Question: This is a question for Mother Mary. Can you relate and expand upon the following? In the Summit Lighthouse, we had the teachings on the 14 Stations of the Cross, as well as the 15th Rosary, which were your teachings on the mystery of surrender. Thus, moving through the 14 stations, relate to more recent teachings on climbing from the 48th level to the 96th level of consciousness. And then the 15th Rosary to passing beyond the 96th level. And does this surrender of one’s Christ’s attainment in service to the all extend all the way to the 144th level? Can you elaborate on this process in particular to maintain one’s personal sense of self within one’s unique self, within the greater self on this planet?
Answer from the Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2025 USA Conference.
In the Summit Lighthouse, we were more focused on giving people a bridge between the Catholic Church, for example, and the teachings of the ascended masters. We used imagery that they were familiar with, not just from the Catholic tradition, but other traditions as well. As in, for example, the messenger’s teachings on Kabbalah. We were trying to create a bridge for people to show some similarities between the path that we teach, the path to Christhood, based on the ascended master perspective, and then previous teachings, other teachings. And that is why I used this image of the 14 stations. And you will obviously see that the 14 stations of the cross are focused on Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. They are focused on a lot of suffering. And you will see how this has been used by Catholics to feel that even though their lives were suffering, because Christ also suffered, they can relate to him. They can relate to the suffering of Christ.
And these rosaries based on the 14 stations were actually meant to help people transcend the suffering and lock into the path of Christhood, which of course is not, as we teach this from the ascended level, the path of Christhood is not about escaping suffering. It is about locking into the greater joy of the Christ consciousness, where you are free from these earthly concerns, free from the suffering. You can relate this to climbing from the 48th to the 96th level. But you cannot do it in an exactly linear way. In other words, do not try to divide the 48 levels with 14 and say that these levels relate to the first station of the cross and so forth. That is being too linear about it. You can say there is some comparison, but it depends on what background people come from, because obviously the process from the 48th to the 96th level is independent of any cultural or religious background. It is just simply illusions that are not particularly Catholic or Jewish or Muslim or whatever.
In terms of surrender, you do not have to be at or close to the 96th level to use the surrender rosary. This messenger actually used it quite a bit in the mid-1990s, where he had not reached the 96th level. But you can, of course, use it because you can say, what is it that allows you to rise from one level to the next? You have to see the illusion, see the self. You are, as we say now, letting it die, but you could just as well say you are surrendering it, you are letting it go, so on each step of the path, there is a surrender of the self that kept you at that level or that allowed you to go down to that level. Surrender is always an essential aspect of the path.
Now, in terms of maintaining a sense of self, well, both in the surrender rosary and what we teach today, the surrender of self is part of walking the path because, as we explained it today, on each level of the path, you have a certain sense of self that keeps you at that level or took you down to that level, keeps you there. And it is only when you surrender that sense of self and are, in a sense, reborn into a higher sense of self that you are free from that level.
But we understand, and I see this in many people, that there can be a certain confusion where you are trying to sort of find a correspondence between the levels, the 144 levels, and your everyday life. There can be a confusion where you can think that if you surrender the sense of self you have right now, can you function in your daily life? And the reality is that the answer is a yes and no because you can function in daily life, but you will not function exactly the same way you have been doing up until the point where you surrender a certain self. It depends on what kind of sense we are talking about. But as you move towards the 96th level, you are shifting your priorities, where there comes that point at the 96th level where you are basically deciding, it is not about me as an independent self. We have said that in order to climb from the 48th to the 96th, you are building a spiritual self that takes you beyond the downward pull of the mass consciousness. And this is a necessary vehicle to take you beyond that. But this is still an independent self.
It is also in a way a separate self because you are separating yourself from the mass consciousness. It is not a separate self in the sense that it is based on duality. It is not based on the duality consciousness, but it is based on seeing yourself as independent from the mass consciousness. But in order to pass the 96th level, you have to surrender that self. And that self, seeing yourself as a spiritual being, will often also relate to your everyday practical life. What you do and what you do not do, what you eat and what you do not eat, how you dress, what kind of job you want or career you want, all relating to this. And it is not that you necessarily have to give it all up in order to pass the initiations at the 96th level, but you have to be willing to give it up. We can say, let’s say you have a successful career in some kind of business. It does not mean that when you come to the 96th level, you necessarily have to give that up. But you have to give up the sense of self you have had so far, because at the 96th level, you have to give up that sense of identity as being a separate self.
And even though I say that the spiritual self you build is not necessarily a dualistic self, it can still have a sense of superiority. Where you see yourself as superior because you have done all these spiritual activities that other people have not done. And that has to be given up, because if you cannot give that up, you will use your attainment and use the spiritual teaching to continue to reinforce that self. And this can then take you down again to a bigger and greater and greater focus on self. In order to pass the 96th level, you have to give up the focus on self. It does not mean, as I said, you have to necessarily give up your outer career, but you have to give up being identified with it. That instead of seeing your career as a way to raise yourself up in comparison to others or validate yourself, you see your career as a way to serve the whole, to serve other people. You can have a doctor, for example, who is a famous surgeon, and he is driven by his ego to be able to do what no other surgeon can do. But if you pass the initiations on the 96th level, this fades away. This must be given up. And now you are just focused on helping people, using your skills to help them, not to glorify yourself.
Now, when you go higher on the path beyond the 96th level, you go through a phase where it is a little more difficult to balance your everyday practical life with the new sense of self you have risen to. But after some time, you find your bearings, and you are still able to function in your normal life, take care of your physical body, take care of your family, have an income, and so forth. But you are just less and less identified with it, less and less attached to it. Of course, as long as you are in a physical body, you need to eat, you need to have a roof over your head. And in today’s world, that means you need to do certain things to have that. But you can fulfill these outer tasks without being identified with them. And as you grow towards the 144th level, you become less and less attached to it, which also means that you become more of an open door so that the light can stream through you and manifest your outer needs, take care of your outer needs.
But it also means that you shift, you do not have a goal. You cannot, for example, go beyond the 96th level and be focused on making money and becoming a billionaire. You instead shift into a state of mind where you need to have the basic needs fulfilled, but how that is happening, you are not attached to. And you certainly give up the idea that you should have a million dollars in the bank so you can always feel secure. You are willing to flow with it and see how it manifests. I know this is not a mechanical path. And perhaps it is important to make that distinction that between the 48th and the 96th level, there is some mechanical aspect to the path. You gave the invocations to consume the misqualified energy, you look for the self, you overcome the illusion. But as you go beyond the 96th level, the path is no longer as linear or as mechanical. And that is where surrender becomes even more important. And you might say, what are you actually doing as you are approaching the 144th level? What happens to your sense of self?
Well, what happens is that the Conscious You becomes more aware that it is pure awareness, neutral awareness, that it is not the structures and the four lower bodies. But you also become more aware of the individuality of your I AM Presence. This means you can surrender the sense of identity relating to this world and you acquire a new sense of identity based on the individuality of the Presence. Because it just starts shining through you more. And you become willing to let go of your earthly sense of identity in order to experience the identity of the Presence more fully. You could say it in different ways. You can say that the Conscious You withdraws its sense of identity from the four lower bodies and places its sense of identity more and more on the I AM Presence. You can express it in different ways. In a sense, you could say that when you reach the 144th level, your sense of self relating to earth has been surrendered, given up. But you can still function in a physical body and you can still take care of your needs and you can still do whatever is part of your Divine plan that you do for others or serve the ascended masters.
We can say that as you approach the 96th level, as you go a little bit beyond it, there can be that, we might say, confusion where you feel a certain tension between the outer practical aspects of life and your new sense of identity. But as you go a little bit higher, that gradually fades away and you just find a new sense of self where there is not any contradictions, there is not any tension. You are, in a sense, you could say, from the 48th to the 96th level, you are sort of withdrawing from your identification with the world, becoming less and less attached to the outer things. That is how you pull yourself above the mass consciousness because the mass consciousness is obviously completely identified with the world. For a time, it is like you have one foot in each camp and you are being pulled apart a little bit. But as you go beyond the 96th level and give up that focus on self, you very quickly find a state of balance that resolves that tension that you see in many spiritual people throughout the ages, the tension between having to maintain a physical body and wanting to pursue spiritual goals.
It is as if there is no contradiction anymore. You just take care of the body because you see it as a vehicle for the expression, the fulfillment of your Divine plan, the expression of your I AM Presence. And you just take care of it without putting too much attention on it. And after some time, you are just focused on what you can do for the rest of the time you have in the physical body. What can you bring forth? What can you change? How can you serve the whole? And that is, in a sense, a surrender. What I am saying is there comes a point where you have surrendered your identification with the world, with the outer selves. But you are still in the world, but you are not of the world. Now you are more focused on letting the individuality of your I AM Presence shine through you because you have given up enough of the outer self that there is room for the Presence to shine. And it is a beautiful process where you just find more and more peace, more and more joy. And the tension, it is not like one big thing that suddenly resolves the tension, it just gradually fades away.
Copyright © 2025 Kim Michaels