Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.
Let us begin this key by talking about what I call the guru paradox. As I have explained, once you are trapped in the duality consciousness, your conscious self is effectively inside a mental box of its own making, and it has forgotten that it has an existence outside the box. We might say the conscious self cannot actually see the box, for since it has no contact with anything outside the box, it has no comeasurement to help it see that it is in a box. If you go back a thousand years, you will see that there were several cultures that lived in isolation from each other. Each culture thought theirs was the only possible culture, and since they had no contact with other cultures, they had no comeasurement to see that it was possible to live in a very different culture.
As I have said, the problem is that the conscious self has become fixated on a localized perspective of the world and has forgotten that it is out of the universal mind. It has forgotten that it has the ability to connect to the overall perspective while being focused in a particular point—thus it has become trapped in the localized view. In order to help lifestreams escape this trap, we of the Ascended Host send teachers to Earth to show people that there is something outside the mental box created by individuals or an entire culture. So the very foundation for spiritual growth is that you have contact with a teacher, or guru, who is outside your personal mental box. The teacher can give you a sense of comeasurement that empowers you to see that there is indeed something outside the box—and thus your conscious self does not have to remain trapped in the box.
Yet as everything else, your interaction with a guru will very much be influenced by your current state of consciousness. Your separate self will indeed project graven images upon the guru and will then demand that the guru lives up to them. If he or she does not, then the ego will declare that it must be a false guru or deny that the person is qualified to be your guru (making you seem superior). This brings us to a trap that many spiritual seekers have been led into because they could not see the dynamics of their egos.
The ego is based on duality, which means it has a built-in contradiction that the ego cannot escape because it will refuse to see the inconsistency of its approach to life. The conscious self is capable of seeing this contradiction, and it is indeed one of the primary ways in which people grow—they see an inconsistency in their viewpoints and start looking for a higher understanding. Take the story of how I confronted a group of people who were ready to stone a woman caught in adultery. They were blinded by their egos, but when I asked that the person who was without sin should cast the first stone, they saw the inconsistencies in their approach and walked away (John 8:7).
So here is the paradox created by the way in which the ego approaches any guru. The ego is looking for a way to build its sense of superiority, so it wants to find a guru who appears to have some kind of status according to the norms of its society. The ego is seeing only the outer path, so it feels that if it follows a guru who has superior abilities or status, then the guru can do something for it. This is exactly why orthodox Christianity has built me up to be an absolutely unique individual – the only son of God, as if an almighty God could have only one son – who has the power to absolve all sins committed by humankind, past, present and future. The paradox is, of course, that this pacifies you and causes you to look outside yourself for your salvation. In other words, the ego puts you in a situation where you cannot be saved, and thus the ego’s expectations must be shattered before the real you has an opportunity to find the true path to salvation.
Another aspect of this quest for the ultimate guru is that many otherwise sincere spiritual students think they cannot learn from other people. This is especially true of those who have been on the path for a long time and have attained some kind of position in a spiritual organization or in society. Such people often fall into the subtle trap of spiritual pride and think they cannot learn from those who are beneath them in their self-created hierarchy. Yet as I have explained, the only true teacher is the Christ and he/she can appear in many disguises. And this is the reason for Master MORE’s saying that you must heed the guru even when he appears in the form of an ant. In many cases, we test our students by sending them someone who appears in a humble form, so we can see if the student is willing to listen for the truth regardless of the disguise in which it is presented. As I said, inasmuch as you have done it to the least of these my little ones, you have done it unto me. My point being – again – that your concept of the guru can block you from heeding the guru, and thus your graven images of the “ultimate guru” must be shattered before you can truly step onto the path to Christhood. The problem is how the conscious self reacts when the ego’s expectations are shattered.
Do you see the paradox? A false guru will use the ego’s expectations to bind you more firmly to the guru, meaning that a false guru will not threaten but confirm your ego’s expectations and sense of superiority. Yet a true guru has the goal of setting the conscious self free, so a true guru must of necessity shatter your ego’s expectations and sense of superiority. And in so doing, the true guru must run the risk that if the conscious self cannot free itself from identification with the ego, it will believe the ego’s reasoning that the true guru must be a false or incompetent guru because he or she does not live up to the ego’s dualistic expectations. Once again, a catch-22 that can be broken only by the conscious self overcoming its ignorance.
What is the real problem with building up the guru as an idol? An idol is a mental image that the ego creates and then elevates to the status of infallibility, which means it becomes a graven image because you never question it. One problem with this is that no human being can possibly live up to the ego’s desire for perfection, so any guru on Earth will eventually fail to live up to your ego-based expectations. This often causes people to become either angry with the guru or discouraged about the spiritual path, which is exactly what the false teachers want. Yet how can you become angry because a guru did not live up to your expectations? Only because you refuse to take responsibility for yourself! Thus, you feel you cannot secure your salvation on your own power, and you then project the image that the guru will do it for you. When that illusion is shattered, you feel you have been cheated, which only blocks you from taking responsibility. It is much the same with discouragement—you have given away your power over your own growth and believe in the illusion that the guru will do it for you. When this expectation is shattered, you feel discouraged and give up on the path.
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Another problem is that no true guru can possibly live up to the ego-based dualistic illusions, so such expectations often block people from following a true guru and steer them onto the outer path offered by the false gurus—of which there are many. My point being that idolatry is very much a spiritual poison that must be overcome. An idol actually has the effect of standing between you and the true God, between you and the freedom that can be found only in oneness. Thus, when you have allowed your ego to set up an idol, the idol must be broken down before the conscious self can be free. In many cases, people’s egos actually break down their idols, for the ego is dualistic, so it is easy for it to switch from seeing nothing wrong with a person to seeing everything wrong with that person. This is the basis for the love-hate relationship that is readily observed by any student of psychology.
The fact is that only when you stop idolizing the guru, can you develop a true relationship with the guru. Which means you do not expect the guru to elevate the separate self but to help the real you transcend the separate self. The ego will always see the guru as superior as long as its expectations are intact. When they are shattered, the ego will dethrone the guru and see it as a false guru, projecting all kinds of negative images upon the guru—images that reflect the ego’s internal division rather than an external reality. So the ego will always have a superiority-inferiority interaction with the guru. A “true” guru will always be seen as superior, whereas a “fallen” guru will always be seen as inferior.
The highest relationship with a true guru is one of equals, or rather a relationship where value judgments – that create the superiority-inferiority dynamic – have fallen away. The core of my Being is the conscious self, which is an extension of the Creator’s Being. The core of your Being is the conscious self, which is also an extension of the Creator. The Creator is Infinite, thus it is meaningless to compare the value or status of one extension of the infinite to another extension of the Infinite. You and I are both extensions of the same God, which means it has no meaning for one to be superior to the other.
I have no desire to be seen as superior by you, for as long as you see me as superior, you will always see a distance, a space, between yourself and me. Can you see why this is so? Superiority can exist only when there is separation, for only then can there be a comparison between two separated entities. When there is oneness, no comparison is possible and thus inferiority and superiority are irrelevant.
I am a true spiritual teacher, which means I teach the path of oneness. You can follow my teaching only by coming into oneness with me, and you cannot do that as long as your view of me is filtered through the inferiority-superiority glasses of the ego. As I said when I won my Christhood, “I and my Father are one.” Yet as a teacher I long to say, “I and my student – you – are one.” Which requires you to come to the point where you can say, “I and my Father – my guru – are one!”
Take note of a subtle point. The ego can twist anything through the duality consciousness. Thus, when I say we are equals, that too can be misused by people’s egos by making them think that if we are equals, they don’t need to listen to me. The reality is that you and I are equals in terms of our intrinsic value. Yet you have not fully realized and accepted your potential, whereas I have. Thus, I serve as the teacher, meaning that you need to respect that I have insights that are beyond your mental box, and thus you need me in order to see beyond the ego. You need to see me as having higher authority than your ego and the false teachers of this world—so that you will listen to me even when they tell you the opposite.
We might also say that your ego is not an equal with me—although it very much thinks it is, even that it is superior to me. Thus, your conscious self needs to see that I do indeed have a greater insight than the ego and the false teachers, which is why you need to pay attention when I tell you something that is beyond what your ego wants you to hear. We might also say that the reason why there is an advantage to you in coming into oneness with me is that I have a less localized perspective, and this is the only way for you to transcend your current perspective. Do you see the point? Separation is based on division, so the only way to overcome it is to come into oneness with a Being who is beyond duality. You cannot overcome duality while retaining a sense of identity as a separate being.
Obviously, coming into oneness with the teacher means you have to stop seeing me as a teacher, for the student-teacher relationship implies distance between student and teacher.
NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book: Master Keys to Personal Christhoood.
Copyright © 2008 Kim Michaels