How do the ascended masters grow in consciousness?

Question: While in embodiment, we grow in consciousness by resolving our illusions. How do the ascended masters grow in consciousness?

Answer from the Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2025 New Year Webinar

By helping you resolve your illusions, but also by being co-creators and co-creating in the ascended realm. Some ascended masters choose to stay with earth, and we grow by helping you. Other ascended masters choose to go on and take up various co-creative positions in the ascended realm. You might say that when you are in embodiment, before you ascend, you do not only grow by resolving illusions, you also grow by being co-creative. And as you resolve more and more illusions, you can become more and more co-creative and bring forth something positive instead of overcoming the illusions.

As you become more creative, we of the ascended masters who are working with earth can also help you in your co-creative abilities. We can help you by releasing ideas of what you can bring forth. For example, many of us, in fact all of us who are working with the earth are, of course, working with or working under, you might say, Saint Germain, as he has the overall vision for the golden age. And we are, of course, growing by coming up with ideas and releasing the ideas for how the earth can manifest the golden age. There has been a tendency for ascended master students to look at us as if we are somehow perfect beings, which means we do not grow, but of course we grow. That is what we have been saying over and over again. We are growing towards ultimately the Creator consciousness. But we who have ascended in the sixth sphere above yours, we are growing in that environment first and then we rise to higher levels later.

The entire world of form, from your unascended sphere all the way up to the Creator, is a growth process. And you grow by expanding your sense of self until you can fathom what it is like in the next level up. For example, the sixth sphere, the latest ascended sphere, is clearly in a fundamentally higher level than your unascended sphere, but it still has layers. And the beings who are at the highest level of the sixth sphere are considerably higher in consciousness and self-awareness than I am, since I ascended from earth in the not-too-distant past. I first have to reach their level, then I can graduate from the sixth sphere, rise to the fifth, start working my way up in that. And this is how life progresses.

We can give you glimpses of the higher spheres, glimpses of the Creator consciousness, but you cannot fathom it until you have reached a much higher level. You need to reach the higher levels of the sixth sphere before you can begin to fathom what it is like in the fifth, at the lower levels of the fifth, and then gradually expand from there.