Question to Kim: You have said about the separate selves that they are not stupid, they are there for a reason, seeking some sort of psychological safety, in relation to planet Earth. I know that this has helped me to switch from seeing separate selves as being in opposition to me, to this motivation for safety. Could you give more insight into this.
Answer from Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2026 Lithuania Conference.
Kim: Well, the first thing that comes to me is that you have to realize there are separate selves at different levels. As the masters have said, consciousness starts at the 144th level, it creates a self there, and then it keeps creating selves until it reaches the 48th level. And those selves are not dualistic selves, but they are selves that are meant to give you the experience that you are a human being in a world that seems completely real.
At the 48th level, you see yourself as a human being, you have some intuitive sense that there is something beyond your own mind that you are connected to, yet do not yet have a clear vision of your I AM Presence. Those are selves that are just meant to give you the experience of being in embodiment on earth. And that is how you integrate with the physical body, basically, first with your identity body, then your mental, then your emotional, and finally the physical.
And then, of course, you can go into duality, and now you are creating separate selves. The separate selves are created in reaction, and they are all created as a reaction to something shocking that happens to you. That is why they can sometimes be, for example, very defensive. And they are seeking security because, as the masters have said, you go to the 47th level and you create what we talked about earlier, the ego, where you see yourself as a separate being. And the Conscious You has a sense of loss, that you have lost something, you do not know what.
The ego is sort of created to compensate, or cover over, that sense of loss, deflect your attention from it so you don’t start seeking for something beyond the ego. And all these selves you create out of duality, they are, in a sense, created because you experience something on earth that makes you feel insecure, threatened. And it is not that you are not, because there are many things going on, on earth. They are created to deal with that situation. You can say the dualistic selves are, in a sense, against you in the way that they want to survive. They do not want you to rise above them. They do not want you to rise above the level of consciousness where you created them. They are pulling on you. And they are trying to project into your mind that you should ignore these ideas from the Christ mind that can help you dissolve the self, see the illusion of the self. And the ego as well, because it wants to keep you in separation, because when you go beyond separation, that aspect of the ego dies.
You can also say, as you are descending towards the 48th level, you are based on your individuality and your I AM Presence and based on reacting to earth. You can create certain selves because you want to have a certain experience. Let us just take a neutral self. You want to experience nature on earth. You like nature. You want to be a farmer or a fisherman that is in contact with nature. This just allows you to have a certain experience you can have on earth. It is not dualistic. There is nothing dualistic about being a farmer. It is just an experience you can have. Or you can be a craftsman or an artist or good with the physical body or whatever it may be. But you are not fighting other people. Those selves are much more neutral because they are just created to give you an experience. But still, the self has some survival instinct that only as long as you want the experience through the self can it survive. And it wants to be useful.
In a sense, it will pull you towards still having that experience. And the self can never say: “I have had enough of this experience”. It is only the Conscious You that can come to that point and say: “Oh, I have been a farmer for 157 lifetimes, that is enough.”
The neutral selves and the selves created in duality, how do you differentiate? Well, I guess you cannot differentiate because some of them are strong reactions and you can tell that.
Kim: No, you can differentiate once you kind of lock into what duality is all about. Because you can say a neutral self is just having an experience. There is no evaluation. Is it good or bad? Is it right or wrong? And you are not projecting that other people are wrong, for example. But the dualistic selves are always based on this dualistic polarity, right or wrong, good or bad. And they are always projecting out. Because, you see, when you go into separation, you are essentially seeing yourself as a victim of circumstances beyond your control.
You are always reacting against something. And that is why if other people do not do what you want, you see them there against you and you blame them. Or you try to force them. With the dualistic self there is always an element of force, always an element of fear—there is always resistance. It is like you can say, yeah, you can be a farmer when you are below the 48th level of consciousness, but you are probably fighting with your neighbor because you think he is stealing your land. There is always that element of conflict in the dualistic selves. And you are always blaming, it is your neighbor’s fault, he is the one doing it. Like Putin: ‘NATO is threatening Russia. Therefore, we need to attack Ukraine’, which is not in NATO.
Another way to say it would be, you are putting on a pair of yellow glasses, and they are coloring what is coming to you, how you experience the sky, looks green. But through the dualistic selves, it is like you are projecting upon the universe and upon other people what they should be like.
It is more than just coloring your experience. You are actually trying to, in a sense, export your experience—project it on others in a forceful, aggressive manner. Because the ego ultimately feels that the only way to be really secure is that everybody agrees with you or submits to you.
And that is the psychological safety piece that you had mentioned?
Kim: Yes, the desire for safety. The ego is on this quest to produce safety that compensates for your loss of connection. But it can only seek to achieve it through the things of this world. That is why you have a person like Stalin, who had obviously deep, deep insecurity. He felt threatened by everybody, even the people who were closest to him and who were totally loyal to him. He was afraid they would threaten him. Every once in a while, just to keep them on their toes, he would execute a couple of them. You see what I am saying? It is total projection out upon others because he wanted everybody to submit to him. But even those who had submitted to him, that was not enough. He still did not feel secure. You can never feel secure through the ego. It is an existential insecurity. You can never overcome it. Only when you let the ego die and you rise above it. Ultimately, only by really coming to the 96th level, you connect more to your I AM Presence. And you realize that the only thing that is going to fulfill you is oneness with your I AM Presence.
I am thinking about, like, I go to work, I have certain selves that come up in reaction at work. One of them is a desire to please or be nice to others so that, for example, I do not get fired. Let us say I do something. I have a reaction from someone who is offended, and my instant, I guess, separate self comes up, and it is like, I have done something wrong. Or it starts to label it as something is wrong, and then I go split into the two selves, which try to appease, or try to justify why I did what I did and that they should not be offended. That to me is an example of a dualistic play because it is essentially, I would go into a sense of forcing the other person to be okay with me because that is the only way I can survive in that workplace because I do not want to upset anybody. That might mean I get fired or I get low marks on whatever.
Kim: But that is a good example of it because, again, you are trying to create a sense of being secure in your workplace, and you have a self that the belief behind the self is that you will only be secure if you do not offend anybody and everybody likes you. You are not being forceful, like Stalin, who was ready to kill people that do not submit to you, but you are thinking that you have to change yourself in order to accommodate them. It is sort of the classical instance, where the masters are saying, you are trying to change your state of mind by changing others, by making them like you. But you are also willing to change yourself so that you do not offend them. But you are really, in a sense, you are projecting on them that they should like you.
Yeah, which is against their free will, in a way, and my own.
Kim: Yes, but it also keeps you in that state of mind where you are so sensitive to other people and where you feel threatened. You need to really look at why do you feel threatened? Why am I afraid of losing my job? What would happen if I lost my job? And then you have to come to where you see those selves there and just see the belief behind them and resolve that. You have the process in some of the books and some of my videos.
Yeah, that is another helpful angle about why am I so concerned about losing my job. The illusion that I did see was that I want to make other people feel comfortable because it is safety for me. That is a safety mechanism, and that was an illusion.
Kim: But this can go back to, for example, your parents, where if your mother got upset, for example, it was unpleasant for you, or she might even do something to you. You wanted your mother to always like you. Many children go into that. They fear that their parents will get upset, so they want to keep their parents not necessarily happy, but at least not angry at you.
And this is an authority figure, right? Like at work. I am kind of placing that.
Kim: Yes, and it can even be that. It can go back to past lives where you were near an authority figure, and you did not live up to their demands, and all of a sudden, your head was rolling down the scaffold. Rude awakening, I can tell you.
Copyright © 2026 Kim Michaels