What Shall I Write In The Next Ten Years?

Posted on October 16, 2022 by Douglas

October 17, 2012 is not a particularly historic date. There was the usual fervor over the upcoming American presidential election. There was some hysteria about the Mayan calendar coming to a stopping point on December 21. But something important to me happened on that date. I wrote a blog post on my journey to Boulder, Colorado, to attend the 2012 Encampment of the New Message from God.

What shall I write in the next ten years?

What have I written in the past 10 years? I have written 492 posts (including this one). Alisa joined in 2013 and wrote 293 posts in both Russian and English between 2013 and 2018. I wrote a series of blog posts about Steps 1 through 95, of the 365 steps of Steps to Knowledge. Steps to Knowledge is the book of spiritual practice of the New Message from God. I didn’t go further because I didn’t have a succinct way of explaining “what is in this step will only make sense if you have practiced all the previous steps.” But I would like to think that I have written something that describes part of the Steps to Knowledge experience.

Our worldwide community is taking a journey

I have written a number of posts about the progress of the Worldwide Community of the New Message from God. This includes posts about the annual Messenger’s Vigil, the annual Steps Vigil, and the Encampments. The New Message is being organized, translated, published and disseminated into the languages of the world. I consider the devotion and determination demonstrated by my colleagues to be remarkable.

Pile of Bison skulls 1870. An increasingly difficult world

Humanity faces difficult times ahead

Part of this devotion and determination comes from the recognition that humanity faces challenges to its survival and freedom. Humanity faces an increasingly difficult world, a world created by its own choices. A world of declining resources, affected climate, a degraded environment, and extraterrestrial intervention.

So what are the statistics? 166,607 page views, from 113,916 sessions (visits), from 95,262 users, from 10,935 cities in 204 countries/regions. Sometimes an inner voice tells me it’s not enough. I tell it that it’s more than what would have happened had I done nothing.

What shall I write in the next ten years? I consider it presumptuous to declare what I will write about in the next ten years. Nothing is guaranteed. But it might be some things about building a practical spirituality for a crashing world. It might be some things about mitigating the Great Waves of Change coming to our world. I might write about some of the thousand solutions the human family needs for its survival and freedom. And most assuredly, there will be poetry, from poets of every nation and era. I offer this poem by J. R. R. Tolkien for company:

The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

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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.

I Should Be Suspicious Of What I Want For The World

Posted on December 27, 2013 by Douglas

Steps 65 through 67 of Steps to Knowledge have something in common. They all contain some variation on the sentence “You have come to the world to work.” Step 65, “I have come to work in the world,” introduces the idea. Step 66, “I will stop complaining about the world,” gave the idea of something I need to drop if I’m going to take this idea seriously. And now, Step 67, “I do not know what I want for the world,” brings another item from which I need to slowly back away; my designs for the world.

I should be suspicious of what I want for the world

Someone might say “I don’t demand that the world devote itself to making me happy. I’m willing to be the change I wish to see in the world.” But what if the change you wish to see in the world sets other events in motion resulting in changes in the world you didn’t wish to see? Are you wise enough to see it fully through? I’m not.

Someone might say “I would make the world a more just place.” But many who live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Even people who care about strangers, who care about evil and social injustice, can be heartless and cruel and hard and cold.

I am recalling the Rumi poem which I have already shared once in this space:

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
Chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
And end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.
I should be suspicious
Of what I want.

Someone is going to ask, “Well, what should we do then?” Steps to Knowledge recommends at this point that we cultivate a healthy suspicion of what we want for the world. Steps to Knowledge recommends at this point that we reserve a space for what Knowledge knows it must contribute, for the mission we have in life to fulfill, for the work we have come to the world to do.