From Matthew:
23 Therefore if you bring your gift to the altar,
and there remember
that your brother has something against you,
24 leave your gift there before the altar,
and go your way.
First be reconciled to your brother,
and then come and offer your gift.
~ Matthew 5:23, 34 NKJV
The other day I had a conversation about the “missing link” with my dear friend, Vrajaprana.
Pravrajika Vrajaprana is a nun in the Ramakrishna order. She is also a big mucky-muck in the Spiritual world, although if you met her, you wouldn’t know it. She is so cool and down-to-Earth and hilarious. But if you sit with her for more than a minute, you quickly comprehend the depth of her wisdom, and feel the gentle compassion radiating from her eyes bathe you in calm.
It never ceases to amuse me to watch people fall under her spell, and she literally does nothing to encourage the adoration she is showered with, but she is beloved because she rocks.
Vrajaprana is practical, funny and laid-back. She wears jeans most of the time, but ochre robes for pujas or services. She is a tower of Spirit that reaches into and beyond the Multiverse and back to hanging her laundry on a line.
Tantey and I, (I call her ‘Tantey’ even though she’s a year younger than me,) had got together over a couple of Lattes and some Chocolate grahams.
We started chatting about a young nun who’d left the Ramakrishna order. That led us to, what we called, the missing step you can’t “Spiritualize.” And why some, who take up the renunciant life, mistake becoming all Spiritual, as a way of dealing with pain they didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t deal with in the “outer world.”
Tantey said, “It just doesn’t work. You can’t sit in meditation while you’re resenting someone, or angry at someone.”
I remembered Paramahansa Yogananda quoting Shankara, an 8th century Hindu philosopher. Shankara said, “The outer environment has nothing to do with the inner.”
In other words, you can sit in meditation, or go to church looking all pious, but still be thinking about killing or stealing from someone.
I’ve always loved the Baptism Scenes in Francis Coppola’s film, THE GODFATHER, because they illustrate this point perfectly. 
In an elaborate and ornate Cathedral, we see Michael Corleone, surrounded by his family, standing up as godfather to his sister’s baby. When asked by the priest, if he “renounces Satan, and all his works, and all his pomps,” Michael answers that he does renounce them.
And yet, at the very moment he’s renouncing evil, he’s green-lit the murders of the 5 heads of the other Mafia families, and Michael scheduled those killings to be carried out while he was standing in church, all spiffed-up and righteous-looking, but all the while, so not. (1.)
That’s exactly what Shankara was talking about. Praying in church (the outer environment) but planning a murder (the inner environment)
Sri Daya Mata, the President of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship for 50 years, also talked about this point. Daya Ma said she had no time for “Street Angels and House Devils.” She had no time for people who put on a public face of kindness, but who were hellacious at home.
(Sri Daya Mata had counseled many women who were regularly beaten by their husbands, both in the USA and India.)
Aretha Franklin’s famous anthem, RESPECT, is also, exactly, about this point:
“What you want
Baby, I got it
What you need
You know I got it
All I’m askin’
Is for a little respect when you get home (just a little bit)
Hey baby (just a little bit) when you get home
(Just a little bit) mister (just a little bit) (2.)
So—you can’t “pray-away” your pain. Would that you could, but no dice.
You have to deal with inner-pain the old-fashioned way; with a professional who is trained to help you deal with it. Whatever bitterness, resentment, wounds, hurts, betrayals, jealousies, anger and everything else you may be feeling that is preventing you from being peaceful inside.
And if not a therapist, then a Spiritual teacher or workshop or 12-Step program or wherever you feel moved to go to rid yourself of whatever is holding you back from happiness.
This is what Jesus meant. If you come to your altar—but remember that you’re still pissed off at that co-worker who got the promotion you should have had—then first, go deal with that bitterness, and THEN sit to pray or meditate.
Tantey told me this is not only what renunciants miss, but most people miss, over and over again. Can’t pray it away, drink it away, overwork it away, drug it away, shop it away, gamble it away, travel it away or shove it away.
Wherever you go—there you are.
I’m fairly certain that many of us on this path have been doing inner-work for decades. Everyone I know has. Steve and everyone he knows has. Linda Dillon and everyone she knows has. All of us. You can’t get to this place where we are at, without having dealt with, as Linda elegantly puts it, many “core issues.”
This is a necessary step in Ascension because you can’t Ascend if you’re full of anger. Won’t work. You can’t be in a realm of Light when you’re enraged.
Unresolved issues, core issues, or Vasanas, as Steve likes to put it, look to me like that adorable Peanuts character, Pigpen. He is surrounded by a cloud of dust and that dust has always looked to me like unresolved bitterness. And you sure can’t take emotional dust into the 5th Dimension.
I don’t believe we have to be 100% perfectly cleared of all our “stuff,” BTW. I think 51% will do. And that’s one heck-of-a-lot.
So.
If you have ANY anything that prevents you from inner-peace, harmony, kindness, happiness, generosity, love, gratitude and truth, to name a few happy characteristics, then you need to deal with that stuff. It’s ESSENTIAL. (And you’ll feel loads better.)
Naturally, the cabal-constructed world poo pooed mental peace so that there is suspicion, even today in 2019, about anything that has to do with mental health.
Dalai Lama shaking hands with Vrajaprana, Desmond Tutu in the background
It does make sense however, that the cabal don’t want a happy, peaceful, connected-to-Spirit Humanity. A light-filled Humanity that remembers itself as powerful Multidimensional Angelic beings, blasts the illuminati out of the galaxy in a nanosecond.
There are growing numbers of people all around the globe who are waking up and clearing themselves and the collective of millennia of sorrows. Because when you heal yourself, you heal the collective.
That is what lightworkers are doing 24/7. Clearing ourselves and the collective. (Hence our frequent exhaustion, imo.)
So I think Tantey’s missing link, Matthew 5:23, 24, is an essential link in the Ascension story.
“Inner peace
but from remembering who we are.”
~ Marianne Williamson
Footnotes
(1.) Michael Corleone, THE GODFATHER
httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?
THE GODFATHER Baptism Scene script:
httpss://www.scribd.com/
(2.) Aretha Franklin ‘RESPECT,’ 1967
Aretha Franklin – Respect [1967] (Original Version)
‘RESPECT’ was written by Otis Redding in 1965.