Ascended Master Padmasambhava through Kim Michaels, March 8, 2026. This dictation was given at the conference in Vilnius, Lithuania: Making a Difference in a Turbulent World.
I AM the Ascended Master Padmasambhava. I have been deliberating—if you can say that an ascended master deliberates—what I could possibly add to what has already been given, or rather, what I could add without overwhelming you completely.
Via Dolorosa
What I will begin with is referring to the legends of how I brought Buddhism to Tibet and I supposedly called a group of Tertöns, my students, who would in a future time be treasure hunters and find the treasures that I had hidden. And many people, especially in Tibet, have taken this quite literally and think that I, in some kind of hidden mountain cave, hid either various objects or books with teachings, advanced teachings that they could find. And some people have even gone in search of such caves, which of course is a very big task in Tibet, where there is no shortage of mountains, always difficult to climb, but some people have felt that the more difficult they are to climb, the better the chance that there is a hidden cave.
And this is something that it is important to ponder if you want to make a difference in a turbulent world. Because there is a certain amount of spiritual students, there is in fact collective beasts or rather several created, that want to make it seem like the spiritual path should be hard. You have in Christianity the Via Dolorosa. You have in Hinduism various teachings about this long, arduous, difficult path. And there are some people who seriously believe that the more difficult, the more hard, the more disciplined they are on their path, the better off they will be in heaven, however they conceptualize it. There are even some ascended master students that feel that the more difficulties you encounter while you are in embodiment, the more spiritual attainment you build and therefore, you will be in a higher rank of ascended master after you ascend.
The spiritual path as an epic drama
But if you take the teachings we have given, you can say that you cannot do anything on earth that will give you a higher position in the ascended realm because in order to ascend, you have to let go of everything on earth. What you are actually doing is you are taking what you see down here, what you see in the physical realm, what you see in the spiritual teaching, what you see in your own mind, and you are creating a mental image of what it means to be an ascended master. And you are then projecting that and thinking that reality will live up to your image but as we have explained now so many times, nothing in the ascended realm will live up to any image, for the Christ will never live up to an image created on earth. How could it free you from the illusions if it conformed to and validated the illusions?
When you see that the spiritual path should be hard and difficult, it is really a reflection of what we have called the epic mindset where you have created a drama.
You have turned the spiritual path into a drama and you think that the more heroic your path is of overcoming difficulties, slaying the dweller, slaying the dark forces, the more of a heroic welcome you will receive in the ascended realm. And part of your motivation then is not just to ascend, but to have some kind of superior reception in the ascended realm because again you think that your vision is shared by the ascended masters. And that is why you have in some previous dispensations seen this epic mindset comparing an organization to Camelot, the Knights of the Round Table, and this heroic quest for the Holy Grail. But how do you find the Holy Grail? By slaying dragons that you encounter on your path? By rescuing damsels in distress? Or by finding hidden treasures? Nay, the Holy Grail is within you, for the Holy Grail is the Christ consciousness.
Designing a new sphere
The hidden treasures that I talked about so many years ago is the Christ consciousness and you find that in the kingdom that is, we might have mentioned a few times, within you. As long as you are looking outside, be it in a cave or somewhere else, you will never find it. You cannot find it. You cannot find something if you are looking where it is not to be found. Does that mean I am saying that the concept of the path is worthless as some of these new Neo-Advaita, non-duality teachers are saying? That is not what I am saying. The path has value, but not for the reason many people think.
Let me give you a different perspective on this idea of being a treasure hunter looking for hidden treasures. First you need to recognize here that the real treasures you are looking for is not something I left behind. It is an entirely different kind of treasure. Let me reach back to one of the questions answered earlier. Is there going to be another sphere after this one? And the answer is yes, there is going to be an eighth sphere. Is it going to be designed by the ascended masters from the sixth and the seventh sphere? Yes, that is correct. Even some of you when you ascend will choose to be part of designing that sphere and we have said that the next sphere will be denser than this one. But of course, us who have experienced life in this dense sphere, the seventh sphere, we will take our experiences and use them as a foundation for designing the eighth in such a way that even though it is more dense, people can still find the path and make their ascension.
The cosmic archive of duality
But how are we going to do this? Well, we have talked about various reasons why avatars choose to come to an unnatural planet. We have talked about your vision. You had a certain motivation, you wanted to achieve something. But there is a deeper explanation for this, which we were not aware of when we left those natural planets to embody on an unnatural planet. But the deeper reason is to find treasures that can only be found on an unnatural planet. Why is this so? What is it that can only be found on an unnatural planet, not on a natural planet? Well, it is the kind of experiences you can only have on an unnatural planet, experiences of duality.
You can say that in the spiritual realm, in the sixth sphere, there is a structure similar to a building but more complex. Nevertheless, you can visualize it, if you desire, as a building. It is an archive building. It does not store written records or books or photos. It stores something that can best be compared to holographic images, three-dimensional. In reality, they are actually four-dimensional. They are, in a sense, like a three-dimensional movie that can be played and there are many of these, also some from natural planets, of course. But there is a special archive that is only for these records from unnatural planets and the purpose of this is to store experiences that can be used when we design the next sphere so that we can incorporate these experiences.
You can basically say that we are looking at how far into duality could people go on earth, how dense, how elaborate of a separate self could they create on a planet with a vibrational level of earth, with a planetary matrix of earth. And then, through a very intricate process that I will not describe in detail, we will, when this sphere ascends, some even before, we will begin to look at these stored experiences and say: “How can we use these experiences to design the seventh sphere and certain planets in this sphere in such a way that there is a built-in safety mechanism, so that even though matter is denser, beings can still find the path and follow it?” It is as if the dualistic experiences that people have had in the seventh sphere become the foundation for designing the next sphere in such a way that people do not have to learn the same lessons over again. They may create other deeper levels of duality and separation, but at least there is some trail they can follow.
The goal is to experience duality
Avatars, part of your task on earth, is basically to have certain experiences. Saint Germain talked about how any experience you have had, anything you have done, was not a mistake. It can be turned into an asset that can help you help others. This, of course, applies very much to the rest of your embodiment in this lifetime and if you have future lifetimes, but it also applies to this higher perspective that your experiences can help the lifestreams in the eighth sphere. This means it does not matter what you have experienced. In fact, you could say from a certain perspective, the deeper you have gone into duality, the better, when you rise above it again because the purpose is, of course, not to store how you go into duality and stay there indefinitely, but to store how you come out of it again, how you come out of that level of duality. And, of course, when you ascend, you will have overcome anything you have experienced in this and previous lifetimes. There is nothing unresolved when you ascend and that means that when you ascend, none of what you experienced matters.
When you look at this, that you are going to die, and when you die you leave your current concerns behind, then you can see the same thing. When you ascend, you leave it all behind. So why be reluctant to look at it? Why seek to suppress it? Why seek to hide it? It is by looking at it that you transcend it, and that process of transcendence then rises up to the archive. We can call it the akashic archive, although it is not exactly the same as the akashic records and therefore you are helping, contributing to the design of the next sphere.
Separate selves as hidden treasures
Now, if a Tibetan Buddhist heard this teaching, he or she would, of course, say: “Oh, that is not what it means. We have our interpretation of what these treasures are.” That is fine. Let them have their interpretation as long as they need it.
But you who are ascended master students can realize that any experience of overcoming a limited sense of self is a treasure. Why is it hidden? Well, because until you have overcome the limited self, you cannot see it as a treasure. You will see it as a prison, as a limitation, as suffering, as: “Woe is me, why is this happening?” Our hope is, of course, that by giving you these teachings you will be able to look at your life and say: “I do not need to hide anything anymore. I do not need to try and hide it for other people. I do not need to try and hide it for myself.” First of all, it is important to stop hiding it from yourself. You look at it, you go into it, and you look for the hidden treasure, the lesson of how to transcend it, how to transcend the self, the separate self that gave you that experience.
Someone the other day was talking about pain, deep pain. There comes a point where the only way to overcome pain is to go into it. Your instinctual response or reaction is, of course, that when you feel this inner pain, you want to get away from it, you want to ignore it, you want to turn your back on it. The last thing you want is to go into it but what if I told you that behind the veil of the pain hides the hidden treasure? And the only way to find it is to go in through the pain. You cannot find the treasure by running away from the pain, or for that matter, away from anything. For the treasure is the experience of overcoming another experience, a limited experience and if you do not allow yourself to experience the limited experience, how can you overcome it? How can you find the treasure?
Padmasambhava’s Tertöns
Now there are, of course, different meanings of this treasure, because there are certainly some people in embodiment who are tied to me as their guru, as an ascended master. They are meant to find a different kind of treasure. By the way, these people, most of them are not embodied in Tibet, but scattered all around the globe. Some of you are among them, not many, but some. What are my Tertöns meant to find? What is the treasure waiting for them behind the veil of their experiences of their pain? Well, I am the treasure waiting for them. You are linked to other ascended masters, and when you really go through the pain and resolve the selves, you find your master, your I AM Presence as well, but your ascended master or masters. So that is the treasure.
And of course, when you do find the master, the experience of the master’s consciousness gives you a different perspective. How many of you recognize that before you found ascended master teachings, you had a much more limited perspective on life, and finding the teachings has changed your perspective. But many of you have also had the experience of a master’s presence and being and consciousness, and that changes your perspective even more. When you directly and consciously experience an expression of the Christ consciousness, you have a frame of reference, as we have called it, but you really have an experience that changes your life permanently, forever. You cannot go back, you cannot unsee what you have seen, and that is, of course, a treasure to be sought after.
The path defined by the ego
But now, going back to this idea that the path should be difficult, what determines how your path is going to be? Some will want to look at the image that there is a path of initiation defined by some higher spiritual being, ascended masters or others, or perhaps by these beings who gave the Masonic teachings, the 33 levels of initiation, or the 33 steps to Christhood, or whatever they call it. They will say: “There is a path of initiation defined by the ascended masters, and you must take one initiation at a time and climb on that predefined path. May you pass every test.” From a certain perspective, you can say, yeah, there is a path, because we of the ascended masters are, of course, using our experiences of ascending from this sphere, to define a path that can help others. Those of us who are ascended from an unnatural planet look at how can we design a path that will help people on earth, and we give a teaching accordingly.
However, many people have this view that this is some predefined automatic path, where you just need to find the clue that solves the riddle, and then you turn the key in the lock, and a hidden door opens, and you walk through. But that is not how it is. Even though there is a certain path of initiation defined by us, each of you must follow it in your individual way. And what determines how your particular path is going to be? Well, the separate selves you have in your consciousness because the initiation you must pass is that of coming to see the separate self you have at your current level of the 144 levels, letting it die, so you rise to the next. That is how you pass a test.
It is not some mystical process of finding some hidden clue or hidden riddle that you solve, or completing a task, or slaying a dragon, or whatever it may be. Not even slaying the dweller, as it was talked about in a previous organization. It was a metaphor given at that time that was valid for the level of consciousness of the teaching. But you are not slaying a separate self. That is the magic of the higher teaching. You are just letting it die, but before you can let it die you must come to see it from the outside by the Conscious You separating itself from it and that letting go is passing the test.
But what have we also said? A separate self is designed to give you a particular experience and you are allowed to have that experience. In fact, you created the self because you wanted to have that experience and you are allowed to have that experience as long as you want, until you have had enough of it and can let it go.
What determines how long and how difficult your path is going to be? It is how many of these epic selves you have created and how long you need to have the experiences through a particular self before you have had enough and can let it go. You are making the path difficult for yourself. You are making the path long and hard and how are you doing it? By having this image that walking the path is an epic process that has some epic importance and that will lead you to some epic reward. But this is all defined from the dualistic consciousness. This is not the path that we have defined. We have defined a path of freedom from all these dualistic selves and images.
You see here, there is a certain stage on the spiritual path, and it applies to all spiritual people. But every teaching, every organization has their own version of it. Previous ascended master teachings had the image of Camelot, the quest for the Holy Grail, the heroic quest to find this hidden treasure. But this is driven by the ego who thinks that if you complete the quest that the ego or the fallen beings have defined, you will get the reward that the ego wants. You will be special. You will be anointed. You will be elevated to some position of authority or power. Power over matter. Mind over matter. Tell me, having power over matter, why would it matter in the ascended realm? Why do you need it when you have ascended?
Letting go of the epic quest
There comes that point at the 96th level where you need to take a look at the self that you created between the 48th and the 96th. And you need to see that it still, in most cases, has an element of that epic mindset where you think that you have some epic importance in the cosmic perspective. There is an epic importance to you walking the path, you passing the initiation, you becoming the Living Christ. For you can do something no one else can do, and therefore, receive some ultimate recognition or reward. And I know this will sound harsh, but sometimes you need to just speak realistically because going on the 96th level, you cannot pretend, you cannot fake it. You hear the popular statement: “Fake it, till you make it.” But you will never make it as long as you fake it. You cannot fool the Christ as we have said. You really think you can fool your way into heaven? Well, the ego does, and that is what you need to come to see and therefore, you can see that vanity of vanities. All is vanity. Your ego thinks that it is more special than the egos of any other person. My ego is stronger than your ego. But you see, in a certain sense, there is nothing new under the sun. There is only a limited amount of illusions that the duality consciousness and the fallen beings can come up with because they have a limited imagination. Why is it limited? Because it is dualistic! It must always be in relation to something else. That is a limitation of imagination.
There comes that point at that 96th level where you need to look at whether you have this epic view of the spiritual path and let go of it and accept that there is nothing special about your ego. There is absolutely nothing special about your ego! It cannot do anything that other egos cannot do. It has not come up with any epic quest that others have not come up with. Whatever you have done, somebody else has already done it. Some of those somebody else’s are now ascended masters because they let go of it, saw it for what it is and decided: “Enough, enough, enough is enough!”
The left-handed path
If you do not let go of this epic quest, you will not rise beyond the 96th level but you cannot stand still at the 95th so you must go down. What are you then doing? You have essentially rejected the Christ like Peter did three times. Actually, he rejected Christ when he told Jesus: “This shall not be unto thee, Lord. I know better than you what should happen to you in Jerusalem.” That was also a rejection of Christ.
What do you do then? You start what we have called the left-handed path, the false path and it is that instead of letting that epic self die, you are now seeking to validate and glorify it so that you seek to create the experience that your epic self, your ego is right and knows better than Christ what is real, what is unreal. And you can go all the way to the lowest level because the fallen beings, since the fourth sphere, whenever they fell, they have been on that left-handed path to establish that their separate self is right and that the Christ is wrong.
The false teachers
Now, mind you, the law of free will gives you the right to do this. You have a right to have that experience. What many people do when they decide to go into that path is they set themselves up as spiritual teachers seeking to attract students from a lower level of consciousness and they set themselves up as some superior authority that is giving the highest teaching here on earth. Some of these gurus even referred to the ascended masters, but they have no contact with the ascended masters because that is what they rejected at the 95th level. They come in contact with beings in the mental realm who are masquerading as ascended masters.
We have sometimes called it the false hierarchy because they attempt to set themselves up as the ultimate hierarchy. These gurus can sometimes, over lifetimes, build quite an ability to pull people in, to hypnotize them to a spiritual teaching and they may develop certain abilities to affect people’s minds, to make them go into a state of ecstasy, or being overwhelmed. Or they may claim they have the ability to materialize things, regurgitate small containers that contain rings or other things. And this impresses people, but does it impress the Christ?
The unreality of the epic self
Well, of course not. In order to give up that epic self, which I will call it, not different from a separate self or even the spiritualized self that we talk about, but the epic self, you must come to see it as the Christ sees it. It is not that it is wrong. It is not that it is bad. It is not that it is evil. It can in fact be good, it can be very spiritual but from the perspective of the Christ mind, it is just unreal because it gives you an experience that is not based on connection with the Christ mind.
This leads to a discussion: “Are you saying there are different kinds of experiences?” Well, yes. There is the experience that you are a separate being, and the experience that you are a connected being. And this will sound confusing because we have said that at the 48th level, you sense intuitively you have a connection to something outside your own mind and as you rise towards the 96th, you get a clearer sense of what you are connected to. And you can have genuine experiences of experiencing the Christ mind but there are some spiritual people who do not make the switch of realizing that the condition you must fulfill to attain Christhood is to surrender something. Even in the previous ascended master dispensations, many students were focused on building attainment, even though they had a concept given by Mother Mary of surrender, but many people did not grasp what they needed to surrender. They thought they were building this sophisticated separate self, this attainment. But the real attainment that you build in your four lower bodies, or rather in the Conscious You, is your willingness to surrender.
The importance of surrender
The spiritual lessons you learn, they are in your causal body, not in your four lower bodies, not in the Conscious You, which has no structure for them. The crucial distinction is, do you somewhere between the 48th and the 96th level begin to tune in to this need to surrender something? Even if you do not understand what it is, you see the importance of just letting go. And if you do not see that, then you will come to that point where you think: “Why should I surrender this self? It is giving me great experiences of my own importance.” And then you start going down the left-handed path, even if you are right-handed. What we have attempted to do from the very beginning with this dispensation is to help you see that you must surrender something. You must overcome the ego. You must overcome the duality consciousness.
But especially when we started giving the concept of the selves, we have given the teachings about the importance of just letting go, letting a self die, which means you are basically surrendering it. You have had this self that you have built, that there is an epic importance to you walking the spiritual path. But in order to get beyond the 96th level, you must come to see that that self simply gave you an experience that motivated you to walk the spiritual path and make an effort, possibly a great effort and it could take you to the 96th level, but it cannot take you beyond it. And if you do not see this, you cannot let it go. You will continue on that epic quest.
So many times have we seen this with spiritual people and religious people. You have some Christian groups who believe that the members of their church have a special place in heaven where they will go higher than others. Well, for that matter, the Jews believe they have a special place in heaven.
But there are ascended master students who believe that their ascension has a greater importance than the ascension of anyone else and therefore, we of the ascended masters are looking at them with great anticipation: “When will he ascend? When can we welcome him? When can we knight him and hang the medal of whatever around his neck?”
No “special” in Christ
And this is again perfectly fine according to the law of free will because they are having an experience but again, this is an experience you can only have in the unascended sphere. For in the ascended realm, in the Christ consciousness, there is no room for the epic mindset. You cannot go beyond the 96th level if you desire to be special compared to other people. Why? Because the Christ is the One mind that unifies all with their Creator and seeks to raise up all lifestreams.
How can you serve to raise up another if you want to be superior to that other? Then you will want to hold them down so you can be better than them and only when you see this, when you lock into that aspect of the Christ mind where the high shall be made low and the first shall be last, will you realize what Christ is. Christ does not make you special, it raises you beyond the dualistic polarity of special and not special, or more special or less special, or any kind of value judgment you can conceptualize. Now again, if you have not had enough of this experience of being special because you are in a spiritual teaching, you can continue to have that experience and build on that experience. But then you are leaving behind the ascended masters and attuning yourself with other so-called masters and again, you have your free will.
The existential dilemma of Christ
And the thing is, and this is another of what Jesus called the existential dilemma of the Christ consciousness, is that you have some students that have walked the path for a long time and they have honestly and sincerely striven to raise their consciousness and pass their initiations, and they think they have attained Christhood at that 95th level. They think they have attained the kind of Christhood that the separate self, the epic self, defines and if they are not willing to give that up, they lose their connection. They have had a genuine connection to the ascended masters but they lose it, but they do not know they have lost it.
We stand there, look at a student who fails that initiation, and we must let them go for they are absolutely convinced that they still have connection to the ascended masters, that they in fact know better than the ascended masters what the ascended masters should say through a particular messenger. Or they know better than the ascended masters that this person is no longer a messenger. This person has lost his mantle or that new person is now a messenger. They know better.
And how can we help them out of that mindset? We cannot because we will not violate their free will and they are not asking for our help because they are convinced they do not need it. I am not saying this to change the mind of those who have gone down that path, for they will only change when they have had enough of that experience. I am saying it to help those who have not yet reached the 96th level, or who are just there but have not let go or have not seen the need to let go.
The shift into surrendering your way into heaven
We see that in these last couple of years, quite a few of you who are part of this community have come to that initiation, and most of you have passed it. Some of you have not yet, but we know that all of you have the potential. Some of you are not there yet so you do not need to really be concerned about this teaching, although you can still take that lesson that whatever level of consciousness you are at, you can grasp the value of surrender because as we said that is essentially how you overcome any self. But still, there are quite a few of you, I would even say many of you, who are very close to that level, and therefore, really can benefit by taking this teaching to heart and contemplating it until you have that experience of shifting your perspective, and you look at your spiritual self, your epic self, from the perspective of the Christ mind. Or you can say the Conscious You steps outside of the self and no longer looks at yourself and the path through the filter of that self. Instead of thinking you have to do your way into heaven, you realize you can only surrender your way into heaven. You can only surrender.
With this, I will surrender my attempt to help you because I know that Gautama Buddha will take up the torch and continue our deliberations. With this, I too thank you for being part of this figure eight flow, this alchemical process. Surely, you are not doing it just for yourselves, but to carve that trail that others may follow and even have those experiences that can be stored in the cosmic archive and used to design the next sphere.
I seal you in the great joy that I AM, Padmasambhava, I AM.
Copyright © 2026 Kim Michaels