The Whirlwind Of Ascension

from

The  Whirlwind  of  Ascension

Martin Exeter  February 3, 1985 a.m.

There is one body which in essence you compose. We call it a spiritual body, but it only has meaning because of a flesh counterpart. Both heaven and earth in unison are required. We have shared a recognition that the truth of heaven is love. This truth can only be known as there is adequate substance present, not only flesh substance but the substance of minds and hearts, to accommodate the truth. If we have a grouping, then the essential substance is the responsibility of all the individuals who compose that group. Without that connecting substance, connecting with spirit, nothing of any meaning can be known. The major responsibility rests with you. This is not usually the view. It is anticipated that the one who speaks will provide what is necessary, and I trust that is true, but to provide what is necessary requires all of you. Unless there is the substance capable of accommodating spirit, spirit will not be accommodated; and unless spirit is accommodated, so as to find fitting expression, there is no meaning or purpose to the fact that we have assembled. What is brought by all of you makes available the substance by which spirit may be accommodated and the truth of heaven known.

The truth of heaven is never absent. Love is never absent. The fact that this is so is revealed by the continuing presence of everything that is, for if the truth of heaven was absent there would be nothing. We have assurance that that truth is present, that the reality of love is present—even though it has heretofore been largely invisible or unknown. Nevertheless nothing would exist if the truth of heaven was not already present and indeed an eternal reality.

We are well aware that man—male and female—is essential if the truth of heaven is to be known in the earth. Human beings have absented themselves from providing this connection by which the truth of heaven could be known in the earth. Everyone has been engaged in their own personal affairs, and it has been forgotten that there was any real purpose to the presence of human beings on earth, and in particular to one’s own presence on earth. This has been called somewhat to our remembrance, the fact that there is a purpose of providing the connection between the earth and the truth of heaven. When we assemble ourselves as we are now, if we have experience in our own living, based in our own behavior, of the truth of heaven, then we may bring the substance of connection with us to be available collectively, to be available for the increased release of spirit and the increased experience of the truth of heaven, of love.

We all have a keen awareness of the veil that has been present, because of human behavior in general, between the truth of heaven and what was being experienced on earth. This veil has excluded the truth of heaven to a very large degree and to most people it doesn’t even exist; there is no awareness of any possibility in this regard. The only way that human beings think that anything can be done is by manipulation of what is present in the earth. Nothing much beyond that is included in the human experience. So most people endeavor to protect and sustain themselves and those who may be associated closely with them, but totally exclude the only way by which a state of peace and harmony, order, might be brought forth. It will never be brought forth by any of the manipulations of human beings who by their very manipulations exclude the truth of heaven.

Most people try to be good. Their idea of goodness is not always one’s own, if one has an idea of goodness. Perhaps the idea of goodness and of badness should be relinquished. This might be comparable to ceasing from that fatal choice of eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This means that one would have to cease to judge, and we have recognized that. The matter of accusation, blame and criticism which characterizes most human behavior is seen for the destructive thing it really is. One is always participating in emotional and mental involvement with what is going on, so one keeps one's world in a state of turmoil, blaming somebody else for doing it. The question is as to whether we’re going to keep it that way or not, and it is an individual matter. The individual is always the key. It’s only because someone somewhere makes a choice himself or herself to stop eating of the forbidden fruit, to stop judging, to stop blaming, criticizing and accusing. This would mean that one would have to become naive—actually it’s not naivete, it is innocence—become innocent, become transparent instead of opaque. I’m sure we’re all very much afraid of becoming transparent—probably wouldn’t admit it. To become transparent one must become innocent so that all the nonsense, the rubbish, is cleared out. Oh, that would be fatal. Well I don’t know—what we’re doing now is fatal, isn’t it? Maybe it’s reasonable to take a chance that something else might not be.

There is substance which provides the connection with heaven, with spirit, if we permit that substance to be present. This substance starts out by being what we call physical substance. We all have flesh bodies. But there is a process of ascension, isn’t there? We know about it. We can observe the fact that the mineral kingdom is transformed by the vegetable kingdom; and the animal kingdom, which includes the body of man, emerges by reason of the vegetable kingdom. So minerals, vegetables, animals—here is something being lifted up, transformed. We know what a rock looks like, but if you look at a potato you don’t see a rock, and yet the substance in the potato came from the rock, or at least some of it, and there is a process of ascension, substance being lifted up. It’s lifted up as far as the flesh body of human beings, but then human beings behave in such a way that this process of ascension almost inevitably is slowed down and eventually it ceases. In fact all the substance that had been lifted into the particular human body drops down with a plop, back into the mineral kingdom. We see this process occurring during what we call life, human existence anyway. Substance is taken into the body and substance leaves the body. This is a necessary process if there is to be health.

The human form might be said to be a container for this movement of substance: substance being lifted up and substance going back down again. However the substance which is being lifted up was not designed so that it might all drop back down again. What would have been achieved thereby? Here is this very intricate and miraculous process by which what seems to be inert mineral substance is raised up in the cycles of life to a supposed apex in man. Well man isn’t Man really. He is a facsimile thereof, because it was truly stated that man was made in the image and likeness of God. He doesn’t look much like it now. But the point is that here in man is the means by which the ascending substance might carry through in the processes of ascension and transformation and transmutation into what is describable as a higher level, to become something else. Well minerals became human beings; they became something else. Why should it stop there? What’s the point if all this is lifted up and then just dropped back down again? Well in actual fact, according to the behavior of human beings, there is a lifting up a little bit beyond this container.

The container of the human body is occupied by physical substance, but there is also something else in the human body; it’s not just a lump of flesh. There is what we call consciousness. There is a mind and a heart. There is the capability of thinking—virtually never used!—and the ability to participate in emotion, almost invariably wrongly used. But there is this level of substance which puts in an appearance because of the physical body; in other words, here this substance has ascended to a level which could be describable as mental or emotional. There has been a transformation to this extent of physical substance. Before, it was sitting there in a rock, and the rock wasn’t thinking much or feeling an awful lot—something maybe—but now it is much more alive, we would say, much more capable of participating at these higher vibrational levels of substance, mental and emotional. Where is it going to stop? There? Not rightly. This is being lifted up, transformed, to a level of what we would call spiritual substance, the substance which is ultimately the substance of connection between spirit and the realm of form. If there is no substance there, there is no consciousness of the reality of spirit.

A lot of people have no consciousness of the reality of spirit. All they know is their own emotions and their own mental gyrations and the fact that they have a physical body. Well the physical flesh is the first evidence of something being lifted up into this human container in the processes of ascension. When we come together in a service such as this we are together to provide a facility by which this process of ascension might continue, not for ourselves but in order that spirit might have a means of connection with human beings. There are a lot of them on earth, disconnected human beings. The evidence of that disconnection is all the confusion and chaos and destructiveness that is so apparent, not only out there, as the media tells us, but right close to home we know about it. To some extent we have let our behavior change, so that we do not indulge ourselves so much as heretofore in accusation, blame and judgment and in all the accompanying states of experience, fear being a very prominent one. But fear will always be there as long as we are accusing, blaming and judging. It must be, because we see all these hostile people and events all around, ready to clobber us unless we protect ourselves somehow. As a human family we have to defend ourselves from each other—at least this is the view—and it would be very risky not to do that. One would have to admit that it is so unless one was aware of the truth of heaven, unless one was aware of the fact that in reality there is no need for defense.

This is the innocent posture, one might say: “I don’t need to defend myself from anything. I don't need to defend myself from myself.” This attitude of defensiveness is common to most people, isn’t it? How quickly we all leap to our defense, simply because we have no adequate substance of connection which would cause us to be aware of the truth of heaven. We speak glibly about love and we have some emotional feelings on occasion, but the reality of love is virtually unknown. Most of it is simply a human misinterpretation, because the reality of love cannot be known until the truth of heaven is known. To imagine that one can get love out of the earth and from one’s fellows and that that will bring satisfaction and fulfilment is nonsense. It never happened. It never could happen, because love is the truth of heaven. When the truth of heaven is known in one’s own experience then love is introduced into the earth; otherwise it’s excluded.

Lots of people talk: “Oh we need more love.” We don’t need more love. There's all the love that is necessary, because the truth of heaven is present. We think we need more love because we exclude the truth of heaven. The world’s problems are not going to be solved by increasing love. In actual fact the world’s problems don’t need to be solved; they need to pass away. They are humanly created, humanly sustained. We’re very good at that. We’ve been trained generation after generation in the process of creating and sustaining problems. We do it very efficiently. We find a problem. We go to work to solve it. We think we’ve gotten rid of that problem but in the process we have created half a dozen more. Problems are proliferations of the human endeavor when there is no experience of the truth of heaven. Everything immediately dissolves in that realm of things when the truth of heaven is known. Wouldn’t it be more sensible then, intelligent even, to be concerned about the truth of heaven in one’s own personal experience than to try to solve problems, which only produces more? People are the problem. That’s really the only problem: people who insist upon excluding the truth of heaven, because they insist upon their ridiculous behavior of accusation, blame and criticism. Then there is fear and there is insecurity in consequence.

So we assemble ourselves together to bring ascending substance together. We bring our flesh bodies; that’s the base. We couldn’t do very much without bringing those. So we put in an appearance in the flesh, and the process of ascension is going on. We are letting substance ascend. I would like to read a passage from the Book of Job. It is very pertinent, in fact, but scarcely ever looked at as being meaningful at all. It is the first verse of the 38th Chapter of Job: “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said...” What about the whirlwind? Was this just a nice fanciful, poetic phrase to indicate something mysterious happening? I don’t think so. I think it referred to this ascending substance. Unless there is the ascending substance reaching to a level of spiritual substance, beyond mental and emotional substance, there is no means by which the truth of heaven can be personally experienced by anyone. As long as one is plodding around in physical, mental and emotional substance and that’s all, one will be incapable of comprehending, let alone expressing, the truth of heaven. And this is what most people are doing, treading around in the muck and the mire of their emotional reactions and their mental figurings and gyrations and their physical excesses in one way or another. There is no basis for understanding how the physical body should work—the only reason for its existence is as part of the facility for ascension. And if one blocks the ascending process by accusation, blame and criticism, by human behavior in other words, then one has no expectation other than that of plopping down into the mineral kingdom again, and I don’t think an awful lot is known in that mineral state. Something only begins to be known when it’s lifted as high as human beings.

So there is rightly a whirlwind, an ascending cyclic motion of the substance that is present in ourselves, when we assemble for a service. That’s the reason we’re here, that there might be a whirlwind, an unbroken whirlwind, because we let go of the judgments and all the crazy notions that human beings have about the way they should behave in this upside-down world. That’s all relinquished. It’s more or less easy to do in a setting such as this, but we can't really let anything happen in a setting such as this unless we’ve been letting it happen in the rest of our experience in living. Then we begin to be familiar with the ascending process, so that we have plenty of substance to know the truth of heaven in daily living—and we can bring it together and let it be blended into an ascending current of substance.

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.” Unless the whirlwind is there there’s no means by which the truth of heaven can come forth. The substance must be there, the refined substance that has been lifted to the level of what may be referred to as spiritual substance. As this spiritual substance is generated out of the mental and emotional substance, when we have let go of our ridiculous attitudes of accusation, blame and criticism, then it can ascend up higher, and we begin to have an awareness of the truth of heaven, which has been with us all the time—and having that awareness, that becomes a base for our own living, for our own behavior. It becomes the base of our understanding.

Now I say that there must be innocence—in other words that substance must be transparent rather than opaque, rather than preventing the experience of the truth of heaven. And when there is clarity, that truth of heaven is there, and it is love, and it is an effulgence. We don’t need any protection. There it is, impenetrable one might say. Human beings have found it to be impenetrable. They've banged their heads against it in every generation and landed up dead. Why not be a means by which it can come forth? That’s the purpose of it. Why resist it? Why fight against it? Why indulge in all these ridiculous attitudes and ways of behaving which completely prevent the experience of what human beings claim they long for, fulfilment and peace? There could be no peace as long as the truth of heaven is excluded. That's where peace is known. So we share the responsibility, whenever we come together in a gathering such as this, of letting this whirlwind be present for a purpose, that something may be allowed to emerge because that whirlwind is present.

The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind—the only way that something can come out of the truth of heaven into the earth. Then human beings stop being a veil obscuring the truth of heaven and become an open window of heaven, become the means by which the truth of heaven comes into the earth, and that creates beauty. When it’s excluded there is ugliness, there is destructiveness, there is conflict, there is suffering, tribulation of all kinds, simply because the truth of heaven is being excluded. That is the only reason. Very simple really. But there’s only one person who can allow the truth of heaven to be included, and that’s the one who speaks of himself or herself as me. It is a specific individual responsibility. Nobody else can do it for oneself. One either excludes the truth of heaven or one welcomes it into expression. And we can’t welcome it into expression until we have the substance to accommodate it. So this process of ascension is something with which we are very much concerned, that the substance may be available through which the truth of heaven comes into the earth.

We can’t have it both ways. We can’t maintain our human state of accusation, blame and judgment, criticism, fear and hate and resentment and all these things, we can’t keep that and be of any value whatsoever in allowing the transformation of human experience to be brought to pass. It needs to be brought to pass in oneself; then it may be multiplied. But if everybody refuses to do that there’s nothing, rightly so. So we rejoice to be together in sharing this whirlwind in a very specific collective way when we gather ourselves together on such an occasion as this. Individually it should be occurring constantly anyway, but here we have a marvelous opportunity, if it has been occurring individually, to bring it all together and let that ascension be a reality in our experience. We know it's a reality in our experience because of what is coming forth by reason of this connection. Then we begin to know the truth of heaven, that this may be reflected as the truth of earth.

The innocence, the transparency, that is proper does not exclude an awareness of the manner in which human beings function, because after all we’ve been doing it ourselves, so we know all about it. But there is also an awareness of the futility of the way human beings function, and so why would we be bothered with it anymore? The state of that transparency, that innocence, was described as being as “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” We know what’s going on; we were going on in that way ourselves; but now transparency, innocence, that the truth of heaven might come into the earth.

© emissaries of divine light