency.
All these experiences may be very helpful and inspiring to the person having them and can indeed lead to a deep sense of inner
communion. But they are sometimes less useful for other people, perhaps leading to futile thoughts of belief, disbelief and comparison.
Ultimately, someone else’s experience is neither here nor there and in any case belief forms no part of this teaching. The level of personal experience is the only one that matters and this point is driven home again and again in MSI’s teaching and writing.
If have found that the practice works on two distinct levels, which as
time goes by intertwine to become one. At the level of life experiences, the teaching invites us to make the radical choice to unconditionally appreciate the present moment just as it is. I have found the Ascension Attitudes to be highly effective tools to help gently and persistently reinforce this enlightened perspective on life – and though the resultant life changes have sometimes been far from gentle, they’ve caused me to live more fully and be more real than ever before.
| | At the same time, the practice has helped reinforce the connection with my deepest level of being, our Source, the silent depths of consciousness from which each moment arises, known in the Ishaya tradition as the Ascendant. This is the deep unchanging place within us where we experience our oneness with life.
Over the couple of years I’ve
been ascending, I’ve found that these two levels have merged. Whenever I am sufficiently conscious to do so, I co-operate with this merging through a moment by moment process of surrendering experience back to the stillness. This means instead of internally contracting away from uncomfortable experiences, embracing what is there to be lived in the moment it arises as deeply as I can. In this way, the slate is cleared for the next moment to arise anew.
The word
surrender sometimes has connotations of control, but I mean it in the sense of that exquisite moment of surrender to a lover. To our divine lover.
At least that’s the way it works when my attention is there.
I still often find this process of surrender to be incomplete and clumsy, joy being easier to surrender than grief, fear or rage, or some deeply buried emotion that I’m not fully in touch with. My mind is eager to say that one experience is good and another not so good, rather than simply embracing what is. Yet much as I may kick and scream at times, part of me always knows from my own experience that each moment is born in love from a deep place of perfection and harmony.
So it
seems that the Ishayas’ Ascension has two aspects, an inner essence that is timeless and an outer form that is transient. The inner essence is the tradition of enlightenment that exists as a spark in everyone, a spark that is nurtured through our connection to the flow of life itself.
This essence is at the heart of any authentic spiritual teaching and is nurtured by teachers of truth, past and present, in every tradition. This is the lineage of teachers to which the Ishayas connect, rather than teachers of a particular sect.
Looked at from this inner perspective, the origin of the Ishayas’ Ascension lies in every human heart, each with its own unique variation on what it means to be human. The teacher is inside us, and the teaching is tailored to our
individual needs.
The present day tradition arises from a group of committed individuals - teachers and ascenders alike - consciously making the choice to live life from this place. A group of people answering the fundamental inner call to come home. And so, to me, the source of this teaching really is the individual human heart. That’s where its power comes from, rather than from the outer form of tradition, dogma and adherence to a belief system.
Seeing
the origin in this way leads to a question for anyone interested in this teaching: this is our tradition now, what shall we make of it? Shall we try and encapsulate it into a fixed and rigid form so that we don’t lose any of it? Shall we release all structure and let it drift apart like so much dust in the wind?
We could all learn something from the boldness with which MSI fashioned the outer form of the tradition to suit what he saw as the needs of the moment.
We could simply look for that place of inner harmony and let life flow from there.
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