AMSlogin – Page 46 – Ascended Master Answers

You cannot overcome the ego in an instant, but you can stop identifying with it

TOPICS: Your sphere of self – the mortal self in the sphere of self – made of false beliefs about yourself – the gravitational force of your ego pulls on your conscious attention – when the human self becomes a background noise that does not control you – you can instantly stop identifying with the ego –

Question: In the conscious mind that controls things, how can we direct it to always be in the Mind of God and being that individualization of God always.

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

It all starts with the recognition that you are a self-conscious being who has free will to choose what you identify yourself as. And then you must be mindful of where you direct your attention. Again, this is addressed in greater detail by Mother Mary in her book. The concept she gives is that the Conscious You resides in a sphere, in the container of self. In that container is your I AM Presence, and when your being was first created, there was only the I AM Presence and the Conscious You within your sphere of self.

Yet when you experimented with the duality consciousness, you allowed elements of a lower vibration, elements of duality, to enter this sphere of self. And gradually, over many lifetimes, you have built a mortal sense of self that opposes or seems to oppose your I AM Presence. This is what we also call the ego.

This mortal self is made up of decisions you have made, beliefs you have come to accept. And many of those beliefs are about yourself. You might believe that you are a sinner. You might believe you are a mortal human being who will die when your physical body dies. You might believe that you cannot do this and you cannot do that. You cannot contact God directly in your heart but needs the outer hierarchy of the church, or any number of dualistic beliefs.

As these beliefs enter your sphere of self, they begin to form a gravitational force and it pulls on the Conscious You. It pulls on your attention. It is almost like the force of gravity that prevents you from rising into the air, but pulls you down to earth. Likewise, your mind is being pulled by the gravitational force of the ego that has gained entry into your sphere of self. And as long as that mortal self remains, it will have some pull on your attention and that is why your thoughts are being pulled back to these old thought patterns and habit patterns. And it seems that no matter what you do you cannot get rid of them, they keep pulling on you.

When you use the proper spiritual tools, you can gradually get rid of the mortal self, and that will lessen the gravitational pull. Yet once you understand the equation, that your mortal self is an alien influence in your sphere of self and that the Conscious You has the ability to stop identifying with that mortal self, then you will have taken a major step toward avoiding being pulled back into these old patterns.

As you use the decrees and invocations or resolve things in your psychology through other tools, you will gradually minimize the gravitational force until it just becomes a background noise that may remain for some time, but eventually you will come to the point where the prince of this world comes and he has nothing in you because the mortal self has died.

Yet, the essential concept here is that the Conscious You is not the mortal self. It has created the mortal self and it cannot instantly remove the ego, because this was done over a long period of time and the decisions you made must be replaced by better decisions.

Yet you can instantly choose to stop identifying with that mortal self. When you make that decision, the mortal self will have far less power over you, and even when it does pull on you, you can instantly identify it and say, “Oh, that’s just the mortal self, that’s just the ego. I choose not to identify with it. I come apart from that consciousness and I raise my attention to my I AM Presence, to my Father in heaven.”

How can we direct the conscious mind to always be in the Mind of God?

TOPICS: First only the I AM Presence and the Conscious You – allowed elements of duality to enter sphere of self – limiting beliefs make up the ego – use tools to lessen pull of the ego – stop identifying with the ego –

Question: In the conscious mind that controls things, how can we direct it to always be in the Mind of God and being that individualization of God always.

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

It all starts with the recognition that you are a self-conscious being who has free will to choose what you identify yourself as. And then you must be mindful of where you direct your attention. This is addressed in greater detail by Mother Mary in the Abundant Life book. The concept she gives is that the Conscious You resides in a sphere in the container of self. In that container is your I AM Presence, and when your being was first created, there was only the I AM Presence and the Conscious You within your sphere of self.

As these beliefs enter your sphere of self, they begin to form a gravitational force and it pulls on the Conscious You. It pulls on your attention. It is almost like the force of gravity that prevents you from rising into the air, but pulls you down to earth. Likewise, your mind is being pulled by the gravitational force of this mortal self, this ego, that has been generated inside your sphere of self. And as long as that mortal self remains, it will have some pull on your attention and that is why your thoughts are being pulled back to these old thought patterns and habit patterns. And it seems that no matter what you do you cannot get rid of them, they keep pulling on you.

As you use the invocations or resolve things in your psychology through other tools, you will gradually minimize the gravitational force until it just becomes a background noise. It may remain for some time, but eventually you will come to the point, where the prince of this world comes and he has nothing in you because the mortal self has died.

Yet, the essential concept here is that the Conscious You is not the mortal self. It has created the mortal self and it cannot instantly remove the mortal self, because this was done over a long period of time, and the decisions you made must be replaced by better decisions. Yet you can instantly choose to stop identifying with that mortal self. When you make that decision, the mortal self will have far less power over you, and even when it does pull on you, you can instantly identify it and say, “Oh, that’s just the mortal self, that’s just the ego. I choose not to identify with it. I come apart from that consciousness and I raise my attention to my I AM Presence, to my Father in heaven.”

The dweller-on-the-threshold or the carnal mind?

TOPICS: Carnal mind is a computer that runs the body – the dweller is a decision to hide from God – must be faced and overcome for each step you took away from God – difficult if you don’t realize this was a wrong decision – must recognize what decision entails –

Question: I have one more question in relation to my question of the Christ self and I AM Presence. Where/how does the dweller-on-the-threshold fit in to this picture? Is the dweller just another name for the carnal mind?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

The concept of the dweller on the threshold was is comparable to the human ego, as that ego is described in The Inner Path of Light. That book describes the carnal mind mainly as a computer designed to run the physical body.

However, the term “carnal mind” can also be used as a general name for the entire conglomerate of the human consciousness, which includes the ego. That is how it was used by Paul, for example.

The expression “the dweller on the threshold” refers to the process described in The Inner Path of Light of the lifestream deciding to hide from God. As a result of separating itself from God, from the spiritual self, the lifestream started a process of gradually walking further and further away from God, meaning that the lifestream descended into successively lower states of consciousness.

For each time the lifestream descended to a lower level, it made a decision that caused and seemingly justified that descent. When the lifestream starts the spiritual path and begins to reverse the process of walking away from God, it must face and undo each decision that caused it to descend to its current level of consciousness.

Let me illustrate this by comparing the spiritual path to a staircase in a building. One section of the staircase leads from the bottom floor to the first floor, which is a plateau or platform from which the staircase goes to the next floor. Each section can be compared to one level on the spiritual path, so each level has several smaller steps.

When the lifestream starts the spiritual path, it is at a certain level, but not necessarily the lowest of the 144 levels of consciousness. It now ascends each of the smaller steps that lead it to the first floor. Each step represents a certain state of consciousness, a certain decision and an amount of misqualified energy. Each step is relatively easy to overcome. Yet when the lifestream stands on the uppermost step and is ready to move on to the next level of the path (the next section of the staircase), the lifestream must face the original decision that caused it to descend below that level of the path. That decision is what is called the dweller on the threshold. This expression signifies that the decision is waiting on the threshold to a new level, and before the lifestream can take that final step and ascend to a higher level of the path, it must face its previous decision and undo that decision.

If the lifestream adopts a systematic approach to the spiritual path and is willing to surrender itself to the higher will of the spiritual self, this will not be all that difficult. Once you have transmuted the misqualified energy and overcome any minor decisions made on that level, all that is left is to undo the final decision.

However, if the lifestream does not realize the need to overcome this decision, if it does not recognize why the decision was wrong, then the lifestream might fail to undo that decision. If the lifestream has not truly understood the need to surrender every aspect of the ego, it might tie in to the entire momentum of its rebellion against God. Therefore, instead of having to undo only one small part of the ego, or dweller, it now has to battle the entire momentum, which is often overpowering. Therefore, the lifestream cannot take that final step onto the next level, and it can indeed become stuck and perhaps even begin to slide back down the staircase.

So the dweller on the threshold is a valuable concept, especially when it is understood to be a decision that stands in the way of the lifestream’s progress. The lifestream can overcome the dweller only by fully recognizing what the decision entails, why it was wrong and by making a conscious choice to replace it with a right decision. Obviously, each aspect, or layer, of the dweller must be undone before the lifestream has its final victory.

Foundational teachings on human prejudice and discrimination

TOPICS: All prejudice comes from the descent into duality – this caused fear of death – creating a mental image that makes you feel secure – when image threatened, you respond with hostility towards others – cause of prejudice – some people can escape prejudice only by experiencing it against themselves – some nazis are now embodied as Jews – prejudice misqualifies energy that can affect other people and create karma for yourself – being too tolerant can also help reinforce a limited self-image – negative and positive prejudice – not judging after appearances – seeing the difference between the lifestream and outer personality – you see imperfections as only temporary – thus you do not condemn, and you do not affirm imperfections as real – seek to enlighten others without forcing them – all limitations are unreal; none worse than others – planetary vortex of prejudice can overpower people – what you do to others, you have subconsciously done to yourself –

Question: I was wondering if you could tell me why people treat homosexuals and others of sexual differences from normal with great animosity and dislike within their hearts. I’ve witnessed this myself and have been the recipient without even being gay.

Why are people like this? I try to love everybody and I can’t understand why others can’t? With comments such as there should be a 2-week open hunting season on gays and should go out with bats looking for them.
I’m one of the biggest gay rights supporters out there but I also know that it goes against the natural order of the universe. It was the souls choice and therefore not my place to say anything. I know that the universe was created out of the divine and therefore two energies yin and yang. Well they’re really one energy in all but to us it’s two. Yes i realize that there is no such thing as a homosexual soul, just ones that think they are. But what the crux of this is that why do supposed “Christians” treat other human beings with such vile usage of god’s essence. And although you don’t see it as normal I’m pretty sure you don’t view people like that or wish that others would treat them as such.
So could you please tell me what the divine wishes how people should treat homosexuals and others of the such?
I don’t know but if you want to get me riled up, you just have to state your dislike of gays and lesbians. But that’s how bad energy finds me, by using this subject to raise my anger for such people but that’s how it is.

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

You raise a very important question. I would like to step back from the issue of homosexuality and look at the big issue of human prejudice. The animosity against those with sexual differences is simply one effect of the state of consciousness which causes people to feel prejudice towards those who are different from themselves.

One of the recurring themes on this website is that after the Fall of Man most lifestreams on this planet have descended into, and become lost in, a dualistic state of consciousness. In this state of consciousness, people are trapped by relative viewpoints, and they can no longer see the truth of God. It is the relativity of this dualistic mind that causes people to feel prejudice towards those who are different from themselves.

If you could look into the mind of a prejudiced person, as I easily can but don’t particularly enjoy doing, you would see that behind the prejudice is always fear. In reality, there are two basic emotions, namely love and fear. The cause of fear, the essence of fear, is a sense a separation from God. During the Fall, the lifestream, in its own mind, separated itself from God. This inevitably caused fear in the lifestream because at subconscious levels the lifestream realizes that it is mortal. There is immortal life only in complete union with God. When you compromise that union, by separating yourself out from God, you become mortal and this automatically gives rise to the fear of death. With that I mean a fear of the death of the lifestream and not the death of the physical body that you are temporarily wearing.

To cope with this fear, the lifestream begins to create a false image of reality, an image which makes it seem like the lifestream can escape its mortality by living up to certain outer rules. This gives the lifestream a sense of security, and as long as the world around the lifestream seems to follow the lifestream’s mental image, this fragile sense of security can be maintained. When another person does something to question or threaten the mental image of a fearful lifestream, the lifestream will inevitably see the other person as a threat. That is why the lifestream responds with the hostility that is typical when people are driven into a corner. Psychologists call this the fight-or-flight syndrome. People’s first response is to try to get away from or remove the people who threaten their mental image. If that is not possible, they will begin to respond with an ever-increasing hostility.

The more adamant, negative and outspoken people are in their condemnation of those who are different from themselves, the more these people demonstrate that they are consumed by their fears. These people are trapped in a very small mental box, and because they refuse to question the basic assumptions that caused them to create the box, they think they will die if the box breaks down. In reality you should pity such people.

The only real way to help people overcome their prejudice is to help them accept and follow the inner path to personal Christhood. The essence of Christhood is that the lifestream accepts its oneness with God, and this removes the fear of death and gives immortal life. However, the problem is that prejudice causes people to cling to outer doctrines, and this prevents them from accepting the inner path. Therefore, prejudice will be one of the last things that the lifestream overcomes before it truly begins to manifest Christhood.

The more firmly people are trapped by the dualistic mind, the more they are consumed by their prejudice, and the more difficult it becomes to help the lifestream see the futility and the folly of this prejudice. If you try to reason with such a lifestream, the lifestream’s prejudice will almost inevitably cause it to reject what you are saying.

In many cases, the only thing that can help a lifestream begin to look beyond this prejudice is that the lifestream is exposed to the same type of prejudice it feels for others. Only by experiencing such a situation, will the lifestream finally see how unnecessary and damaging prejudice truly is. Therefore, I can tell you that many of the lifestreams who are currently extremely prejudiced against another group of people are likely to embody among those people in their next lifetime.

In other words, some of the people who are currently the most outspoken against homosexuals run the risk of becoming or embodying among homosexuals in a future lifetime. This will not be because these lifestreams choose homosexuality, but because the only way for the lifestream to attain balance is to be at the receiving end of what it has given to others. For example, some of the lifestreams who had leadership positions in the regime of Nazi Germany are currently embodied as Jews. This fact should cause prejudiced people to make an effort to overcome their prejudice. Unfortunately, most of the Christians who are prejudiced against homosexuals are also prejudiced against the idea of reincarnation, so they will instantly reject this idea.

I would like to explain why prejudice is so damaging. I have mentioned throughout this website that you are ultimately responsible for what you do with God’s energy. There is a constant stream of spiritual energy that flows through your subconscious and conscious minds. You direct that energy through the power of your attention. When you send out mental energy towards another person, that energy can affect the person in subtle but powerful ways. One of the most obvious examples is the influence that parents have on their children. If a parent holds a negative or limited image of a child, it can set a negative pattern for the child’s entire life. That is why it is so important for parents to hold a positive image of their children and their children’s capabilities and potential.

When you hold a negative or limited image of another person, you are sending mental energy towards that person. If the person is not protected, this energy will enter the person’s energy field. If enough energy enters the field, it can gradually start creating a vortex or momentum that will begin to affect the person’s thoughts and feelings. Eventually, this vortex can become so powerful that it begins to overpower a person’s thoughts and feelings.

If you hold a negative image of another person, you can eventually create an energy vortex in the person’s energy field which causes the person to outpicture the image you are holding. In other words, your negative image becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is especially dangerous for people you know and who might be more affected by your opinions than strangers. Many people have unwittingly had a negative impact upon the people who are closest to them.

When you understand this dynamic, you can see that it is important to hold a positive image for every person you encounter. You will personally be held responsible for what you do with God’s Energy, so if you hold a negative image of another person, you will make personal karma for doing so. The amount of karma will be proportionate to the amount of energy that you send at the other person. It is in your own best interest, and in the interest of the other person, that you overcome the tendency to hold a negative or limited image of that person.

We now come to a subtle point that will be difficult to understand for people who are trapped in the relativity of the dualistic mind. As an example of this, let me refer to your statement, “It was the soul’s choice and therefore not my place to say anything.” This statement is an example of how people are often polarized towards one of the relative extremes. One of these extremes is the prejudice that you describe in your letter. Such people have gone into the extreme of judging others based on their own relative standard for what they believe is right and wrong. This causes them to hold a negative image of other people, and, as I have just described, this inevitably leads to negative effects for all parties. This is what I call black-and-white thinking.

It is very common that when people begin to overcome this negative prejudice, they swing into the opposite extreme of thinking they have to tolerate anything—what I call gray thinking. In other words, many people today think that they should uncritically accept homosexuality and never speak out against it. If you read my discourse on the cause of homosexuality, you will see that this form of sexuality is not natural and has negative effects for the lifestreams who engage in it. So if you view another human being as a homosexual soul, then you are actually projecting an image upon that lifestream, and that image is out of alignment with the divine potential of the lifestream. In other words, you are holding a limited and limiting image of the lifestream.

Can you see the subtle distinction here? Homosexuality is an unbalanced state of consciousness. Therefore, it is best for the lifestream to overcome this state of consciousness. If you hold the image that another person is a homosexual, and especially if you do it with the attitude that homosexuality is a perfectly acceptable and permanent condition, then you are actually helping to reinforce the lifestream’s limited self image. You are therefore helping to reinforce the unbalanced state that keeps this lifestream in bondage.

What I am saying here is that both the people who are prejudiced against homosexuals and the people who uncritically accept homosexuality are doing a disservice to the lifestreams who temporarily believe they are homosexuals. Both types of people are serving to hold such lifestreams in a limited state of consciousness. That being said, it should be obvious that the people who are negative towards homosexuals often direct greater amounts of negative energy at these lifestreams. A person who is uncritical usually does not have the same intensity of energy, and therefore that person does not make as much karma. Nevertheless, what I am hoping you can see here is that the picture is not quite as simple as many people make it out to be. One might say that there is a negative prejudice (of condemning others) and a positive prejudice (of accepting their imbalances as normal and permanent) and that both are damaging to the victim.

My beloved mother held the immaculate concept for me while I was growing up. I can assure you that I was not an easy child. I was quite headstrong and emotional, and a weaker person than my mother might have allowed me to get away with doing things my way. Yet my mother unflinchingly held the immaculate concept for my spiritual mission, and that had an immensely positive influence on my ability to fulfill that mission.

The bottom line is that you cannot deal with any situation correctly as long as you are looking at it through the relativity of the dualistic mind. You can only take the correct position by rising above that relativity and connecting to your Christ self, so that you can see the true perspective of the Christ mind. That is why I told people not to judge. When you judge based on the relativity of the dualistic mind, you cannot judge righteous judgments, and therefore you inevitably make karma in the process. You will judge based on appearances, based on what you think is right according to the relative standard that you currently accept.

So could you please tell me what the divine wishes how people should treat homosexuals and others of the such?

Jesus: When you rise above the relativity of the dualistic mind, you gain the correct perspective of the Christ mind. As I said 2,000 years ago, God does not judge because he has given it to the Son to judge. The Son of God is the Christ consciousness. The Christ consciousness is the only begotten Son of God, and therefore it knows the reality and the truth of God. Because of this, the Christ mind can judge righteous judgments.

When you look at other people from the perspective of the Christ mind, you see a clear distinction between the lifestream and the outer personality and behavior. You clearly realize that the lifestream itself is a son or daughter of God. Therefore, every lifestream is your spiritual brother or sister. Every other lifestream is simply an individualization of the same God from which you sprang. Through your own sense of union with God, you experience a deep union with all life.

You also see that all lifestreams have currently taken on an outer personality, which is often adapted to the conditions found in the lifestream’s environment. This personality is a conglomerate of the lifestream’s many lifetimes in this world. When you look at this with the clarity of the Christ mind, you see that this personality is temporary and therefore ultimately unreal. You also see that some aspects of this personality are in alignment with the truth of God while others are out of alignment with that truth. Therefore, you affirm those aspects that are in alignment with truth.

Concerning those aspects of a lifestream’s personality that are out of alignment with truth, you will never condemn the lifestream for these temporary imperfections. However, it would not be loving towards that lifestream to affirm a temporary imperfection as if it was permanent or even acceptable. Therefore, you see it as a natural extension of your love for the lifestream that you attempt to help the lifestream grow out of this temporary limitation.

When you deal with another lifestream, your concern is always to help that lifestream rise above its temporary limitations. Exactly how you should do that is a complex topic that must be decided on an individual basis. However, in general you would seek to enlighten a lifestream so that it can make the best possible choices, choices that will help the lifestream grow towards outpicturing its spiritual potential.

In doing so, you must obviously respect a lifestream’s free will. As a guideline, let me tell you that a spiritual master will often be direct, although completely without condemnation, in pointing out a lifestream’s temporary imperfections. If a lifestream rejects the Master’s suggestions three times, then the teacher will withdraw. I suggest that this might be a good guideline for dealing with other people. You can attempt to enlightened a person to the best of your ability, and if the person rejects you three times, you will simply drop the topic until the person brings it up. You can then feel that you have fulfilled your obligation to attempt to help the other person, and you can leave it up to the person’s free choice.

What I am trying to say here is that when you begin to attain Christ consciousness, you stop judging people based on the relativity of the dualistic mind. You therefore see that virtually every human being has certain temporary imperfections and limitations. You are not condemning the lifestream for this, but you take every appropriate opportunity to help the lifestream see through its limitations and make better choices. The consequence is that you would not treat homosexual persons any differently than you treat any other person. Every human being, no matter what their outer characteristics, is temporarily expressing certain limitations. Condemning someone for this only helps bind them to that imperfection. Holding the immaculate concept with the Christ mind will help the person rise above the limitation.

When you judge based on the relativity of the dualistic mind, you think that some human limitations are worse than others, and you base this judgment on your own situation. In other words, people often think that the limitations which they do not have, or do not see in themselves, are the worst possible. When you rise above this limited perspective, you realize that no limitations are worse than any others. They are all unreal and temporary, and they all need to be left behind for the lifestream to grow. So the real concern is the growth of the lifestream, and that cause is best served by holding the mental image that the lifestream rises above all limitations and becomes the whole, balanced spiritual being that it truly is.

I don’t know but if you want to get me riled up, you just have to state your dislike of gays and lesbians. but that’s how bad energy finds me, by using this subject to raise my anger for such people but that’s how it is.

Jesus: I will comment on the fact that if you allow yourself to feel negative emotions towards those who are prejudiced against homosexuals, then you are actually helping to perpetuate the state of consciousness that causes persecution of homosexuals and others.

You see, all kinds of prejudice spring from the same state of consciousness. So if you engage in that state of consciousness, you feed your energy into the planetary vortex of prejudice that has been created by humankind over thousands of years. It is this vortex which overpowers weak-minded individuals and causes them to express prejudice towards others.

Certain people have become so weak-minded that they can become entirely overpowered by such negative planetary momentums. That is why they become the catalyst and commit violent acts that spring from this momentum. For example, a person who burns the Church of a black congregation is acting as a catalyst for the planetary momentum of racial prejudice and hatred.

Instead of becoming angry at such people, it would be more constructive to pray for their deliverance from this limited state of consciousness and to hold the mental image, the immaculate concept, that they overcome their prejudice and achieve greater balance and peace of mind.

The real key here is my statement that as you believe, so shall it be done unto you. When you hold a certain mental image, you cause spiritual energy to flow into that image, and it will eventually manifest as a material reality in your life.

It is an often overlooked fact that whatever you do to others, you are subconsciously doing to yourself. If you have prejudice against another group of people, it shows that you are subconsciously condemning yourself. Therefore, you will inevitably, perhaps in a future lifetime, experience the outpicturing of your mental image. Experiencing this condition might cause you to see the imperfections of that image and accept a better image of yourself and of life. You can then begin to outpicture that vision.

So the bottom line is that the mental image you hold of life will determine the conditions you encounter in life. Therefore, you would do well to hold the highest possible image, the immaculate concept, for yourself and for all other people.

Tibetan Buddhism says that there is no soul, there is only mind

TOPICS: Words used differently by different religions – in Buddhism there must be a vehicle for mind to interact with body –

Question: Beloved Jesus, Tibetan Buddhism says that there is no soul, there is only mind. So I don’t understand. What does it mean when you do have a soul?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

It requires a great deal of delicacy, and non-attachment of mind to bridge the language barrier between different religions or spiritual traditions. What one religion characterizes with one word might be the same thing that another religion characterizes with a different word. So, truly, one can say that everything is mind because where does the soul come from? Well, it comes from the mind. It comes from your greater mind, the Conscious You and it was created after the Conscious You started to experiment with the duality consciousness. So one might say that it is created out of your mind.

In a sense, we could say that Tibetan Buddhism is correct but this does not necessarily mean that other traditions that talk about a soul are incorrect. They are simply using a different word for the same thing. Because, truly, even in Buddhism, there must be a vehicle of the mind that descends into the physical body and interacts with the physical body.

Another perspective on healing Soul fragmentation

TOPICS: The Conscious You experiences trauma and decided to withdraw – the only way to healing is for Conscious You to re-experience the situation with higher awareness –

Question: What does it mean when you do have a soul, what does it mean when you have a division of that soul and you have different fragments?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

The real cause of soul fragmentation is that you experience a situation here in the dense energies of the material world that the Conscious You does not want to go through. You are all familiar with the concept that you are more than your physical body, so most of you have been used to saying that your soul inhabits the body. It is almost like a hand fitting in the glove or it is like when you get into your car and drive. You know you are not the car but that the car is a vehicle that takes you places in the physical octave. Likewise, the 4-fold vehicle or soul is a vehicle for the Conscious You that the Conscious You has entered into in order to be able to survive in the material realm and interact with the body. The challenge is whether the Conscious You identifies itself with the soul or whether it realizes that it is more than the soul.

If you are fully identified with the soul and then you experience a situation that gives you severe trauma, the Conscious You might decide that it will not take responsibility for that situation. It wants to withdraw and hide from the experience. As it does so, the soul, as its vehicle, fragments and a part of the energy of the soul withdraws into a little hole that it creates for itself, where it can hide from the experience that it cannot bear.

This energy will remain there until it is set free. And in some cases the energy might be attached to a specific place in time or a specific place in the material universe. For example, some soul fragments can be attached to a house where a person lived and that is what some people call ghosts. However, ghosts can also be disembodied spirits that are not soul fragments.

The key to returning such a soul fragment is that the Conscious You realizes who it is and realizes that even though in the past it made the decision to avoid a particular experience, it can undo that decision. And then it can relive the experience with its greater sense of identity, whereby the experience will be much easier to bear. You all know this because you think back to your childhood and you can see that there were certain situations in which you felt very afraid. Perhaps you were afraid to go to sleep without the lights on. Or you were afraid to walk down the hallway at night. And now you look back as an adult and you say, “There was nothing to be afraid of. Why was I afraid?”

Likewise, the Conscious You, as it begins to identify itself as it truly is, namely a spiritual being, can come to that same sense, that the experience that seemed so traumatic to it in the past really is not that difficult to bear now. Thus, by reliving the experience, you can free that part of the soul that is tied up in a ball trying to avoid the experience.

Thereby, your lifestream can become whole. And only when the lifestream is whole can the energies of the lifestream be raised back up to the higher vibrations that the energy had before the Conscious You lowered the vibration through the dualistic beliefs that you came to accept.

Why no evidence that the soul exists after death?

TOPICS: Free will gives lifestream right to deny God – plausible deniability must be maintained – dualistic mind can deny any evidence – ego and power elite create system that is always right – science cannot prove anything beyond limitations of the instruments used – some are not ready for the path of Christhood – do not waste your time seeking to convert them –

Question: Why isn’t there one hundred percent irrefutable evidence that the soul exists after death, even though scientists and para-psychologists have been trying to prove it for years?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

The reason is that planet earth is currently functioning as a planet that gives sanctuary to many lifestreams who are in a specific state of consciousness. They either desire to deny God’s existence or they desire to deny that God is right here with them. In other words, they want to continue to live based on the sense that they are separated from their source.

The Law of Free Will allows lifestreams to live out this illusion for a time, and that is why there must be plausible deniability. Therefore, no absolute proof will be given of God’s existence, the reality of the spiritual realm, the soul’s survival of physical death and many other such questions.

As long as people are in the consciousness of separation, they look at life through the filter of the duality consciousness, and thus there is no evidence that is one hundred percent irrefutable. When I walked the earth 2,000 years ago, I raised the dead, I healed the sick, I walked on water, I turned water into wine and still there were people who doubted that I was the Messiah.

The simple fact is that the dualistic mind can always question and doubt any evidence. Because the dualistic mind is relative, it seeks to create a framework that enables it to believe what it wants to believe, and consequently to disbelieve what it wants to disbelieve.

Even though I performed miracles, I could not convince the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the lawyers and the temple priests of the Jewish religion. I can assure you that no matter what evidence could possibly be given, it would not convince the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the lawyers and the temple priests of the scientific establishment or even orthodox Christianity.

You see, once a power elite has established itself in any field, it makes use of a principle that we might call the privilege of formulating the problem. When you conquer this privilege, and when you operate from the duality and relativity of the dualistic mind, you define a framework in which your basic beliefs cannot be disproved. The reason they cannot be disproved is that you have defined these beliefs in such a way that they always give you a way out. You can always refute any evidence that contradicts your basic beliefs, your paradigms, your mental holy cows.

For example, most orthodox Christians vehemently deny the reality of reincarnation, and consequently they adhere to the doctrine that the soul does not exist before the conception of the physical body. Well, if you do not believe that the soul exists before conception, you cannot give an irrefutable proof of the soul’s existence after death. If the soul can exist independently of the body, it can exist both before the conception of and after the death of the body.

Likewise, the scientific establishment has defined that anything that cannot be proven by instruments made of matter simply does not exist. The soul is a non-material entity, so how could the existence of the soul possibly be detected by an instrument made of matter? You might be aware that an ordinary microscope cannot detect a subatomic particle, no matter how powerful that microscope is. The simple reason is that the microscope makes use of visible light, and the wavelength of visible light makes it impossible to see a subatomic particle directly.

The instruments that have been developed by science up to this point simply cannot detect the soul. There are some instruments that can detect the energies of the soul, but so far they have not been accepted by mainstream science.

As I said, God simply does not want humankind to have irrefutable evidence about the existence of God or the spiritual realm. God wants this to be a matter of belief, because this requirement acts as a filter, filtering out those who are not willing to look beyond the dualistic mind and their own egos. These are precisely the people who cannot enter the kingdom of God anyway, because until you look beyond the dualistic mind and the human ego, you have no chance of attaining Christ consciousness. So what would be the point in proving the existence of heaven to people who have no chance of entering heaven?

One might say, “But if there was irrefutable proof, these people would be converted.” Unfortunately, this is not true, as my rejection by the religious authorities proves. There are numerous examples of how we of the ascended masters have given proof that has been accepted by many people but nevertheless rejected by some. The people who reject such proof are simply not ready for the path of Christhood.

If you read the scriptures, you will see that I often said that those who had ears had better hear. Having ears means to be open to the Living Truth that can be known only through direct experience in your heart. If you are not open, there is no outer proof that can open your mind and heart to the truth. And when you are not open to the truth, you can and will question and tear down any evidence that could possibly be given.

I have seen people who observed that I raised a man from the dead. These people knew and fully believed that the person was dead. They saw the person raised from the dead and walking around. Yet they were still not convinced that I had anything of value to teach them. And after a very short period of time, their dualistic minds had made them doubt, explain away or deny what they had observed with their senses. There is an old saying that seeing is believing, but it is only true for those with open minds and hearts. Those who are not open will quickly find ways to deny what they saw with their own eyes. That is why I said:

Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. (John 20:29)

The brutal truth is that as a spiritual seeker you need to realize that there are some people who currently are not in a state of consciousness in which they can be awakened to the spiritual path, as I explain elsewhere. Therefore, you should be careful not to waste your time and energy on such people. As I said:

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you. (Matthew 7:6)

This might sound brutal, but the reality is that life is too short to worry about helping those who will not help themselves. There are so many people who are open, and they are the ones I was talking about when I told my disciples to feed my sheep. The others you simply have to leave behind, as I said:

Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead. (Matthew 8:22)

Does the I AM Presence start over when a lifestream is dissolved?

TOPICS: Your positive experiences are not wasted as they become part of the individuality of your Presence – yet the purpose for your existence is that you become an immortal being – why the masters seek to help us –

Question: Dear Jesus, does our I AM Presence start from scratch when a soul’s energies are returned to their original purity? Since the limited sense of identity and its memories are lost, does the I AM still learn something and improve on the next soul it creates? I ask because it would seem more heartening to me that a soul’s life wouldn’t be completely for nothing if it failed to fulfill its mission of attaining its spiritual identity.

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

When the Conscious You makes right choices and has positive experiences, it creates positive karma and positive memories, which is what I referred to in the following saying, “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” (Matthew 6:20).

The treasures you lay up in heaven become part of your I AM Presence, and they are stored in the causal body. In other words, what you experience while in embodiment has a positive impact on expanding the individuality of your I AM Presence. And as we have explained, the Conscious You has no built-in individuality because it is meant to be the open door for the individuality of the Presence. So if your Presence were to send another Conscious You into embodiment, that new Conscious You would obviously be a reflection of the current individuality of the Presence. So in that sense, it is true that the lifestream’s experiences are not wasted.

Nevertheless, that should not be interpreted to mean that it doesn’t really matter whether the Conscious You becomes an immortal spiritual being or is erased through the second death. If that was the case, why would we of the ascended masters bother to stay with the earth and help our unascended brothers and sisters? We could simply go on with our own growth and let unascended lifestreams sink or swim.

We are seeking to help our unascended brothers and sisters because you are all extensions of the same greater lifestreams out of which we have come, and we love you with an unconditional love. Therefore, we desire to see you make it all the way home and become immortal spiritual beings as we are. Therefore, we do feel sorrow and a sense of loss when a lifestream goes to the second death. This is no different than when you lose a member of your earthly family. Although our feelings are not exactly the same as human feelings, we still do have feelings, and we would love to see every lifestream on earth become an immortal spiritual being through the ritual of the ascension.

Basic teachings on soul fragmentation and mental illness

TOPICS: How the Conscious You descends into embodiment – the Conscious You starts in a mystery school – the Conscious You creates its own self – individuality and the Conscious You – the ideal path to Christhood – ideally your 4-fold vehicle cannot be fragmented – only when 4-fold vehicle is based on separation, can it be fragmented – why people feel threatened – four ways for the soul to fragment – structure of the soul – how the crystalline structure is fragmented – fragmentation causes sense of loss and pain – basic ways to cope with fragmentation – real cause of mental illness – those who are unreachable – those who need professional help – those who can help themselves – protection, being cut free, transmutation – a life-time commitment to the spiritual path – three stages of Christhood –

Question: There are spiritual and psychological teachings that say the soul can be divided, split or fragmented. You talk about that in the answer to the question about schizophrenia. What happens to lost fragments of the soul? What spiritual or psychological techniques exist for the return of those fragments? Is this a viable or necessary thing for healing severe mental illnesses?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

The topic of soul fragmentation and soul division is potentially quite complex. Yet because of the nature of the question, I will here focus on the practical rather than the philosophical aspects. In other words, what do you need to know about soul fragmentation in order to protect yourself from it or heal a mental illness.

In the following answer, I will assume you are familiar with our teachings about the four levels of the material realm, and the teachings about the components of self, especially the relationship between the I AM Presence and the Conscious You. I will also assume you have read a previous answer concerning whether the soul is physical or spiritual.

We begin by looking at the I AM Presence. It exists in the spiritual realm, which is far above the material world in vibration, meaning the Presence cannot in any way be destroyed or split by the lower vibrations of the material world. Yet this also means that the Presence cannot descend directly into the material world. The I AM Presence has a distinct individuality, which it desires to express in the material world. In order to do that, the Presence creates an extension of itself, that can descend into the material world. That extension is the Conscious You.

The Conscious You is an extension of the consciousness of the I AM Presence. Yet the Presence does not embed its individuality in the Conscious You. The Conscious You is like a lens through which the Presence can express itself and through which it can experience the material world. So the Conscious You is what descends into the lower vibrations of the material realm, yet because it is pure awareness – and it is pure awareness because it has no individuality – it too cannot be destroyed or split by the lower vibrations in the material world.

However – and here is the essence of the problem – even the Conscious You cannot act directly in the material world. In order to act in the material world, the Conscious You must create or take on a “body” made from the vibrations of the material spectrum. As we explain, there are four levels of the material realm, so creating a physical body means creating “four lower bodies,” namely an identity “body,” a mental “body,” an emotional “body” and then the physical body.

When the Conscious You is first created, it simply isn’t capable of creating four lower bodies. It has no experience with co-creation and it has no experience with the vibrations of the four levels. Thus, a new Conscious You starts out in what we call a mystery school, as symbolized by the Garden of Eden. This is an environment in the identity realm, and here it can experiment with taking on “bodies” created for the identity realm by a spiritual teacher.

The basic quality of the Conscious You is that because it is pure awareness, it can project itself anywhere it envisions, and this is what allows it to descend into embodiment. In other words, the Conscious You does not become an identity body or a physical body. It projects itself into a sense of self. It is like an actor putting on a costume and make-up in order to play a predefined part in a play.

So the Conscious You starts out in the mystery school by projecting itself into an “identity self” created by the spiritual teacher. We might compare this to a student who enters a flight simulator, where it can get a sense of what it is like to fly an airplane without risking a crash.

When the Conscious You has attained some mastery of an identity self, it takes on an identity/mental self and again experiments. After that it takes on an identity/mental/emotional self. Finally it takes on an identity/mental/emotional/physical self without actually descending into the material spectrum. It is still in a simulated environment.

After it has attained a certain mastery with this process, the Conscious You enters a new phase, in which it now starts defining its own self, instead of taking on one defined by the teacher. How does it define this self? It does so based on its contact with the I AM Presence and its experience with the four levels. The Conscious You starts with a point-like sense of self, in which it knows it is connected to something greater than itself, but it has no direct experience of the I AM Presence. Thus, the individuality of the Presence cannot be expressed fully through the Conscious You.

As the Conscious You experiments, it also expands its sense of self. And as long as it follows the guidance of the teacher, this means the Conscious You will become more and more aware that it is an open door for the Presence. As this happens, the individuality of the Presence can shine through the Conscious You in greater measure. In other words, the Conscious You does not take on or become the individuality of the Presence; it only becomes a more and more open door for the Presence. This means that when the Conscious You creates a self, it will reflect the individuality of the I AM Presence.

In the ideal scenario, the Conscious You will continue to follow the guidance of the teacher, until it is ready to create an actual identity/mental/emotional/physical body and project itself into it. It is no longer in a simulation environment, but descends into the “real world.”

My point for this long explanation is to explain that what many people see as the soul is actually an identity/mental/emotional/physical body created by the Conscious You. In the ideal scenario, this 4-fold vehicle – I will avoid calling it the soul from now on – is a reflection of the individuality of the I AM Presence. The individuality will not at first be expressed in full measure, but as the Conscious You gains experience with expressing itself, the individuality will become more and more expressed. Thus, the path to Christhood is ideally the path whereby the Conscious You becomes the open door through which the individuality and power of the I AM Presence can be expressed in full measure. I and my father are one.

Yet exactly how is the individuality of the Presence reflected in the design of the identity/mental/emotional/physical body? We can compare this to a movie projector, where the individuality of the Presence is the film strip. The individuality is like an image that is projected onto the screens of the four lower bodies. The reason why this is important is that it explains that in the ideal scenario, your 4-fold vehicle cannot be divided or destroyed.

At present the material world is – at least on planet earth – an environment that is deeply affected by the duality consciousness and fallen beings. Thus, it is quite likely that when you descend into embodiment, you will be traumatized in any number of ways, and such trauma can indeed cause damage to your 4-fold vehicle. There is simply no way to avoid that, given conditions. Yet what I am saying is that in the ideal scenario such trauma can be healed almost instantly, when you make a conscious decision to not react to it. In that case, the trauma is like someone striking water. At first, there is a big splash, but the water soon returns to its calm state, where it again forms the perfect mirror for reflecting the individuality projected by the I AM Presence.

In other words, when your 4-fold vehicle is built based on seeing yourself as an extension of the I AM Presence, soul division or fragmentation simply isn’t an issue. So now let us look at the not so ideal scenario.

As Maitreya explains in great depth in his book, there were some lifestreams in the mystery school who decided to take the initiation of the duality consciousness before they were ready. They were misled by the serpentine mind into thinking that they were now advanced enough to actually descend into physical embodiment—even though the teacher told them they were not ready. Thus, they decided to take “heaven” – or rather embodiment – by force.

In reality, these lifestreams were not capable of defining their own 4-fold vehicle. Their abilities were limited by the level they had reached before they turned their backs on the teacher. So what they did was to take on a 4-fold vehicle that was partly their own creation and partly the creation of fallen beings. Yet either way, this vehicle was not a reflection of the individuality of their I AM Presence; it was created based on the illusion of separation.

This had two effects. One was that the ideas, mental images and beliefs that made up the individuality of the 4-fold vehicle were affected by the duality consciousness. They might have been based on some of the individuality in a lifestream’s I AM presence, but it was perverted by the duality consciousness. As we have explained, everything in the duality consciousness must have an opposite polarity. This means that when a dualistic quality encounters its opposite polarity, it will seem as if it will be cancelled out by the opposite.

It should now be possible to see that when your 4-fold vehicle is based on the duality consciousness, it is in a constant state of being threatened by its dualistic opposite. Your sense of identity, your mental sense of self and your emotional sense of self is constantly threatened by the dualistic opposite of the beliefs out of which your vehicles are made.

We now see that there are four ways in which your 4-fold vehicle – your soul – can be fragmented. At the physical level, having your body killed or in other ways experiencing physical pain can lead to such severe trauma that it creates a fragmentation of your emotional “body.” Encountering very intense emotions from other people can also be the cause of trauma. Consider how easily you are affected when other people are angry at you or have an evil intent to destroy you. At the mental level, experiencing the overturning of deeply held beliefs can cause trauma. For example, many Christians have felt their belief in mainstream Christianity destroyed by science, and this can cause a split in the 4-fold vehicle. Such experiences can also cause a split at the identity level, when you feel like your very sense of identity is threatened. This can also happen when fallen beings threaten your sense that you are a basically good person by accusing you falsely—as they often do.

We will now go one step further by realizing that the 4-fold vehicle is made from two components. One is the mental images and beliefs and the other is the energy that drives everything in the world of form. The images and beliefs form what we might compare to a crystalline structure. You know there are certain toys, where you can fit plastic or metal pieces together to create a structure with empty spaces inside a cage. The energy component is what fits inside the structure, almost as if you put balls inside the cage.

Now, in the ideal scenario, your 4-fold vehicle has no images or beliefs based on duality. The effect of this is that even if you are attacked, you will not take the attack personally, because you don’t feel threatened the same way. Thus, even if the crystalline structure is damaged, it can be almost instantly healed by you letting go and returning to pure awareness. This is the higher meaning of my teaching to turn the other cheek. When you truly turn the other cheek, no lower force can harm your higher bodies.

Before you attain full Christhood, you can be temporarily affected, and this can cause you to lose some of the energy inside the structure. Yet when you return to pure awareness, you will magnetize that energy back to yourself. In other words, you can learn to quickly heal yourself from any trauma you are exposed to while in embodiment. When you attain full Christhood, even your physical body is not truly physical. Thus, it is possible to manifest a body that appears physical but cannot be killed by any force on earth.

When your 4-fold vehicle is made from the duality consciousness, the crystalline structure can very easily be damaged or fragmented by conditions in this world, as described above. Furthermore, the energies inside the structure vibrate at a lower level, meaning they can easily be sucked out or lost when there is a hole in the structure. So when the 4-fold vehicle is fragmented, it is because something has blasted a piece of the crystalline structure away along with its contents of energy. You are now left with a structure that is no longer whole, but has a big hole in it. And you will feel this as a severe trauma.

If the fragment of the structure and the loss of energy is big enough, you will be left feeling so divided – a house divided against itself – that it is unbearable, and this is the real cause of all severe mental illnesses. There is such severe pain and sense of loss, that you cannot function normally—you simply must do something to overcome the sense of emptiness, loss and pain. The question is what to do, and this is where we see the classical catch-22 that literally causes people to be crucified by their own 4-fold vehicles.

There are several basic ways to cope with soul fragmentation:

You seek to numb yourself, so the pain becomes bearable. This can be done through a chemical substance, which inevitably leads to addiction. The addiction then creates other incidents that cause trauma, which can lead to further soul division. This leads to a downward spiral that continues until you hit rock bottom and decide to fundamentally change your approach. Incidentally, what modern psychiatry does with medication is similar to this approach. If it is not combined with talk therapy, it will not resolve the division. Take note that if people are severely divided, it can be necessary to seek psychiatric treatment, so I am not denouncing treatment or discouraging people from seeking help.
You seek to quickly get energy from other people, so your sense of emptiness is lessened. One way to do this is through sex, where you take in energy from the person with whom you are having sex. This is part of the explanation for rape and pedophilia. Obviously, this also does not resolve the division. Another way to do this is by creating arguments or fights with other people or abusing them in various ways. Those who perform torture or serial killers also do this as a way to steal energy to cover over severe inner division.
You invite a foreign entity into your 4-fold vehicle to fill the hole. This might be a discarnate soul, a demon or what Gautama Buddha calls a beast. This will literally mean that you now have a foreign being occupying space in your 4-fold vehicle, and it will obviously lead to what people call bipolar disease, split personality, multiple personality disorder or schizophrenia. Sometimes the foreign entity will take over your mind, and sometimes you will be in control.
You seek to avoid having your wounds triggered by withdrawing from people or from life. In the past, many people entered monasteries for that reason, and today you see many people in spiritual communities who are seeking to hide their inner division. Incidentally, a spiritual teaching can indeed be misused for this purpose.
You seek to avoid having your wounds triggered by controlling your environment. This can be anything from the leader of a dysfunctional family to the CEO of a corporation or the dictator of a country. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other dictators were willing to kill any number of people in order to control their environment, and they were all driven by severe soul fragmentation.
You seek to repair the fracture in your 4-fold vehicle. This can be done in many different ways, but it usually involves using the duality consciousness to build up a new structure and then fill it with lower energy. The fracture caused your original soul structure to be damaged, and this makes you feel unwhole. Closing the hole can give you some sense of wholeness. In other words, even if your 4-fold vehicle is created from the duality consciousness, an unbroken structure still gives you some sense of wholeness, some sense of being in control. One way to seek to repair the damage is to let your ego create new mental images based on the trauma. This might cause you to see yourself as a victim, or it might cause you to appoint a scapegoat and now seek to fight or destroy it. Thus, you close the hole with a new structure that springs from the trauma, and you fill the gap with energies such as fear or anger. Of course, this will not heal your inner division, but many people have built so many layers of this, that they still have some sense of being whole and being in control.

You now see that some of the worst atrocities in human history were caused by people with soul fragmentation. Some of the worst abuses on a personal or family level were also caused by this. Most mental illnesses and severe psychological problems are caused by a fragmentation of the 4-fold vehicle. And based on this realization, we can finally begin to suggest what can be done about it.

First, we have a group of people for whom the fragmentation is so severe that they are trapped in a dysfunctional pattern. As long as people are going downward in their spiral, there is usually nothing that can be done to help them. They are unreachable, and nothing you could say to them would make a difference. They have to act out their pattern until they hit some kind of bottom and decide to do what they have not done so far: take responsibility for themselves and acknowledge that they created the separate self and they are the ones who must uncreate it.

Then we have another group of people, who have such severe fragmentation that it will be impossible or very difficult for them to heal it on their own. I highly recommend that such people seek whatever professional help is available to them. You live in a time, when the schism of mental illness should have faded away, so there should be no more shame associated with mental illness than physical illness. Beyond psychiatrists and psychologists, you can also consider alternative practitioners, but as with more traditional therapists, it is important to find the right person to help you. Thus, the person itself is more important than the methods used. Yet as a general recommendation, you might look at gestalt therapy and EMDR. In terms of spirit release therapy or more shamanic methods for soul retrieval, I will again say that the practitioner’s level of maturity is all-important. It is also extremely important to combine therapy with the spiritual tools I will recommend below.

We now have a third group, who are not so fragmented that they absolutely need a therapist, although they can still benefit from one. Yet you can at least do something on your own. So what can you indeed do?

The first thing to do is to realize that when your 4-fold vehicle is fragmented, it is open to external influences, such as dark beings or lower energies. So you need to first of all establish a shield of spiritual protection around your energy field. This can be done most effectively by using the tools we have given, such as Archangel Michael’s Rosary, and the decrees to Archangel Michael and Hercules.

I am not here talking about dabbling in decreeing, but about making a commitment to a daily program of sincere application. Your effort should be guided by how severe of a fragmentation you feel and how strong of a desire you have to overcome it. I am talking about half and hour or more every day for spiritual protection.

The next step is to realize that you might already have taken in or at least created a tie to lower beings or energies. The absolutely most effective way to cut yourself free from such ties is the decree to Elohim Astrea. Again, half an hour or more on top of the protection decrees.

The next step is to realize that you might already have taken in lower energies, that pull on you from the inside. The way to deal with that is to invoke spiritual energy to transform the lower energy. Here the decrees of all seven rays can help you, but I recommend you start with the violet flame decrees. Again, half an hour on top of the previous decrees.

You can benefit from giving decrees along with the recordings that our messenger has prepared. This will not only help you learn the decrees, but there is also light released through the recording that many people with fragmentation cannot invoke on their own.

Once you have invoked enough light to feel some relief, you can begin to use the other tools we have given. You can begin with the Spiritual Crisis Toolkit, and then move on to some of the many other invocations. The East-West Invocation calls specifically for lost soul fragments to be returned to you. There are however many other invocations designed to help you deal with specific problems, and once you overcome the worst sense of chaos, you will be guided from within.

Now, what I have said so far is simply a stop-gap program to help you overcome the most severe effects of fragmentation. The next phase is to realize that attaining wholeness is truly a long-term, even a life-time commitment. That is why you need to adopt the view that you are on a spiritual path that will gradually lead you from your current level of consciousness to the full Christ consciousness, that is your highest potential but also a realistic potential.

This means that you grab onto the spiritual path as you are currently able to see and understand it, and then you keep following it to the best of your ability. Yet you should also be aware that the path is a path of self-transcendence, meaning it has many levels. There will come points where you need to step up to a higher vision and application.

In the later phases, you can benefit from the teaching I have given in this answer, namely that your 4-fold vehicle – what most people call the soul – is not created by God and does not currently reflect the individuality of your I AM Presence. Thus, for people who have descended into separation, the path to Christhood has three distinct phases:

In the lower phase, it will be necessary to seek to seal up any holes in your soul or to return lost fragments. Yet this is a stop-gap measure that only serves to get you onto the real path.
In the second phase, you are not actually seeking to heal or perfect your soul, because it is created from the illusions of the duality consciousness. Thus, it truly can never be raised to a point, where it can enter the spiritual realm. What you are really doing is to disentangle the Conscious You from its identification with the soul created from duality. You do this by invoking spiritual light to transmute the lower energies in your 4-fold vehicle, and you do it by using spiritual teachings to replace all dualistic illusions in your 4-fold vehicle. However, it is essential to realize that this phase will not actually bring you to Christhood and it will not qualify you for your ascension. It will simply return you to the state you were in before you entered into duality. In other words, what you are doing during this phase is NOT perfecting the soul but transcending the soul. You are allowing the soul to die bit by bit, as I expressed when I said that if you seek to save your life – meaning the soul created from duality – you would lose it. But if you were willing to lose your life for my sake – let the dualistic soul die – you would find eternal life through the Christ consciousness.
The third phase is when you can begin to do what you actually came here to do, namely be an open door for the individuality of your I AM Presence to be expressed in this world. You will attain full Christhood, when you become the open door—and nothing more.

Is the soul physical, spiritual or both?

TOPICS: Transcending the conflict over words – many definitions of soul – a new understanding of the soul and its components – why reincarnation becomes necessary – what it is that reincarnates – four levels of the material realm – levels of the soul – how to transcend the soul – communicating with the soul – how is the soul connected to the physical body –

Question: Is the soul physical, spiritual or both? Is it comprised of energy or matter? Does the soul reside in the physical body and, if so, where? I have heard some say that it is located in the heart and others say it is in the solar plexus area. What is the best way to communicate with our soul? Can you please explain the difference between the soul and the spirit? Some people seem to get them confused or think that they are one and the same thing.

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

If you look at the history of humankind, you will see an almost endless string of conflicts. If you take a closer look at the conflicts, you will see that many of them originated from the fact that words can have different meanings to different people.

When you combine this with our teachings on the duality consciousness, you see that one effect of this consciousness is that it makes people think they are as gods, who can define what is right and wrong. In other words, the duality consciousness causes people to interpret words a certain way AND then believe that their interpretation is the only true one and all others are wrong. This often leads to what I have called epic dramas.

One effect of this consciousness is that certain words over time can become almost useless for a spiritual teacher. The reason is that different people attach different meanings to a word, and they always end up in a conflict about who is right. Thus, instead of listening for a higher teaching, people become focused on defending their present teaching and its use of words. People are literally caught up in fighting over the meaning of words instead of seeking an inner experience that transcends words.

You will see that some spiritual teachings define the soul one way and others define it another way. Some teachings use the word “soul” without giving a special definition of it; assuming everyone knows what the soul is. That is why we of the ascended masters have decided to give more specific teachings about the components of what most people call the soul. It is not our aim to hereby say that all other teachings are now wrong. But it is our aim to give a more detailed understanding of the components of self, so that spiritual seekers can rise above the various interpretations of the word soul.

So what we now teach is that the core of your being is the Conscious You. As you will see from our explanation, the Conscious You is an extension of the I AM Presence. Thus, it is spiritual and not physical at all. The Conscious You can descend into the material universe, but it can never be altered by any of the energies of this realm. The reason is that it is made out of consciousness and not energy. As I explain in another answer, everything in the world of form is created FROM energy, but it is created BY consciousness. The Conscious You has the ability to form a mental image and superimpose it upon the Ma-ter light, causing the light to take on the form of the image.

As also explained in the other answer, the Conscious You can co-create from an identity of seeing itself as a connected being or as a separate being. If it co-creates with a sense of separation, its mental images and the lower energies it generates cannot rise to the spiritual realm. Thus, they accumulate in the lower self, which can eventually become a very sophisticated and powerful sense of self. If the Conscious You identifies itself with the separate self it has created, then it cannot let it go when the physical body dies. Thus, reincarnation becomes a necessity, as it gives the Conscious You another chance to dis-identify itself from the separate self and attain Christ consciousness (in which it correctly identifies itself as an extension of God’s Being).

So when you look at a lifestream that reincarnates, it will be a combination of the Conscious You and the separate self. And it will indeed descend into the physical body from a higher level of vibration than the material realm. And that is why some teachings say that what reincarnates is the soul, and since it descends into the physical body from a higher realm, they assume that it came from the spiritual realm and thus that the soul was created in the spiritual realm.

You can gain a deeper understanding of this by combining it with our teaching about the four levels of the material realm. What you now see is that the Conscious You descends from the I AM Presence, which is located in the spiritual realm. The Conscious You creates or takes on a separate self in the identity realm. It then creates mental images based on that self in the mental realm and projects them upon the Ma-ter light through the emotional realm. Thus, the separate self is not spiritual at all, but is created in both the identity, mental and emotional realms.

So when the physical body dies, the separate self obviously cannot rise to the spiritual realm, because it is created out of the energies of the identity, mental and emotional realms. And when the Conscious You identifies itself fully with the separate self, it cannot rise higher either, meaning that in between embodiments, the Conscious You will “reside” in (have its self-awareness focused in) one of the three lower realms. And it is from here that the lifestream descends to its next embodiment. Thus, you see that what descends does not actually come from the spiritual realm—unless you define the “spiritual realm” as anything beyond the physical realm without distinguishing the identity, mental and emotional realms.

So you see my overall point, which is that much of the confusion around the soul is caused by the fact that there are different definitions or that there is no precise definition of the soul. If you say that the soul was created in the spiritual realm and is spirit, then the soul should be able to ascend and reincarnation would be unnecessary. If you say the soul is physical, then how could it ever ascend to the spiritual realm?

What we of the ascended masters are seeking to do is to give a more detailed view, namely that what most people call the soul is made up of various components—some of which are spiritual and some of which reside in the various levels of the material realm. And when you understand this, you can avoid the confusion.

So based on what I have said here, we can see that the lower part of your lifestream has various levels. And in each of these levels, you can accumulate beliefs and mental images based on the sense of separation. This accumulation has happened in many previous lifetimes, where you have responded to the conditions you encountered on earth. And since this planet has been deeply affected by the duality consciousness and certain fallen beings that have incarnated here, you could have been deeply wounded and traumatized in past lives. Thus, you could have much misqualified energy and many limiting beliefs stored in your four lower “bodies.”

In order for the Conscious You to extricate itself from – to stop identifying itself with – the lower self, it must transmute the lower energies and replace the limiting beliefs. These images and beliefs are all illusions, and in order to be free of them, the Conscious You must become conscious of them and make the decision to discard them and replace them with images based on Christ discernment. Yet you will often have to start by reducing the amount of misqualified energy, as it will cause so much emotional pain that you cannot uncover the underlying beliefs. We explain this in more detail and we give practical tools on the Transcendence Toolbox website.

The process whereby the Conscious You becomes conscious of the contents of the subconscious mind (the physical, emotional, mental and identity levels) can indeed be said to be a process whereby you communicate with the soul.

There are many ways to make the subconscious conscious, such as meditation or writing a journal. You can use several psychological healing techniques, and one of them is what is called working with the inner child. Others are Gestalt therapy or EMDR therapy. My technique for inner attunement can be used to communicate with your soul. Simply imagine that you are using me or your Christ self as a link for communicating with your soul. Then write down the thoughts that come to you during the meditation.

Now, consider your question:

Does the soul reside in the physical body and, if so, where? I have heard some say that it is located in the heart and others say it is in the solar plexus area.

As I have said, you have four lower “bodies” or four levels of the mind, and they form your energy field, often called the aura. Now, I know that popular belief is that the aura surrounds the physical body, and some even believe it is produced by the physical body, as a magnetic field is (supposedly, but wrongly) said to be produced by the physical magnet. Yet when you understand the teaching on the four levels of the material universe, you see that your aura is not produced by your physical body; your energy field produces the body. The physical body is simply the most dense aspect of your total energy field.

With this in mind, you can see that it is meaningless to assign the soul to a particular physical location in the body. Again, if you define the “soul” a certain way, you can obviously argue that it is located in a specific location, but my point is that there is not one physical location that is the entry point or anchor point between your three higher bodies and the physical body.

We give teachings about chakras, and all of the seven major chakras are points where your higher bodies interphase with your physical body. We teach that the energies from your I AM Presence first enters a chakra called the Secret Chamber of the Heart, which is said to be located behind the heart chakra but is actually in a higher level of vibration. From there it goes to the heart chakra before it then spreads out to the other chakras.

We have also said that the second chakra from the bottom is called the Seat of the Soul chakra, but this does not mean that all of your four lower bodies are anchored here. Again, if you define “soul” a certain way, you can indeed say that the soul is anchored in this chakra.

Yet if you reach for a higher understanding, you see that all of the chakras are important for your creative expression in the material world. Each chakra has different functions, and each chakra relates to what you can do with your physical body and conscious mind. My point being that the analytical, linear mind loves to divide everything into separate categories, but in reality, everything is one, interconnected whole. So what we have attempted to give you is a less linear, less divided and more interconnected view of your total being.

If a person’s twin flame has ascended

TOPICS: Ascended twin flame exerts magnetic pull on you – extra effort to unite with twin flame – become extension of your twin flame in embodiment

Question: Some teachings suggest that sometimes our twin flame has already ascended before us and does not walk on earth with us, and our love partners on this earth are soul mates but not the actual twin flame who is “with us” in another dimension.

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

It is quite possible that a person’s twin flame has ascended, and in some cases that twin flame might have ascended centuries ago. In fact, many of the people who are consciously on the spiritual path, and who are making great efforts to raise their consciousness, are doing so precisely because their twin flames are already ascended. The ascended twin flame exerts a magnetic pull on the lifestream. This compels the lifestream to come up higher and to sacrifice many of the temptations on earth in order to regain union with the twin flame. So while it might seem like a loss that your twin flame is ascended, it can be a great advantage for a lifestream who is on the spiritual path.

If your twin flame is ascended, you will have to walk the earth without the possibility of a love relationship with your twin flame. However, as already explained, this is not necessarily a disadvantage. When you recognize that your twin flame is ascended, you can make an extra effort to attain union with your Christ self. When you do attain that union, you also attain union with your ascended twin flame, and you can then be here below as your twin flame is Above.

This is an opportunity to be of great service to humankind and to the ascended masters. You are now the physical counterpart of an ascended master, and therefore you can serve as the open door for that master to work directly in the physical octave.

When you understand the Law of Free Will, you realize that we of the ascended masters cannot act directly in the material universe. We can only act when we are authorized to do so by human beings in embodiment. This is because the ultimate law of the material universe is free will. So only when a person in embodiment authorizes us to step in, can we act in this octave. Obviously, when you consciously realize that your twin flame is ascended and you unite with your Christ self, you can become an extension of that twin flame in embodiment.

How free is your free will?

TOPICS: You have two levels of awareness, the totality of the Conscious You and the awareness of your soul vehicle – the Conscious You makes choices, but when in embodiment, it sees its options through the filter of the soul vehicle – you can always uncover and fulfill your divine plan – you must deal with the dweller on the threshold of your past momentums – your free will is always free, but limited by your awareness –

Question: Is the free will of my immediate consciousness separate from my soul, like my soul’s is distinct from our I AM? For instance, in many, many moments I have been so hopeless, and in some I have voted to not be. In others I have felt so sincere and convinced and eager about our spiritual destiny. Is my soul making more sense out of this than linear me is, or are its hands tied similar to the way my I AM’s are tied by the free will of my soul?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

If you study some of the many books on near-death experiences or people who have been regressed and have remembered how their lifestreams planned their current embodiments, you will see that the totality of the lifestream is far more than the conscious awareness of most people. In other words, before you come into embodiment, you can look at the big picture of the evolution of your lifestream, and you can do so in a detached manner. Therefore you can make a very rational and detailed plan for what you want to accomplish in your next embodiment.

When the lifestream enters a physical body, it usually loses the memory of the big picture, meaning its total awareness. Some people can remember having certain experiences or memories as young children, but they are often forgotten later, as the lifestream becomes involved with daily living in the material universe. Only lifestreams who have attained a high degree of spiritual maturity in past lifetimes will retain a high degree of awareness and memory. Yet most spiritual seekers will have a strong intuitive sense of where they want to go in life.

So one can say that when your lifestream enters the physical body, its sense of awareness and identity becomes far more limited than before the lifestream entered the body. So what determines the awareness you have with your conscious mind?

As we explain, the core of your being is the Conscious You. The Conscious You starts out with a point-like sense of self, and as it gains experiences in the material universe, it will expand its sense of self, it will expand the sphere of its total awareness. This expansion has a vertical and a horizontal aspect. The vertical is that you expand your sense of being connected to the I AM Presence, moving towards total oneness with your Presence (personal Christhood). The horizontal is that you expand your knowledge of the material world and how it functions.

So the awareness you have before you descend into embodiment is determined by how much the Conscious You has expanded its sphere of self. The wider your sphere – the more awareness you have – the more options you can see. In other words, the Conscious You is the center of your free will. The Conscious You has complete free will, yet it can choose only among the options it can see or imagine. And the options you can see depend on how wide is the sphere of your awareness. In other words, while you are making your divine plan for your next embodiment, you have access to the total awareness you have attained through all of your embodiments.

So then what happens when you actually take embodiment? As I explain elsewhere, what most people call the soul is actually a 4-fold vehicle that the Conscious You creates in order to express itself in the four levels of the material universe. This 4-fold vehicle is created over many lifetimes, and as I explain, most people on earth have descended into the duality consciousness. This means that your soul vehicle is made up of many illusions from the duality consciousness and it also stores many misqualified energies. All of these will limit the awareness of your soul vehicle.

When you are in between embodiments, you can – if you have some spiritual maturity – look at your situation with the full awareness of the Conscious You. Yet when you descend into embodiment, you will begin to look at life through the soul vehicle, which means your awareness of life will now be limited to what you can see through the filter of the 4-fold vehicle. You can compare this to standing on a ship with full freedom to look around and then putting on a deep-sea diving suit, that has only a small window through which you can look out. Your soul vehicle is comparable to the diving suit, and the level of consciousness of the soul determines the size and clarity of the window through which you look at the world when you are in embodiment.

So you now see that you have two considerations. First, is the level of awareness that the Conscious You has built over many lifetimes. This is what you use to plan your next embodiment. Yet when you descend into a body, you usually lose this awareness. Many young children still have some awareness from being between embodiments, but it is usually forgotten as the child grows. And what then happens is that your awareness is now limited to what you can see through the filter of the 4-fold vehicle.

Again, the Conscious You is the seat of your free will, and technically your will is always completely free. Yet in actuality, the Conscious You can only choose among the options it can see, and that is why you feel limited by your soul vehicle. Many spiritual people sense there is more to them than the soul, and they feel they should be able to make better choices, yet they can’t consciously envision or accept their options, so they remain stuck and this can give rise to a sense of hopelessness.

Yet the beauty of the teachings about the Conscious You is that the Conscious You is NOT the soul vehicle. The Conscious You is pure awareness, which means that it has the ability to project itself anywhere it desires. No matter what is your level of soul awareness, the Conscious You always has the option to deliberately stop identifying itself fully with the 4-fold vehicle. It will then be possible for you to experience yourself as pure awareness, meaning that you are conscious, but you are not experiencing the world through the filter of the soul vehicle. You now experience that you are more than the soul.

Once you begin to have this frame of reference, you will stop identifying yourself with the 4-fold vehicle, and this will make it much easier for you to dismiss the many illusions of the soul consciousness. As you also clear out the energies in the soul vehicle, you will clarify and expand your perspective, and this means you will gradually begin to see the divine plan that the Conscious You made before coming into embodiment. In other words, no matter how low of a soul awareness you have created in past lives, you will always have the option to rise to the total awareness that the Conscious You has attained. Which means you will always be able to uncover and fulfill your divine plan—if you apply the spiritual teachings and tools we have given.

My point is that when you distinguish between the Conscious You and the 4-fold vehicle, you see that it is the Conscious You which makes choices. What most people call the soul is not actually the seat of your free will (unless you define soul as including the Conscious You), and the function of the soul is to limit the options that the Conscious You can see or imagine while in embodiment.

Consider that you are walking inside a dark building with a small flashlight and you come upon two doors. You would obviously think that you have to go through one of the two doors. Yet what if there was a third and fourth door that you cannot currently see. Only if you expanded the flashlight, would you be able to see the other doors.

So when you discover the spiritual path, your first task is to realign your outer personality and your conscious free will with the broader awareness and deeper choices of the Conscious You. Once you have brought your outer awareness and personality into alignment with the true individuality of the Conscious You, you can then begin to build from there to fulfill your divine plan and express your God-given creativity. We might also say that your foremost task is for the Conscious You to become conscious of who it really is, instead of thinking it is limited to the 4-fold vehicle.

You mention a sense of hopelessness and that you have many times chosen non-being. This is something many spiritual seekers encounter, as it is indeed an inevitable part of the spiritual path. Let me explain why.

During past lifetimes, most people have built certain momentums on making specific choices. If you choose to react to certain situations in a specific way, and if you reinforce that choice over many lifetimes, you will build a reactionary pattern. As Gautama Buddha explains in a pivotal discourse, LINK anything you focus your attention upon will be imbued with a certain form of consciousness, which can lead to the creation of a “beast.” This has in some esoteric teachings been called the “dweller on the threshold.” The reason for this name is that the beast dwells on the threshold to a new level of awareness. So in order to rise above your present level of awareness, you will have to encounter and overcome the dweller of your past momentums, the momentums that keep you tied to your present level of awareness.

If you compare this to the timeless question of Hamlet: “To be or not to be,” we can say that you have in past lives built a certain momentum of choosing not to be. And in order to rise to a new level, you must overcome those momentums. Now, most non-spiritual people can live an entire lifetime without ever encountering these past momentums, this dweller. Yet for a spiritual person who is willing to grow, it is inevitable that you must encounter one or more of your dwellers. And as you do so, you will for a time feel the weight of the momentum of non-being that the dweller is made from.

What this momentum – which is made from both the dualistic beliefs of your ego and the momentum of lower energies – will do is to give you a sense that you simply can’t live without it and that you – meaning your self-awareness – will die if you “slay the dragon of the dweller.” The key to overcoming this sense of hopelessness is to experience pure awareness. Thereby, you will realize that it is quite true what your ego is telling you. The self-awareness that was defined by the ego and the dweller will indeed die. Yet this does not mean that YOU will die, because you are not the 4-fold vehicle, you are the Conscious You, which is pure awareness and thus cannot die when the dweller dies.

This is the only real way to separate yourself from the dweller and surrender it, whereby it will either die of starvation or can be bound and dissolved by Archangel Michael. And once a certain dweller is slain, you will feel a new sense of freedom, which will last until you are ready to ascend to the next level up and thus must encounter the next dweller. Yet once you become conscious of the process, it becomes so much easier to avoid identifying with the dweller. You simply see it for what it is and then surrender it unconditionally.

My point again is that the ego and the dweller will have the effect of limiting either the options you can see or your ability/willingness to choose a higher option than you have done in the past. And thus we can say that until you overcome your past momentums, you are not truly free to choose. My point being that although I keep saying you have free will, it is a valid consideration how free your will actually is. And obviously, your freedom of will depends on your field of vision, your awareness, your sense of self.

Why does God allow lower spirits to exist and to tempt us against our free will?

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.

Free will and ultimate consequences

TOPICS: Looking for a higher understanding or defending pet theories – why do you need to be saved? – why did God allow both salvation and non-salvation? – your free will determines your salvation – free will and consequences – imposing a false image of God upon free will – there must be an ultimate consequence – what happens when a lifestream is dissolved –

Question: I am enjoying your website-teachings. I am involved with a christian-universalist forum who believes that ultimately all souls will be saved thru/in Christ. I have read some messages from Jesus given thru Kim that seem to say that not all souls will be saved even thought its God’s Will for them to be…because he gives them a free will…and that this free will is sovereign enough that it can totally/finally cause a soul to forfeit even its own existence (soul-extinction/annhilation/death).

Am I correct then that Jesus (thru Kim) does not support the idea that God’s Will will ultimately win out and Love will save all souls…because some souls thru their own will can transcend/overpower God’s Will for their salvation?
Thanks for any help. I once believed that souls could actually self-destruct (annhilation)..but have been holding more to universal salvation that assumes all souls will ultimately be saved by the Ultimacy of Love and eventual Triumph of divine Will. Of course the issue of ‘free will’ seems to be the issue in this debate.

I just don’t see how a soul could actually finally choose its own non-existence and just “poof” and become as it never existed. What happens to the energy residues of that soul and its memory? I must admit the Urantia Book has an interesting view of this ….as having souls who choose termination….being absorbed back into the Universal Spirit.

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

You are correct is saying that, “Jesus (thru Kim) does not support the idea that God’s Will will ultimately win out and Love will save all souls” However, let me comment on the expression “Jesus (thru Kim).” The existence of the second death whereby a soul is annihilated is a spiritual reality. It is not a matter of what Kim or any other person believes about it. It is a fact that will not be changed by what human beings want to believe, just as the earth was round when everyone believed it to be flat.

The greatest problem for any true spiritual teacher is that too many people prefer to cling to their pet theories rather than open their minds to the reality that is presented by the ascended masters. We see that reality because we have risen above the subjectivity and relativity of the human ego. We are quite willing to help people do the same, but we can do our job only when people are willing to let go of the illusions that give their egos a sense of security and instead face the reality of life.

To give people a greater understanding of the issue, let us use basic logic.

Why do you need to be saved?

The concept of salvation implies that two states are possible, namely salvation and non-salvation. If only salvation is possible, why do you need to be saved? If you believe God created you, you must reason that God must have created this dichotomy, meaning that God created the possibility of non-salvation.

So you need to be saved because non-salvation is a possibility. If it is God’s will that all lifestreams are saved and if God’s will is supreme or unbreakable, then why did God create a situation with two options? Why not simply create lifestreams in a state where non-salvation is impossible?

If non-salvation is possible, then your salvation is not guaranteed. Yet if it is God’s will that all lifestreams be saved – but salvation is not guaranteed – then it cannot be God’s will that determines whether or not you are saved.

God has created a situation where your salvation is not guaranteed. Yet God wants you to be saved. So there must be a mechanism that can override God’s will and make non-salvation a reality.

That mechanism is your free will. The solution to the enigma is that while it is God’s will that you be saved, God wants you to be saved as a result of your own free choices and not as a result of some force from above. In other words, when God gave you free will, God suspended its superior will when it comes to your salvation.

God obviously wants you to be saved, but God allows the outcome to be determined through your choices. We might say that it is God’s will that you make your own choices. It is God’s will that you have free will.

If you are to have free will, then non-salvation must be possible. In order for your will to be free, you must be able to choose any conceivable option, including that your lifestream is not saved but is erased as if it never existed. God does not want you to choose this option, but in giving you free will, it must give you the option.

Free will necessitates that your choices have consequences. If your choices do not have consequences, you do not have a choice. If you will be saved no matter what you do – as fundamentalist Christians believe I will save them if they declare me their Lord and Savior – then where is your choice in the matter?

To have a choice, you must have more than one option, and what sets options apart is their consequences. If you come to a fork in the road but both ways take you to the same place, your choice of one way has no consequence and thus was not a real choice.

God wants you to be saved, but as a result of your own choosing. So if you will be saved no matter what you do, your choices have no ultimate consequence, and thus you do not have ultimate freedom of choice. You would simply be a puppet on a string, who might seem to move but truly has no freedom to move on your own.

The problem with free will is that people impose their image of God upon it. For example, fundamentalists look at it through the filter of black-and-white thinking. Thus, they think God must be almighty and therefore nothing could ever go wrong in God’s creation. God must ultimately have his will fulfilled. As I have explained, God has suspended his superior will when it comes to your personal salvation.

Many New Age people or liberal Christians, including many universalists, look at free will through the filter of gray thinking. Thus, they think everything will ultimately be okay and that God really has no absolutist laws. Consequently, all lifestreams must be saved in the end by Christ performing some kind of miracle. Yet if I were to save all lifestreams, I would have to force some of them to be saved, and that would be an obvious violation of the Law of Free Will as I have just explained it. Thus, there is such a thing as an ultimate consequence.

Let us now take this to a higher level. In the end, God’s will is guaranteed to be fulfilled in the sense that the goal of the universe will be met. The material universe will be raised up in vibration until it becomes a part of the spiritual realm. However, it is still an open question how many co-creators will become part of this ascending process and how many will chose to step outside of it and thus ultimately face dissolution.

What happens when a lifestream is dissolved? If you read the teaching on your true identity, you will see that there are three main aspects to your lower being:

The Conscious You is an individualization of God’s Being that can become an immortal spiritual being. Thus, when a lifestream is dissolved, this Conscious You simply blends back into the whole of your I AM Presence as if it had never been apart. It is like a wave that sinks back into the ocean when a storm is calmed.
The sense of identity is what you build as you journey through the material universe. Yet a being will only be dissolved if it has built an identity that is based on the mind of anti-christ. Nothing created from this dualistic mind has ultimate reality, and thus it will be dissolved in the process called the second death. This is comparable to turning on the light in a room, whereby the darkness instantly disappears—because it has no substance.
The beliefs and energy out of which your lower being – what most people call the soul – is formed. This is what we call the Ma-ter light, and when you create an identity based on the duality of anti-christ, the Ma-ter light takes on an imperfect form. Yet when this identity is dissolved, the Ma-ter light instantly returns to its pure form and the imperfect forms are erased as if they had never existed. The form that is imposed on the Ma-ter light is comparable to the image on a movie screen. Yet when you remove the film strip from the projector, the image disappears and the movie screen is blank.

As we also explain, your spiritual identity is anchored in your I AM Presence, which is permanently abiding in the spiritual realm. Thus, your imperfect choices will not limit your I AM Presence although the Presence will learn from them. So when your lifestream is dissolved, your I AM Presence will still be there, and it can chose to send another individualization of itself into the material universe. However, this will be a new being with no memory whatsoever of the previous lifestream that did not become immortal.

This does not mean that every lesson learned by the dissolved lifestream will be wasted, for all positive lessons will become part of the causal body that surrounds the I AM Presence, and it remains even when the lifestream is dissolved. Thus, the I AM Presence can draw on this learning process when designing a new lifestream, which makes it less likely – but still possible – that any succeeding lifestream will go to the second death. There are simply no guarantees in the material world.

I think people who are into a universalist form of Christianity should be able to accept that the major purpose of the universe is to give God’s co-creators an opportunity to grow by making choices. In order for them to learn anything, choices must have consequences, and if a lifestream consistently chooses death/separation over a long period of time, that choice must have the ultimate consequence. As I said, he who seeks to save his life – meaning a sense of identity as being separated from God – will lose it, whereas he who is willing to lose his life for my sake – for the sake of coming into oneness with all life through the mind of Christ – will find eternal life.

Choices do not create alternative realities

TOPICS: No parallel universes – loss of individuality – your choices erase some probabilities and create others – your choices limit future options – part of you exists in the spiritual realm –

Question: Dear Jesus, I was just curious as to whether or not alternate realities exist. For example, right now, I work as a Loss Prevention Officer, but in another reality, I could be the President. Are they real or not? If alternate realities do exist, which one of me is real? In each alternate reality, do I have a lifestream or would that be another lifestream living an existence as myself?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

It all depends on how you define alternative realities. If you define them as seen in some science-fiction movies or books, then the answer is that they do not exist. Even the theory advanced by some quantum physicists is not correct. In other words, it is not correct that when you have a situation with 10 options, that situation will create ten alternative realities with you – or some form of you – existing in each one.

Just imagine how many people there are on earth, how many choices they make daily and how many alternative realities would be created in just one day. Everything in the material universe is finite. A lifestream is created with a finite consciousness and attention. If alternative realities existed, each reality would have to contain a part of your consciousness and attention, meaning that your lifestream would quickly lose so much substance that you would lose all sense of identity and individuality.

As quantum physics explains, before a scientist makes an observation, a subatomic particle exists in the realm of probability. There might be a large number of probabilities, but when the scientist makes an observation, one of the probabilities is actualized as what the scientist perceives as a subatomic particle. At that point, all of the other probabilities simply disappear (the quantum waveform collapses) as the world moves on another step. There is still a realm of probability, but it no longer contains the exact same probabilities that existed before the observation was made. Instead, it contains a new set based on the changes created by the observation.

It is much the same with everyday situations in which you make choices. In a given situation, you might have 10 available options. Yet when you make a choice, one of those options becomes a manifest reality, and the others are no longer available. You have now created a new situation with new options.

You can understand this when you consider the importance of free will. You are here to learn, and you learn by making choices and reaping the consequences of those choices. One of the consequences is that if you make choices that are out of harmony with the laws of God, you limit your future options. If all of your choices simply created alternative realities, a choice would not eliminate future options, and how could the lifestream learn from that?

The simple fact is, that there is only one of you, meaning that there is only one self-conscious being who has the particular sense of identity that you have right now. There is much more to you than what you experience in your conscious awareness, yet that more does not exist in the kind of alternative reality portrayed by science-fiction movies.

It does, however, exist in another realm, as I explain elsewhere. Your Conscious You is an extension of your I AM Presence, and your I AM Presence resides in the spiritual realm. Your I AM Presence is also you, although you probably see yourself as different from or separated from your I AM Presence at the moment. Nevertheless, a larger part of you does exist in the spiritual realm at the same time that your Conscious You inhabits your physical body.

It is possible that your I AM Presence can have a number of Conscious Yous in embodiment on earth at the same time. Other Conscious Yous might be in embodiment in other locations in the material universe. So from that perspective, one might say that there are other parts of the greater you that exist in alternative realities. Yet those other parts are separate lifestreams, and they have a separate sense of identity. So they are not directly affected by the choices you make in this world.

The basic truth is that there is only one of you, meaning there is only one being who has your particular sense of identity. You can expand that sense of identity and unite with a greater part of your being, and this will greatly change how you see yourself. Yet in the here and now, you really are who you think you are—you are who you see yourself as being.

Setting people free from false beliefs

TOPICS: Many Christians would persecute Jesus – be an example of an openminded approach – live your spirituality – respect free will – do not seek to convert; simply share – setting people free – avoid fanaticism –

Question: Maybe I am wrong, and If I am please correct me. At times, when I have spiritual discussions and give my opinion/beliefs out to Christians in particular (much a total regurgitation of what you say on the website) I receive hatred from them. How besides love can I help someone liberate their mind or is that ultimately only something they have to be willing to do themselves in their lifestream’s evolution?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

Isn’t it an interesting phenomenon that so many of the people who call themselves Christians, and who claim to be my followers, respond with hatred and anger when they are confronted with ideas that go beyond or contradict their church doctrines? Isn’t it interesting that these self-professed Christians fail to see that they have entered into the exact same mindset that I encountered and challenged so many times in the leaders and followers of the Jewish religion? Isn’t it interesting that they claim to follow my teachings but refuse to embody my teachings, specifically my command that you love one another as I have loved you (John 15:12)? Isn’t it interesting that they claim to follow Christ, yet fail to see that they embody the mindset – the mind of anti-christ – that killed the Living Christ 2,000 years ago and would persecute him again today?

Anyone open to the teachings on this website needs to recognize that he or she has reached a higher level of spiritual maturity than most of the people found in mainstream Christian churches—or in the orthodox branches of any other religion. (Obviously, this should not lead to pride but simply to a realistic assessment.) As I explain in my discourse about the different levels of spiritual development, some people are stuck in a fear-based approach to religion. Therefore, they feel threatened by anything that does not conform to the doctrine they have decided must be the only truth or the whole truth.

Ultimately, the lifestream will not escape this fear-based approach until it becomes willing to look beyond its existing beliefs. The lifestream has to decide that it is willing to grow, and in order to do that it must be willing to take responsibility for its own salvation instead of expecting an outer savior to do all the work. However, there is indeed much you can do to help other lifestreams reach this point of decision.

The most important thing you can do is to be the example. Walk the spiritual path and seek to gain a higher understanding of the spiritual side of life. However, it is not enough to simply have an intellectual understanding. You must internalize the insights you attain and express them in all aspects of your daily life. Religion should never be an overcoat that you put on before you go to church on Sunday and then take off when you leave church. True spirituality is an integral part of your being that affects all aspects of your life. And when you demonstrate this complete commitment to spiritual growth, you will indeed inspire many more people than you imagine.

As part of walking the spiritual path, it is natural that you feel a desire to share your understanding and insights. My advice in this context is that you develop a deeper understanding for the importance of free will and an uncompromising respect for the Law of Free Will. This has two aspects:

You must have an uncompromising respect for the free will of other people. They have a right to believe what they want to believe, even if you consider it to be limited or directly erroneous. They have a right to go through a process of gradually increasing their understanding, as you have done to reach your current level of understanding. They even have a right to close their minds to any higher understanding than the particular belief system they have decided must be the ultimate truth.

This does not mean that you cannot talk to other people about your beliefs. But it does mean that you should do so with the uncompromising attitude that you are not trying to convert or convince anyone that their beliefs are wrong and that yours are right. There is a subtle but extremely important difference between having the fear-based intent of wanting others to accept your beliefs and having the love-based intent of simply sharing your beliefs and understanding. When you are not motivated by fear, you will not feel a compulsive need to convert others. You will simply state your beliefs and be non-attached to how other people respond to your statements.

The second aspect is that you must have an uncompromising respect for your own free will. You have a right to believe what you believe, and you have a right to express your beliefs. So when other people respond negatively, you simply need to be non-attached to their reactions. And as long as you follow my advice about having a love-based intent, you should not let other people’s reactions stop you from expressing what you believe. They want you to stop saying anything beyond their belief system because they are afraid to open their minds to new ideas. They have a right to close their minds, but they do not have a right to demand that you do the same or that you stop speaking your understanding.

As you walk the path toward personal Christhood, you will gradually achieve the ability to challenge people’s illusions and limited beliefs in a way that is completely love-based, nevertheless very direct and firm. You will see that I did this many times during my mission. There are indeed many cases where a person’s lifestream wants to be set free from certain outer beliefs, yet the outer mind cannot let go of those beliefs. Therefore, the person is trapped in a spiritual stalemate that the person cannot break on his own. The reason being that in order to move on, the person must make a decision, yet the person is clinging to an illusion that prevents the lifestream from making the crucial decision.

Such a person can be set free by being challenged by a person who has attained a certain degree of Christhood and can therefore deliver the understanding, the love and the power of God that can cut through the prison of illusion that surrounds the person’s mind. However, doing this is a very delicate balance that can be achieved only through your Christ self. However, until you do achieve this level of Christhood, you can do much for others by using Archangel Michael’s Rosary and Mother Mary’s rosaries LINK to set people free from fear and other limitations.

Is a regrettable fact that so many people become converted to a particular belief system and then see it as their holy duty to convert all others by any means possible, even if it violates the commands of their religion. These people often use their outer minds or their emotions to reason that because the goal of converting others is so noble, it is acceptable to violate the Law of Free Will. They now become fanatical in their attempts to convert others, and they use fear in an attempt to control others into accepting their beliefs. As Mother Mary explains, in her discourse, the concept that the end can justify the means never came from God.

Seeking to control others through fear, guilt or other negative emotions is never acceptable, and it has nothing to do with Christhood. Yet as you attain some degree of Christhood, you will be able to rise above this fanatical response and still challenge people’s illusions. The crucial difference is that you do not challenge others with your outer mind or with your emotions. You recognize the truth that you, of your of own self, can do nothing (John 5:30). You simply wait until your Christ self acts through you and challenges others. In other words, you do not use your outer mind to decide that you have to challenge the illusions of others. You let it happen spontaneously from within.

The key to reaching the point where your Christ self can work through you is to have an uncompromising respect for free will and a clear attunement with your Christ self. When you do reach that level, you will simply let the mind of Christ work to help the people who cannot free themselves from their illusions.

One might say that all spiritual teachers are sent to earth to help the people whose lifestreams want to be free, but who are trapped by their outer minds, by a particular organization, a belief system, their culture or by dark forces. These are the people who will remain in ignorance and illusion unless they are set free by the direct intervention of a person acting as God’s representative through the power of the Christ mind. So when you sincerely strive to “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus,” (Philippians 2:5) you can indeed become an instrument for helping people escape the prison of illusion.

Your own past choices can indeed override your ability to make future choices

TOPICS: Only you can override your free will – past choices can limit future choices – free will in polarity with karma – higher law is that of self-transcendence – when faced with second death, lifestream knows what its options are – even final death is by the lifestream’s own choice –

Question: Does a soul’s dissolution usually come from an accord with its I AM, or is the dissolution always an overriding of the soul’s free will, as in the case with Hitler?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

The Law of Free Will is an absolute law in the world of form, meaning that no being in heaven or on earth has the right to override the free will of your lifestream—that is, no being except yourself. You see, your own past choices can indeed override your ability to make future choices.

The Law of Free Will does not exist independently. It exists in a polarity with the Law of Action and Reaction, the Law of Karma. This law states that you are responsible for how you use God’s energy. If you use energy in harmony with the laws of God, you will magnify creation and enhance your creative abilities. This will increase your creative powers and give you more options for how to exercise your free will. The more creative power you have, the more options you have from which to choose, just as an adult has more options than a baby.

If you use energy in violation of God’s laws, you create a burden – karma – for yourself that will limit your creative abilities. This will limit your creative powers and the options for exercising your free will. In other words, when you choose to go against God’s law, the consequence of your choice is that you limit your ability to make future choices.

Although the Law of Free Will is absolute, it is not the highest law. The highest law of the world of form is the Law of Self-transcendence. You have the right to go against the laws that God used to create this universe. You have the right to create a limited sense of identity, and you have the right to remain in that limited identity for a very long time. Yet the Law of Self-transcendence mandates that you cannot remain in a limited sense of identity forever. If you could, what would be the purpose for your existence?

So if a lifestream deliberately and willfully violates the laws of God, it will eventually reach the end of its allotted time. If the lifestream has not turned around of its own accord, if it is not willing to transcend itself, and if it has not responded to the spiritual teachers sent to help the lifestream, then the lifestream will be taken to a place in the identity realm called the Court of Sacred Fire. The lifestream will then be faced with the lake of fire that is spoken of in Revelation.

14. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
15. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. (Revelation, Chapter 20)

Death and hell represent the consciousness that causes lifestreams to deny their inherent divinity and their potential to manifest Christ consciousness and God consciousness. Those who are not found in the book of life are those who have continued to deny their potential and who have refused to transcend themselves; self-transcendence being the spiritual meaning of the word “life.”

Obviously, this means that it is not some power in heaven – as most Christians believe – that decides who is written in the book of life. Lifestreams on earth must decide, through their acceptance or denial of their Christ potential, whether to write their names in the book of life.

I can assure you that no matter how far a lifestream has descended into a state of denial, no lifestream can face the lake of fire without being awakened to the reality that this fire can dissolve the lifestream completely and totally. Most lifestreams that end up in the Court of Sacred Fire have great pride, and they often think they can get away with anything. Yet when a lifestream looks into the lake of fire, even the most prideful lifestreams instantly realize the fallacy of this state of mind. This is the ultimate “hitting the concrete experience.”

So the lifestream cannot fail to know the consequence of the choice is it about to make. Because the lifestream has made so many past choices that were in violation of the laws of God, it has now narrowed its options until it literally has only one choice left. That choice is simple. Will you turn around, abandon your current sense of identity and begin the upward climb that leads you to transcend your limited sense of identity, until you attain Christ consciousness and become the immortal spiritual being you were destined to become? Or will you instead choose to continue to deny the Christ within you and refuse to climb back towards immortality—thereby inevitably being dissolved in the lake of fire?

This is literally the only option that the lifestream has at this point. Up until that point, the lifestream could keep procrastinating the choice to turn around and transcend its sense of identity. Because of the Law of Self-transcendence, the time has run out. Now the lifestream can no longer postpone the choice. It must choose whether to be or not to be, and it must choose now.

If a lifestream decides to turn around, it will be given all possible help, but it will also be faced with the task of overcoming all false beliefs that it has accepted as part of its identity and all negative karma made through its many incorrect choices. Some lifestreams literally refuse to do this for various reasons – mostly the pride of not wanting to admit they were wrong – so they actually choose that they would rather be dissolved than having to uncreate their own imperfect creations. Some lifestreams refuse to abandon their rebellion, anger and hatred, often cursing God to the very end. This was the case with Hitler who had embodied the Luciferian consciousness to the ultimate degree.

So you see, even the second death is not done against the lifestream’s free will. It is actually the lifestream’s own choice, because it chooses that it does not want to undo its past choices. Therefore, it would rather make one more choice in denial of its own Christ potential. That choice will then become the lifestream’s last and final choice.

Foundational teachings on your divine plan and karmic relationships

TOPICS: God’s will is not external – higher will and lower will – is your will truly free? – what is forcing you: society or your divine plan? – your limited viewpoint versus your divine plan – your divine plan is not a straight-jacket – you grow by making decisions – the ego resists your divine plan – seeking to force yourself to learn your lessons – the ego’s will is not free – forgiving others – karmic relationships – not necessarily a sexual relationship – concerns about relationships – consider attachments before making decisions – call forth the balancing of karma with other people – giving up attachments leads to a higher level – divine plan has two elements: work and fun – getting stuck in karma so you never get to your sacred labor – how your ego sabotages your divine plan – breaking the treadmill of karmic patterns – be willing to re-evaluate your life and make dramatic changes –

Question: Dear Jesus, I’m trying to understand what a divine plan really is, what kind of details it might contain and how it relates to the free will. I understand that we all have made a personal plan before embodying on the earth. Are we now to follow that plan to the point like robots, or is there room for improvisation, using our free will?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

You are raising a question that confuses many spiritual seekers when they first become aware of the concept that they have a divine plan or a higher purpose. This is a question that is very much influenced by the fact that traditional religions – including Christianity – have portrayed God as the angry being in the sky who is imposing his will upon you and judging you harshly if you do not follow it like a robot.

To resolve the enigma, you need to contemplate the fact that the true God is not the angry being in the sky. However, you will also want to take a look in the mirror and realize that most people have an internal conflict about their divine plans. As an example, look at the wording from the question above:

I understand that we all have made a personal plan before embodying on the earth. Are we now to follow that plan to the point like robots, or is there room for improvisation, using our free will?

Do you see that there is a duality implied here, in the sense that there is a subtle belief that following your divine plan takes away your free will and turns you into a robot? However, who made your divine plan? Obviously, you did! How did you make your divine plan? By making choices through your free will!

You did have help from your spiritual teachers, but true spiritual teachers do not force you into making certain choices, they present you with insights that help you make the best possible choices for yourself. So your divine plan is entirely an expression of your free will, and thus how can following your own choices turn you into a robot? Yet what the question correctly illustrates is that for many people there is a conflict between their higher will and their immediate will. So the real question to ponder is whether the will you have right now – your conscious will – is actually free?

What happens to virtually all people is that when they descend into embodiment, they forget about their prior existence, including their divine plan. As they grow up, they are influenced by family and society, which causes them to build certain expectations about life, and these might well be in conflict with their divine plans. For example, most people are exposed to external pressures because other people – including family members – and certain institutions in society want to control them and keep them within strict boundaries. Let me assure you that your divine plan does NOT specify that the supreme purpose for your present lifetime is to be the perfect consumer who is constantly seeking more things, more sex or more superficial recognition from a superficial society. Nor does your divine plan specify that you stay within the confines defined by whatever elite is ruling your society—even the religious elite which says you are a miserable sinner who can never do the things that I did.

On the contrary, most spiritual people have a divine plan which involves challenging status quo by demonstrating that it is possible to live a more spiritual life even in a modern, scientific, materialistic and skeptical society. So what is it – truly – that pushes you to follow an external standard like a robot? Is it your divine plan or is it the norms of society, the standard of this world—which is what I referred to as “mammon.” You will recall that I clearly stated that you cannot serve two masters, you cannot serve God – as a symbol for your divine plan – and mammon – as a symbol for the norms imposed upon you in this world. One might say that your divine plan is not an external but an internal standard, whereas the norms of society clearly represent something external.

Most people have experienced that there are certain situations where they are so emotionally overwhelmed that they cannot think clearly, so they make decisions that they later recognize as being less than ideal. The reason was that your emotional involvement with – your attachment to – the situation formed a veil over your mind that prevented you from thinking clearly. Well, coming into a physical body is like stepping in behind such a veil, and thus you cannot look at life as objectively and clearly while you are in the body as you can while you are outside the body. My point being that when you make your divine plan, you are free of the veil through which you currently look at life.

Obviously, the foundation for exercising your free will is that you have the best possible vision of what your options are and what consequences they have. Thus, you can actually make freer choices while you are making your divine plan than you can make right now while you are partially blinded by the veil built in this lifetime. Reconnecting to your divine plan gives you a guiding rod that can help you see beyond your short-term emotional attachments and expectations, so you can make decisions that are better from an overall perspective. Doing whatever feels good at the moment without considering long-term consequences is not actually exercising free will, for if your vision is limited, how can your will be truly free?

That being said, let me make it clear that your divine plan is NOT a straight-jacket. Following your divine plan does not mean that your entire life is laid out in the most minute detail. On the contrary, everything in your life revolves around your free will, so your divine plan is not actually made in order to tell you what to do. It is only by making decisions that you truly grow, and the entire purpose for your divine plan is to get you into situations that help you make the best possible choices, namely decisions that empower you to overcome your limited beliefs and become free to express – in this finite world – your infinite potential.

The central element in your divine plan is the lessons you need to learn in this lifetime, lessons that are adapted to both your long-term plan for coming into the material universe and your short-term plan of rising above the dualistic limitations you have come to accept for yourself. My point is that the overall goal is to set you free to express your divine individuality and potential. However, to accomplish this, you must overcome your current limitations, and this can be done only when you consciously see the unreality of these limitations and decide to let them go.

Any spiritual seeker who is honest with him/herself will know that there is a force in the psyche that resists growth, resists change—namely what is normally called the ego. This force will seek to make you shy away from anything that is difficult, it will want you to follow the path of least resistance. This is what I called the broad way that leads to destruction, and it is not the path which leads to spiritual growth. So when you make your divine plan, you do take into account this tendency, including how you might have fallen prey to this in prior lifetimes. Therefore, many people do indeed create a divine plan that will force them to experience certain situations – and experience them over and over again – in order to force themselves to face the lessons they need to learn.

Obviously, this can be quite unpleasant once you are in a physical body and have forgotten that you actually wanted to experience a difficult situation. You tend to wonder why you keep attracting the same problems over and over again, and you tend to believe your ego, which states it is not your fault and that you should run away from the situations instead of seeking to learn the lesson. So one can certainly say that there is an element of force in many people’s divine plan, because when you are above the veil of this world, you know how easy it is to run away from your lessons once you are blinded by that veil. Nevertheless, once you begin to understand this, can it truly be said that your divine plan overrides your free will? Or is it actually seeking to prevent you from being controlled by the temporary, dualistic, self-centered will of the ego—that is not truly free?

What kind of details are in your divine plan? Well, that is a highly individual matter. Yet for most people a major part of the divine plan is to balance karma they have with specific other people. Thus, your divine plan specifies that you embody with other people as your family or spouse(s) and that you encounter certain people during your current lifetime. Yet take note that the overall goal here is to balance the karma, which first of all involves completely forgiving the other person and establishing a loving relationship. In other words, the real goal here is that by you setting the other person free, you also set yourself free form any karmic ties to that person.

The consequence is that your purpose for encountering another person is to learn a lesson and balance the karma. Your divine plan does not necessarily specify exactly how that should be done, in terms of what kind of a relationship you need to have with the other person. Nor does it say that it has to be a life-long relationship. For example, it is quite common that when two people meet, their karmic tie will make them feel a strong attraction to each other—which is actually an expression of their desire to work out the karma and be free. Yet if the two people are of the opposite sex – or even the same sex these days – it is quite common that they think their attraction means they have to have a sexual relationship.

Over the cause of history, this has caused immense suffering in the form of creating relationships where both people feel trapped. It has also broken up countless viable relationships because one person feels he or she has to follow the latest karmic attraction. Can you see that what really happens here is that because people are blinded by the veil of being in embodiment, they simply act out their human expectations and start a relationship while they could possibly have balanced the karma in other ways? Can you see that some people go from one relationship to the next without actually learning the lesson they are meant to learn? They are always chasing the dream that the next relationship will be the ideal one, but in reality they will never have an ideal relationship until they learn the lesson they are meant to learn.

My point here is that your divine plan might have specified that you meet and interact with another person in order to balance karma. Yet your divine plan might not have specified that you had to have a physical, sexual relationship with that person. On the contrary, having such a relationship might indeed cause you to make more karma, because as soon as the honeymoon is over, the karma between two people will make it very difficult for them to get along in a traditional relationship. They are likely to both feel trapped and to blame it on the other person, which works directly against forgiving the other person and setting yourself free. Thus, what was meant to be a relationship to set both people free now becomes a tool for binding them even more.

Obviously, there are many forms of relationships between human beings, and sometimes it is indeed necessary for you to marry a person in order to balance the karma—for a committed relationship makes it harder to run away from the lesson instead of facing it. Yet what I am seeking to impart here is two concerns:

• Your divine plan always leaves room for choice. You might have karma with another person, but there is often more than one way for you to balance that karma. Indeed, if you could – immediately upon meeting a person – forgive that person completely, you might not need to have any further relationship with the person.

• By seeking to step outside your worldly expectations – the veil that blinds you – and reconnect to your divine plan, you will gain a clearer vision that can help you avoid making many mistakes in the physical world. You can avoid taking actions with physical consequences and instead learn your lessons and balance your karma before it manifests as physical circumstances that are difficult to reverse. You can avoid experiencing the same problem over and over again.

As a practical way to avoid rushing in where angels fear to tread, create a habit of stepping back from a situation before you make important decisions. Consider your attachments to a given situation—do you somehow feel compelled, feel as if you have to do something, as if you don’t have a choice in the matter? The most common remark after people realize they made a major mistake is, “I had no other choice!” The reality is that you ALWAYS have more than one option, but because you have allowed yourself to become overwhelmed by the situation, you could see only one option.

By consciously stepping back from the situation and seeking to reconnect to your divine plan, you will avoid this form of spiritual blindness. And only when you can clearly see that you have more than one option, can you make a free choice. You can NEVER make a free choice if you think you have only one option.

In fact, it would be wise never to engage in a close relationship without first calling forth the balancing of all karma you might have with the person and making an effort to overcome any attachments/compulsions you feel concerning the relationship. If you feel an unwillingness to give up a relationship, it is a sure sign that there is something unresolved, and if you proceed with it unresolved, it will most likely ruin the relationship. He who seeks to save his life shall lose it, whereas he who is willing to lose his life for the sake of growth will find a higher form of life.

In fact, it is quite common that a karmic relationship blocks your meeting the person with whom you can have a deeper relationship. Many people have experienced that giving up a karmic relationship – completely forgiving the other person – opens up for a deeper, more spiritual relationship. Obviously, what I am saying here applies to more than just relationships, and when you are willing to give up your attachments to a given circumstance, you often open the door for a better circumstance to manifest.

Your divine plan has two main elements. There is the work that needs to be done, namely balancing your karma from past lives, and there is the fun part of your divine plan, namely your sacred labor, which is the gift you want to bring to this world. Many spiritual people choose to encounter their karmic challenges early in life, so as to get them out of the way and set themselves free to do the sacred labor that can only be unlocked after the karma is balanced.

The problem is, of course, that many people get stuck in their karmic relationships – making more karma rather than balancing it – and thus they never get to the sacred labor. You can immensely speed up the process of working through your karma by applying what I have said here, especially by forgiving all people with whom you sense a karmic tie. And this means anyone with whom you have a less than harmonious relationship. Approach every relationship with the attitude that the purpose is to set both yourself and the other person free to move on in life. And never be concerned if the other person does not respond in kind. If you truly forgive another – if you truly turn the other cheek – you will be free of the karmic relationship even if the other person holds on to it.

You can quickly learn to recognize when you find yourself in a situation where you are not free to follow your divine plan, and the best sign is that you sense tension and attachment. And while such attachments always come from the ego, an honest examination will reveal that your attachments have power over you only because the Conscious You has not been willing to take full responsibility for your life. You need to recognize that one of the major purposes of your divine plan is to set you free from the control of your ego and the forces of this world. Thus, your ego obviously does not want you to discover your divine plan, and it seeks to avoid it in many clever ways. Here are the most common ones:

The ego seeks to make you attached to the expectations about life built in this lifetime, so you allow them to override your divine plan. There are myriad disguises for this mechanism, such as the idea that you should live your life according to the norms of your family and society.
The ego seeks to make you accept a set of restrictions for what a human being can do, thus denying that you are a spiritual being. This involves denying that you have the potential to rise above your karma and your psychological issues in order to manifest your Christ potential.
The ego seeks to get you so entangled in karmic relationships that you cannot forgive other people and thus set yourself free to move on to your sacred labor.
The ego seeks to make you believe that your problematic relationships are all the other people’s fault, so that it can prevent you from learning the lesson YOU need to learn.
The ego seeks to divert your attention into following any pursuit in this world, thus never having the time and attention to consider your divine plan.

We now see that there are two main things that block you from discovering and following your divine plan:

Your karma from past lives.
Your unresolved psychological issues that cause you to feel attachments.

This can cause your life – and even many succeeding lifetimes – to become a treadmill, where you never get around to starting your divine plan. To break this cycle, do the following:

Take an honest look at your life and consider problems you encounter over and over again. Be willing to recognize that they are hiding a lesson you have not yet learned. Then make a determined effort to learn the lesson.
Learning a lesson most often means uncovering an issue in your psychology that is holding you back. The issue is unresolved because you have so far been unwilling to take a look at it. So take that look now and do whatever it takes – including appropriate forms of therapy – to move beyond it.
Consider your highest hopes and dreams and then evaluate how the limitations put upon you in this lifetime cause you to reject your dreams almost before you dare think about them. Dare to go beyond such limitations and connect to your highest dreams.
Make a determined effort to use the violet flame and the invocations and rosaries to consume any karma involved with specific situations or your life in general.
Step back and look for the higher perspective beyond any attachments. Be willing to see what your ego does not want you to see and what you might not have been willing to see either. Be willing to see something even if it requires you to make a dramatic change in your lifestyle or outlook on life. You can use my technique for attunement to get a clearer vision.

Your life can be said to have two distinct phases. One is to balance your karma, which requires you to live a certain way—a way that is often heavily influenced by the norms of family and society because you embodied in that circumstance as a result of your karma. Once you have moved beyond the karma, you can start the more fun part of your divine plan, namely your sacred labor. However, in order to accomplish this, you often have to go through a dramatic shift in your outlook on life and in your physical lifestyle. And if you have become attached to any of the conditions in the prior phase of your life, you simply will not be willing to change, and thus your conscious mind will block the vision of your divine plan.

To avoid this trap, you need to reevaluate your life and make an effort to look beyond any attachments. Once you step back, you will experience that your perspective – on life or on a specific situation – can change as if by magic. The clouds suddenly part and you now see clearly. You often see that what you formerly thought was your only choice was actually the worst choice you could have made in a specific situation. The other options you now see will all lead to a better outcome. Or you see that what you thought was the only way to live could never give you the fulfillment you truly desire. Yet you now see other ways to attain that fulfillment, and thus you become willing to change your lifestyle accordingly.

If you want to make the best possible choices in your life, always seek to reconnect to your divine plan. Make sure you do not get stuck in the “work” phase of your divine plan and never get to the fun part. Your divine plan is truly your best friend, your best guiding rod for getting the most out of your present embodiment. And as long as you perceive it as being something forced upon you by an external force, you have not truly connected to it. So step back and take another look—knock without attachments and the door shall be opened unto you.

Note: Mother Mary’s books and the divine plan book contain many teachings on your divine plan. You can also do a novena to the Great Divine Director in order to get a clearer vision of your divine plan.

Today, you need to integrate spirituality with practical life

TOPICS: During Pisces, often necessary for people to withdraw from the world – in Aquarius, find spirituality within yourself and then express it in all activities – can you conduct your business with love? – is it the right kind of business for you? – key is non-attachment – tune in to your divine plan – for spiritual people, worldly success will not be satisfying – sometimes, you must take a step into the unknown –

Question: Beloved Jesus, you have taught us in the past to let go of everything—apart from you. How important it is to be conscious of you all the time and conscious of the I AM Presence, yet our businesses and our worldly affairs pull on us. Is it safe to continue to conduct our business, surrender our business and work with it just as spiritual beings?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

Again, 2,000 years ago my teachings were adapted to the state of consciousness that people had at the time. Back then, people were much more trapped in the sense of separation from God. When people are trapped in that state of consciousness, it might indeed be necessary for them to pull apart from worldly affairs for a time before they can manifest the non-attachment that allows them to no longer serve mammon but to serve the God within.

That is why you have had a tradition over these past 2,000 years of monasteries where spiritual seekers would withdraw from the world and completely disassociate themselves from worldly affairs. Yet in today’s world, that is not the highest goal. I am not saying that people cannot or should not withdraw themselves for a time if they feel it is necessary to do so. But the ideal in the Aquarian Age is that instead of withdrawing from the world to find spirituality, you go within yourself to find the spirituality and then you bring it out into your worldly activities. This applies to family, studies, businesses or any other activity.

So the question really is: do you have non-attachment? Can you do your business with love? And if you find that conducting your business disturbs your inner peace, makes you attached or draws you into situations where you cannot feel love, then you have a choice to make. And you might begin by seeing if perhaps you can discover what it is in your psychology that causes the attachment and then heal that wound so you can be free of it.

Yet, in some cases, it might also be necessary to say, that my particular form of business is not conducive to a spiritual lifestyle, either because of the nature of the business or because it requires too much time and attention, so that I do not have the proper balance between spiritual in-going activities and worldly out-going activities. Again, this will be a personal balance that each person must find.

The key is non-attachment. If you are non-attached, you will feel the love of God flowing through you and then you can and should interact with the world in various ways to sustain yourself and your family. But even more importantly, to express your God Flame to the other people you meet in your business. Yet if you find that your business is pulling you away, then it might indeed be right to come apart from it. And for some people it still may be right to come apart from a worldly business and instead focus on the spiritual business. This again, is very individual.

There are indeed many spiritual seekers who came into the world with a very specific divine plan of helping to awaken humankind in this age. Many of these people are very capable and intelligent souls. And many of them are fully capable of running a business. Yet, running a successful business might not be part of your divine plan and if this is so, then you need to go within and get in touch with your Christ self and with your I AM Presence and with your divine plan, so you can choose appropriately when it is time to either let the business go or find a different way, so that you can have the time and attention left over for what is your real business—your Father’s business that you must be about if you are to find true happiness and fulfillment.

If you are a spiritual lifestream, no amount of worldly success, no amount of money or recognition from the world will truly satisfy your deeper sense that you are here for a purpose. Only when you uncover your divine plan and fulfill that plan, will you know that you are in your right place—the right place in consciousness. And so, if that is true for you, it might be necessary – and again this is completely individual – but it might be necessary to leave your nets and follow the Christ within until you are on the mountain of God where you see clearly what is the path you need to take in life.

Some people can indeed be so embroiled in their worldly affairs that they have no time or attention left over to clearly see their divine plan. And so in some cases it will be necessary to leave your nets and take a step into the unknown before you will know your true path. Yet for many others it will be possible to live an entire lifetime raising a family, running a business, having a job or a career.

Always keep in mind that you cannot serve two masters, you cannot serve God and mammon. So if you feel that you are too attached to mammon, then you need to take some time and realize that the Conscious You is a spiritual Being and that you need to stop identifying yourself with mammon and get in tune with who you really are.

Your divine plan and running a business

TOPICS: In the past, many spiritual people needed to withdraw from the world – today it is time to bring spirituality into all areas of life – non-attachment – coming from love – find a personal balance – is running a business part of your divine plan? – are you here to help awaken humankind? – stepping back in order to discover your divine plan –

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

Again, 2,000 years ago my teachings were adapted to the state of consciousness that people had at the time. Back then, people were much more trapped in the sense of separation from God. And so when people are trapped in that state of consciousness, it might indeed be necessary for them to pull apart from worldly affairs for a time before they can manifest the non-attachment that allows them to no longer serve mammon but to serve the God within.

So the question really is whether you have non-attachment. Can you do your business with love? And if you find that conducting your business disturbs your inner peace, makes you attached or draws you into situations where you cannot feel love, then you have a choice to make. And you might begin by seeing if perhaps you can discover what it is in your psychology that causes the attachment and then heal that wound so you can be free of it.

Yet, in some cases, it might also be necessary to say, that my particular form of business is not conducive to a spiritual lifestyle, either because of the nature of the business or because it requires too much time and attention so that I do not have the proper balance between in-going activities and out-going activities. Again, this will be a personal balance that each person must find.

The key is non-attachment. If you are non-attached, you will feel the love of God flowing through you and then you can and should interact with the world in various ways to sustain yourself and your family. But even more importantly, to express your God Flame to the other people that you meet in your business. Yet if you find that your business is pulling you away, then it might indeed be right to come apart from it. And for some people it still may be right to come apart from a worldly business and instead focus on the spiritual business. This again, is very individual.

There are indeed many spiritual seekers who came into the world with a very specific divine plan of helping to awaken humankind in this age. Many of these people are very capable and intelligent souls. And many of them are fully capable of running a business. Yet, running a successful business might not be part of your divine plan and if this is so then you need to go within and get in touch with your Christ self and with your I AM Presence and with your divine plan so you can choose appropriately when it is time to either let the business go or find a different way, so that you can have the time and attention left over for what is your real business—your Father’s business that you must be about if you are to find true happiness and fulfillment.

NOTE: For help in discovering your divine plan, do a novena to the Great Divine Director.

Avoid using a genuine spiritual teaching to block the fulfillment of your divine plan

TOPICS: Bringing your divine plan into reality – transcending discouragement by doing something new – using a spiritual teaching to keep yourself stuck – being constant without becoming rigid – follow inner directions – losing your “life” to follow Christ – pride becomes a subtle trap – conquering your fears – the fear of making mistakes – unwillingness to discern – being an anti-chela – letting go of all sense of obligation – seeing what to do but not how to do it – being a house divided – going beyond outer rules – do not use man-made standards for success – when feeling stuck, there is something you have not surrendered – the road to hell is paved with human intentions – seek Christ consciousness before any outer goals – no belief is absolute – using a teaching to build a closed mental box –

Question: Beloved Master, I am diligent as some would say on my inner path and my devotion to you as my Master and two a few others of the ascended masters to whom I feel I have more than ordinary ties. I have served the ascended masters directly on staff for one of your beloved Messengers when she was active and I have been passionate about the Sacred Fire and the teachings that come with it. At this point in time I find myself confused due to the fact that I know in my inner being that my service needs to expand worldwide and it being done through the Motion Picture Industry. I have a desire as an actor to express my True Self via such method just as my cousin will do so through directing. Many years ago, your colleague the mighty Master Saint Germain, called our movie project “for the revolutionizing of the patterns of world thought” and directed us to reach the people of influence and power first so that we could have an in and then reach the masses. We have fought hard and steady in the best way we both know how and yet today we seem to be ever closer but yet bereft of any finances to even get around the corner and await.

Question: Is it at all lawful to use the light-momentum I have garnered as a Son of God and transfer it to a world in need through the Motion Picture and “act” in ways that as a Decree Leader I would (by the powers that be) have been forbidden to act?
I trust there might be a lesson for all in the experience I have forgone which has brought me to my knees once again, not knowing where to turn and where to go at times and seeing heaven in my very front door at others.
I need direction Master and though I pursue it daily, I haven’t developed a clear hearing to hear You in my heart directly.

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

My beloved brother, my heart truly goes out to you and to the many other sincere lifestreams who have been faithful to the teachings of the ascended masters through any of the many organizations we have worked with over the past century and more. You are right that your experience does indeed contain a lesson that is of value to all spiritual seekers and especially to students of the ascended masters.

Many lifestreams have been given a vision of their higher purpose in life, their divine plan, yet when it comes to transferring that vision to physical reality, they often feel inadequate in themselves or they feel they get an inadequate response from the world. This causes some to become discouraged or to become confused. I can assure you that you are not the only one of our students who is in this predicament. In fact, far too many are at an impasse, and I truly wish I could help them move on.

Unfortunately, some of them are not willing to listen to what I say through this messenger, and I commend you for your willingness to ask me this question. In fact, I can assure you that several of my colleagues, who in the past have sponsored various organizations, would love to reach the members of those organizations with the next level of progressive revelation. So let me give you, and others who have ears to hear, some thoughts to ponder.

Thought 1
Moving on is the key concept you need to ponder. When you find yourself stuck in discouragement or confusion – or for that matter any other type of human limitation – there is only one way out, and that is to transcend your current state of consciousness, to reach for the higher understanding and the balanced vision of the Christ mind. The simple fact is that if you have done the same thing for a time and have not yet achieved your goal, then it is time to try a different approach. Stubbornness and rigidity will not get you to heaven, but the flexibility of the Christ mind – the flexibility that is not a compromise of truth – will help you achieve your true goals.

The problem is that before you can grasp a balanced vision, you must be willing to let go of your present beliefs and expectations of how life or the spiritual path should unfold. And this is precisely where many sincere students get stuck for a period of time, sometimes for lifetimes. And unfortunately, they often use our teachings to keep themselves stuck indefinitely.

As I attempt to explain throughout this website, any spiritual teaching can become a trap for your mind. Therefore, even a true teaching can be used to build a mental box that prevents you from ascending to the next level of your personal path. One might say that the essence of the spiritual path is that you transcend your mental image of who you are, who God is and how the world works. All seekers start out with a limited vision and understanding. Many were brought up with a severely limited world view, such as those presented by orthodox Christianity or materialistic science.

Many seekers experience finding a spiritual teaching or organization that expands their world view and helps them grow to a much higher level. And because this teaching gave them such growth, they think it is absolute truth or the highest teaching on the planet, and therefore they should never need anything else. These people then build the mental image, the expectation, that if only they keep doing what they have been told (or have decided – based on their spiritual teaching – is all they need to do), they will automatically achieve Christ consciousness.

Yet, as I explain throughout my website, no outer organization can guarantee that you achieve Christ consciousness by following its teachings and practices. The reason is that Christ consciousness can be achieved only through an inner process. Sure, an outer teaching can assist you greatly, but no outer teaching or practice can automatically produce Christ consciousness. Unfortunately, an outer teaching can prevent you from achieving Christ consciousness, and even a true teaching – including the teachings on this website – can be misused to create a mental box that keeps you stuck at a certain level of your path.

Thought 2
At a certain level of the path, it is helpful to follow an outer teaching, but you need to be ever vigilant, so that you do not fall into the subtle trap of turning that outer teaching into a closed box. For example, at the beginning stages of the path, you are fighting much opposition from dark forces, so it is necessary to be steadfast, even to the point of being somewhat rigid. Yet as you rise to the higher levels, the very quality that got you there can quickly become a liability.

The dark forces fully understand the fact that any teaching can mislead you if it is taken to extremes. So they see a student who is very steadfast, and they whisper in his ear that this is all he needs to do for the rest of his life. And thereby the student keeps doing the same thing far longer than he should have done, which inevitably leads to rigidity. And once the student passes a certain point, he cannot go any higher by being rigid, so his growth comes to a halt. Yet the student is so convinced that he is on the right path, that he thinks he is still progressing. This can go on until the student begins to wonder why – if he is doing all the right things – his divine plan is not being fulfilled.

You need to be aware that at the beginning stages of the path, it is necessary to be steadfast to plow through the opposition from dark forces. Yet when they see that they cannot hold you back by force, they will change their approach, and they will now tempt you by using very subtle ideas. At the higher levels of the path, you need to be flexible, so that you can outsmart the opposition. You basically need to move so fast that the dark forces or your own ego cannot pin you down. And to do that, you need to be willing to follow the minute-by-minute directions from your Christ self. You simply cannot allow the dark forces to be able to predict your next move. The student who is too predictable is an easy target for dark forces. In other words, at the higher levels of the path, nothing will work forever and therefore you cannot cling to any outer rules.

If an outer teaching is valid, it will help you grow, and the true purpose of any outer teaching is that you grow to the point of getting direct instructions from your Christ self and your spiritual teachers. The problem is that your expectations, preconceived opinions and mental images can form a wall that prevents you from hearing our instructions or prevents you from trusting what you do hear.

The more closed your mental box – the more emotionally attached you are to the outer teaching and organization – the more impenetrable it will be for our guidance. It is a sad fact that we simply cannot reach many of our students, even many who have followed one of our outer teachings for decades. These people have used our teachings to shut up their ears against our inner guidance, just as the scribes and Pharisees had used the Torah to shut up their ears against my new teachings.

When you find yourself at an impasse and cannot see which way to go, you should always assume that you are being blocked by the expectations and mental images held by your outer mind (which includes your ego). So if you are serious about growth, you need to step back and make a conscious effort to look beyond your mental box. And in order to do this, you have to be willing to question or let go of any and all of your present beliefs. I am not saying you have to let go of all your beliefs – at least not all at once – I am saying you have to be willing to let go. If you are not willing to let go, you are attached, and attachment is the cause of all suffering, as the Buddha pointed out millennia ago.

Thought 3
At the lower levels of the spiritual path, the student is inevitably trapped in the consciousness of duality. So even though the student finds and follows a true spiritual teaching, the student builds a mental image of the teaching, and of the correct way to follow that teaching. Yet this image will inevitably be based, at least partially, on the consciousness of duality. As you grow toward Christhood, you will come to a point, where you can go no further until you are willing to let go of your mental box. You must free your vision of the spiritual path from the dualistic elements.

One characteristic of the dualistic state of consciousness is that it traps people in a black-and-white approach to the path. In other words, people think that this is absolutely right and that is absolutely wrong, and if they keep doing what is defined as right, they will automatically be saved. So the dualistic frame of mind is very rigid, and thus the only way to grow beyond a certain level of the spiritual path is to let go of the dualistic mindset by becoming flexible. Yet this flexibility must not be based on the shifting sands of the human consciousness. It must be based on the rock of Christ, which knows how to be flexible in the moment without compromising timeless principles.

To go beyond a certain point, you must literally be willing to lose your life – your sense of what life should be – in order to win the higher form of life of your personal Christhood. This is a very subtle initiation that will be faced by all advanced students, and you will face it as a continual initiation as long as you are in embodiment. And as I said, he who seeks to save his life – meaning his current mental box – shall lose it—shall lose the life of his continued growth. It is wise to contemplate the fact that a student can fail at any level of the path. Failure on the spiritual path means that you become attached to your current level of attainment and refuse to transcend it, to transcend your image of who you are.

There is a subtle temptation to think that the longer you have been on the path, and the more outer things you have done on the path, the less likely you are to fail. Many advanced students fail because they think they cannot fail, and thus they think they no longer need to transcend. Yet I tell you there are crucial points on your personal path where you have to be willing to die on the cross, meaning that you are willing to let go of all of your expectations and preconceived opinions about how your life and your personal path should unfold. If you are not willing to let this human sense of life die, you cannot be resurrected into the higher sense of life of the Christ consciousness. The reason being that you are holding on to a dualistic vision created by your outer mind, and you refuse to align yourself with the higher vision and will of your lifestream and I AM Presence.

Do you see my point? So many sincere seekers find a spiritual teaching or organization and use it to take a giant leap forward on their path. Yet without realizing it, they use the teaching to create a mental box, and when it comes time to let that golden calf die, they cannot let it go. Some are too afraid to let it go, some are too prideful and others are just too lazy. Let me say that again.

Some people find the path and use an outer teaching/organization to build a mold for how a true student should be. They take pride in the fact that they live up to the outer criteria, and they decide that they will remain steadfast forever. They often use their viewpoints to judge those who cannot live up to their high standard, and thus they build the subtle sense that they belong to the highest class of students.

Yet when it comes time to go to the higher levels of the path, this approach becomes a trap. These students will feel that if they change their approach to the path, they are slacking off, and this would be a blow to their pride. And if they are not willing to let go of that pride, they have no other option than to keep doing the same thing. Unfortunately, this keeps them trapped at a certain level or causes them to slide into the depths of spiritual blindness that is the inevitable consequence of pride. These people can be completely convinced that they are better than everyone else, yet they are unable to recognize the Living Christ, as was the case with the scribes and Pharisees. That is why I called them hypocrites.

Some people find a teaching and feel that it offers them an oasis of security in an insecure world. By following the outer teaching, they believe they will be saved, and thus they can distance themselves from the demons of fear that used to haunt them. And following a true spiritual teaching can be a bulwark against fear. The problem is that you cannot enter heaven by insulating yourself from your fears. You can enter heaven only by conquering your fears, and to conquer them, you must be wiling to face them.

So it is never the purpose of a true teaching to insulate you forever from your fears. The purpose is to give you a safe haven, so that you can build up your strength to face those fears. Yet if you do not realize this, or if you are not willing to face your fears, you will cling to the certainty of the outer teaching and use it as a justification for not facing your fears. Unfortunately, while this approach is valid at the beginning stages, it will never take you beyond those beginning stages. The problem is that these people become so afraid of making a mistake that they do not dare to try anything new. Yet without trying, you cannot move forward. If you are not willing to risk making a mistake, you cannot succeed.

Some people find an outer teaching and find that it is so easy to follow that teaching instead of doing the hard work of thinking for themselves. They gladly allow an outer guru or organization to do their thinking for them, and they gradually become addicted to this sense of security, much as people become addicted to a drug.

Yet again, a true teaching will give you a reprieve so you can gather strength and the ability to discern truth from within yourself. When you reach a certain point on the path, you cannot go further until you are willing to engage in the difficult task of discerning truth from within yourself instead or relying on an outer teaching or guru.

Common for these types of students is that they want to hold on to the idea that they can keep believing or doing the same thing for the rest of their lives. These people are essentially saying to their Christ selves and to the ascended masters, “Don’t disturb me with your inner directions. I have this outer teaching and organization that gives me everything I need!” So they keep dancing around the golden calf instead of being willing to let their human expectations be consumed by the fire of God—the fire that consumes all unlike itself.

The simple fact is – a fact overlooked by many students – that even a true teaching can be misused into creating a closed box. Thus, many sincere students have used our teachings to follow the way that seemeth right unto a man, yet the ends thereof are the ways of death. It is a sobering fact that many spiritual seekers have used a valid spiritual teaching to box themselves in, whereby they eventually start following the left-handed path. This is a complete betrayal of the trust of the ascended masters who sponsored the release of a particular outer teaching. If you think my colleagues and I are happy about this situation, then you obviously don’t know us as well as you think you know us!

The inescapable fact is that the essence of the spiritual path is self-transcendence. The moment you use an outer teaching to justify why you do not have to transcend yourself, you are following the left-handed path. Thus, you are no longer a true student of the ascended masters. You have now become the anti-chela, and you will inevitably begin to follow an anti-guru. I can assure you that I am not exaggerating or being melodramatic. It is a stark reality that many longtime students are on the wrong path, yet they use our outer teachings to make themselves feel that they are the most advanced students on the planet. And we have virtually no way to awaken these students to the folly of their ways.

The only way to break this pattern is to be willing to have the humility to question some of your long-held beliefs about the spiritual path. I am not saying you should drop an old teaching and follow a new teaching, such as this website. I am saying you should drop the beliefs that block your contact with your Christ self so that you can get guidance from within.

And I can assure you that if you have followed and practiced a true spiritual teaching for a time and still do not have clear contact with your Christ self, there can be only one reason. You have some outer beliefs and expectations that are blocking your inner direction. So be willing to let go of these limitations; be willing to let them die so that you can live forever in the light of Christ Truth.

Thought 4
The subtle distinction that many students overlook is that the approach of following an outer teaching can indeed give people growth. Yet it only works for a time, and then it will begin to hinder your growth. The only way out of this impasse – and the only way to prevent yourself from sliding backward on the path – is to transcend your mental image. And in order to do that, you have to be willing to let any part of that image die when you are prompted to do so by your inner guidance. And as I already said, the more you hold on to the mental image, the more you will block the inner guidance—which is what creates the catch-22.

So my suggestion is simple. In the back of The Christ Is Born in You, I give an exercise in which I set people free from all sense of obligation, all sense that they have to do something or have to do it a certain way. This is a useful exercise because it is only by letting go of the preconceived opinions that you can still the outer mind so that you can hear your Christ self. So be willing to let go of all sense of what you should do for the ascended masters, and be especially willing to let go of all sense of how you should do it.

I can tell you that one of the most common problems we see is that a student receives a correct vision of what he or she should do in this lifetime, but then uses an outer teaching – or rather a dualistic interpretation of that teaching – to build an unrealistic expectation of how it should be done. You now have a situation where the student has become a house divided against him/herself. The lifestream knows what the vision is and it also knows how to accomplish it. Yet the outer mind has set up a different vision for how to accomplish the goal because it has used an outer teaching – or a set of rigid rules defined by that teaching – to define how the goal should be accomplished.

This will inevitably shut off the true creativity of the lifestream, and therefore the lifestream refuses to go along. You see, your divine plan can be accomplished only by you expressing your divine individuality – anchored in your I AM Presence – through your work. If you use an outer teaching to set up rigid rules or expectations for how to accomplish your goal, you will deny your individuality the opportunity to express itself through your work.

Therefore, the outer mind will be fighting against the Conscious You – you will be fighting to restrict the creativity that is the key to fulfilling your divine plan – and thus the goal is not accomplished. The student is working toward a worthy goal, but he is trying to accomplish it in a way that the Christ self and Conscious You cannot accept, and thus it sabotages his outer efforts. The Christ self knows that the student will never achieve his goal through the faculties of the outer mind, so the Christ self is actually seeking to get a message through to the outer mind.

The only way out of this impasse is to overcome the division in the self by letting go of the mental image held by the outer mind. And this often requires the student to let go of some – or perhaps all – of the expectations built up as a result of his involvement with the outer teaching/organization. At the very least, the student must be willing to let go of all expectations. The key is for the Conscious You to experience itself as pure awareness.

Thought 5
You ask:

“Is it at all lawful to use the light-momentum I have garnered as a Son of God and transfer it to a world in need through the Motion Picture and “act” in ways that as a Decree Leader I would (by the powers that be) have been forbidden to act?”

First of all, it is always lawful to use your attainment to achieve your divine plan—that is what the attainment is for. Yet you need to make sure that your outer mind is brought into alignment with the vision of your goal held by the Conscious You and Christ self.

Is it lawful to pursue your goal in ways that are against the outer rules of a spiritual community? Certainly—if your Christ self tells you to do so and if you are sure it is not your ego tempting you. Yet in most cases it is your outer mind that tells you to follow the outer rules blindly without listening to your Christ self. You should ponder my teaching about the sabbath and the statement, “The sabbath was made for man—not man for the sabbath.” It applies to all rules created by any religion.

To manifest and express your Christhood, you have to be willing to transcend all man-made limitations. You have to be willing to let them die so that your lifestream can be free of their shackles and rise above them. Your lifestream is literally crucified on the cross of these human, dualistic expectations that your outer mind has accepted. Thus, your outer mind and the forces of this world have nailed your lifestream to the cross.

This includes the inner limitations created by your lower mind and ego. And it includes the outer limitations created by the world, including a particular religious community. Obviously, there is a balance to be found, and at the lower levels of the path, you can benefit from following the outer rules. Yet there comes a point where you cannot grow further until you pass the initiation of being willing to follow your inner guidance rather than the outer rules.

Thought 6
Achieving your spiritual mission cannot be measured by the world’s standard for success. From a worldly perspective, my mission was a failure, yet from a spiritual perspective it was a success. So do not fall into the trap of thinking your personal success can be measured by the standard of the world—especially not the standard of Tinseltown.

Another aspect of this is that you should not allow yourself to feel that the progress of your mission can be limited by the world. To manifest Christhood, you must come to the point where you decide that you are NOT going to let anything – from within or from without – keep you from taking the next step on your path. In other words, if you have a vision, you keep moving toward your goal with whatever lawful means you have available to you. You do not let lack of money prevent you from doing whatever you can do – and there is always something you can do – including working on yourself.

Remember the motto of one of my esteemed colleagues, “Do right action and be non-attached to the fruits of action.”

Thought 7
Let me say again that any time you feel stuck, it is because there is something you have not let go of, something you have not surrendered. And the reason you have not let go is a mental image of how the path should be—an image that you have so far been unwilling to question or that you thought it was unnecessary to question. Yet I tell you that as you grow toward Christhood, you must be willing to question and look beyond any and all of your beliefs, opinions and expectations. Whatever you are not willing to look beyond will inevitably become a mental box that traps your mind.

So step back, let go of your sense of what you have to do and how you have to do it. Let go of the sense that you have to save the world, that the fate of the world depends on your actions or that the cause of the ascended masters rests on your shoulders. Contemplate the fact that God has given everyone free will. Therefore, you are not responsible for the salvation of other people. Yet you are the only one who is responsible for your own salvation.

Please understand that there is a subtle distinction here. We are not in embodiment, so if the earth is to change, people in embodiment must bring about that change. Yet the necessary change cannot be brought about through the outer mind. When you become attached to a certain mental image, you begin to think that you are the doer. And it is people who think they have to save the world that inspired the saying, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” In reality, the road to Hell is paved with human intentions, dualistic intentions.

The key is to let go of the human expectations and bring your outer mind into alignment with your lifestream and Christ self. Then you can say, “I and my Father – my I AM Presence – are one” and “My Father works hitherto and I work.” This is the only way to bring true change to earth. If you want to bring the teachings of the ascended masters to the world, your first step must be to embody those teachings and walk the path to Christhood. You cannot teach Christhood until you have attained some degree of Christhood. You can teach Christhood only by example.

Thought 8
The ascended masters are not as concerned about saving the earth as we are concerned about saving your lifestream. And the only way to save your lifestream is for you to attain Christhood. So our primary goal is for you to achieve Christ consciousness—and even the fulfillment of your divine plan or the saving of the world is secondary to that. At the higher levels of the path, you must have your priorities straight. You must be willing to seek first the kingdom of God, the Christ consciousness. Of course, when you seek first the kingdom of God, all else, meaning your divine plan and the saving of the earth, will be added unto you.

Do you see the subtle point? Even the worthy goal of walking the spiritual path, fulfilling your divine plan or saving the world can become a trap if you put them before the task of attaining Christ consciousness. As long as anything is more important to you than Christ consciousness, you cannot attain Christ consciousness. And until you attain Christ consciousness, you cannot fulfill your divine plan and save the earth. Thus you must be willing to let all other goals die – you must be willing to lose your sense of life – in order to attain the eternal life of the Christ consciousness. This is the process Kim went through before qualifying as my messenger.

When you do attain your personal Christhood, you will not be bound by any outer rules or expectations. You will allow your divine individuality to express itself through you, because you will know, “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise” (John 5:19). The son is the lifestream who is in alignment with its I AM Presence.

Thought 9
You cannot take your human expectations, opinions or mental images with you into heaven. So you cannot enter heaven until you let go of them. Holding on to them will keep you out of heaven. So the key to entering heaven is not found by holding on to what you have. It is found by letting go of all that is unreal. And before you have the discernment to tell the difference, it is wise to make it a clear goal never to create a closed mental box.

To avoid creating a closed box around your mind – a box that your Christ self cannot penetrate – you must be willing to always reach for a higher understanding, meaning that you never allow yourself to believe that any of your beliefs are absolute and thus above being expanded by inner direction. In other words, never let an outer teaching, teacher or organization come between you and the inner teacher of your Christ self.

I truly wish all of our longtime students would contemplate these ideas—and thus I hope people will feel free to share them. I can assure you that the ascended masters are very concerned about the fact that so many of our longtime students have used our teachings – given to set them free from all limitations – to create closed mental boxes. This not only prevents them from achieving their divine plans, it also prevents them from attaining Christhood. For this reason alone, the teachings we have given over the past century have not had the impact on this planet they were meant to have.

This state of affairs can be corrected, and it can be corrected quickly. But it can happen only if our longtime students are willing to let their former expectations die and be resurrected in the fire of the Living Truth – the baptism by fire – that they can receive only from their Christ selves.

Thought 10
I wish our longtime students would contemplate my explanation of the origin of their Christ selves and meditate on its deeper meaning. It does contain a teaching that has not been released in the past, and thus it is a good example of why progressive revelation is needed.

Obviously, my Christmas address was directed at Christians, so I could give only a basic teaching. Yet for longtime students, it should be clear that many ascended masters have “broken” their Spirits to form Christ selves for their unascended brothers and sisters. So not all students have a Christ self that is part of my Spirit, and it is important for the student to attune his or her consciousness to the master who gave him/her the gift of life in the form of the Christ self.

So if you are a longtime student of the ascended masters, you might consider whether you are loyal to an outer teaching or to the source of that teaching. I am not saying people need to necessarily leave behind a previous organization. But I am saying that people need to be willing to leave behind an old organization, if they are directed to do so from within. And if you have used the old teaching to build a closed mental box, how will you ever hear our inner direction?

I am also saying that all of our longtime students could benefit greatly from using the new invocations and decrees as a supplement to whatever techniques they use from previous organizations. Why travel by a propeller-driven aircraft, when the jet airplane has been brought into the physical world? Given the severity of the current situation on earth, we need all of our students to use the most powerful techniques available.

Quite frankly, I have much more to say to our longtime students, but if what is said here does not open their ears to who I am, I suspect nothing will do so. Let a word to the wise – or those who claim to be wise – be sufficient.

Overcoming the sense of having no purpose in life

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!

Why does the lifestream descend into the material world?

TOPICS: Why the I AM Presence created you – your purpose for coming into embodiment – the risk of taking embodiment – losing contact with spiritual teachers – the Conscious You cannot be lost – you have the potential to ascend – you can never lose the opportunity to change –

Question 1: Dear Jesus, You said, “When the lifestream descends into the material world, it has the potential to fall into a lower state of consciousness. When this happens, the lifestream can forget its spiritual origin and even its spiritual identity and individuality.” This seems like a really dumb thing for a lifestream to do. After all, it has it “made” in the spirit realm, and can choose a number of ways to grow and learn without endangering itself. Why would a lifestream choose earth?

Question 2: Dear Jesus, I have a question concerning Free Will. When we came to earth, higher knowledge was taken from us. We don’t have enough information to make wise choices. But our Christ self does, as does our I AM Presence. Does that part of us also have free will, and does it override the free will of our lower consciousness?
I know in my heart of hearts, that I would never have agreed to come to earth without some kind of contract….some guarantee that no matter what happened to me here, that I would be rescued and brought back home. Even an earthly soldier going into battle has a hope that if he is shot down, his buddies will not abandon him to the enemy.
God can show everyone their soul and their I AM Presence so they can remember who they truly are. God can remove the veils between heaven and earth. I can’t imagine that a loving God would abandon His soldiers and allow us to self-destruct.

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

Although I honor all questions and the people who ask them, I love questions showing that people have thought deeply about spiritual matters. Your questions touch upon very important topics.

Many spiritual seekers know that they are more than the physical body, and they also sense that there is a part of them that resides in the spiritual realm. Many people use the term “soul” to refer to the totality of their beings. As I explain elsewhere, it is more correct to use the term “soul” to refer to the 4-fold vehicle that the Conscious You creates in order to express itself through a physical body. Your spiritual identity is that part of you which permanently resides in the spiritual realm, namely the I AM Presence or the spiritual self. The Conscious You is an extension of the I AM Presence, which has the ability to project itself into the four levels of the material realm.

The I AM Presence is a spiritual being. It was created by your spiritual parents for a dual purpose. One is to help co-create the world of form from inside this world, meaning this latest, unascended sphere. The other is to give the hierarchy of beings above itself a vehicle for experiencing the world of form from inside this world. Your I AM Presence has a unique individuality, and it has resolved the seeming enigma that it has individual identity yet is still part of the total being of God.

Your I AM Presence was born out of God’s love, which drives God to continually self-transcend. This is explained in more detail in the discourse by the Presence of Unconditional Love, the discourse by the Presence of Infinite Light and in Mother Mary’s discourse. Your I AM Presence resides in the spiritual realm, and it cannot descend into the denser energies of the material universe. As an expression of the love of your I AM Presence, the drive to become more than it is, your Presence decided to create an extension of itself that could descend into the material universe. The purpose was to give your Presence a vehicle through which it could experience and co-create the material universe and help make this universe as self-aware universe that is a permanent part of God’s creation.

Returning to your question, it is your I AM Presence who “has it all made” in the spiritual realm. Technically speaking, the Conscious You does not make the choice to descend into the spiritual realm, because the Conscious You does not exist as an individual being before its descent. The Conscious You was created to descend into the material universe, and immediately upon being created, it was sent here by your I AM Presence.

Originally, the Conscious You was meant to live in this universe until it had reached its full awareness as a spiritual being. This is a subtle distinction, and I understand it can be confusing to many people. Yet by reading the other discourses I mentioned and pondering this enigma, you will gradually gain a deeper understanding. When the Conscious You was created, it was created as an extension of your I AM Presence. Yet because the Conscious You has self-awareness and free will, it has the potential to attain a complete and self-sufficient sense of identity as an immortal spiritual being. In other words, the Conscious You has the potential to resolve the enigma that has already been resolved by your I AM Presence, namely that it is a self-aware being who is part of a larger whole.

When the Conscious You first descends into the material universe, it starts with a point-like sense of self-awareness. It looks at the universe from one point and sees everything from that point. As the Conscious You grows in self-awareness, it attains a wider and more spherical awareness of the world, and it begins to see itself as an extension of the I AM Presence. It cannot yet see itself as a self-contained spiritual being. Yet as the Conscious You continues to build upon its sense of identity, it can attain the Christ consciousness which enables it to say, “I and my Father – meaning the I AM Presence – are one.” At that moment, the Conscious You wins an immortal sense of identity as a self-contained spiritual being. I explain this in more detail in the new book, Save Yourself.

To return to your question once again, the Conscious You really did not make the choice to descend into the material universe. It was born out of the choice of your I AM Presence, and that choice sprang from love. So really, it was not a dumb thing to do but a very loving thing to do.

Furthermore, many of the lifestreams who are still embodying on earth descended for the first time before the Fall of Man, and at that time there was little risk associated with descending to earth. It was only after the Fall that this planet became a more treacherous environment, in which it became easier for people to forget their spiritual origin. Yet even after the Fall, many spiritual beings voluntarily chose to descend to earth on a rescue mission to save their brothers and sisters who were stuck in the lower state of consciousness.

The only way to truly save another lifestream is to teach it by example. In other words, the only way to truly serve as a spiritual teacher is to descend to planet earth and then win your Christhood, thereby demonstrating that any human being has the potential to put on the mind of Christ and win its immortality through the ascension to a higher state of consciousness.

To go into your second question, it is not technically correct to say that higher knowledge was taken from the lifestream when it descended to earth. When the Conscious You first descended, meaning before the Fall, it did have an intuitive connection to the I AM Presence, and it did have outer contact with a spiritual teacher, illustrated as the God in the garden of Eden. So the Conscious You was not left without guidance. It was only by descending into the consciousness of duality that lifestreams gradually lost their intuitive connection as well as their outer contact with their spiritual teachers. So for the lifestreams who have reincarnated, it is correct that many came into this lifetime without higher knowledge. However, this is a result of their own past choices and not God’s punishment.

After a lifestream descended into the consciousness of duality, that lifestream’s I AM Presence could no longer contact the Conscious You directly. Therefore, the Christ self was created out of the universal Christ consciousness. This state of consciousness is embedded in everything in the world of form, yet it can never become trapped in any particular form. The universal Christ consciousness always knows that it is an extension of God’s being. Therefore, your Christ self enables you to tell the difference between the illusions created by the consciousness of duality and the reality of God, namely that you are a spiritual being. So yes, your I AM Presence does have free will, as does your Christ self. However, the choices of your I AM Presence and your Christ self can never override the free will of the Conscious You. At the level of the Conscious You, your free will is the ultimate law, and no spiritual being has authority to override it. It is only dark forces who will violate your free will.

You talk about knowing that you would not have descended without having a contract. One might say that when your I AM Presence created the Conscious You, it knew the reality that the consciousness embedded in the Conscious You could never be lost. That consciousness is an expression of God’s immortal being that can never be lost. So one might say that there is a sort of contract which guarantees that the consciousness of God that makes up your Conscious You can never be lost. It will either ascend and become an immortal being or it will be reabsorbed into the I AM Presence through the second death.

Because the Conscious You has free will, it does have the potential to take on a sense of identity as being a mortal, human being restricted by all kinds of limitations. This sense of identity is out of touch with the reality of God’s being and God’s energy. Therefore, it follows logically that this limited sense of identity can never become permanent. And because it cannot become permanent, it must logically be temporary. And anything that is temporary can come to an end. That is why your sense of identity as a limited, mortal being will eventually come to an end.

Thereby, this limited sense of identity is lost, but your original divine individuality, out of which the Conscious You was created, is not lost. Your I AM Presence can always recreate another Conscious You based on the experiences it has gained. The energies that make up the soul or 4-fold vehicle will simply be returned to their original purity and can therefore be used to co-create more perfect forms. So one might say that there is a contract which guarantees that the consciousness and energies of your soul will ultimately be brought back home. However, it is the hope of your I AM Presence that the Conscious You will not simply be brought home but will return home triumphantly by becoming a self-aware, self-contained, immortal spiritual being.

You say that God can show everyone the spiritual reality, but this is not true because no spiritual being will violate the free will of embodied lifestreams. God can offer you knowledge – through the ascended masters – of your spiritual identity, God can lead you to the waters of living truth, but God cannot force you to drink those waters. Yet God has not left you alone on the battlefield of life. God has sent you a Christ self as a spiritual teacher, and God has sent you numerous outer teachers. Throughout the ages, many beings – including myself – have taken embodiment on earth and attained the Christ consciousness, thereby demonstrating the path that all lifestreams have the potential to follow.

You talk about soldiers on the battlefield, and it is a good illustration because currently planet earth truly is a battlefield. Yet when a soldier goes to war, there is no guarantee that he or she can be rescued. The soldier will know that all possible attempts will be made to rescue him, but there is no guarantee that those attempts will be successful. Likewise, a lifestream can know that all possible attempts will be made to rescue that lifestream on the battlefield of earth. Yet there is no guarantee that those attempts will be successful, not so much because the enemy will interfere with them but because the lifestream might not see the rescue attempt or might not accept the hand that is being stretched out from above.

In order to fulfill its mission on earth and become a self-sufficient spiritual being, a lifestream must have free will. Yet it is an inevitable potential of free will that the lifestream can choose to abandon its original mission and build a sense of identity as being a mortal human being that is forever separated from its God and can never put on the Christ consciousness and win its immortality. As long as the lifestream maintains this sense of identity, no being in heaven can rescue that lifestream. Yet the Conscious You can, at any moment, choose to abandon the limited sense of identity and decide to engage in the spiritual path that will lead it to the Christ consciousness. Nevertheless, no being in heaven can make that choice for any being on earth.

Who I am and what is my God flame?

TOPICS: Look within to know who you are – follow your highest love – how to get answers from within – your divine plan – not trusting your intuition – certain things not found in outer teachings – a novena –

Question: Would you care to describe who I am, what my flame is or what my Divine plan is?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

Consider why you are asking me that question. In other words, why would you ask a source outside of yourself to reveal to you the core of your own being?

The essential realization here is that you cannot fully be who you are by hearing it from an outside source. To be who you are, the understanding and realization must come from within. If you are looking to an outside source for the answer, then you are looking in the wrong place. To find the answer, go within instead of thinking that the answer must come to you from without.

You already know what your flame is; you simply do not dare to trust your intuition and that is why you are asking for an outer confirmation. The key to discovering your spiritual flame is to determine which positive, God-like quality that you love above everything else. Follow you highest love, and you will discover your spiritual flame.

If I was a false teacher, I would give you an answer so that you would come to depend on me and come back for more answers. Because I am a true teacher, I cannot and will not give you the answer because you must find it inside yourself.

This is not as difficult as you might think when you use the technique for inner attunement. Apply that technique and tune in to your Christ self instead of Jesus Christ. Ask your Christ self to reveal this to you and repeat the exercise over several days (see also the 33-day vigil). You will begin to get answers, and when you feel that you get consistent answers, trust those answers.

In terms of your divine plan, the first and foremost part of your divine plan is to discover your true God-given identity and to express that identity in this world. You can build on that foundation by deciding who you are and who you want to be. Again this is not something you can be told from an outer source; it must come from within. Your lifestream can discover this, but in order to do so you must resolve the question of why you do not dare to trust your intuition.

You will see that the answer to this question is that in past lives you felt that you made wrong choices by listening to advice from without. Because you feel your intuition should have warned you (even though you were not listening to the inner warnings), you feel that you can no longer trust your intuition. Use appropriate techniques, to go back and rediscover the original reason you decided that you cannot trust your Christ self. You will see that it goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden when you listened to the serpentine voice, the outer voice, and used the logic, the serpentine logic, of that outer voice to overrule and ignore the voice of your Christ self.

There is a wisdom in the fact that a spiritual teacher has outer and inner teachings. I taught the multitudes in parables but expounded all things to my disciples because the multitudes were not ready for the full force of my teaching. However, there is another aspect of this. There are certain teachings that can never be spoken as an outer teaching because part of the spiritual path is that the lifestream must discover certain things on its own.

As a spiritual teacher it is my job to help you discover and follow the spiritual path, but it must be an inner path. I am not willing to give you certain teachings from an outer source because the essence of the path is to help you trust the inner source. The outer teacher is simply here to remind you of the existence of the inner teacher.

Yet if you want a practical suggestion for how you can discover your life’s purpose and divine plan, give a novena to the Great Divine Director and you will surely receive the assistance you are ready for at your present level of development.

What is my purpose in life?

TOPICS: Individual and overall purpose – personal purpose must come from inside yourself – as above, so below – being a co-creator – expanding your sense of self – true individuality covered by layers of the outer self – uncover true self – your divine plan for this lifetime – balancing karma – your lessons in life – demonstrate how to graduate from the schoolroom – the ascension – Christhood on earth –

Question: I would like to know what my purpose in life is?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

Your purpose in life has two aspects, an individual, personal purpose and a general, overall purpose that you share with most other people.
Your individual purpose in life is specific to you alone, and its particular form and expression is unique to you in this present lifetime. Although I could sit down with a person and give that person his or her personal purpose in life, I would not do so. You see, the fulfillment of your personal purpose in life will require all of your attention and commitment, and that commitment must come from inside yourself.

Therefore, if I, as a spiritual teacher, told you about your personal purpose in life, you would have received it from a source outside yourself. This could never give you the internalization and commitment that you would get from receiving it from a source inside yourself, namely your Christ self. Therefore, it is essential for you to establish a contact with your Christ self and through that contact receive your own intuitive insights concerning your personal purpose in life. However, to discover your personal purpose, it is very helpful to understand the general purposes that apply to most people on this planet.

One way to describe the purpose of life is to start with the new golden rule that I released on my website, “Be here below, all that you are Above.”
When your lifestream was created by God, or rather by your spiritual parents, it was endowed with a unique individuality, a unique spiritual flame. This individuality is who you truly are, and no matter what has happened to you here on earth, your spiritual individuality has not in the least been damaged or altered. It is fully intact, because it is stored in your I AM Presence, which is above and beyond the material universe and therefore can never be influenced by any of the energies of the material universe.

Therefore, one might say that your purpose in life is to express your true God-given individuality in this material world. When you do that, you act as a co-creator with God, and you bring a unique gift to this world. At the same time, you will also expand and build upon your true spiritual individuality and enhance it even beyond what was given to you by God. You will, so to speak, multiply your talents so that God can multiply them even more.

The problem that we currently see on planet earth is that most people have descended into a lower state of consciousness in which they have no clear recognition of their true spiritual individuality. Consequently, they cannot express that individuality. For most people, the true individuality has been covered over by layer upon layer of the outer, or human personality, that they have created over many lifetimes. This lower mind, this dualistic mind, has for many people completely obscured their spiritual identity. It has made them identify themselves as mortal human beings who are very different from the uniquely beautiful spiritual beings they were created to be.

Therefore, on an immediate level, your purpose in life is to uncover your true individuality and to leave behind the outer individuality. This is what Paul expressed in the saying that you must put off the old man (of the human self) and put on the new man (of the spiritual self).

Because your spiritual individuality is anchored in a higher realm, you cannot contact that spiritual self directly with your conscious mind. You can do this only through the mediator of your Christ self. Therefore, your immediate purpose in life is to make direct, conscious contact with your Christ self. This will begin in the form of increased intuition, and there is much you can do to sharpen your intuition. I have given several techniques and teachings on this that can help you increase this contact with your Christ self.

So the overall purpose for your life is to be who you truly are as a spiritual being, even while you are still in embodiment in this material universe. However, because you have been in embodiment before, you also have a purpose that is specific to this particular lifetime. You can find much inspiration about this by reading books about near-death experiences or people who have experienced how their lifestreams were conscious before they came into their current embodiment.

It is important for you to understand that before you came into this lifetime, your lifestream had a conference with your personal spiritual teachers. You determined a divine plan, a mission or blueprint, for what your lifestream desired to accomplish in this lifetime. Part of this mission is to increase your spiritual understanding and attain contact with your Christ self. Therefore, by using techniques for increasing your connection to your Christ self and by studying spiritual teachings, you not only fulfill part of your mission, you will also discover other parts of your mission.

Most people in embodiment have made karma in past lives, so an important purpose for this lifetime is to balance this karma. This often means that the lifestream has volunteered to be born into a particular situation and to meet specific people. So no matter what your outer situation might be, it is important for you to make peace with that situation and to realize that your lifestream chose to come into embodiment in these conditions. When you accept this, you can stop trying to get away from the unpleasant aspects of your current situation and instead embrace your situation as an opportunity to move on and to grow spiritually.

So one might say that no matter what your outer situation is, an important purpose for your life is to see the situation as an opportunity to balance karma, to learn specific lessons about the spiritual side of life, to experience certain aspects of life on earth and to bring forth your unique gift to the world or to specific people.

When you accept life as an opportunity for growth, your attitude towards life will be magically transformed. As you go through this inner transformation, you will often see that your outer situation will also be transformed. The simple fact is that life on earth is like going to school. The purpose for planet earth is to help your lifestream achieve its permanent freedom as a spiritual being. To achieve this freedom, you must learn certain lessons and they cannot be learned by the intellect alone.

Your lessons must be fully internalized, and that is why you often need to experience a difficult situation so that through direct experience you can learn the lesson you were meant to learn in that situation and fully integrate it into your being. When you understand this, you realize that once you have fully learned a specific lesson, there is no longer any reason for you to be in a particular outer situation. Therefore, when you embrace life as an opportunity and seek to learn your lessons and fully integrate them into your being, you will see that difficult situations will begin to dissolve as if by magic. Obviously, this is not magic at all. It is simply because you have now learned the lesson, and you need to move on to learn higher lessons in different situations.

Another purpose for life is that you can win your right to ascend from the material universe, so that you do not have to reincarnate. As long as you have unfulfilled business in this world, meaning that you have karma to balance, lessons to learn or experiences that you need to gain for your growth, then you are not free to permanently ascend to the spiritual realm. You will be drawn back here either by the Law of Cause and Effect or by your lifestream’s desire to finish its unfinished business.

An important aspect of my mission on earth was to demonstrate that it is possible for lifestreams to eventually graduate from the schoolroom of earth and win their permanent ascension. Thereby a lifestream becomes an ascended being, an ascended master.

So one might say that one purpose in life is the ascension, whereby you no longer have to come back here. However, in today’s age a more important purpose is to qualify for your ascension, but to do so while you are still in the physical body. Thereby, you attain your Christ consciousness while you are still here on earth. In other words, you can be an unascended master walking the earth and thereby you can give a unique service to humankind and to God’s purposes. You can literally be an unascended master here below as I, and all my colleagues in the ascended masters, are ascended masters here Above. This will give us a unique opportunity to work together and bring God’s kingdom to earth, which is truly what needs to happen in this day and age.

Why you cannot convince some people—and shouldn’t even try

TOPICS: Many people trapped in the fallen consciousness – the serpentine mind creates doubt and confusion – any argument has a counter-argument – dream of a final argument – right among men or right with God? – why you cannot convince people – transcending the ego’s desire for control –

Question: I have visited your site and found it amazing. However, there is a person who is claiming to be God’s Messenger for our time. It is said that only one Messenger is in the world at a time, to prevent the errors and competition that would arise from more than one. What are your thoughts.

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels: (July 29, 2011)

It is wise for a spiritual student to realize that you cannot base your growth on intellectual, analytical arguments. The essence of the spiritual path is to have Aha experiences, which give you an intuitive knowing that is beyond all outer arguments. This gives you the peace that passes understanding, because it is not based on understanding but direct experience.

One of the basic dynamics on earth – and one which all spiritual seekers can benefit from knowing – is that this planet has given embodiment to a number of people who are trapped in the fallen consciousness. This can also be called the serpentine consciousness, and it refers to the Serpent who deceived Eve to eat the forbidden fruit—which was truly the dualistic consciousness. These beings are very skilled in crafting sophisticated arguments that can sow the seeds of doubt, confusion and discouragement in the minds of those who are the innocent, the children of God.

It is wise to recognize that as a spiritual person, you will never be able to outmaneuver those in the fallen consciousness. There is no argument that does not have a counter-argument. Which means you will never convince them, because they can always come up with an argument that they claim is superior to yours.

The problem is that when you try to reason with those in the fallen consciousness, you become pulled into the maelstrom of arguments created by that consciousness. Those who are in the fallen consciousness are already there, and you will never be able to save them through arguments. Yet by trying, they will inevitably pull you in, because you must go where you place your attention. It is an ancient dream for the servants of God that they can come up with some final or ultimate argument, that will awaken those blinded by duality. Yet it simply cannot be done, and you will see this when you understand how duality works.

True spiritual students never allow themselves to think that they have found an ultimate expression of truth here on earth. They realize that the only ultimate truth is God, and God cannot be described through words or images. God can be experienced only through oneness. Thus, God is the only valid frame of reference. And the true God can never be reduced to a human argument.

Ask yourself this: “Do I want to be right here on earth, or do I want to be right with God?” You cannot serve two masters. If you want to be right with God, you must stop the endless argumentation with other people about this or that—all of which is inconsequential compared to a direct experience of God.

Those blinded by duality cannot experience God directly, and the reason is that they cannot let go of the separate self, even for a split second. They cling to the sense of control that the separate self gives them. What is the basis for this sense of control?

It is that because the ego cannot experience God directly, it can never have an ultimate frame of reference. You will recall that the Serpent told Eve that if she ate of the fruit, she would become as a god, knowing good and evil. This refers to the fact that those blinded by duality cannot experience God as the ultimate frame of reference. Thus, they cannot experience that there is a reality outside the world of their perception. As a result, they become infatuated with the intoxicating belief that they are “as a god” and that it is their ability and their right to define their own frame of reference.

Thus, each being blinded by duality has defined its own frame of reference, and such beings are firmly convinced it is the ultimate frame of reference. Any arguments you define will be measured against their frame of reference, and it will always fail to convince them. The reason is that in their frame of reference, they have defined certain expressions here on earth as ultimate truths. Thus, they refuse to question them, and as long as these expressions are seen as beyond questioning, no argument could ever move people’s conviction.

In a sense, one could say that those in the fallen consciousness have as their ultimate frame of reference one simple statement: “I could never be wrong.” And thus, you can never convince such people that they need to go beyond their chosen “infallible” truth and have a direct experience of God’s Being—which is beyond any expression.

In reality, all expressions on earth are “wrong” in the sense that they can only be substitutes for the direct experience of God. And if you refuse to question a particular expression, it will block your direct experience.

The reason is that when you do experience God’s Being, you realize that you are NOT a god, and thus you do not have the ability to define “good and evil.” You can know good and evil only through the direct experience of a greater Being outside the mental box created by your individualized perception.

Even if you have risen above ego, you will know that you need a frame of reference from outside your own mind, because even an individualization of God can never have the perspective of the omnipresent God. Ultimate truth can never be encapsulated in form; it can be known only by going beyond form. Even as an ascended master, I know I need to regularly experience God’s Being in order to avoid creating my own perception.

Experiencing God, or pure awareness, can be accomplished only by transcending the ego’s desire for control—the same desire for control that has been taken to the extreme by those in the fallen consciousness. They want to define “good and evil” in order to gain the control that enables them to live with their own inner insecurity. They do this by pompously defining themselves as the only representatives of truth.

Wise are those who do not make themselves the blind followers of such blind leaders.

In terms of the argument that there is only one messenger at a time, see an old answer, which still has timeless validity.

Any adversary is a product of your state of mind

TOPICS: Psychiatrists are only a threat if you want them to be – looking for an adversary – an excuse for not being the Christ – your inner struggle will go on until you change your mind – strive for balance – psychologists ideally do not judge your spiritual beliefs – some psychologists are fanatical – an adversary is a product of your state of mind – being the Christ does not require taking an unbalanced stand –

Question: I have a very important question. When we look at history we can see that many times people were attacked very aggressively for their beliefs. For example thousands or millions of people who were burned alive at the stake. Also in Hitler’s germany maybe even millions of people which were killed. Also concentration camps.

And now maybe in the more civilized world: psychiatrist?
Are psychiatrists a threat to us?

I had a very uncomfortable situation when I talked about miracles which
I experienced by using your teachings, techniques and those of other ascended masters. And one human hated me so much and told that I have a mental disease and I should be locked in a psychiatric hospital… and I begin
to think that maybe some time I will meet some psychiatrists. Maybe we students of spiritual teachings should be ready for this situation?

And there is an important question: Are psychiatrists a threat to us? Is
it proper for them to lock people in psychiatric hospitals for their miracles and spiritual beliefs, which for many people seem so strange even sick?
And how should we deal with this threat (if it is a threat)?
So how we can scream aloud from the rooftops to others when there is threat like that for us? How can we talk aloud about the God Kingdom like you? Is God a guard of our safety? Or maybe it is a risk and cost which we all for God’s Kingdom and salvation have to have? Maybe there are many risks and threats like that? And how do we overcome fear? Please explain this.

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels: (August 10, 2010)

Let us approach this from the personal level and from the level of society, starting with the personal level.

If you, as a spiritual seeker, want to have psychiatrists be a threat to you, then you have – by the Law of Free Will – a perfect right to have that experience. Whatever mental image you project into the cosmic mirror will eventually be reflected back to you in the form of material circumstances.

As we have mentioned many times and from many different perspectives, some spiritual seekers are still stuck in, or at least partially blinded by, the epic mindset. In this frame of mind you are deliberately – but unknown to your conscious mind – seeking for an adversary whom you can appoint as a threat, so that you have an excuse for not taking full responsibility for your own state of mind. For example, the subconscious belief might be that you cannot be at peace or express your Christhood because certain outer conditions are not met. And they are not met because the adversary is opposing the “perfect” conditions in which you could be at peace or be the Christ. Thus, you have an excuse for focusing on battling the adversary instead of manifesting and expressing your Christhood—which must be done regardless of any outer conditions, as ALL material conditions oppose the expression of Christhood.

In reality, there is no such adversary, but because the world is currently so affected by the dualistic mindset, you can always find a seeming adversary. The reason being that you are the one who is creating the mental image of an archetypal adversary. And because you are not willing to take responsibility for your state of mind, you convince yourself that there really is an adversary who is ready to pounce on you at any moment, completely independently of your state of consciousness.

As you project this mental image upon the society in which you live, there will eventually be someone who will seem to confirm the validity of your image—and thus you will appoint that person or group of persons as your personal adversary. The more you “struggle” with the adversary, the more it will seem as if the adversary is struggling back (and in some cases the adversary may actually be struggling back because the people in the group are also stuck in the dualistic mindset). Thus, everything the adversary does seems to confirm your mental image that this really is your adversary.

How long must this struggle go on? Well, since your part of the struggle is truly taking place inside your mind, it must go on until you decide that you have had enough of this experience and therefore decide to rethink the mental images you are projecting out. As was recently said in another answer, some people have turned their own government into an adversary, and this struggle can never bring about the Golden Age.

No spiritual teacher can persuade you that your struggle exists only in your mind until you are willing to take a critical look at the way you perceive life, meaning that you see life through the filter of the dualistic mindset in which there must be an adversary. This can then bring about the realization that your perception of life is not a passive activity of seeing external conditions that exist independently of your mind. It is an active activity through which you project mental images into the cosmic mirror, which can only reflect them back in the form of what seems like external conditions. This has been proven by quantum physics for those who are willing to “see” beyond their perception.

Of course, as was explained elsewhere, perception is born of a certain mental state, and once the Conscious You identifies itself based on that mental state, it “sees” through the filter of the ego. And the ego itself can never question the mental state out of which it was born. Thus, the ego will never transcend the mental state of wanting an adversary. Which means that the only escape is for the Conscious You to recognize that it is pure awareness and thus beyond not only your ego’s perception but also the mental state from which it springs.

If you study this website carefully, you will see that I repeatedly caution spiritual seekers to strive for balance and to avoid extremes. And if you follow this advice, then psychiatrists will not become an actual threat to you and you will not be in danger of being “locked in a mental institution.” The reason is simple. A psychiatrist who is following his or her training will not be evaluating your actual spiritual or religious beliefs, as the psychiatrist is trained to see all beliefs as the product of the mind (which, as I have just explained, is not incorrect for a person who has not yet attained Christ consciousness).

Thus, while you or certain people around you may find your spiritual beliefs strange, a professional psychiatrist will not even look at them but will focus on your behavior. Only if there is a clear link between your spiritual beliefs and unbalanced or extreme behavior, will your beliefs become an issue. And even then, a psychiatrist will not have an issue with your beliefs but will address them only in an effort to curb unbalanced behavior.

I am, of course, here talking about psychiatrists who are true to their professional training. According to which all beliefs are a product of the mind, meaning that even the belief that there is no God is a product of the mind. Of course, there are some psychiatrists who cannot maintain this professional distance and who themselves have come to believe that the belief in materialism is not a belief but represents a reality. And such “religious” materialists may become as fanatical as “religious” religious people.

Yet my point here is that my recommendation for all spiritual seekers is to strive for balance, which truly means transcending the dualistic mindset and the epic struggle. If you allow yourself to maintain the epic mindset, then in this dawning of the Aquarian age, you will be “forced” by the growth in the collective consciousness to take your epic mindset further and further into extremes in order to maintain it. And this will indeed lead to unbalanced behavior that might attract the attention of councillors, psychologists, psychiatrists or even law-enforcement personnel.

If you then respond to such situations from the epic mindset, you will appoint these professionals – who are by and large simply trying to do their job – as your new adversaries, and you will then use your epic beliefs to justify even more unbalanced behavior. This can indeed lead to a negative spiral that might end up with you in a mental institution or in jail (in extremes cases it can even lead to people committing what is known as “police-assisted suicide”). I would prefer that those who are true students of this website avoid such a spiral. Of course, I bow to the Law of Free Will and your need to have any experience you desire in order to transcend the epic mindset. Some people truly have to take this mindset to an extreme before they realize that they no longer want to fight an adversary—and thus decide to let go of the mindset that creates the adversary (and thereby “forces” the cosmic mirror to send them a physical adversary).

I realize some will point to my own life or the previous lives of other ascended masters, and say that being the Christ means taking an uncompromising stand. Yet taking a stand for truth is NOT the same as unbalanced or extremist behavior. There are indeed many people who have taken an uncompromising stand and have been persecuted for it, but if you look closely, you will see that they did not take their stand based on an unbalanced state of mind. Likewise, you will find many people who have been firmly convinced that they were taking a stand for higher principles, but in reality they were driven by the ego’s need to either fight someone or to elevate itself above others.

In other words, the outer action of taking a stand can be driven by both the Christ mind and the egoic mind. And only those who strive for balance will avoid walking into a trap set by their egos and thus “taking a stand” for their own mental images rather than a higher truth. What is the difference? Well, as one measure you might look at people’s willingness to forgive those who persecute them. Those driven by ego are involved in the dualistic struggle and will project responsibility and blame outside themselves—thus being unwilling to forgive (Indeed it is the ego’s desire to project responsibility outside itself that drives them to take a stand.). Those who truly come from the Christ mind will indeed be willing to forgive, as in my statement: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” You might also study the life of Thomas More and how he had nothing but forgiveness towards the egoic king who sentenced him to death.

We are now moving into an age, where it will become increasingly possible to take a stand for truth without going into extremist behavior. In other words, even though other people or even society at large may consider your viewpoints extreme, your behavior does not need to be extreme. In fact, in this age, you will have a greater impact by taking a stand in a balanced way and teaching a balanced – as opposed to what will be seen as a fanatical – approach to spirituality. History has seen plenty of religious fanatics. What is needed in the Aquarian age is people who can elucidate spiritual principles in a way that the population can understand and relate to because it resonates with – and thus awakens – something within them.

Christ and anti-christ not the same as good and evil

TOPICS: Christ is one with God – anti-christ is separated from God – Christ is not in opposition to anti-christ – in material universe, you are allowed to oppose God – the universe acts as a mirror – when you send out an unbalanced action, the mirror creates an opposite reaction – Lucifer and fallen beings sent out an action that became evil – the cosmic mirror sent back a reaction that is good – both good and evil spring from consciousness of anti-christ – evil is not in opposition to God; it is in opposition to itself – removing anti-christ means transcending the epic, dualistic struggle –

Question: Could you give me a deeper understanding of the concept of duality and non-duality? What exactly is the difference between Christ and anti-christ? Are they the same as good and evil—as my fundamentalist friends seem to believe?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

The consciousness of Christ is a state of consciousness that is one with God, with God’s purpose and with God’s will. The consciousness of anti-christ is a state of consciousness that is separated from God and therefore opposes God’s purpose and violates his laws. Yet you can cannot transfer the concepts of Christ and anti-christ to the dualistic concepts of good and evil.

In fact, you will see that I personally never used the term anti-christ, and the problem is that it makes it seem like the force of anti-christ is in opposition to Christ. Therefore, it becomes tempting for people in a dualistic state of consciousness to reason that Christ is the same as good and anti-christ is the same as evil—according to their definition of good and evil. This is not true because even though the consciousness of anti-christ opposes God and the consciousness of Christ, the consciousness of Christ is not in opposition to the consciousness of anti-christ. The consciousness of Christ is simply beyond the consciousness of anti-christ.

I know this is a subtle distinction that is difficult to understand with the linear mind, but let me attempt to explain. When the Creator created self-conscious beings and gave them free will, God knew that some of them might misuse their free will to oppose his purpose for creation. In doing so, they could no longer remain in the River of Life and enter the spiritual world. That is why Lucifer, and those who followed him in his rebellion, inevitably fell to lower level of God’s creation, namely the material universe.

In the material universe it is allowed for a conscious being to oppose the laws of God. Yet this universe acts like a mirror and returns to you everything you send out. This principle has been discovered by science in the form of the law of action and reaction. This law simply states that if you send an action into the universe, the cosmic mirror will reflect that impulse back to you with equal, but opposing, force. In reality, the universe is not opposing your action. It is simply mirroring your own action back to you, and human beings see it as a reaction.

So when Lucifer and his followers fell into the material universe and embodied the consciousness of anti-christ, they became the force that human beings today call evil. In so doing, they sent an action into the universe, and the cosmic mirror reflected it back upon them in the form of a force that seems to oppose the force of evil. This is the force that human beings normally call good.

The important distinction here is that what human beings call good is not necessarily good in the eyes of God. It is simply a reflection of the consciousness of anti-christ which has created its own opposition, its own reaction, its own opposing force. In other words, whereas Lucifer and his followers believed that they were actually in opposition to God, they were in reality in opposition to themselves. The consciousness of anti-christ, and any human being who decides to embody that consciousness, is not actually fighting against God. They are fighting against themselves.

Because God gave people free will, God can do nothing to stop this from going on in a seemingly endless spiral of violence and bloodshed on this planet. We of the ascended masters cannot force human beings to abandon this endless struggle. We can only continue to offer them spiritual teachings and hope that they will eventually tire of fighting against the windmills as did Don Quixote.

We can only work toward helping people see that although there is an epic struggle between two forces on this planet, those forces cannot be defined in black-and-white terms. What most people call good and evil are simply two expressions of the consciousness of anti-christ which has created its own opposition. Therefore, the only true way to remove anti-christ from this planet is to rise above the dualistic struggle in which both sides seek to force people to be saved. In other words, even a political or religious institution that claims to be working for good, but uses force to make people comply, is in reality an expression of the consciousness of anti-christ. It does not respect the Law of Free Will and thus it opposes God’s purpose for creation.

When you attain Christ consciousness, you cannot remain passive in the face of evil, but you will not define evil in dualistic terms. You will not engage in the dualistic struggle between the Gog and the Magog, as the false gods of this world. You will rise above duality through the single-eyed vision of the Christ mind. When your eye is single – meaning that you see beyond duality – your whole body shall be full of light [Matthew 6:22], the light of the universal Christ mind. You can then bring the true light that will dispel the darkness that prevents people from seeing that even what they call good is out of alignment with the truth of Christ. This might shock many Christians, but remember my statement, “For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20). So there is a true righteousness in Christ and a false righteousness defined by man.

When you put on the mind of Christ, you become the open door for bringing forth a higher awareness, a higher culture and a higher form of government that can solve the problems that today seem to have no solutions. My entire purpose for this website is to give people the tools and the understanding they need to manifest Christ consciousness. Let those who have ears, hear my words, but be not hearers of the word only [James 1:22]. Be the doers of the word by being the Word incarnate.

Do we create another dualistic illusion within the illusion?

TOPICS: Creating from duality reinforces duality – people create their own hell – the cosmic mirror – thinking you can get away with things – blaming others for the consequences of your own past choices – negative spiral – receiving a morsel of Christ truth – follow the spiritual path and use the tools – creation and co-creation – God’s will is not an external will – Aha experiences –

Question: Dear Jesus, You have said on this site that we are co-creators with God, yet we are living within an illusion of separateness. My question is this: We live in an illusion. When we create, do we create another illusion within the illusion? How do we transmute illusion, and how do we know that we have transmuted it?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

In a sense you are right. The illusion of separation springs from the duality consciousness, the dualistic mind. So as long as you create based on the dualistic visions of that mind, you are only reinforcing and adding to the illusion. That is why I said:

22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
23 But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great [is] that darkness! (Matthew, Chapter 6)

The “evil eye” is a metaphor for the duality consciousness. The “single eye” is a metaphor for the unified vision of the Christ mind, through which you see yourself as being one with God. Only then can you be a co-creator instead of a creator.

Although there is an ultimate limit, there is a long way that a lifestream can descend into these self-created illusions of duality. In reality, Hell is a state of consciousness, a place in consciousness, that is the ultimate creation of the duality consciousness connected to this planet. Yet many people in physical embodiment have descended so far into the duality consciousness that they are essentially creating their own private Hell right here on earth.

When you are trapped in duality, you become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I explain this in greater detail in Save Yourself, but the essence of the teaching is that the material universe – with its four levels, as explained elsewhere – functions as a mirror. Whatever human beings send into the universe, the cosmic mirror reflects back to them.

So take a lifestream who has become trapped in the duality consciousness. Such a lifestream thinks it is the doer and that it can actually create something without God and without using God’s energy. The lifestream thinks it is creating by using matter and the laws governing matter, and it fails to see that matter is simply an expression of God’s energy. This illusion of being the doer is the core effect of the consciousness of separation.

Because the lifestream no longer sees itself as part of the whole, and therefore affected by the laws that govern the whole, the lifestream might begin to believe that it is a law unto itself. It might think that it is affected only by the laws that visibly affect matter. In other words, if it does not see an immediate negative consequence of its actions, it begins to think that it can get away with anything. So the lifestream has one or several lifetimes in which it seeks earthly power and pleasure without considering the consequences it has for the whole (of which it is a part—a fact it does not realize). After a few lifetimes, the lifestream’s karma inevitably catches up with it in the form of negative events in its life.

Suddenly, the lifestream goes through a rude awakening in which it realizes that the matter universe will no longer conform to its desires and beliefs. Yet because of the duality consciousness, the lifestream fails to draw a cause-effect connection between its current attitude, its past actions and what is happening to it right now. And because of the duality consciousness, the lifestream cannot accept that it has sown what it is now reaping. Consequently, someone or something else must be to blame.

Many lifestreams now subscribe to the false image, supplied by many religions, that God is to blame because he is an angry and punishing deity. The lifestream now lives a lifetime being angry at God, constantly sending into the universe energy that is qualified with the vibrations of fear, anger and blame. This energy will inevitably be reflected back by the cosmic mirror, and when that happens, the lifestream often sees it as proof that the image of an angry God is correct. The lifestream’s dualistic world view has now become a self-fulfilling prophecy that can eventually lead the lifestream into the ultimate consciousness of separation from God, namely what people call Hell.

How can a lifestream break this downward spiral? Through the faculties of higher reasoning, that most people call intuition but which is really your Christ self. You must receive a morsel of Christ truth – this is my body, which is broken for you – and you must allow it to raise the vibration of your consciousness until you resonate with the vibration of truth.

I know it can seem impossible to break the illusion of duality, but it is not that difficult. Any spiritual seeker has developed his or her intuitive abilities to some degree. Otherwise, you simply could not recognize any truth, either on this website or elsewhere. You only need to continue to sharpen your intuitive faculties by studying spiritual teachings and practicing spiritual rituals. Yet you can take a major step by consciously internalizing the truth that there is a reality beyond the dualistic illusion created by your lower mind and the mass consciousness.

So use the tools we give on the toolbox website and remember my saying, “In your patience possess ye your souls” (Luke 21:19). By following the spiritual path, you will gradually break down the walls of illusion, the walls of Maya, that surround your mind.

As a final thought to ponder, consider the concept that when you create, you are only adding to the illusion, whereas when you co-create you are rising above the illusion. Creation implies that you are separated from God and creating on your own. This is always an illusion because you are a part of God and no part of God can be apart from God. Co-creation implies that you know you are using God’s energy and that you are committed to working within God’s law and overall vision. That is why I said:

I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me. (John 5:30)

But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. (John 5:17)

Of course, when you are trapped in the consciousness of separation, you see God as an external deity, dictating to you what to do according to his foreign will. When you overcome duality, you sere that the Father is your I AM Presence, of which you are an extension. Therefore, the Father’s will is not external but the will of your higher self. Thus, following that will is not a sacrifice or a restriction of your freedom. It is the supreme joy of your lifestream that leads to true creative freedom, meaning a co-creation that sets you free instead of binding your lifestream further to the spiral of duality.

How do you know you have overcome the illusion? By the many little experiences, often called “Aha” experiences, where you know you have recognized a higher truth. You will eventually have more dramatic breakthrough experiences. Yet even such experiences do not necessarily mean you have permanently transcended the illusion. At the lower levels of the path, you only have occasional glimpses of a reality beyond the illusion. In the intermediate stages, you have a mixture of true vision and the illusion. At the higher stages, you will have more truth than illusion, and then finally, one day, there is no more illusion.

Believe me, when you are there, you will know it. As long as there is a question in your mind, you are not there yet. But if you keep moving forward, you WILL get there. I will be the first to greet you!

Removing evil from earth without fighting it

TOPICS: Dark forces seek to create a struggle between relative opposites – spiritual people can get drawn into this struggle – ends can justify means leads to fanaticism – slave of your attention – people can authorize the masters to remove evil – being non-attached brings judgment – evil springs from ignorance – ignorance is separation from God – no evil act was ever committed – Christ does not judge based on relative standard –

Question: Beloved Jesus the Christ, I absolutely love everything I’ve read in Kim’s books thus far, but do have questions about evil. In “The Christ is Born in You” on page 214, it says that humans cannot remove evil from earth. I do understand the comparison to that of removing darkness in a room and that it only comes by bringing light (it makes sense). However, don’t some spiritual movements tell individuals something similar to this, in regard to evil? Or is it that we (humans) cannot remove darkness from earth, but our decrees and raised consciousness provide light and opportunities for the ascended masters to remove evil from astral plane which will also remove it from the physical octave leaving a void which we need to fill with light?

Also, You had mentioned that no evil act was ever committed on this planet. I was wondering about the Fall of Lucifer and the other angels who took on human form; isn’t their intention to prevent the Sons and Daughters of God from realizing their Christhood and attaining union with their I AM Presence? Then the plot and conspiracy against, not only the youth, but all children of God seems to be a conscious choice of using free will to knowingly do evil (that which is not in accordance with God’s Laws), and not necessarily acts performed out of ignorance. It seems as if the Fallen Angels knew, and still know, exactly what they are doing, and that it is not ignorance from the dualistic mind by which they act. Obviously my reasoning is incorrect somewhere because You did mention that no evil act was ever committed on earth, so what is missing in my understanding of this particular topic?
Thank You very much for Your time and for clearing this up for me, I sincerely appreciate it.

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

One of the main messages on my website is that human beings have descended into a state of consciousness in which they look at everything through the filter of relative opposites. One pair of opposites that give people a distorted view of reality is the opposites of good and evil.

As explained in many places on this website, there are dark forces who are seeking to deceive humankind. One of the primary weapons used by these dark forces is to create two opposing forces, one which represents relative good and one which represents relative evil. The dark forces then seek to deceive people into supporting one of these opposites.

Therefore, people give their lives and their energy to fight for a cause that was never God’s cause to begin with. It was, from the very beginning, a cause that sprang from the relative opposites of good and evil, and therefore it had nothing to do with the cause of absolute good pursued by the ascended masters.

The problem you see through the ages is that many well-meaning and spiritual people have allowed themselves to become drawn into this conflict between relative good and evil. Many of these people are eager to do God’s work, and they realize that there is a force on this planet that opposes God’s will. They therefore begin to think that it is their high and Holy calling to fight against evil and that in so doing they are advancing God’s cause on earth. The problem here is that these people easily become tricked into adopting the basic paradigm of evil forces, namely that the end can justify the means.

These people often become fanatical and develop anger and hatred against evil. In so doing, they misqualify God’s energy. As I explain throughout this website, the dark forces can survive only because they trick people into misqualifying God’s energy and steal that energy. So even when people think they are fighting for the cause of good, the misqualification of energy will actually support the cause of evil.

It was my hope that, through the parable of trying to remove darkness from a room, people would see through this fallacy. It is a simple fact that human beings are slaves of their attention. Whatever you focus your attention upon will receive the energies streaming through your consciousness. I am not thereby saying you should ignore evil. I am saying that if you focus undue attention on evil, and especially if you become angry or fearful, you misqualify the energies of God and thereby strengthen the very forces you think you are fighting. This ties in to my statement to be wise as serpents but harmless as doves.

This statement indicates that human beings cannot fight evil without becoming mixed up with evil. Therefore, people cannot remove evil from the earth. However, they can authorize the ascended masters to remove evil. The key to doing this is to remain non-attached to evil, and this is the true meaning of turning the other cheek. If someone harms you and you respond with negative emotions or seek revenge, you become karmically involved with that person. By making that choice, you make it impossible for us to step in to the situation. When you remain non-attached and turn the other cheek, you allow us to bring the judgment upon the other person. This will eventually remove darkness from the earth, whereas no amount of effort based on the dualistic mind will remove darkness—it will only reinforce that darkness.

One of the best ways to become harmless as a dove is to realize that what people are so quick to label as evil truly springs from ignorance. Once again, there is a very subtle distinction here. On one hand, you are quite correct that there are many dark forces, and many human beings, who knowingly rebel against the laws and the will of God. They know that they are violating the laws of God and that they are violating the law of free will by manipulating human beings.

From a certain viewpoint, it would be correct to label these acts as evil. In fact, I use that terminology in several places on this website. This use of the word evil is not incorrect, it simply reflects a certain level of understanding, a certain level of consciousness. It also reflects that words are inherently relative and therefore can have more than one meaning.

However, there is a higher understanding of this issue. When Lucifer rebelled against the laws of God, he obviously saw himself in opposition to God. In other words, he had created a sense of distance between himself and God. This then is the ultimate definition of ignorance. Ignorance is a state of consciousness in which you do not realize that you are created by God and created out of God’s substance, being and consciousness.

Ignorance causes a sense of separation from God, and this sense of separation is always an illusion. Without him was not anything made that was made. Nothing was ever created that was separated from God, and therefore no part of God can be apart from God. The sense of separation is the ultimate form of ignorance.

When you understand this, you see that ultimately even the rebellion of Lucifer sprang from ignorance. Ignorance is not evil in an ultimate sense. That is why one might say, although I admit this will be a provocative statement to many people, that no evil act was ever committed.

When you realize that you are one with God and that everyone else is one with God, you see that whatever you do, you do to yourself. If you realize that an act will harm yourself, then you simply will not commit that act. Therefore, if you truly know the reality that everything is God, you will never commit any of the acts which human beings call evil. No being will ever knowingly harm itself. So harming yourself, or another part of yourself, can only be done out of ignorance. In other words, it simply isn’t possible to have full knowledge of the reality of God and commit an evil act.

I realize that my statements in The Christ Is Born in You will be provocative to many people. I gave those statements for the specific purpose of stirring people’s preconceived opinions about evil. One might say that I should have given further details in the book, but one of the techniques that we use is to write a book about a specific topic but to insert a few remarks here and there that will help the more sensitive students pick up on an idea that will take them beyond the main topic. My remark that no evil act was ever committed on earth was precisely such a pointer, and the fact that you have picked up on it shows that you are a sensitive student who is ready for a higher understanding.

As I said earlier, many people have been tricked into fighting for a cause which they think is God’s cause, but which is truly the cause of those who oppose God. Human beings are very quick to judge others based on some outer standard. In many cases that outer standard springs from the relativity of the dualistic mind, and therefore it can be far removed from or in complete opposition to the true standard of the Christ consciousness. It is only the universal Christ consciousness that judges righteous judgments. It does not judge based on appearances, as do people who are trapped in the relativity of the dualistic mind.

The Christ does not judge people and label them as bad or evil. The Christ consciousness realizes that all human beings are sons and daughters of God, so therefore they all have the potential to regain their true identity. A Christed person never judges any human being. One will judge acts and ideas and discern whether they are of God of whether they are in opposition to God. This is a righteous judgment, as opposed to the value judgments performed by human beings.

To truly work for the cause of light, you must rise above the relative judgments that spring from the dualistic mind. You do that by becoming wise as serpents and harmless as doves. A valuable tool for rising above the relative state of consciousness is precisely the teaching that all acts, which human beings label as evil, spring from ignorance. In fact, many of the acts which human beings label as good also spring from ignorance.

Once again, the key to true spiritual progress is to rise above the relativity of the dualistic mind and see the truth of the Christ consciousness. That truth simply will not fit into any of the mental boxes created by human beings. In many cases, Christ truth will neither fit into the mental box labeled evil nor the mental box labeled good. So the only way to know Christ truth is to think outside the box!

NOTE: You can also authorize the ascended masters to remove evil by using the decrees and invocations found on the Transcendence Toolbox website.