This is my second post on Step 44 of Steps to Knowledge “I wish to know my own strength.”  I’m continuing the practice of showing each sentence of the step, and offering commentary.

“How can you approach your strength when you feel weak and helpless, when you feel unworthy, if you are burdened by guilt or confusion or in anger blame others for your own apparent failures?”

There’s a certain amount of poison that has to be sucked out of a person’s soul in order for them to approach their strength.  Maybe they didn’t quite catch everything in Step 24, “I am worthy of God’s love.”

“To claim your strength means to release all that holds you back.”  See the previous sentence.

“You do not release your obstacles by claiming they do not exist. You release them because you value something greater.”

I have a certain investment in my obstacles.  It is an investment in attention, practice, rehearsal, sharing with others, enrolling others in their obstacles, and so forth.  Am I ready to sell guilt and confusion, so that I can buy strength?

“Their obstruction is merely the sign that you must pass through them.Your own strength is then cultivated.”

Am I allowed to recall that I can close my investment in some things, so that I can invest in other things?  I can do that?

“You seek your strength, and you use it to find your strength.”

I have to cultivate my strength to find my strength?  That seems a little self-referential, but there it is.  I have to declare my strength to find my strength?  I have to bring forth my strength to find my strength?  I have to create my strength to find my strength?  Maybe.  I’m still thinking about this.

“We wish for you to know your strength and to utilize it on your own behalf.”

Could it be that the mission I have in my life to fulfill is something that requires my unadulterated strength?

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Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

The mystery of God.

There was a time when I felt very ambivalent about the word “God.” However, Steps to Knowledge often refers to God, and the New Message from God is the source. Shouldn’t this have raised my hackles and if not sent me running from the room, at least made me want to retreat, quietly closing the door behind me?

Perhaps, but I did neither, instead I stayed in the room and decided to examine my ambivalence. What do I have against the word “God?” And I decided it was because I associate it with religion. But I don’t consider myself a religious person, I don’t go to church, and I don’t read the Bible, although there was a time in my life when I did go to church and there was a time in my life when I did read the Bible. I like the Bible, if the word “like” is appropriate in this context, I find it a source of infinite wisdom. I did not particularly like going to church though. It just never felt right, its walls were too confining.

Then I found that if I substituted the word “God” for “Higher Power,” my ambivalence lessened. In a forest grove with its majesty, air and light, I felt the closer presence of a Higher Power, so I substituted church for the forest and embraced the power I felt there.

The mystery of God.

And by the time I embarked on Steps to Knowledge, I was ready to acknowledge that “you find God in a pure impulse, in a timeless moment of recognition, in the desire to act beyond the sphere of your own personal interests and motives, in the recognition of another, in the motive to give, in the inexplicable experience of affinity. These are translatable. This is God in action. For you, this is God.”

Step 38 says that God knows the way to Knowledge, Step 39 reminds me that the power of God is with me, Step 40 tells me to feel the power of God today, and Step 41 asks me to affirm that I am not afraid of the power of God. With these tools in my arsenal and additionally armed with the affirmation “the power of God represents the mystery of [my] life” (Step 39), all ambivalence flew out the window for good.

Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

Errors may be serendipitous

I like to describe my experience of taking Steps to Knowledge so far as a series of serendipitous events. Serendipity is something I am very partial to.

Wikipedia describes it this way:

“Serendipity is not just a matter of a random event, nor can it be taken simply as a synonym for “a happy accident” (Ferguson, 1999; Khan, 1999), “finding out things without searching for them” (Austin, 2003), or “a pleasant surprise” (Tolson, 2004) ..

The New Oxford Dictionary of English defines serendipity as the occurrence and development of events by chance in a satisfactory or beneficial way, understanding the chance as any event that takes place in the absence of any obvious project (randomly or accidentally), which is not relevant to any present need, or in which the cause is unknown.”

It goes on to say:

“The serendipitous can play an important role in the search for truth, but is often ignored in the scientific literature because of traditional scientific behavior and scientific thinking based on logic and predictability.”

I added the bold italics to this phrase, since this speaks so loud and clear to me.

Errors may be serendipitous

When I reached Step 26. My Errors Give Birth to My Knowledge, this serendipity thing rose to its full height and opened in full bloom. It suggests in this Step that I not justify my errors, but what if I turn them around into fortuitous events that take me in a direction I was not intending? What if they bring me to value truth and in this leads me to true Knowledge?

One particular error I made in the summer of 2012 led me to the New Message from God and set me on the journey to Steps to Knowledge in October 2012. Call this what you will, but I call it serendipitous.

Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

Can God be known by a human being?  The God of the Bible seems to not only say “Yes!” but to describe it as a thing to be pursued.  The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah declared

This is what the Lord says:

“Let not the wise boast of their wisdom
or the strong boast of their strength
or the rich boast of their riches,
but let the one who boasts boast about this:
that they have the understanding to know me,
that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness,
justice and righteousness on earth,
for in these I delight,”
declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 9:23-24, New International Version)

Jesus, in what some call his “high priestly prayer,” declared

Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. (John 17:3)

Albert Einstein declared “I am not interested in this phenomenon or that phenomenon, I want to know God’s thoughts – the rest are mere details.”

In my undergraduate days, the book Knowing God by J. I. Packer generated a great deal of reading, study and reflection.

Step 43 of Steps to Knowledge confirms all of the above, and adds a new idea, that not only is it possible to know God, not only is it desirable to know God, it is my will as well.

“Your will is to know God. That is your true will. Any other desire or motivation is to escape this, which represents your will. It is your will that has become fearful to you.You are afraid of what you know and most deeply feel.This leads you to find refuge in other things that do not represent you, and in this you lose your identity and attempt to construct an identity that is related to those things which you have sought for escape. In isolation you are miserable, but in relationship happiness is regained.”

For me, this step feels similar to Step 41, particularly the part about how we malign what we love to fortify separation.

Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

When I began Steps to Knowledge in October 2012, I thought I already knew something, I thought I was starting from a place of accumulated knowledge based on past experiences, on lessons learned, on a certain treasure-trove of facts and figures I had accrued over my life. However, I quickly learned that the Knowledge it refers to in Steps has nothing to do with what I thought knowledge was up to this point in my life. So if I were to ask the same question as Sally Brown, which I did when I reached Step 3. What Do I Really Know?, the only answer I could truthfully give is “I know nothing now.”

This is by way of a first post as I test the waters as a guest blogger at Ascending Knowledge. I have to admit feeling a certain amount of honor at being invited to post here, while also feeling a certain amount of trepidation: Am I up to the task? Will I meet the expectations? Will I be able to share in a coherent way? But nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say, which is precisely the way I feel about taking this mysterious journey called Steps to Knowledge.

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Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.