At the age of 8 I chose to separate from myself. The gap that I created between me and myself has been filled for most of my life with an array of debris that has masqueraded itself as life. One such piece of debris was the belief that evolution works like a ladder – as you climb up it, you evolve.
For a very long time I had a strong sense that I was ‘getting somewhere’ – I felt that I was slowly making my way up the invisible ladder of evolution. I have always been a happy person and never worried too much about anything; I felt that I had things pretty much sorted and I took my happiness as evidence of my bogus ascension.
Looking back now, I can also see that I mistook the feeling of being very physically fit as a sign of being in genuine good health.
For me, physical well-being was somehow linked to evolution. I did not question my need to exercise, in fact I prided myself in my commitment to keeping myself very physically fit. I saw it as a strength, another rung mastered and an indication of the fact that I was getting somewhere.
In my mid-thirties I trained as a yoga teacher and it was at this point that I really started to get deeply into the illusion of ascension. There is much within the yoga consciousness that revolves around the idea of ‘moving up the ladder.’
The physical poses themselves go from basic to advanced and so it went without saying that the ‘better’ you are at the physical yoga, then naturally the ‘higher up’ you were getting. Those that practised a lot were considered to be, in some way, more dedicated to the pursuit of evolution. It was not discussed, however it was quietly understood, that those who practised under well-known teachers seemed to accrue more credits in the game of ascension, and ‘bonus points’ were rewarded to those who studied yoga in India.
The goal of the game was to reach enlightenment. I saw enlightenment as being the moment when you reached the very top of the ladder… the moment when the veil of illusion would magically lift. Did I think enlightenment was achievable? Yes I did. I was embroiled in the belief that I was climbing up the ladder.
This belief lay like a canopy over my entire life. It infiltrated my thoughts and engineered my body to move in certain ways. The belief owned me; I was its puppet, its plaything, acting out the characteristics of the belief.
I was not being Me, I was enacting a belief, as sincere as a game of charades.
Pick a category, any category will do.
When we take on a belief, we take on a pre-selected set of characteristics that come with that belief. It comes as a bundle.
One of the components of the ‘Belief in Enlightenment’ package is levitation, and as I had brought the whole package, I was under the illusion that it was very possible that one day I would lift clean off my yoga mat and hover in the air effortlessly. I find it both funny and sinister at the same time. Funny that I thought that any moment I was going to hover over the mantelpiece, and sinister when you consider that some ‘belief packages’ contain killing as part of their bundle.
When you download a belief you subscribe to the whole package, you don’t choose the parts you want.
Within the beliefs that surround yoga there are clear ranks of distinction, the top of the pile being God-like figures who are revered by everyone underneath them.
The belief that I was climbing the ladder of evolution managed to cling onto me for all of 20 years. It gripped me so tightly that I was unable to feel the damage that my relentless yoga practice and deep lack of self-care were doing to me.
My body tried repeatedly to let me know how it felt but my beliefs were so ingrained that they kept me motoring along at the same breakneck speed every day. I lived with intense pain and extreme exhaustion for years until, eventually, my body broke down: it literally stopped going.
It was around this time that a friend introduced me to Serge Benhayon and the teachings of The Ageless Wisdom. I took my battered body along to workshops. Due to the fact that my once athletic body was no longer willing to even walk to the local shop, I had no choice but to start to slowly question my long held beliefs.
By attending workshops, having esoteric healing sessions and listening to audio recordings, I have slowly, over many years, let go of an incredible amount of beliefs.
I have discovered that what lay underneath beliefs is truth and the truth is, we are born already knowing God unencumbered, but we layer over the top of our connection to this knowing – false ways of being, beliefs, ideas, practices, habits, behaviours, personality traits, pain etc., they serve to distort our connection with ourselves, and it is through our true connection with ourselves first, that we know also our connection to God. We forget altogether that once upon a time we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that;
In our essence, we know God.
This connection is found by looking within and not by seeking outside of us.
Serge Benhayon found his way back to this knowing and he now teaches others the way back through ‘The Way of The Livingness.’ This is a U-Turn because it teaches us that we already know God, we just need to remove the impediments (and belief systems) that prevent us from feeling this connection in our bodies.
It is not possible to ever be separate from God, it is only possible to have the belief that God is separate from us. Take away the false belief and we return to this knowing.
I am eternally grateful to Serge Benhayon for returning to this knowing and for then lighting the way back for everyone else.
By Alexis Stewart, Care worker with the intellectually disabled, Yoga teacher, Mum, dedicated Student of the Livingness, Sydney, Australia
Further Reading:
Beliefs V Truths
Evolution is about us returning to who we truly are
Happy New Year: Snakes and Ladders or Evolution?
The Truth about Universal Medicine 
Alexis, I like your break down of the many beliefs we absorb
“When we take on a belief, we take on a pre-selected set of characteristics that come with that belief. It comes as a bundle.”
We have a tendency to soak up beliefs when we are young because I feel that we believe our parents to know and the education system is set up in such a way, that we are literally saturated with ideals and beliefs so that as we grow older we become set in our ways and it is very difficult to extract ourselves from all that we have misguidedly taken on. We can go to war over beliefs, we can fall out with friends and family members, we can get into the right and wrong, basically Beliefs are a Rabbit hole that we can go down and lose ourselves for many lives until we come to the understanding that they are deliberately fed to us to keep us in the separation to God.
I like this, that beliefs are a, ‘Rabbit hole that we can go down and lose ourselves for many lives’… too true.
Evolution is a path, is a step forward. But, climbing a ladder is just like a treadmill, you can fall off both and never go anywhere.
If we’re everything already, which we are, then evolution must be a step back every time.
When have we been told Alexis that we are already everything and that we do not have to try to be someone? There is no going anywhere, we are the everything there is. I do not remember ever being told that, not within my family, education, relationships, work. In fact it could be said we are told the complete opposite to look outside of ourselves for confirmation that we are okay and that security matters most, so get a great education so that we can secure a position in life that will ensure we will be secure into our old age. It wasn’t until Serge Benhayon came along and offered humanity the possibility to consider that actual we are already everything so there is no trying or doing just reconnect back to the sense of who we are. We are so drenched in ideals and beliefs that it can take some while to get past the blocks that have been put there to stop us from returning, but I can see from all those around me that have made the choice that it is definitely one worth making.
Agreed Mary none of us have been told the truth of who we are already (The Consciousness of God in Completeness) and that’s because the world currently is being run and governed by the astral forces and not the forces of Heaven. BUT THE TIDES ARE TURNING and boy oh boy are they turning fast! We are in an acceleration phase at the moment where more and more people are returning to the embodied knowing that they are indeed a living portal for the Consciousness of God. And with these living portals dotted all over the world then the consciousness (light) of God has greater access to humanity. There will also (in the not too distant future) come a tipping point, where we all very gloriously tip together back towards being the glorious embodiment of the One Divine Energy that birthed us forth, AKA God. It’s been a long time coming that’s for sure😃
Oh the ‘invisible ladder of evolution’ and of course the lie and illusion it is where we ‘think’ we are ‘going or getting’ somewhere when in truth we are not, and also that the ‘somewhere’ is an ill ideal, belief of pictures we hold so of course not true truth. My understanding now is that it is in fact all about deepening within and not getting or going anywhere and that the deepening is fathomless ✨
Vicky the deepening is in fact fathomless but we distract ourselves almost permanently with small bits of nothing on the outside. Our distractions are endless but what they all are is simply just that – distractions.
The invisible ladder of evolution is similar to us being stuck on the hamster wheel thinking we are going somewhere, yet in reality we are just going round and round and nothing is changing.
Understanding appreciation of how we live in our essences is a simple but important part of letting go of the ladder and free falling back into to truth.
People treat life like a game of Snakes and Ladders, and if they win, they think they have evolved… no matter how long it takes. But in truth, we have won without the compilations of trying to ascend to someplace outside of us that we have always been within. We have just forgotten the natural magic that resides within us all.
Your climbing the evolution ladder is like walking up a downward moving escalator. You can work hard to get to the top but then will find there is another one you need to scale. And, if you tire and stop you lose all the ground you had made. All of this effort to get someplace we have never left.
Absolutely Steve, love the analogy, and when we stop trying we return to the platform we have left, this can be a free falling gift from heaven as we let-go and reconnect to our essence, thus re-ascend to where we started.
It has been a long and rocky road back to God. I have turned over every rock I could find for what is not God, except for the one that coved myself. Knowing God is easier when you know what is not.
A lie must always be feed, and that requires energy, and we are just one large battery. What are we doing to our body’s by lying that God is separate from us?
Could it be we become a battering ram that is giving away its energy to something that is separated from God, and it is up to us with our appreciation of our essences to plug back into the True source of SSD (Sacred Soul-full-ness and Divinity).
Steve if we are as you say one large battery and yet many of us feel tired and drained or as one colleague put it burnt out. Then what is draining our battery? Or, put another way what is using our bodies as an energy source. How many of us have stopped to consider that there is something else going on here that we have not taken into our conscious awareness.
Yes, there is more at play than most of us are consciously aware of.
Steve, could this be why there is so much illness and disease in the world because we are feeding a lie which is draining our natural vitality/battery?
When we return to being at one with God’s vibration then we won’t need to jump start our bodies with caffeine and sugar but as long as we’re vibrating at a lesser frequency then we’re going to have to keep injecting ourselves with substances that temporarily prop us up.
Why do we become the sum of our choices that take us away from something that never needed fixing?
The sum of our choices can also be love.
I did yoga for many years and would attend weekend retreats away to recoup myself and evolve. There is this belief that the fitter and more supple we are the more enlightened we can become, but what I experienced was a withdrawing from the world due to the daily meditation practice, which resulted in me isolating myself from others as a form of protection, but what I have come to realise is that for me it is healthy and beneficial to spend time with people. No longer do I spend hours meditating or doing yoga positions that my body can’t cope with.
Julie I saw a psychiatrist for many years and they suggested that I went to yoga classes as a way to calm my mind by meditation. I went along and my body was emphatic and loudly said No this is not it. I never went back again. I wonder if we listened to our bodies rather than our minds would there be such massive rates of illness and disease in the world, as our bodies are constantly in communication with us but we override the signals and rely on our minds instead which clearly hasn’t worked, because our minds are cold and calculating and the information we receive is from a group consciousness that deliberately keeps us all in the disconnection to God.
I used to go to yoga and various meditation classes thinking I was supporting myself to be healthy, yet looking back I see that some of these practices definitely encouraged my withdrawal away from people and life.
Alexis what a great revelation to have had and thank you for sharing it as it is a trap we can easily fall into, thinking we need to get somewhere when we are already everything we could ever want to be and far more. It is drilled into us from young that we need to attain knowledge and get what we need from outside of us when it is all within us.
To think that others accrue more credits or bonus points in the game of ascension because of who they know, or are taught their yoga by, shows how little we value the lessons of our normal day to day life that are constantly asking us to grow and evolve.
Very true and it shows how much credence we give to what is outside of us rather than what is innately within us all.
Until we understand that life is a total setup to distract everyone by what is going on in the outside world, the distractions are more complex and intricate so that we are completely absorbed. We are so mesmerised that we never stop to consider that we have everything that we could possibly need within us. We are like moths around a bright flame completely entrapped until we either drop from exhaustion or fly too close to the flame and die.
We let beliefs and other impositions take precedence over our innate wisdom, ‘The belief owned me; I was its puppet, its plaything, acting out the characteristics of the belief.’
Understanding that we are not going anywhere and that we are returning to our natural state of being that we walked away from aeons ago, can at first be hard to grasp because everything about life says we are going forward, up, and needing to improve, when in fact we are already everything we need to be. It is a big lie that we have fallen for but it suits us to be in the driving seat thinking we are going somewhere.
Is it a big lie that we’ve fallen for or a big lie that we keep choosing?
It is like the complete opposite, we don’t need to go anywhere, we need to connect to within, to our innermost, to who we are in truth.
When we’re not feeling great in our body, it’s the biggest loud and clear signal that we’re not being true to ourselves on some level. But even though we know that, it can still be difficult to change. What makes us change? Either our body forces us to, or it’s when we get sick and tired of the exhaustion and the not feeling great, and decide to explore a different way of living, based on what and how we feel and not what we know.
The trouble with exploring different so called healthier ways of living is that so many ‘healthier ways of living’ actually come from the same energetic pool as the ways of living that lead to exhaustion in the first place. For example ‘excessive juicing and excessive exercise’ often harm the body in much the same way as staying up late and eating rubbish. Many people would argue with this but having lived both ways, I would say that the juicing and the excessive exercise harmed me more because at least with the staying up late and eating rubbish, I knew that these things weren’t good for me, whereas because juicing and excessive exercise are touted as being healthy, it took much longer to feel from my body that they were in fact contributing to my poor health.
No matter how far and long we walk away from ourselves, when we decide to return to who we all are, the road back is always in sight!
When we are weighed down by beliefs it is like walking with shoes made of lead that prevent you from feeling the lightness of your being.
Beliefs are fed to us, and we embrace them and give up on who we are, ‘I was not being Me, I was enacting a belief, as sincere as a game of charades.’
It has been a long time since sabretooth tigers were chasing us as a snack. We have evolved and have gotten smarter; we now only have to run faster than the person next to us! There is no race, but we all win when we reach the finish line together.
“It is not possible to ever be separate from God, it is only possible to have the belief that God is separate from us. Take away the false belief and we return to this knowing.” Wow the truth presented is beautiful and magical and so powerful, beyond all the beliefs we have subscribed to and taken on. The knowingness of God lies within and is part of who we are.
tricianicholson some religious beliefs have saturated humanity with the belief that we are separated from God and the only way to God is through an emissary which is some sort of theological person usually a man. How disgusting is this that we could set ourselves up to believe in such a lie. But then again in the ‘Dark Ages’, so called because of the acts of barbarism against humanity to force us all into at that time the Roman Catholic faith by torture, rape and death, if you didn’t succumb to their ideals and beliefs. Wow writing this I feel it’s not too dissimilar to the current state of the world where once again humanity is being forced by the elitist few to accept certain conditions or be ostracised from the community. Is history repeating itself?
Mary what about the belief that if you live a ‘good and righteous’ life then you will get closer to God? How evil is this once you return to the conscious knowing that ‘good’ and ‘righteous’ are ways of being that are pasted over the top of the truth that we are the living fabric of God already. So the enacting of being good is no different to the enacting of being bad, both are pasted over the top of the truth, the only difference is, most people would find it very difficult to see that there is more evil in the myth of being good and so would have no motivation to renounce being a ‘good’ person. In fact many people strive to be a ‘better’ person, totally bypassing the fact that they are already the livingness of God and when we all return to being His livingness then this will expose how evil being ‘good’ and ‘righteous’ are.
I can relate to what has been written as I also practised yoga for many years and would go away on long weekends to practice with various teachers. There is this unspoken belief that if you can do difficult poses and are dedicated then you are higher up the enlightened ladder. It was on one of these trips that I injured both of my knees and limped for three years but it didn’t stop me from practicing, it just slowed me down. Looking back I can see that my body did not want to be put in those positions and that it was speaking to me very loudly. Especially, at those weekends away as it felt more like torture and endurance than enlightenment.
Alexis, this is really interesting to read and makes absolute sense; ‘When you download a belief you subscribe to the whole package, you don’t choose the parts you want.’
The whole concept of ladder is based on the foundation of inequality, being better or more superior are those in the higher ranking and the whole concept is disgusting and anything that comes from this foundation cannot be from Truth, our whole body knows it.
We are never separate from God even when we say we do not believe in God, He is still with us no matter what, because we live in His atma.
This notion of getting somewhere, becoming something is so deeply ingrained in us. Even though evolution is about re-turning back to who we truly are, I can feel there’s an element of ‘trying’ in my movements that feels a bit tension riddled at times, rather than a simple surrender.
If only we were able to simply let ourselves fall back into the arms of God.
Alexis I’m so full of conditions that to allow myself to fall back into the arms of God is like what if he doesn’t catch me?
Mary He has ALREADY caught you, there has not been one moment when even so much as one of us hasn’t been in His arms, it’s simply that we all work tirelessly at tricking ourselves that we’re not. We think that we’re here, there and everywhere, tricked by what our eyes are seeing but the truth is we are more than in God’s arms, we ARE His arms because we are the Body of God Himself.
Maybe that is what some people are now embracing Alexis, knowing that, ‘In our essence, we know God. This connection is found by looking within and not by seeking outside of us.’
When I am trying to get somewhere unknown, as in going up the ladder my body feels very anxious, yet when I feel how evolution is this u-turn and I actually do know everything already, this makes my body settle and feel confident, even though there is still much to reacquaint.
The belief that we are separate from God is what most religions teach, and I for one was tied up in that belief for most of my life, always searching but never finding God, until the Way of the Livingness came along and showed us that God lives within and always has, just waiting for us to connect to. There is a freedom and an equality that can be lived when we are willing to see and understand that all belief systems are untrue, just a way of keeping us away from discovering the true gold, that we all are divine sons of God, innately so.
The Way of The Livingness is the only religion I know that teaches the truth about God, who He is and how we connect to Him.
Isn’t it fascinating how even evolution has become a concept by which people can compare themselves to each other with. Have we really lost our connection to the Soul so much that its very love has been turned in to a game of comparison, jealousy and personal achievement – all of which stem from judgement, something which has no love in it all.
‘It is not possible to ever be separate from God, it is only possible to have the belief that God is separate from us.’ So true Alexis, God is forever holding and loving us no matter if we turn our back on him or walk away, as God’s love is not conditional in anyway.
So true and just like the poem or words from ‘Footprints in the Sand’ God never leaves us, only we think at times he has but it is us who have separated in those moments.
God is always there, holding and supporting us whether we realise it or not.
“When you download a belief you subscribe to the whole package, you don’t choose the parts you want”. So from where I see it, you can’t just go instantly to the bottom of the ladder as each rung you have climbed is part of the whole ladder and each issue associated with that rung needs to be examined. I can see the easiest way to live is not to step foot on the ladder at all, but simply turn within – the ‘u-turn’ – where all the answers to life’s questions are waiting.
It is so easy to think we can just say yes to a part of something as we like it and not the whole. It means we have to be super discerning with everyone and everything as we cannot isolate anything and say yes in isolation. It also brings a whole new meaning to responsibility as what we are living in each moment affects every other moment – it really is all or nothing.
In a way it would be good if it could be ‘nothing’ but unfortunately everything is something, which means that every single thing that we do, including every single thing that we don’t do adds to the all and the everything. We are ‘out-putting’ constantly, even when we are laying on the couch doing nothing.
Very true Alexis, there is no off switch or off moment where we can allow ourselves to go astray and think everything else will not be affected. Ultimately everything we do affects everything and everyone else – its a massive dose of responsibility and not one that many of us want to accept or are ready to!
Once you buy into the belief you are stuck with the whole package, ‘When we take on a belief, we take on a pre-selected set of characteristics that come with that belief. It comes as a bundle.’
Coming back to the awareness and wonder of a small child while having the understanding of an adult is one of the nicest experiences in the world.
So beautifully said Christoph.
It sure is exquisite Christoph and something we can all experience and live with if we choose to.
To short cut the ladder thinking while living esoterically – which says basically we are already everything, we are complete – it is key that we feel that we are divine, to feel that we are love, and that all the healing sessions we are doing, the yoga, the walks etc are not destined to make us better, but to discard what we are not to uncover our essence, the divine being we are.
The Way of the Livingness teaches us all that the way we really evolve is very different to which we used to think. It is a different type of movement.
Much simpler. Much much simpler than I ever thought.
Superb piece of writing Alexis. I too was on this ascension belief path for a long time. And if you are not careful you can take the esoteric also as another ladder trick, I realize now. To really embody you are already everything is key. Wake up call, thank you.
This whole ladder and attaining thing has such a lot of self and identification in it such as it was ME who did it. The complete opposite to true evolution and the RETURNING to the oneness that holds us ALL us equally glorious.
“When you download a belief you subscribe to the whole package, you don’t choose the parts you want.”
This is absolute truth. We are not as free to ‘pick and choose’ from the smorgasbord of life as we think we are. We either align to the energy of love or we align to all that is not of this love and thus the many abuses that soon follow.
So true and once we align to the package or align to the energy that is not love, it gives us the illusion that we have many choices and we make all the decisions but they are all the same choices disguised as good or bad.
True, we are not as free as we like to think we are, if we align to the energy that is not love we get everything that comes with that consciousness, ‘We either align to the energy of love or we align to all that is not of this love and thus the many abuses that soon follow.’
“Within the beliefs that surround yoga there are clear ranks of distinction, the top of the pile being God-like figures who are revered by everyone underneath them”.
I attended a few yoga classes many years ago and felt the push of the class to always strive to do more amazing holding of postures and poses, but feeling little connection to anything except for hurting my body in ‘trying to’ keep up. Years later Esoteric `Yoga came into my life and it took a while to realise that there was nothing to achieve or attain, simply to surrender and be with myself and the re-connection to stillness within. Read more about Esoteric Yoga at http://www.unimedliving.com/yoga
This is a great example Stephanie. If we see life as lineal then we introduce a beginning point and an end point and lose ourselves oscillating between A and B as we try to get to B and leave A behind. By doing this we miss out on the depth and richness on offer when we surrender to deeper and deeper levels of our multidimensionality that can then be brought through into our daily way of living. This approach eliminates ‘trying’ as we are not caught up in the illusion that we have to ‘get somewhere’ but are simply returning to something we already are that we may not yet expressing in full. Evolution game changer.
“When you download a belief you subscribe to the whole package, you don’t choose the parts you want.” I love this sentence. Its not something that we consider as we think that we can get away with liking only a portion of something, but we can become so imbedded in the whole consciousness without even realising.
The belief that one belief is better than another is a very evil belief, all beliefs poison the body.
Absolutely Alexis, it is key to let go of all beliefs.
I love this piece Alexis. In the temporal as well as the Esoteric community nothing is a ladder. It is very uncomfortable to just see the results tada, without the process which is a forever deepening, there is no right and wrong, just with what energy it is chosen. But only the end results mean little.
When we are young we think we are going to set the world on fire with our ideals and beliefs, and when it doesn’t work out we settle for what we believe is a better quality of life, yet do we ever truly stop and ask ourselves what quality we are truly living in?
When we are very young we are completely free of all ideals, beliefs and images and our relationship with truth is a naturally intimate one but once those outside forces come in, we simply swap one belief for another and it is these scourges that interfere with our ability to both see and feel the truth.