Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

In this and the next keys we will tackle the spiritual poison of ignorance. The Buddha who is the antidote for this poison is named Vairochana and his wisdom is the All-pervading Wisdom. His mantra is:

OM VAIROCHANA OM

Use it as you study the following teachings.

Ignorance might seem to be the first hurdle you have to overcome before you can begin walking the spiritual path. After all, when you look at humanity, you see that most people are ignorant of the spiritual path. They either deny the existence of God or they follow – blindly – a mainstream religion that promises the outer path to salvation instead of the true inner path. So why didn’t I start out by talking about the poison of ignorance? Well, the reason is that there are layers of ignorance. Those who are open to this course are not new to the spiritual path, so they have usually overcome the outer or innocent ignorance that affects most people on this planet. We can now define two layers of ignorance:

Innocent ignorance is when you simply don’t know. You are probably innocently ignorant of the latest discoveries of quantum physics, for example.
Sophisticated ignorance is when you actually know something in the higher part of your being, but your conscious mind refuses to recognize it or to make the choices that follow from your knowledge. In a sense we can say that you do know better, but you refuse to do better. A practical example is that all people know smoking is dangerous to your health but some people continue to smoke anyway.

Why do I still call this ignorance? Because the conscious self really would do better if it truly knew better—if it consciously saw how it is refusing to acknowledge what it knows and how this is hurting itself. The problem is that the conscious self has come to believe in one or several of the dualistic illusions, and thus the conscious self cannot “see” that it actually knows better. So we might say that sophisticated ignorance is when you actually know better but you are not consciously acknowledging this. You have not actually seen the beam in your own eye, or you have not seen it for what it is.

You now see why I have started out by talking about the more obvious spiritual poisons, saving the more subtle poison of sophisticated ignorance until you had cleared away some of the energies that are covering over the deeper ignorance. Thus, we now have the foundation – provided you have actually done the exercises in the previous keys – for tackling sophisticated ignorance.

***

The problem with sophisticated ignorance is not that it causes people to know nothing. The problem is that it causes people to think that whatever they know – be it much or little – is all they need to know or all there is to know. Thus, they are not open to expanding or transcending their mental boxes, which means they have shut themselves off from the spiritual teachers of humankind. They think they know so much that they can safely reject the Living Christ, when he or she comes to free them from their mental prisons. This ignorance can, however, take two distinct forms, meaning that it leads to two distinct forms of thinking. We will tackle them in this and the next key, and I want you to begin by reading an excerpt from my website. You might have read this before, but I ask you to study it again with the deeper understanding you have as a result of following this course. You are bound to see deeper layers of understanding.

Why the ego wants you to think the world is black and white

The most obvious example of the ego’s relativistic, dualistic way of thinking is what I prefer to call black-and-white thinking. This plot by the ego makes blatant use of the basic duality built into the mind of anti-christ. It defines two opposites that are opposites in every way, meaning that there is no overlap or potential for compromise. There is no gray zone because the opposites cannot coexist but must cancel out each other—or so it seems. One opposite is defined as being absolutely good and the other is defined as being absolutely evil, thus setting up an inevitable, to-the-death struggle between them.

The ego makes people believe that the only way for them to please God and be saved is to take the side of good and to fight against evil. An extreme outcome of this scenario is the definition of two religions or ideologies that both claim to be the only true one, making their respective followers believe it is their duty to fight the other. The ultimate triumph of the prince of this world is to get two groups of religious people to kill each other in the name of the same God, as for example in the Crusades.

The result of this ego-manipulation is that people adopt a very simplistic view of the world. Their religion is completely true and all others are completely false. There is no room for any nuances in between, which means that people almost inevitably become extremists and fanatics. This is a very easy approach to life because it really does not require people to think for themselves. They simply accept the definitions created by the leaders of their society without making any personal attempts to discern whether their leaders are right according to the Christ standard. They believe these leaders are absolutely right and that God himself would agree with them.

The consequence of this approach to life is that once people have accepted that a particular belief system is absolutely good, they will never question it. Thus, they will blindly follow what the leaders of their religion have defined as absolutely right, and this has led to some of the worst atrocities in history. I described this scenario as follows:

Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. (Matthew 15:14)

Yet instead of leaving the blind leaders alone, people follow them uncritically. They never question that the black-and-white definition of life might not be in alignment with God’s truth. As a result, many people have spent one or more lifetimes engaging all of their energy and attention in this dualistic struggle between two relative opposites. Such people have defined an enemy or scapegoat and they believe they must do God’s work by destroying the enemy.

As long as people are trapped in this extreme form of black-and-white thinking, they are absolutely convinced that they are working for good and will be saved. Yet the stark reality is that everything they do to fight the self-defined enemy only serves to trap them more firmly in the dualistic state of consciousness. This obviously prevents them from putting on the wedding garment of the Christ consciousness, that is the only way to enter Heaven.

It can be extremely difficult for extremists to admit that they are wrong. They cannot admit that what they have seen as a work for God has not promoted God’s cause but has only served to reinforce the dualistic struggle created by the forces of anti-christ. Such people tend to become very defensive and hostile toward anyone who questions the validity of their approach. This is why the scribes and the Pharisees wanted me dead and why some people in today’s world become fanatical in defending their “truth.”

The sad fact is that such people are unapproachable for a spiritual teacher. You see this illustrated in how the scribes and Pharisees rejected my attempts to show them the higher Way of Christ. They literally used their black-and-white viewpoints to justify rejecting the Living Christ, meaning that they had put their own graven image before the Living God. They used a relative image to justify not reaching for the direct experience of God’s absolute reality—the experience I came to offer to all who were willing to lose their mortal sense of identity for my sake.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book: Master Keys to Personal Christhoood.