Question: At a certain moment of our spiritual journey, we are faced with a need to get rid of all images that we have created about our identity, our masters, God and all our experiences. But this seems like a very hard task to accomplish. In fact, on one hand, we are so used to seeing ourselves, God, our masters, our experiences through the filters of our material bodies that we have been using for eons that it is an incredibly difficult task to let all those images go. But we know that until we manage to do it, we will stay in duality and cannot really unite with our I Am Presence, our masters, our true beings. But, on the other hand, how do we go up in our spiritual path? Is it not really by creating a new image of ourselves, our masters and so on? For instance, when we are attuned to our I Am Presence and feel the love coming from the core of our being and formulate the desire: “I want to be an instrument of love”, we are creating a new image of our identity.
And if we are attuned to our masters and feel that the single-eyed vision that makes us grow is true freedom that is inseparable from unconditional love, are we not creating another image? But we know that all images create a separation, a filter that is still duality.
How, truly, are we going to escape duality and ascend? What does it take to cancel the separation of the images? Is it the deep and absolute love of our I Am Presence that we can feel when we silence our analytical mind and just listen, and then at some moment, a quantum leap will happen, and we will need no more images between us and our true identity, our masters and God?
Answer from the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2023 New Year’s webinar – Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world.
Well, as one possible way to deal with this paradox, which is a paradox that all of us have had to deal with, you can make a distinction between images and direct experience. What happens on the early stages of the spiritual path is that you find a spiritual teaching that talks about ascended masters, your I Am Presence, the possibility to ascend, and you, of course, look at that teaching through your present level of consciousness. You filter it through your present level. As a result of that, you superimpose certain images upon it. But these images come from the mind that is already blinded by separation and duality. They are images based on separation, and as long as you hold on to them, are attached to them, they will, of course, only reinforce the sense of separation, or at least keep you in separation.
What you can do is you engage in a path where you use decrees and invocations to transform the energies that are based on these images and that pull on your mind to accept and continue to accept the images. You can use our teachings to begin to question the images and realize, for example, that an ascended master is much more than any image. This is something that students in previous dispensations have not really paid much attention to. They have formulated a very, very fixed image of certain masters, for example, El Morya, and they were very reluctant to question it, which is why El Morya decided to change his name to Master More, to simply shock them and force them to deal with this, either reject it or accept it.
What is the alternative? Well, it is the teachings we have given about the Conscious You and your ability to step outside your four lower bodies and have some kind of intuitive mystical experience. This is a direct experience that is not filtered through your four lower bodies and images. The challenge after you have such an experience is that you do not superimpose the images upon it when you process or interpret the experience. In fact, you should strive not to interpret the experience and not to process it through your normal perception filter. You should be very careful not to let a mystical experience validate your present perception filter.
The question is, of course, how do you have such an experience? How do you free the Conscious You from its identification with the outer mind? Well, again, the only answer is to really walk the path, apply the tools and, as I said recently here, when you clear your emotional, mental and identity mind of the illusions and the energies, you will begin to see more clearly because there is not so much obstruction to experiencing directly your I Am Presence and the ascended masters.
It is true that as you walk the path, as you transcend a certain level of the path, you will create other images. We have said that you will have certain illusions with you until the 144th level. You always have a certain image because if you did not have a certain image of yourself in relation to earth, how would you relate to earth? How would you even stay in the physical body? There are certain images that you keep with you or, rather, you refine your images, and you always have certain images with you on the path. But this is just part of the path and something you need to accept. You can, of course, come to a point where, especially when you pass the initiation of the 96th level, where you less and less base those images on duality and separation and you refine the images. Not all images are dualistic. They are just a necessary vehicle for interacting with the material universe.
Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels