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Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels, September 27, 2018. This dictation was given at a conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I AM the ascended master that you know as Mother Mary, and it is my great joy and my great privilege to open this conference. Of course, when I say “open,” you have already opened the conference by opening up your hearts to share with each other. Some of you, my beloved, have the question in your mind: “But we haven’t given an invocation yet so how can we be ready for a dictation?” What is the purpose of giving an invocation? Is it not to release light? And have you not released light when you shared so freely of your sorrows, your trials, your joys, your experiences?

My beloved, we have given teachings now for a very long time, at least if you measure with just one lifetime, since we started this dispensation of progressive revelation, of messengers who could speak the Word. You can look at these teachings, as some of you have done. You can study them. You can seek to understand them, as many students have done—and many students have grown in understanding. Yet my beloved, what is it we truly want to give to you? Is it understanding? Well, we do want to give you understanding but we realize very well that understanding will only get you so far on the path. It is, as has been said so many times: You cannot solve a problem with the state of consciousness that created the problem, you cannot get out of the dualistic state of mind through the reasoning, analytical faculties of the mind.

When students first find the teachings of the ascended masters, they often do so because they have questions that were never answered by the previous religions or teachings they had been exposed to. They want to understand, they want to have that intellectual understanding of some aspect of life. There is nothing wrong with this, but this will only get you to a certain point.

You see this in the story of Jesus’ life where he encountered the scribes and the Pharisees who were so advanced in their intellectual understanding that they could not recognize the Living Christ when he stood before them. In fact, their sophisticated, intellectual, analytical reasoning blocked them from actually having the experience that was the highest potential of encountering the Living Christ. Namely, that they had an inner experience that there was something higher than their present level of consciousness.

How to tell other people about the path

What do we of the ascended masters really want to give to you? We want to give you that experience. Surely, many of you have had that experience while listening to a dictation or even reading it because you tuned in to our Beings, to our Presences. Do you not realize, my beloved, that when you talk about, as some of you did, reaching out to other people, telling other people about your path, you sometimes have a tendency to think that you need to give them understanding that they can grasp intellectually? But what is it you first of all need to give them? You need to give them an experience of your being, of your presence, of what you have internalized on the path, which means that you are at a higher level on the path than they are at. You are at a higher state of consciousness than they are at and if you can share that with them, then they will get something from you that they could never get if you tried to only give them the intellectual teaching.

Do you not realize that the session you had earlier, where you were so willing to share from the heart, this is the most powerful way to approach other people? To be willing to be open, to be willing to even be vulnerable, to be very honest and very direct about your own path: What you have learned, what you have experienced, what you have internalized. When they sense that you are genuine, many will be moved that would not be moved by the intellectual teaching. My beloved, some may still give you a negative reaction. This is where you have come to a point now on the path – and I include all of you who are here and all who have studied these teachings and been willing to open yourself to them – where you are ready to step up and say: “I’m not going to let those who are negative cause me to close myself off. I’m going to focus on those who are positive, who are open. I’m going to focus on those people that I can reach, those people I can help. I’m not going to be concerned about those I cannot help, I’m not going to even react to them.”

If you find that you do react to them, then you follow what the messenger explained. He looked in himself: “Why am I reacting to these negative people? What is it in me?” If you can come to the point of resolving that, you will feel that now you are free to be who you are, to share who you are. This will transform people more than anything else.

Being an open door for the masters

What is it we have trained the messenger to do? We say he is an open door and, yes, he is an open door for many teachings that you can grasp with the intellect, but he is also an open door that allows us to shine some measure of our Beings, our light, through him so that you can experience it. But how many people can this messenger meet in the rest of his lifetime? Certainly, not as many people as all of you can meet. How are we going to reach many people on earth if there is only one person who can be an open door for us sharing our Presences through them? Therefore, we are not looking for all of you to do specifically what the messenger does and take dictations and bring forth teachings. We are looking – certainly – for all of you to be able to share you own presence, and in sharing your own presence also allowing us to shine through you. You all have the capacity to be the open door in that way.

Some of you may do other things as well, I am not putting a limitation on it that this is the only thing you can do. This is certainly something you can strive to do and that most of you are much closer to doing than you might think. As you can see, you could stand up and share. If you do it more times, if you work on your own reaction to doing it or having done it, you can get to this point of being an open door. It is not a matter of always (although you may do it sometimes) standing in front of a group of people. It is also one-on-one or with a few friends where you can share something from your heart that is beyond mere intellectual understanding.

How can you do this? You can do it by, as the messenger explained, working on this sense of ownership, the image of yourself. You can do it when you are setting other people free because you have set yourself free. You are setting them free to react any way they want because you have already set yourself free. However they react, you are not going to have a negative reaction to it. You do not own them, they do not own you but you are sharing.

What it truly means to give

You see my beloved, there is a very important concept to ponder because most people on earth have a distorted view of what it means to give. They think that if you give something to somebody, they either own the thing you are giving them or they own you because you are obligated to give them something else tomorrow. When you come to the point where you have set yourself free from the need to own other people, and you have accepted that nobody else can own you, then you can freely give. That is the real meaning behind Jesus’ statement: “Freely ye have received, freely give.”

How have you freely received? Because Jesus was free when he gave to his disciples. He did not have the sense that: “They are my disciples, I own them.” He freely gave without any strings attached, without any expectations, any demands, any sense of ownership. What he wanted his disciples to do was to then give that gift to others in the same freedom, freedom from ownership.

“The prince of this world cometh and has nothing in me.” How can you achieve that state of freedom? Well, you cannot let the prince of this world own you. How can you come to a point where the prince of this world has nothing in you whereby he can own you? You can come to that point only when you have given up the desire to own anything on earth. As long as there is something on earth that you want to own, then the prince of this world has something in you—and he will use it to exercise ownership over you.

The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Spiritual Solutions to America’s Problems.