Question: I’ve been on a spiritual path for decades and although I know I have made progress in consciousness, sometimes I feel like I’m behind where I could be because I’ve never gone through any road to Damascus experience, which seems to be present in the lives of many spiritual masters. Is this just a “self” coming from a collective programming related to illusory and unreasonable spiritual expectations, like the masters appearing in front of us at any moment?
Answer from the Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2021 Webinar – Ending the Era of Ideology.
It is very individual what you will encounter on your spiritual path. And it is very, very important that you do not apply a value judgment to this. That you do not create some kind of criteria relative and in a sense to elicit criteria that, if you are an advanced spiritual student you are supposed to have certain experiences.
You have an entire culture in the New Age, spiritual and even in many religious organizations that you are supposed to have these dramatic or peak experiences. You have an entire group of people in the New Age field who are trapped in this endless quest for peak experiences.
Now, when you look at this concept of a peak experience, you realize that the very definition of it is that you have an experience and there is nothing higher. But some people go into not only wanting to repeat the peak experience, but they want to have an even higher peak experience. So they start creating rankings for peak experiences. Some are more peak than others. And this, of course, is counterproductive to spiritual growth.
It gets you into a competitive mindset that actually cannot bring your spiritual growth because spiritual growth is about what? It is about letting go of the ego, not reinforcing it. And the ego loves to use a spiritual experience to say that: “You must be a highly advanced spiritual person because you had these experiences.”
You have to be very careful about that. You have to realize something very, very simple here. The purpose of walking a spiritual path is not to have dramatic or peak experiences. It is to free you from certain beliefs and reactionary patterns, “separate selves” if you will, in your four lower bodies.
So what does it take for you individually to be free? For some people, it may take a certain experience and that is why they have a certain experience. But many people are able to walk a steady, slow, progressive path where they gradually let go of their illusions. And they do not need the dramatic experiences.
You also need to recognize that there have been people who have had these dramatic conversion experiences like the road to Damascus. You could say, was this really a spiritual experience that Paul was having? Or was it a conversion experience where he suddenly saw how wrong he had been in his previous approach—how counterproductive it was?
You can ask yourself: “Why did Paul have to have that experience?” Well, if you look at the actual situation you will see that he had persecuted Christians, he had opposed the Christian religion. But it was part of Paul’s divine plan that he should become a Christian evangelist. He had resisted what was part of his divine plan. And the resistance became more and more intense until he suddenly could not keep it up anymore. And then something snapped, he let go of the resistance. And this gave him a very large contrast between the resistance he had before and the freedom from the resistance. And he then experienced that in a certain way.
You will see here, that what gave the drama of the experience was the contrast between him resisting and letting go of the resistance. It was the intensity of the resistance that created the contrast. Well, many of you do not have that kind of resistance towards spiritual growth and that is why you grow at a more steady pace. You do not have the contrast.
You also have to recognize that at the beginning stages of the path, it is not uncommon that people can have a peak experience, a dramatic experience because there is still a contrast between their previous state of consciousness and the higher state of consciousness that they are beginning to go to. But as you move higher on the path, as you move towards the 144th level of consciousness and actually beyond the 96th, you no longer have that sense of contrast because now you have already reached a higher level of consciousness. It is just a matter of gradations. So where is the contrast?
At the 48th level of consciousness, overcoming the resistance and experiencing, glimpsing the 49th level of consciousness can feel like a great contrast. But from the 102nd to the 103rd, it is a lesser contrast, not nearly as dramatic. There is also the effect that at lower levels of consciousness, some people need to have an undeniable experience that their outer minds cannot deny, cannot gloss over, cannot explain away. It is necessary for these people.
But people who are more mature on a spiritual path do not need those kinds of experiences. It is actually common that as you move higher, there is less and less of a contrast. There are less and less drama lessons, a sense that you are having a peak experience. You actually come to a point where you begin to have that state of consciousness that I called the “Kingdom of God” and that the Buddha called bliss, where you are in such a balanced, neutral state of mind that you do not have those big contrasts anymore.
Copyright © 2021 Kim Michaels