Question: Who, from modern public embodied spiritual leaders or who left their bodies not so long time ago, are translating the cosmic truth or are sponsored by ascended masters? From present, I mean people like the Dalai Lama, Sadhguru, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra. From the recent past, I mean people like Osho, Sai Baba, Blavatsky, Paramahansa Yogananda, and others. Do we benefit from reading their books and meeting them for those who are embodied? Which current spiritual practices and traditions are sponsored by ascended masters and could help on the way? And then it talks about and any of them could slow the journey. Examples could be Advaita Vedanta, Kriya Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Qigong, and so forth.
Answer from Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2025 USA Conference.
What you have to grasp here is that the real spiritual teachers for humankind are the ascended masters. And they are up there in the identity realm and the spiritual realm. They are always seeking to bring forth ideas that can help people grow. And they are not seeking to bring forth one idea that can help everybody. They realize people on earth are in many different groupings, different levels of consciousness, and come from different backgrounds. They need different teachings.
You can say that the masters are always releasing ideas from their level. And the question really is, is there somebody in embodiment who can tune in to the ascended level and receive some of those ideas? It does not mean that they need to even know that they come from ascended masters or recognize ascended masters, because the ascended masters do not need to be recognized. There can very well be a spiritual teacher who tunes in to some ideas from the ascended masters but expresses them in his or her own language that appeals to people from the same culture or background as the teacher.
That is still valid. This does not mean they are in an official way sponsored by the ascended masters, but they are able to tune in and get some ideas from them. The masters, generally speaking, do not comment on various spiritual teachers or gurus, but they have from time to time commented on some. I am not going to go through the list, but I am going to say, you have to take the approach that, is there a teacher that somehow appeals to you, that somehow resonates with you? Then study that teacher. Just be aware that there is a common tendency to think: “Oh, now I found this teacher and he has the truth and the highest teaching. I should be loyal to that teaching for the rest of my life.” But you should be loyal to your own growth path. And that might mean that you could need more than one teacher during a lifetime. You never give loyalty to an outer teacher organization. You stay loyal to the inner path. And if you feel that after some time studying with a certain teacher, you need to go somewhere else, then you do that.
You also need to be aware that in the beginning, you might think: “Oh, I found this advanced teacher. I have to learn these teachings.” But there could be other lessons you are meant to learn. I have met many, many ascended master students who were attracted to a certain organization or teaching or guru, only after some time to discover that they were false teachers, or at least they had a lot of false ideas. Very, very common. There is almost a pattern that, before you find the ascended masters, you have to be confronted with some false teachers, to show that you are willing to discern, and you are willing to reach for something higher. And only then can you recognize the masters. What I am trying to say here is that they talk about those who are sponsored by ascended masters. What I am saying is, there can be many genuine spiritual teachers who are receiving ideas from the masters. They are just not officially sponsored. Sponsorship is kind of a difficult concept to pin down exactly. The question is, are these gurus able to tune in to certain ideas, then they can receive them?
But there can also be, of course, gurus who have a mixture. They are able to tune in to some genuine ideas, but they might come from a certain background where they cannot free themselves from that background, or they can have a certain cultural overlay. Now, the masters have said, for example, that Paramahansa Yogananda has ascended. He is not working with earth as an ascended master, but he has ascended. And I personally love Yogananda. My first spiritual book was Autobiography of a Yogi. And I read it, I do not know, 10, 12 times. I used to read it at least once a year. But it came to a point, it was actually some years ago, where I realized that I had to stop reading it because well, there were those two things. What I saw in the book was that Yogananda was from India. Obviously, part of the book is he is promoting India because he felt that India was not recognized by the West. He wanted to promote his Indian scientists and this and that. There was a cultural bias. It did not mean that his teachings were not OK, but there was a cultural bias.
But what I came to see was, I was reading how he met his guru Sri Yukteswar and how their interaction was. And I suddenly had the insight that he was completely invested in the Indian guru tradition. And that that really is not something that can be scaled up for millions of people, because the Indian guru tradition, you have a guru, he has an ashram with a limited number of disciples, he can interact with them personally. And when we have the Aquarian Age where millions and millions of people are going to awaken, you just do not have enough gurus in embodiment. That is why the solution to that is the ascended masters, that people learn how to work out their personal relationship with the masters. They even do not need a messenger, certainly not to tell them what to do personally.
There are, of course, also some false gurus. The masters have mentioned Osho as a false guru. And quite frankly, what you want to strive to do is, as I have said before, you want to try to learn to read vibration. And one way to start it is to focus on your heart chakra and sense the vibration. Do the energies move up or do they sink down?
And I have had, several times in my life, where I have seen the picture of a certain guru, and I could just instantly sense how my energies sank. I still remember when I was fairly new in the Summit Lighthouse back in the early 80s, I met somebody in Denmark, and we were invited to their house, and she shows me her meditation room. And then she takes this picture and shoves it right in my face and says, this is Baba. And that was Sai Baba (Sri Sathya Sai Baba). And I almost physically jumped back from that picture. I had almost a physical reaction to it because I saw like a dark cloud over him. And the same with Osho. I look at his picture. He is obviously all about himself. It is just me, me, me, me. a Rolls Royce for every day of the year. No, not really much non-attachment there, I think. You can also, of course, look at their behavior and those kinds of things.
Other than that, I think it is, you know, the reason why the masters are somewhat reluctant to say, and maybe I am even going too far by saying this, is that you are walking an individual path. I am not telling you that you should not study Osho’s teachings, if you feel that you need to. If you feel prompted to do this, it is because there could be something you need to learn from that, whatever that may be.
And, you know, when you think about it, let us say the masters came and said: “Oh, this person is a true guru.” Then people will think: “Oh, that means everything he says is OK.” But that might not be the case either, because there could be some, as I said, a certain coloring. It is not that there is anything wrong with what Yogananda said. It is just that the Indian guru tradition is not for everybody. And it is not the only way to grow spiritually, to have a physical guru. That is why you have to be a little bit more discerning about these things. But to me, it is first of all about following your intuition.
I mean, I was, as I have talked about many times, into Transcendental Meditation, and I never met the Maharishi in person, but I saw videos and the first videos I saw were recorded back in early 60s where he was fairly young and he had a certain energy, a certain radiation of energy.
And then I was on this teacher training course in Switzerland in the late 70s. And we saw a recent video with him. And when I saw this video, what came to me was: “Oh, he has got no light left because he looked, his aura was like gray.” I mean, I am not saying I saw it physically, but I just sensed there was no output and no energy there. This really troubled me. I mean, I basically left TM at that moment, even though it took me some time, but it really troubled me. And the reason why it troubled me was that I thought: “Oh, was I wrong for ever being in TM, following a false guru? Was I fooled?” Because I felt my intuition had told me to go into TM. And now if he was a false guru, my intuition could have been wrong. What can I trust? It actually took me years to work through this. And I came to the conclusion at some point that: “No, my intuition told me to go into TM because I had something to learn from that. It did not tell me that he was a true guru. That was something my outer mind superimposed upon it. And it did not tell me that this was the ultimate spiritual teaching either. I was attracted to that because I needed to learn a lesson.” And it is the same thing with many people I have seen. You are attracted to certain things because there is something you need to learn from it. And if you learn the lesson, you often move on to something else.
Copyright © 2025 Kim Michaels