Jeremy Elliott is a Reiki Practitioner and spiritual healer who works in the Chattanooga area; his practice is called Positive Resonance. He’s also a self-described “spiritual nerd” who writes about a wide range of psycho-spiritual topics that explore how to live the life you have always dreamed of.

I invited Jeremy on the show to share some of his knowledge about the topic of Ascension.

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Okay, so ascension, there's essentially two things. There's the process and the event. Ascension is basically the process of reconnecting with God. A reason that it's called "ascension" is because here in the physical world, we're at low vibration, low frequency. So during the process of self-purification, which is another term for healing, we are raising our vibrations and eventually we will make it up to the point where we do reconnect with God or with everything. With Oneness.

Slade:

How did you become interested in this topic in particular?

Jeremy:

Actually, this topic kind of found me as a part of my path. For a lot of my life, it was not on really a spiritual path. I was working on websites in a corporate office. And then at some point I realized that I could definitely produce more meaning for the world. I had a more beneficial purpose for the world in general. And in that time, going through this process of self-discovery, the ascension topic really hit me in a big way.

There's a lot of background, but I'd really like to get into more about the ascension in particular.

Slade:

Yeah, go ahead! And talk about what that process is for you. When you discovered it, it sounds like there was a process there that you latched onto and were interested in going through as part of a personal journey. Tell me about what that was.

Jeremy:

So just to give a little of the background, in my 20s, it was a point in my life where I didn't care about spirituality. I wasn't interested. It didn't matter, didn't make a difference to me. Then a close relative in the family died at a relatively young age, in their early 20s, and somehow that just set off, I don't know, it was a trigger. Something clicked and all of a sudden, I just started getting into everything.

I didn't even know about meditation. I found this word in a book. I looked it up. I was looking up 'spiritism' which is a fascinating aspect of emerging Christianity and psychic abilities, life between lives, all this kind of thing. And for meditation, I got into Buddhism and that's where things started becoming a little bit problematic in life was how to deal with spirituality in life.

At first there were questions like, how do I... because life was becoming in many ways, it was starting to become meaningless and kind of painful on one hand. I was starting to notice that things weren't clicking. I wasn't happy. I'd read about enlightenment and... Oh. That's what I want. That's going to solve everything.

That was really the start of the whole process.

Now, years later, I can say that's not the way you go about it. Actually, it's a lot different process because the journey... and it really helped me understand that what I was doing as I was looking at my life thinking, okay, I've got problems, and I want a solution to them. I want to get out of this pain. I want to be happy.

And so I said, if I choose enlightenment, this is what's going to work for me. And so I go sit down on my meditation cushion for weeks and months and years. Nothing happened. At the end of it, it's almost like, you know what? This isn't working and I've done this for so long. What's going on?

There was some resentment because when you realize this, it's almost like I made some kind of bargain with God. It was like, if I be a good spiritual person for so long, then everything's going to work out. I'm going to get my goody bag at the end. And that's not the way it works at all.

So at this point, there's almost this idea of, maybe I don't really want it after all. Screw that.

What that was, was actually just a classic case of what's called spiritual bypass. What happens is, what people will think, okay, I've got these problems. But now that I'm working on enlightenment, all the life issues, that's for little people. That's not for me because I'm too spiritual for those kind of concerns. It's a common trap to fall into.

What actually happens is, the pain in our life, what we get in life is exactly what we need for ascension and for self-purification. That pain that we're trying to avoid by seeking ascension or seeking enlightenment, those are the signs that are signaling exactly what we can find inside of ourselves that we need to work on.

So it's really kind of the opposite. We always tend to do things the opposite way than what we really need to do. So for instance, any time that you in life find something that you're not happy with, that is a signal that there is something inside of you that needs to be healed. So in healing that, whatever that is inside of you, that's the process of self-improvement. That's the spiritual path. That's what leads you to ascension.

Slade:

Mmm... let me stop you there and say that, when you said that, the first thing that I thought is, most people respond to that with thinking they need to change their circumstances or the situation that's causing them problems, right?

Jeremy:

Right. That's very common that people aren't happy. They think, I just need this. I just need that. Just to make it a short response. Anything that's temporary is not going to get happiness. Nothing external, in other words, can give you happiness. It has to be something internal. That internal is finding your true self and your true worth.

This process of self-purification is actually uncovering... what has happened in life is we've all been wounded. We have these emotional reactions. People hurt us and that pain, instead of allowing ourselves to feel it, we repress it. We stuff it down inside.

When that happens, those emotions actually prevent us from feeling our true self and our true worth. So the process of self-purification, the ascension process, is a journey of actually healing, is bringing those up, allowing ourselves to feel the pain in order to release it.

One of the things that I like to point out to people is that... negative emotions are very tricky to deal with. Nobody likes to feel them or to work with them. But it's important to understand in the idealistic world that we're living in, the extent that we allow ourselves to feel negative emotions, that is the same capacity to which we will be able to feel positive emotions. If we don't allow ourselves to feel negative emotions, we cannot feel happiness. We cannot feel joy.

So it's not avoiding the negative emotions or avoiding the negative situations, or trying to find things, bringing things into our lives that'll make us happy. It's actually working through the things that are difficult for us and are causing us pain. By working through those, we will get to happiness or the joy that we're seeking.

Slade:

So how do you work through that? When you and I were initially discussing this topic, writing back and forth, you talked about there being sort of stages, right? There are official stages to ascension, with some of the early stages being about this purification process.

Explain what... because people hear that and they think, okay, I'm supposed to be going through a purification process. What does that mean?

Jeremy:

Okay so there's two aspects to it. Personal process and then there's the general process.

In general, what we have if we're on this planet here, we have the first 7 initiations. And just to put this into perspective, in order to reach perfection, or oneness with God, there's 354 overall.

So some people kind of think that once you reach enlightenment, or you ascend off this planet, that, okay, you're home free. It's not that way. You can think of the Ascended Masters, the ones who have ascended from this planet, as being just older brothers that are also not very far along the path but are there. And interestingly enough, those Ascended Masters, they want to help us because we're going to eventually take their place as they move up in what's basically called a spiritual hierarchy.

So the stages, what we're dealing with here on Earth, we have, kind of before the initiation process, when you start the ascension process, you're now called an Initiate. Before that happens, you're basically on your own. You're doing whatever. You're experimenting. You're experiencing life.

Once you start thinking about good versus bad or having some conceptual ideas of right and wrong, and also start to begin to manifest qualities of love and compassion, you're starting to get on the path of ascension.

Now the first three stages of ascension deal with being able to have some sort of control over your physical body, your emotional body, and your mental body. There's a very good reason for this. So once you start to ascend higher and higher, because your thoughts and your emotions they're actually, can't say physical things but they're objects on the spiritual level. So even though we can't see them, if you look at the higher level, when you get to the astral level and higher, the spiritual beings that are helping us, spiritual helpers, they can see those as actual objects and those have consequences.

So if you were to take somebody from the Earth plane and put them on a higher level, those thoughts would instantly manifest. So if you don't have control of your thoughts that well, well guess what? You've just actually done that.

So this thing about ascension. It's not something like God's here being like... we're not playing favourites. This is just a necessary part of the process in order to be able to get to another level without doing harm on a higher level.

Moving up in the initiation process, the 4th initiation is something that probably a lot of people on a spiritual path, at least that I've seen, are experiencing now is sometimes known as the "Job initiation", where everything in the world just kind of becomes meaningless. Everything that used to give you pleasure doesn't give you pleasure anymore. Or maybe just kind of your world collapses and everything falls apart. One of those two aspects.

At first, it's extremely painful and mentally, because you feel like there's nothing for you, life doesn't make sense. It's all over. What that is is kind of like, for people who understand or know about tarot, it's kind of like the tarot card where it's a destructive process but it's actually a freeing one because it's allowing you to understand what's really important. That the physical, material things of life are not important. It's the spiritual aspects that's important. So it allows you to build a firm, spiritual foundation.

As you build higher, the 5th initiation, you're actually starting to merge with your spirit, which is the divine aspect of yourself. And then when you get to initiation 6, you're actually at the beginning of the ascended master stage and at the end of initiation 7, you have completed your, you are basically, you are no longer in a cycle of reincarnation. You have released yourself.

When you're at that level, if you think about what that level means, that means always having kindness in your heart, always having pure thoughts. When I say that, of course, I'm already laughing about the fact that people are gonna be like, okay, all I have to do is control my thoughts, control my feelings.

No. That is not what you do. Because you can't. You can't control your thoughts and you can't control your emotions. The process of self-purification is one where you're finding, what is inside at a higher level that is affecting your thoughts and emotions? Whatever's influencing your thoughts and emotions, that's what needs to be healed. And that you can work on and help purify.

Slade:

I was gonna say, what about observing, because observing is not necessarily trying to control. You can acknowledge that you're having a certain thought or emotion without becoming overly attached to it or acting on it. So that's kind of a mid-range stage or goal in that process, right?

Jeremy:

Correct. Yes. You do want to have an awareness, or it's not that you... It would be very helpful if you had an awareness of your thoughts and your emotions at all times. Because people get lost in them. So part of the process is to, when you have an awareness, first of all, don't judge anything. The minute you judge it, you've basically repressed it. You've said, oh, I don't want this.

And then when you start doing that, then it goes away and once those thoughts go away... When you're not aware of something, you can't fix it.

Slade:

Where would you fit re-framing into that process? This is something that I do a lot so of course I'm gonna quiz you from my limited perspective.

But one of the things that I try to do is not only to acknowledge and observe those thoughts, but to replace them. Like you said, there's an equally positive level of thought and emotion for those negative thoughts and emotions. So how does that play a part in your perspective on this? Am I on the right track with that?

Jeremy:

Can you give a specific example? Because I'd like to use it. Or maybe I'll give an example: Let's say somebody's a jerk, right? You have this thought, somebody's a jerk. So you would reframe it and say, well, I really like this person.

Is that kind of what you're doing?

Slade:

Well probably what I would do in that instance, like if I were to experience somebody who was acting a certain kind of way to me or whatever, causing me to have a negative thought or emotion about them, depending on what my relationship to that person was, if it was a random stranger, I might look for some kind of thought about the fact that it doesn't really have anything to do with