Ascension of Man

Ascension, the feast that celebrates when Jesus rose to heaven, after his resurrection, in full view of his followers is one of the more epic accounts of his life, or in this case, afterlife.
Whether or not you believe this actually happened, it is a fine analogy to something far more mundane and natural within ourselves.
While we live, we often change and grow, experiencing a sort of metamorphosis.
Like the man, we are born and raised and we grow and we are taught to believe things.
Like the man, we are challenged by the world about our beliefs. Like the man, we have to face real persecution.
And like the man, we may come to the point of spiritual death: that point where the reality and truth around us prevails over the superstitious and naive beliefs we've held.
This is very tortuous; very difficult.
Some cannot bear this loss and forever seek in the dust the ghost of their blind belief.
But some rise again.
Like the man, they have the scars of their death. But unlike the man they no longer persist in insisting that what they've formerly believed has any hold on them.
Like a butterfly freshly free of their chrysalis, they are new, slightly vulnerable and wobbly.
But soon enough the sun of truth warms them and the old ways fall away and where once there was fear and helplessness and dogma and doctrine, there is now only joy, awe and freedom.
The ascension of man comes when we realize it is worthy to let the old versions of ourselves, which clinged to the thralldom of mythology as fact, die away and we can become new in freedom from bad dogma.
Ascension of Man means we let the poisonous beliefs we held fall away, and find hope in the real, every day truths we can depend on.