TOPICS: Sense of having no purpose is selfishness – give your life to serve others – being self-centered makes you vulnerable to dark forces – depression is caused by selfishness – find a cause that is more important than remaining in your own misery – the surest cure for depression – only a life of selfishness is not worth living – the world will not change until you change yourself – reach out to give – hell is a state of consciousness – change your vision and you will change your life – making the switch –
Question: Dear Jesus: After so many awful events in my life, I feel utterly alone. I have no one to confide in, to share my heart and lifestream with. This world is extremely depressing to me. People make me sick and so does all of chaos that happens on a daily basis. Some would disagree, but I believe that if there truly is a hell, then this place is it. All that I see are people who care only about themselves and not other people. I see greed. I don’t see any caring or love. I don’t feel those two things either. It seems like all people care about is money, power and themselves. I don’t care about my career. I need money to survive in this world, but it isn’t the most important factor in my life. I could care less about how powerful I am. All that I wish to see is people caring about other people. Not someone firing another person several weeks before Christmas, not someone driving by and ignoring a person who is broken down in the rain. I have hope, but it’s wearing out fast.
My question today is, What is the point of living when you have nothing to live for?
Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:
My friend, I do not want to seem insensitive to your situation or to the suffering of so many other people who have experienced difficulties in their lives and therefore feel like you do. I feel great compassion for you and so many other people who have lost hope. Yet I am a spiritual teacher, and I cannot help you by making you feel that it is understandable, and therefore supposedly acceptable, that you remain depressed. I can help you only by giving you a teaching that can take you out of your current state of consciousness—if you are willing to heed my words. So allow me to point out that the central problem in your letter is selfishness.
Would you like to know what I consider the ultimate form of selfishness? It is suicide. I know this will surprise many, but allow me to explain. Consider one of my statements that has baffled many:
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13)
What does it mean to lay down your life for another? It doesn’t necessarily mean that you lose your physical life, although it can be interpreted that way. The higher spiritual meaning of my statement is that you lay down your life to serve others and help make this world a better place. In other words, you set aside any selfish or self-centered desires in order to help other people who are worse off than you are.
I know that many people who are depressed or are contemplating suicide feel as if no one could be worse off than they are. However, this is an illusion, and it is an illusion reinforced by dark forces. Yet what makes a lifestream vulnerable to this illusion is that the lifestream has become too self-centered. The lifestream is therefore blind to the fact that there is always someone who is worse off than you are. This refusal to see that there is always someone you can help is the ultimate selfishness.
So when a person commits suicide, that person is refusing to acknowledge that there are those less fortunate. The person is unwilling to set aside his or her self-centered feelings of despair and reach out to help others. So the person completely refuses to “lay down his life for a friend” and instead takes the life that is given by God as an opportunity to make the world a better place. This is the ultimate form of selfishness.
Depression, especially the feeling that life is not worth living or that you have nothing to live for, is a close second when it comes to selfishness. I know I have stated elsewhere that dark forces always play a big role in depression. Yet I will now give the next phase of my progressive revelation on depression. And what makes a lifestream vulnerable to depression in the first place is that the lifestream has allowed itself to become far too self-centered. This causes the lifestream to enter a negative, self-reinforcing spiral that will overpower the lifestream until it makes a determined effort to change the equation by looking beyond itself. Therefore, the surest cure for depression is to set aside your personal misery in order to help those less fortunate. And there are always some who are less fortunate than you.
If you are reading this, you can obviously read, yet millions of people – even in the richest countries – cannot read and millions of children grow up with no hope of getting an education. If you are reading this on a computer, you obviously have or have access to a computer. Many people are not that fortunate.
How can I say there is always someone who is worse off than you are? No young children commit suicide or go around stating they are depressed. Yet millions – by some estimates a billion – children grow up under the most horrible conditions imaginable and have no hope for a better future. Why have they no hope? Because too many adults in the richest and most privileged nations of the world are so busy feeling depressed – feeling like they have nothing to live for – that they don’t have attention left over to see that they are in a position to help these children who cannot help themselves.
Imagine what would happen if all depressed people decided to look beyond their own situation and set aside their own – what they consider worthless – lives in order to help someone else. The world would literally change in the blink of an eye, yet even one person can make a difference. If you think your life is not worth living for your own sake, then open your eyes and see that it is worth living for the sake of someone else. All it takes to change the world is that some people lay down their lives for those who cannot defend themselves.
So here is my surest and quickest cure for depression. Wake up and realize that there are thousands of worthy causes in this world that are simply waiting for someone – anyone with any skill level – to lay down their lives to make the world a better place. There is no one in the rich and privileged nations who cannot find a cause to work for. And I can assure you that once you start working for a cause, you will quickly forget your sense of depression. You will begin to feel that you are making a difference, and once you realize that you have done something for someone else – not out of selfishness but for the sake of doing good – you will never again feel like life is not worth living. The only life that is not worth living is a life lived in complete selfishness. So snap out of that selfishness and find a cause. If you want my specific advice, use the tools on the Toolbox website to connect to me in your heart.
You might work to improve the physical conditions in which people live through anything from humanitarian organizations to politics, science or the media. Or you might help improve people’s spiritual lives by working to enlighten them to the path to Christhood. You might even help me spread my true teachings in this age. Or you might begin right in your own living room by giving the many invocations we have released for improving world conditions. Just take your pick and consider how other people have made a difference. Mother Teresa being a prime example, yet each one of the many beautiful lifestreams who supported Mother Teresa’s mission also made a difference as do the many other people who work for worthy causes.
Let me point out to you that we have given the teaching that the universe is a mirror. What you send out, the universe will mirror back to you. You know that when you are looking at yourself in a mirror, there is only one way to get the image in the mirror to smile at you. That’s right, you have to smile at the mirror. Yet when people become too self-centered, they take the opposite approach. They sit in front of the cosmic mirror, thinking that when the mirror smiles at them, they will smile at the mirror. Will this approach make the world a better place? Will it improve your own life? Obviously not, so stop waiting for some miracle to improve the world. Snap out of the passive approach to life that makes you feel like a victim. Instead, take an active approach. Smile at someone less fortunate than yourself and I guarantee you that your lifestream will begin to smile.
Please understand that I am not trying to single out one person. I am trying to use the above letter as an example of how easy it is for people to become trapped in taking a passive approach to life. So allow me to comment on this letter.
You say you feel alone, but there can be only one reason. You have not made an effort to reach out to those less fortunate than yourself. There are so many people who would gladly receive any help you could give, and once you get started helping others, you will never feel alone. You will quickly find others who are seeking to make the world a better place, people with whom you can share your heart and lifestream. Yet remember that in order to get the image in the mirror to smile, you have to smile yourself. And don’t reach out in order to receive something back because that only binds you even more to the treadmill of selfishness. Reach out to give!
You say that people make you sick, and this reveals that you see yourself as a victim, and thus you are taking a passive approach to life. You think other people or the world can make you feel anything. Yet the reality is that you have the potential to take command over your thoughts and feelings, and it is your responsibility to do so. Our website is filled with practical methods that can help you do this. Start by following my advice concerning how to combat a lifelong addiction. Truly, a prolonged depression is a form of addiction.
You say this place is Hell, but Hell is a state of consciousness. I said that the kingdom of God is within you because the kingdom of God is a state of consciousness, namely Christ consciousness. So heaven is where you find the Christ consciousness and create heaven. Likewise, Hell is where you allow yourself to be sucked into the negative vortex of selfishness. Hell is a place created by the lifestreams who are the most selfish lifestreams in the entire universe. Please don’t join them. Join me in the kingdom of heaven. Use my tools to get there.
You say that all you see are people who care only about themselves. Yet I see millions of people who work every day to make the world a better place by fighting for worthy causes. And I see that together all of these people are making a difference and slowly – but surely – they are lifting this planet out of the darkness and into the light. The universe is a mirror. What you see in the world is what you get. What you project into the cosmic mirror, the universe reflects back to you. So change your vision and you will change your life.
You say, “All that I wish to see is people caring about other people.” Who is going to start caring? Are you going to wait for someone else to make the first move and when you see them caring you will start showing that you care? Are you going to sit in front of the mirror and wait for it to smile at you? Or are you going to decide that you simply don’t have time to feel depressed, so you are going to go out and do something for someone else?
You might not think so, but you are so very close to changing your life for the better. All it takes is the flip of a switch inside your mind. You flip it from off to on and turn on the light. I invite you to make the decision right now to lay down your sense of hopelessness, to set aside your self-centered feelings, and join the ranks of those who are positively making a difference by taking a positive approach to life. I promise you that if you smile at the cosmic mirror, the image in the mirror will smile back at you. In fact, one day you will see my image smiling back at you. I am looking forward to that day! Be there with me!
Copyright © 2004 by Kim Michaels