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Virtues of Magnificent Confusion

Published 27.04.2018 | By Йосиф

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

Published 24.04.2018 | By Йосиф

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
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