TOPICS: Suffering is not necessary if you let go – attachments cause suffering – why it is difficult to see what you cannot see – surrender expectations – the ego builds unrealistic expectations – suffering caused by rebelling against conditions in this world – suffering will not buy forgiveness of sin – finding the joyous path –
Question: When the masters say that suffering is not necessary, but they also say that we shouldn’t expect it to be easy—isn’t there a contradiction there?
Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:
There can only be contradictions in the duality consciousness. And the duality consciousness can interpret any statement to be contradictory to another statement. That is what the linear mind will do and has always done.
Suffering is not necessary because suffering comes from attachment. What makes it difficult to walk the path is your attachments. So in a sense you could – if you were willing to let go of your attachments – walk the path without any suffering whatsoever.
When we say the path is not easy and that you should not expect it to be easy, it is because we are practical realists who realize – from our own experience – that it is almost impossible to let go of everything at once. And therefore, we all had to follow a gradual path. We all had to walk step by step and give up certain limitations one at a time, so as to preserve some sense of continuity.
Yet, the difficulties on the path come from your inability – or in some case unwillingness – to see what you need to see in order to let go of a particular illusion. And we know – again from our own experience – that it is difficult to see what you cannot see. This is no different for many of you than it was for myself when I was in embodiment. When you are in embodiment, you are inside your current mental box. And it is always difficult to look at your own situation from outside that box. That, incidentally, is why you need guidance from spiritual teachers, from other people and from spiritual teachings.
Yet you can literally come to a state of surrender, where even though there are difficult phases of your path, they do not cause you suffering. In other words, the physical octave, the material realm, is dense. It is not easy to walk the spiritual path in the density of the collective consciousness. Yet, when you reach a certain state of surrender, the difficulties you encounter will not cause you suffering. And the reason is that you have done what Mother Mary spoke about yesterday—you have surrendered your expectations, you have surrendered your conditions.
There are many people who find the spiritual path and they realize that in order to walk the path they have to make what they see as sacrifices. Because they have to give up some of their old lifestyle, some of the activities in which the world indulges, such as alcohol, drugs, material pursuits and many other things that take you away from the spiritual path.
And so people get enthusiastic and they are willing to give up some of these activities. But they still feel that they have made a sacrifice in doing so. And so their egos trick them into building the subtle expectation that when they have sacrificed for the path or sacrificed for God, then after that point everything should be easy. And God should simply pave the way for them so that they do not encounter any more challenges or difficulties.
This, of course, is the ego trying to trick people into building an unrealistic expectation that is guaranteed to cause disappointment, so that they become discouraged and stop walking the path. Or even get angry, as some people do, feeling that they were given empty promises by a particular organization or teacher. And therefore, their egos trick them into abandoning the path.
When you give up your conditions, you have no expectations of what the path should be like. And therefore, how can anything that occurs to you cause you suffering. For you see, suffering is caused by a psychological condition that causes you to emotionally and mentally rebel against what you are experiencing in the physical world.
You will see that many people who have encountered great physical difficulties have come to a state of surrender and peace, where they have accepted the condition and accepted that they can – no matter how difficult the outer conditions are – make the best of it and still have a joyful life. Look at some of the people who have physical handicaps, such as sitting in a wheelchair. Many of the people who experience this become depressed, but there are a few who rise above it and become joyful and are at peace with the situation, making the best of it.
So you see that suffering is not caused by the outer condition but by the inner psychological condition of rebelling against the outer physical condition. And that is why, as we have attempted to explain over these last days – both Patrick and Mary and Saint Germain – that when you are on the spiritual path, you would do well to give up your outer conditions and expectations of what the path should be like. For you should know, as spiritual people, that the physical realm is dense, that the collective consciousness is dense. And thus, you should not expect it to be easy and trouble-free to walk the path.
Yet, you certainly should not either go into the opposite extreme of thinking that in order to be spiritual, you have to suffer—and walk up a mountain barefoot because somehow that pays for your sins because God is pleased the more you suffer. So the more you suffer the more sins he will forgive.
Again, there is the Middle Way. And when you find the Middle Way, you can overcome all difficulties and maintain the joy. And when you decide to meet all difficulties with joy and you are willing to transcend, then the difficulties are not so difficult. They are simply events in the physical realm. And you move beyond them because you have a clear vision of your goal.
You know where you want to go and it is not a matter of thinking that you can only go there if there are no obstacles. You know there will be obstacles and that it is simply a matter of overcoming them, moving beyond them, rising above them, walking right through them—so that you find the joyous path that is independent of the outer conditions because your joy is full.
Copyright © 2007 by Kim Michaels