TOPICS: Do not be concerned about the free will of beings in other spectra – two types of lower spirits – subconscious and conscious will – how subconscious beliefs neutralize spiritual protection – impure intentions – the problem of criticism – not all that is intense is light – no infallible defense – why dark spirits are allowed to tempt us – people seek justification; spirits deliver – hearing what you want to hear – which spirits will you listen to? – how you move to higher levels of consciousness – dangerous illusion to think you can help lower spirits – the masters don’t tell you what to do – a frame of reference for making better choices – truly testing the spirits –
Question: Dear Jesus, I have to admit there is an aspect of understanding free will that confuses me. I understand that we are given free will and we are never to violate another being’s free will. I also understand that God will not violate free will. However, I am trying to understand how this works in conjunction with spiritual protection. I realize that lower spirits (those not in the spiritual realm) have to steal our light to survive, and that by paying attention to them we are allowing them to steal our light. I have read everything Jesus answered on channeling and psychics, but I am still confused as to how much spiritual protection we can have from lower spirits without God violating their free will. I always thought that if we did enough rosaries, invocations, and other protective measures and prayers, and our intent was pure, we could ask God to only receive communication from those spirits that are of God, otherwise in the spiritual realm. But I have discovered that other spirits still come through, even with all those requests for protection. Is Archangel Michael not allowed to bind these spirits to keep them from communicating with us when we ask, or does he only bind those who intend to harm us in a more serious way than just stealing our light. Please, Jesus, help clarify the confusion surrounding this issue. I am a serious student of the spiritual path and I am trying to avoid major mis-steps along the way.
Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels: (June 29, 2011)
Let me comment on the separate issues raised here.
Issue 1:
Does the fact that you invoke spiritual protection mean you could be violating the free will of dark beings in a lower realm?
As a human being, you are in a certain frequency spectrum. You need to be concerned about not violating the free will of other beings in your own frequency spectrum. But you need not be concerned about violating the free will of beings who are in a higher or lower frequency spectrum.
In fact, you cannot violate the free will of beings in a higher or lower realm. You cannot physically hurt an ascended master, and because we have overcome the ego and the duality consciousness, you cannot fool or manipulate us either. Likewise, you cannot physically hurt lower spirits, and given how self-centered they are, they will not listen to anything you say, so you cannot fool or manipulate them. Their minds are closed to you, because even though they might be in a lower frequency spectrum, they actually believe they are superior to you.
There are basically two types of lower spirits:
- One is beings who never had free will but were created by other beings misusing their free will. These are what we have called beasts or entities. Because such beings were never created out of God’s Being, they cannot have free will and they can never be raised up or redeemed. They can only be bound and their energies transformed into their original purity.
- Another type is beings who did start out having free will. By systematically abusing the free will of others, they gradually fell into such a low state of consciousness that they do not meet the requirements for embodying on earth. Such beings, often called demons, can theoretically be redeemed if they come to recognize that they do have the Light or Being of God within them. Yet they will not do this as long as they are trapped in a momentum of abusing people. Calling for them to be bound and stripped of their stolen energy can sometimes help them decide to change. Yet you need to keep in mind that you are not in any way responsible for beings in a lower realm.
Issue 2:
How is it possible that you can invoke spiritual protection and still feel the presence of lower spirits?
Because the ascended masters will always respect your free will, even as lower spirits never do. However, in order to understand this, you have to realize that there is a difference between your conscious will and your subconscious will. For many people – even many spiritual seekers – there is a vast difference between the two. In fact, your subconscious will can easily override or negate your conscious will.
As an example, let us say we have a person who is calling for protection from Archangel Michael. As the call compels the answer, this will indeed place a shield of high-frequency energy around your energy field, but this does not work in a mechanical way. It is not that making calls to Archangel Michael generates a shield that will protect you from any lower spirit.
The shield you invoke is created and upheld by Archangel Michael’s angels, meaning it is upheld by conscious beings with intelligence. Thus, the angels generating your protective shield will make a distinction that you often cannot make with your conscious mind.
Let us say you are aware that there are dark forces of anger, and you have made a firm decision with your conscious mind to not become angry. Yet in your subconscious mind, you have a belief that if people do certain things to you, then anger is justified. Your calls will now create a shield that protects you from the spirits that promote the kind of anger you have decided to stop. Yet you will still be open to spirits who promote the kind of anger you think is justified or unavoidable. You can now see a person who is invoking spiritual protection and who is indeed protected against the majority of the anger spirits. Yet if a particular situation comes up, then the person will think anger is justified, and he or she will then have no protection against that type of spirits.
There are, obviously, innumerable variations of the difference between conscious and subconscious beliefs. For example, some spiritual people have indeed overcome all beliefs that lead to anger, so they are protected from anger spirits. Yet they might not have overcome fear, or pride or the desire to criticize, so they are not protected against those spirits.
At a certain level of the spiritual path, it is indeed the major challenge to uncover the subconscious beliefs and align them with your conscious will. This cannot be done by making calls for protection, as it requires a willingness to take responsibility for your own mind and a willingness to engage in – sometimes painful – self-examination.
Issue 3:
If you do protection, have pure intentions and ask God to only receive communication from higher spirits, why can you still get communication from lower spirits?
Again, the cause is that there is a difference between your conscious and subconscious vision and will. What does it mean to have pure intentions? You can easily think you have only pure intentions, but in your subconscious mind you have intentions that are not pure. This can indeed be very subtle, and an impure intention can often be camouflaged as a pure intention.
Let me give an example. In most religious and spiritual movements, you find people who are very critical and judgmental towards others. You will recall that 2,000 years ago, I said: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” So this problem has always existed. The psychological mechanism is that there is a certain stage of the spiritual path, where you have awakened to the need to reform your actions, and you have recognized that you have not always been perfect. For example, some Christian churches talk about recognizing that you are a sinner and that you need redemption.
This is a necessary step on the spiritual path, but it can easily become a blind alley. It represents a somewhat precarious period, in which a person has recognized its own imperfection and thus has a self-esteem issue. It now becomes very easy for the ego and lower spirits to make people accept the subconscious belief that if only they follow certain outer rules, then they will be saved. And this almost inevitably causes people to become critical and judgmental towards those who are not members of their church or do not follow the rules. Their egos think they can elevate themselves by putting down others.
Once this happens, people actually have a subconscious belief that they are not being judgmental, for they are simply helping to reform other people for their own good. This is the basis for the old saying: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” There are innumerable versions of people believing that it is necessary or justified that they criticize or expose other people—all for some greater good.
Yet when you truly understand and accept free will, you see that it is never justified or necessary to judge, criticize or expose others. You have a right to state what you believe, but you do not have a right to tell other people to believe what you believe. And at higher levels of the path, you realize you can only truly help others through your example, not by forcefully seeking to reform them.
So my point is that far too many religious and spiritual people have been fooled by their egos into thinking that they will further their own salvation or spiritual growth by focusing their attention on others (instead of looking at the beam in your own eye). These are – obviously – people who have not been willing to take responsibility for themselves. And once you believe – consciously or subconsciously – that you can be saved without taking responsibility for yourself, you will be unprotected from the myriad of spirits who affirm this belief.
No amount of spiritual protection will seal you from these spirits, because you are subconsciously saying to Archangel Michael: “Protect me from all spirits that I see as lower, but not from the ones that tell me what I believe is true.” And what can Archangel Michael and his angels do but respect your free will?
This also applies to the belief among some ascended master students that when you feel the presence of any kind of spirit, you should say: “In the name of Jesus Christ, show forth your light or be gone!” And if you then get a sense of light, then it is a genuine spirit. As you can see, your subconscious beliefs can also neutralize this call. What do you see as light? Well, that depends on your personal discernment, and that depends on both your conscious and subconscious beliefs.
For example, many ascended master students subconsciously long to have the power to impress others. And this makes them vulnerable to spirits who can produce an impulse of light that has a certain intensity. The students mistake intensity for true power, not realizing that many false spirits can indeed produce a temporary manifestation of intense energy that can often seem like true power (or other God qualities).
I know that at lower levels of the path, many people need to believe that calling forth protection or demanding that a spirit shows its light is an infallible defense. But the more mature student needs to realize that nothing is infallible, because the purpose of life is that you grow towards Christhood. This includes developing the inner discernment, where you know the true vibration of your Presence and ascended masters, You can thus easily feel if a certain spirit resonates with that vibration or has a lower vibration.
This comes only with practice, yet if you think you have some infallible technique, you will not even start practicing.
Issue 4:
Why are lower spirits allowed to tempt or attack people; why are they allowed to be on earth?
I have given part of the answer in the previous comments, namely that so many people want to believe certain things, or want to feel justified in being angry, and this allows certain spirits to remain with the earth. Yet, let me go a step further.
Everything revolves around free will. There is a subtle mechanism that few people are aware of. If you truly accept the concept of free will, you must also accept that you and you alone are responsible for your choices. Yet at a certain level of the path, it is very difficult for people to accept full responsibility for their choices.
This is in part caused by a multitude of dark forces, who have created a very subtle culture or mindset that has associated guilt with the exercise of free will. And when people believe some choices are mistakes and that God will condemn them for making mistakes or that they should feel guilty for it, then it becomes difficult to accept full responsibility for your choices. It is so much more comfortable to believe that there were some external circumstances that “forced” you to make those choices.
The result is that many people have inadvertently created a subconscious mechanism that gives them justification for doing that which they want to do, but which they will not consciously admit that they want to do. For example, many people feel it is justified to become angry and seek revenge. In the Middle East the ability to justify your anger and hatred based on some greater cause has become an art form. Not a habit we of the ascended masters encourage, but one must admit that the creativity is astounding.
And as I said, another major problem is that so many spiritual people have made it an art form to justify being critical of others, or at least focusing attention on others instead of looking at themselves. Thus, they have neutralized the eternal truth that YOU will never make spiritual progress by reforming someone else. YOU will make progress only by reforming yourself.
So do you see the point? Many people want an external justification for their subconscious beliefs, and this makes them open to the kind of spirits that will give them the justification they want, often by coming up with a spiritual teaching that contains a lot of truth but has a few dualistic or serpentine elements mixed in. This is why people feel justified in killing in the name of God or criticizing in the name of God (criticism simply being a more slow way to kill).
The basic mechanism is this: Your conscious mind hears what your subconscious minds wants to hear.
And no matter what you want to hear, there is a spirit who will tell you exactly what you need in order to feel that you are right. These spirits will often parade as ascended masters or even as God, so that people can feel they have the highest possible justification for doing what they want to do.
And we, who are the ascended masters, must simply respect the Law of Free Will and stand by while people are listening to the lower spirits. Sometimes we must even allow students to listen to us on certain issues and listen to lower spirits on other issues. Yet this can only be allowed for a time, before people must choose whom they will serve. Will they continue to listen to the spirits who tell them what they want to hear, or will they listen to the Spirits who tell them what they need to hear in order to transcend their subconscious illusions.
Do you see how the Law of Free Will works? You must be able to go into any state of consciousness among the 144 levels allowed on earth, as we describe in “Healing Mother Earth.” Yet how do you go into a certain state of consciousness? By accepting certain beliefs and feeling they have some higher validity or authority.
So for each of the 144 levels possible on earth, there are certain lower spirits that will give you exactly what seems to justify the illusions that represent that level of consciousness. How do you progress from one level to the next? By coming to see through the illusions that represent your current level.
It is when you no longer believe in the spirits associated with a given level of consciousness that you can move on to the next level. If you look at the story of how I was tempted by the devil after my stay in the wilderness, you will see an example of this. I was ready to rise to a higher level of consciousness, but I first had to prove that I could no longer be deceived by the spirit of my former level. I had to prove that I was no longer wanting to be deceived in order to feel justified in staying at that level. You might say that what I gave up on the cross was the ghost or spirit that represented a certain level, so I could rise to the next level and enter the resurrection spiral.
As long as people have not taken responsibility for themselves, they look for an external authority to justify their actions and beliefs. This is allowed, which means that it is also allowed that people – helped by lower spirits – can create a justification for any belief they hold. In other words, people can always feel that some external authority has validated their beliefs. This explains the spread of nazism and communism as well as the existence of a multitude of lower spirits.
For anything human beings can conceive, there is a spirit that will make them believe.
For the sake of completion, lower spirits are also allowed to exist because certain people think it is their mission to rescue or reform them. This is an extremely dangerous illusion, and I strongly discourage any ascended master student from indulging it. The best way to give lower spirits an opportunity to change is to call for the stopping of their self-destructive momentum and then by demonstrating that they cannot tempt or manipulate you.
It is a serious blind alley to allow the devil to make you believe it is your mission to reform other people. But it is even more serious to allow the devil to make you believe it is your mission to reform the devil. You are not responsible for the salvation of any other being. And no other being – Jesus Christ included – is responsible for your salvation. It is only when you fully accept this that you start moving beyond the reach of lower spirits. For you stop looking for an external “authority” to validate your beliefs, instead looking for the kingdom inside yourself.
Issue 5:
How the ascended masters seek to help us.
The Law of Free Will makes you responsible for your own choices, meaning choices related to your personal actions and beliefs. People who have not taken responsibility for themselves often want some external authority to tell them what to do, or to affirm that their choices are right before they make them. Yet relying on some external authority will never help you rise to become spiritually self-sufficient. And only when you are completely self-sufficient, will you be able to walk through the gate to the ascended realm.
You grow towards self-sufficiency only be making choices based on your current knowledge and level of consciousness. You then analyze the consequences of your choices and use them to question the beliefs that represent your current level. And when you come to see the limitations or falsity of those beliefs, you will – through the increase in YOUR discernment – have risen to the next level.
The ascended masters will help you go through this process, but we will never tell you what to do in your personal life. It is only lower spirits who will do this. So if you are not willing to make your own decisions – but instead look for some external authority to either tell you what to do or validate what you have decided to do – then you will not reach the ascended masters. You will attract to yourself only the exact spirits that will tell you what affirms the ego illusions on your present level among the 144 levels of consciousness possible on earth.
The real ascended masters will NEVER validate or affirm your current level. A true teacher will appear to you only when you are ready to make your own decisions. We will not tell you what to do, but we will give you a frame of reference that can empower you to make right choices and learn from them.
Yet be aware that we will often appear in disguise, because for each level among the 144 levels, there is a certain initiation you must pass. If you knew exactly what the test was, it would be too easy and you would not expand your discernment. Thus, the extreme importance of heeding the old saying:
If the guru be an ant; heed him!”
Do you see the underlying teaching? You grow through the 144 levels only by increasing your ability to see through the illusions presented by lower spirits. This MUST be an internal process, and we cannot do this for you.
When you invoke our assistance, it is not as if we will speak to you with an external voice, saying that this spirit is false and that spirit is true. Instead, we appear to you in subtle ways that many people overlook. We will present you with a teaching or vibration that is higher than your current level. If you acknowledge it, this will empower you to see through the illusions of your current level and thus transcend them.
Yet if you overlook this – or use your current beliefs to argue against it – you will miss the opportunity. If we did it any other way, you would simply become codependent upon us, as you indeed see many “spiritual” people who become codependent on a psychic or guru, always going to this external authority before making any personal decisions. This is not growth towards Christhood, no matter what the lower spirits might tell you, in order to make you feel like you are making great progress by following their directions.
The old admonishment “test the spirits” is good. But if you think you can test the spirits based on your current level of consciousness, you will think that the spirits who validate the illusions of that level are genuine spirits. And when a true guru or ascended master comes to challenge your illusions, you will often argue against us, using the teachings of lower spirits to convince yourself that we are the false spirits.
I know it can seem like building discernment is very difficult. But it is only truly difficult as long as you keep looking for excuses for focusing on the splinters in the eyes of other people instead of being willing to truly see the beam in your own eye. Through honest self-examination, it is indeed possible to gradually build a discernment that will help you separate the sheep from the goats.
Copyright © 2011 by Kim Michaels