Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels.
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My beloved heart, I will now give you another key that it is essential for you to understand before you can truly manifest the abundant life. When I survey the course of history and the history of individual lifestreams, including your own, I see that the one thing that truly prevents people from manifesting the abundant life is the tendency to wait for the right outer conditions before you make a move, before you change yourself, before you give up some part of your mortal self. This very problem springs from the mortal self and its built-in tendency of wanting to attain a state of ultimate security.
The mortal self has a built-in conflict, an inescapable contradiction, that cannot be resolved. Your mortal self was born when the Conscious You decided that it would no longer make decisions, and thus it wants to make decisions for you. Because the Conscious You can never lose its drive for wholeness, your mortal self wants to satisfy this desire. The mortal self cannot understand what true wholeness is, and thus it seeks to give you a sense of security by controlling every aspect of your life.
The ultimate and only source of true wholeness is that the Conscious You identifies itself with your I AM Presence and takes part in, plunges itself into, the River of Life. Only when you are in God’s ongoing flow of abundance – of self-transcendence, of becoming more – can you feel truly whole. The mortal self can never be in that flow of life because, as Jesus said, it has no life in it (John 6:53). The mortal self can never give you a true sense of wholeness. It will seek to produce a substitute, a false feeling of wholeness, which is what the Bible describes as those who cry peace but there is no peace (Jeremiah 6:14).
This is the central contradiction, the central dichotomy, of the mortal self. The real key to wholeness is to be in the River of Life, which is constant self-transcendence. In order to be truly whole, you must be constantly transcending yourself, constantly becoming more than you are at this moment. This is the joy of life, this is true wholeness. The mortal self is trying to create the illusion of wholeness by stopping growth, by stopping self-transcendence, by preventing you from becoming more. The mortal self has an image of wholeness as something that is in a state of “perfection,” meaning that everything stands still and nothing changes. It believes it can attain this perfection by controlling you and everyone else, even by controlling the material universe. Your mortal self and the prince of this world are constantly trying to control the universe and make it conform to their mental images.
Unfortunately, this image of perfection as still-stand is very persuasive and it has found its way into many cultures and religions. Many religions teach the image of the external God, claiming that this God is perfect. They think that if something is perfect, it could not possibly change. Your mortal self and the forces of anti-christ are constantly trying to stop self-transcendence, to stop growth, to stop the process of God becoming more through you. They are trying to create a counterfeit kingdom, a kingdom of man, in which there is no growth, in which they have defined a state of “perfection” based on the duality consciousness. They have managed to make most people and societies fit into that mental box, fit into that mold, for what is perfect.
This is an illusion. This is completely impossible. This is attempting to do something that simply cannot be done. One of the safety mechanisms built into the material universe is that nothing can stand still. Because you have been given free will, you can choose to pull yourself away from the ongoing River of Life. You can pull yourself up upon the river bank and stand still on the shore while the River of Life is flowing by you. Because God has given you free will, he has given you the ability to do this and he has set up the material universe with a delay factor that allows you to maintain the illusion that you are now standing still in your own little world. You have now created some perfect state and if only you maintain status quo, you will be in this paradise forever. This illusion can truly exist only in the mental box of your mortal self, and it can, as every other aspect of the mortal self, exist only for a time. It is inevitable that the contracting force of the Mother will eventually break down this illusion. That is why, over the course of history, many civilizations have indeed reached a high level of attainment and have then inexplicably collapsed. These civilizations collapsed because they thought they had attained perfection, and thus they refused to self-transcend. Inevitably, the contracting force of the Mother broke down the towers of Babel that they had built, thinking that those towers were reaching into the heavens.
Humankind has been on this impossible quest for thousands upon thousands of years, even for much longer than is currently recognized by your historians and scientists. You can continue on this quest until your allotted time runs out, if that is what you desire. I am not here to encourage you to do so. I am here to encourage you to pull yourself away from this impossible quest and instead recognize the eternal truth that the only key to true wholeness, and the only true key to salvation, is to get back into the River of Life and to continually self-transcend.
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Your mortal self is programmed to do everything it can to prevent you from self-transcending, to prevent you from going beyond the mental box defined by its dualistic beliefs. Your mortal self has managed to make the Conscious You believe, at least partially, in the lie that perfection means stillstand. Your mortal self has managed to make the Conscious You believe that you need security. In many cases, it uses the insecurity in the outside world, the turmoil generated by the duality consciousness, to get you to strive for this sense of stability, security and comfortability. If you will take an honest look at people in the world, you will see that although there are many outer addictions, behind all of these outer addictions is the addiction to security, the addiction to comfortability. Many people are truly security addicts, and they are trying to establish some sense of security above all else. In so doing, they are willing to sacrifice growth, to stop the motor of life, to kill the joy of life. They want the process of life to come to a halt so they can attain and maintain a sense of security based on the idea that if nothing changes, nothing bad can happen.
This drive for security is based on a fear of growth, a fear of change. The essence of life is growth, meaning self-transcendence. Because your mortal self cannot understand this, it has managed to project into your being the fear of change, based on the reasoning that change can only be for the worse, change can only be bad, change can only mean that you lose something. I have told you over and over again that you have free will and that everything revolves around the Conscious You and the decisions you make. If you allow the mortal self to make decisions for you, you will never break this stranglehold of being on the impossible quest, the drive for security and stability in a world of constant and unavoidable change. Why is change unavoidable? Because God’s law is set up to prevent you from becoming trapped in a limited state. It mandates that you must either change by following the drive to become more, or you must change because the contracting force of the Mother will break down your graven images, break down what you seek to keep unchangeable. You must change through self-transcendence or self-contraction. If you take unto yourself a graven image, the contracting force of the Mother will generate an opposing force that will challenge the image in order to set you free.
This impossible quest for the security that cannot be obtained in this world is what turns your life into an ongoing struggle. Your mortal self believes that if only it can attain this ultimate sense of security in which nothing changes, then your struggles will be over. If only you will stop all attempts to self-transcend, you will forever remain in this state of paradise. It is the quest for stability, it is the quest for non-change, that sets up the struggle because it puts you at odds with the very nature of life itself, which is ongoing change in the form of self-transcendence. The only way you can begin to free yourself from this sense of struggle is that the Conscious You realizes that your mortal self is on an impossible quest. You must fully understand what I have told you, namely that the ultimate key to security and wholeness is to be in the flow of the River of Life so that you are constantly growing and becoming more, rather than seeking to stay the same. Growth does not mean loss. How could you possibly lose when you are growing and becoming more? The Conscious You can never lose by growing. But the mortal self and the forces of this world can indeed lose when the Conscious You grows and transcends the limitations they have attempted to define for you. That is why they have projected the fear of growth into your being, and they have linked it to a fear of loss. They are the ones who have the fear of loss, but they have managed to make the Conscious You identify itself partly or wholly with that fear of loss. That is why so many people on this planet do not want to change and fear that change can only be for the worse. Many people talk about the “good old days” as a time when everything was better and change has only been for the worse. In reality, many of the changes happening in the world are clearly for the better and are bringing more abundance for more people.
If you are to manifest the abundant life, what will it take for you to get that abundant life? Let us simply do a reality check. The reality is that you do not currently have the abundant life. If you had the abundant life, why would you be studying this course? If you currently do not have the abundant life, what will it take for you to attain that abundance? For you to attain the abundant life, something must change. If you are to have something you do not currently have, then something must change. If you are unwilling to change, if you are afraid to change, how could you possibly attain what you do not have? This might seem like a very simple line of reasoning, it might seem naive, unsophisticated or self-evident to some. But if you had truly understood this simple principle, you would not be reading this course; you would be enjoying the abundant life.
If you are to obtain something that you do not currently have, something must change, and what is it that must change? What must change is you, the Conscious You. You must change your approach to life. If your current approach has not produced the abundant life, the only realistic possibility for manifesting abundance is to change your approach to life. If what you have done so far has not produced the desired result, then you must change your approach. Again, consider Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity, namely that insanity is when you keep doing the same thing but expect different results. This is the insanity built into your mortal self. Your mortal self is like a computer that is programmed to do the same thing over and over again. It truly believes that if it keeps doing the same thing, if it keeps trying to stop the clock, trying to stop self-transcendence, it will one day produce the ultimate state of security in which nothing changes. Your mortal self will keep doing this indefinitely, as a computer will keep doing the same thing until you tell it to do something different. Your mortal self cannot change its basic approach, it does not have the ability to change its very nature, as a computer does not have the ability to change its own programming.
The only one who can change what is happening in your life is the Conscious You. You must make the decision that you are willing to self-transcend. You must take the first step and give up some of the dualistic beliefs of your mortal self, even though you might have used such beliefs to establish a fragile sense of security. This is the essential principle for manifesting abundance, a principle that most people – even people who have studied abundance for a long time, even many of the abundance gurus – have overlooked. If your life is to change, you must change. If your world is to change, you must begin by changing yourself. If your life experience is to change, you must take the first step by changing your consciousness, by changing your approach to life.
The very basis for change is that you are willing to give up at least part of your current sense of identity. You must be willing to give up some of the dualistic beliefs of your mortal self, the beliefs that keep you trapped in a prison of limitations and a sense of lack. The basic principle of growth is that you must be willing to let your current sense of identity die so you can be reborn into a new and more expanded sense of identity. The central issue here is that you cannot move into that new sense of identity, perhaps you cannot even clearly see this new sense of self, until you are willing to let the old sense of self die. You cannot receive abundance until you are willing to give up your limitations. Let me say this as loudly as I can: You must give before you can receive!
NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book: Expressing Your Love for Life. The book also contains an invocation based on the dictation.
Copyright © 2005 by Kim Michaels