My ascension work was born of my frustration with the world. “Why do people need to buy happiness, or even survival?” “Why do we need to sacrifice light to live in day to day darkness?”
I could go on and on with my questions. I would rather relate the answers I found while I was desperately seeking for light.
Light is everything. It means illumination, just as it means a burden-less existence. To live a life of light is to be enlightened while free of the heaviness the world insists to encumber upon itself.
I had given up my life for the pilgrimage to the unknown. I knew that light was in the world somewhere. Not just anyone else’s light, but my light. Initially, when I began my walking pilgrimage in California, I interlaced my day with a lot of exercise. Following a one-hour regimen of running around the track in the local high school in West Covina in L.A. County, I would close the regimen by practicing a set of powerful meditative bodywork a friend in Sagada taught me called The Five Tibetan Rites. So powerful were these exercises that my light weight was further reduced as my energetic metabolism reached new heights. I could feel a change come over me, as I mustered the courage to quit my day jobs and be stuck in the U.S. waiting for a sign that would catapult me to a worry-less promised land existing in my mind.
I felt that to contain light (for light is information, too), we need to enlighten our waste-filled bodies.
After I had quit my job, I walked the many miles from Covina all the way to Pasadena to visit the 2-story Borders bookstore. It was there that I came upon the works of James Redfield and Nealle Donald Walsh. At times of torment, new age spirituality is a welcome reprieve from the mental prison we are trying to escape.
Back then, it was enough to bathe in the light within the words in those books. I had no money to buy the books, so I stayed there the whole day bathing in universal concepts so easy to realize, that it is difficult to think of how confusing the world is outside of that section of the bookstore.
I took my readings to heart so profusely, that my life changed overnight. A few weeks after I had re-read the Conversations with God series, I had that fateful meeting with the Mexican stranger who took me to the San Gabriels to tell me about my past, my present, and my future. It isn’t important that you know the details of this event. Importantly, experience changes one’s perspective, just as perspective changes one’s experience. I couldn’t fathom everything that happened, but it was enough to prod me into a greater part of nothingness.
Fast forward to the time I had left my family, my job, my friends, and my sanity. I’m in Boracay beach, and I am about to make the biggest decision in my life. The “Queen Mother” came in the form of a yellow butterfly and spoke to me. She said, “it will be difficult, can you make it if you choose to embark on this journey, rather than ending your life now?” I was frustrated at everything. Nothing meant anything. It was the darkest night of my soul. Yet, I felt light. My body tingled, though tired.
I threw away my questions, realizing that if I was to continue living in illusion, within Maya, it was certain, figurative and literal death anyway. Leaving everything my mind once clung onto, I decided to let go.
People think that it was a difficult thing to walk around Mindanao, the fifth largest island in the world. If you have experienced a good Inner Dance workshop, you will feel a certain trance-like affair descending upon you. You are entirely conscious, yet you are not thinking and fearing the same way. Your troubles have little power over you, and you feel that we humans are meant to do greater things that we think we are limited to.
When I was walking around in Mindanao, I felt that sensation, but much more so. I felt like I was walking around while enveloped in a powerful energy blanket that protected me from all harm, sickness or injury. I never got sick, nor did I go hungry. If I was sleeping on the streets on the way from one place to the other, I slept soundly. If I had no food or money in my pockets, the most generous people offered me food without my having to ask for anything. I was provided for, every step of the way.
Every person has access to a direct energy stream that is unique to that person. It is the energy stream we will call, The Birth Vision. The Birth Vision is that which leads us to our greatest, most awesome expression and experience possible while living as individuated souls on this planet.
Along the while, I was led to new light, new information that came to my ready hands at precisely the right time.
I learned of entire communities that existed on raw fruits and vegetables. Individuals who elevated their existence to basic goodness, yet a more profound level of happiness people seldom find.
Suddenly, I have no job, no money, living in absolute faith. My one frustration with the world could be summed up in one question: “can we not live in this world receiving energy that is freely given to us by the universe, while having the courage to give energy just as freely, without thought of anything in return?”
Now, put yourself in my shoes. I grew up in Manila, studied in La Salle Greenhills, graduated high school in the mid-west U.S.A., took up Integrated Marketing Communications in the University of Asia and the Pacific. I ran several small companies, acted as consultant to a few corporations, and was the country manager of what was then the fifth largest travel company in the world. I was a professor of advertising, direct marketing, public relations, and English literature. I hailed from a clan that thrives on power, image and money.
In the cut-throat world, benevolence and kindness is conditional. It is seldom real, but rather, it is an idea, a concept; at best, it is an attainable, yet very difficult goal.
For years, I had felt a certain oneness in my bones, I could sense it in marketing presentations, I could feel it in street signs. I got into trouble talking about it, much more when I try to insert it into my professional life. A lot of people understood it, but I had to talk to them on a one-on-one basis, when people had let go of their walls and weren’t afraid of speaking their own yearnings to find happiness.
By the time I was walking around the Philippines, sometimes as much as 60km a day with just some water and a few bananas, I was able to take the very abstract new age philosophies, the esoteric mysteries, the new physics, and my own knowledge of the world, and find a synergy. It was a new connectedness, very different from the conceptual spirituality I dabbled in while living my pretenses in Manila.
I resonated with a woman whose story gave me immense inner strength. Her name is the Peace Pilgrim. I found her story in a magazine on the latter part of the Mindanao journey and was stunned to learn that she began a three decade walking pilgrimage for peace as a grandmother. It took her fifteen years to prepare herself fully for doing this well. She did this all this without money, and swore never to ask people for food and shelter, yet openly received what was offered to her. She began her walk in the same place and time I did mine, Pasadena on the first week of January. She died the day I was born. July 7.
Look up her story on the Internet. The first thing that will come to mind is how she could be so focused on her seemingly impossible task. The same instructions Jesus gave his disciples before he died.
To be involved in Ascension work is like locking on to a specific goal. The goal is constant but the way to that goal is twisting and turbulent, beset by perils and distractions. The goal of ascension is light. The light within us all. The way to finding this light is to find a certain balance.
First, the journeyman/woman must at least have the clear intent to shed off any impurities and attachments that will hinder the difficult upward climb. Most people, at this first stage, are unready. Those who are ready have often undergone tremendous challenges that did not kill them but ended up making them stronger, experiences that have deepened them and are now forcing them to ask the more important questions. Who am I? What am I doing on Earth? Is it okay to allow so much suffering in the world while I am so intent on accumulating material wealth? The same questions Prince Siddharta asked himself before setting for the path of the Buddha.
Second, the pilgrim must place firm faith in his/her innate wisdom. There are many signs meant to misdirect the pilgrim from the light. Signs confoundedly say, “go back home,” “danger zone,” or even “stay here.” There is nothing wrong with home, with staying put, if you are content with your stage in ultimate reality. If you can look at the mirror and say, I reflect from within me, the heart and soul of the universe,” why ought you to change anything, then?
Without these first and second conditions, it will be difficult to summon courage and determination to get past the first few veils of the labyrinth walk to the heart of the earth.
The third thing that can help you find the balance to truly comprehend and rightfully act on your Ascension work is this: give away enough of your belongings to the poor. Enough of it to hurt. To make a point of it, the universe likes good thoughts and nice words, but you will have to prove your detachment to the material world, your neediness if it is going to allow things to flow towards you even if you think you do not “have” enough resources to survive the journey.
Of course, this is not a condition. You do not have to do it. If you can do it, though, you will be taken cared of. Every single one of your needs will be met. You must prove it to yourself – that you truly believe in the creative force within you, and everything that you need at the right moment, will manifest itself instantly, no matter how impossible the situation.
Anyway, if you are on the path to simplification but hold on to things, the universe will find ways to take away your material belongings to remind you of why you’re here on Earth to begin with.
