Question: How do the experience of awakening, the realization of one’s true nature and the unity of All, which Eckhart Tolle, Ramana Maharshi and others experienced, relate to the 144 levels of consciousness? What are the reasons for this experience?
Answer from the Ascended Master Jesus Christ through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2022 Ukraine Webinar.
This is a difficult question to give a clear answer to, because there are various definitions out there of what it means to be enlightened. What we have explained is that when you come into embodiment on earth, you go through a process of taking on the various illusions that relate to each of the levels of consciousness from the 144th to the 48th level.
You could say in a simple way, as I just explained in another answer, that the process of spiritual growth is that you escape the illusion that you are a separate localized self and you attain a more spherical awareness of who you are. From this perspective, you could say that attaining enlightenment is rising towards a more and more spherical awareness, where you are not seeing yourself as a separate localized being. And there can come experiences where people have a breakthrough, and they have a direct experience of the connectedness of all life—that everything is connected in consciousness. You can have this not necessarily only at the 144th level. You can have it at lower levels as well – at least for a short period of time.
You could say that there is a process of growth that is linear. You go from the 48th to the 49th step, and from the 96th to the 97th and so on. This is a linear process. You are escaping certain illusions that make you see yourself as a localized, separate being. But we have also explained that the Conscious You is pure awareness. So theoretically, regardless of which level you are at among the 144th levels, the Conscious You has the ability, at any moment, to step outside of your current sense of self and experience a greater reality. You may not necessarily experience the highest reality, but you can step outside and recognize or have an experience of a higher reality. This possibility is always there. Of course, the lower you are on the levels of the 144th steps, the more difficult it is for the Conscious You to pull itself out of this. The higher you go, the easier it is to disengage from your normal sense of self and have this kind of experience.
At the lower levels you can have this experience for a short time and then you go back into your normal state of consciousness and then you have the task of dealing with that experience from that level of consciousness. How do you even process this experience and what do you do with it? That is why you will see that some mystics have had a spherical experience, a universal mystical experience, but they were firmly anchored in the Christian faith, for example. So, they have now come back, and after processing the experience, they have reasoned that the experience validated their Christian beliefs.
Of course, in many cases it did no such thing, but that was the only way that people’s outer minds could deal with the experience. That is why you have the terminology that you have: Christian mystics, Sufi mystics, Hindu mystics and so on. When you are truly universal – when you truly grasp the universality of your spherical experience, you see that it cannot be confined to any belief system on earth, and neither can you.
The reason for having the experience is, of course, that it helps people realize that there is something beyond their present level of consciousness and this can then serve as an inspiration for others if people choose to share their experience. This is essentially how humankind has progressed – that some people had an experience that pointed them beyond the normal level of consciousness in their society, and by sharing the experience and seeking to help other people have similar experiences, there has been this gradual progression, this gradual raising of the collective consciousness. To use one of Lanto’s concepts, where certain things have become obvious to more and more people.
And that is why you have so many democratic nations today, because certain things have become obvious. This is in a sense also an example of how the Conscious You steps outside of its normal state of consciousness and experiences that there is a higher reality, that there are certain rights that people have, and that no authority on earth should violate those rights. This is not an intellectual reasoning even though you can turn it into an intellectual reasoning. But it is an experience, and it is by people having this experience where they see something that is beyond what they could see before, and they experience the reality of it, so that it becomes obvious to them. This is how individual consciousness shifts. But as many people go through this, the collective consciousness shifts as well.
Copyright © 2022 Kim Michaels