24. Flowing with the River of Life

Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels.

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Allow me to make one more attempt to explain to you the essence of the mortal self, or what many people call the human ego. The most important point you can understand about the mortal self is that it is engaged in an impossible quest. The quest is impossible because the mortal self is born of duality. The mortal self has a built-in conflict, a built-in contradiction, that can never – and I truly mean never – be resolved. The mortal self was born when the Conscious You decided that it would no longer make decisions. The real problem with this decision was that the Conscious You denied its true identity, its true nature. The Conscious You denied that it is a co-creator with God, and therefore it denied the fact that – by your very nature – you are worthy and acceptable in the eyes of God. The Conscious You has come to accept the dualistic lie that you are separated from God and that you are not worthy to come back to God because you have made some kind of mistake. In reality, you have only temporarily departed from the immaculate concept by accepting a lower sense of identity, but you can always come back to that pure vision. 

When you accepted the sense of unworthiness, the Conscious You withdrew into a little cage. The Conscious You can never fully withdraw from being conscious. The Conscious You can withdraw from making decisions, but it cannot withdraw from having conscious experiences. The Conscious You can stop making decisions, but it cannot choose to stop experiencing the consequences of its decisions or lack of decisions. Because self-awareness comes before will, the Conscious You cannot choose to stop being conscious, although it can try to numb itself so that it is barely conscious. The Conscious You can never completely lose its longing for wholeness, its longing to come back to God’s kingdom, to once again be in the River of Life and experience the abundant life. This is a safety mechanism that can never be completely turned off. No matter what the Conscious You does, it will always have an inner longing for wholeness, a longing for something more.

When the mortal self was born, it attempted to fill the void that had been created because the Conscious You no longer had a direct experience of its I AM Presence. The mortal self is always engaged in a quest to set itself up as a worthy replacement for your I AM Presence, for the true identity that is still stored in the universal Christ mind. Your inner quest for wholeness can be filled only through oneness with your I AM Presence, the oneness that releases the flow of God’s light through your lower being. That oneness can be attained only when you accept and recognize that you are worthy to face God, to be one with God. The Conscious You has simply forgotten its worthiness, and it can come back to it by recognizing the eternal truth that because you were created as an extension of God, you are inherently worthy to be one with God. In fact, you were never separated from God, you never lost your worthiness.

In contrast to this, the mortal self was not created by God, and thus it never has been, and it never will be, worthy in the eyes of God. The Conscious You has a built-in worthiness because it has an immaculate concept in the universal Christ mind. It is not a matter of earning worthiness by doing things in the matter realm; it is simply a matter of accepting it. The mortal self does not have this built-in worthiness, and therefore it can never earn it. The universal Christ mind does not contain an immaculate concept for the mortal self, and thus this self has nothing, no reality, to which it can return. The mortal self is constantly trying to build a false sense of worthiness, an image of being worthy, which it then builds up to the point where it believes it is acceptable in the eyes of God because of all these outer conditions. It thinks that by doing outer things for God, God will have to let it into the kingdom.

The mortal self is born from the illusion of separation, and therefore it uses the consciousness of separation in an attempt to create an illusion of oneness with God. Of course, that which is born of separation can never come back to oneness. The mortal self is trying to build an image, a golden calf, that is worthy in the eyes of God, and it uses the things of this world to build up that image. It is attempting to say that if it adds together enough “things” built from the duality consciousness, it will be worthy, it can build a tower that reaches into the heavens. No matter how many zeros you add together, they will never add up to one—the oneness with God.

This is an essential key to freeing yourself from the prison of the mortal self. The Conscious You can become whole by accepting its oneness with God whereas the mortal self can never do this. It is seeking to please the remote god, the idol of its own making. The Conscious You simply needs to stop dancing around this golden calf and climb the mountain of God, the mountain of self-transcendence.

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The basic frame of mind of the mortal self is that it constantly feels threatened. It feels threatened because it is trying to uphold an illusion, an illusion of worthiness and authority that gives it a sense of security. The mortal self feels that as long as it can convince the Conscious You to believe in its illusion, it will be in control, it will survive. Your mortal self knows that if you were to separate yourself from its illusion, you would stop feeding it energy and thus it would die. To the mortal self, upholding its illusion is literally a matter of life and death. Unfortunately for the mortal self – and fortunately for you – everything in the material world is constantly seeking to tear down its illusion, its false sense of security. To understand the basic dilemma of the mortal self, consider the following:

The Creator is constantly transcending itself. God is the River of Life that is constantly in the process of becoming more.

The duality consciousness is separated from God, and it is not part of the River of Life.

The duality consciousness and your mortal self cannot fathom that God is constantly transcending itself. It cannot experience God’s Being directly. It can know God only by creating a mental image of God.

The mortal self believes God is perfect, and it interprets perfection as something that could not and would not need to change. It believes God is static and it is seeking to create a non-changing image of God. This image inevitably becomes a graven image that will trap you in a limited view of God.

God has given you free will so you have a right to adopt a graven image of God. Such an unchanging image automatically sets you outside the River of Life, and as long as you hold on to that image, you cannot inherit your Father’s kingdom. You cannot have the abundant life.

Because God loves you unconditionally, he does not want you to remain outside his abundance forever. He has designed the material universe in such a way that it always seeks to break down the illusion that you are separated from God. Every aspect of the material universe is designed to challenge the dualistic illusions created by the mortal self.

The primary challenge to a dualistic world view comes from the duality consciousness itself. This state of consciousness is based on two relative opposites that seek to cancel out each other. If your mortal self goes too far into one relative extreme, its world view will inevitably be challenged by the opposite extreme.

Once again, there is a subtle distinction that cannot be grasped by the intellect but can be understood by the heart. When the Conscious You sees itself as one with the River of Life, you know with absolute certainty that God is the ultimate reality behind all surface appearances. You know that the Mother Light can take on any form, but only the forms that express the immaculate concept are ultimately real. Imperfect forms have only a temporary existence, and they have no actual power over you. They are based on an illusion, and if you do not accept the reality of this illusion, it cannot influence you. The prince of this world will come and have nothing in you—because you know that the prince of this world is not real.

When you are in the reality of God, you know there are no opposites, you know that nothing could ever oppose the reality of God. Only God has ultimate reality, and in God there are no divisions, no contradictions. When you partake of the duality consciousness – the knowledge of good and evil – you lose the direct experience of God’s Being, of God’s reality. You now enter a world – a house of mirrors – in which everything is defined by two relative opposites, such as good and evil. Your mortal self is born of separation from the River of Life, and – by its very nature – it has an absolute belief in the reality of relative good and evil. It believes both are real but that one can destroy the other.

The inevitable consequence is that if you believe relative good is real, you will also believe that relative evil is real. If you create a graven image of God, you will inevitably have to create a graven image of the opposite of your relative god, namely the devil. In the world of duality, nothing can exist without an opposite. As long as you believe your relative image of God is real, you will also believe your image of the devil is real. You believe the devil is as real as God, that evil is as real as good. In a sense, it is true that relative evil is as “real” as relative good, but when you step outside the duality consciousness, you see that only God is real and all that is less than God’s absolute good is unreal. It has no objective existence but exists only in the minds of self-aware beings who are trapped in the duality consciousness. It has power over you only if you give it power, if you give it “reality” in your world view.

Consider the consequences of this. When you step into the world of duality, you automatically encounter a threat to everything you believe. This is inevitable because everything has an opposite. You cannot define an idea, a belief system, that will not be instantly opposed by its opposite. If you define something as good, there will instantly be an opposite that you then see as evil. Because you believe both relative opposites are real, you think it is possible for something to oppose and destroy your world view. You believe the devil is real and has the power to threaten you, and therefore you will feel threatened by anything that opposes your world view. This is why the mortal self constantly feels threatened, and this is why many religious people feel threatened by the devil.

My beloved, it is a great burden to my heart that so many people are afraid of the devil, are afraid of evil. Consider how different people deal with this threat. Many Christians fear the devil to such an extent that they dare not even consider ideas that are beyond their literal interpretation of the Bible. They would not even dare to read this course, fearing it is of the devil. Many New Age people are open to new ideas, but they deal with the threat of evil by ignoring it, by refusing to even consider it. Both types of people are trapped in the pattern of running away from something that seems threatening to their sense of security. They both fear evil, and their fear prevents them from taking a closer look at it. If they were willing to overcome their fear and take a closer look, they would realize that evil only exists in the realm of duality. The ultimate way to overcome evil is to separate the Conscious You from the mortal self. When you clear your four lower bodies of dualistic beliefs, the prince of this world will have nothing in you and thus you need not fear anything in this world.

Jesus, the Buddha and other spiritual leaders had no fear of the devil because they had internalized what I have just told you. They had become enlightened to the reality that there is no opposite to God, there is no opposite to Christ truth, to the Buddha nature. The mind of anti-christ thinks it is in opposition to the truth of Christ, but it is simply outside of, disconnected from, the reality of Christ. Anti-christ is trapped in its own world, a world that is inescapably dominated by two relative opposites. Anti-christ is not in opposition to Christ, but in opposition to its own relative version of Christ truth. Evil is not in opposition to the absolute good of God. Evil is a relative force that is in opposition to relative good. The reality of God and the truth of Christ are above all relative opposites. A Christed being is never pulled into the ongoing, dualistic struggle between two relative opposites. A Christed being never takes sides in the human power struggle, which is why the devil could not tempt Jesus. A Christed being stays true to the one vision, the single-eyed vision, of the Christ mind. He or she realizes that the kingdom of God will not be manifest by having relative good replace or eradicate relative evil. The kingdom of God will be manifest only when a critical mass of people rise above the entire dualistic struggle.

 

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