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Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels, May 2, 2015.

I am the Ascended Master Mother Mary. In this discourse I will talk about another of the spiritual causes of war. This time I will talk about the quest for raw power. Although I have mentioned some of the aspects of the quest for power in my previous discourses, I want to give you more depth and detail.

When you look at history, you will see that there have been empires, there have been certain leaders, that have been driven by this quest to extend their power. Sometimes, it has been mixed with a quest for material gain. Other times, it has been mixed with the desire to gain territory, to conquer territory. In some cases, it has been mixed with the clever use of ideas, such as the desire to spread a certain religion or a certain political ideology. It has even been clothed in the seemingly benign quest for extending civilization.

Look at some of the leaders who have been driven by this desire for raw power, this quest to extend their power. You quickly see that even though they may seem to have great power over men or power to build empires, they are actually not free in themselves.

The spiritual realm and the material world

There is something you need to understand about what it means to be a human being in embodiment on earth. Earth is a quite dense planet. With this, I mean that the energies on earth are quite dense compared to the energies in the spiritual realm.

If you are a being who has some inner memory, some inner sense of the reality of the spiritual realm, then you will know that the energies on earth are quite dense. You will know and feel that everything you do in the material world is limited, that there is an opposition, that there is a resistance. It is difficult on a planet as dense as earth to have a free flow of creative energies because the collective consciousness opposes transcendence, which is the essence of creativity.

Where this is important is in understanding how the contrast between the freedom of the spiritual realm and the restrictions of the material realm can give rise to various desires. You may be mature enough to realize that your inner longing for something more is really a longing for the spiritual realm. You then direct your attention towards raising your consciousness and attuning it to the spiritual realm and also winning your ascension so you do not have to re-embody in the dense material world. When you do this, you will have a desire that cannot be fulfilled in the material realm because it will not be fulfilled until you exit the material realm permanently through the ascension. Nevertheless, it is not a longing that will be obsessive-compulsive. It will not swallow up your life. It will not prevent you from engaging in active life on earth or seeking the fulfillment of the desires you have concerning life on earth.

How longing for freedom can cause rebellion

There is an old tendency to say that your physical body and its desires are an enemy of your spiritual growth. This we of the ascended masters do not teach. What we do teach is the healthy balance where you do not allow the desires related to the material realm to run your life, to take over your life, to become insatiable desires. When you do have the inner memory that the goal of life is to ascend, then you can accomplish this fairly easily.

If you do not quite have the maturity to know that there is a spiritual quest, then it is possible that your inner knowing that there is something more than the earth can give you a desire for freedom, a desire to rebel against the restrictions you feel on earth. This is what you see in some revolutionaries, even in many of the young people who were part of what they call the sixties, the youth movement, the youth rebellion against authority.

These people had such a quest for freedom, but because they did not quite understand how to direct it towards raising their consciousness, they became ensnared by the desire to rebel against authority. They thought it was the outer authority, such as the institutions of society, that were restricting them. They did not understand that it was actually the denseness of the energies in the material realm that were the greatest restriction.

How extreme desires give rise to addictions

If you are at an even lower level of consciousness, you may still have some inner memory of the spiritual realm. This gives you a quest for infinity, for something beyond the finite world. Because you do not understand that this is a spiritual quest (a spiritual path, a raising of your consciousness) you direct it towards finding some ultimate fulfillment of the desires that relate to the material realm.

You will see many people in today’s world who are pursuing such an extreme fulfillment of desires. Look at how many people are allowing their lives to be swallowed up by the quest for material goods, material possessions. Look how many people are completely focused on making money, even to the point of making more money than they could personally spend for the rest of their lifetime. Look at how many people are pursuing the quest for sex, for sexual conquest. So many other of these desires can be taken to the extreme, and any time you take any desire related to the finite world and pursue it with the desire to gain something infinite through the fulfillment of a finite desire, then you will have an addiction.

An addiction is when you are seeking a goal that cannot be attained through the means you are using. A drug addict may be seeking some inner experience. During the 1960s, many of the people who could have been forerunners for raising the collective consciousness allowed themselves to be caught up in the drug culture. Their quest for freedom, their quest for spiritual experiences, was replaced by this misguided quest of seeking them through chemical experiences. Even though a chemical reaction in the brain can lead to a state of consciousness that is beyond your normal state of consciousness, this is not spiritual freedom. Spiritual freedom is when you attain a higher state of consciousness without any material means. You attain it through your inner growth in consciousness.

When you are seeking an infinite experience through finite means, you cannot ever reach the goal. You may have an experience that is beyond your normal level of consciousness, but your brain will quickly adapt to the introduction of this chemical substance. Now, it takes more chemical substance to have the same experience again, and this can go on, not indefinitely, but until your entire life is swallowed up in either being affected by these chemicals or longing to have the experience.

You may also pursue an infinite experience through sex, but again it becomes an addiction because you can never quite reach that ultimate experience. You are always chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It is never quite enough, no matter how much sex you have or how intense it is. What I am seeking to point out here is that many people have this desire for something ultimate, something infinite, but when you seek to fulfill it through finite means, you end up in an addiction, whereby I mean your life becomes a self-reinforcing downward spiral that swallows up your attention and energy.

The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Help the Ascended Masters Stop War.