TOPICS: Do not seek to force visualization – you cannot DO yourself back to oneness – you must surrender old sense of self – surrender is spontaneous – seek inner knowing – you do not lose by surrendering – surrender is not through the outer mind – division leads to frustration – look at yourself instead of condition – giving up your old self-image – look for what you have not seen – using an old teaching to reinforce your mental box – rejecting a new teaching to hold on to the ego – when you defend something, you have an attachment – surrender the concept of a path –
Question: I find that whenever I try to visualize, all I get is blackness. Is there something that myself or other people with the same problem should do?
Answer from ascended master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels:
If you have difficulty visualizing, stop trying to visualize. Do not have the image, the mental image, that you are supposed to visualize anything in particular. Allow the visualization to come on its own—and if nothing comes, then be content with that. Be non-attached, simply focus on giving a rosary, or reading a book, internalizing a teaching and then let the visualization come spontaneously, if it comes at all. You see, the more you strain, the more you push it away.
And this gives me an opportunity to comment on a question some of you have had, about how you surrender. You have been so programmed by the false teachers and the consciousness of duality that you believe you have to DO something to earn your salvation. But, in reality the reason why you have separated yourself from oneness is that you started doing something with the dualistic mind, thereby doing yourself away from oneness.
So you cannot DO yourself back to oneness. I am not thereby saying that you do not need to do anything, because you do need to study teachings to seek to internalize them, to practice rosaries or other appropriate techniques to further your spiritual growth. Because, as we have said, there are certain mechanical aspects of spiritual growth, such as the transformation of energy. Nevertheless, the element that is the essence of spiritual growth is to overcome your old limiting beliefs and rise to a higher understanding and awareness.
And that transition cannot be forced, cannot be done with the dualistic mind, for when you seek to do things on the spiritual path with the consciousness of duality, then you are stepping onto the false path, the outer path of thinking that by doing these outer things, God has to let you into heaven.
So the real essence of the path is to let go of limitations, let go of unreality, and this is something that you cannot force with the outer mind. You cannot force it physically, you cannot force it emotionally, you cannot force it mentally. And the more you seek to force it with your outer conscious mind, with your feelings or with your thoughts, the more you will cause yourself to hold on to the things you are trying to surrender. Surrender can only happen spontaneously.
You can set the groundwork for surrender by studying a teaching and coming to a greater and greater understanding of why you need to give something up, so that you thereby set the stage for the spontaneous surrender to occur. But you cannot force it, and if you get into the mode of trying to force it, you will make it impossible for you to surrender. And I can assure you that I see many people on the spiritual path who have tried for decades, sometimes even for lifetimes, to surrender a particular aspect of their psychology, a particular dualistic illusion. Yet, because they keep trying to force it, it cannot happen.
My beloved, the image that I gave this messenger yesterday, is this. Consider that you are holding an object in your hand and someone tells you to drop it, to let it go. Well, you might sit there with your mind and decide, “Should I let it go, or should I hold on to it? Do I want to get rid of it, or do I want to keep it?” And so, your mind can go back and forth and the more you think about this – the more intense you are in your thoughts – the more you will subconsciously tighten your grip and hold on. Yet imagine now that suddenly your nervous system signaled to your brain that the object that you are holding is glowing hot. What would you do, my beloved—you would spontaneously and instantly open your hand and drop the object, would you not?
So you see, surrender can only happen spontaneously. There is no way to force it, and if you try to force it, you push it away from you. And so, what you can do is become aware of this, so that you can neutralize the mind’s tendency to hold on to things. You can also cultivate what in traditional religion has been called faith, but which is more because it is an inner knowing. And the inner knowing you can attain is that by using the tools and tuning into your Christhood, you will begin to realize that there is a part of your being that is beyond the ego and the human conditions, beyond your outer situation.
And thereby, you will begin to know that you cannot lose anything by giving something up in the material world, for you will not be plunged into a black hole of having no identity. Instead, you will find a higher identity in God. And this understanding and realization and internalization then brings you to the point, where you can willingly and gladly give everything to God, and allow your Christ Self to give back to you what is real. In other words, you can give up everything without focusing on a specific belief, or habit, or practice.
You can simply give yourself into the hands of God and do what Jesus did, when he said, “Father, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.” And when you trust that that higher will is the will of your own higher Being, the ultimate reality of your being, you will not fear letting go, you will not fear losing something. And thus, it will be easier for you to outsmart the ego and its attempts to create an attachment, whereby you somehow fear or resist that state of surrender that is your ultimate freedom from the ego.
Take note of what I am saying in my example. Once you actually experience that an object is hot, you have no doubt about letting it go and the surrender is spontaneous. This is obviously a sensory experience, yet you can have a similar experience beyond the senses, namely what people call an intuitive or “Aha” experience. Once you have this experience and see why a certain condition is preventing you from getting where you want to go, the surrender will be spontaneous.
What confuses many spiritual seekers is that they are still approaching the path with the outer mind, with the mind that is vulnerable to duality. So they read a spiritual teaching, and the teaching says to stop doing something, be it eating meat or engaging in anger. So they get the idea that they need to let go of – surrender – this condition, yet the idea is still in the outer mind.
And so they are trying to give up – to surrender – the idea with one part of the outer mind, but another part of the outer mind – often below the level of conscious awareness – is holding on to the condition. So they have a division in their beings and are being pulled in opposite directions. They now see that they are not giving up the condition, and this creates a frustration in the outer mind so they try even harder. But this only increases the tension, so the other part of the mind will hold on to the condition even more tightly. The tension can be maintained for a long time or it can build to such a crescendo that the person experiences a crisis and finally lets go.
The better way is to take your focus away from the outer condition and follow Jesus’ admonition to look first for the beam – the division – in your own eye—meaning, obviously, your own psyche. You see, my beloved, the subtle temptation of the outer path, the false path, is that you can gain entry into heaven by doing – or by giving up – things in this world. And this is what causes people to focus attention on something – anything – outside themselves.
For example, some people get very focused on pointing out the faults of others or world conditions—which causes them to go on a crusade instead of taking up their cross and following Jesus. Others get very focused on overcoming certain conditions in themselves, but they still do this in an outer way. You see, you can give up all of the outer behavior and all of the imperfect emotions or thoughts specified by a spiritual teaching and yet you still have not actually discovered the beam in your own eye.
The beam in your own eye is your self-image, the image of yourself as a mortal, human, separate being. This image is unique for each one, even though there are certain similarities. Yet each person has a unique reason for holding on to his or her image of the separate self. That is why each person must come to a unique inner experience of seeing the separate self and seeing – experiencing in an Aha experience – how the separate self is unreal and is preventing your real self – the Conscious You – from attaining oneness with your higher being.
You can then experience the pure awareness that the Conscious You is, and this makes it obvious that you are more than the outer personality trait, meaning you will not die by surrendering it. Once you have that total – undivided – experience, you will spontaneously let go of the separate self, but as long as you are focused on giving up only part of the separate self, well then all other parts of that self will resist your surrender. Do you see that as long as you are focusing on ANY outer condition, surrender will be very difficult?
You can have an Aha experience that shows you that a particular condition is harmful, and thus you surrender it. Thus, for some, the path is a continual process of surrendering small things until they finally can see the big thing. Yet for those who have trouble surrendering, I suggest taking your focus off the outer conditions and seeking to look squarely for the separate self that is seeking to hide itself by keeping you focused on the outer conditions. As Albert Einstein said, “If you keep doing the same thing and expect different results, you are insane.” Thus, if you have trouble attaining a particular goal on the path, do something different, meaning look for what you have not so far seen.
This is why progressive revelation is so essential. People will quickly become familiar with a particular teaching and their egos will use it to create a mental box. People then think that as long as they stay in that box, they are guaranteed to be saved. So once that happens, we have to attempt to give a different teaching that challenges people’s mental boxes and their sense of comfortability. Some respond and grow, while other cling to the box, often by attacking the new teaching by using clever arguments based on the old teaching. The argument is always the same: Because the new teaching says something that isn’t in the old teaching, it cannot be true, for God would never say that. Yet do you see, my beloved, that the new teaching MUST say something beyond the old teaching if it is to have any possibility of shaking you out of your mental box?
My beloved, attachment to anything, even a spiritual teaching, is the enemy of growth, for growth comes only through surrendering ALL attachments to anything on earth. Thus, if you find yourself defending your present beliefs, you have stepped off the true path, for you are no longer looking for the Living Teacher in disguise. Thus, whenever you are defending something, consider that you have of a division in the psyche. For if you were in oneness, you would have no need to defend anything. In total surrender there can be no division, so if there is division, there is something you have not surrendered. And the reason you have not surrendered is that there is something you have not seen, and that something is the separate self itself—not the condition that takes your attention into outer things.
My beloved, we always talk about a path. Yet as Jesus has said before, even the concept of a path can be misused by the ego. For it implies that you can go on forever. Yet there are stages on the path, and there does indeed come a point where you are ready to see and surrender the separate self. And if you keep thinking that you have to keep taking steps on the path, then you will never actually come to that Aha experience that empowers you to see – and then spontaneously surrender – the separate self.
In fact, if you could see and surrender that separate self right now, you could become a Christed being instantly. So the question is how many steps you have to take before you come to that realization, and that will in large part depend on your understanding of surrender and your willingness to focus on the separate self rather than the many separate diversions it has created in order to hide itself from you.
Copyright © 2007 by Kim Michaels