The Ascension is actually the birth of the Inner You expressed as the spiritual individualism of the inner particle state.” – Stuart Wilde

I am in a constant state of ascension – not only because of all that has happened in my life – but also in spite of all that has happened in my life. By definition, most would assume that the pathway of ascension is upward. I have found the opposite to be true. Whatever glimpses of enlightenment I have had, whatever spiritual growth I have experienced in life, have only been realized by my journeying inward, deeply within myself.

The other common assumption made on the subject of ascension (see what I did there?) is that one does not spiritually ascend to his/her God Self until one has physically died. Who says? My personal experience has taught me that my state of ascension is taking place now, in this moment in time. What happens after my death is anyone’s guess (with heavy emphasis on the word guess). I certainly don’t pretend to know what happens to my body, mind, or soul after my heart stops beating and I stop breathing. What I do know is this: everyday that I consciously choose to move further away from my False Self (Ego Self), I become closer to God – and to the man He created me to be (i.e. my True Self).

My personal ascension towards the realm where God resides within me began when I started to follow His gentle whisper. Since time immemorial, humankind has longingly searched the heavens for God – or Gods, as the case may be – for isn’t that where one would naturally look? God “spoke” to man in booming thunderclaps, “beckoned” him from the majestic clouds atop tall mountains, and “rewarded” him by making it rain on his parched farm fields. Throughout history, man just figured that God must be up there, somewhere, right? Yet, in the Holy Bible, when Elijah is told to stand on the mountain because the Lord was going to be passing by, we are told:

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. (1 Kings 19:11-12, NIV)

It wasn’t very long ago when I realized that, to hear a whisper, especially a gentle one, an individual must be very close to the person speaking in order to hear what he/she is saying. That’s when I remembered the old adage that the ego is the distance we put between ourselves and God. During these past nine years of addiction recovery, I have been sincerely trying to bridge that gap between me and God, by destroying my False/Ego Self – that facade of a man that I used to be. Over time, I began to notice how attuned my ears were becoming to God’s gentle whisper, and that’s when it hit me: for me to be able to hear such a soft, quiescent voice, it must be coming from within me and not from the heavens above.

If one believes that humankind was created in the image of God, or that God breathed life into man, then one can readily understand why many world religions, and mystic traditions, believe that each of us is born with the divine spark of God within us. I believe that it is that divine spark that whispers to us from that place within our God Selves. In the same way that our Ego Selves loved to tell us how wonderful we looked on the outside – how smart we were, how rich we were – all of those superficial (i.e. exterior) “qualities” we prided ourselves as having, it was only when we began to mine deeply within ourselves that we found our true God-like, Divine Essence.

When Jesus was asked by the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them:

The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:20-21, KJV)

Far be it for me to ever attempt to “read” more into the words of Jesus than was intended, but in this one particular verse, it appears to me that Jesus is clearly saying, “Quit looking out there for the kingdom of God – for it is right here within you. 

As a sojourning pilgrim, on a spiritual quest to ascend to that place where God dwells, I have come to realize that I could spend a lifetime traveling to the far reaches of the earth – from Tibetan monasteries in the Himalayas to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome – only to realize that, at no time, was I ever traveling alone. For wherever I was on my “solitary” journey, looking for God in the resplendent majesty of nature, other people, and temples of worship, it was only when I looked within my True Self that I began to ascend to where God truly lives – within the temple of my soul, ever whispering, gently and lovingly, “Welcome Home.”