Kim Michaels
Basic teachings on what happens after death
Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:
There is no general answer to this question because everything depends on the consciousness of the lifestream. I would advise you to read some of the many near-death experiences, and you will quickly see that the consciousness of the person has a major impact on where the lifestream goes after it separates from the body. I have given a basic understanding of the soul/lifestream in another answer, and you can benefit from reading it before you continue with this one.
There are several general categories, or directions, in which the lifestream can go. In order to understand this, you need to read our teaching about the four levels of the material universe.
Lifestreams who are in a negative state of consciousness create a magnetic pull and are attracted to the emotional realm. This realm has many levels, and some of the lower ones are very similar to what many people have seen as hell. Lifestreams who have been engaged in anti-spiritual activities, such as satanism, various forms of witchcraft, black magic, crime or violence go to the lowest levels of what is often called the astral plane. Lifestreams who are consumed by anger or hatred, or who are consumed by guilt and other negative emotions go to the higher levels of the emotional realm. Lifestreams who commit suicide will also go here.
Some lifestreams are very attached to the physical body or to their life on earth. Such lifestreams can find it difficult to let go of their attachment to the body or this world, and therefore they remain in the highest level of the emotional realm, the one closest to the material world in vibration. There are physical locations on this planet, where the vibration is so low, that there is almost an overlap between the physical and emotional realms. Or one might say there are portals between the realms. These lifestreams become what some psychologists and spiritual teachings call discarnate souls. These discarnates roam around in the material frequency spectrum and often attach themselves to people in embodiment. This can cause such people to have the same psychological or even physical problems as the discarnate had in its last embodiment.
People who have been very materialistic and have denied the existence of God tend to gravitate to the mental realm, where there are levels in which lifestreams engage in very intellectual activities. Such people often have the capacity to rise higher, but they don’t simply because they do not believe they can go anywhere else.
The more spiritual lifestreams go to the identity realm, where we of the ascended masters have etheric retreats. This is indeed what is ideal and what is intended for every lifestream. Here they receive instructions and healing to prepare them for their next embodiment—or in some cases for their ascension.
You now see that there are many levels of the emotional, mental and identity realms, and therefore there is no typical experience. The non-physical realms are much more fluid than the material world, and therefore a lifestream’s experience will always be adapted to the individual needs of the lifestream. However, if you study near-death experiences, you will see that many lifestreams go through the same general phases:
The lifestream separates from the body and often floats above the body.
The lifestream sees a brilliant light and moves into that light.
The lifestream goes through a tunnel and comes into a bright light where it is usually met either with deceased family members or which spiritual beings with which the lifestream has a connection.
The lifestream is made to feel at home and often goes through a review of its last lifetime.
In the case of people who had near-death experiences, these people obviously had the option to come back into embodiment, and they chose to use that option. That is why they can tell about their near-death experiences. However, many lifestreams do not have this option, simply because their time is up and they need to move on.
After going through the initial welcoming phase in the spiritual realm, such lifestreams usually move on to centers of learning or healing, where they can prepare for their next embodiment. In some cases a lifestream would go back into a new embodiment within a very short period of time. In other cases the lifestream might stay out of embodiment for a very long time, even thousands of years as measured by earth time. Some lifestreams even embody on other planets before coming back into embodiment on earth.
Some lifestream are so highly developed that they do not need to come back into embodiment, and in that case the lifestream has several options. If a lifestream has balanced all of its karma, resolved all psychology and done everything it wants to do on earth, it can immediately ascend to the spiritual realm, where it can go through a period of learning and integration with its spiritual self, or I AM Presence. After that, the lifestream has the option to remain with the earth, serving as an ascended master, as a spiritual teacher, to help unascended people grow spiritually. Lifestreams who choose this option are known as boddhisatvas. Other lifestreams choose not to remain with the earth, and they move on to other realms in the spiritual world, where they can continue to learn and grow or even fill various spiritual offices.
If a lifestream has not balanced all of its karma (but has balanced enough to not have to come back, meaning over 51%), then it needs to work out that karma from the identity realm. This is much more difficult than balancing your karma while you are still in embodiment, and therefore it is very important that people make an effort to balance their karma while they are still on earth. You will indeed see throughout the scriptures that I advocated an approach to spiritual growth than was aimed directly at helping people balance the maximum amount of karma in the shortest possible period of time.
This is the explanation for some of my suggestions that many people consider radical or extreme. For example, you might recall my statement to the rich man to donate all his money to the poor [Matthew 19:16-26]. I am not hereby saying that all people should give away all their money. However, for this particular lifestream, and for many lifestreams in a similar situation, the only way this person could have balanced all his karma in the remainder of that lifetime was to give away his fortune and focus the rest of his life on spiritual activities.
Obviously, every person is different and has a different mission and a different karma. Therefore, I do not want people to take this remark as being valid for everyone. However, it would be highly beneficial for people, as they age, to start considering what they might need to do for the remainder of that lifetime in order to balance the maximum amount of karma and fulfill their mission for this lifetime. If they will use the exercise for inner attunement and use other spiritual tools, I can assure you that most people will get such inner direction, and it will often cause them to change their lives dramatically in order to make maximum spiritual progress and make maximum use of the opportunity that life truly is. One of the most efficient ways to balance large amounts of karma quickly is to use the Invocations and decrees.
Let me say here that regardless of a lifestreams state of consciousness, every lifestream will exit the physical body after the death of the body. When the lifestream has exited the body, which usually happens immediately after death, the lifestream will see the light that leads to the spiritual realm. Therefore, every lifestream that leaves a body has the opportunity to go to the spiritual realm. There are no exceptions to this. Every lifestream has the opportunity to come up higher.
However, as I explain throughout this website, everything in this world is subject to the free will of the individual lifestream. And if a lifestream chooses not to enter the light, then it will remain in one of the lower levels, depending on its state of consciousness. That is one reason we of the ascended masters have sponsored the many near-death experiences. We want people to understand that every lifestream has the option to go into the light and receive healing and instruction.
Yet, in order to enter the light, the lifestream must choose to do so after it separates from the body. And a person’s state of consciousness before death has a major impact on the lifestreams ability to choose the light. As explained earlier, some people do indeed set themselves up to make it almost impossible for their lifestreams to choose to enter the light. However, this could be changed if the person would go through a transformation in consciousness. Even if this transformation in consciousness happened five minutes before the person died, it would still be a great assistance to the lifestream after death.
Let me say that I highly recommend that everyone studies some of the many near-death experiences and changes his or her outlook on life, on the lifestream and on death accordingly. However, if you have lived a spiritual life, no matter which religion you have followed (or even if you have not followed a formal religion), you have nothing to fear from death. The one lesson that should be learned from all of the many near-death experiences is that death is not an uncomfortable process but a great sense of liberation. Therefore, anyone who has sincerely attempted to be a good person, even if the person has not been religious, has nothing to fear from death. It will indeed be a pleasant experience for the lifestream, as long as the lifestream chooses to enter the light and move on to a higher realm.
http://www.ascendedmasteranswers.com/spiritual-topics/death-and-dying/273-basic-teachings-on-what-happens-after-death
Virtues of Magnificent Confusion
Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.
I am quite aware that most of the people who sincerely study my discourses on the ego will end up feeling somewhat confused. They will feel as if it seems almost impossible to distinguish between what is the dualistic “truth” of the ego and what is the real truth of the Christ mind. They will feel as if it seems very difficult to know when they are acting from the ego and when they are not. Some will even feel a sense of hopelessness, as if it seems impossible to ever overcome the ego and its subtleties.
I understand these feelings, but I hope I can help you see that this is simply a necessary phase on the spiritual path that all seekers must pass through before they can rise above the lower aspects of the ego. Every person who has ever attained the Christ consciousness has passed through this phase, myself included. I hope I can help you realize that you are not alone and that it is indeed possible to pass through this phase, even though it can seem hopeless at times.
What I truly hope to help you see is that the state of honest confusion is actually a magnificent state of consciousness. Instead of feeling despair or discouragement, you should congratulate yourself for having won an important victory. By being willing to move into a state of confusion, you have taken a very important step on the path of freeing yourself from the ego. Why is that so?
What I have endeavored to explain in the previous ego discourses is that the ego has an insatiable desire to be in control of every situation. It is constantly seeking to set itself up as an authority figure that cannot be questioned or gainsaid. Being an authority figure comes with a subtle temptation that has caused many otherwise sincere people – especially in the field of politics – to fail their missions in life. Certainly, the ego has no way of resisting this temptation. The temptation is that if you are an authority figure, it seems as if you should always be right. If you are not right, your authority is brought into question, and this gives rise to the fear that you could lose your position and its privileges.
The ego lives in a constant state of fear that if it is proven wrong, it will lose its control over you and thus it will die. This is a well-founded fear in the sense that once the Conscious You begins to see the fallacy of the ego’s dualistic, fear-based and control-seeking reasoning, the ego will lose its control over you and it will eventually die.
Here comes the subtle reasoning. The path that leads to freedom from the ego is that the Conscious You must stop identifying itself with the ego and the ego’s dualistic beliefs. If a person is completely identified with his or her ego, the person will feel the ego’s fear of losing control. This person will feel compelled to defend the ego’s beliefs as if it was a matter of life and death. The person will feel it is of utmost importance never to be proven wrong.
How does the ego attempt to avoid being proven wrong? By creating beliefs that are based on either black-and-white thinking or gray thinking. The ego defines a world view, and as long as the person accepts this world view, the person can never be proven wrong. The person will always be able to twist any situation or argument so that it seems like he or she is never wrong.
The consequence of this approach to life is that it truly gives a person a sense of certainty, which can make people feel very sure that they are right, that they are okay or even that they are superior to others. This is a false security that is in constant danger of being threatened or shattered by events over which neither the person nor the ego has any control. I referred to this false sense of certainty when I said:
26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:
27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it. (Matthew, Chapter 7)
When a person is completely identified with the ego, the person is using black-and-white or gray thinking to refute any idea or viewpoint that questions the ego’s dualistic world view. Such a person simply is not teachable, and a spiritual teacher has little opportunity to reach the person.
When you identify yourself with the ego, you have the ego’s superficial certainty, and thus you can deny any confusion. In a sense, you are never feeling confused because the ego always
has ready-made answers to any question or situation. The very fact that you now feel confused and that you are willing to recognize that you feel confused is a clear demonstration that the Conscious You is no longer completely identified with the ego.
Recognizing the true teacher
I realize that in a certain way, the dissolution of the ego’s superficial certainty will feel like a loss, but only when you look at it from a narrow perspective. Once you step back and look at the forest instead of the trees, you see that being confused is a major step forward because you have now become teachable for both your Christ self and your spiritual teachers. As the old saying goes: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” Instead of looking back towards the “good old days” when you thought you knew everything and had life under control, you need to refocus your attention and look for the teacher who is here with you right now and is ready to help you take the next step.
I see many spiritual seekers who finally see through the ego’s false certainty and who give up the security of the ego’s old belief system or world view. However, they do so reluctantly and they immediately start looking for some other source of security. In so doing, they are often attracted to a guru or organization who makes very strong – even absolutist – claims. This often gives them a sense that because they are now with the true guru or savior, they can feel secure again. Obviously, this approach simply gives the ego a new lease on life because it will now start using the new belief system to enslave you.
I also see some seekers who give up the security of an old belief system, yet they adopt a new one that makes them think they are on the path to enlightenment. They think that once they reach that state, they will once again feel secure and have the certainty of knowing everything. However, even an enlightened person does not know everything, as I will explain shortly.
What I desire to see happen is that seekers go beyond the need for outer certainty and security by making conscious contact with the ultimate teacher, namely the inner teacher of their Christ selves and through that with their ascended teachers. The reason I said that the kingdom of God is within you is that you can enter the kingdom of God – the Christ consciousness – only through an inner process. It follows that in order to complete this process, you must make contact with your inner teacher.
I am not denouncing an outer teacher or teaching, as both can be very helpful. You will always attract to you both the true teacher that can help you take the next step and the false teacher that will make you feel like you shouldn’t take the next step. If you look for certainty, you will inevitably be attracted to the false teacher. Only if you are willing to remain confused, will you find the true teacher. Why is that so?
The ego seeks to control you, and the last thing the ego wants is for you to become self-sufficient and spiritually independent. In return for letting it control you, the ego offers you the false sense of certainty—that you are always right, that you are guaranteed to be saved, that you are superior to others or whatever your particular need might be. In contrast, the true teacher wants you to become self-sufficient, and thus a true teacher will never seek to control you. Instead of offering you a superficial certainty, the true teacher offers you the true, inner path—and this is an ongoing process of expanding your consciousness.
The path never ends, meaning that there is no limit to how much you can grow in awareness and understanding. However, what exactly does that mean? If you are open to the possibility of never-ending growth in awareness, it means that there is no belief or viewpoint that can be considered absolute or infallible. The true inner path does not offer you the outer certainty of the ego, namely that this or that belief is absolute. On the contrary, on the inner path there are no absolute beliefs, as any belief can be expanded or replaced by a broader awareness. This leads to two essential considerations:
It is not the essence of the inner path that you become codependent upon the inner teacher. It is the essence of the path that you become self-sufficient so that you no longer need your Christ self. This means that the true teacher will not tell you what to do, as the ego and false teacher will gladly do. The true teacher will give you a greater understanding so that you have a better foundation for making choices. It is you who must choose because only by choosing will you grow in self-sufficiency. Unless you are willing to make your own decisions, you might easily overlook the directions of the inner teacher, thus prolonging the state of confusion unnecessarily.
On the inner path, there is no outer certainty or security. It is essential that you develop an inner sense of certainty and security. The ego is trying to say that as long as you believe in its infallible doctrines, you are okay. What you need to do is go beyond this need for an external security and find an internal source of security. This will be our next consideration.
http://www.ascendedmasterlight.com/ascended-master-light/date/21-2006/639-ego10
Spiritual Blindness – the Main Ego Challenge
Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.
It is my intent with this series of discourses to give you a brief overview of the challenges that the human ego presents to all spiritual seekers, no matter which outer teaching or religion they follow. This is, so to speak, “the very least you should know about the ego.”
Why do I give these discourses? Because overcoming the ego is the central aspect of the spiritual path. No matter which outer teaching or tradition you follow, you must overcome the ego in order to attain the higher state of consciousness that is the only key to rising above the need to re-embody on earth. The basic reality is that the human ego simply cannot enter Heaven, the kingdom of God, Nirvana, enlightenment or whatever you prefer to call it. Even if a spiritual teaching does not talk directly about the ego, any true teaching is designed to help you separate yourself from the ego and build a new sense of identity that is not based on the ego.
One might think that I should start out by defining the human ego, but when you understand the ego, you see why this is not the most fruitful approach. The reason is that the main challenge presented by the ego is that it distorts the way you “see” everything. The ego forms a filter that “colors” the way your mind perceives everything, and this filter would distort my attempts to define the ego. I choose to first address the issue of spiritual blindness—for until you start seeing through this blindness, there truly is no point in saying anything else about the ego.
What is spiritual blindness?
When you normally think of a person who is blind, you think of a person who cannot see anything. You might think that spiritual blindness means that a person cannot see the spiritual aspects of life. Perhaps such a person would be an atheist or a scientific materialist, either denying the existence of God or denying that people have a spiritual nature. However, that is not the true definition of spiritual blindness.
In reality, most of the people who are spiritually blind are completely convinced that they are religious or spiritual people. A substantial portion of them can be found in Christian churches every Sunday. Others belong to the orthodox branches of other world religions and some of them belong to various spiritual or New Age movements. Common for all of these people is that they are completely convinced that they belong to the only true religion or that they are following the highest possible guru or spiritual teaching.
These people are completely convinced that they will be saved, ascend, enter Nirvana, attain eternal life or however they define the final outcome of their religious efforts. In reality, this belief is based on an illusion created by the human ego. The ego has, so to speak, put a veil over these people’s eyes, causing them to see a distorted vision. The simplest possible illustration of this is that you put on a pair of colored glasses. Everything you see through the glasses is tinted by the color of the lenses.
Now imagine that a baby had a pair of yellow contact lenses put on shortly after birth. The child would grow up seeing everything through the yellow lenses, thus thinking the sky is green. The child would have no reason to question whether its view of “reality” is accurate, thus being completely convinced that the sky really is green. This is essentially how the ego has distorted the spiritual vision of every human being on this planet. Every person has grown up with a distorted view of “reality,” but most people have never seen an alternative and thus have no reason to question their world view. They have no frame of reference for questioning the reality of what they see.
The essential problem with the ego
This explains why so many people consider themselves very religious or spiritual, being completely convinced that they will be saved, yet in reality they are following a path that can never lead to salvation. The reason being that this false path is created by the ego, and thus it is exactly what the Bible describes as follows:
There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. (Proverbs 14:12)
Does that mean I am saying that most religious/spiritual people on this planet are following a false path? That is exactly what I am saying, and I am simply repeating what I already said 2,000 years ago:
13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
14 Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. (Matthew, Chapter 7)
The wide gate and the broad way is the path created by the human ego. The ego has created an illusion, namely that you can be saved without overcoming the ego, without doing the hard and unpleasant task that I described as follows:
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
(Matthew, Chapter 7)
The essence of hypocrisy is an unwillingness to change. However, no hypocrite ever realizes that he or she is unwilling to change. The reason being that hypocrites always accept the illusions of their egos, meaning that they firmly believe they do not have to change. They base this belief on the fact that they belong to the only true spiritual/religious movement and – because they fulfill certain outer requirements – they are guaranteed to be saved. When you believe your salvation is guaranteed, why would you have to change? This is the wide gate and the broad way that leads to destruction. How can you avoid following this false path?
Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.
In this discourse I will give you the overall view – the big picture – of how the ego manages to make and keep people spiritually blind and what you can do to start getting yourself out of the trap set by the ego. I know that for people who are still identifying with their egos, this teaching will be impossible to grasp. As I said in the first discourse, most people who find this book have made some contact with their Christ selves, and thus they can benefit from having the big picture.
If there was one thing that I wish all spiritual seekers would understand, it is the fact that the spiritual path is a process whereby you gradually free your mind from all of the illusions created by the ego. As I explained in the previous discourse, the ego can never experience the Spirit of Truth. The ego creates a description – a mental image – of God’s truth (and collectively human beings have created an almost infinite number of such graven images). The ego is absolutely convinced that its description of truth is the real thing. In reality, the ego’s description is an idol that obscures your direct experience of the Spirit of Truth itself. The ego is in violation of the first two commandments given by God to Moses:
3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image… (Exodus, Chapter 20)
The first command is that you have no other gods before the real God, which means that you do not accept any description in this world as a substitute for the direct experience of the Spirit of Truth. The second one is that you do not take onto yourself any graven image, which does not mean a statue carved in stone but a mental image. The ego creates these mental images and then it seeks to make you believe that you should accept an image as the absolute, unchanging truth. You should be satisfied with the idol so that you do not attempt to go beyond it and experience the Spirit of Truth.
The ego cannot experience the Spirit of Truth, but you can. When you do experience the Spirit of truth directly, you will no longer believe the ego’s illusion, namely that its description is the real thing or is all you need in order to be saved. The ego will lose its power over you, and as you stop feeding the ego energy, it will gradually wither away and it will eventually die. Because the ego has a strong survival instinct, it does not want to die, and thus it will do anything to keep you from seeing through its illusions. It will do anything to prevent you from experiencing the Spirit of truth directly so that you can gradually expand your vision and can eventually rebuke all of the lies created by the ego and the prince of this world.
We might say that the essence of the spiritual path is to gradually clear your mind from the illusions of the ego so that you gain a progressively purer experience of the Spirit of Truth. As Paul said it:
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1Corinthians 13:12)
The basic choice of life
In traditional religions you find the concept of the laws of God. We might also call them the design principles that God used to create the universe in which you live. The origin of all other design principles is the principle of oneness, the Law of Oneness. It is described in the Bible as follows:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John, Chapter 1)
God created everything out of its own Being, and thus God’s Being is embedded in everything that was created—without him was not anything made that was made. The Word is what is also called the only begotten son of God:
No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. (John 1:18)
Many Christians think this refers to me, the historical person of Jesus. However, as I explain in the previous books in this series, I came to earth as a representative of something far greater than any one person. That is why I said:
Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God. (Mark 10:18)
The concept of the word or the only begotten son refers to what I today call the universal Christ mind. This is the mind, the state of consciousness, that is created by God as the very foundation for the principle of oneness. The fundamental function of the Christ mind is to be one with God, one with God’s overall vision for the universe and one with the specific design principles that God created in order to make sure the universe reaches its intended goal.
You now need to realize that you – meaning your lifestream, which is more than your physical body and your outer mind and personality – were created to be a co-creator with God. That is why the Bible says:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion… (Genesis 1:26)
God has given human beings dominion over the earth, which means that God (or rather a group of ascended masters called the Elohim) created this planet as a foundation upon which human beings could build a “house” as a way to express and develop their creative abilities. Human beings have been given free will so they must – individually and collectively – decide what they do upon the earth. The only catch is, of course, that they will inevitably experience the conditions they create. God did not create the current state of limitations, lack of resources and other forms of suffering. Humankind has collectively created current conditions, and everyone is experiencing them.
When God gave co-creators free will, a fundamental duality came into being. As I said, the universal Christ mind is an expression of the principle of oneness which is designed to make sure everything follows God’s purpose and vision. When co-creators gain free will, it becomes possible that they can choose to go against the principle of oneness. The mind of Christ logically has an opposite. The basic reality of free will is that a co-creator can create in one of two ways:
You can co-create by using the mind of Christ, which means that everything you do is in alignment with God’s purpose and the design principles used by God. The Elohim used the mind of Christ to build the original earth and you use the same mind to build onto it.
You can de-create by using the mind of anti-christ, which is in opposition to the mind of Christ. Everything you create through the mind of anti-christ is out of alignment with God’s purpose and laws.
The mind of anti-christ is in opposition to the mind of Christ because it is based on the illusion that it is separated from God. Free will gives you two options for expressing your creativity:
You can co-create within the framework of God’s law. This ensures that you are in harmony with God’s purpose and that your efforts enhance your own life and the lives of everyone else. Everything you do raises up all life.
You can de-create outside the framework of God’s law. Thereby, you set yourself apart from God’s purpose and you are, so to speak, fighting against the current of the River of Life, you are fighting against the entire universe. The result of co-creating outside of God’s law is that you limit your creative freedom and power, and everything you do only pulls down yourself and all life. That is why humankind has created so much suffering on this planet.
To better understand the difference between following or going against God’s laws, consider the law of gravity. This law is what makes it possible for you to live on the surface of the earth instead of floating into empty space. Is the law of gravity a restriction of your creative freedom on this planet or is it the foundation for it? Would it make sense to rebel against the law of gravity and spend your entire life fighting it? (Take note that flying is not a rebellion against the law of gravity but a result of learning how to make more advanced use of all of God’s laws.)
As a co-creator, you have the option of co-creating through the mind of Christ – the mind of oneness with God and all life – or the mind of anti-christ—the mind that sees itself as separated from God and all life. You now see that the mind of anti-christ is based on a fundamental division, a division between itself and God, God’s law and all other co-creators. The mind of Christ is the mind of oneness whereas the mind of anti-christ is the mind of division, the mind of duality, the mind of separation. We now need to take a closer look at the fundamental duality of the mind of anti-christ.
The knowledge of good and evil
When you stay within the framework of God’s law, you have an absolute standard for evaluating everything. There is that which is one with God’s truth, God’s reality, and there is that which is apart from God’s reality. When you move into the consciousness of anti-christ, you lose this absolute guiding rod. Only the consciousness of Christ can see God’s reality, and when you step outside the consciousness of Christ, you can no longer see God’s absolute truth. You now enter a state of mind in which truth becomes a relative concept, a concept that is dominated by two opposites that can only exist in relation to each other.
The Bible describes these concepts in the story of how Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden. The literal, orthodox interpretation of this story is out of touch with reality. Adam and Eve were not the only human beings in the Garden. The story is meant to illustrate what has happened to every co-creator on earth. You are not being punished for the original sin of Adam and Eve. Your present situation is the consequence of the fact that you – for most people, many lifetimes ago – made the same choice made by Adam and Eve.
What was that choice? In the beginning, all God’s co-creators lived in a protected environment in which they had direct guidance from a spiritual teacher—what Genesis calls “God.” This teacher [In reality, the teacher was named Maitreya] was teaching co-creators how to exercise their creative powers while staying within the framework of God’s law. Because they had free will, they also had the potential to go outside of God’s law. This is what Genesis describes as follows:
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (Genesis, Chapter 2)
What is the deeper spiritual meaning behind the metaphor of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil?” It is a description of the consciousness of anti-christ, the consciousness that sees itself as separated from God. Perhaps you have wondered why God planted the tree in the Garden if he did not want Adam to eat of it? The reason is now clear. The “tree” was an inevitable consequence of giving God’s co-creators free will. God could not give you free will without giving you the potential to go outside of God’s law.
Having this potential does not mean that you have to exercise it. Being able to hurt yourself does not mean that you have to hurt yourself. However, having the potential does mean that you are exposed to the temptation to go outside God’s law. The Serpent can be seen (among other things) as a symbol for the fact that free will does come with a price, namely the temptation to make choices that harm yourself and all life.
The real meaning behind the expression “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” is that it represents a state of consciousness, namely the consciousness of anti-christ. In this state of consciousness you have stepped outside of oneness with God, and thus you no longer see God’s reality. You now see everything as defined on a scale with two opposites. On one side of the scale is good and on the opposite side is evil. For the scale to exist, both are necessary, meaning that “good” and “evil” have now become relative concepts. They exist only in relation to each other and one is defined as the opposite of the other.
The consequence is that in the consciousness of anti-christ there is no absolute truth. “Truth” has become relative, meaning that it can be defined differently by different people. You have heard the expression: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and in the consciousness of anti-christ “truth” is in the eye of the beholder. When you partake of the consciousness of anti-christ, you create your own definition of truth—and it will be outside of God’s absolute truth.
The ultimate outcome of the consciousness of anti-christ is the belief that evil is the opposite of God, meaning that the devil (or however you picture personified evil) is the opposite polarity of God and is a necessary (even beneficial) part of the basic polarity of life. In reality, the consciousness of anti-christ is not in a polarity with the consciousness of Christ. Evil is not the opposite of God. Evil is outside of God, and the consciousness of anti-christ is outside the consciousness of Christ—the consciousness of oneness. Relativity is a product of the consciousness of anti-christ, and it is only in the sphere of anti-christ that good and evil exist as relative concepts, as opposing polarities where one cannot exist without the other.
Fitting a Square Peg Into a Round Hole
Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.
You have heard the expression that someone is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and it describes what the ego will continue to do until you allow it to die. The round hole is a symbol for the letter “O,” which stands for Oneness. The square peg is a symbol for the four levels of the material universe, which the ego sees as the only road to eternal life.
In reality, the only road to salvation, the ascension or the eternal life is the Path of Oneness whereby you come back to the correct sense of identity as a co-creator with your God. You will enter God’s kingdom only by attaining a sense of oneness with God whereby you can say, as I did: “I and my father are one!” The ego was born when you decided to turn away from the Path of Oneness and instead join the path of separation. The ego can never come into oneness with God. You created the ego because you separated yourself from God, and thus when you come back to oneness, the ego will no longer be needed and should be allowed to die.
Obviously, the ego will never recognize this fact, and it is constantly trying to build the false image that you can be saved without overcoming the ego, without letting it die. The ego is trying to create the appearance that you can be saved by living up to certain requirements in this world. The ego is trying to use something from the four planes of matter in an attempt to force its way into the kingdom of oneness. That is why anything created by the ego will be a square peg that will never fit into the round hole of the kingdom of oneness. That is why I gave the following parable:
1 And Jesus answered and spake unto them again by parables, and said,
2 The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son,
3 And sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come.
8 Then saith he to his servants, The wedding is ready, but they which were bidden were not worthy.
9 Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage.
11 And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment:
12 And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless.
13 Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
14 For many are called, but few are chosen. (Matthew, Chapter 22)
The reality is that the wedding garment symbolizes the Christ consciousness, which is the only way to establish oneness with God. As I explained in the previous discourse, the ego is born of separation from God, and thus everything the ego believes, every mental image it creates, springs from the mind of anti-christ—the mind of separation. These images can never form the wedding garment that gives access to the kingdom, and the ego will always remain in the outer darkness of its own making. As long as you identify with the ego, you too will remain in the state of consciousness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
What is the you that can escape the ego?
Obviously, you do not have to remain trapped by the ego. The inner message of every true spiritual teaching – often disguised in metaphors or mythical stories – is that you can slay the dragon of the ego, be rescued by the knight on the white horse of the Christ self and inherit the kingdom of God. But what is the “you” that can do this? We have called it the “Conscious You.” You might also call it the “Conscious I” or the “conscious self.”
This Conscious You is the core of your lower being. It is an extension of your spiritual self, your I AM Presence. It was designed to descend into the material universe to both experience this realm and bring the light of your I AM Presence – your God Flame – into this world, helping to turn it into the kingdom of God. The Conscious You is what makes you aware that you exist, and it is also the part of you that makes conscious decisions.
The Conscious You is meant to be the master of your lower being, which we can call your container of self. You are meant to make most of your decisions at the level of the Conscious You, under the direction of your I AM Presence and spiritual teacher. When you turned away from your spiritual teacher, you lost that divine direction, and thus you had to make decisions alone. This became painful for many co-creators, which is why they gradually allowed their egos to make more and more decisions for them.
We might say that the problem faced by most people is that they have put the Conscious You to sleep and have allowed the ego to run their lives. That is why many of their decisions are not made at the level of the conscious mind but are made through a subconscious process ruled by the ego. We can compare the ego to a computer that is not actually able to think but that has a sufficiently sophisticated programming to give the appearance that it can think.
This analogy is fruitful when compared to my previous analogy of the forest and the trees. The ego has created a large number of relativistic, dualistic illusions that are like individual computer programs. You might compare them to the trees in the forest, and each program is designed to handle specific situations in life. When you encounter a particular type of situation, one of these programs kicks in and takes over your reactions to the situation. You are no longer making conscious choices as to how to best handle the situation; it is all run by the computer of the ego.
You probably know that a computer has a number of specific programs that all function within the framework of what is called the operating system. This is what gives the computer its identity as a Windows, Macintosh or UNIX computer. The operating system is the ego itself, and it compares to the forest in the previous discourse. This operating system is the very core of the ego, and it was born out of the decision to turn away from your teacher. The specific reasoning that the Conscious You used in order to justify turning away from the teacher became the very core of your ego. This is important because when you realize that your ego was born out of this decision, you see why the ego will never question the validity of that decision. The ego is like a computer that can never question its operating system but will forever continue to function according to its programming.
The ego literally lives and dies by the original decision to turn away from God. If the Conscious You ever looked at that decision, realized that is was not a constructive choice and replaced it with a better decision – by choosing life over death – the ego would die. The Conscious You can now begin to understand that the ego will do anything in its power to prevent you from ever uncovering and reevaluating the original decision that created the ego. Returning to the computer analogy, you know that an individual program cannot alter the operating system—it must function within the framework defined by the system. The ego seeks to make the Conscious You so focused on its individual beliefs – the trees – that you will never see the underlying belief – the forest – that created the ego.
Even many sincere spiritual seekers have been fooled by this trick. They have realized that there is an entity – whether they call it the ego or something else – that is blocking their spiritual growth. They have realized that it is necessary to cut down some of the trees in the forest in order to remove the veil of illusions that separates them from God. They have not yet seen that there is something hiding behind the trees. Although many seekers are sincerely questioning aspects of their egos, they have not yet seen behind the veil to start questioning the ego itself. Obviously, a beginning seeker is not yet ready to do this, but many of the people who have been on the spiritual path for decades – or even lifetimes – could benefit immensely from considering the teachings I am giving. They are ready to begin to question the basic illusions of their egos.
You are more than the ego
The first step towards overcoming the ego is to realize that there is more to “you” than the ego and its individual illusions. You need to realize that you are more than a highly evolved animal, that you are more than the computer programs of the ego. When you look at the world, you will see many people who have not yet come to that realization. These are what the Bible calls the “multitudes” and you will note that I spoke to them in parables and then gave my disciples a more sophisticated teaching.
My disciples had realized that they were more than their egos, but they had not begun to truly see their egos. This is comparable to the situation of many spiritual seekers today. In today’s world millions of people are at the same or a higher level of spiritual maturity as were my disciples 2,000 years ago. If you are consciously aware of the spiritual path, you already know there is more to “you” than the ego, that there is more to reality than the material world. In order to take the next step, you need to come to a more sophisticated understanding of the “you” that is more than the ego.
The crucial understanding that most spiritual seekers are missing is the realization that the Conscious You is designed to make decisions and that it makes those decisions based on its sense of identity. The Conscious You is an individualization of God, but in time and space, the Conscious You is who it thinks it is, who it sees itself as being. The Conscious You has the ability to identify itself as absolutely anything it can conceive and accept as real. The Conscious You can identify itself as a highly evolved animal, and it will then make decisions as an animal. If the Conscious You identifies itself as a mortal sinner, it will make decisions as a sinner—and it will consider it blasphemy to see itself as a son or daughter of God.
The Conscious You is designed to be a co-creator in the material universe, and it expresses its creative abilities through the filter of its sense of identity. Every decision the Conscious You makes is colored by the sense of identity you have come to accept, based on your upbringing in this life and your experiences from past lives. The Conscious You is never confined to or permanently trapped in its current sense of identity. The Conscious You has the ability to mentally project itself anywhere it wants, meaning that it can also project its sense of self outside its current identity—the identity built in this world.
It is this very ability to separate yourself from your current sense of identity – and realize there is more to life – that is the key to all human progress, be it material or spiritual progress. If you could see yourself only through the filter of your current sense of identity, you could never rise above that identity. Human beings could never come back to oneness after they had descended into the consciousness of separation.
The essential key is that the Conscious You can step outside your current sense of identity at any moment. Nothing binds the Conscious You to your current sense or identity—except your belief that there is nothing outside of it or that you cannot escape your current sense of identity. The catch is that most people have come to identify themselves with their egos to the point where they cannot conceive and believe that they can escape the ego at any moment. In a sense, this belief is true because you cannot simply walk away from the forest of the ego. You must systematically cut down the trees – illusions – of the ego before you can see your true identity. Even though these illusions must be removed, the Conscious You can – at any moment – choose to stop identifying itself with the ego, and this will make it far easier for you to let go of the ego. This process is what I described in the following quote:
3 Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
4 Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?
5 Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. (John, Chapter 3)
Being born of the Spirit means – among other valid interpretations – that you realize that the Conscious You can walk away from the mental prison of the ego and reclaim its true identity as a co-creator with God. You can realize that your current sense of identity is deeply affected by the illusions of your ego and the illusions of the collective consciousness of humankind. It is based on the sense of separation from God, and thus it is mortal because anything that is outside the kingdom of oneness cannot have eternal life. Your mortal sense of identity is unreal and can never inherit the eternal life. That is why I said:
For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. (Matthew 16:25)
If you seek to hold on to the sense of identity – life – built by the ego, you will not find eternal life. If you are willing to lose that sense of life in order to win the Christ consciousness and come back to oneness, you will indeed find eternal life.
Becoming a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.
The ego has a very specific mission, namely to prevent the Conscious You from rediscovering and then abandoning the original choice to turn away from God—the decision that gave birth to the ego. This decision was made by the Conscious You, but it was not made in the full clarity of the Christ consciousness. It was made because the Conscious You had started experimenting with the duality consciousness, the consciousness of anti-christ. The Conscious You did not clearly see what the decision entailed, and it did not fully understand that its reasoning was based on dualistic thinking. The ego will do anything in its power to prevent you from overcoming this blindness; it will do anything to prevent the Conscious You from projecting itself outside the ego’s illusions.
The Conscious You made its fateful decision because it did not see the absolute reality of Christ and had become blinded by the veil created by the duality consciousness. The Conscious You believed its reasoning was sound, and it felt that the decision to turn away from the teacher was either justifiable, necessary, beneficial or its only option. Because the Conscious You had already been partially blinded – meaning divided – by the dualistic logic – as Eve was divided in her mind by the serpent’s statement that she would not surely die – it did not see that its reasoning was relative. It did not understand that the serpentine logic seems reasonable only when viewed through the filter of duality, a state of mind in which everything is relative—meaning that anything can be justified.
The Conscious You is made in the image and likeness of God, meaning your I AM Presence. You are not a bad or evil person and you are not stupid. If the Conscious You knew better, it would do better. The problem is that as long as the Conscious You looks at the world through the filter of dualistic logic, it cannot fully know better. It cannot see beyond the relative logic of anti-christ to see the absolute reality of Christ.
Why the universe seems to confirm the ego’s illusions
The essence of the duality consciousness is that the Conscious You – guided by the false teachers of this world and the ego – creates its own “reality,” a world view that is centered around the illusion that created the ego. Everything in this world view is born from the central illusion that created the ego, and thus everything seems to support that illusion. As long as you look at the world through this filter, everything you see will confirm that the ego’s illusion is right. If you wear yellow glasses, the world will appear to have a yellow tint, and it will do so until you take off the glasses and see the world without a filter.
There is an even deeper reality in the sense that the world not only appears to be colored. The reality you experience in the material universe is shaped by the ego’s beliefs. As I explain throughout our books and websites, the material universe acts like a mirror that reflects back to you whatever you send out. That is why I told people to do onto others what you want them to do to you. The reality being that the universe will do to you what you do to others. This is a safety mechanism that aims as serving as a substitute teacher for those co-creators who have turned away from the spiritual teachers assigned to humankind. When you have no contact with the teacher, your only way to learn is to see the consequences of your actions, and thus the universe mirrors back to you what you send out.
The Law of Free Will mandates that if you turn away from God and your spiritual teacher, you must be allowed to learn from your own actions. A spiritual teacher cannot interfere with your learning process until you decide to seek the teacher’s help. The teacher is not trapped in your personal illusions, your ego’s house of mirrors, so he clearly sees through the veil that blinds you. He cannot explain this to you until you rise to the level of the path where you are open to this explanation. The teacher must wait until the Conscious You begins to question the illusions created by the ego.
The teacher is fully aware of the essential problem, yet only a student with a certain amount of maturity can even begin to grasp this problem. What is the essence of the problem? Your ego has used the duality consciousness to create a mental image of what it thinks the world is like—or rather what it wants the world to be like so that it can uphold the basic illusion that created your specific ego. The Conscious You has partially identified itself with this world view and is therefore seeing the world through the colored glasses represented by the ego’s illusion. At the same time, the Conscious You – as the director of your attention, which is your creative force – is projecting this world view into the cosmic mirror. Guess what the mirror is reflecting back.
Do you now begin to see the problem? The Conscious You is using its creative faculties to project a dualistic image into the material universe, and the cosmic mirror is reflecting it back, meaning that what comes back to you seems to affirm the ego’s world view. If your ego has created the image that God is an angry and unjust being in the sky who has abandoned you, then the material universe will reflect back to you conditions that seem to affirm this image. You simply will not be able to experience God directly as long as you identify with the illusion of separation, and thus the material universe will hide the reality that God’s Being is in everything. Everything you experience in this world will seem to confirm the belief that God is not here, and thus you have been abandoned by God. Likewise, if you believe life is a struggle, the cosmic mirror will reflect back to you physical conditions that make your life a struggle.
You are a co-creator with God, and you can never stop co-creating. As I have said before, you will inevitably create your own circumstances, and the choice is whether you create through the dualistic sense of identity defined by the ego or through your divine identity that is anchored in your I AM Presence. The Conscious You has the ability to identify itself as anything it conceives and accepts as real. If the Conscious You identifies with the mortal identity defined by the ego, you will believe you are a mortal, human being living in a limited world that makes your life a struggle. Because you have identified with this world view, your soul will gravitate towards a planet where these conditions are physically manifest—because they have been created by the collective consciousness of the lifestreams living on that planet.
Starting to question the ego’s identity
As long as you identify fully with the world view created by the ego, everything you see must be forced into the framework of that world view. Until the Conscious You begins to suspect that it is more than the ego, you will be unable to question the world view of the ego. You cannot bear to lose your sense of identity so if you think the ego’s mortal identity is all there is, you will be unwilling to question it, and thus you are unreachable to a spiritual teacher. Instead, you will try to interpret everything that happens to you in a way that reaffirms the ego’s world view. Because the mind of anti-christ uses relative logic, you can twist almost anything in such a way that it proves what you want to believe. This is what is commonly called circular logic.
How can you ever escape the illusions created by the ego? Because God has built a safety mechanism into the material universe, as Mother Mary explains in her teachings about abundance. That mechanism is the Mother light’s tendency to return to its ground state, to equilibrium. If you use your co-creative abilities to create something that is out of alignment with the laws and the creative intent of God, your creation will not be sustainable. It will exist only in time and space, meaning that the Mother light will inevitably break it down.
The consequence is that your life becomes a constant struggle to uphold the ego’s illusions. The more you seek to hold on to the illusions, the more you create a counter-force that seeks to break them down. Your life truly does become a struggle because you are fighting against the basic force of the material universe. The Mother light is designed to break down every structure that is not in alignment with God’s law. In order to uphold your ego’s illusions, you must seek to force the entire universe to conform to the ego’s world view.
A group of co-creators can force a localized part of the universe to conform to their world view for a time. That is why humans beings have managed to force the Mother light that makes up planet earth to conform to their collective world view. No matter how strongly the co-creators believe in their illusions, they cannot force the Mother light to maintain them forever. They will inevitably create a counter-force that will break down the world they have created. You clearly see this in human society today in the form of diseases, lack, poverty, short life-span, lack of food, pollution and natural disasters and imbalances.
The consequence is simple. One way or the other, you must learn that the ego’s world view is false. If you will not listen to a spiritual teacher, you must learn by hitting your head against the concrete wall of the universe—until you finally break down and start to wonder whether there might be a better way. It is always a challenge for a spiritual teacher to watch people who refuse to question the illusions of their egos and thus create increasingly severe crises in their lives, until they finally break under the strain and cry out for help. We are bound by the Law of Free Will to let people run their course until they ask for our help. We can only watch as people box themselves in until they can no longer move.
Once the Conscious You has identified itself with the ego’s dualistic world view, it is very difficult to break the spell of that illusion. The universe itself will actually seem to confirm the ego’s world view by complying with it for a time. This is why you see so many people who are absolutely convinced that their world view is correct. You also see that the basic world view shared by most people progresses over time. Centuries ago, many people believed the earth and the universe were very small. They believed the earth was flat and that the sky was a dome covering the planet.
This world view has changed because in every generation a few people dared to question the world view of their society and their egos. In this age, there is a crop of people who are ready for the harvest of once again reconnecting to their spiritual teachers and being lifted – fully and finally – out of the dualistic illusions of their personal egos and the collective ego of this planet. There are forces that will do anything they can to prevent your personal awakening, and they have a very powerful weapon to use against you, namely the subtlety of the duality consciousness. Let us take a closer look at exactly how subtle things can be in the world where everything is relative.
When the Ego’s World Is Black and White
Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.
The most obvious example of the ego’s relativistic, dualistic way of thinking is what I prefer to call black-and-white thinking. This plot by the ego makes blatant use of the basic duality built into the mind of anti-christ. It defines two opposites that are opposites in every way, meaning that there is no overlap or potential for compromise. There is no gray zone because the opposites cannot co-exist but must cancel out each other—or so it seems. One opposite is defined as being absolutely good and the other is defined as being absolutely evil, thus setting up an inevitable, to-the-death struggle between them.
The ego makes people believe that the only way for them to please God and be saved is to take the side of good and to fight against evil. An extreme outcome of this scenario is the definition of two religions or ideologies that both claim to be the only true one, making their respective followers believe it is their duty to fight the other. The ultimate triumph of the prince of this world is to get two groups of religious people to kill each other in the name of the same God, as for example in the Crusades.
The result of this ego-manipulation is that people adopt a very simplistic view of the world. Their religion is completely true and all others are completely false. There is no room for any nuances in between, which means that people almost inevitably become extremists and fanatics. This is a very easy approach to life because it really does not require people to think for themselves. They simply accept the definitions created by the leaders of their society without making any personal attempts to discern whether their leaders are right according to the Christ standard. They believe these leaders are absolutely right and that God himself would agree with them.
The consequence of this approach to life is that once people have accepted that a particular belief system is absolutely good, they will never question it. They will blindly follow what the leaders of their religion have defined as absolutely right, and this has led to some of the worst atrocities in history. I described this scenario as follows:
Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. (Matthew 15:14)
Instead of leaving the blind leaders alone, people follow them uncritically. They never question that the black-and-white definition of life might not be in alignment with God’s truth. As a result, many people have spent one or more lifetimes engaging all of their energy and attention in this dualistic struggle between two relative opposites. Such people have defined an enemy or scapegoat, and they believe they must do God’s work by destroying the enemy.
As long as people are trapped in this extreme form of black-and-white thinking, they are absolutely convinced that they are working for good and will be saved. The stark reality is that everything they do to fight the self-defined enemy only serves to trap them more firmly in the dualistic state of consciousness. This obviously prevents them from putting on the wedding garment of the Christ consciousness, which is the only way to enter Heaven.
It can be extremely difficult for extremists to admit that they are wrong. They cannot admit that what they have seen as a work for God has not promoted God’s cause but has only served to reinforce the dualistic struggle created by the forces of anti-christ. Such people tend to become very defensive and hostile towards anyone who questions the validity of their approach. This is why the scribes and the Pharisees wanted me dead and why some people in today’s world become fanatical in defending their “truth.”
The fact is that such people are unapproachable for a spiritual teacher. You see this illustrated in how the scribes and Pharisees rejected my attempts to show them the higher way of Christ. They literally used their black-and-white viewpoints to justify rejecting the Living Christ, meaning that they had put their own graven image before the Living God. They used a relative image to justify not reaching for the direct experience of God’s absolute reality—the experience I came to offer to all who were willing to lose their mortal sense of identity for my sake.
Overcoming extreme selfishness
You will remember that I earlier said that the ego creates a false path to salvation. By using black-and-white logic, the ego creates the impression that being saved is a matter of belonging to the only true religion and meeting its outer requirements. The more people identify with their egos, the more prone they are to believe this illusion. It seems so easy that instead of doing the hard work of pulling the beam from your own eye, you simply have to believe a predefined doctrine and follow a set of outer rules.
At the beginning level of the spiritual path, people are prone to accept the black-and-white approach to salvation. They become very zealous – even fanatical – in following their particular belief system – be it religious, political or scientific in nature – and they absolutely refuse to question it. That is why some people can believe that by killing the enemies of God, they will instantly be saved.
Now comes one of the subtleties that the more mature spiritual seekers need to understand. The extreme outcome of being blinded by black-and-white thinking is that people become entirely self-centered and selfish. They often believe they have a supreme right to do what they want and that anyone who opposes them – including the rest of the human race – is wrong. They start acting like predatory animals who take whatever they want and are unwilling to consider how their actions affect other people, affect themselves in the long run or compare to higher principles. In the past, humankind was at a much lower level of consciousness than today, as illustrated by the cave man society in which the law of the jungle ruled. In today’s world, you see this level of consciousness in many criminals, from leaders of organized crime to pedophiles or serial killers.
How do you take people who are completely selfish and raise them to a more spiritual level? Extreme selfishness is the ultimate outcome of the relative logic of the ego. In the Christ mind you see that all life is one, and thus when you hurt another, you are hurting yourself. When you are completely trapped in the mind of anti-christ, you think you can hurt others without hurting yourself, you even think you have the right to do whatever you want regardless of how it affects others. You justify this by using the relative logic of the ego, which can truly make it seem like anything – including total selfishness – is justified.
How do people start rising above this level of consciousness? They do so by realizing that there is something beyond the ego’s relative logic, that there is something that is right or wrong according to a higher standard. When you are completely selfish, you see nothing beyond the relative logic of your ego—and thus you think you have the right to do anything you want. To begin the process of escaping total selfishness, you must realize that there is a higher standard for evaluating your behavior so that you choose to limit certain types of selfish behavior.
For most people who are trapped in selfishness, this realization comes only when someone “puts the fear of God in them.” These people begin to realize that there is such a thing as long-term consequences. Their souls can be affected in an afterlife by what they do in this life, and they will either be rewarded in heaven or burn forever in hell. From a purely selfish motive, these people begin to modify their short-term egotistical behavior according to a higher standard.
Because these people are still identified with their egos, they cannot yet see the limitations of the relative logic of the ego. They need a very simplistic, black-and-white belief system with clearly defined rules for how to avoid hell and get into heaven. Here comes the subtle point. When people start modifying selfish behavior, they have reached a turning point from which genuine progress is possible. There is a real danger that these people will be fooled by their egos to enter the blind alley of fanaticism where they think they serve God by fighting what their belief system defines as the enemies of God. This will, of course, abort such people’s progress. However, if people avoid going into fanaticism, it is possible to make genuine spiritual progress by following a black-and-white belief system. The reason being that when you believe certain types of behavior will send you to hell, you gain a very strong motivation for modifying selfish behavior. This will cause a person to make less karma, and thus the lifestream can gradually free itself from at least some of the downward pull of the dualistic struggle. When you are completely selfish, everything you do creates negative karma that only reinforces the sense that you are in a struggle against everyone else. When you relieve some of this pressure, you can begin to see through the more selfish beliefs, and thus you can free yourself from some of the illusions of the ego.
Judge not
Even though most fundamentalist Christians will reject my teachings as the work of the devil, there are actually people who have made progress by following a fundamentalist belief system. The problem is that this progress will only last for a time. A black-and-white approach simply cannot take you above a certain level of the spiritual path. Because this approach is still so heavily influenced by the relative logic of the ego, it can very easily become a blind alley that begins to take you into a downward spiral of judgment and pride, which is only marginally better than the downward spiral of selfishness.
The problem is that a black-and-white belief system automatically implies a value judgment. “The members of our church are automatically good and everyone else is bad.” This inevitably causes people to judge others based on a relative standard defined by their egos. As I said:
1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matthew, Chapter 7)
Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment. (John 7:24)
Judging according to appearance means that you judge based on a relative, dualistic standard created by the ego. Judging righteous judgment means that you discern reality based on the vision of the Christ mind. When you judge based on the ego, you inevitably feel that you are better than other people, and this leads to spiritual pride, which binds you to the duality consciousness.
The ego wants a relative standard because it allows it to build the appearance that it is better than others. It can then create the illusion that because you are better than certain other people, you are guaranteed to be saved. As I explained in a previous discourse, there is no such value judgment in the Christ mind. That which is in alignment with God’s law is real, and that which is out of alignment with God is unreal. The Christ does not use the relative terms good and bad—it does not compare things on a relative scale that leads gradually from one extreme (good) to the opposite extreme (evil). The Christ mind does not judge based on appearance but is only concerned about whether something is real or not real.
One might say that the deepest level of ego-identification is to be completely selfish. You are completely identified with the dualistic struggle, thinking that life is a battle between you and the world. As you rise above this, you stop indulging in the most extreme selfish behaviors, but this makes you feel you are better than those who are still acting in “evil” ways. At the lower level, you might engage in religion in order to destroy all threats to your religion, thinking God will reward you for doing so. At the next stage, your motivation for being involved with religion is to prove the superiority of your religion and thus create the appearance that you are so good that God simply has to save you.
When the Ego’s World Is Gray
Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.
As I have explained in previous discourses, the ego operates entirely in the realm of duality. When you go to the lowest aspect of dualistic thinking, you end up seeing the world as black and white, meaning that you are always right and anyone opposing you is always wrong. The reasoning is simple. People define a belief system as infallible and as the only true one, meaning that they think it is entirely true and not influenced by error at all. In the terminology I use in these discourses, people think their belief system springs entirely from the truth of Christ and is not influenced by the illusions of the mind of anti-christ.
In reality, this line of thinking springs from the ego’s desire to set itself up as an authority figure that cannot be questioned. It is an attempt to create the outer appearance that because you belong to the only true belief system, you are guaranteed to be saved. It also gives many people the sense that they are better than those who do not belong to their belief system. If you take an honest look at the world, you will see that even today many people are caught in this approach to life. They have a very obvious sense of righteousness, they judge others and they feel better than others. An obvious example is the fundamentalists of any religion.
If you have ever interacted with such people, you will know that it can be extremely difficult to carry on a normal conversation with them. It is virtually impossible to discuss anything that goes beyond or seems to contradict their beliefs. If you try to make them see that their beliefs are limited or even incorrect, you are usually met with a very hostile reaction. In extreme cases, such people are willing to kill anyone who threatens their belief system, as for example a Muslim fundamentalist who carries out a suicide bombing to defend Islam. Or a Christian crusader defending a piece of real estate in the Holy Land—as if God (a spiritual being) ever wanted people to kill each other over anything in the material world. When people are less extreme, they will label you as being of the devil (or any number of other negative labels) and refuse to talk with you. This, of course, makes such people unreachable for a spiritual teacher.
Escape from extremism
What can bring people out of this state of having closed their minds completely? The reality of the situation is that the conscious selves of such people have refused to make decisions. The Conscious You has retreated into a self-made fortress, and it has assigned the ego as a guard. The role of the ego is to build fortress walls that are impenetrable to anything that would require the Conscious You to wake up and start making decisions again. Of course, as the medieval castles proved, any fortress built to keep the world out, will also keep its inhabitants in, thus becoming a prison.
The inevitable result is that the ego will act as a computer that mindlessly carries out its programming, taking the person further and further into the extreme of black-and-white thinking. This will cause the person to be in continuous conflict with other people, and when the conflict becomes extreme enough, the Conscious You might finally wake up and realize: “I can’t do this anymore. There must be a better way!”
If the Conscious You is willing to take at least some responsibility for its situation, it can now reverse the downward trend, and it can then start the upward path that gradually leads it out of the prison built by the ego. There are three main factors that can impede this growth:
The mental prison was built as a fortress designed to “defend” the Conscious You from having to make decisions. The Conscious You might be emotionally attached to the security and comfortability of the prison. This might manifest as an unwillingness to run the risk of making decisions or as an attachment to the beliefs out of which the fortress is built. It might cling to this security in order to avoid feeling vulnerable.
The ego wants the Conscious You to believe in the lie that if you don’t make any decisions, you can’t make mistakes. The reality is that because you have free will, not making decisions is still making a decision. If you don’t make decisions, you are allowing the ego to make decisions for you. All of the ego’s decisions are mistakes, in the sense that they will not bring you closer to oneness with God.
The ego’s survival instinct will seek to keep you inside the walls where it feels like it has you and the world under some form of control. The ego will actively and aggressively seek to prevent you from rising to a new level of the spiritual path.
What do I mean when I talk about rising to a new level of the path? There are many valid ways to divide the spiritual path into levels or stages. In this context, what I am talking about is that you come to the point where you begin to see the fallacy of dualistic thinking. You begin to see the forest itself rather than being blinded by the individual trees. This is when you can begin to consciously reach for the non-dual truth of Christ.
The ego and the forces of this world will mount a major offensive against any person who begins to rise above duality. They will do anything they can think of to keep you trapped in dualistic thinking. Their only way of doing this is to use the duality of the mind of anti-christ. However, this is a formidable weapon because it is much more subtle than most spiritual seekers realize.
From one extreme to the other
As I explained in the previous discourse, many people have started rising out of extreme selfishness by being converted to a religion that talks about heaven and hell. These are what we normally call religious people, and they are still very much trapped in black-and-white thinking. They are largely unreachable to me, and most of them would reject this book outright.
In today’s world, many people have started seeing the limitations of a black-and-white approach to religion. Some are still members of traditional religions while others seek a more universal spirituality or belong to a New Age organization. Common for all these people is that they have started to rise above the black-and-white, fear-based, judgmental approach to religion. They are what I call spiritual seekers. They realize there is more to know about the spiritual side of life than what can be found in black-and-white doctrines, and they are actively looking for a higher understanding. These are the kind of people who are open to the teachings that the ascended masters are bringing forth in this age, whether through this book, our websites or other means.
Spiritual seekers represent the greatest potential for turning around planet earth and bringing humankind to a higher level. The problem is that at the present time this is only a potential. What keeps it from becoming a manifest reality is that too many spiritual seekers have become trapped in a form of dualistic thinking that is so different from black-and-white thinking that some people believe it is above duality. In reality, it is simply the opposite extreme of black-and-white thinking.
Here is one concept that I would like all sincere spiritual seekers to understand. You live on a planet that is like a twilight zone. Some spiritual light has started to penetrate the density of humankind’s consciousness. There is still so much darkness left that the light and the darkness can mix into shades of gray that make it very difficult to tell the difference between what is real and unreal. The human ego and the prince of this world can still use the subtlety of the duality consciousness to blur the difference between what is real and unreal.
The result is that there is currently no concept, truth or spiritual teaching on this planet that cannot be perverted by the human ego. The ego will try to turn any idea into a dualistic idea by putting it on a scale with other dualistic ideas—usually by setting up the idea in opposition to another idea. The consequence is that whenever you take a major step forward on the spiritual path, your ego will repeat its never-ending game of seeking to create two extremes and polarize you towards either one. When you come to the realization that you have had enough of one extreme, your ego will instantly try to make you jump into the opposite extreme. The purpose is to prevent you from leaving behind the dualistic way of thinking and rising to a higher plateau.
As I have said, most spiritual seekers have had enough of the black-and-white approach to religion. They are done with the fanaticism and they see the fallacy of the value judgment: “Our religion is the only true one and thus we are always right and those who disagree with us are bad people and will go to hell.” Most of them have distanced themselves from this approach, which is a step in the right direction. The problem is that the ego will try to make such people go into the opposite extreme, and in too many cases it is successful.
What is the opposite extreme of black-and-white thinking? It is a form of thinking in which nothing is black or white because everything is gray. This gives rise to a number of problems, but let me briefly outline the main ones:
Religious people tend to think there is only one true religion (their own), which inevitably leads to religious intolerance. Spiritual seekers have distanced themselves from religious intolerance, but many have come to believe that religious tolerance means you must accept all religions as equally valid, meaning that you don’t need to evaluate whether an idea is true or false. Just believe and let believe.
Many religious people are judgmental and intolerant towards members of other religions. Most spiritual seekers make it a virtue to be non-judgmental, but the extreme outcome is that they see almost any type of belief or behavior as acceptable. Or at least they think you should never speak out against other people’s beliefs or behavior.
Many religious people feel threatened by those who disagree with them and often respond with hostility and anger. Obviously, this prevents them from following my command to love one-another as I love them—which leads to hypocrisy. They claim to be Christians, but they don’t act lovingly. Most spiritual seekers see through such hypocrisy and are sincerely striving to be loving towards everyone. However, they also believe that being loving means you should be gentle and never challenge people’s illusions.
The net outcome of this approach is that many spiritual seekers have come to believe that in order to do God’s work and raise the consciousness of the planet, they simply have to avoid the obvious extremism of black-and-white thinking. They think it is enough to be tolerant and loving, but they do not see that this is simply another fortress built to prevent the Conscious You from making its own decisions.
They do not realize that the ego that used to be judgmental when – in past lives – they were trapped in black-and-white thinking, has now morphed into an ego that is loving and kind towards everyone. Instead of truly overcoming their egos, they have allowed the chameleon of the ego to change color so that it blends in with their new world view where being gray has become a virtue that is seen as being superior to being black-and-white. Let us take a closer look at the points raised above.
A Spiritual Teaching Can Abort Your Growth
Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.
As I explained in previous discourses, most people start walking the spiritual path in a conscious way when they find some kind of spiritual or religious teaching. People have an awakening or conversion experience, and they now join a religious or spiritual – or perhaps a political or charitable – organization. Such an awakening experience is always the result of the longing for something more, the desire to understand, the sense that there must be answers to life’s questions. As I explained earlier, this longing – although it can lead to pain or a sense of aloneness or emptiness – is the safety mechanism that prevents you from becoming totally lost in the duality consciousness. This is what we might call the “quest for truth,” and it is the driving force behind all spiritual growth.
Your ego’s main goal is to prevent you from awakening to a higher sense of identity as a spiritual being. It will do anything within its power to get you to ignore or deny the quest for truth. As I have explained, this can be achieved only on a temporary basis, and eventually the quest for truth will resurface. Even then, your ego will not give up. The ego will take the spiritual or religious teaching that served as the outer tool for your awakening, and it will seek to use it to neutralize your quest for truth. This discourse will expose some of the methods that the ego uses to achieve its perpetual goal of trying to make sure that the latest step you have taken on the spiritual path becomes the last step you will ever take.
The vain dream of a guaranteed salvation
As explained in previous discourses, the one truth of the Christ mind is above and beyond the many dualistic “truths” created by the mind of anti-christ. The essence of your quest for truth is a longing for a direct experience of the source of truth, the Spirit of Truth. It is this experience which is the truth that will set you free from the ego. No man-made, dualistic belief system can do this for you.
The ego, of course, will never understand this truth. It is seeking to misdirect your search for truth and make you believe you can find some ultimate or absolute truth in this world and that this dualistic truth can guarantee your salvation.
A common result of an awakening experience is that people begin to believe that by joining an outer organization, they have somehow “made it,” have been saved or have arrived at the ultimate destination. This belief is always promoted by the ego because it wants you to believe that by the mere act of stepping into this “ultimate” teaching or organization, you have automatically qualified for salvation. Perhaps the organization defines a process for you to go through, but nevertheless, the ego wants you to believe that as long as you stay in the organization and keep following its outer requirements, your salvation is guaranteed.
The reality of the situation is, however, that the ego has managed to herd you into a fold that it will now attempt to turn into a closed box, a mental prison that traps you indefinitely on the false path to salvation. By making you believe that your salvation is now guaranteed, the ego has neutralized your quest for truth. The ego can often silence your inner longing for an indefinite period of time, certainly for the rest of one lifetime. The ego has managed to make you think that because you have now found some ultimate teaching, you no longer need to think—you no longer need to exercise Christ discernment.
There are millions of people who believe they are religious or spiritual people and that they are saved or are making great progress. In reality, they have stopped their spiritual progress and have allowed their egos to trap them in a “holier-than-thou” attitude. This is the false sense of righteousness that I denounced so forcefully in the scribes and Pharisees. The true righteousness is the Christ consciousness in which you never stop transcending yourself and thus flow with the River of Life that is the Spirit of Truth—the Living God rather than an ego-made idol.
The driving force behind your quest for truth is that you ask questions. When the ego makes you believe in a guaranteed salvation, it has made you accept that there are certain questions you either are not allowed to ask or do not need to ask. You no longer need to stretch your mind and reach for a progressively deeper understanding of the spiritual side of life. Simply accept the doctrines of your organization and stop thinking about the more subtle or difficult questions. You will then prevent or abort the direct inner contact with the Spirit of Truth, which is the only factor that can take you beyond the dualistic beliefs of the ego.
For example, you see many Christians who believe I ascended to heaven 2,000 years ago and that I have “all power in Heaven and on earth.” They cannot accept that I could be speaking to humankind today, giving teachings that go beyond what is said in the Christian Bible. They have turned the Bible into a closed box. You also see many New Age people who are open to my website—until they come across teachings that contradict their belief that all is well. Many New Age people reject my teachings on evil, dark forces or the need to take a firm stand for truth. They have turned the concept of being kind into a closed box and will not let me take them out of it. Their egos have become their teachers.
The ego has now created the perfect mental prison in which you feel relatively content. You think that as long as you stay in the prison, you will be saved. You think you should never look outside the prison. As long as you accept this approach to spirituality and salvation, your ego can feel safe because it knows that the Conscious You will never discover the ego’s existence.
Should you begin to see through the illusion of an automatic salvation through an outer organization or guru, the ego can still win. Many people have realized that a particular organization or guru was not what they first thought it to be. Instead of searching for something better, they give up on the spiritual path, which means they now have nothing to lead them beyond the logic of the ego. The ego has won either way.
Black-and-white, gray and beyond
Let us look at how the black-and-white and the gray approaches (as described in the previous two discourses) relate to this:
When you take the black-and-white approach, you think there is truth in only one belief system. You never need to look at any ideas outside your belief system. You think you should reject all such ideas as dangerous. This explains why many Christians believe that anything which is not in accordance with the Bible is of the devil and why some New Age people think they should listen only to their guru. You become stuck in one belief system and can never move beyond it. This approach is based on fear, the fear that opening your mind makes you vulnerable to false ideas. This is the ego saying that unless you allow it to control you, you will go to hell.
When you take the gray approach, you think there are no false ideas. You are willing to look for ideas in many different belief systems, which can seem to be more open-minded. If you do not have the willingness to discern (as explained in the previous discourse), people often end up doing what I call guru-hopping. They go from teacher to teacher until they find one that confirms their belief that they can be saved without discerning and confronting their egos. Or they continue to go from guru to guru, constantly thinking that the next one will do it all for them, all the while refusing to see that no serious spiritual growth is possible until they take responsibility for their path and exercise their built-in ability to know truth from an inner source. This approach is based on pride, the belief that you could not possibly be wrong. This is the ego saying that it is always right.
Although the two approaches can seem very different, the reality is that they are based on the same basic psychology, namely an unwillingness to reach beyond the duality of the ego and attain the discernment that can come only from the Christ mind. It is only through the Christ mind – which is the open door that no human can shut – that you can experience God’s Living Truth. It is only this forever self-transcending truth that will make you free from the dualistic “truth” – the graven images – defined by the ego and the prince of this world.
The mechanism that can bring you beyond the prison of the ego is the quest for truth. The ego is constantly seeking to stop this quest. If it cannot stop you from asking questions, it will seek to divert your attention. The central aspect of the ego’s efforts it that it is trying to make you believe that ultimate, absolute truth can be found in this world—in one of the belief systems of this world.
As I have tried to explain in previous discourses, truth cannot be confined to the words and images used in the material world. Truth is a Living Spirit, and thus you can know truth only by having a direct, inner experience of the Spirit of Truth. In order to have this experience – to know the one true God – you must be willing to look beyond the graven images – the idols – created in this world.
The ego is trying to make you believe in its own mistaken belief, namely that the Spirit of Truth can be captured in – confined to – a belief system in this world. If you believe this lie, you will limit your quest for truth to a particular mental box, and thus you will not encounter the Spirit of Truth—except possibly in rare glimpses. Your ego will never see that the Spirit of Truth bloweth where it listeth and thus cannot be confined. The Conscious You is able to see this truth and then decide to reach for the direct experience.
Let me be clear. As long as you are searching for truth outside yourself, you will never find the Living Truth. There simply is no belief system on this planet that will guarantee your salvation. No outer system can ever take you – automatically – to enlightenment. The reason being that enlightenment is an inner condition that can be reached only by continuing to look beyond all outer beliefs systems, until you attain a permanent state of oneness with the Spirit of Truth.
Take note of the subtle distinction here. I am not saying that all belief systems are false or that it is wrong to follow a belief system or teacher. In order to make ultimate spiritual progress, you must become aware of the mechanism whereby your ego turns the outer belief system into a closed box. If you are not aware of this, you will inevitably be trapped by the ego, and your progress will come to a halt—even if you have been following a teaching and diligently performing its practices for many years.
Take note that the ego can use even a true and valid spiritual teaching – even a teaching released directly by the ascended masters – to create a closed box. Once a teaching is expressed in words, it enters the realm of duality, and it can now be used by the ego. There is no guarantee against this—except your personal alertness and discernment!
Also take note that there is only one way to have true discernment. In order to expose a dualistic truth created by the ego, you must have a frame of reference, you must know a truth that is not dualistic. This can be attained only through a direct, inner experience of the Spirit of Truth whereby you have a direct experience of the Living Truth and can thus instantly expose all dead doctrines coming from the mind of anti-christ. Can you see that no outer teaching can do this for you? There simply is no substitute for a direct experience of the Spirit of Truth.
Many people will read these statements and think they do not apply to them. They will think that they really have found the ultimate teacher or belief system, and thus their egos cannot possibly trap them. There are also those who will think they have such a sophisticated intellectual understanding of the path – perhaps even of the ego – that they could not possibly be fooled. The ego is subtle, and it is precisely the people who think they are above the ego who are trapped in the most subtle weapon of the ego, namely intellectual and spiritual pride. This is a topic I will talk more about later.
Diverting Your Attention From the Inner Path
Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.
In this discourse I will take a step back and look at the big picture, thus giving a clearer explanation of how the ego manages to divert people’s attention from the true road to salvation, namely the inner path of self-transcendence. As I have explained in the previous discourses, you were created as a spiritual being, and you were never meant to lose the awareness of your true origin and identity. By using your free will to experiment with the duality consciousness, the Conscious You gradually came to see itself as separated from its source, meaning your own higher being and God. This acceptance of separation created your ego, and since then the ego has attempted to create an impenetrable wall between your Conscious You and your acceptance of your true identity as a co-creator with God.
The process of separation took most co-creators into a self-reinforcing downward spiral – or rather, a spiral being reinforced by the ego and the forces of anti-christ – that led them further and further into a sense of alienation from God. This led them to build a sense of identity based on the things of the material world, including their bodies and their egos. There is theoretically no limit to how far this downward spiral can take you into a sense of being absolutely convinced that you are separated from God, or even that God does not exist. There is a force built into your being that counteracts the downward pull, namely your longing for something more than what the material world can offer.
The further you descend into identification with the material world, the more you will limit your sense of identity. You are, so to speak, building a prison for yourself, and it gradually becomes smaller until you can hardly move. The smaller your mental prison becomes, the greater the possibility that you will see the emptiness of the things of this world and decide to look for something more. Although there is no guarantee that this will happen, most co-creators will eventually reach a bottom line from which they decide to start going back up towards a more unlimited sense of identity.
The ego would much prefer that this turning point did not take place, but once it has taken place, the ego will not simply give up. It will resist every upward step you take, and its primary weapon is to divert your attention from the inner path itself. The ego wants to create the false path, which makes you believe that you can “be saved” without confronting the ego and letting it die.
Not all co-creators descend to the same low level before they turn around. The lowest level to which one can descend on this planet is represented by the life of the cave man or other primitive cultures that had no true spirituality (I am not counting all native cultures as such). They were basically living as animals with less hair cells and more brain cells. Their attention was almost entirely focused on physical survival, thus being engaged in an endless struggle against others of their own kind, animals or even Mother Nature.
The fact that the majority of human beings are no longer living this way shows that humankind has progressed to a higher state of consciousness, a higher sense of identity. This proves that most human beings on this planet have turned around and have started the upward climb. Most people are not yet consciously aware of this so they do not understand the process and are thus easily manipulated by their egos and the prince of this world.
Diversionary tactics of the ego
As long as you are in a downward spiral, your ego has managed to make you neutralize or ignore your longing for something more. For most people, the ego cannot do this indefinitely, and they will eventually reach the turning point. Although the ego will try to prevent you from turning around, it is not necessarily unhappy about you striving for a greater sense of identity.
This might sound like a contradiction, and the reason is that the ego is full of contradictions. The ego is one big contradiction, as I will explain later. The ego sees only the things of this world, and thus the ultimate triumph of your personal ego would be that you had absolute power in this world. The ego is driven by contradictory forces. On one hand, it will do anything to prevent you from discovering and following the true spiritual path that leads you to build a sense of identity that does not include the ego. To prevent you from finding the spiritual path, the ego is willing to drive you into a state of consciousness in which you see yourself as – and act as – an animal fighting for the survival of the physical body. It is willing to completely destroy your self-esteem in order to maintain control over you.
This is a very limited sense of identity, and it does not fulfill one of the ego’s essential needs. Because the ego sees only this world, it sets up relative comparisons between you and other people. When you live a very low existence, such as a cave man or a person on the street, the ego finds it hard to maintain the illusion that you are better than others. Both you and your ego will be unhappy with such a state of existence.
Although one part of your ego is afraid of you turning around and walking the path towards a greater sense of existence, another part of the ego actually welcomes this—as long as it can maintain its control over you and misdirect your longing for something more in a certain direction. To give you a better understanding of this mechanism, let me briefly outline the stages that many people go through as they climb the path towards reclaiming their true identity:
The lowest stage is where all of your attention and energy is fed into the survival of the physical body. Your life is a constant struggle against others of your own kind, animals, nature and your own karma from past lives. We might say this is the lowest stage of the duality consciousness, the black-and-white thinking, that leads you to think that you – as an individual – are fighting against the whole world. Obviously, this is a very limited sense of existence, and most people will – at least after a few embodiments – reason that there has to be more to life than just surviving. This is often the starting point for people’s upward climb.
When you are in survival mode, you see the world as a place with lack of resources, and thus you have to fight for everything you get by taking it from someone else or from nature. In reality, this is a perception that comes from the duality consciousness. The higher way out of this state of consciousness is to realize the truth in my words that it is the father’s good pleasure to give you his kingdom—the abundant life. By seeking first the kingdom of God – the Christ consciousness – all things will be added onto you.
For most people, the ego manages to convince them that they should focus their attention and energy on accumulating the things of this world. Seeking material possessions becomes the goal of life, and people can spend many lifetimes seeking some state of ultimate riches that will – supposedly – satisfy their longing for something more. The ego is happy with this because it can now pursue the sense that if you have more possessions than other people, you are better than them.
While having possessions can satisfy your longing for something more for a long time, it will eventually come to seem like an empty promise. You will realize that no matter how much you have, you still do not feel completely fulfilled. There is also the fact that the more you accumulate, the more time and energy you must spend defending it from the forces seeking to take it away. Finally, no matter how much you own, you still cannot avoid death, which inevitably means losing it all. But what if you could free yourself from the fear of loss?
The higher way to do this is to seek the true non-attachment to the things of this world. This comes from realizing there is a higher goal to life, namely a growth in consciousness. Once you overcome the ego and attain the Christ consciousness, you will allow God to be in control of your life, and with God all things are possible. You realize that you, of your ego-self, can do nothing, but that the father within you, your own I AM Presence, is the true doer. With God all things are possible.
For most people, the ego manages to divert their attention from the true path. When people become aware that having material possessions will not fulfill them, the ego manages to convince them that what they really need is the power to control their destiny. Some people engage in a quest to seek ultimate power on this earth so that they can control every aspect of their lives. This inevitably locks them in a struggle against other people with the same approach. Such people are often polarized into two opposing camps, and they can spend many lifetimes fighting for their cause, even the “ultimate” cause of the epic fight between what people have defined as good and evil.
Again, people can spend lifetimes on this quest, until they finally realize one of two things, namely that it is impossible to gain ultimate power and control or that having such power still would not satisfy their longing for something more. This realization can cause people to move to an entirely new level.
Beyond the material world
When you compare the stages outlined above, you will see that they are all based on the same characteristics:
You are focused on your own – separate – self, centered around the physical body and the ego.
You are focused on a sense of lack, meaning that you are incomplete in yourself and need something from outside yourself.
You are focused on getting what you need from the material world.
You are focused on comparing yourself to others, thinking you are better than others if you have more possessions or power than they do.
As a co-creator matures, he or she gradually begins to realize that the material world cannot be all there is to life. This is when a person becomes open to the possibility that there could be a world beyond the material world and that you might have some form of continued existence in that world after the body dies. It becomes possible that your conduct in this world might have an impact on what happens to you in the afterlife. This is usually when a person is awakened or converted to a religious lifestyle.
The part of your ego that is afraid of losing control would rather that this conversion did not happen and that you remained focused on the material world. A religious conversion is always a blow to the ego. Another part of the ego takes the approach that: “If you can’t beat-em, join’em,” and it will seek to use your religious conversion to keep you under its control.
We might say that the stages outlined above were the material stages of your growth, and we can now outline some of the religious stages:
The lowest stage is represented by the black-and-white thinking, which makes people believe there is only one true religion. Only members of that religion will be saved, which means that by the mere act of being a member of that religion and following its outer requirements, your salvation is guaranteed. When a lifestream is first awakened to something beyond the material world, it often believes in the claims made by one of the so-called mainstream or orthodox religions, and it believes it is better than non-members. This can lock people in a religious version of the struggle between relative good and relative evil, and this is a dangerous trap because the ego makes people think they are doing God’s work, and thus they can deny the need for self-transcendence.
Such people go through the death of the body with the firm belief that they will immediately enter Heaven. It is therefore quite a shock to the lifestream when it is confronted with the reality of reincarnation. Some lifestreams refuse to let go of the dream, and in their next embodiment they fall right back into following an orthodox religion. Some go to the same religion while others believe there must be another one that can fulfill the promise that membership guarantees salvation. Some lifestreams have to be reborn into a great number of different religions before they finally accept that there is no automatic salvation.
The lifestream now realizes that it is not enough to simply be a member of an outer organization but that you have to meet a set of individual requirements. The highest outcome of this process is that you realize that salvation is determined by your state of consciousness. As I said: “I am the way, the truth and the life, no man cometh to the father save by me,” meaning the Christ consciousness that I represent.
The ego often manages to make a lifestream believe that if only it meets certain outer requirements, it will qualify for salvation. This causes many lifestreams to focus on doing good works, seeking to buy their way into heaven by doing what their religion prescribes. Some seek status or position in a religious organization as a way to buy their salvation. Some even go into the blind alley of seeking to fulfill the ego’s need for power through a religious organization. After all, if you are the highest representative of God on earth, the ego can feel it has near absolute power on earth.
People play these ego games with a keen sense of comparison, thinking that if they do more good works than others, their salvation will be guaranteed. Eventually, a lifestream will have had so many experiences of having to re-embody despite its good works that it lets go of even this dream.
The highest potential for the next stage is that the lifestream takes full responsibility for its own salvation and recognizes that the Christ consciousness requires one to discern between the relative “truth” of the ego and the absolute truth of the Christ mind.
Most lifestreams are not quite ready to take full responsibility. They let their egos talk them into going into the gray thinking that I described in a previous discourse. This causes some people to deny the validity of all religion, which leaves them in a kind of no-gods land, often for several lifetimes. Others go into one of the many variations of a teaching that does not require you to discern. One example is that if you are gentle and kind, you will be doing the right thing and will be saved.
While this is different from seeking to buy salvation through good works, it is a similar mechanism of thinking that by not being judgmental or by cultivating a certain approach to life, one will be saved. The problem is that this “higher” state of consciousness is defined by the ego – meaning the mind of anti-christ – and not by the Christ mind. It can never lead you to Heaven, no matter how adept you become at pretending to be a good or spiritual person. It is simply the ego’s judgment after appearances, appearances that are defined by its own relative definition. The ego has now defined what it means to be a spiritual person, and this definition can never lead you to the Christ consciousness. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult for sincere spiritual seekers to admit this fact and admit that their spiritual quest has been misguided.
This third stage is a very critical stage on the spiritual path, precisely because a lifestream can stay stuck here for many, many lifetimes. Such lifestreams will often go through the death of the body being firmly convinced that they will be saved. They are severely disappointed, but if they are not willing to take responsibility for their salvation and discern between the relative truth of the ego and the higher truth of Christ, they cannot move on. Some come to believe that it is okay for them to re-embody on an indefinite basis, and thus they are no longer disappointed by not being saved. Some believe that they
voluntarily return to earth to hold a spiritual balance and bring spiritual gifts, and this makes them even more convinced that they don’t need to change their approach to salvation.
It can be difficult for a spiritual teacher to watch lifestreams being stuck at this stage because they are so very close but yet they remain completely unreachable to us. If only they would turn the dial of consciousness a little bit, they would see the greater truth, but the ego has managed to make them firmly convinced that they are so spiritual that they don’t need to change their perspective. They are often as unreachable as a cave man, yet they are firmly convinced that they are far above the cave man and everyone else.
A House Divided Against Itself
Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.
In previous discourses I have hinted at the fact that the ego has certain built-in contradictions and we will now take a closer look at them. The fact is that the ego is based on an inescapable contradiction, and therefore the ego will always be a house divided. If you allow the ego to make you divided against yourself, then you simply cannot stand in the light of Christ truth. You are not going to enter the kingdom of God while you are lying down. You are going to enter only when you stand on the one truth – the rock – of Christ.
In order to understand the ego’s systemic division, we need to take a closer look at your own being and your purpose for being here. Everything is made from an interplay between two polarities, namely the expanding force of the Father and the contracting force of the Mother. In every aspect of life, there are two forces at work. This is a truth that all spiritual seekers should fix in their minds so they never forget it.
The consequence of this truth is that in every situation, there is a high and a low potential. A sustainable creation can occur only when the expanding and contracting forces are held in balance—so they enhance each other. This is the high potential. The low potential is that one force becomes dominant, which inevitably leads to an imbalance that will cause the situation to deteriorate. If the expanding force is too strong, everything will be exaggerated, and if the contracting force is too strong, everything will collapse upon itself.
What is it that keeps the two forces balanced? It is the Christ mind, the principle of the Son, which is designed to ensure oneness between the two aspects of creation. From the viewpoint of a human being, the two forces represent Spirit and matter, the spiritual realm and the material world. The Christ mind is designed to ensure oneness between Spirit and matter, which can happen only when matter outpictures the blueprint designed by Spirit—the blueprint that is stored in the universal Christ mind.
On a personal level, you have a spiritual aspect of your total being, which we normally call your I AM Presence. You also have a material aspect of your being, namely your four lower bodies. In order for you to fulfill your highest potential, you must have oneness between your spiritual self and your lower self. We might say this has always been the essential challenge for spiritual people. The Bible describes it clearly:
For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. (Romans 7:19)
Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. (Matthew 26:41)
What can ensure this oneness in your being? Only the Christ mind, but the Christ mind will not do this as an external force that imposes oneness upon you. It will do it only when it becomes an internal force, and that will happen only when you – meaning the Conscious You – makes the decision to unite with the Christ mind, to become the Living Christ. To do this, the Conscious You must take full responsibility for your life and being, even for your salvation. It must be willing to make the critical decisions and seek balance in every situation.
Once you have the Christ mind, finding balance is not difficult, but in order to have that mind, the Conscious You must accept full responsibility, and that is often a major stumbling block for spiritual seekers. That is why the ego is so often successful in getting people to follow the outer path, the automatic path that does not require you to take full responsibility for making decisions. That is why the false teachers so often trick you into believing they can make decisions for you.
The birth of the ego
In a previous discourse I described how you became enveloped in the consciousness of duality, the consciousness of anti-christ. This caused you to make limiting decisions, until you came to the point where the Conscious You decided that it would no longer make decisions. You were alive and you were in a particular outer situation, and these facts were not changed by your decision not to make decisions. Your outer situation demanded that decisions be made, and since the Conscious You would not make them, someone else had to make decisions for you. That someone was what became the ego.
Let me make sure you understand the basic dynamic here. You decided that you did not want to make decisions because it seemed like all your decisions led to undesirable consequences. You felt: “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.” The only reason your decisions produced undesirable consequences was that they were based on the murky waters of the duality consciousness. This caused you to take everything too far into one of the two extremes, and the result was that every situation led to suffering. If your decisions are based on the clarity of the Christ mind, they will always lead to growth, and then there is no burden associated with making decisions. You decided to stop deciding only because you had lost contact with the Christ mind—or a spiritual teacher who served as your link to the Christ mind.
When you decided to stop making decisions, you had already created a certain momentum of making decisions based on the dualistic mind. We might say you had created a computer program in your subconscious mind. When the Conscious You stopped making decisions, that computer program took over and quickly developed into the ego. The ego is more than a computer program in that it has a survival instinct and is thus an aggressive force in your being. Once you have given the ego control, it will rather die than give it up—because giving it up means that the ego will die.
The ego was born out of your separation from the Christ mind, and thus the ego can perceive only the consciousness of anti-christ, the consciousness of duality. The two basic forces of creation do not stop operating because you make a decision so you are still faced with situations in which the two forces exist. Here is the vital difference:
When you look at life through the clarity of the Christ mind, you see the expanding and contracting forces as complementary. You see how to balance them so that every decision you make is balanced and produces growth.
When you look at life through the filter of the duality consciousness, you see the two basic forces as opposites. Instead of complementing each other, you now see them as canceling out each other. The reason is that when you do not balance these forces in your own being, they will seemingly cancel out each other. The inevitable result is that your decisions will produce an imbalance that leads to suffering. You are constantly struggling against one or the other force.
To your ego, the two basic forces are seen as enemies that are out to oppose its control over your circumstances. Since the ego can never grasp the Christ mind, this is a fundamental problem that can never be solved at the level of the ego. The ego will always look at life through the duality consciousness, and therefore it can never balance the expanding and contracting forces. The ego’s decisions will always produce suffering.
The ego is on a constant see-saw between one of two extremes. It will first go into one extreme, for example by letting the expanding force dominate. This leads you to be caught in the black-and-white thinking described earlier. When you have finally had enough of this form of thinking – and its unbalanced results – the ego will not admit its mistake, for it can never see its mistake. Instead, the ego will take you towards the other extreme, namely gray thinking. When you have had enough of that, the ego will take you right back towards the other extreme, and this can go on for numerous lifetimes.
It can go on indefinitely, unless the Conscious You finally has had enough and decides that it will take back the responsibility for making decisions. The problem here is that taking back responsibility is not enough. You must also understand that in order to make right decisions, you must reach for and put on the mind of Christ. Because most religions teach the outer path to salvation, most people simply do not know that they need to do this or how to do it. They continue to cling to the dream of an outer, automatic path to salvation, which leaves them at the mercy of the ego and the false teachers.
There is only one thing that will bring about a solution to your problems and an end to your suffering. You must restore balance to your own being by restoring balance between the expanding and contracting forces, your spiritual self and your lower self.
The only factor that can restore this balance is the Christ mind, the one, undivided truth of the Christ mind. The Christ mind will not enter your being unless it is invited. Your ego will never invite the Christ mind to enter, for it cannot even see the Christ mind as a solution to your problems. If it could, it would know that the entry of the Christ mind would mean the death of the ego. The Christ mind can enter only when invited by the Conscious You.
The trick is that the Conscious You cannot invite the Christ mind to enter until it has taken full responsibility for your life and salvation by deciding that it is willing to make decisions and to take the decision-making power away from the ego. The other trick is that the Christ mind will not enter as an external force that will fix your problems for you. The Christ mind can work in your life only when it becomes an internal force because the Conscious You has decided that it is willing to put on the mind of Christ and become one with your own higher being. You are willing to base your sense of identity in the material world on your spiritual identity. You are willing to be here below all that you are Above. This idea deserves further scrutiny.
Why are you here?
The ego sees only the material world and it sees everything through the duality consciousness. To the ego there is no spiritual purpose for life; the purpose for life must be defined in, defined by, the material world. The human ego has defined any number of “life purposes” that people spend lifetimes pursuing—always without finding happiness, fulfillment, peace of mind or a sense of purpose and meaning.
The real purpose of life is your growth in self-awareness. This growth comes from fulfilling your role as a co-creator with God. Your Being is designed in the image and after the likeness of God, meaning that you have the creative powers that you need in order to use the Ma-ter light to create form. You descended into the material universe in order to multiply your creative powers and take dominion over the earth, meaning the mastery of mind over matter. You will be fulfilled only when you fill this role—a role you chose before coming into embodiment.
What does it mean to take dominion over the earth? As everything else, it has a Father and a Mother – an Alpha and an Omega – aspect. The Alpha aspect is that you must start by taking dominion over your own being by establishing oneness between your spiritual self and your lower self. The key to this is that the Conscious You decides to fulfill its proper role of being the Christ in your being and balancing the father and mother aspects, Spirit and matter. The Omega aspect is that you take dominion over the earth and do your part to raise it into the kingdom of God. You do this by both exercising your creative powers and by using the Christ mind to help other people rise above the duality consciousness.
The key to this phase is that the Conscious You decides to take up its role of being the Christ on earth by challenging the consciousness of anti-christ wherever it is encountered. We might say that when you are in embodiment, your own consciousness is the Alpha aspect of your life and your environment is the Omega aspect. Once again, your role is to establish oneness between the two so that your environment reflects your inner being that reflects your spiritual self.
As always, the key is to have the Christ balance between the two basic forces. If you let the ego run your life, it will still seek to fulfill your goals in an unbalanced way:
Dominion over self. If the expanding force is dominant, your ego will seek to control every aspect of your life. You will attempt to force yourself by strictly following an outer system, be it a religion or a diet. This is the dream that by living up to outer requirements, you will be saved without looking at the beam – the ego – in your own eye.
If the contracting force is dominant, your ego will take the “if-it-feels-good-do-it” attitude. You will be completely unable to discipline yourself or free yourself from the control of the ego or other people. You will feel like a total victim of outer circumstances and find a million excuses for not changing your life.
Dominion over the earth. If the expanding force is dominant, you will attempt to force other people to become a member of your belief system, thinking that the end of saving them can justify the means. This is what you see in fundamentalist people from any religion, even the fundamentalist people in a political ideology or the ideology of scientific materialism. This leads to black-and-white thinking.
If the contracting force is dominant, you will think you have no right to influence other people and that you should be tolerant of everything. Any idea is as valid as any other so live and let live, for love is all you need. This leads to gray thinking.
The key to fulfilling your divine plan – the plan you made before coming into embodiment – is to bring the Christ mind into your life so that it can balance the two basic forces. Instead of the perpetual tension between the two forces – leading to conflict, loss and suffering – your life can become an upward spiral of greater freedom and fulfillment. The Christ is not somewhere between the two extremes but transcends both extremes because it is above and beyond the duality consciousness. The Christ mind clearly sees that the earth is out of alignment with the Creator’s vision and laws, which will eventually cause the material universe to self-destruct. It therefore sees that the only solution is to bring the earth back into harmony with the purpose of creation. The Christ mind realizes that the mother aspect cannot be allowed to evolve on its own, creating its own laws instead of following the Creator’s laws. The material realm must always be an expression of the spiritual realm, yet this can happen only when the co-creators that embody on this planet decide to become the Living Christs. They must take dominion over the earth rather than letting the earth have dominion over them.
NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Freedom from Ego Illusions.
Copyright © 2006 Kim Michaels
http://www.ascendedmasterlight.com/ascended-master-light/date/21-2006/630-ego1
Do the ascended masters feel frustrated?
Question: The ascended masters must have seen golden opportunity after golden opportunity for the earth to transcend into higher spheres of energy slip away over the course of the past 2000 years. How is it they can refrain from losing patience with earth, or from hating the dark forces that keep foiling these golden opportunities that the ascended masters set up for us? I realise that the masters are too loyal to Free Will to allow themselves to feel frustrated, but do they not find themselves wondering with exasperated disbelief how people can spend lifetime after lifetime without growing?
Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels: (Aug 22, 2011)
Your question is understandable, but it is also based on a popular assumption that is out of touch with the reality of who we are.
We clearly see the reality that the purpose of the world of form is to facilitate the growth in self-awareness for all self-aware beings. And the way chosen by the Creator for this to happen is go give self-aware beings free will and allow them to outplay it, until they learn to make choices that raise the All.
Thus, when we look at earth, we do not look with the consciousness that there is a supreme standard against which life on earth must be evaluated. In other words, we do not have a standard of right and wrong, according to which we say that things are currently wrong.
On the contrary. What is it that facilitates the growth in self-awareness? It is that beings project the totality of their consciousness – their selves – upon the Ma-ter light and experience the reflection. They keep doing this until they have had enough of a particular experience and decide: “I want to be more than my current sense of self.”
So what are current conditions on earth? They are simply the outpicturing of the current self-awareness of humanity. Thus, current conditions are the perfect opportunity for people to transcend their sense of self. It has always been so, and it will always be so.
Obviously, our role is to hold the immaculate concept for people, and this means we have a blueprint for the highest potential humanity has, based on where the collective consciousness is at right now. Yet what does it mean to hold the immaculate concept? It means we hold the vision without any form of judgment.
Do you see the importance? Holding the immaculate concept does NOT mean that you have a predefined standard for how people should exercise their FREE will. A standard is ALWAYS created from the duality consciousness, as we explain in Healing Mother earth. We do not look at humanity and say, “Oh, this or that should have happened, and thus it is frustrating that people once again chose the low road.” Instead, we only look at what is, and then we hold the vision for how people can take the very next step.
It is a common misunderstanding among ascended master students that the Christ consciousness means a superior standard according to which we judge people. In reality, the Christ consciousness means no standard—at least not as it can be understood by people trapped in duality.
What is the significance of my embodiment 2,000 years ago? It is that the Christ is ALWAYS where you are. Which truly means that you can never descend to a level of consciousness, where the Christ is not found. Without him was not anything made that was made. Which truly means that even the seemingly lowest conditions or forms have the seed of the Christ consciousness within them. Meaning that any condition in the world of form carries within it the key to the transcendence of the level of consciousness from which the form was created. It could never be any other way.
The Christ does not approach people with a superior standard that requires them to come up many steps all at once. The Christ does not look at people and say: “Well, when you have made yourself worthy, then I will help you transcend that state of consciousness.” Instead, the Christ approaches them with a frame of reference that can empower them to take one step higher on their personal path. The Christ is ALWAYS willing to help anyone transcend their current level of consciousness and come closer to oneness. (Take note that a particular master can indeed refuse to work with students below a certain level of consciousness, yet the universal Christ mind will find ways to work with anyone, which is illustrated by me descending to hell.)
When a person does take one step, we see that as a victory. When a person does not take the next step, we know that according to the law, that person will only increase the pressure that will compel the person to transcend his or her current sense of self. So even that is a step closer to progress. The same holds true for groups of people and humankind as a whole. When you are an ascended master, you learn to take the long view and see that the road to progress often takes twists and turns, but in the end it will indeed lead to the goal of raising self-awareness. If you do not learn this, you will “fall” back into embodiment and once again engage in the dualistic struggle to “force others for their own good.” You see, any choice will have consequences. And the more unpleasant the consequences, the more quickly it will bring people to the point, where they are willing to transcend their current sense of self.
Once you let go of the lie that you have to judge how other beings exercise their free will, you will set yourself free from feeling the frustration that throughout history has caused so many people to think they have to correct others through force. And this will actually do more to further the progress of this planet than just about anything else you can do as an individual.
In terms of whether we wonder how people can spend lifetime after lifetime without growing, we do sometimes ask the question in order to get people to think. Yet in our own minds, we do not wonder, because we remember with humility that we too have been in embodiment, and we did not always take the straightest road towards our ascensions.
When you give up the need to judge others, there are a lot of questions that simply evaporate. And that is a great sense of liberation. Yet truly, you have to try it, to know how it works. Of course, if you decide to continue in the sense of self that can only lead to frustration, I will respect your choice. And I will stand ready to offer you a higher choice any time you want it.
You see, I have time on my side, for I know that time is not. In fact, it is the sense that there is a standard and that something is not living up to it that keeps the illusion of time alive in the minds of people on earth. And that explains why some people can spend lifetime after lifetime without growing—because they are instead focused on forcing other people to conform to their standard.
Copyright © 2011 by Kim Michaels
http://www.ascendedmasteranswers.com/spiritual-realm/ascended-masters/59-do-the-ascended-masters-feel-frustrated
Are you moving away from God or toward God?
The stages of spiritual development
A message from the ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:
When you survey the behavior, the attitudes and the beliefs of human beings on this planet, it should not be difficult to conclude that people are in many different states of consciousness, they are at different stages of spiritual development. These stages correspond to different degrees of understanding of the spiritual side of life. To give people some sense of co-measurement, I would like to give you a survey of the different stages of spiritual development found on this planet.
The following stages cannot be put on a line and ranked from lowest to highest. A lifestream does not necessarily have to descend to the lowest stage before it turns around and starts climbing its way back to God. There are many lifestreams on Earth who never descended to the lowest stage of spiritual awareness. The numbering of the stages is therefore a practical matter of making it easier to reference the stages.
Stage 1. Lifestreams who rebel against God
Certain lifestreams are in a state of consciousness that causes them to deliberately, and in most cases knowingly, rebel against the laws and the will of God. In some of these lifestreams, the rebellion is obvious. Some promote atheism or agnosticism. Some advocate scientific materialism and vehemently deny the need for a creative being. Some are openly practicing satanism, and although they do not deny the existence of God, they defame, belittle and ridicule everything related to God, religion or spirituality.
In some of these lifestreams, the rebellion against God is hidden deep within the psyche, and it is often unrecognized by the person’s conscious mind. Therefore, this rebellion can often be camouflaged behind a facade of various beliefs, including religious beliefs. It might be surprising to many people, but some of the rebellious lifestreams have managed to attain high positions in various religious movements and churches. They claim to be highly religious and working for God’s cause, yet they have a deep anger against God and believe that they know better than God how the universe should be run or how people should be saved.
For all of these people it is common that they are actively seeking to run away from God, to reinforce the impression that God does not exist or that he does not exist here on planet Earth. Some of these lifestreams engage in an endless quest to prove that God does not exist or to prove that God is wrong and that they are right. They are literally seeking to prove that they can create a world in which God does not exist and in which they have no need for God.
You might ask how the people who work in religious movements can be said to work for this cause or to run away from God. The answer is that they use their power to cement the belief that God is somewhere “up there” in Heaven. These are also the people who cement the idolatrous belief that Jesus Christ is the only Son of God and that no one can follow my example. These are often the first people to cry blasphemy, as they did when I made certain remarks that made it sound like I was equating myself with God or calling myself a Son of God.
Stage 2. Lifestreams who try to hide from God
Many people are openly angry at God. Many lifestreams on Earth have been hurt, and they believe that God has hurt them or treated them unfairly, unjustly or in a way that defies logical explanation. Many lifestreams are afraid of God and see him as an angry and judgmental being who is always ready to punish them for the slightest transgression of his laws. Common for these lifestreams is that they are running away from God, but not because they are rebelling against God. They simply want to get as far away as possible from what they see as an angry, punishing and unjust deity. They are trying to hide from God.
Running away from God is an act of self-defense. These are the people that I referred to in the saying that I wish people were hot or cold. The people at this stage are indeed cold. They are cold in the sense that they have come to accept a negative image of God, and therefore they are running away from that image. However, they have the potential to be turned around if they can come to accept that their feelings for God were caused by a false, imperfect or incomplete image of God.
Stage 3. Lifestreams who are indifferent toward God
A large number of lifestreams on planet Earth have become so indifferent toward God, religion and the spiritual side of life that they have become lukewarm. Some of these lifestreams are indeed in a spiritual coma that makes it almost impossible to reach them with any kind of spiritual truth. Many of these lifestreams have been so hurt or disappointed by organized religion that they have rejected religion, or given up on the idea that they could ever partake of a true sense of spirituality.
Many of these lifestreams have adopted a false, imperfect or incomplete image of God. Yet trying to help them see this and trying to help them accept a correct image of God is very difficult because they often will not respond to any kind of spiritual message. Many of these lifestreams use the imperfections, real or perceived, of orthodox or organized religion as an excuse for rejecting anything related to the spiritual side of life. If one approaches such lifestreams with a spiritual message, they will often become very suspicious and feel that one is out to convert them, to manipulate them, to take advantage of them or to get their money.
These lifestreams often reject all types of spirituality and thereby put themselves in a catch-22 in which they reject the very tools that could help them heal their wounds and get on the upward path. They are often unreachable for a spiritual teacher.
Stage 4. Lifestreams who are conflicted about God
Certain lifestreams have come to the realization that there is indeed some reality to the spiritual side of life and that there is a path they can follow toward a higher understanding of God and their relationship to God. These are lifestreams who have turned around and started the path that leads them back to God. However, many of these lifestreams have been so deeply hurt that they need spiritual and lifestream healing before they can earnestly engage in the spiritual path.
Some of these lifestreams have been hurt by physical trauma. Others have been hurt emotionally through their interactions with other people or the institutions of society. Still others have been hurt by the imperfections of organized religion or have been scarred by so-called infallible doctrines that could not answer their questions about life. These wounds often cause such lifestreams to feel conflicts in their conception of or relationship to God. They might feel that religion doesn’t make sense and presents a contradictory or inconsistent image of God (which is true). Or they might feel that a just and loving God shouldn’t have allowed them to have been hurt. They often feel like victims of forces beyond their control and see no way to personally change their situation.
These lifestreams have come to a realization that they want more from life than what can be attained by material means. They sense there must be a place to go to find spiritual understanding and healing. Yet they have been so deeply scarred and hurt that they are not yet able to start walking toward that understanding. They are like people who have broken a leg and therefore need to heal the fracture before they can start walking toward their goal. Therefore, such lifestreams would do well to recognize their wounds and to focus all of their energy and attention on healing the psychology (as understood by the world) and the lifestream.
Stage 5. Lifestreams who want to experience God’s creation
A certain group of lifestreams are young lifestreams who have not yet spent a long time (meaning many embodiments) in the material world. Some of these lifestreams still have a great desire to experience everything in the material world, and this can make them indifferent toward religion. They are simply so preoccupied with the things of this world that they have no attention left over for spiritual pursuits.
Other young lifestreams are very open to religion, yet often approach it in a somewhat unbalanced manner. This can cause them to take their religious pursuits to the extremes. They often use religion not as a way to transcend the world but as a way to enrich their experience of this world. For example, they might seek to gain a position in a religious movement because it increases their status among men. These lifestreams have not yet had enough experiences to achieve the balance of being wise as serpents and harmless as doves.
Unfortunately, given the current conditions on this planet, it is common that young lifestreams, in their innocence, will be hurt or taken advantage of by both material and non-material forces. This can often cause such lifestreams to lose their innocence and slide toward disappointment or anger. If such lifestreams are taken advantage of by organized religion, they might find it impossible to distinguish between God and the outer religion and thereby become angry at God.
Stage 6. Lifestreams who seek to understand God
These lifestreams have consciously realized that there is more to life than the material realm. They know there is more to understand about life than what they were taught in school and Sunday school, and they have made the decision to start looking for it. These lifestreams have also healed at least some of their deepest wounds so that they have attention left over to focus on studying the spiritual side of life.
To achieve maximum growth, these lifestreams need to focus most of their attention on studying spiritual teachings, practicing various spiritual techniques and seeking to internalize spiritual truth and principles.
These lifestreams are the “reason for being” of any true spiritual movement. It is their quest for understanding that gives the ascended masters great hope for the future of planet Earth.
Stage 7. Lifestreams who seek to help others understand God
After a lifestream has spent a sufficient amount of time studying spiritual teachings and practicing techniques for spiritual growth, that lifestream has internalized a critical amount of spiritual knowledge. The next logical step is that the lifestream begins to give out that knowledge by teaching others.
One can be a student only for so long. When one has reached a certain level, the lifestream cannot learn any more until the lifestream begins teaching what it has internalized. Only by teaching others can the lifestream ascend to the next level of learning because it is through giving that you truly receive and it is through teaching that you truly learn.
These lifestreams are the backbone of any true spiritual movement. Without these lifestreams acting as our partners on Earth, the ascended masters would have little hope for reaching other lifestreams with a spiritual message.
Stage 8. Lifestreams who seek union with God
As a lifestream climbs the spiritual path, it gradually becomes less attached to outer manifestations, such as a particular religion or spiritual teaching. It begins to see that there is a transcendent reality behind the many different expressions of spiritual teachings. It begins to see the universal path behind all of the outer religions, organizations, teachings and teachers.
During the previous two stages, a lifestream might follow one particular religion or philosophy and use it as its springboard for growth. This is quite acceptable, as long as the lifestream does not become stuck in thinking that its particular religion is the only true religion or the only valid road to understanding God. If a lifestream does become attached, it will remain stuck at a certain stage of spiritual growth until it begins to acknowledge the universal path.
When the lifestream does begin to see the universal path, it ascends to the level of becoming a mystic. It now realizes that the ultimate goal of the spiritual path is not to understand God but to know God, to experience God and to attain union with God. This is what I demonstrated in my life, and it is reflected most clearly in my statement, “I and my Father are one.”
Some mystics might indeed withdraw from worldly activities and focus all of their attention on attaining the mystical union with God. However, in this day and age, many have the opportunity to choose to remain active in the world, and this is indeed highly needed. Such lifestreams can then demonstrate the universal path by example, and some of them can teach this path openly.
Stage 9. Lifestreams who have attained union with God
As lifestreams rise on the path and begin to teach spiritual truth, they will gradually begin to internalize more and more truth and more and more light. They will then gradually become what one might call Masters in embodiment.
These are lifestreams who have understood some of the deeper mysteries, especially the difference between “doing” and “being.” You will recall my statement that, “I of my own self can do nothing, it is the Father within me who is doing the work.” When the lifestream attains mastery, it is no longer trying to DO anything in this world. It is simply BEING who it is and therefore allowing the spiritual self, and possibly spiritual beings, to act through it.
The lifestream has become the open door that no human can shut. The lifestream might serve to bring fourth spiritual truths directly from a higher realm, thereby delivering the Living Word in its highest form. Or such lifestreams might serve in other capacities to further and demonstrate the cause of the ascended masters. These lifestreams can literally be our hands and feet on Earth.
However, there is no exact standard for how a lifestream with spiritual mastery should act, or rather BE. Some lifestreams might become world teachers. Some might live a seemingly ordinary life and can hardly be distinguished from the average person. Some might have severe handicaps or diseases. Some might sit in a cave in the Himalayas, or elsewhere, and meditate day and night to hold the spiritual balance for the Earth. Others might even exhibit behavior that is not associated with spiritual mastery.
Do not misuse this teaching
Let me issue a word of warning. There is an inherent danger in giving any kind of teaching that allows people to compare themselves to others. Many people are still caught in the spirit of vain competition, and they will use my stages of spiritual development to judge themselves and their progress compared to others. They will then attempt to set themselves up on a pedestal and judge themselves as being better or more important than others because they have reached a certain level of development.
Let me make it clear that as long as people are caught in this state of consciousness, they have not reached a high level of spiritual development because when you reach such a level there are no value judgments and there is no sense of competition.
I am giving this teaching because it is valuable and important for a lifestream to realize its current level of spiritual development and thereby take appropriate measures to quickly rise to a higher level. It is especially important for lifestreams at lower stages of spiritual development to realize that there is a path that leads them home to God. It is essential for such lifestreams to discover that path and to lock themselves firmly upon that path.
Likewise, it is essential for lifestreams at higher stages to discover the universal, inner path to God. Such lifestreams need to transcend their attachments to a particular outer religion and thereby realize the goal of manifesting their full potential as sons and daughters of God.
Let me also say that the stages I have outlined here are not meant to be seen as the only possible way to categorize spiritual development. One can take different criteria and come up with other stages. One can also divide the stages I have outlined and gain a more detailed picture. Indeed several of the stages overlap, and a lifestream might be working on two or three stages simultaneously. In future teachings, I will expand upon the stages I have outlined here. Yet I desire to give a picture that is not too complex and thereby causes people to focus on details and lose the overall view.
When you do step back and look at the big picture, you will see that the common denominator for each of the stages I described above is that they all represent a different way for the lifestream to relate to God. The importance of this realization is that no matter where a lifestream is in its spiritual development, that lifestream is always facing the challenge of working out its relationship to God.
As I explain throughout this website, every lifestream truly is a son or daughter of God, an individualization of God. The lifestream is meant to come to a full awareness and acceptance of its divine potential and thereby act as a co-creator with God in the material universe. Therefore, the most important task for any lifestream is to resolve any imperfections in its conception of or relationship with God. That is truly what life in the material universe is all about.
Therefore, the goal of life is to resolve and heal all imperfections in the lifestream’s attitude toward God. Such imperfections stand in the way of the lifestream’s union with God and its acceptance of its potential to be a co-creator with God.
Why lifestreams descended to Earth
I will use the stages of spiritual development for future teachings. However, I would like for now to give a brief teaching on the different categories of lifestreams that have descended to planet Earth. When the Earth was first created, it expressed the purity and perfection of the seven Elohim, the seven spiritual beings, who created this planet. In the beginning, most of the lifestreams that descended to planet Earth fit into the category of young lifestreams.
These lifestreams were indeed innocent and had no negativity towards God. Yet some of them did have a great desire for the things that can be experienced in the material universe, and therefore they focused most of their attention on enjoying this world. They had little thought left over for the spiritual side of life. Other lifestreams were more spiritually inclined but had not yet firmly anchored themselves on the spiritual path and had not attained a permanent awareness of their spiritual identity and potential.
Along with the young lifestreams were a group of lifestreams who had attained a degree of mastery. These lifestreams served as the spiritual teachers for younger lifestreams.
For a very long time, the young lifestreams kept descending to planet Earth without becoming trapped in the consciousness of the material universe. Many of these lifestreams did indeed ascend back to God after just one lifetime, although that lifetime was far longer than a normal life span today.
At some point a shift started to occur on this planet. A number of lifestreams started becoming attached to or trapped in the consciousness of the material universe, and they started descending further and further into that state of consciousness. One might say that these lifestreams started walking the path that leads them away from God, causing them to lose the awareness that they are spiritual beings.
As the consciousness of humankind was gradually lowered, it eventually reached a critical level. At this critical level it now became possible for certain rebellious lifestreams to start embodying on Earth. These were lifestreams who had rebelled against God in the spiritual realm or on other systems of worlds. These lifestreams are indeed the rebellious lifestreams, and for thousands of years a number of them have continued to embody on this planet. They have attempted to pull as many lifestreams as possible down to their level of consciousness and accept, even justify, their rebellion against God.
These lifestreams are very aggressive and very ambitious in trying to prove their point that they can create a world in which God does not exist. They have literally influenced every aspect of life on this planet, including the field of religion.
The influence of these rebellious lifestreams has created a perilous condition on this planet. There are still young lifestreams who descend to this Earth for the first time, yet there is a great risk that such lifestreams will be hurt by the conditions found on this planet. This can cause a lifestream to gradually slide down to the stage of being a wounded lifestream. It can then slide even further down and seek to hide from God, either from anger or fear. It is even possible that the lifestream can descend to the stage of deliberately rebelling against God’s will and God’s law.
After the fall, a number of lifestreams have embodied on this planet that are at higher stages of spiritual development, from being teachers to being Masters. These lifestreams have descended on a rescue mission in an attempt to help the lifestreams who have fallen find the true spiritual path, anchor themselves on that path and walk the path until they have regained their spiritual identity and can start the higher levels of the path that lead to the mystical union with God.
Some of these lifestreams have indeed become hurt by the conditions on this planet and have descended into lower stages of consciousness. A few of them have even become rebellious against God because they could not maintain the connection to their higher selves.
My purpose of giving this teaching is to show you that the Earth today presents a very complex picture and a very complex challenge for a spiritual teacher. It simply is not possible to give one spiritual teaching or one religion that will appeal to people at every stage of spiritual development. That is why there needs to be more than one religion, indeed more than one true religion, in order for the ascended masters to reach out to as many people as possible.
Where are you headed?
I would also like to mention that there is a clear division in the stages. The center of the scale are the lifestreams who are young and who are simply experimenting with life on this planet. A lifestream is not meant to maintain this neutral stage for very long. Given the current conditions on this planet, most lifestreams will quickly be forced to go in one of two directions.
One such direction is the lifestreams who have been trapped by doubt or have been hurt in various ways. These lifestreams now start moving away from God. The other direction is represented by the lifestreams who have realized that there is more to life than the material world. These lifestreams have discovered the path and are moving toward union with God.
So the two basic divisions you have on planet Earth are lifestreams who are moving away from God and lifestreams who are moving toward union with God. I am aware that some lifestreams were already moving away from God before they descended and some were already moving toward God before they came into embodiment. Nevertheless, the important consideration here is whether a lifestream is moving away from God of moving toward God.
Lifestreams who are moving away from God are facing a perilous situation. Although there is a final limit to how far a lifestream can move away from God, there is indeed a very great distance that the lifestream can descend. The problem is that everything in the material universe is characterized by limitations. This means that the lifestream does not have an infinite amount of time to make it back to God. If the lifestream keeps moving away from God until its time is up, it will face the final judgment, If it does not respond positively, it can be erased in the ritual of the second death. So it is indeed possible that lifestreams can be lost.
To avoid this scenario, a lifestream must come to a turning point. The lifestream must literally decide that it will stop running away from God and start the path that leads it back to God. It must come to the realization that, “I can’t do this any longer!” What does it take for a lifestream to turn around? That depends on the lifestream’s stage of development.
It is very difficult for a rebellious lifestream to turn around. Such lifestreams are often caught in spiritual pride, and some of them would rather die than admit that they are wrong. However, some lifestreams can eventually come to the realization that their attempts to create a world without God are futile. This can especially happen when they are confronted with a person who has attained Christhood and therefore refuses to be changed by anything in this world. This did indeed happen to a few lifestreams who saw me during my embodiment 2,000 years ago. They realized that even though they could kill my physical body, they could not change my spirit, and this caused them to realize that God will eventually be victorious regardless of the appearances of this world.
A lifestream who is seeking to hide from God out of fear or anger finds it a bit easier to turn around because it does not have to prove that it is right. It is possible for such lifestreams to come to the realization that they have an incorrect or incomplete image of God. Therefore, it was this image that caused them to be hurt, to become angry or to fear God.
Lifestreams who are indifferent toward God can be very difficult to reach for a spiritual teacher. However, these lifestreams have enrolled themselves in the school of hard knocks and in many cases they can be turned around by a severe outer crises. These people will procrastinate the acknowledgement of the spiritual side of life until some outer crisis forces them to realize that something is missing from their lives.
Lifestreams who are conflicted about God or have been deeply hurt can be turned around when they realize, that God did not hurt them and God did not create the doctrines that gave them the conflicts about God. When these lifestreams realize what is truly happening on this planet as a result of the misuse of free will, they can often go through an instantaneous turnaround in which they realize that God has never hurt them. Instead, they have been hurt by forces and people who rebel against God or who are angry at God. Therefore, such lifestreams will often realize that they have no desire to run away from God, and this will enable them to engage in the path that leads to their healing.
Once a lifestream has discovered the spiritual path and anchored itself on the path, the lifestream has already turned around. However, this does not mean that the lifestream is home free. The essential point for a lifestream who is moving toward God is that it realizes the absolute need to keep moving, to keep transcending its understanding of God. It is absolutely essential that the lifestream does not become attached to a particular outer expression of spiritual truth because such an attachment will cause the lifestream’s growth to come to a halt.
If the lifestream does not see the need for constant self-transcendence, it can become stuck at a particular level of the path. If it remains stuck for a long time, it will inevitably start sliding backward. There are indeed many lifestreams on planet Earth today who have discovered the spiritual path and who are walking the path. Yet they have not yet come to the full realization that the path is ongoing. These lifestreams have not yet discovered the inner, universal path, and therefore they have not yet become mystics. It is very important for these lifestreams to recognize the ongoing nature of the path and the ultimate goal of union with God.
Copyright © 2009 by Kim Michaels
http://www.askrealjesus.com/component/content/article/66-introducing-the-path-to-christhood/352-are-you-moving-away-from-god-or-toward-god
About Devachan and Demonchan
Question 1: What is the realm of wish-fulfillment (Devachan)? Is it a realm in which lifestreams can fulfill the wishes they never had fulfilled on earth.
I would like to know whether anyone, who has an unfulfilled wish from their life on earth, has to go there? And isn’t there a danger of remaining there forever if everything you wished for on earth is fulfilled?
Paula
Question 2:
Can you please give me a short clarification about what is the purpose of realm of wish-fulfillment (Devachan)? What about Osama bin Laden? Is he killing Americans there?
Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels: (July 16, 2011)
Only very few people leave the earth with no unfulfilled wishes. Yet that does not mean everyone goes to the realm of Devachan or wish-fulfillment. Determining who goes to Devachan is a complex task, undertaken by a particular lifestream and its spiritual teachers, as well as the Great Karmic Board. The overall concern is how a certain lifestream can be given the greatest possible opportunity for further growth. Yet let me give some general considerations.
In many cases, it is clear that a lifestream needs to go back into embodiment as soon as possible. This is especially true for lifestreams at lower levels of consciousness, those who are identified with the physical body, the material world and the struggle for existence. Such lifestreams can only learn from the “school of hard knocks,” and thus they need to go back into embodiment as soon as possible. And because it is currently not difficult to find embodiments for this type of lifestreams, they usually do not have to wait for long. During this waiting period, the lifestream will be in a realm that corresponds to its state of consciousness, but in general lifestreams simply gain rest.
Considerations are more complex for lifestreams who have reached a higher level of consciousness, meaning that they are open to some form of spiritual guidance. These are lifestreams who are open to at least some self-examination, meaning they can learn from observing life and thus do not have to experience as many “hard knocks” through conflicts with other people. I think it should be obvious that it is currently not as easy to find suitable embodiments for this kind of lifestreams.
Another factor is that the earth currently does not have the number of people in embodiment for which it is designed (ten billion). As a result of these two factors, there are many lifestreams who have to wait for a considerable period of time before they can find a suitable next embodiment. And since they are open to learning from life through thinking—as opposed to physical experiences, they can often benefit from spending some time in Devachan. This realm is – as the name implies – a realm guided by a type of spiritual beings called Devas. These are above the level of elemental life, but not yet at the level of ascended masters.
Devas have great ability to manifest what we might call higher sensory appearances. These appearances are not as dense as what you see manifested by elemental life as material appearances. Thus, it is easier for the devas to manifest many different appearances, which means the realm of Devachan can serve a greater number of lifestreams than can the material universe. It can also provide them with more types of experiences than can the material universe.
Because of this, Devachan can help a great number of lifestreams overcome the wishes they have not fulfilled on earth and that would be difficult to fulfill, precisely because it is more difficult to manifest conditions in the material realm. This is due to both the higher density of the material and the fact that in this realm, the free will of all people in embodiment will influence what can be manifested. In Devachan, the devas can create an appearance that is centered around the free will of just one lifestream, and that is how the lifestream’s wishes can be fulfilled. There is nothing that opposes the fulfillment of those wishes.
The main function of Devachan is to manifest appearances that seem real to a particular lifestream. For example, many lifestreams have a desire to live in a large house or an opulent palace. This is obviously difficult to accomplish on earth, but it is very easy for the devas to manifest such conditions in Devachan. The devas can easily manifest a wonderful palace that is all centered around one lifestream. They can manifest what seems to be servants occupying the palace. In some cases the devas themselves even take on characters in people’s dreams, as that can give the devas an opportunity to grow.
The obvious purpose for Devachan is to give lifestreams the exact conditions they did not have on earth, so that by experiencing the fulfillment of their wishes, they will eventually reach a saturation point and then become aware that they have a desire for something more. This, of course, is also what happens on earth, only on earth life is much more of a struggle, so people often start the path by becoming aware of a desire for something more than the struggle.
In Devachan, lifestreams eventually become aware of a desire for something more than the conditions they have. Certainly, there is a risk that a lifestream can be stuck in Devachan for a long time. Yet in the majority of cases, it takes a surprisingly short time before lifestreams have had enough of a situation in which everything is exactly as they want it and in which they never encounter any contrast to their own mental images.
Do you see what I am saying? On earth, there is a constant struggle, whereas in Devachan there is no struggle, because everything conforms to your wishes. For most lifestreams, this quickly becomes boring, and then they will go one of two ways.
One is that they actually long back for the struggle, they long to have someone oppose their wishes, so they have something to struggle against. Which means they can now set aside the particular wish that brought them to Devachan and go back into embodiment on earth.
The second option is that lifestreams long for interaction with beings who are at a higher level of consciousness than themselves. Again, in Devachan everything conforms to your wishes, which means you never encounter anything or anyone that is of a higher or lower level of consciousness than your own.
For a time, this can actually be achieved by interacting with the devas. Yet some lifestreams eventually become aware of a desire to interact with those a different level of consciousness, which means they will go in one of two directions:
Those who want to interact with beings in a lower level of consciousness – without struggling against them – will go back into embodiment in particular situations, often as spiritual students or teachers.
Those who want to interact with beings of a higher level of consciousness, will be ready to leave the earth behind. They will then either take embodiment on other – higher – planets or begin the ascension process.
When considering which lifestreams go to Devachan, the dividing line is whether a lifestream is dominated by a wish or a desire. A wish is generally seen as something more positive, something that helps yourself or others without hurting anyone.
As an example, take the fact that many lifestreams on earth have a wish for more sex. Sex has the potential to be both a wish and a desire. If consenting adults seek to fulfill each others wish for more sex, there is nothing inherently wrong with this. Yet if people develop a desire that makes them willing to rape or force others, then we obviously have a karma-making situation. Some people are on the borderline between wish and desire, but still at the point where they can potentially benefit from Devachan. It is surprising how quickly lifestreams get bored with having sex with partners who are exactly as the dreamt about on earth.
The wish to have certain material things is in itself innocent in that it does not necessarily harm other people. Yet if seeking to fulfill it means coercing others, it too can be karma making. Yet in Devachan it is very easy to have this wish fulfilled without hurting anyone, and again it is surprising how quickly it becomes boring to have everything you want.
The wish to be revered as a spiritual teacher is not in itself harmful to others, and it is also easy to fulfill in Devachan. And again, it can quickly become boring to have followers who never give you any contrast, either as opposition or by challenging you from a higher state of consciousness.
So do you begin to see the distinction? Devachan is for the fulfillment of wishes, and wishes are something that can be fulfilled without harming others. In contrast, killing Americans can never be a wish, because there is no way to fulfill it without harming others. Thus, Devachan simply cannot accommodate this, which means a lifestream will either go back into embodiment or go to a lower realm, which we generally call the astral realm.
In fact, as Devachan is a realm guided by devas, there is a corresponding realm in the astral guided by demons; we might call it Demonchan. The fundamental difference is that lifestreams are magnetized to Demonchan through their negative “wishes,” meaning those that can only be fulfilled by harming others. Thus, in Demonchan, you can indeed experience anything you desired to do on earth, including killing Americans, blowing up buildings or bringing down the “Great Satan.”
The difference is that in Devachan your wishes are fulfilled without you misqualifying any energy. In fact, as your wishes are fulfilled, you will purify some of the emotional energy you poured into the wish while on earth. In Demonchan, you also experience the fulfillment of a desire, but because this involves harming others, you will continue to misqualify energy.
It can indeed happen that a lifestream eventually has enough of killing or fighting and thus becomes aware of a desire to experience something more. Yet even so, it can be difficult for a lifestream to extricate itself from Demonchan, because the demons will not voluntarily let the lifestream go. The demons need the lifestream to continue misqualifying energy for their own survival. In contrast, the devas do not need energy from the lifestreams in Devachan, because they can get it from a higher source.
If you read my comment about Osama bin Laden, you will see that I did not say he was in Devachan killing Americans. I said he is not actually a low lifestream, and thus he has the potential to go to Devachan, and in fact should ideally be there.
Thus, it would be possible to help bin Laden escape from Demonchan by people making calls for him to be cut free. I am not saying that people in general should do this, as there are many far more important things to call for. Yet if certain people feel an inner prompting to make calls for bin Laden, they should do so, as this could help them balance karma with him.
So in closing, you can take a look at people and make a reasonable prediction about whether they are likely to go to Devachan or Demonchan after this embodiment. People who have a strong wish for something that can be fulfilled without harming others, are likely to go to Devachan. People who have a strong desire to harm others, or to force others to change are likely to go to Demonchan. The strength of their ill will towards others will determine how difficult it will be for them to extricate themselves from Demonchan and move on.
Truly, if you find yourself having ill will towards anyone on earth, you should seriously consider that if you let the sun of this embodiment go down upon your wrath, you are very likely to find yourself in a place that is not pleasant and from which it will be impossible to extricate yourself without giving up the ill will. So why not give it up now and enjoy the rest of the time you have in your current embodiment? Ill will towards others is truly one of the more unpleasant mental prisons known to humans.
Copyright © 2011 by Kim Michaels
http://www.ascendedmasteranswers.com/spiritual-realm/spiritual-realm/37-about-devachan-and-demonchan
Is the Old Testament God a false god?
Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:
I have been hoping that someone would take my teachings on this website, put two and two together and come up with this precise question. It is not only a logical question to ask, it is an extremely important question to ask.
Let me first address your realization that in the past you would not have dared to even consider this question. This is a very important realization that all spiritual seekers need to come to in order to rise to a higher level of the path. You need to rise to a frame of mind where there are no taboos, where there is no question you do not dare to ask.
Why is that so important? It is important because the spiritual path is a process whereby you free yourself from all the serpentine lies that caused you to create a false sense of identity. You must be willing to lose your life, to lose your mortal sense of identity, by letting go of any and all of the serpentine lies that influence your consciousness and have become part of your sense of identity. To do that, you must be willing to question absolutely anything in this world and then reach for an answer coming from your Christ self or from the ascended masters through your Christ self.
Consider the importance of the question of whether there is a false god. Let us imagine for a minute that there was a false god and that some people on earth had been fooled into worshiping that false god. If these people considered it blasphemy to even ask whether there might be a false god, then how could they possibly be freed from that trap? They would literally be stuck for a lifetime and their culture could be stuck for thousands of years.
The basic law of this universe is free will. We of the ascended masters have been given the task of saving every human being on earth. To save people, we must liberate them from the serpentine lies by giving them the truth that will make them free. However, in order to give people the truth, people must ask. Ask and ye shall receive is a divine law. If you do not ask, you cannot receive from us because the Law of Free Will does not permit us to give you an answer for which you have not asked. In fact, until you ask, you would not be open to the answer of able to fathom that answer.
Therefore, we must allow you to continue to live in illusion until you finally decide to throw away your taboos and ask the logical questions. In that respect, let me say that every religion which discourages its members from asking questions has been influenced by the serpentine lies and the forces that seek to keep people trapped in this world. Let me make it clear that there are no exceptions to this statement. It is the truth that will make you free, and the truth can be known only by asking questions. If your religion discourages you from asking questions, your religion has been influenced by the forces of this world. I am not thereby saying that your religion is completely false or is completely controlled by these forces. I am saying that your religion has been influenced by these forces and that is why it has created forbidden questions.
Is there a false god? In reality there are many false gods. One of the messages I seek to get across on this website is that human beings have created their own reality. Let us go to the situation in the garden of Eden. Genesis says:
22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. (Genesis Chapter 3).
The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil is, as I explained elsewhere, the fruit of the knowledge of relative good and evil. Relative good and evil signifies that because human beings are meant to be co-creators with God, they have the power to create their own reality, meaning that they can create their own definitions of good and evil. Therefore, human beings can create a culture and a belief system on planet earth which is completely out of touch with the truth and the reality of God.
I am sure you can see that when people become trapped in such a relative belief system, they are worshiping a false god. If they were to attain eternal life in that state of consciousness, they would never escape that illusion. Therefore, the law of God mandates that when you create a relative definition of good and evil, when you create a “reality” that is out of alignment with the reality of God, you will be subject to the laws of deterioration that scientists describe as the second law of thermodynamics. This law determines that if you cut yourself off from God, your creation will gradually break down and self-destruct.
As I explain throughout this website, human beings partook of the fruit of relative good and evil, which truly means that they descended into a lower state of consciousness. That state of consciousness is dominated by the relative opposites of good and evil. These opposites are mutually exclusive, and they are different from the original polarities of God, namely the expanding and contracting forces that Mother Mary describe so beautifully in her discourse.
As the Bible says, God created man in his image and likeness. This means that God created lifestreams with imagination, with free will and with the ability to create by using God’s energy. After human beings fell into a lower state of consciousness, they lost their conscious connection to the reality of God. Therefore, it was inevitable that they began to create false gods. They began to create idols that were defined according to their own relative definition of good and evil. They began to create gods in the image and likeness of man. They began to create gods that were an expression of their own state of consciousness, and those gods were the way people – or at least some people – wanted them to be.
As I seek to explain on this website, everything you do is done with God’s energy. You are alive because there is a constant stream of spiritual energy which flows from the spiritual self through your lifestream. That energy becomes directed by your attention. As the energy flows through your mind, it becomes qualified and colored according to the images, beliefs and feelings that you hold in your consciousness. I have several times likened this to a film projector with the spiritual light being the white light from the light bulb that is colored as it passes through the film strip of your mind.
As the energy passes through your mind, some of it is lowered in vibration into the material spectrum and it becomes translated into actions. Yet some of it remains in a higher vibration, and as I explained elsewhere, there are four basic levels of vibration in the material universe. Two of the other levels are the mental realm and the emotional realm. Some of the energy that passes through the mind of human beings is converted into thoughts and feelings that are stored in these other levels of the energy continuum.
As the laws of physics explain, energy cannot be created or destroyed. Therefore, once the energy is qualified by human thoughts and feelings, it will retain that vibration until those who qualified the energy raise the vibration of the energy back to its original purity. What you need to understand is that as energy begins to accumulate, it increases in intensity.
Here comes the next logical step. Everything is created from God’s Being, so God’s energy is truly created out of God’s consciousness. Therefore, the energy with which human beings co-create has consciousness within it. As the energy begins to accumulate and increase in intensity, that consciousness is awakened. Once a critical mass is passed, a cloud of energy can attain a certain rudimentary form of consciousness. In other words, this mental and emotional energy now begins to realize that it exists.
As the energy increases in intensity, it can attain enough consciousness to realize that it can exist and grow only if it continues to receive energy from human beings. What has now happened is that through the power of their minds, human beings have created a conscious being that exists in the emotional or mental realm. Because human beings have created this entity, they are tied to it in consciousness. This link is a two-way process, meaning that the entity can potentially communicate with some human beings who are more than normally sensitive.
Now add to this the fact that a human lifestream can never fully forget its spiritual origin. The lifestream realizes that there is more to reality than the material universe it perceives with the senses. The lifestream realizes, even though it cannot put this into words or even conscious thoughts, that it has a spiritual self and that it will not be complete and whole until it regains contact with that spiritual self. This is what, over the course of many millennia, has given rise to the concept of an external God, a God that is outside of, separated from and above human beings.
So what truly happens is that when a particular group of people begin to form an image of such an external God, they will gradually create a conscious entity that exists in the emotional or mental realm (or even in both realms). That entity will naturally take on the characteristics envisioned by human beings. As it attains a certain degree of consciousness, it will begin to believe that it actually is the type of being that people envision as God. It will literally begin to believe that it is a god or that it is the God.
The catch here is that this man-made god can continue to exist only as long as it receives energy from human beings. And because consciousness is by nature expansive, the man-made god not only wants to survive, it also wants to grow. As it attains a sufficient state of consciousness, it can actually begin to communicate with certain people and make demands concerning how it wants to be worshiped. It might prescribe certain forms of worship that cause people to give it more energy. If it was created as an aggressive god, it might prescribe animal or human sacrifices because by the spilling of blood, energy is misqualified and that energy is fed to the false god. In a similar vein, such a false god can entice people to wage war and to kill the enemies mercilessly. Once again, the spilling of the blood releases energy and the spilling of the blood through violence misqualifies that energy, which can then feed the man-made god.
I realize that many people will find this teaching very difficult to accept. Yet before they reject the idea outright, I would remind them that if indeed there is a false god, then they will never escape the clutches of that false god until they dare to question the validity of their god and their religion. I would strongly advise anyone who finds it difficult to accept this idea to be very careful about rejecting the idea. If you find it difficult to accept this idea, there can be only one reason. Your religion has to some degree been influenced by a false god who does not want you to be free of its control. That is why your religious culture has instilled in you that there are certain questions you are not allowed task. This is especially true for cultures that contain the idea that certain questions about God are blasphemous and that you will be sent to hell for even asking the question.
Let me make it clear that the true God – whom I know and experience constantly – wants you to come home to its kingdom. Yet you cannot come home as long as you are trapped in the worship of a false god. Therefore, the true God wants you to overcome those illusions, and the only way for you to do that is to question the serpentine lies that reinforce the false god. Consider that those who do not want you to ask certain questions must have something to hide—otherwise why seek to discourage questions? The true God has nothing to hide. God is truth, so why would God ever try to prevent you from discovering truth? And if God wants you to find truth, why would it prevent you from asking questions that can lead you to the truth?
Let me say again that only the truth can make you free. Let me say again that you live in a world in which almost every aspect of life has been influenced by dualistic lies. Let me say again that God has given you free will, and it has given you the right to question absolutely anything. You have the right to ask any question, and if you ask with an open mind and heart, we of the ascended masters or your Christ self will give you an answer that will help you free yourself from the serpentine lies. Yet if you dare not ask, we cannot help you, and you will remain trapped until you decide to let go of your taboos and ask the logical questions.
I have much more to say about this topic, but I would like to release that knowledge in small portions so as not to overwhelm people completely. For those who have a desire to know more, let me ask you to consider our teaching on how God created the universe. Based on that teaching, you will realize that the true God, the ultimate God, is a Being which is completely beyond the world of form. The Creator is above and beyond anything it has created. In other words, God is complete, self-sustained and self-sufficient. God needs nothing from outside itself.
Therefore, how could the true God have a need to be worshiped by or to receive sacrifices from human beings? This then leads to the logical question, “How can a religion that promotes worship of an external God be a completely true religion? How can a religion that promotes worship of God be worshiping the true God who needs no worship?”
Copyright © 2004 by Kim Michaels
http://www.ascendedmasteranswers.com/spiritual-realm/god/15-is-the-old-testament-god-a-false-god
36 ideas for transcending your world view
By Kim Michaels
In order to make use of Transcendence Tools, you need to shift your world view beyond the common, sensory-based view and beyond the view provided by traditional religion and materialism. One way to do this is to look at how science itself has pointed the way to a new world view.
Given that you are open to studying this website, you have likely already shifted your world view. Yet in order to make the best possible use of Transcendence Tools, it will be helpful for you to understand the following ideas.
IDEA 1
Have you ever considered that the material universe is a communications tool, almost like a radio that is broadcasting a message? What is the basic message we receive from the material universe? It is that we are limited by – trapped in – material conditions. Yet is this true?
Every situation you encounter in the material world presents you with a basic question: “Will you accept that you are limited by this condition, that you cannot change it, that the material world has power over you—and over your state of mind?” Behind this is an even deeper question: “Will you accept that your state of mind depends on material conditions?”Image08
In most cases, we do not even realize that we are facing these questions, because we have already accepted the limitations and accepted that we cannot transcend them. Yet is this true—or is it just a product of limited perception? What can be attained by exposing our subconscious illusions and making a conscious effort to transcend them?
When you understand the following ideas, you will see that everything in the material world is a matter of perspective—that everything is relative, as Albert Einstein put it.
IDEA 2
The human senses give us a dualistic view of the world. They tell us that the world is made from many separate “things” or forms, even many separate materials. There are many types of solid matter but also many types of fluid energy.
This corresponds to the view of scientists before Albert Einstein discovered the theory of relativity. Scientists thought the world was made from matter and energy; two separate substances that did not mix.
The consequence of this dualistic world view is that matter has permanence or at least continuity, which means matter is difficult to change. And more specifically, because matter is fundamentally different from thoughts – which are clearly energy – the human mind does not have the capacity to change matter.
Unless you transcend this world view, you will not be able to transcend the limitations you face in the material world. You will believe these circumstances are real and have some actual power over you.
IDEA 3
With his simple formula:
E = mc2
Einstein disproved the dualistic world view. He proved that the world is NOT made from two separate elements, because there is only one basic substance, namely what he called energy. Matter is simply a form of energy that has taken on a vibration that makes it appear solid to the human senses.
In reality, matter DOES NOT EXIST. It is a construct of the human mind. Or we might say that matter is not solid, permanent or unchangeable. The “unchangeability” of matter is an illusion created by the human mind. Given that matter is simply a form of energy, Einstein proved that “solid” matter can be changed as easily as fluid energy.
IDEA 4
Energy is a form of vibration, often pictured as a wave. The form of a wave can be easily changed by changing the vibrational properties of the wave. DSCF5776
Once you begin to realize that what seems like unchangeable matter is simply made from energy waves, you realize that if you can find a way to change the energy waves that make up matter, you have the potential to transcend ANY limitation you face.
Thus, the key to transcending limitations is to learn how to change the vibration of energy waves. This is part of what Transcendence Tools are designed to accomplish.
IDEA 5
Let us take another look at what Einstein’s formula is telling us. Here is something we all learned in school. You can take a mathematical equation and divide with the same factor on both sides of the equal sign:
Emc2divided
Obviously, the two versions of C2 on the right side eliminate each other, so you now have the following equation:
Ec2final
You now have a new equation, which says something very profound. It says that the material world was made from a basic form of energy, called E. This form of primordial energy has a very high vibration.
Everything we can detect in the material world was created by taking high-frequency energy and reducing its vibration with a certain factor. Einstein saw the reduction factor as the speed of light squared, but in reality the picture is more complex.
IDEA 6
There is more than one type of high-frequency energy and there is more than one reduction factor. Which means that everything in the material world is a product of the following process:
A certain type of high-frequency energy was reduced in vibration by a certain factor. The reduced energy manifested as what we can detect as fluid energy or stationary energy (matter).
scalehigherrealmeps
IDEA 7
This opens up for a new world view that unifies science and religion—once you are willing to go beyond both dogmatic Christianity and dogmatic materialism.
We all know from school that our eyes can see only certain types of light. In other words, there are light rays which vibrate within the range or frequency spectrum that our eyes can detect. Yet science has proven that there are many other forms of light rays that our eyes cannot detect. This leads to a multi-layered view of the world:
The material universe is made from energy that vibrates within a certain spectrum. Some of this energy still has such a high vibration that it is fluid and appears as what we normally call energy (light, sound, electricity, magnetism and so forth). Yet some of it has been reduced in vibration to the point, where it has become captured in a stationary matrix and thus appears as solid matter.
IDEA 8
The material world is NOT all there is. The material world is simply one spectrum in a larger continuum of energy vibrations. There could be many layers of energy spectra above the material world.
energyfloweps
Yet the important point for now is that the material world is created by taking energy from the spectrum just above it and reducing it in vibration. The question now becomes what provides this reduction factor?
IDEA 9
Many see Einstein’s theory of relativity as the greatest scientific breakthrough of modern time. Yet for the purpose of using Transcendence Tools, the greatest breakthrough was provided by quantum physics. Here is why.
Before quantum physics, scientists believed in a myth called “the objective observer.” It said that when a scientist was making an observation through the scientific method, the mind of the scientist would not influence the observation. Quantum physics has proven this to be a fallacy at the subatomic level.
Quantum physics studies the most fundamental level of matter. This is the level where – according to Einstein’s formula – energy becomes matter, manifesting first as subatomic particles that combine into atoms and so forth.
What quantum physicists have abundantly proven is that at the most fundamental level of matter, the consciousness of a scientist will interact with the phenomenon being observed.
In other words, when a scientist is studying a subatomic particle, the particle did not exist before the observation was made. The particle was co-created by the scientist because it was the observation that brought the particle into existence in the material world. This has led some physicists to talk about an observer-created universe.
IDEA 10
We can now see that the subatomic world is actually the boundary region between the material frequency spectrum and the frequency spectrum that is right above it in vibration. Thus, it is at the subatomic level that fluid energy is transformed into “solid” matter.
Here comes the important point. It has been proven by numerous actual experiments, that at the subatomic level, the mind of a scientist does interact with matter. Denying this fact means denying 80 years of scientific experimentation. This leaves us with two options:
The human mind can interact with inanimate matter.
There must be a deeper explanation.
IDEA 11
The deeper explanation is Einstein’s theory, which says that matter is not separate from mind, because everything is one substance, what Einstein called energy. This means that the energy waves produced by your mind can interact with the energy waves that exist at the subatomic level. And as these energy waves interact, they produce subatomic particles; the building blocks of all matter.Image13
This leads to a stunning conclusion: There is a form of consciousness present at the subatomic level, and THAT larger consciousness is what our human consciousness can interact with. This, of course, requires a quantum mind-leap that no materialist is willing to make.
IDEA 12
Traditional religion, such as Christianity, portrays a dualistic world. There is heaven and there is the material world, and you cannot get to heaven by your own powers, which is why you need the external religion. Materialistic science also portrays a dualistic world, because there is the material world, which has an objective existence, and there is the realm of the human mind, which is entirely subjective.
Yet because the human mind can interact with the most fundamental level of matter, it has been proven scientifically that there are no divisions. Any divisions are creations of the human mind, because in reality the world is one interconnected whole, made from the same basic substance.
IDEA 13
Matter is created from high-frequency energy that has been lowered in vibration by a certain reduction factor. We can now see that what determines the characteristics of this reduction factor is consciousness.
This means the world was NOT created through a mechanical process guided by chance. Yet NEITHER was it created in its present form by an almighty God sitting in heaven.
The world is a creation of consciousness, and the consciousness of human beings was definitely part of the equation. Yet is our consciousness the only factor, or is there a consciousness beyond ours?
IDEA 14
Traditional religion, materialism and common sense agree that the earth was created before human beings appeared. Thus, human beings cannot have created the material universe. Which means the universe was created by beings who have a capacity of consciousness that is beyond what we humans have.
There is a realm of high-frequency energy beyond the material universe. This realm has many layers that form a hierarchy leading towards successively higher vibrations. In this realm is a hierarchy of self-aware beings, ranging from beings who exist in the realm right above the material world to the ultimate level of consciousness.
The material universe and the earth were created by beings who exist in the realm of vibration that is right above the material realm. These beings used their consciousness to step down the vibration of the primordial energy and organize it into matrices that we see as the physical universe.
These beings are known in many spiritual traditions and have been called by many names, such as Elohim, Spirit guides or ascended masters.
IDEA 15
After these high-awareness beings had manifested the material universe, they sent self-aware extensions of themselves to take on the kind of bodies that the physical universe supports. On earth, this is what we call human bodies.
Thus, we are truly self-aware beings who have descended into physical bodies, and we use these bodies as vehicles for experiencing the world and for expressing ourselves in the material world. The purpose is that by doing this, we serve to help co-create the material world.
Yet on an even larger scale, our purpose is to help raise the vibration of the entire material world, until it becomes part of the higher realm. By doing this, we grow in self-awareness so that we can also ascend to the higher level. And this growth in self-awareness is the higher purpose for the existence of the world as a whole.
IDEA 16
The material universe was created by seven spiritual beings, called the Seven Elohim. These beings have the capacity of consciousness to take spiritual light and lower its vibration to the frequency spectrum that makes up the material universe. They provide the reduction factor mentioned earlier. DSCF1440
Each of the seven Elohim represent a certain type of spiritual light, also called a spiritual ray. Thus, the universe was created from a raw material of the seven spiritual rays reduced in vibration by a certain factor.
IDEA 17
After reducing the vibration of the spiritual light, the Elohim can then superimpose a thought matrix upon it. This causes the light to take on the form of what we call fluid energy and subatomic particles. These “building blocks of matter” then organize into the forms envisioned by the Elohim.
The Elohim do this from a level of consciousness that is far above that of most human beings. The Elohim create from an awareness that all life is one and that they seek to raise the whole.
IDEA 18
Ideally, we human beings – or rather spiritual beings in human bodies – are meant to serve as co-creators who create within the framework created by the Elohim. However, we do not start out with the same level of awareness as the Elohim. The reason is that the purpose of the material universe is to serve as a schoolroom, in which we gradually grow in awareness by experimenting with our creative abilities.
One might say that the material universe forms a gigantic feed-back machine. As co-creators we have the same creative abilities as the Elohim, yet our abilities have a lesser capacity. As we experiment with our abilities, the material universe outpictures the thought matrices we project upon the light. And if we honestly analyze the result, we can expand our awareness.
IDEA 19
Everything that exists on earth is the product of a certain level of awareness. When we begin to understand how a certain level of awareness always produces the same result, then we can transcend that level of awareness.
There are 144 levels of awareness available to us on planet earth. A new co-creator starts out at the 48th level. At this level, we have a very localized self-awareness, yet we still have a sense that we are connected to a whole that is larger than ourselves.
If we retain this sense of connection, we can gradually expand it, until we grow to the 144th level of awareness. At this level, we are ready to ascend from earth and become immortal beings in a higher realm.
IDEA 20
The only way to grow in self-awareness is to exercise our free will. It is by making choices and experiencing the results that we have the opportunity to grow.
Yet for us to have truly free will, we also have the option – not a necessity but an option – to choose to go below the 48th level of awareness. The only way to do this is to deny that we are part of a larger whole and then start acting as if we are separate beings who can do whatever we want without considering the consequences of our actions.
In order to deny our connection to the whole, we have to accept a set of illusions, which form a veil that distorts our perception of the world. This has in the Buddhic tradition been called the veil of Maya. In the Christian tradition it has been called the prince of this world or the devil.
Yet it is truly a set of illusions that make us believe, that we are separate beings and that we can define what is right and wrong based on the view that we are separated from God and from other human beings. Thus, we can believe that what we do to others will not have negative effects on ourselves.
In a sense, we begin to believe that the universe is not a feed-back machine, because we can avoid experiencing the consequences of our creative efforts.
IDEA 21
In reality, the basic function of the entire universe is not in the least affected by what human beings believe on this small planet. Yet if a majority of the inhabitants of a planetary system decide to go below the 48th level of awareness, then they are allowed to experiment with the lower levels of consciousness.DSCF2376
Of course, conditions on their planet will inevitably outpicture the thought matrices that people project upon the light through the lower levels of awareness. This explains all of the imbalances currently seen on earth, from wars, to poverty, to limited life-span, to diseases, to lack of resources and man’s inhumanity to man.
Once you enter into the veil of illusions that make up the lower levels of consciousness, you will be subject to these main illusions:
1: There are certain things you cannot change. There are certain limitations you cannot transcend. (This is in a sense correct, because as long as you are below the 48th level, there are many things your mind cannot change.)
2: You – or humankind collectively – have not created your current circumstances. This has been forced upon you by an unconscious universe or by an angry god in the sky.
3: Underlying this sense is an often subconscious belief that this is wrong and that these conditions have been forced upon you through an act of injustice. This springs from the separate self’s belief that it should be able to do whatever it wants; thus limitations are unfair. Meaning the separate self thinks the universe should function according to its world view.
4: Thus, the problem is not you or within you. The problem is outside yourself. The cause is that God, nature or other people do not comply with your view of the world.
The effect of these beliefs is that you now engage in a struggle to get God, the universe and other people to comply with your vision and will as a separate being. And you use force to accomplish this. Needless, to say this can only lead to an ongoing struggle that never brings you peace.
IDEA 22
The problem with these beliefs is that they form a catch-22, a closed circle, from which there is seemingly no escape. As long as you believe that you are a victim of circumstances over which your mind has no power, there is no escape from these circumstances.
This is what the Buddha meant, when he said that the first noble truth is that life is suffering. When you have descended below the 48th level of awareness, life can only be suffering, namely what the Buddha called Samsara.
This causes you to be enveloped in an ongoing, seemingly endless, struggle to get what you want by using force to take it from nature or from other people. And given the law of cause and effect, what you send out will always come back to you. The more you struggle, the more resistance you encounter.
IDEA 23
Of course, you have free will, so you have the right to engage in this struggle for as long as you want. By observing the world, it becomes clear that many people actually enjoy struggling against other people, nature or even God.
Transcendence Tools are only meant for people who have come to the realization, that they want to rise above the struggle. So the question now becomes how you transcend the human struggle, and the answer is simple: Stop re-creating the struggle.
When you understand how the struggle is created, it becomes far easier to see how to stop recreating it.
IDEA 24
Let us return to the idea that the material universe was created by seven spiritual beings, the Elohim. The Elohim started with seven types of high-frequency energy, in several spiritual traditions called the seven rays.
The Elohim then used their consciousness to reduce the vibration of these rays to the frequency spectrum that makes up the material universe. The purpose was to create an environment where energy/matter is so dense that it makes it possible for beings to start out with a very localized sense of awareness and then expand from there. The density also makes it possible for beings to believe they are separate beings.
After reducing the energy, the Elohim then superimposed certain thought matrices upon the energy, causing it to organize into the structures we observe, such as planet earth, the solar system and galaxies. The original blueprint for the earth was completely balanced and had none of the inharmonious conditions we see today.DSCF2910
A long time ago, waves of self-aware beings descended to earth and took on bodies here. Yet in the beginning all of these beings used their free will within the framework of the whole. They attempted to raise up the whole, and thus they never descended below the 48th level of awareness but grew from there until they ascended.
These beings acted as co-creators by taking the energy provided by the Elohim and using it without reducing its vibration further, instead increasing its vibration. They superimposed thought matrices upon the energy, but these matrices only sought to raise up all life.
IDEA 25
At some point, a wave of lifestreams descended, and many among them did choose to go below the 48th level. The overall effect of this was that these beings now started seeing themselves as separate beings, and thus they started seeing themselves as being in competition with or in opposition to others.
This had two specific effects:
The “separate” beings now took the energy provided by the Elohim and they lowered it in vibration. One way to do this is through selfish emotions, such as anger or hatred, but even a perversion of love.
The “separate” beings superimposed thought matrices upon the reduced energy that were not based on seeking to raise all life. Instead, they sought to raise themselves by putting others down.
It is the de-creative efforts of beings trapped in the veil of separation that has superimposed lower matrices upon the original blueprint for planet earth. This is why there are natural disasters, why there is a limited food supply, why natural resources seem limited and why there is old age and disease.
IDEA 26
Here is the essential realization. These limited conditions are NOT permanent. In fact, in the material universe, nothing is permanent.
To understand this, compare the universe to a movie theater. The images on the movie screen might seem very real and very absorbing. Yet we know they do not have an actual or permanent existence. They are created by projecting a stream of light upon the screen, and if you turned off this stream, the images on the screen would instantly disappear.
Similarly, if you change the images on the film strip, then the images on the screen would instantly change accordingly.
IDEA 27
You now see the fundamental teaching behind transcendence tools. The circumstances you are experiencing are like the images projected unto the movie screen of the basic energy that makes up the material universe.
You are constantly projecting these images, and the basic energy can only take on the form of what you are projecting upon it. Thus, the essential key to transcending your current circumstances is to STOP seeking to change something outside yourself. Instead, you need to look at your own mind and do two things:
Uncover the subconscious beliefs and mental images that cause you to project images upon the screen which limit you. Then replace them with higher beliefs, so you no longer project the limited images.
Recognize that over time these images have caused you to generate a certain amount of lower energies. Only when these energies have been raised in vibration to their original level or beyond, will you be free of the old circumstances.
In short: Transcendence Tools are designed to help you transform low-frequency energy and overcome limited beliefs and self-images.
IDEA 28
In order to fully understand how you co-create your own circumstances, it is helpful to be aware that there are four levels of the mind:
The highest level of the mind is the identity level. This is where your basic sense of identity is stored, but this is not simply your name and nationality. It is deeper beliefs about what kind of being you are, how you related to the world in which you live, and what your abilities and limitations are.
The next level is the mental level, which is obviously the level of thought. here you find more detailed beliefs and understanding about how the world works. The beliefs in the identity mind determine what you think you can do, and the beliefs in the mental mind determine how you think you can do it. dialmindeps
The next level is the emotional mind, the seat of feelings. Here you also have certain beliefs, for example you might believe that if other people do certain things, then it is acceptable or unavoidable for you to respond with anger. You might even believe it is justified to harm other people in order to get what you want or protect yourself.
The physical mind, which truly is certain aspects of the mind related to the physical body, meaning it contains beliefs related to the physical body. Yet for most people, the physical mind is also what their conscious minds tend to identify with. At this level you might also have certain beliefs about what you can and cannot do.
Anything you do and have ever done involves all four levels of your mind. What keeps you alive and gives you the energy to co-create is that you are constantly receiving a stream of high-frequency energy from a higher part of your being. This can be called your higher self, your spiritual self or in some spiritual traditions your “I AM Presence.”
As this energy enters your identity mind, you will superimpose certain images upon the energy and this will qualify the vibration of the energy depending on the nature of these images/beliefs. Some of this qualified energy will be stored in your identity mind and some of it will move into your mental mind, where it is likewise qualified by the beliefs found here.
This process continues in the emotional mind. Which means that when a creative impulse reaches your conscious mind, it has already been colored by the beliefs and images found at the higher levels.
IDEA 29
You now see that the four levels of your mind form a hierarchical structure. The beliefs in the identity mind are deeper than the beliefs in the mental mind. Which means that it is impossible for the mental mind to override a belief in the identity mind.
Once an impulse has passed through the identity mind, the mental mind can only work with the impulse as it is colored by the identity mind—it cannot override what enters it from above. The same holds true for the emotional and physical minds.
You now see the essential dilemma faced by all us, when we seek to change our circumstances. If your conscious mind is identified with the physical mind, then you will be able to change beliefs at this level. Yet you will NOT be able to consciously override what enters the physical mind from the higher levels. You will ONLY be able to work with the creative impulse that has already been colored by the beliefs and energies from the three higher levels.
Thus, if this was your only option, you truly would be stuck, and from the level of the physical mind, you would have no way out.
IDEA 30
What is the way out? It is to recognize that your conscious mind does not have to be identified with the physical mind/body and the material world. The core of your being is something we might call the Conscious You, and it is a form of pure awareness that has the ability to project itself wherever it wants. Chartwebsite
For example, the Conscious You can project itself outside the physical mind and into the emotional mind. Thus, it can see a belief in the emotional mind and resolve it at that level, which will change the creative impulse entering the conscious mind. And now it becomes much easier to change your physical behavior, because your creative impulse is less colored. The same, of course, can be done to resolve beliefs at the mental and identity levels.
However, it must be recognized that if the Conscious You has been identified with the material world for a long time, it will take a process of hard work to purify all four levels of your mind. For most people this begins with questioning beliefs that reside in the physical mind. The next step is to question beliefs in the emotional mind and so on.
IDEA 31
Yet here is where many people who are into self-help or spirituality fail to understand the mechanics of the situation. The mechanics are simple. When a creative impulse enters the identity mind, it is colored by the beliefs found there. Yet this process produces a certain amount of energy, and some of this energy will accumulate in your identity mind. Likewise, of course, the beliefs in the other levels of the mind produce low-frequency energy that is stored at those levels.
The effect of this accumulated energy is twofold:
When you attempt to consciously look into a higher level of your mind, the accumulated energy will make it more difficult for you to clearly see the belief that produced the energy.fieldvortex
The accumulated energy will seem to reinforce the belief, meaning you tend to think that the belief is not a belief that is based on an illusion. Instead, the more energy you have stored, the more real the belief will seem, meaning you think it does not have to be changed.
The essential realization for all who are serious about transcending their limitations is that energy reinforces belief.
Let us consider an example. At the level of the identity mind, a person has accepted that he is a separate being living in a world that opposes his ability to do whatever he wants. As a result of this deep belief, the person’s mental mind contains the belief that he has to take what he wants by force and that he has the right to do so. At the emotional level is the belief that it is okay for him to be angry when other people will not comply with his will. And at the physical level is the belief that it is okay for him to strike at others before they can strike at him.
It should be obvious that these beliefs have turned this person’s life into a constant struggle. And as a result of the struggle, the person has accumulated substantial amounts of misqualified energy at all four levels of the mind.
Any person can at any time reach the realization that he or she does not want to continue the same old patterns, but wants to change or that there must be more to life. Yet in order to be successful in transcending limitations, any person must uncover and consciously change subconscious beliefs.
IDEA 32
Once you uncover a belief and see how it is limiting you, it is not that difficult to change it, because we will not consciously harm ourselves—when we truly see what we are doing. Yet the problem is that it is often impossible to uncover a subconscious belief, precisely because what makes it subconscious is the amount of low-frequency energy that has accumulated at all four levels of the mind.
Thus, an essential key to changing your life is to overcome this energy. There are various techniques that can enable you to release this energy. The problem is that while this might give you a temporary relief, the energy is still somewhere and you are ultimately responsible for your use of energy.
Thus, the only permanent way to transcend limitations is to requalify the energy by raising its vibration to a higher level. This is very simple to do, when you understand what science has uncovered about the behavior of energy.
IDEA 33
All energy is a wave, yet some energy can take the form of a stationary or standing wave. This is what has happened to the energy that has accumulated at the four levels of your mind.
A wave has certain vibrational properties, such as frequency, amplitude and wavelength. Yet there is no wave that is an isolated unit. In other words, the vibrational properties of ANY wave can be changed.DSCF7888
The way to change the vibrational properties is very simple. When two waves meet, they create what scientists call an interference pattern. This pattern results in a new wave that is a combination of the two original waves.
For example, the way to change low-frequency energy in your emotional body is to use a tool for invoking high-frequency energy and then directing it into your emotional body. As the high-frequency energy meets the low-frequency energy, it creates an interference pattern. The result is that you will now have a new form of energy with a vibration that is lower than the high-frequency energy but higher than the low-frequency energy.
The result is that you have now – paertly – purified your emotional body, which makes it a bit easier to see limiting beliefs. Of course, if you have accumulated low-frequency energy over many lifetimes, it can take some time to completely purify your emotional body. Yet for each time you take one step towards purification, you will feel lighter or more energetic, and this can give you the impetus to keep going until you break through to a distinctly higher level of awareness.
IDEA 34
Transcendence Tools are designed to help you invoke high-frequency energy and direct it into the low-frequency energy stored in the four levels of your mind. However, for you to make maximum use of these tools, it is important to understand two things:
energyaboveeps
High-frequency energy can ONLY come from a level that is beyond the material universe. The energy that is already at, say the mental level, cannot transform the energy misqualified at that level. Not even the energy at the identity level can transform the energy at lower levels.
Invoking high-frequency energy is NOT a mechanical process. When you look at history, you can see that there is nothing that human beings cannot misuse. Thus, there is a safety mechanism built into the process of invoking high-frequency energy.
The safety mechanism is that high-frequency energy must be released by self-aware beings in a higher realm. These beings have a capacity of consciousness that makes it possible for them to work with human beings individually. Thus, they can evaluate a person’s motives and they will release only the amount of energy that the person can handle and will not misuse.
In other words, in order to invoke high-frequency energy, you have to make an appeal to a being in a higher realm, such as one of the seven Elohim. This is what Transcendence Tools are designed to do, and the tools are in fact given as a direct revelation by beings in the spiritual realm.
IDEA 35
Transcendence Tools allow you to invoke the Presence of a spiritual being, who will then release an amount of energy that is adapted to your needs and your purity of motive. This is partly to make sure you do not receive more energy than you can handle (as the energy always stirs up the low-frequency energy) and partly to make sure you do not misqualify the energy and thus makes your situation worse.
As you build a momentum on invoking energy and demonstrate your willingness to examine your subconscious beliefs, you will gradually receive more energy and thus grow faster. If, on the other hand, you use the energy to make yourself feel better but continue the same old patterns, you will receive less energy until you feel the tools are no longer working for you.
It is important to understand that our spiritual teachers are beyond ego and beyond human judgments. They are not looking at you in order to condemn you; they are only seeking to help you grow.
Yet the assistance we can receive from spiritual teachers is guided by the law of multiplication. This is illustrated in the old saying: “God helps those who help themselves.” It is also illustrated in Jesus’ parable about a master who gave different amounts of talents to three of his servants and then went away. When the master returned, the servants had to give account of what they had done with the talents. Two servants had multiplied the talents and were given more, whereas one had buried the talents in the ground and thus could not receive more.
The law that guides all growth is that our spiritual teachers will give us an initial amount of energy when we ask for it. Yet what we receive after the initial grace period is completely determined by our willingness to multiply what we have been given.
IDEA 36
Quantum physics has proven the following:
Everything in the material universe is made from one basic substance. It can take on the form of subatomic particles, but these are truly energy waves.
The subatomic reality responds to our consciousness. The energy waves of our mind can interact with the energy waves that make up all matter.
This leaves an obvious question: If our minds can influence matter at the subatomic level, why cannot our minds influence matter at the normal or macroscopic level? Why can’t we perform the so-called miracles performed by Jesus? Why can’t we move mountains—or at least manifest good health and material abundance? And why can’t we collectively manifest a peaceful world with abundance for all people?
There is only one logical answer. In reality, our minds CAN influence matter at the macroscopic level, but we do not believe we can and thus we are not exercising our ability. We are not exercising our full potential as co-creators who are meant to have dominion over the earth.DSCF2383
And why can’t we believe in our potential, our birthright? Because in the four levels of our minds, we have adopted certain limiting beliefs. And these beliefs have then generated low-frequency energy that blurs our vision and makes it seem like we really do live in a world that limits us. The energy veil (evil) makes it seem like the current conditions in matter are real and have some real power over us.
In reality, of course, we are spiritual beings, and no condition in matter can have more power over us than we allow it to have. Thus, the key to transcending any limitation is to overcome the beliefs that cause us to limit our co-creative abilities.
When we overcome these beliefs, there will no longer be a gap between the subatomic and the macroscopic level. We will be able to consciously work at the subatomic level and thus affect changes on the macroscopic level. Effect must follow cause, and once we uncover our ability to work at the level of cause, the effects will follow.
Transcendence Tools have only one purpose, namely to help you close the gap between who you really are and who you currently think you are.
http://www.transcendencetoolbox.com/home/36ideas
See the Living Christ in yourself—and let the Living Word flow through you
Ascended Master Jesus, December 23, 2005 through Kim Michaels.
My joy is full, for truly I AM the Living Christ, and I AM in all life. Thus, I can speak through and express myself through all of life. And what you need to do, what I desire you to do, is to NOT look at the people that I am speaking through as being any different from or above yourselves.
I desire you to look in the mirror and see that the Living Christ is also in you, and thus the Living Christ can speak through you, as you hear me speaking through another. I know this will give you some trepidation, and you will feel uneasy about standing in front of a group of people or declaring that the Living Christ, or Jesus, or El Morya or Saint Germain is speaking through you. But my beloved, you need not have this fear. For I can speak through you in many different ways.
You do not need to say who it is that is speaking. The people to whom you are speaking do not need to know. They simply need to sense the light that flows through your words, as they become cups that contain my essence, thereby entering their beings and re-igniting their flame or reawakening their memory of who they are.
The one purpose of all spiritual teachings
Truly, every spiritual teaching can be said to be about one thing—the reawakening of people to their true identity as sons and daughters of God. And it is only through the consciousness of the Christ that they can know and accept that they are sons and daughters of God. For truly, as I said 2,000 years ago, no man knoweth the father save the son or to whomsoever the son might reveal him (Matthew 11:27). Thus you can know God only through the Christ consciousness, and thus you can accept yourself as a son or daughter of God only when you have some measure of the Christ consciousness.
And that Christ consciousness must come from the universal Christ mind, but most people on earth cannot make contact with that universal Christ mind. And thus they need the Word made flesh, the Living Christ in embodiment, or the Living Christ speaking through someone in embodiment, to make contact with that Christ consciousness, and therefore have the reawakening of who they are, their true sense of identity, so they can accept themselves for who they truly are.
I know that you will look at this with some trepidation and some fear, for it is natural that at the beginning stages of the path, you do have fear. And it is a fear that springs from many levels of your being, including the ego, but even your soul. Even the Conscious You, can have some fear of what will happen if you accept the Living Christ in your being and accept that you are a son or daughter of God. Because truly, when you fully accept that, your life will change—it will never be the same.
So there is always a fear of letting go of that which you know, that with which you are familiar, that which gives you a sense of comfort and stability in a world that is always changing. But my beloved, we can help you overcome that fear if you are willing to let it go. But we cannot take it from you unless you are willing to give it to us. And thus, it must be you who make the decision that you are willing to face your fear, so that you can see that it limits you, that it is unreal. And so that you can decide that you no longer want it, and thereby let it go.
You might be closer than you think
There are so many of you who are so much closer than you think to reaching a level of consciousness where you can be the instrument for the Living Christ. Again, you need not necessarily stand in front of a group of people. You can speak the Living Word in a conversation with others, that is not an ordinary conversation talking about worldly things, but an extraordinary conversation because you are allowing the Living Christ to flow through you. And that Living Christ can then transform the other person because the Living Christ knows exactly what to say and how to say it to awaken that particular person, in whatever state of consciousness he or she is in at the moment.
The Living Christ can give a person the precise key that the person needs to take the next step on the spiritual path, whatever that might be, which you often will not know with your outer mind. If you are willing to be the instrument, truly the Living Christ can speak through you and thereby you can ignite the heart flame of another person, you can reawaken that memory. And that is how the Living Christ spreads throughout the earth—from heart to heart.
This is how Christianity spread in the early days, when those who went out and preached did not come out with a written book, with a scripture or with a set doctrine. They spoke the Living Word and it was the Living Word that ignited hearts for Christ. And when those hearts were ignited, they came to a point, where they were no longer afraid to let the Living Christ speak through them. And thus, the Christian movement spread like rings in the water, which is the only way it could spread in the ancient world—and which is the only true way it can spread today and transform the world to the maximum capacity.
Truly, you can do much through a book. Truly, you can do much through a website. But ultimately, the most important way for the Living Christ to expand itself in this world is from heart to heart. And thus, you have been willing to come and experience the Living Christ flow through the heart of one person. And you must realize that, truly, the Living Christ can express itself through your heart as you see it expressed through the hearts of others.
But how can this happen in you? It can happen only if you are willing to multiply the talents instead of burying them in the ground. And why do you bury your talents in the ground? Because of fear. There is only that reason. Again, we return to the fact that you must confront your fears, one at a time. Confront your fears of letting the Living Christ speak through you, thereby transforming another person and transforming yourself in the process. I truly will help you, if you apply to my heart and the heart of Mother Mary. We will help you see what it is that you fear, why you fear it and why your fear is unreal, why it is unnecessary.
Multiply what we have given
You must begin, you must multiply the talents, for we have now given you an outer teaching and outer examples. And we can do no more—until you decide to close the figure-eight flow by multiplying the talents so that you are willing to become more, and so that you too can become the instruments for the Living Christ.
You can do this in any situation in life. Some of you have professions where you counsel other people. Well, would you not rather counsel people from the level of the Christ mind than from the level of the worldly mind? Some of you do not counsel people in your occupations but you interact with people in other ways. And you will be amazed how, when you open your heart, the Living Christ will, in seemingly ordinary situations, bring forth some morsel of truth, charged with light, that will transform another person. And they are suddenly awakened and realize, “This is what I have always been looking for, this is the answer I wanted.” Or they realize, “I need to change my life, I cannot go on like this any longer.”
And when you see this happen to other people, as many of you have already seen, you will feel the joy that I feel when the Living Christ is allowed to enter the heart of a person in embodiment and transform that person and lift them up. For truly, the Living Christ has only one desire and that is to raise up all life. And that is why you see that when people embody the Living Christ, they have no other desire than to raise up all of life. They have come to that point of surrender that they simply want to serve, and they want to raise up all life instead of raising up only one part of life, namely themselves.
But what is to stop you from coming to that same point? Only your fears, and your fears are unreal. So what keeps you from being who you truly are and expressing who you truly are is simply unreality. And thus – again – when you see the Living Christ in another, do not idolize that person. Do not put them up on a pedestal as people have done to me for 2,000 years and as people in almost every spiritual movement on earth have done to the leader or leaders of that organization.
Do not deny the Living Christ in yourself
This is the consciousness that must be overcome in the Age of Aquarius—if we are to truly manifest the Golden Age of Saint Germain. And you have a teaching and you have examples so that you can overcome that consciousness and not fall into the trap of idolatry. Because what is it you do when you allow yourself to think that even though you see Christ in another, that Christ can only express itself through that person? Well, when you say or think that Christ cannot express itself through you, you are denying the Christ in you.
You might be affirming the Christ in another person, but you are denying the Living Christ in yourself, and thus you are denying me the opportunity to enter your being. Please, do not deny me. I have no other intention than to raise you up and set you free from your fears and limitations. I come only with love. I have no other desire than to let my love flow through you, so that you can feel the fullness of my love and my joy, flowing through your being 24 hours a day for the rest of your life on earth and then even beyond.
Thus, my beloved hearts, SEE the Christ in yourself and allow that Christ to be born this Christmas season, and then allow it to express itself through you. Truly, I seal you now in the Flame of the fullness of my joy, the fullness of the joy of the Living Christ. In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit and the Divine Mother, it is done!
Copyright © 2005 by Kim Michaels
http://www.ascendedmasterlight.com/ascended-master-light/date/20-2005/84-see-the-living-christ-in-yourself-and-let-the-living-word-flow-through-you
Ascended Master Jesus, December 25, 2005 through Kim Michaels.
I am indeed the ascended Jesus Christ. I come to you on this day with a mixture of joy and a mixture of sorrow. This is not the human sorrow that you know. But I desire you to realize that even an ascended being can feel something comparable to sorrow by watching the people on earth suffer needlessly, because they have not understood the message that could have set them free from all suffering. That message is the very message written into every aspect of my life.
I feel a sense of sorrow on every Christmas season, because I see that even though people come together in the spirit of giving, they come together only to celebrate my birth, my entry into this world. Yet was it really my entry into this world that was the most important part of my life? Nay, it is not so.
And especially not when people celebrate my birth with elaborate rituals and beliefs that make me seem even further away from them, as if I am so far above them because I was born under such miraculous circumstances. When you hear the stories – that I was born of a virgin, that a star, a physical star, appeared over my birthplace and that three wise men from the orient came to greet my entry into this world – surely you will feel that you are not important compared to me. Yet my beloved hearts do you really think that that is how I want you to feel?
Nay, I Jesus have no other desire than for you to feel and accept the absolute fact that God loves you with the same infinite, unconditional love with which he loves me. So many people around the world look at my life and they see me as being above them. Yet did I not declare my oneness with all life on many occasions? And truly, I came as the selfless servant of life who has no desire to be elevated above others, but only desires to elevate all life.
Is that not why I prayed to my father, saying that I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me (John 12:32)? Do you see, that I was not praying for God to elevate me above other people? I was praying because I realized that I had the Christ potential and the potential to become the way-shower for the age of Pisces. And thus, I desired to fulfill that potential—not for selfish reasons, not to have people look up to me, but so that I might serve as the instrument for raising all life, for raising all people into the love and the joy that truly is the Kingdom of God, so that they could understand that it is the Father’s good pleasure to give them the Kingdom.
Take Jesus down from the pedestal
Oh can you not see that it is not my desire that so many people should look at my life and say “Oh well, Jesus was so special, is it any wonder that God gave him the Kingdom and invited him into his Kingdom? But I am just a miserable sinner here on earth and surely I cannot enter.” My Beloved, this is a burden to my heart, and if you love me, and if you would help me lighten that burden, then you will overcome that belief in your own being.
You will banish it from your being and replace it with the reality of the oneness of all life. And then you will go out and share that realization and that experience of the unconditional love of God with all whom you meet. For truly, only when you share with others, when you seek to raise up others, will your own growth and your own joy be full.
Every aspect of my life was a teaching designed to help all people overcome the consciousness of separation from God and help them come closer to oneness with God. Yet so few of those who call themselves Christians have understood this one teaching. If you imagine that my entire life was a book, it is as if they are holding the book in their hands but instead of reading the contents of the book, they look only at the cover, at my entry into this world. And then they turn the book over and look at the back cover, my exit from this world. It is as if they think that my birth and my crucifixion were the only two important aspects of my life.
Read the message of Jesus’ life
Can you see that it is a certain disappointment to me that people will not open the book of my life and read the message? Surely, many have read the gospels that describe my life, but I tell you that the true message of my life cannot be understood by reading the outer scriptures with the outer mind. You must read beyond the words, you must read between the lines, and you must understand that even though I came as a teacher, I taught in a very special way. I did not teach primarily by giving an outer teaching, although I did give outer teachings in parables. I came in the tradition of all true spiritual teachers who have come to this planet. And we have all come to teach one message.
The problem on earth is that people have separated themselves from oneness with God. And the way to salvation, the way to enlightenment, the way to a higher state of consciousness – or whatever you want to call it – the way home is the way of overcoming separation and coming into oneness with God. This is the essence of the message taught by all true spiritual teachers throughout the ages.
Yet this message cannot be taught only through words. It can be taught fully only through example. That is why my life shows the progression of a person who started out just like you. We may discuss that I was born with a certain spiritual attainment that perhaps gave me a head start. But you must see beyond the lie that I was born as a fundamentally different being than yourselves. This is a most insidious lie designed by the forces of anti-Christ to destroy my example, to destroy my teaching. It has been reinforced my the mainstream Christian churches for 2,000 years now. And as I said earlier this year, I truly am come to bring forth the judgment of the consciousness that elevates me to being above all other human beings. And that judgment will come into full manifestation on New Year’s Eve.
The turning point on the spiritual path
I desire to give you a teaching that you can contemplate, so you begin to realize that I was not different from you in the sense that I did not have to walk a gradual path in order to attain my Christhood. I did indeed walk a gradual path, and a careful reading of the scriptures and a little bit of reading between the lines will demonstrate that I was not born perfect, that I was not born in the fullness of my Christhood but that I went through many initiations in order to manifest my Christhood.
This is as is has been for many of you, for many students on the spiritual path, whether they have been in this teaching or that organization. There are even many people on earth who do not belong to any spiritual or religious organization or teaching but who are nevertheless walking the path of individual Christhood, leading them back to a sense of oneness with all life, a sense of oneness with God.
So I come to give you a discourse this day for those of you who have been consciously walking the spiritual path for many years, whether it be in this or that teaching or organization. What I am talking about is those who have realized that there is a spiritual side to life and that it is possible for them to raise their consciousness. I see millions of people who have discovered the path in one form or another and who have diligently followed that path, some for several decades. They have put great effort into it, they have studied the path, they have been willing to inconvenience themselves and give rituals of various kinds.
Yet I also see that many of them have reached a plateau, have reached a certain point from where they find it difficult to progress. I even see some who have started a downward spiral without realizing what is happening to them. My Beloved hearts, when you follow the spiritual path, you will come to an essential turning point. And let me explain the two phases of the ideal growth for a spiritual seeker.
When you first discover the path, it is natural that you are motivated by a somewhat self-centered drive to raise your own consciousness, to improve your own outer situation, to find the truth, to find the highest spiritual teaching you can find and to solve various problems, from overcoming disease or addictions to finding the ideal partner. These are natural desires, yet they are not the motivation that can get you to the very top of the spiritual path, because they are geared towards raising up yourself as an individual being that you see as being separated from all life.
For some time – and for some people this might be years or even decades, and for some it will be only months – it is acceptable to walk the spiritual path based on this self-centered motivation. But there will come the essential cut-off point, where, if you continue to walk the path based on a self-centered motivation, you will no longer be walking the true spiritual path that leads you closer to God. You will actually be taking what the Bible calls “The way that seemeth right unto a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14:12). You will be taking what we might call the left-handed path, the path of the black magicians and those who embody the consciousness of anti-Christ.
Raising yourself or raising all life
For what is the consciousness of anti-Christ? It is the consciousness that sees the individual being as separated from God and thereby separated from all life. And suddenly, the individual being begins to think that it can elevate itself above other aspects of life, that it can elevate itself to make itself look more important, more spiritual, more powerful, more wise, even more loving than other parts of life. But this is not done in order to raise up all life but in order to raise up only that individual.
Do you see the essential teaching I am giving you here? There is a point where it is necessary and acceptable that you seek to raise up your individual being, because you must do what is necessary to heal your psychological wounds, to pull yourself away from the mass consciousness and any downward pull created by you in past lifetimes. This can be a task that requires all of your concentration, and therefore it is natural that you are focused on yourself and raising up your individual being and your individual consciousness.
But if you continue seeking to raise up only yourself, it is inevitable that you will switch from the true path to the false path. And I must tell you in all honesty that there are many people in the world who call themselves true spiritual seekers, true Christians, true Buddhists, true Muslims, true Hindus or even true students of the ascended masters, yet they are still following the path based on the desire to raise up their individual beings. And they have not even begun to understand the need to broaden their sense of identity, so they see themselves as one with all life.
Therefore, when you look at any spiritual organization on this planet, you can see those who have been in the organization, sometimes for decades, who have faithfully met all of the outer requirements stated by that organization. Yet they have done it for one reason only: to raise up themselves in comparison to other people, so that they can create and maintain and reinforce the illusion that they are more advanced, more spiritual, more wise, more loving, more giving than other people in that organization or other people in the world.
Some of these people may actually appear to be humble because they have learned to play the game. Some of them, in fact all of them, believe that they are humble, that they are spiritual, that they are loving. Yet my beloved, they are the lawyers that I denounced 2,000 years ago.
The lawyers seek to prevent others from growing
You might recall that I talked about the key of knowledge (Luke 11:52) and that the lawyers had not been willing to enter in, and that they were seeking to stop others from entering in. Well, the key of knowledge is the realization that the true goal of the spiritual path – and the only key to salvation – is to come into oneness with God and oneness with all life. Oneness with God as the God Above and oneness with all life as the God in manifestation here below.
The lawyers have not understood or have not been willing to recognize the key of knowledge, so they have not been willing to enter into oneness. And therefore, they are using their spiritual teaching to raise up themselves in comparison to others. And in so doing they are, in subtle and often unrecognized ways, seeking to prevent other people from entering into oneness. Because they do not want other people to exceed their own level of spiritual growth, for if that were to happen, then they could no longer maintain their illusion that they were more spiritual, more advanced than others.
So you see, my beloved, when you walk the spiritual path from a self-centered perspective, there will come a point where you cannot grow further. Your growth will come to a halt. Most people do not recognize this with their outer minds, but at deeper levels of their being they know they are stuck, they are not growing. Yet they do not realize that the reason they are not growing is that they have not let go of the illusion of separateness, of trying to raise themselves up above others.
So because they are not willing to let go of this illusion, they are attached to the feeling that they are more advanced than others. So you see, the mechanism that comes into play here when the person subconsciously knows that it cannot grow beyond its present level, and when that person is attached to feeling better than others, then the only way to maintain the illusion of being better than others is to prevent others from growing!
Because if others were to continue on the true path of growth, they would quickly exceed the lawyers who have stopped their own growth. Do you see this mechanism? You need to learn to recognize this mechanism. It is good if you can see it in others because truly there are some who have taken this to the extreme, and you will see them in every spiritual organization, where they go around with an aura of superiority, even if it be subtle. So it is good if you can recognize it in those who are so extreme that it is obvious.
But I tell you, you must also learn to recognize it in yourself because this very tendency, that I am talking about, is the essence of the ego. And the ego of every human being is caught in this trap of not wanting to grow, not wanting to elevate all life and therefore wanting to hold back others. And my beloved, when you seek to hold back others, you truly hold back yourself as well. It is inevitable.
As I have stated before, the real message behind my saying to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is that whatever you do to others, you are inevitably doing to yourself at a deeper level of your being. So if you seek to hold back others from growing and coming into oneness with God, it is because you have allowed your ego to stop your own growth at a certain level. It is most important that you uncover the subtle ways in which the ego is trying to stop your growth or trying to stop the growth of others. For if you do not, you will become stuck on the left-handed path.
Raising your motivation
So what is the key to overcoming this problem? Well, it is to realize that if you want to grow beyond a certain point, you must raise your motivation for following the path. You must learn to recognize that your ego is self-centered and that your ego is very good at using a spiritual teaching in order to make it seem like it is such an advanced student. You must learn to unmask this in yourself and then, instead of feeling guilty, instead of coming down on yourself, you simply realize, “Oh but this is just the ego playing its games, and I am more than the ego, and I want to come up higher. I want to really take my spiritual growth to the higher level that Jesus demonstrated.”
And in order to take your growth to that higher level, you must enter into the sense of oneness with all life here below and realize that you need to use what you have internalized in order to help others. Only when you give out what you have received in the time you have followed the spiritual path, will you take your growth to the next level. Because it is only then that you multiply your talents.
Do you see, my beloved, that my parable about the talents is so fruitful and vast and has so many meanings and interpretations. And one of them is that when you are following the spiritual path based on the self-centered motivation, seeking to raise up yourself only, there will come a point where your growth stops and you have now buried your talents in the ground. Only when you raise yourself above that point, will you multiply your talents. And only then can God multiply your own light, your own growth, and take you to that higher level.
Simplicity is not so simple
This is the most essential teaching that you could possibly internalize about the spiritual path. My Beloved hearts, I see so many people who find the teachings I have given. They find the website, they find a book, they start reading here and there. And the people I am talking about whose growth has come to a halt, almost all of them have the same reaction, “Oh but I already know all of this. And I have found even more advanced teachings, that give me a far more advanced intellectual understanding of the path and the spiritual reality. This is too simple for me.” And so they move on.
Yet I must tell you that no other teaching has exposed the very core of the spiritual path with such directness and such simplicity. And what is the effect of the simplicity? Ah my beloved, simplicity is not nearly as simple as you might think. For truly, that which appears simple, appears simple only to the ego, to the intellect, to the outer mind. And it appears simple because the ego and the intellect cannot do what they always seek to do, which is to interpret a teaching in such a way that it makes them seem so advanced because they can understand this teaching.
There is a danger for those who have followed the spiritual path for a long time but have not truly entered into the inner path of oneness. They seek, inevitably, a higher and higher teaching just as an addict seeks a greater and greater fix. And they think that in order to find the higher teaching, it has to be something that is difficult to understand, because the ego and the intellect reason that the more difficult it is to understand, the more advanced it must be. They become almost addicted to seeking spiritual teachings, and they overlook the very pearls that are so simple that the ego cannot manipulate and misinterpret it because there is no room for misinterpretation—if you are willing to look at the teaching and truly listen to what it says.
My Beloved hearts, be not as the lawyers. And if you have been caught in the pattern of being a lawyer, then be willing to look in the mirror and say, “This is not why I have striven for these many years. I have not put forth so much effort on the spiritual path in order to end up as the lawyers who rejected the Living Christ. I must change my motivation, I must raise my motivation, I must come up higher. I must look beyond the ego itself, the self-centeredness, for I will have no part of it anymore. I am disgusted with that selfishness, that self-centeredness, I am disgusted with the ego’s incessant attempts to elevate itself above others. I want to find the true path that Jesus and the Buddha and all other teachers have demonstrated. I want to look at Mother Teresa who lived an entire life of selflessness, I want to look at Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, the Buddha and other great examples of people who lived a life of selfless service. This is what I want and I am willing to be reborn and to rethink every aspect of my approach to the spiritual path in order to really come up to that level of selflessness and service to all life.”
What can God do for others through me?
The true spiritual teachers of this planet have always taught the path of oneness, and an essential aspect of this path is selflessness, where you realize that you are one with all life and therefore the only way to truly raise yourself is to raise all of life. For only then will you have fully grown. My Beloved hearts this is the essential path—selfless service.
Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me—that is how you must feel, and you must then look around you and say, “How can I help raise up other parts of life?” And it might give you some humility to take a look at the many people in the world who are seeking to solve concrete physical problems, be it starvation, poverty, child abuse, disease or any other things. I must tell you, there are many people in the world who are working selflessly to improve the conditions of humankind. And even though they are not following an outer spiritual teaching or belonging to a particular religion, they have internalized the path of selfless service and they are demonstrating it in their lives.
So when you recognize this, you might be humble and ask yourself, “I have followed the spiritual path for some time now. What have I done to elevate the rest of life?” And I am not hereby saying that you need to go out and battle these concrete physical problems, for there are other people whose mission and karma it is to solve these problems. But what I suggest you do is that you say, “How can I use my experience on the spiritual path? How can I use the teachings that I have internalized and the love I have garnered to inspire other people to awaken to the spiritual path, to the spiritual side of life?”
I am not hereby talking about getting people to join a specific church, religion or organization, I am talking in the broadest sense of helping people discover the universal path that transcends outer teachings and organizations. What can God do through you to elevate other people and help them grow spiritually? That is the question to ponder. And then you need to look at your approach to the spiritual path and change it, so that you do not seek to elevate the individual self but seek to elevate all.
Why the first shall be last
If you look at spiritual organizations, you will see that there are many people who have put forth a great effort. They have taken up leadership positions in those organizations. And many of them have been responsible for putting forth the effort that has helped those organizations grow to where they are today. Yet too many of these leaders have become stuck in the consciousness that I am talking about here, of seeking to elevate themselves and their organization, building the subtle sense of superiority that they belong to the most important spiritual organization on the planet—because their organization has the highest teachings on the planet or is sponsored by the ascended masters or whatever outer characteristic they use to build a sense of superiority that truly can spring only from the ego.
You see many who have taken up leadership positions and consider themselves worthy to hold a leadership position in a spiritual organization. Yet I must tell you frankly that nobody who has not stepped onto the path of selfless service is worthy to hold any position of authority or leadership in any spiritual organization whatsoever. That is why I said to my disciples, “He who would be greatest among you, let him be the servant of all” (Matthew 20:27).
What I am asking you to do today is to realize that what I said to my disciples 2,000 years ago was a reflection of humankind’s consciousness at the time. It is now 2,000 years later. We are now on the brink of entering the Aquarian age, and if you want to be a true spiritual seeker in the Aquarian age, you need to raise your consciousness beyond what it was in the past. And you need to raise your consciousness beyond the entire level of consciousness that compares itself to others.
Do you see that my disciples, even though they had followed me for three years – and had the opportunity to internalize my teachings through my example by being in my Presence – they had not truly internalized my message. They were fighting amongst themselves about who would be the leader among them when I passed from the screen of life. Can you see that in so doing they were stuck in the duality consciousness of comparing, of thinking that one person was more important than others, that one position in a spiritual movement is more important than others. And thus, by attaining this position, you have elevated yourself above others and now your ego can feel safe that it must be saved when you hold such a high position. Can you see that this is simply the consciousness of duality?
And therefore, I tell you that in the Aquarian age this state of consciousness will not be tolerated. We will, as long as we have messengers who are able to receive our word in a pure form, mercilessly expose those who come to spiritual organizations with this state of consciousness.
The requirement is clear. You must be committed to overcoming the ego. You must be committed to walking the path of selfless service. For truly, as Archangel Michael has said, it is not the outer results you achieve that are the most important to us. What is most important to us is the sense of inner oneness with each other, with the ascended masters and with God within you. This is what matters to us, because we desire to create spiritual movements that will demonstrate the path of selfless service, as it has not been demonstrated for the past 2,000 years and beyond. This is our commitment from Above and we are looking for those who will make that same commitment here below.
The real goal is oneness
Let me state something very, very clearly. In many spiritual organizations too many students have become trapped in thinking that because their organization had this or that unique feature, it had to be the most important organization on the planet, it was the essential organization for saving the world and bringing in the Golden Age of Aquarius. And therefore, the organization itself became a goal instead of a means to an end.
Suddenly people started thinking that the most important thing was to make the organization grow and to get the teachings out no matter how they did so. People began thinking that they did not have to internalize the teachings but that it was more important to focus on outer achievements, giving so and so many decrees, putting on so and so many lectures, selling so and so many books. My Beloved hearts, this is not important in the Aquarian age! It is not the outer results we look for.
We do not care how many members you attract, how many books you sell, how many people you reach, how many people you convert, how much money you have, how much property you can buy. We do not care about these outer things, for we would rather have a few people who would come into total oneness with each other and total oneness with the ascended masters. For I will tell you that if even a small number of you in embodiment would come into that oneness, then through your oneness we could save the world.
I will not tell you how big that number is, but I will tell you that compared to the size of many spiritual and religious organizations in the world today, it is a very small number. In a sense we might say that the number is one. For if we have a number of people who have come into oneness, then we have the oneness of God in manifestation on earth. And the oneness of God is always a majority, is always the decisive force that can solve any problem. For as I said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” With the consciousness of separation, where people seek to elevate themselves rather than elevating all life, it is impossible to solve the many problems you see in the world. But when people come into the consciousness of oneness, the power of God through them can solve all of the problems you see in the world.
Thus, this is what we desire to see for you. We applaud you, those of you who have already demonstrated that you are willing to come into oneness and use this teaching as a tool to expand your oneness. We see you around the world, many of you sitting individually, but you come together in other ways through the means of communication here below, or you come together in the spiritual realm, in the spiritual sense, through a sense of oneness that transcends all physical means of communication.
We applaud those of you who have started walking that path of oneness. And I hope that my discourse today will clarify for you what the path is really all about. I even hope against hope that my discourse will reach some of the lawyers who are stuck on the path of separation and awaken them and make them realize that no matter what they have done in the past, they can transcend that state of consciousness and they can be welcomed into oneness—as they are willing to raise their motivation and their approach.
So my beloved hearts, I now bless the communion and I hope you will partake of this communion with a greater sense of why Christ gave his body and blood so that you might absorb it, and through absorbing the consciousness of Christ, come into oneness with Christ, oneness with God and oneness with God in each other and in all life. Thus I, Jesus Christ, charge this communion with the Spirit of Oneness that I AM, with the Spirit of Oneness with which I have been one for now 2,000 years, with the Spirit of Oneness with which every ascended master has become one and remains one. Thus, I say, “It is done. It is finished!”
Copyright © 2005 by Kim Michaels
http://www.ascendedmasterlight.com/ascended-master-light/date/20-2005/86-it-is-time-to-understand-my-true-message-of-oneness
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