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Ascended Master Nada through Kim Michaels, June 7, 2025. This dictation was given the conference in Seoul, South Korea: Being the Living Christ in everyday life.

I AM the Ascended Master Nada, and from my perspective on the Sixth Ray, Christhood is all about service. Other masters have talked about coming to that point where you need to start serving, but what Serapis Bey and Hilarion were talking about was a phase where you are actually focusing on service as a way to trick your mind away from the self-service of the ego. That is why you focus on some kind of cause that is beyond yourself.

As you get beyond this phase and mature in your view of service, you get to the higher level of integration with the Christ mind, where service is not something you decide to take on. Service is an expression of who you are at this level of consciousness. As you go even a little bit beyond the 96th level and begin to attune to the Christ mind, you are seeing yourself as a connected being, as an expression of the Christ mind. Then you begin to see that other people are also expressions of the Christ mind, because you experience that the Christ mind is your source, and truly that means the Christ mind is the source of everyone else. Therefore, it simply becomes natural for you to focus on serving other people as an expression of who you are.

Serving from a self-centered perspective

How do you get to that point where you can serve from the level of the Christ and not be colored by some of the desires of the ego? Naturally, the ego can take the concept of service and use it to glorify itself. You can look at many people throughout the world, throughout the ages, and see that some people have dedicated their lives to what seems like a selfless form of service. They are serving some cause, serving other people, they are engaged in charity work or whatever it may be, and so they are providing a service to society and to other people. If you look into the psychology of some of these people, you will see that they actually have an often unconscious, subconscious, unrecognized ambition where they think that they will get something for themselves by doing service.

Many religious people, for example, think that by engaging in service they will somehow balance karma, gain favor with God, be looked upon favorably by Christ, and therefore, their salvation is guaranteed. Others have a sense that they have been great sinners in the past and they are seeking to compensate for this. Others think that somehow, they will receive some recognition for their service, perhaps here on Earth or perhaps even from God or Jesus or whomever they see as their spiritual figure, their spiritual idol.

In order to reach the level that I am talking about, where service becomes a natural expression of who you are, what do you need to go through? Well, this is where the second aspect of the Sixth Ray is Peace. You need to attain a certain state of inner peace, for you will see that when people are serving from the motivation of the ego, they are not completely at peace. They may seem harmonious on the outer, but on the inner they are not at peace because they are seeking to attain something. Many of the people who seem to be selflessly serving, have a certain goal for their service. They want to see a certain result of it, and that, of course, means they are constantly at a deficit because they never really see the result they are hoping for. This means that they are under stress and therefore, not at peace.

How to attain inner peace

Now, naturally you will ask: “Well, how do I then attain this inner peace?” As always, as you well know (those who have studied our teachings over these last several years), part of the answer is: Resolve the psychology, resolve the subconscious selves that pull you out of peace. What are those subconscious selves? Well, they are the ones who are seeking to achieve some impossible task.

We have said that the ego was created when you went into separation. We have said that the ego was created out of lack and therefore has an existential lack. You might say, if you look at the ego from an energetic perspective, what is the ego at the purely energetic level? It is comparable (not exactly the same of course, but comparable) to a black hole that pulls everything into it without ever being filled. Well, that is the ego. It is constantly pulling on you, on other people, on the world, constantly seeking recognition, validation. What is the ego really seeking? It is seeking immortality. It is seeking to become an immortal being so that it does not have to die.

Now, we have from time to time talked about these non-dual teachers who claim or teach that the ultimate goal of spiritual growth is the death of any sense of self. What they are essentially saying is that somehow the undifferentiated, whether they call it Brahman or infinite awareness, manifested itself as you, as your sense of self, but the goal of this is that your self eventually dies and is no more. Well, they have this half right, but it is the ego that has to die, not the individual self.

Is the ego an individual self?

As we have explained many times, you are created as an individual self, namely your I AM Presence, with a unique individuality. The purpose of your existence is transcending your sense of self, growing in self-awareness until you reach the Creator Consciousness. The I AM Presence was not created to die and will never die, but the ego was created out of separation. It was not created by God, by the ascended masters, therefore, it is not an extension of the Creator’s Being.

You created the ego, not consciously, but you created the ego by going into separation. You might say, what is the difference between the individual self and the ego or the separate self? Well, you can say, from a certain perspective, that the individual self you have at any moment is a structure that gives you a certain experience. Therefore, you can say that your I AM Presence is an evolving self, but at any time it has a certain sense of self that gives it a certain experience. The Conscious You has created a certain sense of self in order to take embodiment and it has also created the ego as a separate self and that gives it a certain experience.

The ego was created essentially to give you a certain experience, namely as a separate being. It may seem as if, well, the ego is just like the individual self. You created the ego, but once this has come into being, it has a rudimentary consciousness, survival instinct, a sense that it exists. Why shouldn’t the ego be able to become immortal? Could you not say that by creating the ego you have just created an extension of yourself? Since you are an extension of the I AM Presence and the I AM Presence is an extension of the greatest being, why shouldn’t the ego be able to become immortal?

You see, you, the Conscious You—you have the ability to create a separate self and endow it with some consciousness, but not self-awareness. You have been given self-awareness as a gift from the Creator, an extension of the Creator’s Being, but you have not been given the ability or the authority to extend that further. You can raise up your sense of self, but you cannot create a separate self and give that life, give that self-awareness. Why? Because what gives life, self-awareness, is the Christ mind and it is the Mind of Oneness. You cannot create a separate self out of the Christ mind. You can only create a separate self outside the Christ mind.

The Christ mind and the separate self

This may again be one of these contradictions, seemingly. Have we not said: “Without him was not anything made that was made?” Any form is made out of the Christ consciousness. Yes, even the ego is made out of the Christ consciousness, but not with Christ consciousness, not with self-awareness.

The ego has a survival instinct. It wants to grow and become more powerful, for it has some sense that it wants to extend its life. Going back to my question: “What is the difference between the individual self and the ego and why could not the ego become immortal?” Is not the individual self, the I AM Presence, the Conscious You created to give you a certain experience? Is not the ego created to give you a certain experience? Yes, the ego is created to give the Conscious You the experience of what it is like to be in a state of separation. As we have said, separation cannot come into oneness, cannot be created out of oneness, and therefore, it cannot become immortal.

The purpose of allowing the Conscious You to experience separation is so that you can experience the different facets of separation that you need to experience, until you come to that point—not an outer decision but an inner realization: “I have had enough of experiencing separation.” Then you can, in full awareness of what you are doing, voluntarily give up any desire to experience separation. That is when you ascend and become an immortal being.

You see, the individual self is created to give you the experience of growing towards higher and higher levels of oneness with your Creator. The ego is created to give you the experience of separation so that you can experience the full range of what is possible with free will, and therefore, come to the point where you voluntarily and consciously decide: “I have experienced enough of separation. Now I want to focus on experiencing higher levels of oneness.” You do this voluntarily, and therefore, as an ascended master you have permanently left behind any desire to experiment with separation.

The ego is only created to give you a temporary experience, and that is why it cannot become immortal. As I said, the ego has a survival instinct, and therefore, it seeks to become immortal, it seeks to compensate for the loss of your connection to your higher self by doing, attaining, owning or controlling something in this world. Because it thinks that there is something in the unascended sphere that is the key to immortality, the fountain of youth perhaps.

The ego’s impossible quest for immortality

You see something profound. What I have just explained, you could not explain to the ego. We could say, in a certain way, that the ego thinks it can become immortal, but it thinks this based on its limited vision. It cannot grasp that immortality is only possible in oneness with Christ, because the ego cannot fathom oneness with Christ. It was created out of separation. How can it fathom oneness?

You cannot make the ego see what I have just explained. The ego will forever (or rather, as long as you allow it to exist) be on this impossible quest to attain immortality through the things of this unascended sphere in which nothing can be immortal. Why can nothing be immortal? Well, because no thing can stand still. There is immortality, yes, through the Christ Consciousness, yes, but what is the Christ Consciousness? Constant ongoing self-transcendence. Only in self-transcendence is there immortality, unless you go into the Allness where the equation is different. In a world of form that is evolving, there is immortality only in self-transcendence.

No thing can transcend itself in an unascended sphere, and the ego is not seeking to transcend itself. It is seeking to make its sense of self permanent, immortal, by stopping it once it has reached what the ego conceives as an ultimate state. The fallen beings think that they can elevate their separate selves to this ultimate status, which is always right around the corner, and has been so since they fell in the fourth sphere or the fifth or the sixth. They think that when they reach this ultimate status, God will have to grant them immortality. You cannot explain this to a fallen being, as long as they are in the fallen consciousness.

Now, the fallen being, which has a Conscious You, has the potential to switch back into oneness, but the ego does not. The ego of a fallen being, no matter how powerful and sophisticated it may seem, also cannot become immortal. The ego cannot see that it is on an impossible quest, but you, the Conscious You, can come to see it. When you come to see it, not only see it, but experience the reality of it by experiencing the life of the Christ mind, then you, the Conscious You, can let go of this impossible quest to reach an ultimate state in this world. When you let go of this impossible quest, you can attain peace of mind.

The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Being the Living Christ in everyday life.