Question: I am on the self-mastery course (Path to Self-Mastery Series) now. Ascended master teaching has touched my heart very much, although there are many difficult parts. It also solved the questions I wanted to know so much. However, I feel that all sorts of emotions in life are gradually fading away and life feels less vivid. In fact, there is little feeling or excitement in the various phenomena experienced in daily life. I tried to get a more intense (a high) experience, but there was no such experience. I wonder if I am only studying intellectually. I want to get a great unconditional love, or an experience that can change my consciousness, but how can I do this?
Answer from Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2021 Webinar – Being the Open Door for Planet Earth.
I sense that the masters want me to comment on this, because they have given various teachings about this already, but they want me to speak from my experience. I very much understand the background for the question, because I remember very clearly myself that when I was new to the spiritual path, I once in a while had a more dramatic experience. And I felt it was a great contrast between the experience and my daily state of consciousness.
And then after being many years on the path, I started noticing that I did not seem to have those kinds of dramatic experiences anymore. And it took me a while to realize that the reason was that I had actually raised my consciousness, so there was not such a big contrast or difference between my normal state of consciousness and a spiritual experience. It was not nearly as dramatic.
And I think this is what happens to many people when they have been on the spiritual path for a while, it is individual how long that may be, but certainly for me, it was 15-20 years. And what happens is that we stop identifying ourselves with the outer self or with the worldly things. We gain a different perspective where the outer things are not as important anymore, so we are not as caught up in things. We do not have that sense of drama that “this is so important to me” or “this experience was so great compared to my normal experience” or even that “this experience was so low, compared to my normal experience.” We do not have the highs and the lows anymore. And we kind of look at ordinary daily activities, and they just do not have the pull on us that they used to have because we are not identified with it anymore, we identify ourselves as spiritual beings.
And it is not that I do not enjoy doing things in life, but it is just that I am not pulled into the experience as I used to be (sometimes). And it has a good aspect, which is that, if I am in some kind of difficult situation, it does not affect me as it used to. It is like it just kind of rolls over me. But the other aspect of it is that I do not have quite the same intensity of positive feeling of happiness or joy that I used to have. But this is not because I do not feel joy, it is just that I feel a background joy all the time, that is always there. And it is much more enjoyable than the dualistic joy I used to have. But it is just that this kind of joy, or what the Buddha, I think, called bliss, is that it does not have a contrast, it does not have an opposite. There is no contrast between this and that. It is just there all the time.
And I think we need to recognize that as we go higher on the path, many of the things that used to be important to us, they just fade away. I have met people, once in a while, that are always chasing these peak experiences, and you can find them out there on the internet. They are always chasing some peak experience. But for me, my everyday state of mind is a peak experience, I do not need to go higher than that. It is not that I do not have certain experiences. For example, during Maitreya’s dictation I really felt this wave that he was talking about. I could really feel it—how my entire being was lifted up by that wave, and it was a profound experience. But it was not such a big contrast between that and my everyday experience that I did not see it as what many people call a peak experience. I just sort of flowed with the experience while it was there.
I think what has happened to me over the last several years is that I have overcome this tendency to always—like Maitreya was talking about—always evaluate everything based on a certain standard, where I can see that earlier I had the standard he was talking about: what it means to be a spiritual person, what it means to be a spiritual teacher, what it means to be a messenger, how I was supposed to behave and not behave. And that has faded away over the last couple of years.
When I am not judging myself, when I do not have the standard, I am not evaluating the experiences I am having. I am not categorizing it, I am not putting them on a scale of high and low anymore, I am just experiencing. And it is a very liberating state of mind to be in compared to this constant, evaluating, analyzing, judging, comparing.
I can see, based on this invocation we just gave, and some of the statements in there, I can see that when I was younger, I had this, that the masters talked about: when you are wounded, you are very focused on yourself, you become very, very conscious of yourself, very focused on yourself. And I was that way when I was younger. I always felt driven to do something different. And in a sense, I think what I really wanted was some kind of attention, where people say: “You are okay Kim. Relax, you are okay.”
But there came a point where I realized that it is never going to happen from outside. Because what I came to realize, actually many years ago, was that I was not accepting myself, I was not accepting myself for who I am. And as I started working on it—this was long before we had the teachings on the separate selves, it was actually before I even became a messenger— as I started working on it, I realized that the only person who can give me acceptance of myself is me. I am the one who has to accept myself.
And I also realized that there was no standard I could take in the world and say: “When I fulfill those requirements, when I live up to this standard, then I am acceptable.” And this ties in to what I have described: I had this experience, where I experienced the Alpha and Omega and the Central Sun, I experienced the Creator beyond Alpha and Omega. And what I gained from that experience was that God is in a state of mind that is beyond anything we can conceive of on earth. And that means that there are no conditions that we can define. I used to say at the time that God’s love is unconditional, but it is not really even love as we conceive of love on earth. It is just a state of mind that is beyond any of the dualistic conditions that we have. And this meant that I realized that God loves me, regardless of conditions. If I am to accept myself, I need to accept myself regardless of conditions.
Now, the question always comes up: “Well, but how can you accept your human self, your separate self?” But you do not need to accept that. You do not need to accept a specific condition of your human self, but you accept the part of you that is beyond the human self. But you also accept—and this is what I found was very important for me—you also accept that right now you are on the spiritual path. I could look back at myself and I could see that I was always very eager to improve myself and to grow. And I was always very willing to look at myself and how I needed to grow. I did for many years have exactly what Maitreya talked about: there were certain things I could not look at, but there were many other things that I was willing to look at. I realized that I am a sincere student, but right now I am at a certain point on the path, and I do not need to feel that this is wrong or that I am behind, or that I am not good enough until I reach a certain level. I am acceptable as I am right now, because I am always willing to improve. It is not that I will stand still, it is not that accepting myself means now I do not need to change anymore, I will continue to change, but I can accept myself at every point I am at.
Because, what is the path all about? It is about taking one step at a time. And I will continue to do that for the rest of my life. That is what I realized. But in order to realize that, to fully accept that, I also had to deal with this consciousness that is out there, that certain people are in a higher state of consciousness, certain people are perfect, certain people are enlightened, certain people are this or that.
I had to come to a point where I realized that it is not that there are no people that are at a higher level of conscience as me (I do not have any problem with that), but that the fact that I was not at the highest level of consciousness did not mean that I could not accept myself. Because I can accept myself at the level I am at, and I can grow beyond that. There is not a standard for how you have to be.
And what helped me very much in this respect was to realize that there is this old model in the world, that in order to be a spiritual teacher, or spiritual leader, or guru, or some kind of, you know, supernatural being—like Jesus or the Buddha are often portrayed as—you have to be perfect, you have to be in this state of perfection. But I had a very profound experience, really an “Aha” experience where I saw this, that this is not really the kind of teacher for the Aquarian Age.
In the Aquarian Age, we do not need these elevated teachers that are up there on a pedestal, and that are claimed to be perfect. We need examples. I do not have to be at the highest state of consciousness before I start teaching. Like Maitreya was talking about, many of us feel that it is part of our divine plan to teach. But we have this tendency, this temptation, to think that we have to be perfect before we can teach. But I realized that I can actually be a much better teacher, by instead of teaching from a state of perfection, I teach my own path.
I talk about the steps that I have gone through, that I was not perfect when I started, that I had the same issues that many other people have, that I have gone through a process that all can go through. And this is how you teach in the Aquarian Age. You do not have to be perfect. There is really no state of perfection, it is a meaningless concept, when you really realize it.
And I also had an experience that—you know there are many people out there who talk about enlightenment, and I always sensed there was something missing in that concept—you know, they say: “Oh, this person is enlightened. That person is enlightened.” But if enlightenment, if being enlightened, has any meaning, what does it mean in the Buddhist context? The Buddha talks about the pairs we need to overcome, what we today call the duality consciousness. And what does the duality consciousness do? It puts labels on everything. Being enlightened is a label. There is a reality to it, but the reality is a state of consciousness. But when people who are not enlightened talk about enlightenment, they are putting a label on it, because they have not experienced it, so they do not know what it is. What I realized was that if you are truly enlightened, you would not say so, because that would be putting a label on yourself. You would not encourage your followers to say so because you are encouraging them to put a label on you, and thereby create a distance between you and them so they cannot follow your example. What is the point in that?
I think this applies to all of us. You know, we have to be very careful that we do not allow ourselves to think that we have to reach some kind of high state before we can teach or help others. We can teach the process we have gone through and are still going through. And it does not have to be perfect before we can help others. You could say, in a certain sense, that if you are at the 140th level of consciousness, how can you help somebody at the 48th level? Because you cannot even remember how it was to be at the 48th level. But if you are at the 60th level of consciousness, then you can help those at the 48th level, and so forth. This was much longer than I wanted it to be, but I felt these thoughts were important to get out there.
Copyright © 2021 Kim Michaels