I’d like to take a deeper look at what Archangel Michael said recently in a personal reading. It’s a clear indication of the gradual nature of our Ascension. He said to me:
Archangel Michael: You are fed up.
Steve: Yes, fed up with waiting. Nothing seems to have happened [on the Reval, personal Ascension, etc.] and here I am dangling again. …
AAM: You are not dangling. You are in the process of your Ascension and what is coming to the forefront is the tiny remnants – and, yes, we know to you it feels massive – but it is the tiny remnants of what remains in terms of your attachment to the old human experience. That is why it feels so intense. (1)
“You are in the process of your Ascension.” So Ascension is a process. Yes, it’s also a snap at moments of enlightenment like Brahmajnana and Sahaja Samadhi. But for the rest it’s gradual.
Zen is sometimes described as being divided into sudden and gradual schools. But is not the truth that both are true? Enlightenment may take decades or even lifetimes of slow, gradual progress before, in a snap, enlightenment occurs. The process of which enlightenment is a part is both gradual and sudden.
And how could our Ascension be anything but gradual in important phases? We’re not discarding the physical body; we’re taking it with us, refurbished, updated, lots of power under the hood. I got to see that we cannot overstretch the body from my operation.
I got it. I got it! No more lessons needed on that one. We have to observe the manufacturer’s limits on this human frame.
In terms of the Company of Heaven’s communicational strategy, I don’t think it would have made a lot of sense in the early years of preparation for Ascension (1990-2010) to emphasize the gradual. I’d have emphasized the sudden, use that to build momentum, and then deal with the disappointment of those who choose not to remain till the end. That’d be in preference to emphasizing the gradual nature of Ascension and attracting very little attention among the populace of Earth – and fewer ascending.
And, to tell the truth, I think that’s what they have done. And if I take that a step further: I wake up to the need to support this effort to keep people awake and alive to the end, and to stop my own foot dragging because I personally am weary and discontented.
So “tiny remnants” are coming to the surface. Again the mere fact that there is a step in the process that Ascension is during which “tiny remnants” due to remaining attachments to Third Dimensionality (habits, vasanas, conditioning) are coming to the surface establishes that the process has steps. A process which has steps over time is a gradual process.
As to the “tiny remnants” themselves, they feel like “massive” icebergs or meteors to me. I am going through the worst of our common feelings – loneliness, depression, disappointment, you name it – every day. Doesn’t this remind you of the initiation process – the cleansing – seekers had to go through in past times?
It’s serious but not fatal. Serious because it’s necessary work. But not fatal because I know I’ll weather this next storm with flying colors. The only one of the voices inside of me who’d say otherwise is the one who derives satisfaction from perpetually complaining. And I’m not listening to him any longer.
All that has ever harmed me has only been my own thoughts and feelings – what my brother Paul would call “our interpretations.”
I know the remedy so I won’t suffer (please don’t write me). The remedy is to open to the experience of these awful feelings and be with them until they complete themselves and disappear. Anything else is resistance and causes persistence. Only being with them causes their disappearance.
Nevertheless, as one who’s agreed to mark the trail, this latter part is at least one of the dark nights of the soul that we sometimes come across. It may be the last or it may not. I don’t know. I just know, as AAM said in the reading, that it will all work out.
Going through it and seeing that it takes time, and knowing that it’s only one step in the process that Ascension is, I get, at least experientially, that Ascension is a gradual process.
Footnotes
(1) Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, July 1, 2016. Used with permission.