Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

There is a very pragmatic reason behind the fact that a non-dualistic teaching is so often transformed into a dualistic religion, namely that the dualistic forces want to get energy from religious people. A non-dualistic teaching will make it very difficult for this force to steal energy from its followers. Thus, the dualistic forces must seek to pervert a non-dualistic teaching by inserting very subtle dualistic ideas. Thereby, they can eventually turn a non-dualistic teaching into a dualistic religion without the followers being aware of what has happened. The effect is that the followers believe they are following a true religion – perhaps the only true religion – yet almost everything they do within that framework gives spiritual energy to the dualistic force that has managed to pervert the religion. Let us look at the most obvious differences between non-dualistic teachings and dualistic religions:

A non-dualistic teaching describes the reality that God is your source. You have a spark of God’s Being within you, and therefore you have the potential to attain oneness with your source. You can say with Jesus, “I and my Father are one.”

A dualistic religion portrays God as a remote being in the sky who is above and beyond his creation and thus inaccessible to you. There is a distance between you and God and thus you and God are in a dualistic relationship. Only very special people, such as Jesus, can attain oneness with God.

A non-dualistic teaching describes the reality that because God is your source, you can attain a direct inner contact with your own higher being, with your spiritual teacher and with God. In fact, it teaches you to let nothing come between you and God, to let no man take your crown (Revelation 3:11).

A dualistic religion says that you need someone or something from outside yourself to mediate between you and God. You need the outer religion and its leaders or at least an external savior.

A non-dualistic teaching describes the reality that God is a loving God who loves you unconditionally. Thus, it encourages you to build a personal relationship with God and God’s representatives (the spiritual hierarchy out of which you are an individualization), a relationship based on love. It also gives you intermediaries for helping you build this relationship, the Ascended Host, but we will neither do the work for you nor block your own growth.

A dualistic religion portrays God as an angry being in the sky, who is ready to condemn you for your mistakes and send you to hell if you do not obey his commands—as defined by the outer religion and its leaders. Thus, it teaches you to fear God and blindly obey the leaders of the outer religion, causing many people to build a relationship with God that is based on fear. This fear makes you a house divided against itself, for you are fearing what is truly your own higher being.

A non-dualistic teaching helps you attain inner communion with the spiritual realm, whereby you can know God’s law from within yourself. You can then begin to spontaneously follow that law because you experience that it is enlightened self-interest.

A dualistic religion teaches that you cannot know God’s law on your own. You can know it only through the outer religion, which has a monopoly on revelation from God. Thus, the law is inevitably portrayed as an external influence that is being forced upon you under the threat of going to hell. You do not follow God’s law out of love but out of fear.

A non-dualistic teaching helps you attain Christ discernment so you can know what is right and wrong from within your own higher being.

A dualistic religion claims that you cannot know right from wrong on your own. Therefore, you need an external authority to tell you what is right and wrong, namely the outer religion and its doctrines, rules and leaders. You should follow the outer religion rather than trust your own inner guidance.

A non-dualistic teaching describes the reality that by putting on the mind of Christ – by walking the Path of Oneness until you become one with the Christ mind and your own higher being – you can know the truth about God from within yourself.

A dualistic religion claims that because you are an incomplete being, you cannot know truth on your own. Human beings can know truth only through divine revelation. And only the leadership of the only true church can determine what is true revelation and what is false revelation.

A non-dualistic teaching describes the reality that you were originally created as an individualization of God. Thus, you have the potential to become all that God is by following the Path of Oneness. In other words, you will be saved not by following an outer religion but by following the inner Path of Oneness.

A dualistic religion teaches that you were created imperfect and incomplete – for example, that you are a sinner – and thus you can be saved only through the intercession of an external savior. That savior might be a spiritual being, such as Jesus, but you still need the outer religion in order to receive the salvation from this spiritual being. You simply cannot be saved without the outer religion.

A non-dualistic teaching describes the reality that as you walk the path of Christhood and become sufficiently mature, you need to follow your inner guidance, even if it conflicts with the outer guidance from an earthly institution or a spiritual teacher.

A dualistic religion claims that if you do not obey the doctrines, rules and leaders of the outer religion, you will not be saved.

A non-dualistic teaching describes the reality that in order to receive reliable inner guidance, you must strive to rise above the human ego. Thus, a non-dualistic teaching promotes Christ discernment.

A dualistic religion does not talk about the ego or Christ discernment. It encourages you to blindly follow the outer religion. It essentially says that you do not need to pull the beam – the ego – from your own eye. You can ignore that beam, for the outer religion will guarantee your salvation.

A non-dualistic teaching describes a path of love. You follow God’s law because you know it is in your own best interest to do so. It will make you more, and you love becoming more.

A dualistic religion seeks to motivate you through the fear of something bad happening to you, such as burning forever in a fiery hell. Thus, you should not seek to go beyond the level of a normal human being, you should not seek to become more, which effectively puts you on the path of becoming less (for if you do not multiply your talents, you slide downwards).

A non-dualistic teaching describes the reality that salvation is not a matter of the arbitrary and unknowable decisions of a remote God or some kind of miracle. It is solely a matter of applying God’s law so that you raise yourself above duality and put on the mind of Christ. This is a rational, scientific procedure, and although it involves creative decisions, anyone can follow it.

A dualistic religion traps you in the dualistic state of fearing the punishment of an angry God and hoping for a reward that is administered in mysterious ways, thus given to some while withheld from others based on unknowing and seemingly arbitrary decisions.

A non-dualistic teaching encourages you to ask questions beyond its outer teachings, for it knows that it is only by asking questions that you internalize the truth.

A dualistic religion strongly discourages any questions that cannot be answered by official doctrines. Such questions are portrayed as dangerous, often combined with the threat of damnation for those who continue to ask them and an eternal reward for those who blindly follow the outer religion. Thus, a dualistic religion gives you both a carrot and a stick, appealing to both pride and fear.

A non-dualistic teaching will do everything possible to take you to a point where you no longer need the teaching for your own growth—you have become spiritually self-sufficient. It will then give you opportunities to use your attainment to help other people.

A dualistic religion will want you to stay codependent on the outer organization and its leaders. It will seek to keep you at a certain level where you are not spiritually self-sufficient.

A non-dualistic teaching will promote leaders exclusively based on their spiritual attainment, meaning whether they have risen above their personal egos and the duality consciousness.

A dualistic religion will promote leaders based on their willingness to conform to the doctrines and rules set by the outer organization. Only those who are willing to put the outer organization above anything else – such as the truth – will attain positions of power.

A non-dualistic teaching is always open to the truth, and it will receive the truth no matter where it comes from.

A dualistic religion is not open to anything beyond its doctrines, for they are seen as absolute and infallible. Only those who have attained power can bring forth any new idea, and only if it preserves the status quo of the organization.

A non-dualistic teaching is open to change coming from below or from the outside, such as changes in society. Such a religion will adapt to changes in society so that it can continue to meet the spiritual needs of its members. It functions to serve its members, not to preserve the status quo.

A dualistic religion is not open to anything coming from beyond its leadership and tradition. The only people who can bring change are the ones in the established leadership, and you can only become part of leadership by demonstrating that you are committed to preserving the organization at all costs. Only those who have power can change the status quo, but you can attain power only by demonstrating that you don’t want to change the status quo. A dualistic religion becomes a closed circle.

A non-dualistic teaching is open to new revelation from the spiritual realm. Thus, the Ascended Host can take a non-dualistic teaching to a higher level, as the consciousness of humankind is raised.

A dualistic religion is not open to such input, claiming revelation stopped with the founder of the organization or can only be brought forth by the leaders and only within the mental box of past teachings and tradition. Nothing can overthrow the status quo.

A non-dualistic teaching is focused on bringing forth the highest possible expression of truth, and it is focused on serving people in the best possible way. It sees itself as a means to an end, namely the spiritual growth and ascension of its members.

A dualistic religion is focused on preserving or expanding itself, meaning the outer organization and the power of its leaders. It is focused on preserving and defending existing doctrine and it acts as if the members are there to serve the organization. It has become an end in itself and neither God, truth or people are more important than the organization.

A non-dualistic teaching has no superior leadership in the three lower levels of this sphere. It recognizes that the true spiritual leaders of humankind are the Ascended Host who are completely beyond the duality consciousness and thus only serve to set people free.

A dualistic religion is led by people in embodiment and by fallen beings and beasts in the mental and emotional realm.

A non-dualistic teaching has ultimate respect for free will. It needs nothing from its members, and thus they are free to leave at any time and with no penalty or threats.

A dualistic religion creates its own beast that needs to be fed by people’s energy. Thus, the beast seeks to suck people into the religion and makes it very difficult – physically, emotionally and mentally – for people to leave.

A non-dualistic teaching places great importance upon humility and the fact that all people are equal in the eyes of God.

A dualistic religion often raises its leaders far above the members but it also raises its own members above all other people. Thus, it appeals to and encourages pride and a sense of superiority (combined with the fear of hell, of course).

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

The quintessential problem with religion on planet Earth can be summarized very simply. Most people have an inner knowing – a knowing that transcends all outer teachings or scriptures – that God is ultimately and wholly good. Because of this knowing, people expect that a religion and its leaders – who claim to represent God on Earth – are sincerely striving to be ultimately and wholly good. So when they see behavior from religious leaders that is not good, people often lose their faith in religion. And if they do not differentiate between religion and God, they can also lose all faith in God. This has happened to billions of people over the course of history, and it is happening at an ever-increasing pace in modern society.

Destroying a person’s relationship with God is the greatest crime that can be committed in this and any other world. Yet I think we have now set the foundation, whereby we can shatter your illusion that religion is ultimately and wholly good without shattering your personal relationship with God—who is ultimately and wholly beyond any religion on Earth.

If you take a look at history and consider how human beings have been treating each other, you will see that one of the central questions raised by the human experience is man’s inhumanity to man. Why do people treat each other the way they do? Why do people do harmful things, why do they keep doing them over and over again, and why can’t they see what they are doing? Such questions often lead to another question, namely why God allows all this to happen. Why doesn’t God simply remove evil from this planet?

We can now see that these questions actually have reasonable and logical answers. The central realization that can open your mind to these answers is the very fact that the Earth was not designed to be a paradise. It was designed to be a mixed environment that gives home to a variety of lifestreams in different states of consciousness. The most important consequence of this fact is that there are lifestreams on Earth who are completely identified with the fallen consciousness, the consciousness of duality. Yet the vast majority of the people on Earth have been influenced by this state of consciousness, and it has affected every aspect of human existence.

When I say that the fallen consciousness has affected every aspect of human existence, I am not exaggerating. And the consequence is that religion has also been affected by the fallen consciousness and the beings who are choosing to embody it. This one realization – when you understand all of its ramifications – has the power to set you free from all religious thralldom. You can then claim your spiritual freedom, a freedom that religion often limits rather than expands. So let us take a look at precisely how religion has become a tool for reinforcing the fallen consciousness and its influence over humanity.

***

Based on my long experience as a spiritual teacher, I find it necessary to say that the truth I am about to reveal will often be met with fierce resistance from people on Earth. And ironically, it is usually met with the fiercest resistance from the kind of people one would think would be most open to the reality of God, namely the most spiritual and religious people. Those who are most concerned about religion and spirituality are often very reluctant to acknowledge a fundamental problem with religion in general and with their religion in particular. It is, consequently, important for us to discus why this is so.

The underlying cause is, as I stated above, that all spiritually aware people have an inner knowing that God is ultimately and wholly good. Thus, they feel that even though there is evil in this world, God will ultimately win and the movie about Earth will have a happy ending. These people are truly optimistic and they hold a positive vision for Earth and the future of humankind. Thus, they feel that even though there is much evil in human affairs, there must be some aspect of life where evil cannot get a foothold. There must be something on Earth that is sacred, that is above being corrupted by evil—and they would like that sanctuary to be religion, especially their own religion.

Spiritual people often feel that if there is nothing sacred on Earth, then how can they maintain the hope that good will ultimately win? And if they cannot maintain that hope, then how can they continue living on a planet with so much imperfection? It is as if they know life could and should be so much more than what they see around them, and this puts a constant burden on their hearts. They can endure that burden only because they have the hope that ultimately things will turn out for the best, and thus their sacrifice of being in this environment will not have been for naught. They simply cannot bear the thought that there is nothing sacred, that there is no aspect of human affairs where evil cannot triumph. And therefore, they often will not look at how evil influences religion.

I must tell you that even though I have maintained a neutral tone throughout this book, I very much feel the pain and anguish of the many spiritual and religious people who feel the way I have just described. I understand the dilemma that tortures their souls. Yet I must also tell you that it is precisely people’s unwillingness to take a critical look at religion that continues to give evil a foothold in religious movements.

Thus, it is my duty to tell you that unless the top ten percent of the most spiritually aware people on Earth will open their minds to reality, religion will not fulfill its potential on this planet. Allow me to show you that your basic expectation is true – namely that good will win out in the end – but that you have an incomplete understanding of how this will come about. And once you attain the complete understanding, you will be able to acknowledge the truth about religion without losing your hope that the Earth will rise above all evil. In fact, only if religion is set free from the influence of duality is there a realistic hope that this planet will rise above evil.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

We have now come full circle and can answer the question of why people do evil things and are unable to see what they are doing, often even justifying them as being good. Yet, once again, we are dealing with a subtle point that will require some contemplation and explanation.

Let us begin by reconsidering and clarifying our previous discussion about your origin as an individual being. Your origin goes back to an immortal being that exists in the spiritual realm. This being started its existence as an individualization of a being in a higher level of the spiritual realm, and this Chain of Being goes all the way back to the Creator. Your spiritual source was created in a particular sphere that was, at the time, the lowest level of the world of form, a sphere that was not yet filled with light. Your parent won its immortality by partaking in the process of raising its native sphere until it ascended and became part of the spiritual realm. When that victory was attained, a new sphere was created, and your spiritual parent desired to be part of the process of raising that sphere. Yet because it had already won mastery, it could not project the fullness of itself into the new sphere. If a number of beings with a high level of mastery entered a newly created sphere, they would instantly raise it, and that would defeat the purpose of allowing new co-creators to grow gradually. So your spiritual parent participated in the process by creating extensions of itself that were designed as one of the following types of beings:

New co-creators with a minimal sense of predefined identity and designed to embody within the new sphere.

New angels serving the new sphere from the spiritual realm or (in the case of your sphere) possibly from the identity realm.

Spiritual teachers working inside the new sphere (the parents themselves serve as teachers from the spiritual realm).

Beings with a more developed identity and mastery than a new co-creator. These are the beings who hold the counterbalance for fallen beings and are sent in an attempt to rescue them. Such a being does not have full mastery, but it has a much more defined identity than a new co-creator. It takes embodiment like a new co-creator, meaning that it must awaken to its true identity and can potentially fall.

No matter where you came from, you are an individualization of your spiritual parent, who incorporated its own experience and mastery in designing your individuality. You were designed as a unique individual, and although there are billions upon billions of individual beings in the world of form, there is no one who is exactly like you. You have a unique spiritual individuality and thus you have the opportunity to bring a gift to the world of form that no other being can bring.

For co-creators, their unique individuality was defined by their spiritual parents and incorporated into creating a spiritual being that I have called the I AM Presence. This I AM Presence is permanently residing in the spiritual realm, and it is an individual being within the greater whole of the spiritual parent. It was the I AM Presence that projected itself into the lower realm in which a co-creator first took form as an individual being (which might not have been the material universe). Since angels are not created to take embodiment in a lower realm, they have no I AM Presence. But if they fall, their spiritual parents do create the equivalent of an I AM Presence to hold an unerasable blueprint of their individuality. The spiritual being who represents the Divine Mother, which is currently the ascended master Mother Mary, then breaks her body to create a Christ self for the fallen angels that can serve as a mediator between their lower and higher beings. All beings who lose contact with the spiritual teacher have such a Christ self created, but for beings other than angels, this Christ self can be created by various masters who sponsor different groups of beings.

The core of your individual being, or lifestream, is the conscious self, which gives you a sense that you exist. For co-creators the task of the conscious self is to build an identity as a co-creator with God in its native realm. For angels the task of the conscious self is to expand the predefined identity and become an even better angel. In other words, the task of the conscious self is to build the identity through which a being expresses itself and serves in the world of form. The conscious self can then refine this identity as a result of your experiences.

In the beginning, all newly embodied beings were tutored by a spiritual teacher whose task was to help them build a sense of identity that was a combination of two elements. One was the individuality anchored in the I AM Presence. By reconnecting to this spiritual identity, a being would gain a framework in which it could build its own sense of identity based on choices made by the conscious self. We might say that as everything else, the identity has two aspects:

The Alpha aspect is the identity anchored in the I AM Presence, which has been predefined by the spiritual parent.

The Omega aspect is the identity a being builds as it expresses itself in the sphere in which it resides.

If you have harmony between the two aspects, you will feel ultimately fulfilled and at peace. You will be one being, a whole being – as opposed to being a house divided against itself (Mark 3:25) – and thus you can complete the Path of Oneness, whereby your total identity – a combination of the Alpha and Omega aspects – becomes immortalized and can ascend to the spiritual realm. It is the task of your spiritual teacher to help you build this identity on your own. In other words, the teacher is not trying to force you or manipulate you into building a particular type of identity. However, the teacher is trying to guide you toward having harmony between the Alpha and Omega aspects, which is the only way you can become immortalized.

The teacher is also trying to help you see that becoming immortalized means that your lower sense of identity, your Omega identity, comes into complete harmony with the laws of God and your spiritual identity. Take note that this does not mean you have no freedom to define your Omega identity. You have great freedom, but in order to attain wholeness, you must exercise that freedom within the parameters set by your Alpha identity. The Father and Mother aspects of your Being must come together in harmony before new life – the immortal you, representing the Son aspect of God (regardless of your physical sex) – can be born.

We might compare this to driving a car. You have certain traffic laws that guide how you can drive, but if you follow the laws, you can go anywhere the road will take you. As you started out building your identity, you did not have a clear understanding of the laws of God or your Alpha identity, so you created an Omega identity that was not in harmony with your higher being. For you to become immortalized, this identity must be spiritually reborn and brought into harmony with the upper part of the figure-eight flow of your total Being. The reason is that only beings who have passed the test of selflessness can become immortal beings, as God obviously would not want a selfish being to become immortal.

There did come a point when your teacher had to give you the opportunity to make the choice as to whether you would consciously choose to align yourself with your spiritual identity. You had to give up the sense of identity you had created during your neophyte phase and be reborn into oneness with your true identity. As I have tried to explain, this was not something that was forced upon you from without. It was truly your own higher will to come into this wholeness rather than remaining in the divided state that can only cause suffering. Obviously, your ego is born from a separation between your higher and lower being and can only see the will of your higher being as coming from outside itself. So it is up to the conscious self to overcome the illusion of the ego. This is the choice between defining your identity based on the mind of Christ – who alone knows your spiritual identity – or the mind of anti-christ, that can never know your true identity.

***

In the first three spheres that were created in the world of form, all beings successfully passed this initiation and became immortalized beings. Yet in the fourth sphere a group of beings rebelled against the very process itself. They refused to bring their Omega identities into alignment with their Alpha identities. They refused to bring the will of their conscious selves into alignment with the will of their own spiritual selves (or for angels, with the beings who created them). Thus, instead of creating a sense of identity based on the Christ mind – becoming one with all life – they created an Omega identity based on the mind of anti-christ. Thereby, they set their Omega identities apart from their Alpha identities and from all other parts of life. In other words, what these beings created was a separate sense of identity, and because they all rebelled for the same reason, they created a superstructure that became what I have described as a separate mind, entity or beast.

As the process of the fall continued, other separate or dualistic identities were created, and there are now a number of them that have been reinforced by many beings. My point here is that when the first beings rebelled, there was no separate identity, no identity based on the mind of anti-christ. Yet after the first such identity had been created, it now became easier for beings to fall. For co-creators the problem was, as I explained earlier, that many of them refused to take command over their lives because they did not want to make their own decisions. Co-creators were allowed to do this for a season, but there came a point when they had to make a decision. And once a fallen identity had been created, it now became possible for co-creators to choose to enter into that state of identity instead of building their own separate identity. For angels the problem was that they became judgmental and rigid, which also caused them to refuse to self-transcend. So they were likewise tempted to enter a predefined, separate identity.

When a being refused to step up and consciously create an identity based on the reality of Christ, it often did so because it seemed like too much hard work or too great a responsibility. It was easier for such a being to keep following someone else. Many students did want their teachers to continue to tell them what to do. Obviously, a true spiritual teacher must eventually refuse to play this role, and at that point, the student is faced with the inevitability of making its own choice.

Creating a separate sense of identity based on anti-christ was originally much more of an effort than building an identity based on the mind of Christ with the help of a spiritual teacher. Yet once the first separate, dualistic identities had been created, students had an alternative to doing the work themselves. They could simply choose to step into the mold of a predefined identity based on the mind of anti-christ. They could choose to partake of the “fruit” of such a predefined identity, which had knowledge of relative good and evil because it was created from the duality consciousness. Once beings had taken a bite of the forbidden fruit, they would no longer have to make their own decisions. They could simply flow with the stream of this new identity, just as a flock of sheep follow the lead sheep. So if a being did not want to follow a true teacher – who demanded that it step up to becoming self-sufficient – it could choose to follow a false teacher who would make no such demand. Thus, for beings who did not want to make their own decisions, following a false teacher seemed like much less of an effort. False teachers will gladly tell you what to do and never demand that you think for yourself, as they want you to follow them blindly. Furthermore, the dualistic identities are tied to the beasts behind them, and this creates an aggressive pull on the emotional and mental bodies of beings who have stepped into the gray zone of doubt. This pull is often the factor that overwhelms the minds of the beings who have become houses divided against themselves (Mark 3:25). Thus, it is the gravitational pull that makes it seem like following a false teacher is easier than following the true teacher, who – by the law of free will – can exert no pull on the student’s mind.

Once beings stepped into a predefined identity, an ego would be created for them, and this ego would then make most daily decisions so the conscious self could withdraw into a little “cave.” Also, there would be other beings who had long ago chosen the false identity and who could act as leaders. Finally, the gravitational force of the beast itself would pull them along. In other words, once beings had chosen to join the club, they could get away with not making their own decisions. What does it take to join such a club? Every separate sense of identity is based on a specific dualistic lie, so in order to enter that identity, you have to accept the lie—which, of course, is presented as an absolute truth. Here comes the essential point. Once you have accepted the lie, you must pledge to never question it again!

If you do decide to question the lie, then the combined force of your own ego, other fallen beings who accept the lie and the beast itself will do anything in their power to prevent you from seeing through and abandoning the lie. My point being that while entering the club requires no effort – can be done by making the decision not to make a decision – it requires an entirely different effort to get out of the club. An identity based on the mind of anti-christ is a club that has no provisions for allowing you to resign your membership. Once you are in, you are supposed to stay forever, continuing to feed your light to the beast, which has now become your new god.

Of course, you were not told all this before you joined, but the reason was that you had made the decision not to listen to your spiritual teacher, and thus you could not be warned. Instead of taking the Path of Oneness, you took what seemed to be the path of least resistance. Yet in reality it turned out to be the path of maximum resistance, the path of separation, the path of death. As they say when signing a contract, “Always read the fine print.” The only problem is that the mind of anti-christ provides no fine print, for the fine print is in the mind of Christ. Even fallen beings and beings blinded by duality have access to the Christ mind through their Christ selves, which is what Jesus described as the Comforter, “But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:26). The question is whether they will listen to this inner teacher or to an external teacher—even the “external” teacher of the ego.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

In this chapter we will take an in-depth look at why people commit selfish – or evil – acts and why they can actually believe such acts are justified, necessary, beneficial, for a higher good or their only option. This is truly the central mystery of human existence, as it has been known on planet Earth. And thus, understanding this mystery is one of the master keys to attaining spiritual freedom. We might say that feeling forced or compelled to commit evil acts or doing so without realizing it is an obvious violation of your spiritual freedom. I have already given you the keys that are needed in order to put together the big picture:

Everything is made from the Ma-ter Light.

The Ma-ter Light has consciousness, or rather, it is consciousness.

A self-aware being has the ability to imagine an image or belief and then use the power of the mind to superimpose that image upon the Ma-ter Light. Because the Ma-ter Light has consciousness, it can take on any form imposed upon it.

A self-aware being can construct mental images by using either the consciousness of Christ or the consciousness of anti-christ.

An image based on the consciousness of Christ will uplift all life by helping it become MORE, and this is the purpose of life itself. Such an image is sustainable because it is in oneness with the forward movement of life, the River of Life. An image based on the consciousness of anti-christ will cause all life to become less, which goes against the basic life force. Thus, such an image will eventually be broken down by the contracting force of the Mother that is built into the Ma-ter Light.

We now see that when an image is superimposed upon the Ma-ter Light through the consciousness of duality, that image will not instantly be erased. It will continue to exist for some time, which has the purpose of giving beings an opportunity to learn by experiencing the consequences of their creative efforts. Thus, whatever you co-create, you will inevitably experience. However, we now need to take this one step further and understand that because the Ma-ter Light has consciousness, what beings create can take on a life of its own.

To explain this, let us look at the creative process that I described earlier. We have seen that there is the spiritual realm, in which there is no room for darkness or evil, and there is a sphere that is set aside from the void but still has a mixture of light and darkness. The lower sphere has entered the process of ascending, leading toward that sphere becoming part of the spiritual realm. In other words, in the past some of the spheres that are now in the spiritual realm were in much the same state as your sphere is in today. As the intensity of light increased in those spheres, the beings in them began to face the initiation I described earlier, namely that they had to overcome their innocent ignorance and begin to consciously create a higher sense of identity based on the Christ mind. Some of these beings refused to do so, and instead they entered into a state of willful ignorance that they justified by using the duality of the mind of anti-christ. These beings refused to come into oneness with the purpose of life, and instead they insisted on maintaining a separate sense of identity as being outside the process of life itself—what I have called the River of Life.

From the beginning of creation, self-conscious beings have always had free will, and thus they had the opportunity to go against God’s vision by using the mind of anti-christ. Several spheres had ascended without anyone using this option, yet there did come a point when some beings for the first time chose the mind of anti-christ. When that happened, the mind of anti-christ was simply an option that had never been expressed. In other words, nothing had been co-created through the mind of anti-christ. Yet as the first beings made their choice, they started creating something through the mind of anti-christ. And because a number of beings used the mind of anti-christ, they created something that was bigger than themselves. In other words, the whole became more than the sum of the individual contributions. How can this be?

The explanation is, as I have already described, that the Ma-ter Light has a built-in evolutionary force that pulls on any organized structure, urging it to become more. So what actually happened was that the initial group of beings created a structure out of the consciousness of anti-christ. When this structure reached a critical mass of complexity, the evolutionary force built into the Ma-ter Light gave it a separate state of consciousness, a sense of awareness as a distinct being with certain qualities (as defined by the beings who created it). In other words, the beings actually created a new state of consciousness, a new mind, a new entity. And this new “mind unit” inevitably became subject to the evolutionary force, causing it to develop a basic level of consciousness. This does not mean that this new entity was self-aware, but it does mean that it had a basic sense of identity that gave it a survival instinct. Part of this survival instinct was the drive to propagate, the drive to grow, to evolve.

At this point, I am aware that the more perceptive students might think I am contradicting myself. I earlier said that the contracting force of the Mother will break down any structure that is not based on the Christ mind. Yet I am now saying that the evolutionary force – also built into the Mother Light – will cause any complex structure to evolve—even structures based on the mind of anti-christ. So let us now take a closer look at the basic forces of life, as this will open your understanding to your true role as a spiritual being on Earth.

***

As I explained earlier, the world of form in which you live started when the Creator defined a boundary and then withdrew itself into a singularity in the midst of a void. In that singularity, there was no differentiation whatsoever—there was nothing expressed. Yet the purpose of life is to give self-conscious beings an opportunity to grow, and for this to happen, they must start out as separate beings and then grow into oneness with their source. Obviously, for anything to be separate, there must be differentiation. The Creator started this differentiation by projecting itself as two different but complementary forces, namely the expanding and the contracting force, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Everything else – everything between the beginning and the end – is created by the interplay of these two forces.

The two forces are manifest as the polarity of Spirit and Ma-ter, which I have also called Father and Mother in order to tie it into a traditional religious terminology. Spirit is represented by self-conscious beings who impose images upon the Ma-ter Light, which then takes on expressed forms. A linear – and thus incomplete – illustration of this would be the figure eight, with the upper half representing Spirit and the lower half representing Ma-ter. Spirit also represents the spiritual realm and Ma-ter represents the sphere that has not yet ascended to Spirit.

We now need to understand that although there are two distinct polarities, each one representing one of the basic forces, we still find both forces within each polarity. In other words, Spirit represents the expanding force because this force is the primary or strongest force in the realm of Spirit. Yet Spirit also has a contracting force, and the interplay between the two forces is as follows:

The expanding force of Spirit is the force of self-transcendence that drives all life to become MORE. The drive to become MORE is what gives rise to differentiation, becau-se it drives co-creators to express their individuality and in so doing build on to, complexify, that individuality. If this was the only drive, all life could become scattered and the differentiation could soon become self-destructive. Co-creators could define their respective individualities in ways that conflict and thus break down each other.

The contracting force of Spirit is what ensures that while life is differentiating, all life is pulled into a oneness with the Creator’s purpose. This oneness is not sameness, and this ensures that all life grows in the same direction so that differences enhance each other instead of canceling out each other. We might say that the expanding force gives life the drive to become MORE and the contracting force concentrates or aligns that drive so the movement of life becomes a coherent stream, what I have called the River of Life. The stream moves all life toward becoming MORE rather then becoming less.

The basic interplay of these two forces gives rise to a cyclical movement, namely what some spiritual teachings have called the in-breath and the out-breath of God. It is essential for you to understand that this does not mean that God creates a world in an out-breath and then – after a certain time – obliterates that world in an in-breath, repeating the cycle indefinitely without getting anywhere. In other words, God does not go back and forth between creation and destruction. Instead, God has created an ever-expanding movement, namely the River of Life. A world is not destroyed in the in-breath—it is accelerated to a higher level so that it transcends its former state. To give you a crude illustration of this, consider the drawing above.

It depicts a zig-zag line that can represent the out-breath and the in-breath, creation and destruction. Seen from this perspective, it seems to go back and forth, creating a world and then destroying it. Yet life is not a two-dimensional line. The zig-zag line is simply a spiral seen directly from the side.

When seen from a different angle, you see that what seems to be a back-and-forth movement actually forms the coils in an upward spiral. The back-and-forth movement now forms an ascending movement, where one out-breath and in-breath form the foundation for a continued growth to a higher level. In other words, nothing is wasted, for every cycle sets the stage for a higher cycle. With this in mind, let us look at how the expanding and contracting forces work in the realm of Ma-ter:

The expanding force is what I have called the evolutionary force. It will bring life toward greater complexity, but it can do so only within a certain level or range. For example, once vertebrate animals had been created by a revolutionary leap, the evolutionary force caused such animals to evolve toward greater and greater complexity, eventually producing primates that have many human-like features. Yet it took another revolutionary leap to bring life to the human level, and such a revolutionary leap can only come from Spirit. The expanding force in the Ma-ter realm is evolutionary and cannot produce a revolutionary leap on its own. It needs the influence from the Spirit realm to make a revolutionary leap.

The contracting force in Ma-ter has the effect of making sure that any structure which does not – after a cycle moves to the next level – make a revolutionary leap is broken down, so that the Ma-ter Light is not permanently trapped in an imperfect form but is returned to its original purity. In other words, when a revolutionary leap has occurred, the evolutionary force is allowed to work for a certain cycle—the outbreath. Yet when a new cycle – the inbreath – begins, any structure that is not raised up by the next revolutionary leap will become subject to the contracting force and will begin to break down.

On Earth (and in any unascended sphere), you have to add to this that God has given dominion over the Earth to the beings who embody here. So these beings can create structures based on the mind of anti-christ, and for a cycle they will be allowed to not only exist but even to evolve in complexity. Yet when the cycle ends, the beings who created such structures should ideally transcend their limited state of consciousness and thus become able to create better structures—meaning structures that are more in alignment with the Christ mind. The beings themselves will erase the imperfect structures they have created and create better ones instead.

If the beings refuse to do so, their structures become subject to the contracting force and will eventually be broken down. Due to the nature of space and time – the density of matter – this will take some time, and the beings can delay the process, as we will discuss later. Yet the final outcome is inevitable. Everything is created from the one source, which is both the beginning and the end, meaning that the end is guaranteed from the beginning. Thus, everything that is not part of the River of Life will eventually cease to exist, as the river reaches the ocean of the Allness.

I earlier said that a new co-creator had a long time to experiment with its creative abilities but that it eventually had to face the final exam in the cosmic schoolroom. We might say that the experimental phase was the outbreath in which a co-creator had freedom to do anything it wanted. Yet the final exam represented the start of the inbreath in which a co-creator needs to come into oneness with its own higher being. Likewise, when a new sphere is created, the beings in it have a long time to experiment, and this is the outbreath. Yet when the sphere starts ascending, the inbreath starts and this is when all beings associated with a sphere need to face the initiation of selflessness.

Can you begin to see the ingenious design that causes the evolutionary force in matter to inflate everything? I have talked about the need to multiply the talents, which means that you use your co-creative abilities in alignment with Christ truth. When you do this, your own higher being and spiritual hierarchy will multiply what you have created, but the effect of this is to raise your consciousness. In other words, this multiplication makes you MORE than you were before. If you co-create by using the mind of anti-christ, the reason is that you have been blinded by duality. Thus, you are unreachable for a spiritual teacher and you cannot see that what you are doing is limiting for all life. Because of free will, you cannot be forced to see this, but the expanding force of matter will multiply what you have created so it becomes more of the same thing. Instead of becoming more than, you become more of. The effect is that the limiting consequences of your creation become more pronounced and easier to see, hopefully awakening you to the fact that you need to change the way you use your mind’s abilities. The Bible talks about those who sow the wind but reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7).

As a side note, the four categories or forces described above do correspond to the four elements of Father, Son, Mother and Holy Spirit mentioned earlier.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

One of the master keys to spiritual freedom is the realization that there is more to life than meets the eye, coupled with the desire to find a deeper understanding of that more. You will be free only when you develop a desire for greater understanding – with all thy getting, get understanding (Proverbs 4:7) – and when you become willing to look for that understanding beyond traditional sources, meaning your personal mental box and the one created for you by society, even by humankind at large.

The beginning of wisdom is when you realize that there is much more to understand about life than what is seen by the senses or known by current human belief systems, be they scientific or religious in nature. For example, you are beginning to see that the Earth had an original purpose and that it now has a modified purpose. Yet the underlying purpose is always to give the maximum opportunity for growth to the maximum number of lifestreams.

Everything you see on Earth is simply a facade, an appearance, that hides a deeper reality behind it. The material world hides the underlying spiritual reality. That is why Jesus told people not to judge after appearances (John 7:24), for when you do so, you inevitably condemn yourself to living a life based on superficial knowledge and incomplete assumptions. You will be basing your life on visible effects rather than the hidden, underlying causes.

The reason why it is possible for people to deny the existence of God is that physical matter is so dense, yet matter has become even more dense than the original design because of the fall in humankind’s consciousness. This is what creates a self-reinforcing downward spiral. The density of matter made it possible for people to deny the existence of God, deny that they are spiritual beings and justify not transcending their current level of consciousness. This caused them to violate the most fundamental spiritual law, namely that of self-transcendence. The contracting force of the Mother magnified people’s choices, making their consciousness more dense, and they actually projected that density upon the Ma-ter Light that makes up planet Earth. Over a long period of time this caused matter itself to become even more dense, which made it even easier for people to deny their spiritual purpose, again lowering their consciousness and projecting an even denser image upon the Ma-ter Light. Obviously, once such a downward spiral reaches a critical mass, the beings who created it can no longer see what they are doing and thus cannot pull themselves out of it.

That is why there is a need to introduce “new blood” into the system in the form of beings who have not created that particular spiral and thus have a fresh perspective on conditions on Earth. These beings can then be like the little child in the fairy tale about the emperor’s new clothes. They can see what none of the native inhabitants of the Earth can see, giving them an opportunity to cry out, “But the emperor has nothing on!” The problem is that these beings have to embody in physical bodies and enter into the density of the energy field of Earth, which can cause them to forget why they came. The question is whether these beings will recognize who they are and whether they will awaken to their roles of crying out to awaken humankind – the sleeping beauty – from its long sleep.

You now begin to see that the main purpose of this book is to awaken you to the realization of who you really are and why you are here on this small planet that you somehow find it difficult to call home—the reason being that this planet may not be your spiritual home. Will you consciously acknowledge who you are and why you came here? And will you fulfill that purpose by following Jesus’ example of bearing witness to the truth (John 18:37)? However, in order to bear witness to the truth, you first have to know the truth, namely the one truth of the Christ mind, as opposed to the many dualistic “truths” of the mind of anti-christ.

***

In the previous chapter, I described the origins of most beings on Earth and divided them into a number of groups. There is always an inherent danger associated with doing this, which is why – in the past – much esoteric knowledge was only available to more advanced students or was veiled behind convoluted or imprecise language. By making this knowledge publicly available in a form that is easy to understand, it is foreseeable that some of the people who read this information will still be trapped in the duality consciousness. These people will be spiritually blind, and they will project their dualistic images upon my teaching. Let me outline how some people are likely to interpret and use the material.

The very first thing that spiritually blind people will do is to impose a value judgment upon the material. They will say that some lifestreams are clearly in a lower, more selfish, state of consciousness, and they will then define this as “bad” compared to a higher state of consciousness – their own – that is seen as “good.” They will seek to set up outer criteria – such as people’s behavior, race, nationality, sex or beliefs – in order to identify the bad people and set them apart from the good—meaning themselves. They will divide the world into good people and bad people based on outer criteria, based on appearances.

This will lead to the next step, namely an attempt to define certain groups of people as being inherently bad while others are inherently good. In other words, all members of certain groups are bad and all members of other groups are good. This can then lead down the slippery slide of discrimination that – during the course of history – has given rise to many atrocities, including discrimination based on religion, race, sex, nationality, ethnicity and any number of outer characteristics. The actual form of such discrimination ranges from mild dislike to genocide.

Once you start identifying certain groups of people as bad, it is but a short step to reasoning that all of your problems, all of your society’s problems or even all of humankind’s problems are caused by the bad people. So if we could only remove these bad people from the planet, all problems would be solved and there would be paradise on Earth. If you take an honest look at history, you will see that even religious people have reasoned this way and have been persuaded by the subtle logic that the end can justify the means. They have fallen into the trap of thinking that even though their religion – as virtually every religion on Earth does – defines killing as being against the laws of God, it is acceptable to kill the people who violate God’s law. In other words, it is acceptable to violate God’s law in order to bring God’s kingdom—which is based on the even more subtle logic that you can actually bring God’s kingdom through a violation of God’s law. This, of course, is not so and we will later look at where exactly this kind of reasoning comes from.

In order to make sure that as few people as possible fall into this dualistic trap, let me make certain things very clear. It is absolutely impossible to set up any system based on outer characteristics and say that all members of certain groups are bad people or are fallen beings, whereas all members of other groups are good people or highly evolved souls. There never has been nor ever will be such criteria. The reason for this is very simple, namely the principle I have described of allowing many different beings to embody on Earth for the purpose of stirring the pot. In order to stir the pot to the maximum extent, beings with high and low states of consciousness can be found distributed in any conceivable group of people.

It is meaningless to set up outer criteria and attempt to identify certain types of beings, because this cannot be done based on outer characteristics but only based on the inner characteristic of people’s state of consciousness. People who look for outer characteristics demonstrate that they are still trapped in duality – they judge after appearances – and thus they simply cannot read people’s state of consciousness. Only people who are almost free of duality can read the state of consciousness of an individual, and such people would never seek to discriminate or judge. Those who want to identify good and bad people can’t do so and those who can have no desire to do so.

Yet I obviously have a reason for describing the fact that there are many different types of lifestreams embodying on Earth. So let us look at a model that – while not being beyond manipulation by the duality consciousness – can give us a reasonable foundation for understanding the planetary dynamics.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

If you take an honest look at current scientific theories, including the Big Bang theory and evolution, you will see that there are a number of questions that the theories cannot answer. The biggest one is obviously why the process started, which some say is outside the scope of science—claiming science is better at explaining “how” than “why.” Yet there are also many “how” questions that science cannot explain. How did the chemical elements evolve in the first seconds after the Big Bang? How did ordered structures begin forming out of a totally chaotic explosion, instead of the energy simply expanding outward in eternal chaos? How did solid matter appear from vibrating energy? How did organic life appear from inorganic matter? How did primitive life make the move from the oceans to dry land? How did primitive life make the leap to vertebrates? How did monkeys make the leap to humans? How did a random process produce sustainable and increasingly complex life forms, instead of reinventing single-celled organisms over and over again? And how did an unconscious process produce a species that is conscious of its own existence and has the ability to consciously alter its environment, its behavior and even its genetic make-up? With that many unanswered questions, one must wonder why these theories ever gained acceptance as scientific facts and why some people have elevated them to the same status of infallibility as some religious doctrines.

We can now answer these questions. I have earlier explained that everything in the world of form is made from the Ma-ter Light. I have said that the Ma-ter Light has a built-in consciousness, even intelligence. It is aware that it is not complete in itself and it has a longing for wholeness, meaning oneness with its source. The Mother Light has a built-in longing for oneness with the divine Father. However, while the Ma-ter Light is conscious, it is not self-conscious, it is not self-aware. Even though it has the potential to take on any form, it cannot take on form by itself.

Imagine that you are watching a far-away planet through a telescope. You assume the planet has a gravitational field, but you cannot tell by looking at it. You can tell only if you observe an object being pulled in by the gravitational field. We might say that gravity is an inconsequential force until it has an object upon which it can exert a pull. Likewise, the life-force built into the Mother Light needs something to pull on before it produces an effect. Compare this to a blanket of snow on a hillside. The snow simply sits there and does nothing. Now imagine you compress a bit of snow and start rolling it into a snowball. There will come a critical point when the ball is big enough that gravity can pull it down the hill. From that point, your intervention is no longer needed, and the laws of nature can “keep the ball rolling,” as they say.

This is similar to the process that led to the existence of the physical universe. The Ma-ter Light could not have started this process on its own. But once the process was started and had reached critical mass, the life-force in the Ma-ter Light could take the process forward to a higher level of complexity. The exact form of this complexity was determined by the design principles defined for the physical universe, what scientists call the “laws of nature.” It was spiritual masters who defined these principles, and it was the seven Elohim who started the creation of the Earth, thus setting the evolutionary process on its track.

Spiritual masters also started the initial expansion that scientists call the Big Bang. In reality, the expansion did not start in a single point but started in a huge number of points that appeared in a spherical shape. When scientists give up the idea of creation starting in a singularity and look for a spherical beginning, they will get their mathematical equations to work. Yet that will also require them to acknowledge that the original points did not appear as the result of a materialistic process. They appeared because an image had been imposed upon the Ma-ter Light from a higher realm. This image was also infused with a surge of high-frequency spiritual energy that started the expansion. This infusion is continuing to this day, and it is what drives the physical universe to keep expanding (the continued expansion of the universe is another fact that science cannot adequately explain). In other words, the universe is not driven by the initial burst of energy but by a continuous infusion of energy from the spiritual realm.

After the Elohim had started the process of concentrating physical matter and having it form into planets and solar systems, they withdrew and let “nature take its course.” In reality, this was not an entirely unguided process because it involved conscious (but not yet self-conscious) beings, often called the “elemental builders of form.” However, for the sake of simplicity, we will simply say that the process continued without direct intervention from the masters in the spiritual realm. You might compare this to Jesus’ parable about the talents, where the master withdrew after giving the servants their talents. Jesus’ parable illustrates a universal principle, namely that more evolved beings start a process and allow less evolved beings to build upon it.

When the process of revolutionary jumps and evolutionary changes had produced the Earth and taken it to a point of being able to sustain life, the masters from the spiritual realm again stepped in and provided the surge to jump from inorganic matter to organic life forms. When this process had reached critical mass, the masters again withdrew until their intervention was needed to take life to the next level. Thus, what biologists call the missing link between monkeys and humans is missing because it was not a physical link. The missing link in evolutionary theory is the intervention of masters in the spiritual realm, beings who have the vision and the power to accelerate the evolutionary process into a revolutionary jump.

It has long been known from the fossil record that evolution is not a smooth or constant climb toward more complex life forms. It starts with a revolutionary jump, followed by an extended period of gradual expansion, adaptation and complexification. Then another revolutionary jump occurs, followed by another evolutionary phase. This process is undeniable from the fossil record, but it has largely been ignored, mainly because materialistic scientists can find no material cause for the evolutionary leaps. Let it be known to those who have ears to hear that there is no material cause, only a spiritual one.

What are some of the implications of this? Well, for starters, we now see that materialistic science is correct in describing an evolutionary process but incorrect in postulating that is has a material cause. In fact, the evolutionary process is a consequence of the spiritual purpose for the physical universe, namely plausible deniability. The universe is designed to give fallen beings from the spiritual realm an environment in which they can find plausible reasons for denying the existence of God. These reasons are only plausible and not absolute, so as to give these beings an opportunity to grow out of the need to deny God and get back into the River of Life. Great care has been taken to design the universe in such a way that there are plenty of opportunities for beings to rediscover the reality of God. That is why a growing number of scientists are beginning to realize that scientific theories, especially the Big Bang and evolution, raise questions that cannot be satisfactorily answered by looking only at materialistic causes. Internally consistent answers can be found only by incorporating the existence of intelligent beings who give the impetus for the revolutionary jumps. Now for the real reason why I brought up the process of evolution.

***

Let us return to the timeline developed by science. For the sake of simplicity, I will ignore the reality that time is non-linear and refer to the official timeline. The Earth was created 4.5 billion years ago and life emerged 3.8 billion years ago. So after the revolutionary leap that created the planet, it took 700 million years for the evolutionary process to bring the Earth to the point of being able to support life. I earlier said that the first intelligent life appeared 2.6 billion years ago. In other words, it took 1.2 billion years to take life from its initial stages to the level where a species with a human-like intelligence appeared. It follows that it took 1.9 billion years from the creation of the Earth until intelligent life could inhabit the planet.

Science will disagree with this timeline because it will be argued that the process of evolution simply could not have produced intelligent life in a mere 1.9 billion years. In reality, this is correct, given that the mechanical process of evolution could not have produced life at all. As I have said, there is a built-in process in the Ma-ter Light that can drive the evolutionary process, once the revolutionary leaps have taken place. Several such leaps were necessary to produce intelligent life, and that is why it took “only” 1.9 billion years to produce such life.

The entire purpose of creating the Earth is to create a platform for intelligent life, and the evolutionary process was given a lot of help in order to produce intelligent life much faster than if it had been left alone. In other words, it would have been possible to produce intelligent life with much less assistance from above. It only took a minimum of seven evolutionary leaps to produce humans, but in reality more were given in order to compress the timeline. My point being that the Earth has been a platform for two parallel evolutionary tracks:

The fast track is the one that was given maximum assistance from above. It did produce intelligent life 2.6 billion years ago, so for that long of a time span, spiritual beings from above have been descending into human-like bodies, as I described earlier. Obviously, this has been an important part of the Earth’s purpose, and it has given growth opportunities to countless beings.

The “natural” track is a track that was given only the minimum assistance from above. In other words, this track has produced intelligent life with seven revolutionary leaps, and then the rest has been due to the evolutionary force that is built into the Ma-ter Light and directed by the laws of nature (of which not all are currently known or correctly understood by science). Obviously, as science is correctly pointing out, this track will take much longer to produce human life. In fact, the timeline that science currently gives for the emergence of modern humans is not too far off the actual timeline for the natural track.

Why is this important? Because it describes the origin of another group of beings that are currently embodying on Earth. You will notice that so far I have only talked about beings who originated in a higher realm and who descended to Earth by merging their energy fields with the energy field of a human body. Such beings are individualized extensions of spiritual beings that were originally created by the Creator. In other words, they are part of a spiritual hierarchy that has descended from higher realms to lower realms. Obviously, many of these beings started out their journey on the Earth and can then ascend from there. Nevertheless, they did come out of beings from the higher realm and thus can tie in to their spiritual “family tree.” They can draw on this for guidance and even for spiritual energy (when they attain some measure of Christ consciousness).

Yet because of the built-in intelligence of the Ma-ter Light, there is a parallel track of beings who have evolved from below. As I said earlier, the Ma-ter Light cannot create by itself, but once a certain critical mass, a critical complexity, has been created, the evolutionary process can and will bring it toward greater complexity. Thus, this process has taken over after the initial revolutionary leaps and has produced intelligent beings from “nothing,” so to speak.

It is only within the timeline that science gives for the emergence of modern humans that such beings have attained the complexity that gives them not only human intelligence, but even the ability to grow beyond the material realm. In other words, such beings have now attained the opportunity to rise above the material universe and work their way up through the emotional, mental and identity realms, until they can actually ascend to the spiritual realm and become immortal spiritual beings.

This is a complex process that I will not here describe in detail. What I will say is that everything is created out of the Creator’s Being, so when an individual being, evolving from below, reaches a level of sufficient complexity, it can receive a conscious self, whereby it awakens to the reality that it is out of the Creator’s Being. In other words, such a being must earn a conscious self, whereas a co-creator starts out with one. You currently find a large number of people on Earth who can trace their origins to this process. Many of them have a deep sense of how the Earth works and they have a great mastery of their physical bodies. Many of them also have a great love for this planet and are more sensitive to it than some of the beings coming from higher realms. Some of them still embody as so-called native peoples around the world, but many are found in all areas of modern society.

In a spiritual sense, these beings are generally less evolved than those who have descended from above. Thus, they tend to join religions in which they can follow leaders who have descended from above. They need to imitate those who have spiritual attainment, often for many lifetimes, before they themselves can receive a spiritual spark that makes it possible for them to transcend from within themselves. My point is that a being who has descended from above has a built-in ability to consciously self-transcend. Beings who evolve from below must earn this ability. Beings from above can lose it, and in that case they must also earn it back. There are actually some beings from above who have descended far below the level to which many of the beings from below have evolved.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

The purpose of this chapter is to give you a fuller understanding of the environment in which you are currently focusing your attention. Having this understanding will open up many perspectives that will help you accelerate your spiritual growth and overcome some of the blocks to that growth. We will look at these perspectives in coming chapters, but we first need to set a foundation. The information I will give you in this chapter will go far beyond what you learned in kindergarten and it can at first seem overwhelming. Yet as you will see in coming chapters, knowledge is power.

Let us simply summarize what science says about the timeline for the age of the Earth and the appearance of human beings. The universe is estimated to be 15 billion years old, with the Earth being formed 4.5 billion years ago. The origin of life is estimated to have taken place 3.8 billion years ago—that is 3,800 million years. Modern humans are said to have appeared 45,000 years ago with modern civilization, and the epoch of historical time, starting 5,500 years ago.

What is being said by science is that it took evolution 3,800 million years to produce modern humans. Yet in only 5,500 years these humans have evolved from being barely more than tool-wielding monkeys to being able to destroy most life on Earth in a nuclear holocaust. It is undeniable that the evolutionary jump from prehistoric humans to modern civilization is enormous. Yet science claims that while it took the evolutionary process 3,800 million years to go from single-cell organisms to humans, it only took that same process 5,500 years to go from prehistoric humans to modern humans.

Obviously, this can be explained by saying that biological evolution is different from social, cultural and technological evolution. Once the slow process of biological evolution had produced a species capable of consciously altering its environment, this species could quickly make a huge evolutionary jump. Nevertheless, does it seem logical that it took 3,800 million years to go from single-cell organisms to modern humans? Or is it possible that modern humans were not the first species capable of consciously altering its environment? Could there have been other civilizations with this capacity, civilizations not currently known or recognized by science?

Obviously, such civilizations have now disappeared, so what I am proposing here is that evolution – contrary to the claims made by science – is not a smooth, unidirectional process that grinds from very primitive to more sophisticated life forms—and once a certain level has been reached, evolution cannot go backward. Instead, I am proposing that evolution is a cyclical process, more like a sine wave with crests and troughs. A civilization can evolve to a high level of sophistication, then enter a self-destructive process that leads it to disappear. I am even proposing that this could have been happening for such a long time that the slow geological processes could have played a role in erasing much of the evidence of previous civilizations. In other words, the first sophisticated civilization might have appeared millions of years ago, possibly many millions of years ago.

Obviously, there is no scientifically accepted evidence of such a process. However, science has shown that within the very short period of historical time, a mere second on the timeline of biological evolution, several civilizations have arisen only to disappear for various reasons. So it would seem possible that this could have happened many times in the much longer time-span from the origin of life to historical time. Furthermore, modern humans have, within a mere century, developed the capacity to alter the planetary climate, alter their own genetic makeup and produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, all of which could lead to the demise – even the disappearance – of modern civilization.

My point here is simply to make you consider that you might have been brought up with a somewhat incomplete view of the potential age of human civilization. While Biblical fundamentalists claim the entire Earth is only 6,000 years old, even the claims made by science – when it comes to the age of intelligent life on Earth – are far too short-sighted. There is simply more between past and present than is dreamt of in your philosophy.

***

Let me now give you a brief description of how the material universe and the physical Earth were created. Let me make it clear that this description is adapted to the linear form of thinking so common on Earth. In reality, the creation process is not as linear because outside the physical realm time and space do not have the same properties as they have on Earth. Thus, creation is an ongoing process that does not have a clearly defined beginning or end or even a linear timeline. I know this explanation will be somewhat abstract, but we have to set a foundation that we can build on later.

Your planet exists in a universe that exists inside a larger sphere. The creation of your sphere started when a group of masters in one of the higher spiritual realms defined a boundary within the void, setting a sphere aside from the void. They then projected a certain amount of Ma-ter Light into that sphere. Yet the sphere was not filled evenly, being divided into four distinct levels that were set apart by the vibration of the Ma-ter Light. I earlier described these four levels as the identity realm, the mental realm, the emotional realm and the physical realm. Each realm has a range of vibrations, and since the identity realm is the least dense, it has the greatest range, the widest spectrum, the greatest number of levels. The mental realm has a smaller range, whereas the physical realm obviously has the smallest range. Each realm was created with one or two levels of vibrations but was then divided into more by the beings in that realm—the exception being the physical realm which still has only one level.

The consequence of this is that the three upper realms have what we, for want of a better word, might call a vertical extension. They can be divided into distinct layers, ranging from the lowest vibration to the highest. Each layer corresponds to a specific level of consciousness, meaning that a being must be at the corresponding level of consciousness in order to stay at a given level. If the being falls below that level, it will descend, or fall, to a lower layer. In other words, if a being in the identity realm falls below a certain level of consciousness, it enters the mental realm.

The identity realm serves as a bridge between the spiritual realm and the material world. In other words, a being who is working its way up can enter the spiritual realm only through the identity realm. It is a spiritual law that the opportunity to ascend must never be lost, and consequently the higher levels of the identity realm can never go below a certain level of vibration, they can never be polluted by the fallen consciousness. Thus, a being that falls in the spiritual realm will not fall into the highest identity levels but can fall only to the lowest identity level. If a being in one of the higher levels falls below a certain level of consciousness, it will instantly descend to a lower level and will eventually fall into the mental realm.

In the mental realm, all of the levels can contain the fallen consciousness, so a being from the spiritual realm can fall to any level. Thus, any level can be polluted by the fallen consciousness, but obviously the higher levels will be less polluted than the lower ones. The consequence is that at the higher levels of the mental realm it is relatively easy to see through the illusions of duality, whereas this is presently very difficult at the lower levels. Obviously, the mental realm has a lower limit, and if a being falls below a certain level of consciousness, it enters the emotional realm.

The emotional realm is similar to the mental in that all levels can contain the fallen consciousness. However, the emotional realm does not have a lower boundary in the same way as the mental level does. If you reach the lowest level of the emotional realm, you will not simply descend to the physical. Instead, lower levels of the emotional realm will be created in order to accommodate beings with such a low state of consciousness that they are not allowed to embody in the physical realm. The emotional level can actually be lowered in vibration until it becomes so dense that the contracting force of the Mother breaks down any structure, including the identity built by self-conscious beings. That is why some levels of the emotional realm – called the “astral plane” in some esoteric literature – are so dense that they appear as the fiery hell that some people have seen in visions. Hell exists in the lowest levels of the emotional realm, and these levels have become so dense that the contracting force breaks down any imperfect structure, setting the Ma-ter Light free in a process that appears as an all-consuming fire. One might say that you have the all-consuming fire of the Father above and the all-consuming fire of the Mother below. However, rather than the gloomy picture painted by traditional religion, the reality is that spiritual fire only consumes that which is unreal – that which is out of alignment with the vision of the Son – whereas it accelerates and multiplies that which is real.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

I know some spiritual seekers will be wondering how angels fit into the picture I am describing, so we will look at that next. Some spiritual teachings describe angels as the thoughts of God that are shaped by the purpose for which they were created. Some people see angels as messengers between God and his creation, while others see them as servants of both God and man. Neither view is incorrect, but it must be understood that the evolution of angels is very diverse and angels have vastly different functions. Therefore, it is difficult to make too many generalizations about angels, and a spiritual seeker should be careful not to adopt a simplistic understanding of angels.

It is not my intention with this book to describe the many different types of angels. My purpose is to give teachings that can help people resolve what for some spiritual seekers seems like a contradiction or paradox. There are several spiritual teachers on Earth who firmly claim that angels were not created to take physical embodiment in this or any other world. Yet there are many spiritual seekers who have an inner knowing that they are angels in embodiment. Is it possible that both are correct and that a deeper understanding will resolve the paradox?

***

Let us set a foundation by taking a closer look at the process whereby succeeding spheres are created. As I have explained, each new sphere is more diverse, more expressed, more complex than the previous one. The pattern for creation is that the One Creator diversifies itself, and each new sphere takes this diversification to a new level. So the distance to the Creator’s oneness is greater for your sphere than for the first sphere—far greater.

Another aspect is that the first spheres are not standing still. When a sphere ascends, there is no longer room for duality in that sphere, but that does not mean the sphere has reached the level of the Allness. Consequently, there is still room for growth in an ascended sphere, and all spheres in the spiritual realm are constantly transcending themselves. As a result, the higher spheres are becoming more sophisticated, more evolved, while the new spheres start out as less sophisticated, more dense.

On the one hand we have a growing diversification, which fits well with the goal of giving individual beings the opportunity to experience a separate sense of identity. Yet on the other hand the goal of the world of form is to bring all separate beings back to oneness, meaning that they lose the separateness without losing their distinct identities. As the diversification increases, it becomes easier for new beings to experience a separate identity. Each new generation starts at a denser level, being one step further separated from oneness. Thus, they have a greater “distance” to climb in order to get back to oneness, which naturally increases the risk that they can become lost in separation. We might even say that for each succeeding sphere, the density of that sphere makes the consciousness of duality more persuasive and harder to overcome. The mind of anti-christ forms a veil of illusions, and the veil becomes denser for each new sphere.

The concern now becomes how to prevent the beings in the latest sphere from becoming lost in separation, lost in duality. A related concern is how to make sure the latest sphere stays in harmony with the laws of God and the vision held by the masters in the higher spheres, who are also involved with designing the new sphere. The combination of “distance” and the need to maintain oneness obviously points to the need for communication. Yet the masters in the higher spheres are not meant to descend to a lower sphere and the masters in the lowest level of the spiritual realm are so busy co-creating the new sphere and teaching its new co-creators that they cannot constantly be traveling to the higher spheres. The logical solution is to create a new evolution of beings who are neither masters nor co-creators but are designed specifically to facilitate communication and oneness between all levels of the world of form. Thus comes about the creation of angels. We now see that there are two distinct types of evolutions:

Co-creators are created in order to descend to the lowest level and work their way up from there. They are created without the Christ consciousness, but only have the seed of Christ consciousness which they can nourish until they become one with Christ and become the Living Christ. During this process, they experience what it is like to move from separation to oneness.

Angels are not created to descend to the lowest level but are created to help facilitate the creation of new spheres and the growth of co-creators. Angels are created with some level of Christ consciousness, and although they can expand it, they are not meant to move from separation to oneness as they are not created as separate beings. They all have some awareness that they are extensions of a higher being.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

At this point, it is foreseeable that some readers will feel that I have spent far to much time and gone into far too much detail in describing what happened to students in the Garden of Eden. Some might feel that my description somehow does not apply specifically to them. One reason might be that they did not originate in the Garden of Eden but in a different spiritual schoolroom, perhaps in a higher realm. As I mentioned earlier, there are other evolutions in the world of form, evolutions that were not designed to be co-creators but to perform other functions. As we will see later, the human beings who currently embody on Earth have come from many different points of origin, so it is difficult to say anything that applies to all people on Earth.

Yet my description of the Garden of Eden has certain universal elements that do apply to all of the people who currently embody on Earth, and that is why I have gone into such detail. For example, every aspect of life on Earth has been influenced by the duality consciousness. The only way to attain spiritual growth on Earth is to rise above the duality consciousness. And in order to do this, it is important to understand how self-conscious beings can become blinded by the duality consciousness without realizing what is happening. It is important for everyone to understand how the duality consciousness blinds you and traps you in a catch-22 from which there is no way out—unless your conscious self takes charge of your life by letting the old identity die, thereby being reborn into a higher sense of identity.

Regardless of where you have come from and how you ended up in a physical body on planet Earth, your only way to enlightenment is to follow the Path of Oneness, whereby you overcome the separate identity and come into oneness with the Chain of Being that leads from you to the Creator. And – as I have explained in the preceding chapters – the only way to overcome the catch-22 of your separate identity is to connect to a teacher who is not inside your identity box and can thus lead you out of it. Only by interacting with a being who is not blinded by your dualistic illusions can you overcome those illusions.

For some this will seem obvious, whereas others will sense a negative reaction in some parts of their being. Some of the beings who currently embody on Earth have a predisposition to reject the Path of Oneness, especially the idea that they need to follow a teacher and come into oneness with him or her. They are, so to speak, programmed against this process, but in reality it is their egos that are programmed. Thus, the only way to overcome this programming is to understand how the egos of these beings were created and why the very illusion that caused these beings to fall also prevents them from overcoming the fall and joining the Path of Oneness. In fact, the consciousness of these fallen beings has affected every aspect of life on Earth, so it is important for everyone to understand how and why spiritual beings can fall from their original state and end up on planet Earth. This is the topic we will explore next, and we will start by looking at the Serpent in the Garden of Eden.

***

In order to fully understand who the Serpent is and where it came from, we need to look beyond some common beliefs about the Bible, especially about Genesis. Obviously, if you believed in a fundamentalist interpretation of the Old Testament, you would long ago have rejected this book, so I assume you have already accepted that the Bible is not the infallible word of God. Thus, you should be aware that it makes no sense to take all of the generations mentioned in the Bible and use them to construct a timeline, according to which the universe was created 6,000 years ago.

In reality, the material universe is very old, as is the Earth. Certainly, modern science is closer to the real age – with their estimate of 4.5 billion years for the age of the Earth – than those who interpret the Bible literally. Yet even science has not fully understood its own theories, namely Einstein’s proof of the link between space, gravity and time. It is simply not correct to see time as a linear phenomenon, thinking that one second is a constant that has had the same length from the beginning of time until now. In reality, time is not linear, and the length of a second varies depending on gravitational conditions. There are areas of the universe right now where a second is shorter or longer than it is on Earth. And during the long history of this planet, the length of a second on Earth has also varied, depending on the gravitational fields through which the planet moved and its own gravitational conditions, including the density of matter itself.

As a side note, even Einstein himself did not fully understand his own theories and made certain assumptions that will one day be proven incorrect, the most important of which is the assumption that the speed of light is a constant. Obviously, this cannot be the case if light rays can be bent by gravity—as Einstein proved. If light rays can be affected by gravity, they can also be slowed down or sped up by a gravitational pull. It is possible to measure the speed of light compared to something constant, namely an immovable backdrop of “absolute” space, which is what I have called the void. To an observer who can measure light compared to the immovable void, the speed of light will vary depending on the gravitational conditions through which the light is passing. The immovable void is the true constant – the ground state of absolute rest – that Einstein and other scientists have been seeking. In fact, what the theory of relativity really proves is that there is nothing in the material universe that is constant—everything really is relative, even the speed of light. In order to make their mathematical calculations work, scientists need a constant. Yet the true constant can be found only by looking beyond the relativity of the material universe. Thus, Einstein actually proved that without spirituality, science can never reach its ultimate goal of explaining the origin of the universe and life.

By comparing time to the void, it will be possible to set up an absolute time that does not vary with gravity or the expansion and contraction of space. This will one day become possible, yet even the best supercomputers of today are not up to performing the calculations needed. Furthermore, science has not yet recognized just how complicated a path the Earth is following as it is hurtling through what they call empty space, being pulled in various directions by different gravitational centers. Only by comparing the Earth’s path to the absolute constant of the void itself, will science be able to trace the true path of the Earth and calculate her absolute age. This will also open up to the possibility of traveling back through time by following the Earth’s exact course through absolute space.

My point for bringing this up is to show you that it is at present meaningless to set up a linear timeline for the age of the Earth or give you a precise date for when the fall took place or when the Garden of Eden was established. What is important is the recognition that the Garden of Eden story goes very far back, yet it does not record the beginning of intelligent life on this planet. There were self-conscious beings living in the energy field you today call Earth long before the Garden of Eden. The records of these beings and their civilizations are currently unsubstantiated by archeological findings and even most ancient myths. Yet Genesis itself has certain hints of the existence of such beings. Let us begin by looking at one of the obvious questions raised by the Genesis account:

And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city… (Genesis 4:17)

The preceding chapters in Genesis record that Adam and Eve had three sons, of which one was killed by his brother. So if the Bible is to be taken literally, Adam and Eve had only boys, which raises the question of where Cain’s wife came from? This, of course, is a mystery that most fundamentalists, be they Jewish, Christian or Muslim, would rather ignore. Yet it is an undeniable fact that there is either a flaw in Genesis or there is something missing, which means you can either reject the Bible or look for the missing insight.

Can we resolve this mystery? We can, when we go back to my previous teachings that everything is made from energy and that the material universe is made from vibrations that vibrate within a certain spectrum. We have already seen that beyond the level of vibrations that is visible to the physical senses is the spiritual realm, which has several layers, or levels. We now need to consider that even the material realm has levels, set apart by their vibrational properties, much like the octaves on the tonal scale. There are four basic levels of the material world. Each level has certain subdivisions, but to make this less confusing, we will begin by looking at the four main levels. It is easier to visualize the four levels when you know that they correspond to four levels of your personal energy field, your mind.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

As we have seen, the entire purpose of life is that you grow in self-awareness, which means that you overcome the limited and narrowly focused self-awareness with which you started the journey. You broaden your self-awareness, and in doing so you rise up the Chain of Being that leads toward full God consciousness. Yet in order to rise to another level, you must come into oneness with your own higher being. And the first step in that process is that you come into oneness with the spiritual teacher.

The challenge here is that if a student has been blinded by the consciousness of separation, the duality of anti-christ, it cannot see the Chain of Being and thus it can only see the teacher as being outside itself. Therefore, it will feel that if it gives up its separate sense of identity, it will have no identity left and will suffer a loss. Or it will feel it gives up its freedom to make its own choices by submitting to the teacher. Some students even felt that having to consider how their choices affected other students was a restriction of their free will. Since no self-aware being can bear the thought of having no identity, students who are blinded by the illusion of separation cannot give up their old sense of identity, and thus their new sense of identity cannot be born.

If a student has overcome the mind of anti-christ and seen through its illusions, the student will know that by giving up its old sense of identity, it will instantly be reborn into a new and higher sense of identity. Thus, such a student has no fear of loss and will gladly give up something that is less in order to gain something that is MORE. Yet when a student has become blind, it thinks giving up something can only lead to loss, and thus it will hold on to the old as if it was a matter of life or death. This literally puts the student in a catch-22 from which there is seemingly no way out.

Is there a way out? Of course, but the only way is that the student’s conscious self comes to realize that it has been blinded by an illusion. What has really happened is that the conscious self has come to identify itself as the student’s current sense of identity. Thus, the conscious self thinks it will die if that identity dies.

Let me expound on that thought. I have so far said that the conscious self of the student is charged with building the student’s Omega identity, the identity that allows the student to interact with its environment and express its spiritual identity and creative powers. It is perfectly natural that the conscious self identifies with the identity it has built, but the conscious self is always more than any identity. The identity is like the costume in a theater that the actor of the conscious self wears during the play. Thus, if the sense of identity dies, the conscious self will not die, nor will it have no identity. It will instantly create a new sense of identity.

The only way out of the dilemma is that the conscious self realizes it is MORE than its current sense of identity and that its self-awareness is not the sense of identity but is simply expressing itself through that sense of identity. However, before the conscious self can attain a higher sense of identity, it must let go of its identification with the old identity. It must let the old identity die, which is exactly the process that Jesus demonstrated when he was hanging on the cross.

The cross symbolizes – among other things – your old identity that has put you in a position where you cannot move. You are paralyzed by your own self-created limitations. Even Jesus felt this way on the cross, crying out that God had forsaken him (Matthew 27:46). This signifies that even Jesus had certain expectations that made it hard for him to give up his old sense of identity. What was the essential key that set Jesus free from the catch-22? It was that he finally resigned himself to his own higher will and gave up the ghost (Matthew 27:50). He gave up the ghost of his old sense of identity, and by being willing to let the old self die, he opened the door for his resurrection into a higher sense of self. The cocoon must be left behind before the butterfly of self can take flight.

***

We now come to a subtle idea that will take some pondering. I have said that it was my goal to raise up the students to become self-sufficient. And I have said that the students needed to come into oneness with me. Does this sound like I am contradicting myself? If so, that is exactly how some of the students felt, but why did they feel that way?

They did so because they had become so blinded by the duality consciousness that they could not see what the path is all about. The reality of life is that you are part of the Chain of Being. You are a separate being in the sense that you have individuality, but you are not separated in the sense that you are disconnected from your source or from other beings. Because you started out with a limited awareness, you built a sense of identity based on the illusion of separation, meaning that you saw yourself as separated from other students, from your teacher and from your source. This sense of identity was based on ignorance and thus it was imprisoning you in a limited state.

What is the natural next step on the path? It is to escape this limited sense of identity, and how can you do this? You can do so only by realizing that although you have individuality, you are not a disconnected being but a part of a larger spiritual being. You are a wave on the ocean of self rather than a drop of water floating around in empty space. What I presented students in the Garden was a way to escape the limited, disconnected sense of identity by becoming part of something beyond that limited sense of self, something bigger than the limited self. The true path to spiritual freedom is to become one with your own higher being, rather than remaining trapped in the limited sense of identity that says you are a disconnected being.

What needed to happen to the mature students was that they would consciously recognize this dynamic and then voluntarily give up the sense of being disconnected from their teacher, their fellow students and their own higher selves. What I truly offered to the advanced students in the Garden was a true sense of community in which all are united – all have come into unity – around the true purpose of creation, namely to grow in self-awareness and to take command over the material realm. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of those students who failed to see this opportunity or who deliberately refused to let go of the limited sense of identity and come into unity with a greater sense of identity. They would not come into unity and thus could not remain in the community of the Garden.

Do you see the point here? Coming into oneness with me as your teacher did not mean that you would lose your individuality or free will. It meant coming into oneness with the will of your own higher being and the purpose for which your higher being sent you into the material realm. I was not forcing you to become something that you did not want to become. I was trying to help you reconnect to the will and vision of your own higher being, which is the only way you can ever feel fulfilled and at peace. As long as your lower being is out or harmony with your higher being, you are what Jesus called a house divided against itself (Mark 3:25).

The Path of Oneness must start somewhere, and for the students in the Garden of Eden it started by becoming one with me as their teacher. You come into oneness with the teacher in order to escape your old sense of identity as a disconnected being. You do this by consciously accepting a new sense of identity as one with a higher being rather than remaining separated from it. However, oneness means oneness in vision, purpose and the knowledge that following God’s laws leads to growth whereas going against them leads to suffering. It does not mean loss of individuality or freedom. In fact, a separate identity is what takes away your freedom, and only through oneness with your own higher being can you experience true spiritual freedom.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

We now need to pull together some of the ideas we have considered in the previous chapters, so we can get a clearer picture of what happened to those students who separated themselves from the teacher. We have seen that a new student starts out with a limited self-awareness and sense of identity, much like an infant on Earth. As the student grows, it builds a sense of identity, but the identity is heavily influenced by the environment—again much like a child on Earth. As a child on Earth is influenced by two factors, so is a student in the cosmic schoolroom. The two factors are its parents and its peers. I represented the parent to the students in the Garden of Eden and, of course, the other students were the peers. A student can develop an identity that goes in one of two directions. It can grow closer to the teacher or it can grow further away from its teacher, much like a child on Earth grows closer to its parents or closer to its peers.

We now come to a subtle but crucial point. I have said that the path I offered my students was the Path of Oneness, whereby students would come into oneness with me. I realize that for people on Earth this will sound like my students had to become slaves or clones of me or that they had to submit their own will to my will. Yet it is essential for you to understand that oneness does not mean sameness.

As I have explained, a new co-creator is an individualization of God’s Being and is created for the purpose of starting out with a separate sense of identity and then growing to the full God consciousness. In doing so, the co-creator becomes one with its Creator without blending back into the Creator’s Being. If a co-creator – as a unique individual – became the same as the Creator, the individual being would cease to exist. It would simply blend back into the Creator’s Being from which it came, much like a wave that blends back into the ocean when a storm subsides.

Yet the true purpose of creation is not that you struggle for a long time to build your identity and reach a higher state of consciousness only to disappear as an individual lifestream. On the contrary, the purpose of creation is that your individuality grows until it becomes immortalized—which means it can continue to grow indefinitely. However, because everything was created out of the Creator’s Being, your path toward God consciousness is to follow the trail that leads you back to your source. When a self-aware being attains a sense of oneness with its source while still preserving its individuality, it has attained God consciousness; it has become a God in its own right. In order to follow the trail that leads back to its Creator, a lifestream must become one with its higher being and the spiritual hierarchy that leads from itself to the Creator. Yet for new co-creators this can be difficult, which is why they are offered the intermediate step of oneness with a teacher.

The mechanics of the path are simple. The goal is to help you grow out of a very narrow, self-centered sense of identity by helping you become one with something that you see as larger than yourself. As you do this, you will eventually expand the boundaries of your sense of self until you realize that God is not greater than or outside your self because God is your Self.

I presented this Path of Oneness to the students in the Garden of Eden. Because it is a huge challenge for a new student to attain oneness with the Creator, I offered the students the Path of Oneness with a representative of the Creator with whom they could interact. By first becoming one with me, a student could go on to become one with its higher being. And then it could work its way up through the levels of the spiritual realm until it attained oneness with the Creator. Because the student started as a separate being, that first step into oneness with the teacher is clearly the most difficult. Once you have experienced coming into oneness with a larger being, it will be far easier to do so again with an even larger being, continuing on to the Creator.

Do you see what this truly means? I realize that many students – and most people in their current state of consciousness – think they suddenly appeared out of nowhere as separate beings. This is precisely what gives a student the opportunity to start out by seeing itself as a separate being and then gradually reconnecting to its source. Yet the reality of the situation is that you did not appear out of nowhere. As I described, the Creator projected itself into the very first sphere in the form of self-conscious beings. These beings then projected extensions of themselves into the second sphere and this process has continued all the way to the material universe. You are not a separate being that appeared out of nowhere. You are an extension of a spiritual being in a realm above the material universe. Yet that being is an extension of a being in a higher realm and so on until you reach the Creator itself.

In other words, all life is truly part of this Chain of Being and the Path of Oneness is a process of gradually expanding your sense of self by coming into oneness with the being out of which you came—continuing to do so until you reach the Creator and attain God consciousness. We might say you have come into being as the last link in a process of spiritual beings, a spiritual hierarchy, projecting extensions of themselves into a lower sphere. Your highest potential in life is to follow that Chain of Being back to your ultimate source. Doing so is the only way to attain a sense of meaning and purpose and overcome the sense of being alone or abandoned. It is only when you realize you are part of a larger whole that you will feel truly fulfilled and at peace. Obviously, every spiritual being that is above you in the Chain of Being, including the Creator, wants you to have that feeling and does not want to see you remain in a state of separation that can only cause constant suffering. Your spiritual “parent” loves you as itself because it sees that you are itself. You will feel fully enveloped in love only when you come to the realization that you love God as yourself because God is yourself, your Higher Self.

For the students in the Garden of Eden, I, Maitreya, was the lowest representative of the Chain of Being. They could not yet see the Chain of Being itself, so their opportunity was to come into oneness with me as the first step and then go on to become one with a Being on the next level up.

I know very well that many of the more mature spiritual seekers on Earth will look at the imperfect spiritual teachers or religious leaders they see on this planet and reason that they have no desire to come into oneness with such teachers. This is understandable, but the point of this book is to show you that there is an alternative, namely to come into oneness with your own Christ self and ascended teachers who have risen above the consciousness of anti-christ. You can go beyond any outer teachers and messengers and establish a direct, inner, personal contact with the spiritual teachers who are above the duality of the ego. And if you feel a reluctance to come into oneness with the beings who are above you in your own Chain of Being, then I must tell you that it is the ego that feels this reluctance. For the ego knows it will die when the conscious self overcomes separation and comes into oneness.

Yet consider that a physical teacher or messenger can still help you establish your direct inner connection, and thus it is valuable to learn from such teachers and honor those who demonstrate an example of the Path of Oneness. Therefore, heed the teacher, even when he appears in the humble disguise of an ant. The challenge of the ego is that it forms a closed box around your mind, and in order to break free, you must attain a connection to something beyond your own mental box—for while you are inside it, you cannot see beyond it. Thus, other people who are outside your box can become your teachers, and that is one of the main values of a true spiritual community, as we will discuss later.

***

As I said earlier, when a child on Earth grows, it smoothly transitions from one sense of identity to the next. And when this happens, the previous sense of identity dies and a new one is born. Although this is a distinct event – one identity dies and another is born – the child obviously has a continued sense of awareness and thus rarely even notices the transition. This was much the same for the young students in the Garden, who gradually transitioned from a very limited to a far more sophisticated sense of identity.

Yet even a child on Earth eventually reaches a sense of identity where it becomes more self-aware, more conscious of the fact that it has the power to deliberately change its sense of identity instead of having it shaped by outer factors. This is the point where the child takes responsibility for itself and becomes an adult. Obviously, I am describing an ideal scenario, and I am fully aware that many people on Earth can live an entire lifetime without actually taking responsibility for their lives and consciously changing themselves. Nevertheless, my point is that as the students in the Garden matured, they approached the point where they needed to consciously let the old identity die and build a new one. This was a change that was fully as dramatic as the change from a teenager to an adult on Earth, and students responded with a wide range of reactions.

Some sought to postpone the change, seeking to hold on to their childhood sense of identity. Others rebelled against the change and refused to let go of their old identity, while still others pretended like nothing needed to happen. As I described earlier, the Garden was a very loving environment, and I fully respected the free will of the students. Thus, I gave them a great deal of latitude, not only in terms of what kind of identity they would build but also how long they would take to approach the final exam of the cosmic school.

Nevertheless, the Law of Free Will demands that a student cannot take forever to reach the point of taking responsibility for its life and thus becoming self-sufficient. This is a point that has been much misunderstood by people on Earth, so we will look at it in the next section. However, my point here is that there did come a point when I, as the responsible teacher, had to confront students and tell them they could no longer postpone the essential choice, the choice expressed by Hamlet in Shakespeare’s famous play, the choice to be or not to be.

A student will eventually come to a turning point where it will have to make a choice between the path of life and the path of death, between the path of becoming MORE or the path of becoming less, between the Path of Oneness and the path of separation, between the true path and the path that seemeth right unto a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death. As the teacher in charge, I had to confront students with the necessity to make that choice, and it was in doing so that I had to run the risk that some students would rebel against having to choose. They could instead choose not to choose, whereby they would separate themselves from me and remove themselves from the Garden of Eden. More on this later, but let us first overcome some common misunderstandings about free will.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

Let us now use these insights to take a fresh look at the Garden of Eden story. This story is one of the pivotal myths in world culture and it is a fruitful source of understanding, especially when it comes to the relationship between people and their spiritual teachers. Obviously, one can unlock this understanding only by looking beyond a literal interpretation. If one does not, one can never resolve the obvious contradictions or answer the questions raised by the story.

First of all, one needs to realize that what the Bible calls God is not God in the ultimate sense, but a spiritual teacher that represented God to the students in the schoolroom that was called Eden. The Creator is beyond all form and thus would not interact with human beings in a form they could see. The Creator leaves this to the beings who hold the appropriate position in the cosmic hierarchy. The word “God” was used differently in Old Testament times, often used to refer to any spiritual being. As I have mentioned before, I, Maitreya, was the teacher of Adam and Eve, which I think makes me more qualified than any human being or institution to explain what truly happened in the Garden. Secondly, one needs to realize that there were many students in Eden. The story focuses on Adam and Eve for the sake of simplicity, and thus Adam and Eve are symbols, archetypes if you will, for what happened to many of the students in Eden. Let us now look at one of the pivotal passages in the story:

16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (Genesis, Chapter 2)

The first question we will consider is why the spiritual teacher even had to tell the students not to eat of the fruit? Why was there a forbidden fruit in the Garden, why didn’t God create the Garden without this temptation? We can now resolve this question by reaching back to our discussion of free will. If students did not have the option to go against the laws of God, they would not have the fullness of free will. Thus, the temptation to deliberately go against God’s laws is a companion of free will.

We can now see that the “fruit of the knowledge of good and evil” is a symbol for a state of consciousness, namely the frame of mind that makes it possible for a student to go against the laws of God out of willful ignorance. As we have seen, violating the laws of God is not possible from the Christ mind, for when you perceive the reality of God, you know that violating God’s laws will hurt yourself and your greater self (all life). And you would never consciously choose to hurt yourself or your Self.

It now becomes clear that violating God’s laws is only possible when you are in a frame of mind in which you do not truly know what you are doing and how it will affect you. You might have come to believe that it will not truly hurt yourself, that it will not have negative consequences or that you can somehow escape those consequences. You might be violating God’s laws without truly seeing that you are doing so, or you might be violating them deliberately but still without the full realization of how it hurts yourself.

Violating God’s laws is only possible when you suffer from an illusion so that you do not see the reality of the Christ mind. You have neutralized your connection to the reality of God and the clear vision of that reality, which is a product of the Christ mind. How can perception of reality be neutralized and replaced by an illusion? It can be done only by entering a state of consciousness that has a more limited perspective on the world than the Christ consciousness. Therefore, you do not see reality but a mental image of reality, an image that is either limited or distorted. In other words, in the Christ mind there is no room for illusions, lies, doubt or interpretation, for there is no gray zone. So you can hurt yourself only by entering into a frame of mind in which there is room for illusion and doubt, meaning that there is a gray zone in which things are not clear. There is room to create a mental image of reality instead of the direct perception of God’s reality found in the Christ mind. There seems to be a distance between you and reality because you are separated from reality—in your mind.

The frame of mind that separates you from reality is, of course, the mind of anti-christ. This frame of mind cannot see reality but sees only a mental image of “reality.” Good and evil have become relative terms and are defined in relation to each other rather than in relation to God’s absolute reality. When “truth” is relative, it becomes possible to define it in such a way that although you know you are violating God’s laws, your perspective makes it seem like this is acceptable, justified, beneficial or perhaps even your only option.

When you realize that the Garden of Eden was a spiritual school, it becomes obvious that this school had certain lessons or initiations that students had to face and successfully pass before they could move on to the next level. Facing the temptation to go against the laws of God was one such initiation. As mentioned before, a new student does not have enough awareness to know the laws of God. Although it is violating those laws, this is done out of honest ignorance, for when you do not know the laws, you simply do not have the option to willfully violate them. The protection for new students is the teacher’s instructions. If they stay connected to the teacher, he will help them develop Christ discernment until they know from within how to avoid violating God’s laws.

As a student grows in maturity, it begins to know the laws of God, and thus it now acquires the knowledge that makes it possible to deliberately go against the laws. Thus, the student must now face the temptation to violate God’s laws and to justify doing so by using the mind of anti-christ and its relative logic. Do you see the all-important point here? A new student is in a state of innocent ignorance in which it simply does not know better. Ignorance is not the same as the mind of anti-christ. Ignorance is a passive state of consciousness caused by an absence of knowledge. If you turn on the light in a dark room, the darkness immediately disappears. In other words, a person who is in ignorance does not resist receiving knowledge that will set him free from ignorance. In contrast, the mind of anti-christ is not innocently ignorant, it is willfully ignorant. It does not recognize that it is ignorant for it has created a mental image of reality and it worships this graven image as the only true God. Thus, it will resist receiving knowledge, as if there was a force hiding in the dark room, trying to prevent you from turning on the light. Or it will get people to keep their eyes closed so they cannot see what is revealed after the light is turned on. When students become blinded by this mindset, they refuse to listen to the teacher, and they justify this by using the logic of the mind of anti-christ. Because this mind defines its own world view, it can justify anything, and thus the teacher cannot help the students escape their circular logic. The students are no longer teachable.

As I have explained, the goal of the true spiritual teacher is to raise the student to become spiritually self-sufficient, which means that the student attains the Christ consciousness and becomes enlightened. Yet this is not a mechanical process that can be forced upon the student from without. It is a creative process that must come from within through the student’s own choosing. Before you can attain the mind of Christ – in which you are one with absolute truth – you must overcome the temptation to use the mind of anti-christ to define your own “truth,” using it to justify that you do not grow and self-transcend. You must overcome the temptation to separate yourself from your outer and inner teacher by using the mind of anti-christ to justify not transcending your current level of consciousness or even projecting a negative image upon the teacher which seems to justify your withdrawal from him.

***

We can now consider one of the pivotal questions presented by the passage quoted above, namely, “Did God lie to Adam?” I am aware that many people who honor the Bible have never considered this inescapable question and that some have seen it and pushed it aside. Yet the question is essential for understanding the student-teacher relationship.

The parameters are clear and undeniable. God – or rather the spiritual teacher – tells Adam that if he eats of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, he will “surely” die (Genesis 2:17). The Bible then describes that Adam and Eve do eat the fruit, but instead of dying, they are cast out of paradise (Genesis 3:24). Since the teacher must obviously have known this, it would seem he lied to Adam. Some people even interpret this to mean that God is trying to hold people in bondage by preventing them from having the fruit of knowledge, while the Serpent is the liberator of humankind. In other words, man did not attain true freedom until he violated God’s laws—or so they say.

In our previous discussions we have set the foundation for sorting this out, but we will need to go a bit deeper into what we have discussed earlier. As we have seen, the center of a student’s being is the conscious self. This self is an extension of the Spiritual Self that has been sent into the material universe. The purpose was to start out with a limited sense of self-awareness and then grow toward the full realization that you are an extension of God and that you are here to take dominion over the Earth and raise it to become the fullness of the kingdom of God.

In order to co-create anything in the material universe, you must do so through your sense of identity, and it is the role of the conscious self to define your material identity. As you start out in the spiritual schoolroom, you have a rudimentary sense of identity, much like an infant on Earth. However, you quickly build a sense of identity, and it is based on two main factors. One is your experience with and understanding of your environment. The other is the instructions from your spiritual teacher. The first factor is naturally limited in the beginning, and thus you build your sense of identity largely based on ignorance. Even your understanding of the teacher’s instructions is limited, for your lack of understanding limits what the teacher can tell you. This is much like small children who cannot be taught advanced knowledge. You do not teach nuclear physics to students in kindergarten.

Child psychologists have discovered that children normally go through several distinct phases as they mature. In reality, each of these phases represents a distinct sense of identity that the conscious self has built. Likewise, a new student goes through such phases, and for each of them it builds a distinct sense of identity based on a specific view of the world. What psychologists have not yet understood is that when a child goes from one phase to the next, the sense of identity built during the previous phase ideally dies.

As I have explained, the conscious self is – at least in the material realm – what it thinks it is. The conscious self is expressing itself through its sense of identity. It can expand its sense of identity gradually, but this evolutionary change can only go so far. At certain intervals, it becomes necessary to take a major leap forward by going through a revolutionary change. This is comparable to the life-cycle of a butterfly. The larvae grows gradually, but then it goes through a revolutionary change and becomes a cocoon. Inside the cocoon, the butterfly grows gradually, but then another revolutionary change breaks the cocoon and the butterfly takes flight.

On a psychological level, a student first builds a sense of identity based on a limited outlook on the world. This identity evolves, but the limitations of the original world view set parameters for how far this growth can go. In order to rise to a higher level, a revolutionary change must occur. The old sense of identity must die and its world view must be left behind as a cocoon. Yet the death of the old sense of identity happens so gradually that most people are not aware of it. They transition into the new sense of identity so smoothly that – even though they may notice a change – they do not realize that they have been psychologically or spiritually reborn.

As a student grew in the Garden of Eden, it gradually built a sense of identity through both evolutionary and revolutionary stages. As it started to reach the stage of becoming more self-sufficient, it had built a sophisticated sense of identity. This identity was based on its understanding of the world and its own individuality. The student had not attained the full Christ consciousness, but it did have an understanding – backed by intuitive experiences and the teacher’s instructions – that it was a spiritual being who originated beyond the material universe and the Garden. In other words, the student’s conscious self was beginning to realize that it was not a product of the world but an extension of a greater spiritual being. This realization was – of course – the master key to the fulfillment of the student’s reason for being. You cannot fulfill your role in this world unless you recognize the Creator with whom you are co-creating. Thus, the student had the seed of Christhood and was on its way to attaining enlightenment, in which you directly perceive – and thus accept with every part of your being – that you are a spiritual Being who is one with your source.

When I told Adam that he would die if he ate the forbidden fruit, I was not lying to him. I knew that Adam – as a symbol for a student who has started to develop the Christ consciousness but is not yet anchored in it – was at a critical stage. This stage is when a student knows enough to realize that it is possible to go against the laws of God, yet the student does not have enough Christ consciousness to perceive that it will hurt itself by doing so. In other words, the student can use its imagination to ask, “What will happen if I go against God’s laws?” But because the student does not directly perceive the oneness of all life, it has no direct perception of the consequences. It can only imagine the consequences, which makes it vulnerable to the subtle logic of the mind of anti-christ. The student does not yet have enough Christ discernment to see through the lies of anti-christ.

Take note of a crucial point. Dealing with the mind of anti-christ was an initiation that all students in the mystery school had to face. Yet as a teacher, I tried to make sure that students did not face this initiation before they were ready. You do not send a driving student into rush hour traffic until he or she has sufficient experience to avoid an accident. Only when you have a certain level of Christ consciousness can you successfully refute the temptations of the mind of anti-christ, as Jesus demonstrated when he was tempted by the devil after fasting in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1). My point is that Adam and Eve represent students who took the initiation of the knowledge of relative good and evil before they were ready for it. And that is precisely why they became lost in the mind of anti-christ, as we will see later.

For now, let us return to the question of whether the teacher lied to Adam. As a spiritual teacher, I knew that Adam was not ready for the initiation, yet – forever loyal to the Creator’s Law of Free Will – I also had no way of forcing him to stay away from the forbidden fruit. Thus, I had to give him a strong incentive for not eating the fruit. I did this by telling him that he would die if he ate the fruit, and we can now see that this was not a lie. Before Adam ate the fruit, his conscious self had a sense of identity that contained some connection to his Higher Self. Yet once he partook of the mind of anti-christ, that connection was lost. Thus, Adam’s sense of identity as a spiritual being in the material universe literally died. Instead, Adam was – without realizing what had happened – reborn into a lower sense of identity in which he saw himself as a material being who was separated from God by an impenetrable barrier. The first Adam had died and a second Adam was born, but the conscious self of the second Adam had no memory of the first Adam and thus did not understand what it had lost. It simply looked at its situation – and its relationship with the spiritual teacher – through the filter of its new identity. This is similar to a teenager who one day realizes he or she is not a child anymore and is now seeing the world through different eyes. This often causes a teenager to rebel against its parents, yet as it matures it learns to understand its parents and comes back into harmony with them (ideally speaking). My point is that Adam’s new identity was based on the mind of anti-christ in which truth had become a relative concept. This is crucial to understanding what happened next.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

Have you ever taken a walk in a dense forest or in a foreign city and actually lost your way, not knowing where you were or how to get to your destination? Why were you lost? Was it not because you had a limited perspective, a limited view of the situation? If you could have jumped into a helicopter and seen the situation from above, it would have been easier to find your way. Or if you could have phoned someone in a helicopter, that person could have guided you from a higher perspective.

There are many people on Earth who claim to be religious or spiritual people, seeking for a higher state of life, whether they call it salvation, eternal life, nirvana, higher consciousness, enlightenment or something else. Some of these people have truly found a viable path that leads to a higher state while others are simply deluding themselves. What is the difference between those who have discovered what Jesus called the strait and narrow way and those who follow what he called the broad way that leads to destruction (Matthew 7:13-14)? The difference is that those who have found a true path have realized that the key to making viable progress is to expand your perspective, to change the way you look at everything, to transcend your limited state of consciousness. In contrast, those who are following a false path think they have found the only true belief system and that this external truth will guarantee their salvation.

The most important fact about planet Earth is that human beings have lost their way and have become trapped in a lower state of consciousness in which they have a limited and distorted view of everything. It is true that, in the beginning, God created self-aware beings in his image and after his likeness. But since people lost the connection to their higher beings, they have created a God in the image and after the likeness of themselves—as they are now in their limited, self-centered state of consciousness. Therefore, they project human qualities upon God and think he is angry, frightening, remote, unloving, unjust or any other human quality that springs from anti-love.

You probably know that there was a time when many human beings believed the Earth was flat. You probably also know that the Earth was as round then as it is today. In other words, there are certain aspects of life that human beliefs cannot change, because those facts were defined by a mind that is in a higher state than the current state of consciousness of human beings. Thus, I wish all sincere spiritual seekers would contemplate the fact that God is not mocked (Galatians 6:7) and that he is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34) or their limited opinions. In other words, people’s beliefs about God do not change the reality of the Creator.

However, beliefs do change people’s perception of and their relationship with the Creator, and thus beliefs change how people see themselves. There is a reason why the first two commandments given to Moses were to not have any other God’s before the one true God and to not take unto yourself any graven image (Exodus 20:3-4). When people fell into a lower state of consciousness, they started creating mental images – as well as idols made of wood, stone or gold – and believed they were the true God. Yet the true God is the Creator who is always beyond – while at the same time being everywhere within – its creation. Thus, no image in the world of form can describe the Creator who created the world of form.

When you create a graven image of God – meaning a mental image that you think is infallible and refuse to change – you will inevitably lose contact with the true God and the reality of his law. As we have already discussed, you will then begin to create a world that is not based on the Creator’s laws. Thus, your creation will inevitably be unbalanced which can only lead to suffering. The cause of all suffering is that people have lost contact with the reality of God’s laws so they are using their co-creative abilities to create an unbalanced world. In other words, all suffering is the result of ignorance, of an illusion. This is proven by the fact that so many people blame their God for their suffering, thinking they were created as sinners, that God wants to punish them or that he is an unjust God.

What I am leading up to here is the realization that most human beings today have a limited perspective on life, a limited world view. Yet they tend to project that limited view upon God and think they can actually know – even define – what God is like based on their present state of consciousness. It would be extremely constructive for your spiritual growth if you would recognize this tendency and make a sincere effort to rise above it.

You can start by contemplating the thought that even though many human beings are confused and cannot understand how the world works, God suffers from no such confusion. The Creator is not unintelligent and has a complete understanding of the laws that guide the unfoldment of its creation. Thus, if you want to escape the confusion that causes your suffering, you need to expand your understanding of God’s laws. This might require you to go beyond your current beliefs about life, God and the world. As mentioned before, one of the major problems on Earth is that many people are so attached to their current beliefs that they reject a higher understanding when it is offered to them. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to offer you a higher perspective on the most basic principles of the universe.

***

As we have discussed, the very purpose of the world of form is to give self-conscious beings the ability to grow in self-awareness, from a sense of identity focused in one point to the full God-awareness that is in every point in the All and is one with the Allness. This requires several elements:

Beings must start in an environment in which they can have a sense of identity as separate, individual beings. As I have explained, that is why the Creator makes a sphere that is set apart from the void and contains basic structures but is not so filled with light that the illusion of separateness is impossible.

Beings must have the ability to build their own sense of identity, which is why they have the Creator’s own abilities of self-awareness, unlimited imagination and unrestricted free will. Only by choosing to build its own identity will a being truly grow in self-awareness.

Beings must have a path that leads them toward full God-awareness. Otherwise they might build a limited sense of identity and get stuck in it indefinitely. Obviously, this would be against the most basic principle of creation, namely growth, and thus there must be a safety mechanism that ensures growth.

We now need to revisit our earlier discussion of the kind of safety mechanism the Creator designed. The Creator decided to manifest itself as two forces, namely the expanding and the contracting force. These two forces are designed to be complementary forces and magnify each other, thereby creating the MORE and raising sphere after sphere until the void is filled with light. Yet if used in an unbalanced way, the two forces become opposites and cancel out each other. The Creator then decided to create a state of consciousness that contains its vision and purpose for the world of form and a record of the principles that the Creator designed in order to ensure the balanced growth of this world. Take note that this all happened before anything was actually created in the void. The Creator then decided that it would only create by using the Christ consciousness. In other words, the Creator itself only created through the Christ consciousness, meaning that everything was in harmony with the Creator’s vision and laws. The Creator never created anything that was against its own laws, but since it did create self-aware beings with free will, such beings can depart from their original design and go against the Creator’s laws.

Once a co-creator has attained enlightenment or mastery, that co-creator likewise co-creates everything through the Christ consciousness. Therefore, the masters who created the original Earth did so through the Christ consciousness, meaning that they created a perfectly balanced planet.

We now need to revisit the fact that the Christ consciousness is the only begotten Son of the Father and that you can know God only through the Christ mind. Yet the purpose of the world of form is to give beings the experience of starting with a limited and separate sense of self-awareness. In other words, this would not be possible if new beings were created with the full Christ consciousness. A new being has only a seed of the Christ consciousness, meaning that it starts out by co-creating without having any awareness of God’s overall vision or God’s laws. Thus, it is inevitable that a new co-creator will violate the laws of God and use the expanding and contracting forces in an unbalanced manner. And since any unbalanced use of the two basic forces leads to an unbalanced creation that produces suffering, it would seem that co-creators are born into a life of suffering.

If this was true, it would obviously seem unfair. Co-creators are born with a limited awareness of God’s laws and thus it is inevitable that they will be unbalanced in their use of their creative powers. They simply don’t know better, and thus they cannot do better. If they were “punished” for the ignorance with which God created them, that would seem unfair to most people. One could argue that this would not be truly unfair, since the purpose of life is to grow in self-awareness—and by growing, co-creators can rise above suffering. However, the reality is that when a being enters any sphere, it is placed in a protected schoolroom under the guidance of a spiritual teacher. The teacher represents the Christ to the student and gives it loving guidance while at the same time protecting the student from the consequences of its unbalanced actions. Thus, a new co-creator is not born into a life of suffering but is born into an environment that seems like paradise – and is a paradise – compared to the current conditions you face on Earth.

It is only when a student chooses to leave this protected environment that it must bear its own burden and experience the consequences of its unbalanced actions. It would thus seem highly unlikely that anyone would choose to leave their paradise. Which makes it necessary for us to investigate the mechanism that has led most human beings on Earth to leave the protected environment of a cosmic schoolroom.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

In order to understand how and why human beings separated themselves from their teachers, we need to take a closer look at your total being. I will describe this in generic terms that apply to most of the beings who evolve on Earth. I have said that everything has an Alpha and an Omega aspect, and so does your own being. We might compare your total being to a figure-eight:

The upper figure represents the spiritual side of your being, the part that permanently resides in the spiritual realm. This part contains the divine blueprint for your individuality, and it can never be destroyed by anything you do in the material world. It is an extension of an immortal spiritual being and the very basis for your sense of identity. It has been called the I AM Presence in several teachings given by the Ascended Host.

The lower figure represents that part of your being which is designed to empower you to express yourself in the material world. This lower self has several parts which we will explore later. For now, the important point is that your lower being is centered around your sense of identity, meaning both the sense of who you are as a spiritual Being but also who you are as a being in the material universe.

Your spiritual self is a gift to you from the spiritual being who created you out of its own consciousness. This is your divine blueprint that you can never lose. In other words, no matter what you do in the material universe, you cannot destroy this divine blueprint because it exists in a spectrum of vibrations that is above – and thus cannot be affected by – the frequencies of the material universe. The important point here is that your original divine identity can never be lost. What can be lost is your connection to it and even your memory of it. As I have said, the learning process of a student has two aspects, but this truly applies to all beings in embodiment on Earth:

The Alpha aspect is that you discover and fully embody your divine identity, so that you reach the point of enlightenment where you know and accept who you are as a spiritual being. You can then express your divine individuality in everything you do in the material world. You have become here below all that you are above. A new student does not have this enlightened self-awareness but starts out with a limited self-awareness as a separate being. It is the role of the teacher to guide the student to discover, accept and internalize its spiritual identity.

The Omega aspect of the learning process is to build a sense of identity that serves as the platform for your co-creative efforts in the material world. In other words, you are meant to discover your Alpha identity, but you are meant to define your Omega identity. A new student starts out with a limited sense of who it is—both spiritually and materially. As it discovers more of its divine individuality and gains experiences with the material world, it gradually builds the sense of who it is as a spiritual being with the task of taking dominion over the material world and bringing God’s kingdom to Earth. At least, this is what will ideally happen.

***

The logical question now becomes who it is that builds this composite sense of identity? Where is your sense of identity centered? What is the You which decides who – and what – you are and who/what you are not? Understanding this is the central mystery of existence, the missing link between the material and the spiritual aspects of your Being. Unfortunately, an understanding of this has been missing from most spiritual and religious teachings on this planet. It has been determined by the Ascended Host that it is time to correct this lack, and Mother Mary’s book was the first step. I will build upon her revelations in this book.

As I explained earlier, everything in the world of form is created out of an interplay between the two basic polarities, namely the expanding force of the Father and the contracting force of the Mother. Yet a sustainable creation is only possible when these two polarities are held in a dynamic balance. And the element that is designed to create and maintain this balance is the element of the Son, the universal Christ mind.

In terms of the figure-eight of your being, the upper figure represents the Father polarity and the lower figure represents the Mother polarity. For you to reach enlightenment, take dominion over your own being and fulfill your role on Earth, you must balance – or unite – the two aspects. In the nexus of the figure-eight is that part of your being which represents the Son, the Christ that is meant to balance the upper and the lower aspects of your being. This part is what Mother Mary calls the Conscious You, but in this book I will call it the conscious self. You have free will, so you are not a robot or an animal. The meaning is that you have the ability to be aware that you exist, to know you are a spiritual being and to consciously choose to co-create on Earth. The very basis for this is that you have self-awareness, that you have the ability to know that you exist. You exist because there is a part of your being that was created by an immortal spiritual Being, and thus it is permanent. You can know you exist because you were created out of the Being and consciousness of the Creator, for without him was not anything made that was made. Thus, the Creator’s omnipresent self-awareness is embedded within your being. We might say that the basis for your self-awareness is your I AM Presence, which gives you the foundation for knowing, “I AM, I exist, I am alive, I have being.” Yet the part that actually comes to this recognition is your conscious self. It is the conscious self that says, “I am…” and then defines the characteristics for what comes after the words “I am.”

Your conscious self is the center of your total being. It is here you decide who you are, and it is here you decide how to express who you are in the material world. What is the basis for these decisions? It is your sense of identity, who you see yourself as being, what you put after those all-important words, “I AM …” What you define as your sense of identity determines how you co-create in the material world. Obviously, this has two aspects, namely to what degree you have discovered, accepted and internalized your divine individuality and what kind of material identity you have built for yourself. My point is that it is the conscious self who has the dual task of discovering your Alpha identity and building your Omega identity. The conscious self is the only begotten son of your higher being and it alone can know the Father, meaning your spiritual identity. It is the conscious self that decides who you are, and, as we will see later, every aspect of your life in the material universe is directly determined by your sense of identity. Thus, we might say that the conscious self is the core of your lower being, the very center of your sense of self. It is therefore essential that your conscious self becomes conscious of itself.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

In the preceding chapters I have given teachings that give you the big picture for the entire world of form and all beings in it. I will now focus specifically on helping you understand your situation as a human being on Earth.

Let us begin by summarizing the process of how a sphere is created. The first step is that a sphere is set apart from the void. Masters from the higher spheres create certain structures in the new sphere and, within the larger framework of the laws defined by the Creator, they define certain specific laws for the new sphere. Self-aware beings are then created to help the new sphere ascend, either by working from the spiritual realm (angels) or by helping to co-create it from within (co-creators). As the sphere reaches a critical intensity of light and organization, it “ascends” and becomes a permanent part of the spiritual realm.

When a sphere ascends, it becomes so filled with light that there is no longer room for the illusion of separateness. The beings who were sent into the sphere started out with a separate sense of identity, yet by transcending themselves they helped raise up their sphere. When a critical mass of beings reach the mastery of oneness with their source, they have brought their sphere to the point of ascension. As one sphere goes through the process of ascending, a new sphere is created by being set apart from the void. The ascending sphere is becoming so filled with light that the illusion of a separate identity cannot be maintained by the beings in that sphere. Yet in the newly created sphere, there is still such a low intensity of light that darkness or shadows can exist, and thus the illusion of a separate existence is possible. A new “generation” of beings is born and sent into the new sphere, beings who start out with a limited sense of identity and an awareness of themselves as separate beings.

I have explained that the very first sphere was created by the Creator itself. Thus, the beings who were sent into – or rather created in – that sphere were created directly by the Creator. The first sphere was designed in such a way that the structures in it were less defined, more fluid or less dense than what you see in the material world. We might say that the Ma-ter Light out of which the first sphere was created vibrated at a higher level and therefore everything in that sphere was more transparent than matter in your sphere. The consequence is that although the beings in the first sphere started out with a separate sense of self, it was far easier for them to overcome separateness than it is for the beings in the material universe. The first beings could easily see that there was something beyond their sphere, that it was created by a Being beyond themselves and that it was sustained by a constant stream of spiritual light that originated with the Creator and was stepped down to their level of vibration. They knew they were not alone and that there was something or someone beyond their own sphere. In other words, it was relatively easy for the first beings to ascend and attain the mastery of oneness with their source.

When the next sphere was created, the beings who had attained mastery in the first sphere helped create the second sphere. It was the Creator who set the second sphere apart from the void, and he also defined the laws for that sphere. Within that framework, the masters from the first sphere designed certain structures that could serve as a platform for life in the second sphere. These structures were more specific, more defined, than the structures in the first sphere. The masters from the first sphere used their own experiences to design these structures. It was part of the Creator’s plan that the structures in the second sphere should be more defined, more complex, more dense, than in the first sphere. In this way the second sphere would be one step further removed from oneness, making it more challenging for the beings in the second sphere to overcome separation.

If the beings in the second sphere had been created as the beings in the first sphere, the density of the second sphere might have been difficult for them to overcome. It would have been similar to taking a group of children and asking them to run a country. Yet the beings in the second sphere were created out of the consciousness of the masters from the first sphere. Thus, these second generation beings were designed based on the experience of these masters, meaning that they had a basis for overcoming the greater separation. This equipped them to deal with the density of the second sphere, making it possible that the Creator – through the second generation beings – could experience a greater sense of separation while minimizing the risk that these beings would become lost in separation. This is somewhat similar to the school system on Earth. Students start out by learning addition and subtraction, which gives them a basis for learning multiplication. This in turn gives them a basis for learning more advanced math, eventually leading to the university level.

The plan of the Creator is that the spheres are created as a continuum from less dense to more dense, from closer to oneness to further removed from oneness, from less complex to greater complexity. The specific structures in each succeeding sphere are designed by those who attained mastery in the previous sphere, but beings in all previous spheres are involved in the design of a new sphere. This means that each new sphere becomes more sophisticated, more specific, more expressed, which necessitates that the Ma-ter Light has a lower vibration. Greater complexity means a greater variety of different forms, and only light of a denser vibration can give rise to greater differentiation. We might say that the matter that makes up the material universe is more dense than the “stuff” in the spiritual realm. Matter is so dense that you cannot see that it is made from vibrating energy, that it is made from spiritual light that has been stepped down in vibration. You cannot directly perceive – at least not with the state of consciousness that is currently considered normal on Earth – that there is something beyond the material universe.

The higher density makes it more challenging for the beings sent into the new sphere to overcome separateness and come into oneness. Yet in their striving to overcome separation, they can lean on the beings who have gone before them in higher spheres. Thus, any given being is not truly separate – no man is an island – but has access to the entire hierarchy of beings that have gone before it and out of which it is the latest expression. It is somewhat like a family tree that gives you access to the experience of all previous generations, giving you the option of learning from the mistakes of others so you do not have to reinvent the wheel or repeat the same mistakes.

***

We will later consider that people on Earth started out their journey from many different points of origin. However, what I want to do here is to give you a universal description of how beings first descended to this particular sphere and eventually came to be in embodiment on the physical Earth. By describing this process, you will also gain a greater understanding of how you can ascend from this sphere and win your immortality as a spiritual being.

As I have explained, the material universe is the most dense part of the world of form, even the most dense part ever created in the world of form. The density of physical matter makes separate forms appear fully separate, which also makes self-conscious beings appear fully separate. Thus, it is more difficult for such beings to overcome the illusion of separation and follow the Path of Oneness that leads them to a higher sense of identity that is based on oneness with all life.

When a being enters a physical body on planet Earth, it will generally forget that it had any existence prior to this particular lifetime. I earlier explained that when the Creator created the first self-aware beings, it did not want to throw them into a vacuum with no sense of identity or continuity. Thus, it was not the original plan that any being would start out its journey in this sphere by being sent directly into physical embodiment. Beings were meant to start out in a protected environment in which they were offered the guidance of spiritual teachers who had attained the greater oneness with the All. Thus, beings would enter this latest sphere through a kind of cosmic or spiritual schoolroom in which they were offered a structured program to help them anchor themselves firmly on the Path of Oneness.

Such a program has existed in all higher spheres, and it has been successful in raising new beings up to a sense of oneness with their source. As I said, all beings are created as extensions of higher beings, forming a Chain of Being that reaches back to the Creator. Thus, the key to attaining oneness with your source is to begin by attaining oneness with the beings who are right above you in the Chain of Being. Obviously, this is far easier for a new lifestream than attaining oneness with the Creator who is far above it.

Once you are in a physical body, it really does not matter so much where you came from. What is truly important is that if you are to attain immortality, you have to follow the Path of Oneness that leads you to overcome the illusion of separation. Yet most people are not born with any awareness of this path, and there is hardly any religion on Earth that teaches the path. We must therefore conclude that on the physical Earth, knowledge of the Path of Oneness has been lost. It is important for you to understand how and why this happened, so that you can overcome the effects of this loss and rediscover the true path to eternal life. We will consider this topic in the coming chapters.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

If you take an impersonal look at the world of form, you might say that the purpose of this world is to have the light grow in intensity until it fills up the void and eventually reaches the same intensity as the Allness, thus becoming – or merging back into – the Allness. Yet this world was not created for an impersonal or mechanical purpose. It was created for a personal purpose, namely to give self-transcending beings the opportunity to start out as separate, self-centered beings and grow in self-awareness until they can enter the Allness with a memory of being less than the Allness. Thus, life is not a treadmill of creating a void, filling that void, creating a new void, filling that void and so on. Life is a creative process wherein self-conscious beings receive a unique opportunity to grow in awareness until they reach the same level of consciousness as God itself. You are, so to speak, a God in the making, which is why Jesus said, “Ye are Gods” (John 10:34).

Imagine the conditions found before anything was created in the void. Your Creator had projected itself as a singularity in the middle of a vast void in which there was absolutely nothing. Your Creator could create absolutely anything it could envision. There were no rules or limitations, for it was up to the Creator to define its own rules. This was actually a challenge for your Creator, for when you can create anything without having any prior experience or reference to guide you, you can feel a bit lonely and lost. Obviously, your Creator had the full memory of the Allness and saw itself as an extension of the Allness, so the emptiness of the void was not scary to the Creator. Yet imagine that the Creator had created a number of self-conscious beings and had sent them into the void with the command to create anything they wanted. These beings would not have had any memory of the Allness and no sense of connection to it. Neither would they have had any prior experience to guide their creative efforts. Naturally, they would have felt alone and quite possibly lost. You might have heard of people who lose their memory and how traumatic that can be. You might even have heard of torture where people are deprived of sensory experiences, thus feeling like they are alone in a world of nothingness. This can very quickly lead to a mental breakdown, even permanent insanity.

Your Creator had no desire to put its offspring through that experience, so it created a protected sphere that was set apart from the void. Within that sphere, the Creator created certain structures and set up certain creative principles – or laws – to guide the growth of that sphere. When a basis for life had been created, the Creator created self-transcending beings and gave them the command to “multiply” and “have dominion” (Genesis 1:28). Instead of throwing these beings into nothingness, the Creator gave them a foundation and told them to build upon it. They could do this by multiplying what they had been given and by learning how to use the laws defined by the Creator, thereby taking dominion over their sphere through self-mastery.

When they had mastered life in their native sphere, the self-transcending beings became masters who helped co-create the next sphere. And in doing so, they had greater creative freedom in terms of designing structures in that sphere. Thus, they had the opportunity to create anything they wanted, but they had guidelines and a basis of experience from which to create. In other words, only the Creator creates from “nothing,” whereas all other beings have a foundation for their creative efforts. The Creator creates, whereas you expand your sense of self within the framework defined by the Creator. We might say that you co-create.

***

We have seen that the purpose of this world is to give self-conscious beings the opportunity to grow in self-awareness. This growth must take place gradually, or in stages. Why is this so? Because at any given time you have a sense of who you are. You might experience a situation that causes you to expand your sense of who you are, but it will take time for you to integrate that new sense of identity. That is why a child on Earth needs time to grow up and why children who are forced to “grow up” too quickly can experience severe psychological problems. If change happens too abruptly, people can lose their sense of who they are and they will find it difficult to cope with life.

My point is that sustainable growth must be balanced growth. You are, so to speak, meant to lose your separate sense of identity. Yet you are not meant to lose it all at once so that you have no identity left. You are meant to lose your separate sense of identity only as the result of a process whereby it is replaced by an expanded sense of identity. If the growth happened too quickly, you would lose your sense of stability and continuity, possibly even all sense of identity. If the growth happened too slowly, you might become so attached to a particular way of life that you would refuse to grow beyond that level of awareness. In order to achieve the best possible growth, everything in your life should be balanced. What does balance mean?

We have seen that the Creator created the void by contracting all of its consciousness and Being into a single point. This set the stage for the creation of the world of form by creating the void. Yet the actual creation began when the Creator projected part of its own consciousness outward. These are the two basic forces involved in creation, namely the contracting force and the expanding force. Imagine that the contracting force was the dominant force. In that case, nothing could be created. As soon as the Creator projected energy out into the void, the contracting force would instantly return it to the center. Now imagine that the expanding force was dominant. In that case all of God’s Being would be released in one giant outburst, instantly filling the void. In either case a balanced and gradual growth would not be possible, thus leaving little opportunity for lifestreams to gradually grow in self-awareness. We can conclude that this world is not built on an all-or-nothing approach but on a careful balance between the two forces.

From a human perspective it might seem as if the expanding and the contracting forces are opposite each other. Yet true opposites cancel out each other. If opposites meet, they either destroy each other or one destroys the other and only one is left. In reality, the expanding and contracting forces are complementary, meaning that they supplement, even magnify, each other. Only when both forces are present is it possible to create a sustainable form.

The point is that the only way to create a sustainable structure – yet a structure that is growing – is to have a state of balance between the expanding and the contracting forces. They must coexist but they must be balanced so they keep each other in check without canceling out each other. And they must be balanced in such a way that they do not stop the growth that is the very purpose of the world of form. Balance is not something static. The balance of the universe is a dynamic balance, leading in a balanced way toward a higher goal. What is it that creates the balance between the two basic forces of creation?

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

If you are to understand the dynamics that shape your experience in the material universe, you need to keep in mind that the entire world of form was created for a very specific purpose. That purpose was to open up for an experience of what it is like to be less than – separated from – the Allness. Yet it was never God’s intention to make this experience permanent. This world was created as being less but also created to follow a path of gradually becoming more, until it again merges into the Allness from which it came and from which it was never truly set apart.

Your Creator has projected itself into the world of form as two polarities. One is the Mother Light, which obediently takes on any form projected upon it by the other polarity, namely the self-conscious beings with co-creative abilities. It is essential to understand that your Creator experiences the world of form through you. The Creator has a memory of the Allness and has a sense of oneness with the Allness that can never be lost. So when you experience limitations in the world of form, your Creator – through you – experiences what it is like to be less than and separated from the Allness. Your Creator created you partly in order to have this experience. Thus, for your Creator, any experience you have contributes to the Creator’s experience of what it is like to be less than the Allness. Why is this important? Because while your Creator can have – through you – an experience of being less than the Allness, the Creator can never be lost in this experience. The Creator can experience the illusion of being separated from the Allness, but the Creator can never fully believe that this appearance of separation, the appearance of less, is real or permanent. The reason is that your Creator’s sense of self-awareness did not originate inside the world of form, and thus it could never be confined to this world. Your Creator knows with an absolute knowing that it is more than the world of form. In contrast, you do not know what it is like to be less than the Allness, for you have not experienced the Allness. Thus, you can become lost in the world of form, thinking it is all there is and that you have no way of rising above your separate and limited sense of identity. Obviously, this is not what the Creator wants for you.

Let me illustrate this point with an analogy. Imagine yourself in a theater as one of the actors in a play. You are fully aware that you started life outside the theater. You entered the building and put on a costume. In order to give a convincing performance, you set aside your normal personality and take on the personality of the character you are playing. Yet when the performance is over, you take off the costume, revert back to your normal personality and leave the theater—returning to the “real” world or at least the world of your long-term sense of identity. Now imagine that a person has been born inside a theater and has never seen the world outside. The person has seen people entering and leaving the theater but has never really thought about what is outside. Thus, the person has come to believe that the theater is all there is to reality and that the world of the theater is real in an ultimate sense. The person might even believe that he or she has no life separate from the theater and has no identity apart from the role he or she is currently playing.

You are a self-aware being and you are an extension of your Creator. Yet you are not created simply as a puppet, as a toy, for your Creator. Your Creator has given you the gift of life, meaning that you have self-awareness, imagination and free will—you have the ability to create your own experience, even your own material circumstances, by using the Mother Light. And you have free will to design this experience according to your imagination and your own choosing. Your Creator did not originate within its own creation, and the Creator can never fall prey to the illusion that the world of form is the only reality. Yet because you did originate within the world of form, you can come to believe that what you have created is the ultimate reality and that you have no way to escape it. Thus, while the Creator can never become lost in its own creation, you can. You can believe that you really are a limited human being, living on a planet where life is suffering.

It is understandable that you might accept this illusion, and God does not blame you for identifying fully with the role you are now playing in the theater called planet Earth. Yet your Creator also knows that you have the potential to expand your sense of self-awareness beyond what you experience right now. Because you are an extension of the consciousness of the Creator, you have the potential to reach the full awareness of the Creator.

You might have heard about a holographic image. It is a type of photograph, but it is unique in that the whole image is comprised of individual parts and each part has a smaller replica of the whole. We might say that you are created as one part of the holographic image that is the Creator expressing itself as the world of form. Your individual consciousness contains within it a replica of the whole, and by magnifying your awareness of the whole, you can become one with the whole, you can become all that the whole is, you can become the All. This is the highest potential that comes with the gift of life.

Here is the essential point. You were created as a separate being, living inside the world of form. Yet it was never your Creator’s intention that you should become permanently lost in the world of form, in your separate identity. Your Creator wants you to realize that the material world is just a theater in which you have taken on a particular role in a play. Your Creator never wanted you to permanently identify yourself with and as that part or think there is nothing more to life than the play. Why not? Because your Creator knows that this world is incredibly limited compared to the Allness. The Creator knows that the material universe, at its current level of development, is incredibly limited compared to the spiritual realm. You are an extension of the Creator and your Creator loves you as itself because you are itself. Thus, the Creator has no desire to see you permanently trapped in a limited world in which you experience life as suffering.

Remember that the Creator experiences separation through you because you are an extension of the Creator’s Being. However, this works both ways, meaning that you can experience the Creator’s Being while in this limited state. You can experience that you are the Creator experiencing limitations through your lower being. When you have this experience of expanded awareness, you will no longer be lost in separation and you will no longer be identified with the limitations that cause suffering. You will rise above all identification with this world, and this is called enlightenment—the state of knowing who you truly are.

You might ask why your Creator then created you as a limited being that is trapped on a planet with so much suffering. The overall answer is that your Creator did not create you with your current sense of – human – identity nor did it create the Earth with its current level of imperfection and suffering. So who created the separate being – the separate sense of identity – that you see yourself as being today? You did! Who created the world that you live in today? Humankind did so collectively! I will give further explanation of this fact, but I will approach it gradually.

***

Let me try to make this as clear as possible. You were created as a self-aware being with a separate sense of identity that is more or less narrowly focused on your sense of self. With your current sense of self, you probably see yourself as separate from other beings in your environment and from the Creator. This is not necessarily wrong, but since you are a spiritual person, you need to become more aware of your potential to expand your sense of self. In other words, while you were created as a separate being, you have the potential to grow beyond that. You can follow a path that expands your sense of self until you attain a sense of oneness with your source – your Creator – and with all life.

You were created as a separate being, but you were not created to remain a separate being. You were created to start out as a separate being and then follow a path of growing in self-awareness, until you overcome separateness and become one with the All without losing your sense of individuality. In other words, the underlying theme in the world of form is to grow from separateness to oneness. What many religious people call salvation is this exact process of growing from a separate sense of identity to an expanded sense of identity, in which you realize the oneness of all life and live accordingly. As I have said, everything is created from the Creator’s consciousness, which has been temporarily projected into a limited, separate form. Yet the Creator does not want its own Being to remain trapped in such limitations forever. Thus, all that was created out of the Creator’s consciousness is meant to return to the Creator. You too can return, the difference being that in this return you will not lose your identity but will magnify it until you can enter the Allness or become a creator for your own universe. Thus, the real purpose of life is to transcend your current sense of identity until you reach what we might call full God consciousness.

We might say that all separate beings were created as “self-transcending beings.” As we will see later, there are various evolutions in the world of form, but they are all created to self-transcend, going from separateness to oneness.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

Now that we have set an adequate foundation, we can go into a more direct discussion about the nature of God and the purpose for this universe. The purpose of this discussion is to expand your mental image of God so that – if you are willing – you can avoid having your mental image block a direct experience of God’s Presence. In other words, it is my hope that I can expand both your understanding of God and your direct perception of God. As an ascended Being I perceive the reality of God. I can describe my perception of God’s reality, but I have no desire to have you settle for my description. I want you to have a direct perception of God’s reality. Yet as we have discussed, this requires you to purify your mind of fixed, or graven, images that block your perception. Thus, let us consider the differences between how you – as an unascended being on Earth – and I – as an ascended being in the spiritual realm – perceive the level of reality in which we live, move and have our being.

As I have said, the material universe is made from the same basic substance as the spiritual realm. Yet the light in the material universe has been lowered to a different vibrational spectrum. We might also say that the lower vibration makes the light less intense, and thus it is not – yet – able to fill the material universe with light. That is why the space between solar systems and galaxies appears to be empty. It appears as if there are huge areas with no light and that only certain localized areas – your sun being one example – radiate light from within themselves. We might say that there is still more darkness than light in the material universe. The effect is that you cannot see energies above a certain vibration, and thus you cannot see that physical matter is actually made from finer energies that stream into the material universe from a higher vibrational spectrum. We might say that there is an observation horizon beyond which most people cannot perceive with their current level of consciousness.

The density of matter makes it possible for people to create and maintain the illusion that there is no God or that they are separated from God by an impenetrable barrier. This sense of separation from God inevitably leads people to see themselves as separate, independent beings. People can see themselves as being separate from other people, which gives rise to the illusion that you can harm other people, other forms of life and even the physical planet, without harming yourself. This, of course, is the essential cause of all human conflict and atrocities, for if people knew they were hurting themselves by hurting others, most of them would modify their behavior accordingly. Only a few very disturbed people would deliberately hurt themselves, but in reality, even they do not fully understand what they are doing. We might say that the purpose of life in the material realm is to overcome the limited perception of reality, so that you can experience directly that you are not a separate being but an extension of your source, of your Creator.

In contrast to the material universe, the spiritual realm is made from energy of a higher vibration, and thus a higher intensity. Even in the lowest level of the spiritual realm, there is no empty space. Everything appears filled with light, and you see yourself as moving in an ocean of light. You perceive directly that everything is made from light, meaning that it radiates light from within itself or allows light to shine through it. Thus, you perceive that you too radiate light from within yourself. If you care to look more closely, you will see that the light in your vibrational spectrum streams into your world from a higher realm. And if you follow the direction of the light, you will see that it originated as the pure light that was created by the Being who created this particular world of form. Thus, you will know that there is a God and that “without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3), including yourself.

Your direct perception that everything is light and that light comes from God does not take away your free will. In fact, it gives you true freedom of choice. A Being in the spiritual realm can still choose to go against the Creator’s laws and creative intent. Yet it cannot do so based on ignorance, it cannot do so without knowing that by hurting others it is hurting itself. On Earth, it is harder to have a direct experience of God’s existence, and thus it is more likely that beings can choose to go against what they do not understand or do not believe to be real. People can believe they can hurt others without harming themselves.

Imagine that you come to a fork in the road and you have to choose which way to go. You cannot see that one road leads to an abyss and another leads to a hospitable kingdom. No one is forcing you to take either road, but can you really make a free choice when you do not know where both roads lead? If you do not know or fully understand the consequences of your choices, can you really make a free choice? Thus, can those who violate God’s laws or deny God’s existence without perceiving God directly really be said to be making free choices? If you have not perceived God, or at least God’s light, can you really choose freely whether you will follow or go against God’s intent for creating this universe? That is why the Bible talks about a way that seems right to a human being, but the ends thereof are the ways of death (Proverbs 14:12).

***

The reality of God is not linear but because the human mind is so programmed to think in linear images, let us look at a linear representation. Let us start with your perception of the material universe. Science has already discovered that there is something beyond the material universe and that the human mind has an ability to perceive something beyond the material universe. Yet few scientists have been willing to put the two together and recognize that when people see something beyond, they are not – at least not always – hallucinating. They are seeing something that is really there. Science will one day recognize that one of the major characteristics of the mind is the ability to perceive and that the mind’s perception is far more sophisticated than perception based on the physical senses. Most people have been brought up to direct the mind’s perceptive ability exclusively through the physical senses. That is why they see nothing beyond the material universe—or rather, they do see it but their minds filter it out as unnecessary information before it reaches the conscious level. Yet the mind can be retrained to direct its perceptive abilities beyond the senses. Intuition is the first step, but others can follow. My point being that your mind has the ability to perceive all of the spiritual realms created by your Creator. You can start by perceiving the lowest spiritual realm and can gradually work your way up to perceiving the highest level of the world of form. You can even take a step beyond and experience the Creator itself.

Many people have already done this, although few have the ability to perceive details of the higher realms. Yet most people who are spiritually interested have the ability to sense that there is something beyond the material universe, and thus they know – through direct experience or inner knowing – that the spiritual world is real. Likewise, you can have a direct experience that there is a Presence, a Being, that is beyond even the highest spiritual realm. Thus, you can know that God exists.

Once you have the sense that something is real, you can use another of the mind’s abilities to increase your understanding of that something, even though you do not perceive the details directly. This is the mind’s ability to imagine, to conceptualize, that which is not perceived in detail but only as “something real.” This ability is – or should be – coupled with the ability to rationalize, whereby you can extend your understanding beyond what is directly perceived. This, of course, is where spiritual teachings have a function in terms of helping you develop a more detailed understanding of the spiritual world. In other words, outer teachings can assist your growth by clarifying your direct experiences—as long as you do not use an outer teaching to block the experience.

Let me now ask you to imagine that you travel up through the various levels of the spiritual realm until you reach the highest level. This is the level described in the Bible as God saying, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending” (Revelation 21:6). This is the highest level of the world of form, because it is the first level of the Creator expressing itself in form. The Creator starts by expressing itself as two polarities, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending, the expanding and the contracting forces, the out-breath and the in-breath, the Yang and the Yin. On the human level, these forces are often seen as the Father and the Mother or the masculine and feminine, although they are far beyond human sexuality.

The point is that as the first level of expression, the One Creator expresses itself as two polarities. These are not opposites, and they do not cancel out each other. They are complementary forces that supplement and enhance each other. When they meet in a balanced manifestation, they multiply each other and become more. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and thus a new expression of life is created. This is how all the succeeding levels of the world of form are created, as we will later explore. My point here is to show that the One Creator manifests itself as two polarities, yet beyond the highest level of the world of form there is still the One Creator. In other words, there is only One God, and although “without him was not anything made that was made” the One God never ceases to be One, the indivisible whole.

Many religions on Earth talk about this One God, simply using different names and slightly different descriptions for the same reality. Yet before we can go any further, we need to address a misconception that has crept into several religions. This misunderstanding states that there is nothing beyond the One God, that this superior or ultimate God is all there is to God. This is partly due to a lack of perception and understanding of anything beyond. Yet it is also caused by the human ego’s need for superiority. Many religious people have a need to feel that their religion is the only true one and is superior to any other religion. And if your religion is the only true one and is the only one worshiping the ultimate God, then it must be the best religion on Earth—or so the ego reasons. This war of religions has prevented the Ascended Host from releasing a higher understanding of God on this planet. Yet a critical mass has been reached, and we have determined to release this higher understanding for those who have eyes to see.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

Let us return to the previous question, “If God does indeed exist, why hasn’t he given human beings some irrefutable proof that he exists?” We now see that God has indeed given an irrefutable proof of his existence by giving all human beings the ability – the key of knowledge – to have a direct experience of God’s Presence. Once you have such an experience, the question of whether or not God exists becomes obsolete. Yet to have such an experience, you must be willing to go beyond the state of consciousness that creates mental images, projects them upon reality and claims that the image is more real than reality itself.

We will later talk in more detail about the importance of free will, but for now let us simply conclude that God has given people the ability to prove his existence, but he has left it up to the free will of the individual whether he or she will make use of this ability. The determining factor is the individual’s willingness to look beyond his or her mental images and adjust them according to a direct experience of a reality that is beyond the image. Thus, as we shall see later, God has given you the ability to find proof without violating his own Law of Free Will, which gives you the right to create your own image of reality and cling to it until the end of your time. This gives people the option to live on Earth and deny the existence of God. If God had given an irrefutable proof that he exists, people would not have had this option, and this would – as we will see – have been against the very purpose for this universe.

We have seen that God – in the ultimate sense – is a transcendent reality, meaning that no words or images from this world can accurately describe God. That is why Jesus said that those who worship God must do so in Spirit and in truth. You cannot worship a transcendent God exclusively through words, mental images or practices that are of this world.

Yet we have also seen that it is not pointless to have spiritual teachings that describe facets of God. You simply need to avoid falling into the age-old trap of thinking that a particular doctrine gives a complete or infallible description of God. No matter how extensive or detailed a spiritual teaching might be, God will always be more than what is described in the earthly teaching. This “more” can be known only through a direct experience. A spiritual teaching is not meant to replace the direct experience of God’s Presence but to facilitate such an experience. Thus, following or studying a particular religious or spiritual teaching is only a stepping stone to a direct experience of God’s Presence and a direct, personal relationship with Beings in the spiritual realm.

***

Having said that no words can fully describe the transcendental nature of God, this book will of necessity use words to give a description that can help you develop a more mature concept of God’s nature. As a starting point for this discussion, let us begin by looking at the fact that most religions on Earth teach that there is at least one aspect of reality that is beyond the material universe. This realm is often called “heaven” or the spiritual realm, and in various religions it has specific names. This gives us the concept that the totality of the world you live in can be divided into layers, or levels. In fact, many religions teach that the spiritual realm is not one-dimensional or uniform. It has various levels, or layers, ranging from the lowest heaven to the highest heaven.

At this point, we need to take a step aside to clear up a misconception that has crept into several religions, namely the idea that heaven and Earth are fundamentally different or that there is an impenetrable barrier between them. To better understand the reality of the situation, it will be helpful to look at the findings of modern science. The idea that science is in opposition to religion springs from the dualistic state of consciousness, and we will later discuss why – in an enlightened society – there should be no real conflict between these two parallel – and potentially complementary – ways of describing the world.

I have stated that the human consciousness is dualistic, meaning that it thinks in terms of two relative opposites. One of the major achievements of science is that it has systematically undermined this dualistic view of the world and pointed to an underlying reality that is not defined by relative opposites. For example, scientists used to believe – partly based on sensory experience – that the world was made of two different substances, namely solid matter and fluid energy. Modern physicists have discovered that the material universe is not made from two fundamentally different substances. In reality, everything is energy. Even what your senses perceive as “solid” matter is made from energy. Energy is a form of vibration that is detected as waves. You can measure the vibrational properties of waves, such as their frequency, and the only real difference between different forms of waves is their vibration. Scientists have proven that the only difference between a material substance, such as gold, and a non-material “substance,” such as thoughts, is a difference in the vibration of the energy waves.

Scientists have measured many different types of energy waves, and there is no theoretical barrier to the existence of energy waves of such high vibrations that they cannot be measured by current scientific instruments. In other words, scientists can no longer in good faith reject the existence of a realm – call it a different dimension or a parallel universe, if you like – that exists alongside the material universe and is simply made of vibrations that make it undetectable by current instruments. In fact, given that everything is energy, science cannot rule out that there could be an interchange of energy waves between such a high-vibration realm and the low-vibration realm that people call the material universe. To put the matter more directly, modern science has – at least on the theoretical level – shown that religions could be correct in talking about a heaven world beyond the material universe.

What is important about the findings of science is that they have proven that there is no fundamental difference between the spiritual realm and the material world. Everything is made from the same basic substance, namely what scientists call energy. The material world is made from energies that vibrate within a certain spectrum. The spiritual realm is made from the same basic type of energy; it simply vibrates in a higher spectrum. We can find mention of this concept in many religious scriptures. Take for example the account of creation given in Genesis. It states that in the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth (Genesis 1:1), namely two realms as part of the same creation. At first, the Earth was without form and void, obviously setting it apart from heaven, which was different from the void. Then, God created light (Genesis 1:3). Light is a substance that God can mold into any form, and thus we might compare the Biblical concept of light to the scientific concept of energy. In reality, they are one and the same. Before God created any material form, he had to create a substance that could be molded into form, and thus light is the “building block” of the material universe.

We will later talk about this process in greater detail, but for now let it be stated that the light described in Genesis is simply light that vibrates within the vibrational spectrum of the material universe. Thus, this light can be molded into material forms, including the atoms that form the physical building blocks for all matter. Yet there is also light in the heaven world, and it is the same basic substance that simply has higher vibrational properties. Thus, it cannot be used to build material forms until it has been lowered in vibration. The process of lowering the vibration of spiritual light is, in fact, the very process that led to the creation of the material universe. As we will see later, even human beings can be part of this creation process, which is why they were created in God’s image and likeness and have the potential to have dominion (Genesis 1:26) over “the Earth”—meaning the light from which all matter is made.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

Does God exist? People have been pondering this question for eons. While some claim to have found proof that God exists in a particular form, others claim there is no final proof and still others claim to have proof that God does not exist. This controversy has given rise to the related question, “If God does indeed exist, why hasn’t he given human beings some irrefutable proof that he exists?” This question is worth pondering before we go any further.

Let us begin by considering how God could possibly give such a proof. How could any proof be irrefutable? Or rather, how could there ever be a proof or fact that could not be doubted by the human mind? When you look at the variety of ideas and belief systems found on Earth, it is not difficult to see that for every idea or belief there is a counter-idea that seems to invalidate or at least question the original idea. Today, it seems completely obvious to most people that the Earth is round. Yet only a few centuries ago, this now accepted fact was disputed by most people.

The logical conclusion is that most human beings are in a state of consciousness that is dominated by an interplay of two opposites—truth and falsity, count and counter-point, black and white. These two opposites are – or seem to be – mutually exclusive. A statement cannot be true and false at the same time—or so it seems to the human mind. And thus, it seems that people must choose between one of the opposing viewpoints. They either accept that God exists or they accept that he does not exist, and in either case they cite evidence to “prove” their belief—evidence that can be debated and disputed endlessly without ever finding a final answer. So instead of finding the final answer to the question of God’s existence, people continue to debate the evidence, and they continue to seek to convince others that their evidence constitutes a final, absolute and infallible proof.

Is there an alternative approach to the question of God’s existence? Let us step back from the debate. Let us recognize that most of the people who argue for or against the existence of God do so based on a particular mental image of God or of “reality.” For example, materialists argue that there is no God because they claim to have discovered an evolutionary mechanism in nature that supposedly can account for the appearance of today’s multitude of species. Thus, if everything could have come from a random process, there is no need for an intelligent creator. However, this theory is based on certain assumptions, and these assumptions are based on a particular view of the world. One such assumption is that a highly structured and orderly universe – and science continues to discover deeper layers of complexity and order – could actually have arisen from a completely random process. In other words, they say randomness can – by chance – produce order and it can – randomly – uphold an ordered process of evolution that – over billions of years – leads from less complex to more complex life forms, such as human beings. Obviously, this cannot be proven in an ultimate way (if everything is random, how can an ordered process be proven?), and thus the entire world view of materialistic science rests on an assumption.

What is an assumption? It is a mental image of reality that you choose to create even though you have no direct experience or proof to demonstrate that the image is correct. You assume your image is true, and therefore, an assumption is a chosen rather than a necessary or infallible mental image. If you have a strong desire to prove your assumption, you might see only evidence that supports it and overlook evidence that goes beyond it. You see what you want to see, because you have used your assumption to form a mental image and you are now seeking to project that image upon reality.

Most religions argue that God does exist, but in reality they are not arguing for a universal or transcendental concept of God. They are arguing for a specific concept or image of God, as defined by their sacred scriptures and by their current interpretations of those scriptures, their preferred doctrines. They are arguing that their God exists and that he/she/it is the only true God. For example, the mainstream Christian churches argue that God is omnipotent and thus he could not have created anything imperfect. Yet everyone can observe that conditions on Earth are not perfect because they produce much suffering. So either an omnipotent God created human beings to suffer or something must have prevented God’s original intent from being manifest on this planet. Either way, there is no absolute proof that God is omnipotent, so this is another example of an assumption that is chosen and not the only possible assumption.

If we are to prove the existence of God in an ultimate way, we have to go beyond theories that are based on assumptions, assumptions that can be disputed based on people’s chosen view of “reality.” We have to go beyond theories that are expressed in words, words that can be interpreted differently by different people. We have to find a way to prove God’s existence that is beyond the human mind, the level of consciousness dominated by the two relative opposites. We have to find something that is beyond truth and error, something that cannot be influenced by the dualistic mind, the mind that sees everything in terms of opposites. To find absolute proof, we must turn to experience, but not just any experience.

***

Most people believe in the existence of atoms, and most people believe in the existence of apples. Most people have never seen an atom, so their belief in the reality of atoms does not rest on direct experience. Instead, it rests on a process that takes place entirely in the mind, a process that has led most people to accept that everything they see is made of invisible building blocks that look like miniature solar systems. Yet because most people have not seen an actual atom, their belief in atoms rests on the creation of a mental image. After they became aware of this mental image, they used the mind’s reasoning faculties to accept that the image must be accurate and therefore atoms must exist. The point is that people’s acceptance of the existence of atoms requires the intermediate step of a mental image.

In contrast, people’s belief in the reality of apples is not based on any kind of reasoning process. People do not have to reason in order to accept the existence of apples, they simply have to draw upon experience. They have all seen an apple, felt its smooth skin, heard the sound of their fingers rubbing that skin, smelled its fragrance and experienced the taste of the sweet juice. Thus, few would seriously dispute that apples are real. The point being that although people have a mental image of apples, they do not need this image in order to accept the existence of apples. They have had a direct experience of the phenomenon they call an apple, and their acceptance is based on this experience with no intermediary in the form of a mental image.

As discussed above, people who believe in the non-existence of God have no experiential proof for this belief. It is not possible to experience that God does not exist—it is only possible to fail to have the experience that God does exist. It is not possible to experience the non-existence of something, as it is not possible to logically prove that something does not exist. You can experience an apple, but you cannot experience the non-existence of apples. You can say that at this point you have not had the experience of apples, but that does not prove you could never have this experience. Likewise, all one can say is that one has not experienced the existence of God. One can never rule out that such an experience could be attained in the future. Thus, people who believe God does not exist do so based on a mental image, a mental image that portrays a world in which God is not needed. The point being that this non-belief in God is not based on direct experience but requires the intermediary of a mental image.

Most religious people have not experienced the Presence of God. Their belief in God rests entirely on a mental image defined by a particular religion. The point being that whether people believe in God or do not believe in God, their belief is based on a mental image and not on direct experience. If people were to have a direct experience of the Presence of God, their view of God would no longer be based on belief, would no longer be based on the acceptance or non-acceptance of a mental image. Thus, the existence of God would be no more mysterious than the existence of apples.

We might say that when you believe in something, your belief is based on a mental image. The mental image is subject to belief or non-belief, and it can be debated endlessly by the dualistic mind without ever finding a conclusive answer. When you experience something, you go beyond the mental image to a direct perception. Yet even experience is not absolute. It is possible that your experience can be colored by your mental images, as if you are seeing the world through colored glasses. Thus, you can refine your experience, but seeking direct experience is still better than clinging to a mental image. We might say that only those who are willing to seek for a direct experience have the potential to answer the question of God’s existence. A mental image can never prove or disprove anything.

Can human beings have a direct experience of the Presence of God? Many people – from every religion, even some from no religious background – have had spiritual or mystical experiences. In fact, the statement in the Old Testament that human beings were created “in the image” and “after the likeness” of God (Genesis 1:26) is an indication that human beings were designed with the capacity to have a direct experience of God’s Presence. Yet this ability to experience God is not based on the physical senses, which is why most people have experienced apples but they have not experienced God. You can experience God only by going beyond the physical senses and even beyond the entire consciousness that creates mental images of reality, the consciousness that operates with relative opposites.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

This book is a gift to those who consider themselves seekers of truth, meaning that they have come to the conscious realization that they want real answers to the fundamental questions of life:

Who am I, where did I come from and why am I here—meaning both in existence and here on this planet called Earth?

What is the purpose of life in general and what is the specific purpose for my personal life?

Who is God and what is God like?

What is my relationship with God and how can I deepen it?

What is the ideal role of religion in my relationship with God and why does religion so often limit rather than expand my relationship with God?

What do I mean when I talk about real answers? There are numerous belief systems that claim they have complete, absolute and infallible answers to the fundamental questions of life. Let it be made clear that it is not the purpose of this book to create another belief system to compete with the many systems that claim to have the exclusive answers to life’s questions.

This book will not give you the answers to life’s questions. It is designed to assist you in receiving these answers from the only place they can be received, namely a source inside yourself. That source is the Spirit of Truth (John 4:24), and the answers you get from it are living answers, the Living Truth that is beyond words.

As a true spiritual seeker, it is essential for you to recognize the limitations of words. Words are inherently ambiguous, and the same statement can trigger mutually exclusive interpretations from different people. That is why most of the people who claim to be religious are caught in the age-old game of thinking that their particular expression of “truth” is superior to others. Thus, they have abandoned the quest for the Living Truth in favor of seeking to prove the superiority of a dead truth, a truth that has been frozen in time by being clothed in words. Let it be understood, therefore, that as soon as a spiritual concept has been reduced to words, it has entered the realm of duality, and from that point it is subject to interpretation by a specific part of the human mind, namely the analytical mind that is so easily controlled by the ego.

One of the main purposes of this book is to explain – in a way never done before – how the human ego interferes with your relationship with God. This will take some time, but what you need to be aware of from the beginning is how the ego uses words to block your growth, while your Higher Self seeks to help you see beyond the words to the hidden meaning:

The ego will seek to make you interpret any statement I make at the level of the words by taking it literally. It will seek to make you compare the statement to your existing belief system and reject anything that contradicts or goes beyond what you already believe. The ego is always seeking to put your mind in a mental box in which it feels it has you under its control. Once you are there, it seeks to prevent you from expanding the box or stepping outside the box. There are billions of people who claim to be religious but who have not realized that their egos have used their religion to build a mental prison for their minds. Thus, this book is a gift to those who have realized or are willing to realize that there is a force in their own psychology which seeks to hinder their search for the Living Truth. In order to find truth, one must transcend this force.

Your Higher Self is seeking to help you look beyond the outer words and use them as a springboard for reaching for a direct, inner experience of the Spirit of Truth. The truth you receive from this inner source is the Living Truth that cannot be confined to words. Nevertheless, it can be experienced through your intuitive faculties, and this experience can be triggered by words. When you do experience the Living Truth, you realize that it cannot be confined to any belief system. Thus, the quest to prove the superiority of one belief system is futile. In reality, many belief systems can serve as stepping stones for the direct experience of the Living Truth. When used as such, they serve their rightful purpose, but when used as weapons to prove the ego’s superiority, they form an impenetrable barrier between you and God.

This book is a gift for those who have passed one of the most important turning points on the spiritual path, namely where you realize that you want the Living Truth over anything offered on this planet, including the many dead “truths” that come from the duality consciousness of the ego. You want truth more than the comfortability and seeming security offered by the mental box of the ego or a ready-made belief system. You have realized that the outer “truth” offered by so many belief systems will never satisfy your inner longing for truth. I hope you will also realize that the reason for this is that only the Living Truth will satisfy your longing. And this truth can be known only through a direct, inner experience.

***

What does it take to have an experience of the Spirit of Truth? It is likely that you have already had at least glimpses of this living experience. However, most people are not quite able to have a clear experience of the Spirit of Truth, for they do – as Saint Paul expressed it – see through a glass darkly (1Corinthians 13:12). That filter – which stands between your conscious mind and the Spirit of Truth – is created by the ideas and beliefs that your ego and the world have programmed into your mind. It is therefore an eternal dilemma that in order to have a progressively clearer experience of the Spirit of Truth, you must be willing to gradually purify your mind from beliefs that spring from a lower source—and rest assured that I will expose this source and its illusions as the book progresses. One of the most important abilities on the quest for truth is the willingness to examine one’s beliefs and let go of all beliefs that are found to limit one’s quest for the Living Truth.

It remains the greatest limitation for humankind’s spiritual teachers that so many of those who sincerely seek truth have not yet recognized the conflict in their own psyches. If you do not recognize the existence of the ego, it can so easily cause you to doubt and rationalize away the directions you get from your Higher Self or your direct experiences of the Living Truth. If you are still caught in the trap of seeking to fit every new insight into the framework of your existing beliefs – seeking to defend your world view rather than expand it – then you will be your own worst enemy, going back and forth without ever finding satisfying answers to life’s questions. The challenge for any seeker of truth is whether to cling to what is familiar and seems safe or whether to reach for an understanding that simply cannot fit within the confines of one’s existing beliefs.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

This book is not for everyone—for the simple reason that not everyone is ready for the teachings that will be revealed in this book. This book is a gift from the spiritual teachers of humankind to those who want the full truth about the path to spiritual freedom. There are, of course, numerous religious and spiritual organizations which claim they have this truth and that it has already been defined by their doctrines. Yet it is a fact that such earthly organizations too often restrict people’s spiritual freedom through a set of rigid doctrines and rituals. This book is for those who are willing to consider the cause of the readily observable phenomenon that religion often reduces people’s spiritual freedom rather than giving them greater freedom. The book will expose the hidden forces that operate in the religious life of this planet, forces that often pervert the original purpose of religion. That purpose is to set human beings free to be – while still on Earth – the spiritual beings they were created to be.

When I say that not everyone is ready for this book, my statement does not in any way imply a value judgment. I am not trying to hint that those who are ready are more sophisticated or spiritual than those who are not ready. We who are the true spiritual teachers of humankind have no reason to judge and we have no human values. The simple reason is that we have risen above the condition of duality from which all judgment springs, a condition that will be clearly explained in the coming chapters. In fact, because we are above duality, we have no need to play the game of pretending that is so common among the members of religious movements. Thus, I am not trying to appeal to the pride of those who are using spirituality to satisfy their need to feel better than others.

My statement is meant to insert a dose of practical realism. I know that not everyone is ready for this book, yet I also know that everyone has the potential to become ready—if they are willing to make the necessary adjustments. Which then leads us to a discussion of what it will take for you to get the maximum benefit from this book.

The basic dilemma faced by all seekers of truth

When you look at humankind, it is obvious that many people display no interest in the spiritual side of life. Some actively deny that there is a spiritual realm beyond the material universe, while others are indifferent, focusing all of their attention on the material world and its pleasures or problems. Based on this observation, many people reason that the spiritual teachers of humankind evaluate people based on their outer interest in spirituality. Many people seem to think that God loves the most outwardly religious people – specifically the members of their religion – more than others. Such people might reason that this book is aimed at those who are openly religious or spiritual.

In reality, a spiritual teacher does not evaluate people based on outer appearances. Instead, we look beyond all such appearances and look at the inner condition of a person’s total being. Our concern is not what people currently believe or don’t believe with the outer mind. Our only concern is to what degree a person is willing to look beyond his or her existing beliefs and belief system. We are spiritual teachers, so our calling is to teach. And in order to teach people anything, people must be teachable. In order to be teachable, a person must be willing to look beyond his or her existing mental box. Why is this so?

One might think that all of the people who see themselves as religious or spiritual people should be open to a higher understanding of the spiritual reality, and thus they should be teachable. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. In order to be teachable, you must be open to the possibility that there is more to know about the spiritual side of life than what is defined by your current belief system, your current mental box. As can readily be observed by anyone willing to take an honest look, those who already have a spiritual or religious belief system often close their minds to any knowledge that goes beyond the mental box defined by their belief system. For example, many religious people are afraid to consider ideas that contradict or go beyond the official doctrines of their religion. They think it is dangerous to consider such ideas and that various calamities might befall them if they open their minds to anything beyond the “safe” framework of their belief system—which they consider to be the only true religion. Thus, it is an unfortunate fact that religion often closes people’s minds to a higher understanding of life, making them unreachable for the true spiritual teachers who are always seeking to raise humankind to a higher understanding.

We now see the basic dilemma faced by any seeker of truth. You already have a certain knowledge about the spiritual side of life, and you have likely received that knowledge through one or more outer religions, gurus or teachings. This knowledge forms a belief system, a mental box, and it gives you a sense of security, even a sense of who you are. Yet if you have started reading this book, you must consider yourself a seeker of truth, meaning that you have questions about spiritual topics that have not been answered. You must have an inner knowing that your search for truth has not been ultimately fulfilled. You sense that there is more to know, and you are longing for a higher understanding. Thus, the central dilemma that determines whether you are teachable is a battle, a tug of war, between two forces in your own psyche:

There is a force that seeks to make you cling to what you already know. This force has an insatiable need for security, for feeling that it is already saved, and it wants you to believe that by following an outer belief system, your salvation is guaranteed. This force is what I will call the ego, and I will describe it in greater detail later in the book. The important point at this stage is to understand that those who follow the voice of the ego will read a spiritual book primarily to get their existing beliefs confirmed. Thus, when they come across statements that contradict or go beyond their existing beliefs, they will judge the book as being false, often using one statement as justification for rejecting an entire book. Such people obviously are not teachable, and this book is not written for them.

There is a force that is never attached to any knowledge expressed in the words and images of this world. This force always seeks to inspire you to look beyond your current mental box and increase your understanding. This force is the voice of your Higher Self, your spiritual self, and it will also be described in detail. People who listen to this voice are always seeking to expand their mental boxes, and some have even understood that the ultimate goal of spiritual growth is to escape all human boxes.

We now see that the factor that determines whether you are teachable is the balance between these two forces. To what degree do you cling to your existing beliefs and to what degree are you willing to look beyond your current mental box?

It might help you to recognize the fundamental reality that guides all human progress. What keeps people trapped in limitations and suffering is ignorance. Human society has progressed beyond the stage of the cave dwellers precisely because modern people have a greater understanding of all facets of life than people did in prehistoric times. So the key to your spiritual progress is that you must expand your understanding of the spiritual side of life—with all thy getting, get understanding (Proverbs 4:7). Yet how can you expand your understanding? Where can a higher understanding be found? Well, a higher understanding can be found only by looking beyond your existing beliefs, your current mental box. If the higher understanding was found inside your current mental box, you would already have that understanding and your questions would be answered. Thus, it remains a basic fact of life that only those who are willing to look beyond their mental boxes will rise to a higher level of understanding. Being teachable means being willing to look beyond your current mental box—not indiscriminately, but with discernment, as will be explained later.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.

TOPICS:  We are looking for balanced students – Challenge the consciousness of the fallen angels – You are what you think you are—so think higher – It is time to follow the call of Maitreya –

Listen to the recording of this dictation (Subscribers only)

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya, October 22, 2006 through Kim Michaels.

Maitreya I AM, and I have hinted at these teachings before, but I will give them again and give some extra detail. Surely, my book will indeed explain this in great detail. But I will give some glimpse here, for I believe that those who are the ascended master students should be ready to step up and realize what has been going on in their own experience.

So as I have hinted before, the Garden of Eden was indeed a place where there was room for both the innocent and the not so innocent students. And this is what you see out-pictured in every spiritual and religious organization on this planet. You see a mixture of those who are the innocents, meaning that they have started to rise above duality, and those who are not innocent, meaning that they are still fully trapped in, fully embodying the state of duality.

We are looking for balanced students

When you recognize this truth, you will be able to look at your own involvement with whatever religious or spiritual organizations that you have encountered in this lifetime. And you will be able to start recognizing the pattern, and you will see, that the question in any spiritual organization truly is whether it will be taken over by the unbalanced people or whether a critical mass of balanced people will arise and say, “No more of the dualistic power plays. We will not allow this to continue, for we want to finally have an organization that is spiritual, truly spiritual. Meaning that it is above and beyond this dualistic struggle.”

Do you see that what we of the ascended masters desire to see for our students is that they rise to that state of being balanced, so that they can take dominion over whatever spiritual organization they feel is dear to their hearts. And so that they can exercise that dominion by exposing the fallacy of those who are still trapped in the dualistic struggle, thereby hopefully helping these people rise above it, but at the very least giving them an opportunity to rise above. And at the same time demanding that if they are not willing to rise above the dualistic struggle, then they must leave. For there simply is not room in that organization to continue this ongoing, endless, senseless, childish power struggle.

We are looking for those students – no matter where they are, no matter what organization they belong to – we are looking for those students who will come into that balanced state of transcending duality, so that they can challenge the proud leaders of any spiritual organization—whether it be a spiritual movement or a traditional religion. Where they can stand up and challenge the proud leaders, challenge their superiority, challenge their beliefs that they have a right to misuse the power they have as leaders in a spiritual organization, a power that is such a deep responsibility that it should never be exercised lightly.

And yet, we are also looking for those who are smart enough to see that they must also challenge those in the opposite polarity, those who are the blind followers and want to remain the blind followers—for they do not want to step out into the limelight and take a stand for anything. They want to remain followers, so they want to keep leaders who will tell them what to do. In order to successfully raise a spiritual movement to the higher level, you must challenge both of these polarities. You must seek to awaken people in both camps to what is really going on, to what is the real dynamic here.

Challenge the consciousness of the fallen angels

And my beloved, as was said yesterday, this must be done with a clear understanding that both those who are in inferiority and those who are in superiority are stuck in a state of consciousness that is the hallmark of the fallen angels. For you see, when the angels fell from a previous sphere, be it Lucifer’s band or other bands, there was already in that sphere the codependent relationship between those who wanted to be the leaders and needed to feel superior and those who wanted to be the followers. When the leaders of the angelic bands fell, the vast majority of the followers blindly followed the leader, and they have done so ever since.

Neither the leaders nor the followers can transcend the consciousness that caused them to fall—unless they are willing to see the dynamic and realize that those who are in the superiority camp must completely let go of that sense of superiority, the need for superiority. And at the same time, those in the inferiority camp must let go of the need to be invisible, to disappear into the crowd.

Once again, I draw your attention to the fact that the hallmark of this state of consciousness is judgment. You will see – if you are honest – that both those who feel superior and those who feel inferior, both of them are judging everyone and everything. There are many people who are in the inferiority camp and who in some settings might appear meek and humble and not say a word. But yet, when they feel confident, then they surely will unleash their judgmental attitudes and observations and their gossip and their backbiting.

Both types of people who are in the extremes are into the consciousness of judgment. And they can only overcome that consciousness of judgment when they finally see it, when they see that they are actually doing it. When they stop pointing the finger at everyone else and realize that there is a big cosmic finger of Maitreya that is pointing straight at them. And they finally realize that they are trapped in the consciousness of the fallen angels, and then they realize that they do not want to remain there, that they are more than that consciousness. For they too have a conscious self that has the potential to identify itself as anything it chooses.

You are what you think you are—so think higher

The key information, the key realization that we want to bring out is precisely – as Mother Mary explains in her wonderful book – that the Conscious You is what it thinks it is, at least in the material realm. And yet, there is an even higher layer of teaching here. You are what you think you are—as long as you think you are anything. And thus, the reality is that what happened to the fallen angels was that instead of simply being who they were, constantly becoming more, they stopped flowing with the River of Life and they started thinking about who they were.

When the conscious self starts thinking about who it is, it has separated itself from the flow of Being, from the River of Life. It is no longer Being who it is. For now there is a gap between your state of inner Being and your state of outer doing. And suddenly, there is this overlay of the computer of the analytical mind that has to first process and evaluate everything before you dare to do.

If you will study the teachings of the Buddha, you will see that he gave, indeed, very profound teachings on how to stop the analytical mind, how to purify the mind of all these analytical judgments that simply pull you away from Being who you are, pull you away from what Saint Germain called the innocence of the child, the childlike mind that knows that you are right with God and you are innocently and lovingly doing whatever is right, what you know is right at the moment. But you have no need to evaluate and think ahead and analyze everything. For as Jesus said, “Take no thought for tomorrow, for tomorrow will take thought for itself.” And of course, that statement did indeed come from me, as it was my privilege to serve as the master for the master, Jesus.

It is time to follow the call of Maitreya

It is still my privilege to serve as the master for all those who want to be students of Maitreya. And I call you, and I say to you wherever you are, “My Beloved, those of you who are my students, the students of Maitreya, you have waited for a very, very long time, since the fall in the Garden of Eden. And I must tell you that we have now, slowly but surely, moved up to the point where I, Maitreya, can step through the veil and expose the fullness of what happened in the Garden of Eden.”

Which is precisely what I will do in my book, so that the top ten percent of the spiritual people will have the full knowledge of rising above the state of consciousness that caused the fall in the Garden and that set this planet into a downward spiral from which it has not yet fully recovered. But surely, the earth is coming close to recovering, for we are indeed making progress. And that is why I can bring out this new book and this new teaching, which I must say in all humility is the greatest dispensation to come from the ascended masters since the fall in the Garden.

For it simply has not been allowed for us to bring out the full teaching of what happened in that mystery school. It has not been allowed that we would take away the mystery from Maitreya’s Mystery School. But now the veil shall be lifted. Thus, my beloved, it has been my privilege to speak and set the platform for the next dictation, which will be from the Being that we all, the three of us, Jesus, Maitreya and Gautama, call master and Lord.

Copyright © 2006 by Kim Michaels