Lecture by Kim Michaels, April 17, 2009 in Lourdes.
I felt I should relate an experience I had in Holland. We had an interesting discussion one day, where one person was saying he had thought about whether he was a bad person or not. He was asked, “So what if you are?” And the way he reacted was, “Well then at least I would have certainty about it instead of worrying about it.”
And I understood that, because the reality is that we cannot overcome our fears until we face them. So if we have a fear about a certain condition, and the condition is so terrible we actually try to run away from even acknowledging we have the fear, then we cannot face the fear and so we cannot overcome it. So we are stuck in this no-man’s land of wondering, “Am I really a bad person? Am I this or am I that?”
Afterwards, the person came over to me, and we ended up having a discussion. And I don’t think he is a bad person whatsoever, but I could see in the discussion that there was something about his self-image and his perspective—that he was looking at himself and the world from a certain vantage point.
And so, my belief is always that it is a shift in perception that is needed before we are free. So for a long time I was trying to change his perception, give him a different perspective, get him to snap out of his way of looking at it, and get him to look at it from a different perspective. I was doing everything I could think of. And then, after a half hour or so, it finally dawned on me “I am not getting anywhere!”
So, I did not know what to do at that point. So I just centered in my heart and what came to me was that I said, “You know what? Enough of this, I want you to know that I am not trying to change you at all. I love and accept you unconditionally for who you are right now.”
And then he said, “Well, but that makes me feel like this…” And I said, “Good. I love and accept you unconditionally for feeling that way.” And he said, “Yeah, but now I am feeling like this.” And I said, “Good. I love and accept you unconditionally for feeling this way.” And after we had done this I do not know how many times, he finally said, “Oh, now I see I am going around in circles.” And so, I am sure he has processed it since, but at the time, it did not really change his perception. And I, of course, had to be true to my word and say, “I am not trying to change you anymore.” And so, what I took away or learned from that experience is that there are two kinds of people on the spiritual path:
You see people who are not yet willing to look at themselves and the beam in their own eye. And so, they are trying to avoid seeing that maybe they are not perfect or maybe they are not good enough. In a sense, they might seem prideful or arrogant sometimes, but the reality is they have very low self-esteem. So they are trying to use the spiritual path and teachings to build up their self-esteem. Because you actually have to have a certain amount of self-esteem before you can look at the beam in your own eye and consider that maybe you are not perfect or that maybe you need to change.
But most of you are more than willing to look at the beam in your own eye, and have been doing so for a long time, even to the point where you are beating yourself up and you feel you are at fault and there is this and that wrong with you. So the consciousness is that you are so willing to look for what is wrong with you that you are always looking for what is wrong with you.
And so, after I had been pondering this, it suddenly hit me, and here is the statement that came to me: The only thing that is wrong with you is the consciousness that there is something wrong with you.
See, here is the trick. We are conscious beings, extensions of God. We are, in our inner beings, pure. We are as pure now as when we were originally created by God. God cannot create anything impure. But we have taken on a certain belief – and now listen carefully – we all have a certain belief that there is a specific thing that is wrong with us. And we are trying to fix the thing that is wrong with us, in order to get back to the purity. So we are focused on the specific flaw, but it is not the flaw that is wrong. What is wrong is the belief that we are not pure in the first place—that there is something wrong with us in the first place.
This is what the ego and the false teachers want us to do. They want us to focus on that outer thing, so we think that if we can fix that, then we are going to be perfect and God is going to have to accept us. But God has already accepted us. In the beginning, God created us—and then what does it say? “And he saw that it was good.”
He created us good. And in God’s mind, we are good. We are as pure as when we were created. But there is a consciousness in the world that says we are not good. But that consciousness has camouflaged itself by saying, “We are not good because of this or that condition in the world, this or that standard that we are not living up to.” And that takes our attention away from the reality that we can never become impure.
And that is why the masters have given us the concept of the conscious self, who is what it was created to be. But in your mind – right now – you are who you think you are.
So look at it this way: There are all these kinds of consciousnesses created in the world by the illusion of separation or the consciousness of duality. It is almost like you are walking into a theater right now, and they have these little metal racks that are holding up the costumes for the different roles you can play in the theater. And you can choose to take on whatever costume you want, if that is what you want to experience.
In a sense, we are created as conscious beings, and as conscious beings we experience. That is what we are here for—to experience. And God has given us complete free will. We can choose to create any experience we want for ourselves, and God loves and accepts us no matter what we experience. He has given us free will and told us we are free to experience whatever we want to experience. He has given us the material universe, which is a mirror that reflects back to us whatever we project out that we want to experience.
And so, what we have done is we have said, “Oh, I want to experience this,” or “I am putting on this costume.” But then comes the falsity – the serpent – which says, “Oh, there is something wrong with you for putting on that costume. You should not have done that, you have fallen from grace, you have eaten the forbidden fruit, now there is something wrong with you.”
But the costume—let us say it is Hamlet; you are in a costume for Hamlet. So you focus on that character of Hamlet and you say, “What is wrong with Hamlet? What did he do wrong? I have got to fix Hamlet! I have got to fix him.”
But the point is, you will never get out of the costume by trying to fix what is wrong with the costume. You will only get out of it by realizing, “This is not who I am. I have just taken on the costume. And there was nothing wrong with me taking on the costume. God gave me free will. I took on the costume because I wanted to experience what it was like to see the world from inside that costume, that state of consciousness. I wanted to know what it is like to play that role in the ‘All The World’s a Stage’ play—the drama of life. What does it feel like to see the world from that particular vantage point?”
There is nothing wrong with it. But if you recognize that you actually no longer enjoy having that experience, you no longer enjoy seeing the world from that vantage point, then you have to realize that if you want to get out of it, you do not get out of it by trying to fix what is wrong with the costume, by fixing the problem or the outer condition. You get out of it by realizing, “This is not who I am. This is just something I have taken on. And just as God gave me the right to take it on, he has given me the right to take it off any time, and to leave it behind!”
And here is where you have to recognize the Alpha and Omega interplay. The Alpha of the illusion is that there is something wrong with you for taking on the costume. The Omega is that in order to get out of it, you have to pay a price. You have to suffer enough, you have to pay a penance. You have to balance your karma. In other words—you cannot just walk away from it. That is what the ego is trying to tell you.
Because the ego was created out of taking on the illusion. And it is going to die when you take off the costume and walk away. And it does not want to die, so it is telling you, “You cannot just walk away from me! You have sinned. You have to pay back your sins, Jesus has to pay back your sins. You have to pay back your karma. You have to beat yourself up for three hundred and fifty-seven embodiments before you can be good enough to walk away from me.
That is the lie!
Someone was asking me about karma and she said, “But maybe I have to be in the situation I am in because I have karma from a past life and I did something wrong.” And that is the old traditional teaching about karma, and I have recently received a higher teaching on it.
What is karma? It is like everything else in the material universe. Everything is an image that is projected onto the Ma-ter light. So what happened was – maybe in a past life – you were a princess who abused your power and treated people badly. But what really happened was that you took on a self-image of yourself as a bad person. And now you think you have to beat yourself up and punish yourself, until you have punished yourself enough that you no longer need to feel you are a bad person. Because now you have suffered ten times more than the people you made suffer, so you must be okay or fixed now. So again, do you see how this projection from outside ourselves mirrors back our belief that we can’t just walk away from our role?
You see, what it says in Mother Mary’s Eightfold Healing Rosary is that everything in the material universe is an image that is projected onto the Ma-ter light many times every second. Your karma is not some external force. Your karma is the image in your consciousness that you are projecting onto the Ma-ter light hundreds of times a second. So you do not see it, because you never can see the film strip or the individual picture, you just see it as a blur. So you do not see that you are projecting this, and that is why you are susceptible to the illusion that this is a continuous movement, that it is something coming from outside of yourself.
And so, I guess that was all, because all of a sudden, the flow just stopped.
Copyright © 2009 by Kim Michaels