TOPICS: Avoid dualistic extremes of fear or passivity – refusal to discern – mature people can deal with those who are negative – do not allow others to pull you down – some negative people are beyond human help – some can be helped through love – rise above human love – no sympathy for dark forces – pride to think you can save others – recognizing non-constructive reactions – use intuition instead of intellect – recognize your attachments – attachment to negative people opens you to dark forces – challenging love – help people make real choices – avoid argumentation – three reasons people are trapped in negative spirals – kindness does not work with dark spirits – moving on –
Question 1: Hello Jesus- I am blessed to be able to contact you. Thank you. My question is about having to avoid ‘evil’ spirits (unclean spirits that can enter us if we do not fill ourselves with your spirit). It is written in the website that we must work on keeping our energy positive and avoid negative spirits that can drag us down. I see such people here in my office – filled with negativity, bad vibrations – should I avoid them? Or do I reach out to them and try and love them? maybe they are filled with negativity because they have never been loved? or are they evil spirits? how do I know the difference? I feel they are the ones who have been hurt and that I should reach out and love and help them to be healed.
Question 2: I try not to associate myself with people who have habits that I do not support, like excessive drinking, swearing etc. However I found that I wasn’t hanging out with a lot of people and was more likely to sit at home feeling sorry for myself. So is it better for me to protect myself and associate with such people or associate myself only with people who are spiritually minded?
Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:
These are very important questions, and they are important for several reasons. One of the recurring themes on this website is that human beings have descended into a state of consciousness in which they are trapped in a dualistic view of the world. When you consider the topic of negative people and evil spirits with the dualistic mind, you tend to gravitate towards one of two extremes:
- One extreme is the fear-based approach, causing you to feel that you should do everything possible to avoid people who are negative or who might possibly be influenced by evil spirits. This will inevitably cause you to become very judgmental, because you have to set up a standard for determining who is negative and who is not. That standard will inevitably be an expression of your fears and of your belief system. That is why you see so many mainstream Christians who become extremely judgmental toward those who do not live according to the ideal or standard defined by their particular church.
- The opposite extreme is that you reason you simply have to love everyone or love everyone the same way. This means that you do not judge according to a human standard. Yet it also means that you do not discern according to a divine standard. This can easily cause you to open yourself up to people or forces that want to manipulate you in order to steal your spiritual light. Such forces are ultimately a bottomless pit and no amount of love will ever fill them up. So by giving them your love and light, you are simply wasting that light by casting your pearls before swine. Unfortunately, I see many people in the New Age movement who are taking this approach.
If you step back and look at both of these approaches, you will see that they spring from the same state of consciousness, namely a refusal to discern what is of God and what is not of God. Many Christians refuse to do this by clinging to outer doctrines. They think they don’t have to use their personal discernment because they just need to mechanically follow the doctrines and rules defined by their church. This is black-and-white thinking. Many New Age people also refuse to use their personal discernment because they think they should indiscriminately act loving toward everyone. This is gray thinking.
As I attempt to explain throughout this website, there is an alternative to going into any of these extremes. That alternative is to reach for the mind of Christ, which allows you to rise above the dualistic state of consciousness. An important aspect of the Christ mind is the ability to discern what is of God and what is not of God. When you do take the Christ perspective, you realize that it is impossible to give a general answer to the questions asked above. There are only individual answers because every human being is a unique individual.
My point being that you need to make a personal determination as to how and to what extent you will interact with negative people. Let me give you a few thoughts that might help you find your personal balance.
Thought 1.
The basic question of how to deal with negative people can be broken down into the following two questions:
- Should I avoid negative people?
- Should I give them love and thereby possibly help them overcome their negativity?
The answer to the first question depends mainly on who you are, or rather your level of spiritual maturity. If you have invoked a high degree of spiritual protection and you feel you can avoid taking in people’s negativity, then you don’t need to avoid negative people. If you have attained a clear sense of who you are and a clear sense of your self-worth, you can interact with negative people without having them affect your sense of identity and self-worth. If you have attained a high degree of Christ discernment, you can interact with negative people without falling prey to their subtle attempts to drag you into their negative spirals and control you.
So one might say that for each person there is a balance to be found. Your level of protection, self-worth and Christ discernment will determine what level of negative people you can interact with without being dragged down with them. And the bottom line here is that if you are to pull somebody else up, you simply cannot allow them to pull you down.
Concerning the second question, this depends largely on the other people. Some people have become so enveloped in negative energies or dark spirits that they cannot be helped by any human being. Only the power of the Holy Spirit has any chance of pulling these people out of their negativity, yet even the power of the Holy Spirit cannot work against people’s free will. So there truly are some people that you should not attempt to help unless you have a momentum on being an open door for the power of God to work through you. Such people cannot be helped by any amount of human love, kindness or sympathy. They will simply take your light and immediately misuse it to maintain or reinforce their negativity.
Yet it is also true that there are many people who have been emotionally hurt, and therefore they have become enveloped in a negative spiral. Such people can be helped by showing them love, although true Christ love is far more effective than any amount of human love.
You now see the basic balance that must be found. Your level of spiritual maturity determines what level of negative people you can deal with without being pulled down. Yet you also need to realize that there are some people who cannot be pulled up until they are willing to change their approach to life. For more on this, see my discourse on the stages of spiritual development.
Thought 2.
If you are interacting with negative persons in the hope of helping to pull them out of their negativity, you need to be able to withstand their attempts to pull you down. Many negative people will unconsciously try to pull everyone else down to their level. If you allow yourself to be pulled down, you have not helped that person, and you have created problems for yourself.
This is not an act of true Christ love. It might be an act of naive human love, but I encourage you to rise above that human love. There are simply too many people and forces in this world who will take advantage of human love and human sympathy. I can assure you that many true spiritual seekers have been fooled into allowing themselves to be dragged down out of a misguided sympathy for negative people, dark forces or even sympathy for the devil.
There is absolutely no reason to feel sympathy for dark forces or people who have allowed themselves to be possessed by such dark forces. You need to respect the Law of Free Will and accept that such people have a right to create a negative spiral around themselves. Yet you also need to respect your own free will and your right to stay out of their negative spirals. As a spiritual seeker, you have a right to build a positive spiral in your own life and to defended it against anyone or any force that seeks to pull you into a negative spiral.
Too many spiritual seekers have allowed themselves to feel – often through camouflaged pride – that they can change or save another person. Some people have spent a lifetime seeking to save another person, be it a spouse, friend or family member, only to realize that you cannot help those who are not willing to help themselves.
Thought 3.
I know I have thrown concepts at you that can seem utterly confusing. How do you know when to be loving and when not to be loving? Here is my suggestion. Avoid making any judgments about this with your outer mind. Observe your reactions to other people, and be on the lookout for the following reactions:
- Sometimes you will feel a strong urge to do something for another person, but if you take a closer look, you will see that this urge comes from your emotional body. Resist that urge.
- At other times you will meet a person, and your first impression is to avoid that person. Then your intellect starts arguing back and forth, and pretty soon you reason that it is Okay to interact with the person after all. Avoid falling into this trap of intellectualizing away your intuitive insights and first impressions.
I encourage you to strive for balance in all aspects of your life. In other words, avoid falling into any of the two extremes I described above. The way to do this is to follow your intuition instead of intellect and emotions. I give several techniques on the toolbox website for increasing your contact with your Christ self so that you can get more accurate intuitive insights. It is also important to maintain a strong spiritual protection because this will help you interact with negative people without being pulled down by their negativity.
You will probably realize that you already have a strong sense of intuition. If you did not, you simply would not have been open to the teachings on this website. So the bottom line here is to avoid having your emotional body or your mental body control your interactions with other people. Strive to rise above it and allow your Christ self to direct you concerning which people you should interact with and what form the interaction should take. If you always follow your intuition, you will never go completely wrong.
There will be cases where you try to help somebody and after a time you have to admit that your efforts did not bear fruit. However, this does not mean that you were wrong in trying. It simply means that no matter what you do, you cannot override their free will. Some people end up deciding that they will not be pulled out of their negativity. I can assure you that I know this as a spiritual teacher who for a very long time has been trying to help human beings rise above their own self-created negative spirals.
Thought 4.
When you interact with someone else from a consciousness of human sympathy or human love, you will notice that you are attached to the outcome of the interaction. So whenever you feel such an attachment, you need to be alert and realize that you have fallen below the level of Christ love. You then need to let go of the attachment by rising above it. It is non-constructive for spiritual seekers to become emotionally attached to negative people. This is an open invitation for dark forces to use such people to pull you away from your spiritual path.
You can use your emotional attachments to discover your personal vulnerabilities to dark forces. You can then use the tools on the toolbox website, or other appropriate tools, for healing your psychology to overcome these attachments and make faster progress on your path.
My point is that when you interact with negative people, it is extremely important to remain non-attached to them or their reactions to you. The more non-attached you can remain, the more you can become an instrument for the light and the love of God to help such people heal their emotional wounds and rise above negativity. The more you become attached, the more vulnerable you will become to being pulled down by their negativity, whereby you will only reinforce their negative outlook on life and make them even more anchored in a negative spiral.
What I am saying here is that it is human love that makes you feel attached, and this love will not pull people out of negativity. Only the perfect love that casts out all fear can do this, and when you are centered in divine love, you are non-attached. Divine love is unconditional, meaning that you will love others unconditionally. When you love others unconditionally, you are not attached to a specific reaction to your love, and therefore you cannot be pulled down by others.
Thought 5.
It is important to consider the fact that divine love is not the same as what most people see as love. Many people have the impression that if you are loving, you should always be soft, gentle and kind. This simply is not true. If someone has blinders on and is walking toward a cliff, it is not enough to gently ask the person to stop. You might have to yell, and if he still will not listen, you might have to rip the blinders from his eyes and point to the abyss.
This is what you saw me do numerous times when I challenged people 2,000 years ago. When I challenged the scribes, the Pharisees, the temple priest, the money changers and the lawyers, I was very firm and direct. Many people thought I was angry and that such behavior was not appropriate for the Messiah or a prophet. Yet, in reality, I was expressing the masculine aspect of divine love, which is very firm in not wanting someone to destroy themselves.
God’s love will not prevent you from destroying yourself if you really insist on doing so. Yet God’s love wants to make sure that before you make a self-destructive choice, you know exactly what you are doing and what the consequences are. In other words, God’s love will not let anyone destroy themselves without knowing what they are doing. If they do know and still insist on remaining in their negative spirals, then God will step back—as God’s representative did in the Garden of Eden.
Any true spiritual teacher will seek to enlighten people as to their options and the consequences of those options. And then the teacher will allow people to make their choices. If people choose to go against the advice of the teacher, then the consequences of their actions will be their new teacher.
My point is that when you interact with negative people, it can be necessary and appropriate to be very direct and firm in challenging their negative outlook on life. If you are not prepared to do this, it might be better for you to avoid such people and focus on building your contact with your Christ self. When you attain that contact, you can then allow your Christ self to challenge people’s negative beliefs through you.
In other words, no good can come from you using your human mind to challenge people’s beliefs. You should always let your Christ self work through you to accomplish this task. Do not allow yourself to become trapped in a spiral of human argumentation and conflict. Simply allow your Christ self to speak through you and state the truth. Then remain non-attached and allow people to respond to that truth as they see fit. If they consistently reject truth, then withdraw and allow them to reap the consequences of their free-will choices.
Thought 6.
Be aware that there are three basic reasons why people are trapped in negative spirals. One is ignorance, the second is habits and old momentums and the third is dark spirits. It is possible to help people overcome the first two problems by being gentle. You can seek to give them understanding and keep showing them kindness in order to demonstrate that there is a better way to live than by being trapped in negative spirals.
However, kindness will not work for people who are possessed by dark spirits. The only way to help such people is to help them become free of the dark spirits. Unfortunately, such people often are not open to being enlightened about their condition. Not many people in today’s world will respond positively if you tell them they are possessed by dark spirits. So what can you do?
Unless you have attained a high degree of Christhood, you should avoid dealing directly with dark spirits of any kind. They are likely to either steal your energy or direct negative energy or thoughts at you. So you can ask Archangel Michael to bind such spirits and cut the people free to make their own decisions without being overwhelmed by the dark spirits. The most efficient tool for this purpose is Archangel Michael’s Rosary. By giving this rosary for negative people for some time, you can cut them free from dark spirits, and this can make them more open to other approaches.
Yet be aware that no spiritual ritual will violate people’s free will. If people are not willing to let go of the dark spirits, Archangel Michael cannot take them. So there might come a point where you have to let these people go their ways and spend your energy and attention on people who are willing to grow. Allow your Christ self to show you when it is time to move on.
Copyright © 2004 by Kim Michaels