Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

In order to give you a gentle on-ramp, let me address the point of how the ego can always project that it is right. I originally described this as an ego game that sprang from the security games. On the individual level it truly is an ego game. Yet the fallen beings have taken this game and have used it to define and justify the ego dramas, which is why it is included in this book.

Myriad spiritual seekers – as well as religious and non-religious people – have spent lifetimes on the quest of proving their egos right. They have been happily following the false path – what I called the broad way that leads to destruction – instead of finding the true path to spiritual freedom.

When you take an honest look at the world, you will notice that many people are caught in the game of proving that some thought system is the only right one and that all others are false. This game takes on many disguises, and it can indeed keep people occupied for lifetimes. Yet eventually, the real you will tire of this game and begin to wonder if there isn’t something beyond the thought systems found in this world, some form of ultimate truth, ultimate reality.

At that point, you are facing the essential choice that can take you onto the path of Christhood. That choice is whether you are willing to find a higher reality or whether you will simply accept a more sophisticated version of the ego game to establish the ultimate belief system. Most people, of course, do not understand the choice they are facing. My purpose for this discourse is to clarify the choice for those who are willing to understand the deeper reality behind my statement:

22 Ye worship ye know not what: …
23 But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.
24 God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. (John, Chapter 4)

How separation leads to idol worship

Let me ask you to conduct a simple thought experiment. When I say the word “apples,” take note of what happens in your mind. Immediately, a mental image comes up, a mental image of what apples mean to you. Now imagine that I tell you that a new fruit has been discovered on a remote island. I may describe it, and based on that description, you will formulate a mental image. The difference is that you have had a direct experience of apples so your mental image of apples is at least somewhat tied to reality (taking into account that the physical senses cannot be entirely trusted). On the other hand, your mental image of the unknown fruit is not tied to reality since you have not experienced it.

This shows the fundamental problem with the ego’s perception of God. The ego is born from your separation from your source, and thus the ego can never have a direct experience of God. The ego will for its entire existence be basing its concept of God on a mental image that it can never compare to reality. The ego will always seek to defend its mental image of God, which means it must prevent the Conscious You from actually experiencing God. The difference being, of course, that because the Conscious You is an extension of the Creator’s Being, the Conscious You can actually have an experience of God.

“Worshiping God in Spirit and in truth” means that you make use of the Conscious You’s ability to have a direct experience of God’s Being. People who are not willing to make use of this God-given ability – the key of knowledge – will be worshiping idols, and their entire approach to religion is based on a graven image of God. That is why you see so many religious people who insist that their religion is the only true belief system. Of course, you also see people who are doing the exact same thing with a political belief system or even the belief system called scientific materialism.

Understanding the origin of duality

Let us now move on to consider what should seem like a peculiar fact, namely why so many people can be absolutely convinced that their belief system is the only true one when there are so many conflicting belief systems that they cannot all be true. This should make people wonder whether perhaps all of them are out of touch with ultimate reality.

Let me make an absolute statement. Any belief system that has ever existed or that could ever exist on earth will give an incomplete description of God. Why is this so? Because the Creator is beyond its creation, is beyond the totality of the material universe. No belief system could ever give an accurate or complete description of God. It is like trying to describe the sun by looking only at the moon.

The subtle difference is that because the ego is separated from God, it cannot have a direct experience of God’s Being. The ego thinks God can be reduced to a description, to a mental image—which then inevitably becomes a graven image. The Conscious You can indeed have a direct experience of God’s Being, and when you have this experience, you will know that God could never be described by any belief system. God can only be experienced, and as soon as you try to put words on the experience, you degrade it.

To the ego, God is not a real, Living Presence. God is a concept, a mental image. The Conscious You can experience God as a Living Being that is right here whereas the ego can only see God as a remote, conceptual being. As I said with my analogy of apples and the unknown fruit, the ego can never compare its mental image of God to reality, meaning it can never overcome its idol worship. It is up to the Conscious You to extricate itself from your ego’s graven images of God. In order to do that, you need to understand how the ego expresses its insatiable desire for security in creating an infallible belief system.

The concept I will give you next might be difficult for you to grasp—if you have not yet had a direct experience of God’s Being. It is still valuable for you to have this concept in your mind. It is actually not entirely correct to say that the Conscious You can have an experience of God’s Being. The reason is that using the word “experience” often makes people think of experiences they have in their normal state of awareness. For example, you may go to the beach and watch a beautiful sunset, but you are aware that you are a separate observer watching the scenery from a distance.

This “observing from a distance” is precisely how the ego thinks of God and thinks of the concept of experiencing God—and everything else for that matter. It thinks you have to experience God as the remote being in the sky. In reality, you will never experience God as long as you look for him outside yourself, which is why I told you that the kingdom of God is within you.

In order to experience God’s Being, you have to be willing to stop seeing yourself as a separate being – at least for a moment – and instead come to experience your oneness with God. You can experience God only through what some of my early followers called “gnosis,” which means a oneness between the knower and the known. The normal separation between the object and the observer is set aside and the observer becomes one with the object being observed. As a side note, this is possible because everything has consciousness. The Conscious You can experience oneness with the consciousness of any object, even a rock.

The ego can never experience Gnosis, for if it did, it would instantly cease to exist. Gnosis is oneness, and in oneness there is no room for separation, meaning that there is no room for opposing viewpoints. Because the ego was born from separation, its world view does indeed have room for opposing polarities. The ego can never escape the form of thinking that incorporates at least two polarities. Why is that so?

I have said that in God’s reality there is only oneness. How can you separate yourself from oneness? You can do so only by creating a distance, which can be done only when there are two opposing polarities that are seen as being separated by space—for in oneness there is no space for distance. Only when there is distance, is there room for the illusion that you are separated from oneness and can have an existence outside of oneness, even being able to hide something from God, as Adam and Eve supposedly hid from God in the Garden.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Freedom from Ego Dramas.