Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels.
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My beloved heart, I would like to build upon the teachings I have given you in the previous chapter. I first of all want to tell you more about the physical part of your mind, which I have so far mentioned but not truly described. Medical scientists have conducted various experiments on the brain in their attempts to understand the brain and discover its higher functions. For example, they have found that by inducing certain chemicals, they can stimulate experiences that are very similar to what people report during spiritual or near-death experiences. This has led some scientists to conclude that all spiritual experiences, and all religion, spring from certain chemical or electromagnetic processes in the brain. They conclude that there is nothing beyond the brain but that all religion is produced within the brain. Some surgeons have performed open brain surgery and have found that they can stimulate areas of the brain and trigger certain experiences. Again, this has led the materialistic scientists to conclude that all spiritual experiences are produced by the brain—that God is the product of a misfiring of neurons in the brain.
It is understandable that a person who has decided that there is nothing beyond the material realm will come to this conclusion. This lack of vision is a product of the fact that the person has chosen to confine his or her mind to the matter realm. The conscious mind of that person simply cannot see beyond the matter realm and will not accept the possibility that there could be a deeper explanation. The reason most people use only 5-10 percent of their brain capacity is that the higher brain centers require a higher form of energy in order to be activated. Those brain centers can be artificially activated by certain chemicals or by an outer stimulation. This does not mean that the stimulation of the brain centers produces a spiritual experience. It only means that the brain centers are designed to facilitate an experience so that the conscious mind can grasp such an experience while you are still in a physical body. The purpose is to allow you to experience that there is more to life than the material universe—while you are abiding in, one might say trapped in, the matter realm.
A genuine spiritual experience takes place when the Conscious You separates itself from the physical mind and the physical body and therefore reaches beyond the matter realm. The Conscious You reaches into the identity realm or even beyond it into the spiritual realm. This is completely natural, and the Conscious You has the capacity to identify itself with anything, anywhere. The Conscious You has the potential to separate itself from the body, even on a temporary basis, and reach up to the higher parts of your identity, your true identity as a spiritual being. When you reconnect to that identity, high-frequency light streams through your four lower bodies and you can have a variety of spiritual experiences.
It is quite possible for the Conscious You to have spiritual experiences that cannot filter through to your conscious mind. This can be caused by blocks in the higher levels of your mind, but there is also a certain class of spiritual experiences that cannot be consciously known while you are in a physical body. The simple reason is that the human brain does not have centers that are capable of facilitating such experiences. When you do have a spiritual experience that filters through to your conscious awareness, it is because the physical brain is capable of facilitating such an experience. The Conscious You has reached into a higher realm and has released a stream of light that filters down to the physical brain and activates one of the higher brain centers. It is this activation of the brain center that gives you a conscious experience. It is quite possible that the Conscious You can have spiritual experiences that cannot be translated by the brain and thus cannot be known to the conscious mind. Many spiritual people disentangle themselves from the body while they sleep and travel to the spiritual realm where they receive instructions from their spiritual teachers. That is why you sometimes wake up with a new sense of clarity and with the answer to a question you have been pondering. This is also why you can have certain dreams just before you wake up that are very lucid and seem to carry a profound message. Sometimes this might be a greater understanding of a problem or it might be a premonition concerning a future event. It might also be a sense of flying, a sense of being free or the sense of being part of something greater than your physical body. It might be a sense of being outside your physical body, looking down upon it.
All of these experiences are real experiences, yet it is true, as scientists have discovered, that it is possible to generate such experiences by stimulating the physical brain in various ways. This does not mean that the brain produces the experience. Reasoning this way is the same as reasoning that the film screen produces the images that appear on the screen. It is true that the brain can influence the exact form and content of a spiritual experience, which is one reason two people can have different experiences.
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Having explained this characteristic of the physical brain, I would like to move on and talk more about what I have called the physical part of your mind. You are an immortal spiritual being, and you have taken on this particular physical body only for a time. In the past, you have been embodied in other bodies in different circumstances. This fact is the only way to explain one of the major blocks to your efforts to manifest God’s abundance in your life. The blocks that appear in your four lower bodies can be divided into two categories. There are long-term blocks and short-term blocks. There are certain blocks in the four levels of your mind that were produced in this particular lifetime, and there are other blocks that were produced in past lives.
If you truly want to clear your four lower bodies, you need to go beyond what you have experienced in this lifetime. In order to go beyond, you need to understand that there are levels of the mind. There is more than one valid way to explain what I will give you next. For the sake of simplicity, I will give you a model which describes your mind as having two major components. There is the larger, higher or long-term component of your four lower bodies. This is the component that you carry with you from lifetime to lifetime. You also have a component that is attached to this particular physical body in this lifetime, yet this component also has an identity level, a mental realm, an emotional realm and a mind that is enmeshed with, and to some degree produced by, the physical brain. You have a larger energy field that is beyond your present body, and within it is a smaller field that is centered around the physical body and interwoven with the body and the brain.
As you grew up in this lifetime, you built a certain sense of identity based on your particular circumstances, such as your family background, nationality, race, ethnic group, sex and other aspects of your physical situation. This put contents into the container of the short-term identity body. This sense of identity was to a large degree affected by your heredity and your environment, yet it was not exclusively produced by these external factors, as psychologists claim. What influences your short-term sense of identity is your reactions to external circumstances in this lifetime, and those reactions are largely determined by the contents of your long-term mind, the mind that was created during previous lifetimes.
The long-term identity body is not affected by the specific characteristics related to this lifetime. It stores the larger sense of identity based on beliefs about yourself. For example, it might store the belief that you are a human being or a miserable sinner, a belief that might have been reinforced in this lifetime but was likely created many lifetimes ago. The long-term identity body stores more general beliefs whereas the short-term identity body stores the identity relating to your current embodiment. The deeper part of your being, which is what most psychologists and spiritual teachers call the soul, is beyond this particular lifetime. It does not see itself as a person with your name, sex, nationality, race and so on. It does not identify itself as being a nurse, a teacher or whatever your occupation might be.
The identity body that is specific to your present lifetime will be wiped clean after the death of this body, and that is why most people do not remember their past lives. The records of those lives are stored elsewhere and you can uncover them, but they are not stored in your short-term identity body. This is actually a grace, in the sense that you receive an opportunity to start over without remembering the mistakes you might have made in your previous lifetimes. The downside is that many people are born without a strong sense of continuity. This gives rise to the fear of death that comes from believing that your identity will be lost when your body dies. Your most precious possession is your individuality, your sense of identity, so your greatest fear is to lose it. That is why it is actually very cruel that children are brought up without an understanding of reincarnation. Knowing that your long-term identity will not die with the physical body can completely relieve you of the fear of death, a fear that is paralyzing to many people and gives them a sense that life is pointless. Why strive to improve yourself and become a better person when all is lost at the end of this life? The improvements you make are not lost but become your “treasures laid up in heaven” (Matthew 6:20), meaning that they are stored in your long-term identity body (even in your causal body in the spiritual realm) and will therefore serve as a foundation that you can build upon in your next lifetime (and after you permanently graduate from earth’s schoolroom).
It is possible that what you experience in this lifetime, and the decisions you make based on those experiences, can have an effect on your long-term sense of identity. Your long-term sense of identity has a profound effect on the sense of identity you build in this lifetime. The contents of your long-term mental and emotional bodies have a major effect on how you respond to the situations you encounter in this lifetime. For better or worse, you are building upon the foundation laid in past lives, yet you do have the potential to improve upon that foundation, which, of course, is your only hope of being free of the past.
As an example, let us say that your long-term identity body contains the belief that you are a miserable sinner and that everything you do is a sin. This will carry over into your present lifetime and give you a tendency to gravitate towards a religion that reinforces this belief. You will find it easy to accept such a religion and you will find it difficult to break free from it, which is why many people simply will not look beyond the religion in which they grew up. The contents of your long-term mind will form the parameters for how you respond to life in this particular lifetime. The Conscious You still has the potential to go beyond the programming from the past. In many cases, the conscious mind builds a sense of identity in the current lifetime that is somewhat in conflict with the person’s long-term identity. This is important because it opens the possibility that you can reinforce the internal contradictions that make you a house divided against itself.
For example, many people have a belief in their long-term identity bodies that they are not worthy to receive God’s abundance. Some people have used a specific teaching on abundance and a set of affirmations to create the short-term sense of identity as being worthy of having abundance. If they have not fully understood what I explained in the previous chapter, this new sense of identity may not go beyond the short-term identity body. It can clash with, and easily be overruled by, the more powerful long-term sense of identity. The person’s attempt to use a genuine technique to raise his or her spiritual awareness has not truly helped. It has only created a greater internal conflict, and this is one of the ways in which your mortal self and the prince of this world can put you in a spiritual catch-22. They do this by seeking to make you accept a belief in your short-term mind that conflicts a belief you already hold in your long-term mind. This temporary belief will prevent you from resolving the limiting belief you have in the long-term mind. If you have built a firm belief in this lifetime that you are worthy to receive God’s abundance, you might not think that you need to go deeper into your psychology and resolve the long-term belief that you are not worthy. This can prevent you from making long-term progress, which can only be attained by purifying your long-term mind. You are, so to speak, creating a temporary movie that is projected onto the screen of your consciousness, and although it might obscure some of the images projected by your long-term mind, it does nothing to actually clean the filmstrip in the long-term mind. It should be obvious that if you want true freedom, you need to go beyond the short-term mind and clear your long-term mind.
There are prosperity gurus, psychologists and holistic healers who have a valid technique for purifying your emotions, your thoughts and even your sense of identity. If a technique works only on the short-term mind, it cannot have the maximum effect on your growth. There are also some gurus who are not seeking to help you resolve the blocks in your short-term mind. Instead, they present you with techniques aimed at creating a new program in the short-term mind, a program that will supposedly bring you great abundance by simply overriding preexisting programs. Without the resolution of the limitations from the past, this will inevitably add to your internal conflicts by creating a new program that conflicts already existing programs in both your short-term and long-term minds. On a computer two programs can be in conflict with each other, and it can cause the computer to crash. The subconscious part of your mind is in some ways similar to a computer. If you put conflicting beliefs or patterns into it, you will experience a form of mental or emotional paralysis.
This also applies to many forms of therapy, especially the therapy developed by mainstream psychology, which is based on a largely materialistic paradigm. You might have been exposed to certain traumatic experiences in this lifetime that have given you emotional scars and have caused you to form certain imperfect beliefs in your short-term mental body and even build an imperfect self-image. It is quite possible that you can use a form of therapy to resolve these blocks in your short-term mind, and truly this can have a beneficial effect. If you do not go beyond the short-term mind, you are not actually making progress in this lifetime. You are simply turning back the clock to the starting point, and thus you are, so to speak, back to square one. In order to truly progress, you need to go beyond the short-term mind, and you can use your experiences in this lifetime as a springboard for this effort. The way you react to situations in this lifetime is determined by the patterns in your long-term mind. By examining your reactions, you can uncover the deeper patterns and work on resolving them. This requires a greater commitment and a clear vision that you are more than your short-term mind. In order to be completely free, you need to go all the way back to the beliefs that originated with your decision to turn away from God, to turn away from your spiritual teacher, and go it alone. This was when you allowed your mortal self and the prince of this world to be your teachers.
NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book: Your Life’s Plan for Abundance. The book also contains an invocation based on the dictation.
Copyright © 2005 by Kim Michaels