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Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, January 8, 2023. This dictation was given during the 2023 New Year’s webinar – Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. We have moved on to the final stage of the Eightfold Path, that of concentration, which might actually be better translated as focus. What is it you focus on? I have said that it is extremely important to realize that the Eightfold Path – the spiritual path, the path towards higher levels of awareness – has stages. 

You come to a certain point where you find an outer spiritual teaching. There is no evaluation here of what level you are at when you find the teaching. Throughout the ages many people have applied such an evaluation and said: “Here is a teaching that to me seems very sophisticated and it claims to be a superior or special spiritual teaching and since I have found it, it must mean that I am a sophisticated spiritual student.” This is not necessarily the case, and it is not necessarily not the case, but you need to recognize here that you live in an age where it is easier to spread information than ever before. 

You have websites, you have books and therefore it is quite possible that people can come across a spiritual teaching even though they are not ready for it, or they have not reached a particular level of consciousness on this stage from lower levels of awareness towards higher levels. This is not said to in any way condemn anyone. It is not constructive to actually apply this evaluation of what level of consciousness you are at when you find the spiritual teaching. What is important to realize is that when you find the path you are at a certain level of consciousness, and your level of consciousness will color and influence your approach to the spiritual path. This means it is difficult to set up a standard method, or standard process, that all people should follow when they find a spiritual teaching. All people need to start at the level of consciousness they are at, they can do nothing else. There are many people who find a spiritual teaching who need to go through a period, perhaps a long period, where they use that spiritual teaching to reinforce their existing worldview, or to build a new worldview based on the spiritual teaching. That worldview is based on the sense of separation and the desire to make themselves seem superior, or to make them seem like they are safe because they are now in this spiritual teaching. 

There are also many people who need to feel that: “Because I am in this spiritual teaching, I will be saved in the end. I will reach enlightenment in the end.” This makes it easier for them to endure their present life circumstances. These are just some of the needs that are there at the lower levels of the path. People have these needs. They can do nothing else but approach the spiritual path through these needs and they must have that experience for some time until their minds become open to a higher view of the spiritual path. We can say that there are some of the people who find the spiritual path who go through a phase where they use the spiritual teaching to actually build or reinforce a worldview that keeps them in separation. This is inevitable. Now some of these people may eventually reach a point where they are ready to go beyond that phase. Others will stay in it for the rest of this lifetime. 

The key is to change yourself

What is the next stage up? Well, the next stage up is that you begin to realize that you have to change yourself. It is not a matter of changing other people or changing the world or changing God and what God will do for you. It is a matter of changing yourself. You start realizing what I have described in these discourses: That you need to focus on changing your mind from the inside instead of first changing outer conditions in the hope that this will change your state of mind. 

Now when you begin to grasp this, then you go into a phase where your primary task is actually to pull yourself away from the magnetic pull of the collective consciousness. Everything is interconnected so you are part of the collective consciousness of humankind. You are also part of the collective consciousness of the culture and group in which you grew up. What you see in all of these cultures is that they have a certain sense of normal. This is what is normal in our culture and there is a pressure from the collective consciousness to conform to this normal. Of course, the standard for normality is defined based on the illusion of separation and the dualistic consciousness. Most cultures have some sense that they are superior to other cultures. Maybe they are in conflict with other cultures and they see this as the only way they can be. Of course, in order to make progress on the spiritual path you need to pull yourself above this. 

You now enter a phase where the main focus – the main concentration – is for you to free yourself from the magnetic pull from the mass consciousness. You do this as I described, by transforming the energies that give the collective consciousness something to pull on. You do it by becoming aware of your reactionary patterns, your separate selves, resolving the illusions and letting the self die. The collective consciousness can only pull on you if there is something in your four lower bodies that it can pull on. It is the same as the force of gravity that can only pull on something if it has mass. If it has no mass the force of gravity cannot pull on it. As you do this you are becoming more and more independent of the mass consciousness. You are raising yourself above it so that when the demons of Mara come to tempt you, they have nothing whereby they can tempt you and pull you back into the patterns that you see in your culture or even in humanity as a whole. You are not concerned about conforming to the norm, you are concerned about raising your consciousness. 

Climbing the path as an individual

Now as I have said once you purify your emotional, mental and identity bodies from these separate selves and the lower energies, you begin to have more of a connection with your higher self. This is when you can come to a crucial point on the spiritual path, and this confuses many people. There can come a point where you have to a large degree, perhaps even completely, freed yourself from the pull from the collective consciousness, but how have you done this? How do you free yourself from the collective consciousness? Well, you can only do this based on your level of awareness, and your level of awareness when you started the path was most likely that you had at least some sense that you are a separate individual being. Naturally there are people on earth that are so overpowered by the collective consciousness that they have very little individuality. They are, so to speak, flowing with the currents in the collective consciousness instead of going their individual way. 

In order to walk the spiritual path, you have to walk it as an individual because there is currently no culture on earth where walking the spiritual path is the norm. You are always going against the norm and you can only do that as an individual. What are you actually doing when you are raising yourself up in this phase, freeing yourself from the pull of collective consciousness? Well, you are building a new individuality as a spiritual person but how do you build this? Well, you build or you create a conglomerate of separate selves that are based on seeing yourself as a person who is walking the spiritual path in your particular spiritual teaching. I am in no way implying here that this is wrong, you cannot do anything else. You have to start where you are at. Your first stage is to free yourself from the mass consciousness and you do this by building an individual self that is so strong that it cannot be pulled into these collective patterns from your culture. You are actually taking a spiritual teaching and you are using it to build a collection of separate selves that can withstand the pressure from, or the pull from, the collective consciousness. 

Once you have done this to a certain point you reach what is in some way the most crucial turning point on the spiritual path because you now face an essential choice. The choice is, will you continue to build on to this separate sense of identity as an individual being? Or will you begin to grasp that, even though this individual identity has served a purpose, it cannot take you to the higher stages of the spiritual path. In fact, it cannot take you beyond a certain point. I have already explained that the real goal of the spiritual path is that you overcome all sense of self, all selves based on the illusion of separation. So, this self that allows you to free yourself from the mass consciousness is based on the sense of separation – not necessarily duality, seeing yourself as an enemy of other people – but you are set apart from other people and from the mass consciousness. 

In order to move on to the higher stages of the path you need to begin to recognize that this self has served its purpose, but you now need to start letting go of it. Of course, this sounds contradictory – first you are building a self then you have to dismantle the self. But think about a rocket, a rocket has perhaps three levels. There is a huge fuel tank with engines at the bottom and this is used to propel the rocket up to a certain altitude where the gravitational force and air resistance are less. Then the fuel tank is empty and in order for the rocket to rise higher it needs to separate itself from that fuel tank and the first set of engines and start the next set of engines that will take it to a higher level. It is the same with your sense of self. You have a self, you build a self to take you beyond the gravitational pull of the mass consciousness, but then you need to discard that self in order to rise higher. The difference between a rocket and you is that you cannot, and you are not meant to, discard that self all at once. You need to do it in increments because the self is not really one self, but a conglomerate of these separate selves, so you can unravel one at a time. 

Now there are many people throughout the ages who have not grasped this process. Some have but many have not so they actually become so attached to this self or this identity they have built that they will not let go of it. They now come to believe, as I described earlier about the ego, that this is actually the self that will take them to heaven or to nirvana so they need to continue to build onto it, they need to continue to refine it and perfect it until this self becomes able to enter heaven or the spiritual realm or nirvana or however you define it. This is an illusion, and it is a potentially dangerous illusion that can keep people trapped even for lifetimes. I have already given you the tools to see why it is an illusion because it is based on separation, the illusion of separation. 

Spiritual pride

It is also possible for many people to look at the spiritual movement they are, or have been involved with and see that some of the people who have been in this movement, perhaps for a long time, have built a certain sense of pride, spiritual pride in their accomplishments, their understanding of the teaching, how many hours they have practiced. They feel superior not only to people who are not in the teaching but even to the people who are in the teaching but not as experienced as they are. You can clearly see, if you allow yourself to step back from this, that this spiritual pride can only come from a separate self, but a separate self cannot bring you to the higher levels of awareness. It cannot bring you to Buddhahood, it cannot bring you into nirvana or into heaven, there is no way that this can happen. 

You now begin to see that when you reach this level, you need to switch your mind. You need to go through another switch and realize that from now on you are actually building a different kind of self. You are building a self that is not based on seeing yourself as separate from the collective consciousness, but seeing yourself as being connected to your higher self. In the process of building this sense of identity as a connected being you are discarding some of these separate selves that you created when you were raising yourself above the mass consciousness. This is just another stage of the path, there is really nothing mysterious about it, it is just that not many people have been aware of this. 

What you do here is you need to start being willing to question your approach to the spiritual path. How have you looked at the path? Are there some elements that you can now identify that spring from separation, perhaps even duality? You can begin to see that these actually limit you, they prevent you from being free. Basically, you can look at the spiritual path as a process whereby your mind becomes more and more free. You can see that people who are overpowered by the collective consciousness are not free in their minds. Their sense of identity is determined by the collective sense of identity. They often tend to think in certain ways and can rarely think an independent individual thought because their mental minds are overpowered by the collective mind. They often cannot choose their own feelings but they feel whatever patterns are in the collective mind. If a certain situation causes the people in their group to react with anger, then these people will react with anger and often feel it is perfectly natural and the only way to react so these people are not free in their minds, they are not too free to choose their reactions to situations, to choose their actions, they are not free to choose their emotions or their thoughts or even their sense of identity. 

As you are building this self that brings you beyond the mass consciousness, you are becoming more and more free, but the self that makes you free from the mass consciousness now becomes a limitation for your mind, because you think you have to stay within that self. You have to stay within this approach to the spiritual path that you took on when you were at a lower level of consciousness so you are still not free in your mind. You are more free than when you were overpowered by the mass consciousness but you have become free of the mass consciousness because you have created a strong individuality, but it is an outer individuality and it is still limiting the freedom of your mind. 

Relating to your higher self

The next stage is that you free your mind from this self, this conglomerate of selves, where you see yourself as an individual unconnected being who is raising your consciousness in relation to, in comparison to, the mass consciousness. As you are building this individuality you are doing this in reaction to the mass consciousness, even in the certain opposition to it where you say: “Well I will not feel or think or identify myself as the mass mind does. I will do something different.” You are still relating to that mass consciousness. It is as if you are a planet orbiting around the sun of the mass consciousness. You now need to accelerate yourself so that instead of orbiting around it, your planet goes into a spiral orbit that brings you beyond this point. You do this by realizing that the next stage is that instead of relating to the mass consciousness, you begin to relate to your own higher self – which comes from within not from without. 

This is where you go into this inner path, the inner phase of the path where you are focusing on your own consciousness—resolving your own state of consciousness. This gives you growth and in a sense, you can continue working on your consciousness for a very long time and you can have quite a lot of progress by doing this. Still, there comes a point where you need to recognize that even though you have raised your own consciousness, purified your own consciousness, the next step is actually to create a new sense of identity based on the fact that you are a connected being, based on the experience that you are a connected being.

The first phase is to connect to your higher self and realize that beyond the outer personality and individuality that relates to this world your higher self has an individuality. You cannot really call it a personality as most people see this, but your higher self has individual characteristics and you can lock in to this and therefore you can begin to bring that into your conscious awareness and express it through your identity, mental and emotional bodies. Now you are in a phase where you are relating to your higher self instead of relating to the mass consciousness or other people and you are expressing some of that individuality from your higher self. 

Entering the consciousness of oneness

The next phase is that you begin to recognize that your higher self is not in the material world. It is not even in the four levels, the physical, the emotional, the mental and the identity level. Your higher self is beyond the world of form as you know it here. It still has form but it is in what many people call the spiritual realm. When you are beyond this world of form everything is one, everything is oneness and your higher self sees this oneness or it could not be in the higher realm. You cannot enter the higher realm unless you see oneness.

The next phase for you is to bring this oneness that your higher self has into your conscious awareness. You begin now to build a sense of identity not on being separated from the mass consciousness, not on being still an individual being who is relating to your higher self. You build an identity based on seeing yourself as a person who is connected to your higher self but also connected to other people and to your physical environment. In other words, you begin to overcome the sense of separateness. This is not necessarily duality but the sense that you are separated from other people, from your environment, and so forth. 

This is the right focus. This is the deeper meaning, the higher meaning, of focus or concentration. You are not concentrated on the mass consciousness; you are not focused on yourself as an individual being, you are focused on the whole, you are focused on connection, you are focused on oneness and this means that you now begin to look at life in a different way. Instead of evaluating: “How can I raise myself up as an individual,” you are evaluating: “How can I raise up the whole, how can I raise up other people? The people around me that I know, how can I raise them up? How can I help them raise their awareness? How can I help improve some facet of life? How can I make a contribution to the forward progression of humankind and the world I live in?”

Focusing on raising the whole

The earth has been making considerable progress in what people call recorded history. You can see the progress that has been made technologically over the last couple of centuries. You can also see that the technological progress has not been accompanied by a corresponding progress in the consciousness of humankind. There has been some progress but there has not been enough so that people can use the technological process in a balanced way. You can see this by the fact that technology causes pollution of the environment, changes to the climate and so forth. You can see it by the fact that weapons become more and more powerful and have the potential to kill many more people. You can see that there has been progress but there is a need for further progress and there is especially a need in the acceleration of the consciousness of humankind, a raising of the collective consciousness. How can this happen? How can you raise the collective consciousness? Well, this can only happen by individuals raising their individual consciousness, thereby pulling up on the whole.

Now even in the phase where you are seeking to raise yourself above the pull of the mass consciousness, you are of course not separated completely from the mass consciousness. The mass consciousness is pulling on you, but you are pulling back. When you are raising your level of awareness you are pulling the collective consciousness up. As long as you still are focused on raising yourself as an individual the pull is not as strong. The moment you shift into seeing yourself as a connected being your pull on the collective consciousness becomes much stronger. You are therefore having a much greater effect. You are giving a much greater service to raising all life by raising the collective consciousness. Some people call this holding a spiritual balance for the planet or for society whereby you can pull up on the collective until people begin to see the need for certain shifts.

How did democracy come into being? There were certain people, a certain critical mass of individuals, that went through a transformation of their own consciousness where they began to see the ideas and ideals that are the foundation of democracy. They came to accept them and as they were raising their own awareness, they pulled up on the collective until this started spreading like rings in the water where more and more people began to see as self-evident these truths that are the foundation for democracy. Human beings have rights, no power on earth should take these rights away from them because they are given from a higher level of awareness. This is how democracy came into being, this is how all other progress has happened, by this raising of the collective awareness where a critical mass of people suddenly shift and they see something they could not see before. Instead of arguing for or against it, they just see: “But this is obvious. This is self-evident. This is the way society needs to go.”

This is a huge potential that you have when you reach this higher level of the path. It is to shift your focus. Instead of concentrating on your own personal growth you are concentrating on raising the whole. This is the only way you can actually move beyond a certain point. You cannot attain Buddhahood if you see yourself as a separate individual and you only care about yourself and not about the whole. Buddhahood is being focused on the whole, being concentrated on the whole, rather than some part of it but of course, you are part of the whole which is why you can pull up on the whole.

You see here that there is an essential difference between being part of the mass consciousness and still being part of the whole. In other words, if you are overpowered by the mass consciousness, well, you are not pulling up on the mass consciousness. You are just either neutral or you are actually pulling the mass consciousness down. It is only when you start raising yourself, your individual mind, above the level of the mass mind that you can pull up on the mass mind. The higher you go in your levels of awareness, the more you focus on the whole rather than your individual self, the more of a pull you have on the mass consciousness and of course the less you are pulled down by it. You become non-attached to the mass consciousness. In a sense, you become transparent to the mass consciousness.

Becoming transparent

You may say that there are the demons of Mara and they are trying to pull you back into the mass consciousness and they can do this if you have certain beliefs, a certain separate self that feels it has to react in a certain way to the temptations of these demons. Jesus expressed it in a slightly different way, he said that the prince of this world cometh and has nothing in me. In other words, there is a certain force, a certain consciousness in the world that wants to pull you into these old patterns that prevent you from walking the spiritual path and raising your awareness and you need to come to a point where you learn to recognize it. You have overcome the separate selves. You have let them die. Now you are transparent. 

The force may direct something at you – a thought, emotional energy, a certain impulse at the identity level – but as it goes into your mind there is nothing in there that it can hit and stir up and reinforce. It passes right through you because you are non-attached, you are free. Jesus expressed it in the saying: “What is that to thee, follow thou me.” In other words, follow the teacher, follow the higher awareness and let go of all these temptations to be pulled into these reactionary patterns.

What is one of the ways in which you raise the whole? It is by demonstrating to people that there is a different way to react than the way that is dominating the mass consciousness in their culture. If you have family members who are prone to reacting with anger in certain situations and if you demonstrate that you are not reacting with anger in those situations, then some will understand. Some will grasp: “Why is he or she not reacting as we do or the way he or she used to react? What has happened? What is different?” Some will grasp this. Perhaps not your closest family members, but some will grasp it.

No isolated effects and no isolated causes

You can now begin to focus on raising the whole but in order to raise the whole you need to make another shift. Or at least in order to have the greatest impact you need to make another shift. You need to contemplate the old teaching about the interdependent originations. I have commented on it before, saying that modern science has this tendency to want to isolate a specific phenomenon and say: “This is an isolated effect and it must have an isolated cause.” Well, in reality there are no isolated effects and no isolated causes. Everything is an interdependent whole. This is, as I also mentioned, the basis for chaos theory where a small change in one area can lead to a much bigger change in another area.

What you need to contemplate is that you are starting to focus on raising the whole and in the beginning stages of this process you have a tendency to look at the world and say: “Here is a problem that needs to be changed.” It could be for example: We need to overcome war and manifest world peace. You have a tendency to say: “Here is a separate phenomenon, war. How can we overcome it? Well, we must identify the cause and then eliminate the cause.” This is the common problem-solving method in the modern societies based on the linear analytical mind, the rational mind. 

It is not that you cannot gain a deeper understanding of war and the causes of war. Ultimately you need to recognize that the causes of war cannot be isolated. Why is that? Because war is caused by human beings. You may look at certain outer excuses: “Oh people are fighting over oil or they are fighting over money or they are fighting over land.” The real cause of war is in the psychology of human beings and it is caused by this illusion that we are separate beings, that we have a right to define ourselves as having some epic cause that is being opposed by other people, and therefore it is justified that we kill those other people. This illusion of separation is the psychological cause of war. You might say: “How can we possibly change that? What can we do? We cannot go into the minds of all people and change those minds.” What I am seeking to convey here is that you cannot remove war by isolating a certain cause and seeking to change that cause. War can be removed only when the collective consciousness is raised to such a level that a critical mass of people suddenly shift and say: “It is obvious that war is not acceptable.”

What I am explaining here is that in the beginning stages of focusing on how you can raise the whole you have this tendency to look for an isolated phenomenon that you feel you should do something about and that you would like to see changed. Then, you seek to isolate the cause and do something about the cause so you can feel you have accomplished something. Many, many spiritual people throughout the ages have done this. They have isolated a certain phenomenon in the world and attempted to change it. Many have of course wanted to overcome war, but as you can see, they have so far not been successful. Many people have after some time been disappointed, been discouraged and said: “Well, a spiritual teaching does not work. What I have been doing obviously is not working.” This is because you are looking at isolated phenomena and isolated causes.

The shift you can make is that you are not looking to create specific outer changes. Your focus, your concentration, is on raising awareness at an individual and at a collective level. You are pulling up on awareness both individually and collectively instead of working on specific physical changes. Why is this important? Because as I have explained, what happens at the physical level of the world is a consequence of what happens in the emotional, mental and identity levels. You can make certain changes at the physical level. You can take a shovel and you can start digging and if you keep digging long enough you can move a mountain. These greater phenomena such as war you cannot overcome by making physical changes. The only option would be to create an army that was so powerful that it could defeat any other army and this might create some temporary peace but would it remove war or the potential for war from the planet? Well, as long as you have armies and weapons you have not overcome war.

Instead of focusing on these specific physical changes you can focus on affecting change at the emotional, mental and identity levels. You do this by raising your own consciousness, by demonstrating to other people that you can react a different way, by perhaps spreading a certain teaching when it is appropriate, when people are open for it. In this way, you are not setting a goal for yourself that is impossible to attain. Therefore, you can avoid disappointment and discouragement which is the sharpest tool in the devil’s toolkit. You can enter a state of mind where you have transcended the doubt, the frustration, the hope that you can see some visible changes. 

You have transcended all this potential for failure and you are on a path that you know works because you know raising awareness works, you know you are working on raising the whole and that this will have an effect. You just continue doing this, raising your own awareness, seeking to raise other people’s awareness and this is how you can feel you are making a contribution but you do not run the risk of failure or disappointment, because you are not demanding specific changes. Why shouldn’t you work for specific changes? Well, in some cases you should, because it is part of your Life plan to create a specific change in a specific area by receiving some idea from a higher level of awareness. What I am talking about is the overall level of wanting to create these big changes, like overcoming war, where you cannot realistically do this as an individual because everything is connected. War is an expression of the collective consciousness and the only way to overcome the physical condition is to raise the collective consciousness. 

In order to not set an impossible goal for yourself you focus on raising the collective and you know that this can be done. You can do something about this and when other people do the same it is just a matter of time before they have built this pull that pulls up on the collective consciousness and something shifts. A critical mass of people brought in democracy and many other positive changes. There are many, many people on earth today, whether they are in a spiritual movement or teaching or not, who are working to pull up on the collective consciousness and therefore set the stage for these shifts that will bring about physical changes so you see the shift.

Focusing on connection rather than separation

On the Eightfold Path, on the spiritual path you go through various phases and on each stage, you are focused on, you are concentrated on certain goals, certain aspects, a certain method. You go through these higher and higher stages where you shift away from having your mind focused through the separate selves, the dualistic selves where your mind becomes more and more focused on connection instead of separation. You can say that the demons of Mara, the prince of this world, are constantly seeking to tempt people and there can be many individual temptations, but the underlying, overall temptation is to pull you into a state of mind where you see life, the world, through the filter of separation. You see yourself as a separate being, you see other people as separate beings. 

What happens in this process is that when you are concentrated on this illusion of separation, when your mind is concentrated on this illusion of separation, you cannot see that behind all of the distinct forms is the Buddha nature. You cannot see that even the seemingly separate forms are connected at a deeper level. You cannot see that behind the seemingly separate phenomena and causes is the interdependent originations. The real goal of the demons of Mara is to keep you in the illusion of separation where you think, for example: “Well this person did something to me that he should not have done. So therefore, he is a separate person or he would not have done this to me. This other group of people did something to my country that they should not have done so therefore they are separate and I can therefore kill them without affecting myself because they did what they did. The world really does oppose me, because it is a separate world and I am separated from it.” 

There are many of these illusions, millions of them in various disguises, but they all have the purpose of obscuring the underlying oneness and connection and focusing your mind, concentrating your mind, on this illusion of separation. Now even a spiritual teaching can be used for this purpose. You see a tendency in most religions and spiritual teachings that they make a very sharp distinction between those who are in the teaching and those who are outside the teaching. 

They may look at those who are outside the teaching in two different ways. There may be those that they think could potentially be converted to their teaching and then there are those they think oppose their teaching and therefore they are the enemy. Many religious people look at atheists or materialists as the enemy and of course many materialists look at religious people as the enemy. You can use a spiritual teaching to reinforce the sense that you are separate, because you are in this teaching therefore you are separated from those that are not in the teaching. By doing this you are only trapping yourself more firmly in the illusion of separation and this is of course not producing progress on the spiritual path, because that path is to overcome separation as I might have mentioned a few dozen times. I mention it again and again because it is one of the most difficult points for people to grasp and there are many people who have been on the spiritual path for decades who have not grasped it. 

There are Buddhists who have been in Buddhist teachings for lifetimes, but who have not grasped it. They set themselves apart from those who are not part of their particular Buddhist sect and they build this idea that because they can understand and discourse on these very advanced intellectual teachings and because they have given their spiritual practice for so many hours and lived a monastic life and been dedicated to growth, it means that they must have grown. They must have reached some advanced level and therefore this sets them apart from those who have not applied the teaching as they feel that they have. They have not shifted to seeing that the real purpose of raising your own awareness is to help the whole and the real purpose of a spiritual teaching is to empower you to raise the whole instead of raising yourself as a separate individual or even raising your group as a separate group. 

There comes that point where you need to realize that you have found a certain spiritual teaching, you have applied it and you have used it to raise yourself to a certain level. The way to move further is to avoid going into the blind alley that so many people have gone into where they think that the way to change the world is to convert everybody else to my spiritual teaching because when everybody else is converted then we will have paradise on earth. In reality, the only thing that matters is the raising of consciousness and you have used a particular spiritual teaching to raise your consciousness, but that does not mean that everybody else could or should do the same. They may need other teachings or they may need some universal ideas that are not sectarian in nature, that are not exclusivist in nature but inclusive. 

In fact, what needs to happen in this coming age of higher awareness is that more and more spiritual people need to transcend the sectarian mindset where they focus on converting other people into their particular spiritual philosophy or into following their guru. Instead, they lock in to the fact that from the level beyond the material world, from the level of higher awareness is being released a set of universal ideas and it is these universal ideas that will have the maximum impact on raising the collective consciousness. These universal ideas can be expressed through a particular spiritual teaching or by a particular guru, but they do not have to be expressed in this context. 

As just one example of this, look at the fact that in many Western countries there are people who are practicing yoga. Now yoga originated a long time ago in a very specific culture that, although it was universal to begin with, has since come to be identified with the Hindu religion. If you go back in time, there was a time where in order to practice yoga you had to be a Hindu or you had to live an ascetic lifestyle where you withdrew from the world, lived in a monastic setting or lived in a cave, ate very little food, did not engage in sexual activity, did not have a family and you focused most of your time on this very arduous spiritual practice like the ascetics that the Buddha encountered when he left the palace. 

Buddhism was not created as a religion

In other words, yoga was originally a much more extreme spiritual practice and philosophy that was not compatible with a modern active lifestyle where you have a family and a job. Yet you see many people in the Western world who practice yoga while having an active life. This is because yoga has become universalized. It has become focused on a particular practice and disassociated from a particular sectarian exclusivist religion. Now some of you are aware of the phenomenon of mindfulness and there is certainly a connection between the Buddhic teachings and mindfulness. You do not have to become converted to Buddhism in order to practice mindfulness and why is this? Because Buddhism was not originally a religion. It was a set of universal ideas and practices. 

Jesus did not preach or start a sectarian exclusivist religion that claims to be the only road to salvation. Jesus taught a set of universal ideas and practices and this is precisely why he was seen as a threat by the Jewish religious authorities. He threatened their sectarian exclusivist religion by presenting universal ideas. What could be more universal than the raising of awareness and the transcendence of the illusion of separation and the duality that causes all human conflicts? So there comes a point where you need to shift your concentration, your focus away from thinking that there is only one solution to the world’s problems and that is to convert all people to your particular spiritual practice and philosophy. Instead, you focus on a set of universal ideas, universal expressions that can help people of many different backgrounds, many different areas of society without requiring them to be converted into an outer religion or movement. 

In other words, what is it that the separate mind always wants to do? I have said that it wants to create the sense that it is safe and in order to do this it builds a worldview and it is evaluating every idea based on: “Is it a threat to my worldview or does it validate my worldview?” Well, this is discrimination, this is sectarianism, this is exclusivism. What validates my world view is right, what questions it is wrong, bad, evil. Yet this is not the Buddha nature. This keeps people trapped in separation. 

The Buddha nature is oneness, connection, and so this is what you strive for, to help people see beyond the separation, the duality, the exclusivism, the fanaticism and see that behind all of these divisions between people, there are certain universal ideas and values that are connecting people. Beyond the ideas that separate and divide people there is a set of universal ideas that connect and unify people. This is what will have the greatest impact on raising the collective consciousness in this day and age, in this particular cycle in the unfoldment of the collective consciousness. Those who can concentrate, who can focus on this will have the greatest impact and those who cling to a set of sectarian beliefs and the desire to convert other people to a particular outer religion or guru, well, they might feel they are very spiritual, they might feel “holier-than-thou,” more advanced, but they are not going to have the maximum impact on raising the collective consciousness. 

What is the goal of the Buddha? It is to set all people free from illusion. What is the basic illusion? It is the sense that the Buddha nature is not where I am, I am separated from the Buddha nature. The goal of the Buddha is to help all self-aware beings see the Buddha nature within themselves and within each other.

“Buddha” was originally a neutral word

Now, when I originally gave these teachings, the term “Buddha” was not sectarian. It was not associated with a particular religion, it was neutral, it was universal. Today Buddhism has become seen as a religion and it is sectarian, so the word “Buddha” has a different meaning than it originally had. We could come up with a different expression in today’s world that is more universal and neutral and say, higher awareness, there is a higher awareness. There is a level of higher awareness and this is what can connect people, can unify them and help them escape the lower awareness that sets them against each other and creates innumerable conflicts. 

What creates tension? What creates suffering in the world? It is the lower level of awareness that causes people to fail to see the unifying element and therefore see themselves as separate beings. What is the goal? It is to raise awareness so people attain a higher perspective, a higher state of awareness where they see the unity beyond all of the manifold diversified expressions. They see that even though people may be different on the surface level, there is something that connects them all. Now, you can only see this when you are connected to something higher, a higher level of awareness within yourself. Only then can you see that there is a higher level of awareness in other people. These are universal ideas that really are not exclusive to Buddhism or any other particular religion or spiritual philosophy. This is what you can come to focus on, to concentrate your mind on: the universality, the neutrality, the connectedness, the oneness behind diversity. 

I am grateful for this opportunity to give these teachings. Some of you who have been ascended master students for some time might think: “But have not we heard this before? Have not the various masters explained all of this before?” The reason for this is that I take this opportunity to bring forth these teachings, because it has long been my goal to bring forth a book that gives a view of Buddhism adapted to the modern world and the modern mindset. This is the start of this book. Others of my dictations that I have given over the years will be included and it will not actually be presented as if these are dictations from the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. They will simply be edited slightly to have a more universal expression and the book will be put out there and some will understand. 

I thank you for giving me this opportunity to express these teachings and I can assure you that this conference has had a major impact on raising the collective consciousness. It has also, even though we have not touched upon it, had a major impact on the situation in Ukraine, the situation with the economy, the situation in Russia. The fact that so many of our students from Russia and Ukraine have been willing to tune in and be part of this upward process is very significant. Again, you cannot look for specific results to manifest at a specific time, but you can rest assured that you have pulled up on the collective consciousness in both Ukraine and Russia and of course in the rest of the world where you have tuned in from, and therefore you have brought the planet forward even though you may not be able to say, this is the specific result we produced at this conference. 

I trust many of you are beginning to realize that you need to come to a point where you are not looking for a specific result to be produced by a specific conference or by a specific vigil. You are not setting yourself up for disappointment and discouragement. You are engaging in an ongoing process to raising the collective consciousness and you are content in knowing that you are raising the collective consciousness. You are raising the entire interdependent originations which will have positive effects in terms of bringing forth Saint Germain’s Golden Age. 

I am not sealing this conference because Padmasambhava will also speak, but I am thanking you for giving me this opportunity to give these new teachings, modern teachings about the Buddhic philosophy. For this you have my deepest gratitude and I seal you, for now, in the joy of the Buddha! The joy that can only come when you are experiencing oneness. How could there be anything but joy in oneness? It is only separation that creates frustration. With this, be sealed, my beloved.

 

Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels

 

Back to Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world

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Listen to a recording of this dictation (subscribers only)

Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, January 8, 2023. This dictation was given during the 2023 New Year’s webinar – Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. Our next step on this Eightfold Path is the step of mindfulness. Consider the word in English: “Mind-full-ness.” What is the mind full of? There comes a point on the Eightfold Path where you need to begin to consider: “What is it that occupies my mind? What is in my mind?” This is, of course, as I have already explained, these separate selves, these reactionary patterns, these subconscious programs. What is the larger effect of all of these programs, the separate selves and the ego? 

The ego and the separate selves are born out of the illusion of separation. If you consider the ocean on a day with a good wind, there are many waves on the ocean. Now consider that you build a crane that can reach out over the ocean. This crane has a grab or a shovel at the end, and you are now reaching down attempting to grab one particular wave and pull that wave out of the ocean. Would you be successful? Well, perhaps you could pull out a bucket of water, but immediately another wave would form and your bucket of water would not be a wave, it would be a bucket of water. Could you separate a wave from the ocean? 

Likewise, everything in the world of form is made out of a formless substance. The formless substance takes on a particular form, but this does not change the substance. The Buddha Nature is still the Buddha Nature as the ocean is still the ocean when it takes on waves as opposed to remaining calm. Once the formless substance has taken on form, the forms are there, they have a temporary existence but they do not have a separate existence. 

The limitations of the physical senses

You may, just to give you a visual example, look at the earth and all the physical phenomena in your environment. There might be houses and trees and mountains and lakes and oceans or whatever, but they are all made out of subatomic particles that really do not have a particular form. You may look at a tree and you may see that this is very different from a rock, but they are both made out of subatomic particles. There are subatomic particles within them, and therefore, you cannot say that a tree is separated from the subatomic particles. It is made up of the subatomic particles that have taken on a particular form. 

Now, of course, you cannot see this with your senses or with the outer mind. You might be able to reason that it is that way with the reasoning mind. You might be able to experience it with the intuitive mind, but there is a certain level of the mind that cannot see beyond the appearances, the forms. Now I am not trying to say that this is wrong. Your physical senses were designed to detect energy within a certain frequency spectrum, namely the same frequency spectrum that makes up your physical body. Your physical senses are extensions of the body and they are meant to serve the body as it interacts with the material world. The body is just a form, but it is also made out of subatomic particles. 

These physical senses and their limitations are the basis, the original basis at least, for human beings going into this illusion of separation. Now I said, it is the basis for it, but it is not the cause of it. The cause of going into separation is a series of choices that people make, whereby they gradually accept the illusions of maya and create these separate selves. The separate selves are created out of the illusion of separation. When the Conscious You steps inside of this mind that is filled with these separate selves, you are seeing everything through those separate selves. You are seeing yourself, you are experiencing yourself, through these separate selves, and over lifetimes, you can forget that you were ever a connected being. You are now experiencing that you are a separate being, but have you become separate because you experience yourself as such? 

Well, this is what you come to question at a certain level of the Eightfold Path. You begin to question your own perception of the world around you, your perception of yourself. We can say that the beginning of a higher mindfulness is that you begin to question your perceptions, your outer thoughts, your sense of identity, even your entire world view. 

You know that your senses can easily be deceived or tricked by appearances. You have all seen optical illusions and you know that there is something beyond what your senses can see. There are atoms and molecules and subatomic particles. You know the senses are not reliable. What really is unreliable are the separate selves that not only take the senses, but build this ideological overlay on top of sensory perception where it says that what your senses see are really separate things. 

Now, if you just take your sensory perception, you will actually see that the senses in themselves have no judgment about what they are seeing. The purpose of the senses is to distinguish and discriminate between different objects at the macroscopic level. Here is a horse. It is not dangerous. Here is a lion. It could potentially be dangerous. This is the purpose of the senses. The purpose of the senses is to discern or discriminate between various objects that relate to your physical survival and safety—what you can do and what you want to do in the world. The senses are really not imposing a value judgment on what they see. 

They may see a lion. They may identify it as a lion but the senses themselves do not actually say that the lion is dangerous. It is your mind that imposes that evaluation on it. Even that is a neutral, we might say objective evaluation. A lion is dangerous because it could attack your physical body and potentially kill it. This is not the same as a value judgment that says a horse is good, a lion is bad, a lion is evil. You see here that on top of the senses that distinguish between different things, objects and forms, your mind has imposed this evaluation, this judgment of good and bad. This is the essence of what I have called the duality consciousness where you create these two polarities. 

Black-and-white thinking

In the extreme form, there are only two polarities and nothing in between. There is good, there is bad. This is what has been called in Aristotelian logic, the logic of the excluded middle. Something is either this or that, there is nothing in between. Now, as I have also said, there is, of course, an alternative to this, which is to say there are two polarities but they are on a scale. There is a middle and there are gradations between the two. Many people have such a value judgment. They see there is something that is good, there is something that is evil but there are some things that are in between the two. 

What is your mind full of? Well, it is full of these separate selves and many of them are based on this value judgment. Something has to be good or bad, right or wrong. What is the purpose of doing this? Well, if you are a connected being, what do you see? What do you feel? What do you experience? You experience that you are connected to something beyond your own mind, your higher self. You experience that you are receiving energy from that higher self and you can use this energy to create circumstances for yourself on earth. 

Before people had stepped into duality and separation, there were none of the conflicts that you see today on earth. People could live in a much more harmonious way where they did not oppose each other. This meant that most people could manifest what they desired without too much effort, certainly without a struggle. Because they saw themselves connected to something higher and connected to each other and connected to their environment, they did not experience that other people or the environment were opposing them. There was no opposition. 

The beginning of suffering

When you are a connected being, where is the opposition? You realize you are connected to the earth and to the material world and that the material world will actually gladly give you the conditions you desire. Once you step into this consciousness of separation and now identify yourself as a separate being, you do not experience any connection anymore. This means you are separated from your environment. You are separated from other people and you are separated from a higher source that gives you creative energy. Now, you have to take energy from your environment. What does that mean? It means taking it from other people. They resist that, of course, so there is the beginning of the struggle. You also experience that even the material world will not give you what you want when you are a separate being, so you have to struggle for everything. 

What does that mean? It means you now start using force. When you are a connected being, you do not have to use force. You use the natural process of allowing energy to stream through your mind, forming mental images that are not based on the illusion of separation, and those mental images are superimposed upon the basic energy and they give you what you desire. When you step into separation, you cannot do this. You cannot co-create in the natural way. You start trying to co-create in an unnatural way where instead of allowing energy to take on form according to the basic principles, you are now seeking to force energy to take on form. You are still doing it in basically the same way. You are formulating mental images and projecting them upon the energy, but you are doing it with force because the mental images are based on separation, the sense of separation. 

A classic example of this is that if you go back throughout history, you see that most societies have had a tendency that a certain elite would form. They would claim to have some kind of authority, for example, the ownership of land. This means that other people did not own land. The only way they could survive was to work on the land of the landowners, but the landowners required something for that, so this means that the landowners could now get the conditions they wanted because other people were doing the physical labor that was required. 

This is an example of how some people have managed to use force to get what they wanted, but it is by taking advantage of other people, by forcing those other people into submission to the elite. What is it that is really happening in your psychology? Well, as I have said several times, once you step into separation you feel a pressure. It is an overwhelming pressure because as a separate being, you cannot really see how you can defend yourself against all the threats that you perceive in the world. What must you do? 

Well, I have said earlier that you suppress your feelings and your thoughts, but what you are really doing in this process is you are creating this conglomerate of the separate selves under the umbrella of the ego. The purpose of doing this is to create a certain worldview that presents yourself as being in a position where you are safe, you are superior and you have a protected privileged position that cannot be threatened. This is the basic psychology of this consciousness of separation. You feel threatened and you are trying to create a worldview that lessens the threat. 

The prison of separation

Now, people, of course, can also take physical measures. Some of these elite people that you have seen throughout the ages have built castles with thick stone walls to defend themselves from an outside threat. There are many other examples of physical measures that people take but they all spring from the mind, from the psychology. Everything begins in the psychology. Whatever physical measures people take are just an extension of this attempt to create a worldview that presents themselves as being in a special position in life where they are able to cope with being on the planet. They are able to cope with the pressure, live with the pressure and continue some kind of existence. 

You may say: “What is wrong with this?” Well, at a certain level, nothing is wrong with it because the earth is an experience machine, a reality simulator, where you are allowed to have the experiences you want for as long as you want until you have had enough of it. If you are a spiritual person and you are studying spiritual teachings and you want to follow a spiritual path, then, obviously this is not enough for you. It is not enough for you to create these mental images that make you feel safe, because what is the effect of creating such an image? It is that once you have it, you feel like you have to defend it. Once you have a certain physical position, you feel you have to defend it. The physical position certainly becomes a protection, such as a castle with stone walls is a protection, but it also becomes a prison because you cannot leave it. Once you have created this worldview, your mind cannot go beyond it. You have to stay within it and you have to always be ready to defend it against all potential threats. 

In duality, you can prove anything

Now, I have explained about the duality consciousness where you always have two polarities. One aspect of the duality consciousness combined with the analytical mind and the intellect is that you can basically prove anything you want. You have a somewhat old discussion in various cultures: “Does God exist?” In the modern world, you have a discussion between religious people and scientific materialists or atheists. They both try to come up with arguments. The religious people come up with arguments for God’s existence and the atheists come up with arguments against God’s existence. They both look at each other’s arguments and try to undermine them and invalidate them, and what do you see if you look at this scenario? You see that after some time, two distinct groups form. One group is absolutely convinced that God exists, the other group is equally convinced that God does not exist. But they are both looking at the same arguments. 

Why is it that one group of people looks at these arguments and concludes that God does exist and the other looks at the same arguments and concludes that God does not exist? Well, it is because each group of people have certain separate selves in their minds and those separate selves will have, as their job, as their programming, to defend these people’s overall worldview. The religious people have an overall view that there is a God who is ultimately in control of what happens in this world. This makes them feel safe because they feel that because they are good religious people, this God will keep them safe, will grant them favors. Their sense of security and safety is based on the existence of this God. This means their separate selves are meant to defend this worldview and the existence of this God. How do the separate selves do it? By suppressing and invalidating any arguments that questions the worldview. 

Now, the atheists have a worldview that there is no God and that is because they feel, and in past lives they felt, threatened by religious people who persecuted them as you saw in the Inquisition and the Crusades. They have reasoned that one of the biggest threats in the world is religion, and therefore, they have created a worldview that religion is all superstition and subjectivity but there is no God. Instead, there are laws of nature and once you can know these laws through science, these people feel they have some sense of control over their situation. How have they achieved their worldview? By creating separate selves that exclude, suppress or invalidate any evidence that questions their worldview. 

Now, you can look around the world and find many, many other groups of people that have exactly the same. The Jews in Israel have a particular worldview where they see themselves in opposition to Arabs. The Arabs have a worldview where they see themselves in opposition to Jews. Many other groups of people around the world have a similar dynamic. 

What you come to realize, when you step up to this higher mindfulness, is that all people have created these separate selves. All people have a basic worldview. You need to have a worldview in order to function but the problem is that when your worldview is based on separation and duality, it will inevitably put you in conflict with other people who have a worldview based on the opposite dualistic polarity. 

As an example, consider the Crusades between Muslims and Christians, they both claim that their religion worshiped the same god, the god described in the Old Testament, but they were still at war with each other. The Christians felt that they represented good and the Muslims represented evil. The Muslims were equally convinced that they represented good and the Christians represented evil. Obviously, they could not both be right. What if none of them were right? What if they both had a dualistic subjective worldview because they had taken one dualistic polarity and elevated that to the status of superiority which, then, put them in an existential conflict with the opposite dualistic polarity? 

In other words, Christianity and Islam had been put on a dualistic scale where they represented two extremes on the scale. The Christians could say: “Well, our extreme is good, the Islamic extreme is evil.” The Muslims could say the opposite. This is how duality works. You take what is one relative extreme, and then, you elevate it to the status of not being relative. It is absolute: “This is the absolute truth. We, the Christians have the absolute truth. The Muslims are in absolute error, therefore, it is justified that we kill them even though our religion contains the commandment, thou shalt not kill.” This is how you invalidate a command and justify violating it, which obviously is relativistic but you think it is based on some superior truth. 

Eight billion universes

This is how people create these worldviews and you can come to see this as a spiritual student when you step up to the higher levels of the Eightfold Path. You come to see this, and therefore, of course, you need to stop focusing your mind on what other people are doing, instead realizing that you have been doing the same thing, because everybody does this until they free their minds from this illusion of separation from these separate selves. It can be no other way. There is no mystery here. This is what everyone does. When I was in embodiment before I reached the higher levels of awareness, I did the same thing. I did it in previous lifetimes as well, even though many Buddhists will deny that I had previous lifetimes. 

You come to that point where you are saying: “I understand what is happening in the world. I see the dynamic of how everybody has a worldview.” Basically, all eight billion people on the planet have an individual worldview. There are many groups of people that have similar worldviews and thereby, they can identify themselves as being part of a group, but each person has a slightly different worldview. 

We can even say that there is not one universe. There are eight billion universes on earth because each person is inside, is in the center of, their own personal universe. Each person sees himself or herself as the center of the universe. A parallel to this is your physical perspective. You are sitting right now in a particular location. Your body is in a particular location. You are looking out through your eyes from a particular perspective. You are occupying space where you are. It is your individual space. Another human being may be able to sit close to you and have a similar perspective as you have, but the person cannot push its body into your body and see the exact same physical perspective that you are seeing. It is the same thing with the mind. You can have similarities with other people but you are the center of your personal universe. 

Now, if you have eight billion people who each see themselves as the center of the universe, and therefore, they are the most important person in the universe, is it any wonder there is conflict and struggle and suffering and a Sea of Samsara? You can come to see this as a student on the spiritual path. What do you, then, need to do? Well, if you want to move higher on the path you need to say: “I understand that all of us are living in our own personal universe. That universe exists only in our minds but we are acting based on how we look at the world, based on our worldview. I understand that we all have a tendency to defend our worldview. I understand that I do not have a right to control another person’s worldview. Even if it is my children, my parents, people close to me, I do not have a right to control other people’s minds. What can I do? As a spiritual student who is beginning to realize what I am realizing about the spiritual path, what can I do?” 

I resign from changing other people

Well, the first step you can do is you can step back and you can make a decision. You can say: “I am choosing to resign myself from the job of changing other people’s minds.” You can even ask yourself: “Do I have an employment contract where some authority figure has signed that it is my job to change the minds of other people? Do I have this contract?” Look through your drawers and your file cabinet, do you have such a contract? If you do not, you can ask yourself: “Well, why have I, then, taken on this job of changing other people’s minds?” Then, you can use this teaching to realize that you have taken on this job because your ego thinks it has to change other people’s minds in order to change your state of mind. It thinks that in order for you to feel secure, you need to change other people’s minds.

Then, you can step even further back, at least once you have started recognizing that you are not the ego, you are not the outer mind, you can step further back and say: “But was it me who took on this job or was it just my ego?” Then, you can begin to realize that it was your ego that took on this job. It was not you., which means that you can now step back from the job and say: “Enough of this. I am going to deliberately choose to stop focusing on changing other people’s minds and I am going to put all of my attention on changing my own mind. That is really my only job on this planet. The only purpose for my being on this planet is to raise my own awareness, not change the minds of other people. It is not a matter of changing my mind as such, but raising my mind to higher levels of awareness.” 

What are you mindful of? You are mindful of the need to change your own consciousness, your own psyche. How do you do it? As I have already described, you look at these patterns, you expose these selves, you let them die. When you focus on this, you will start to make progress, rapid progress. Then, you can come to higher levels of mindfulness where you can begin to see beyond many of the games people are trapped in. 

Look at people. Take, for example, family members who can be locked for decades in this battle where one person is seeking to change another person and vice versa. They are playing a game of who can change who, who can dominate who and so forth. You can free yourself from all of this. You can free yourself from having your attention and your energies, your emotional, mental and identity level energies tied up in this game of seeking to change other people. This can lead to much more rapid growth. 

The constant judgment in the mind

When you, then, come to a higher level and have freed yourself from this game, you can take the next step, you can say: “But I am beginning to grasp now, how the ego works, how these separate selves work. I have experienced that I have come to see some of these selves and I have let them go. I am beginning to grasp the process.” What is it that is really happening here? What is happening is that the ego and the separate selves have created, as I said, a particular worldview. This world view is based on separation and it is based on dualistic polarities and a value judgment. 

What is constantly going on in your mind is that you have a conglomerate of separate selves that are evaluating everything that happens in your life. It is not just a matter of outer events. Your separate selves are, of course, constantly monitoring outer events. They are constantly evaluating: “Is this a threat to my worldview?” Then, they are judging: “Well if it is, it is bad and it must be suppressed or avoided, and if it is not, then, it is good, then I can accept it.” 

There is constantly, in your mind, a process of evaluation of judgment of outer events. Anything that happens, it can be world events, it can be personal physical events, it can be what someone says, something you read, something you see on TV, every impulse that comes to you from outside yourself is constantly evaluated by these separate selves. Much of this goes on below the level of your conscious awareness but as you rise on the path, you become more conscious of this, you cannot avoid seeing some of this process going on. You cannot avoid seeing how it ties up your resources and your attention. 

Beyond what is coming to you from the outside, there is also a constant evaluation process going on inside your mind. At the emotional level, you have selves that evaluate: “What should I feel in this situation? Is this feeling okay based on my spiritual worldview? Is this acceptable for a spiritual person to feel this way?” Then, you have thoughts: “Is this thought okay?” Basically the evaluation is: “Is this thought a threat to my worldview or does it validate my worldview?” Then, at the level of identity, constantly all of these thoughts: “Who am I? How do I fit into the world? Do I have a right to be here? Should I change myself? Should I conform to this group or that group?” All of these evaluations, but the overall purpose is: “Is it a threat to my worldview? Does it validate my worldview? Is it good? Is it bad?” 

Now again, this is, for many people, how they experience life. They experience life through their own minds, through their worldview, through these separate selves. Again, if this is the experience people want, there is nothing inherently wrong with it. As a spiritual student, you need to come to that point where you become mindful of this and you, then, start evaluating: “Do I want this to fill my mind? I see how it has been filling my mind my entire lifetime, but do I want it to fill my mind for the rest of this lifetime or do I want to rise above this?” That is when you can begin to use the teachings to expose these separate selves that are constantly judging and evaluating. 

You can also begin to become aware of your worldview. How is it you actually see the world and see your place in the world? What is it in your worldview that gives you a sense that you can cope with life, that you can exist and continue to exist in this chaotic world? Then, you can realize that the basis for it all is this value judgment. You look at phenomena in the world, it can be physical things, emotions, thoughts, your sense of identity. You are always evaluating: “Is it good, is it bad, is it right, is it wrong?” There comes a point on the path towards Buddhahood where you need to begin to evaluate: “Is this the only way to look at life? Is it possible to free my mind from this constant evaluation, judgment of everything?” 

Suffering is inside your mind

You can even begin to ask the question: “What is the cause of suffering? Is it the external world? Is suffering just an inevitable consequence of the fact that I live in this terrible world?” Then, you begin to ask yourself: “Well, where is suffering taking place now?” You can realize that suffering is a condition that takes place inside your mind. 

Yes, there may be an outer condition. You may ride your bicycle and fall over and break a leg and it causes you pain. There is a physical element of this, but the real suffering takes place in your mind. This is where you might go into an evaluation process: “Oh, this should not have happened. This was so unfair that this happened. It was so stupid of me that I was not careful or it was that other person that forced me off the road.” All of these evaluations that now tie up your mind. Well, it is this process that goes on in the mind that causes suffering. Outer events are just outer events, surely it is not pleasant to break a leg, but it is still an outer event and the evaluation of it, as good or bad or unjust or whatever, takes place in the mind.

Regardless of the physical conditions, suffering takes place in the mind and suffering springs from this constant evaluation of right and wrong, good and bad, this should have happened but did not happen, this should not have happened but did happen, all of these evaluations. That is when you can, then, begin to expose these separate selves, and when you come to see them or let go of them, that is when you experience a greater connection to the Buddha mind. Because in the Buddha mind, there are no such value judgments and evaluations. 

This is what I attempted to explain 2,500 years ago with the concept of the pairs, with the concept of overcoming suffering, overcoming attachments. It is your attachment to things that makes you suffer. It is your attachment to this view that certain things should happen and certain things should not happen. When the things you think should not happen actually happen, you suffer. When you think that the things that you wanted to happen do not happen, you suffer. 

You are constantly in this state of agitation, not being satisfied, not being at peace because you are always looking to the future, fearing that bad things could happen or that good things may not happen. You are constantly in tension and you can come to that point where you begin to have these glimpses where the Conscious You steps outside of the outer mind and you experience a connection to your higher self, and therefore, you experience peace. You now experience this directly—it is not a theoretical concept. You are experiencing that there is an alternative to your normal state of mind and that alternative is a more peaceful state of mind and that is when you can begin to evaluate: “What do I want? Do I want to continue in the agitation or do I want to move towards peace?” In order to move towards peace, well, you have to get rid of these separate selves, but you also have to look at your overall worldview and say: “Is it true that everything is separate? Do I really live in a world made of separate things, separate objects? Am I a separate being? Am I separated from the other 8 billion people on the planet? Am I an island in the center of my own universe or is there an alternative?” Of course, there is and that is the Buddha mind, that is enlightenment. 

The concept of enlightenment

Enlightenment has stages. Of course, there are some people that think it is some absolute perfect state but it is not. Enlightenment is when you begin to see beyond this illusion that the world can be divided into separate objects. 

You live in a computer age. Many of you can remember when computers were more primitive and the computer screen had some pixels on it that were visible to the naked eye. You could actually see the individual square dots that made up the image on the computer screen. Now, if you go back and look at a photograph on the computer screen, if you went close enough with a magnifying glass, all you could see were these individual square dots in different colors but they were all the same shape, they just had different colors. There were basically only three different colors and you could see these individual pixels. This means that you are now looking at the computer screen, and there may be a photograph on that computer screen of a tiger, but when you are close enough, you only see square dots of various colors and it is only when you step back far enough that suddenly your perspective shifts and now you see the image and you see: “Oh, those square dots form an image that is a tiger and it is a dangerous animal that could eat me.” 

This is what you begin to grasp when you reach these higher levels of mindfulness, namely that only at a certain level, from a certain perspective, does it appear that the world is made of separate objects. Only at a certain level, is it relevant to apply this value judgment of good and bad, right and wrong. When you step closer, you see that all of the forms, all of the shapes in the world, are made up of these little individual dots. You can even go a step further and realize that the dots could not appear unless there was a screen and so all of the different shapes in the world are made out of these smaller units going all the way down to subatomic particles and energy waves. 

All of this could only appear because there is something behind it that makes them appear. What is behind the dots on the computer screen is the screen itself, what is behind dots on a piece of paper is the paper itself, but what is behind the dots that make up the world of form is the formless, which is the Buddha Nature. The Buddha Nature is the formless that allows form to arise. It is the formless that can take on form temporarily but the formless is not changed by it. Again, I have used the image of a movie theater where you are projecting with your identity, mental and emotional bodies onto the screen. The screen can display many different movies but it is not changed by displaying the movies. The screen is still there, it is still white, undifferentiated, formless. No matter what forms the Buddha Nature takes on, it does not change the Buddha Nature. The forms are only temporary. The Buddha Nature is timeless, eternal, ongoing. No form could ever change the formless. 

A form may be able to change another form, but no form can change the formless and this is what you are able to not only understand intellectually but eventually even experience intuitively, namely that behind all forms is the Buddha Nature. When you do begin to experience this intuitively, you gain an entirely different perspective. You see that all of this evaluation of right and wrong, good and bad, it only takes place in the mind but it only takes place in the mind that is separated from the Buddha Nature, and the effect of this evaluation, this constant tension, this constant judgment, is that it keeps the Conscious You focused on the separate mind, focused in the separate mind, seeing the world through the separate mind. Because the Conscious You is an expression of the formless Buddha Nature, it can step outside of the mind that has form and experience its own nature. This is higher mindfulness. This is what mindfulness truly means. 

Different definitions of mindfulness

Now, if you look at Buddhism through the ages you will see that many people, many Buddhists, even many so-called advanced scholars have defined it in many other ways. Some have attempted to define it in such a way that there are certain things that you should not be thinking about and there are certain things that you should be thinking about that your mind should be focused on. They have, then, created various forms of meditation aimed at shutting out certain thoughts, focusing the mind on other thoughts. 

This is not the original meaning of mindfulness. It is actually that these people are using the teachings of the Buddha to reinforce or to even create a new separate self. These people are taking the teachings of the Buddha, which are meant to set them free from the outer mind, the dualistic mind, the separate mind, and they are using the teachings of the Buddha to create a separate self that now feels superior to those who do not have their worldview. They are creating a specific worldview that is (they claim) based on the teachings of the Buddha but it is actually created from separation where they are looking at the teachings of the Buddha through the filter of separation. Then, they are distorting the teachings, turning it into a doctrine or a dogma and a very fixed, closed, absolutist worldview. 

What is the entire concept of the Eightfold Path? It is that as long as you are in physical embodiment, you have not arrived at some ultimate level of consciousness. Like I said, you will have some illusion as long as you are in physical embodiment. It can be no other way. Walking the Eightfold Path is a lifelong process but what these people have done is they have taken the teachings of the Buddha, or rather their distorted version of it, and they have said: “Here we have the absolute worldview. We are Buddhists. We know this. We are practicing these practices. We are able to force our minds to not think about certain things and force it to only focus on other things. Therefore, we are advanced. We are saved. We have reached a higher state of consciousness. We are special and surely the Buddha will reward us in some future that will come.” This is not what mindfulness means. This is mindlessness even though the mind is full of its own self-created worldview. This is all illusion, a giant web of illusions and this is the essence of the dilemma that you face.

If you take the story of my life, you will see that after I had entered Nirvana, I contemplated going back to earth and teaching. I was confronted with the thought that: “But you have reached such an advanced level of consciousness that is so much higher, so fundamentally different from the consciousness that people have on earth, therefore, nobody will be able to grasp your teaching. Nobody will be able to understand it.” It was a temptation that I had to face, that I had to work through and I had to evaluate: “Is it even worthwhile to go back? Will anybody grasp it?” What caused me to go back was that I realized that I had grasped it. I had understood. I had raised my awareness to a certain level and, as I said, when you reach that level of enlightenment and Buddhahood, your worldview is based on oneness. You do not see yourself as separated from other people, therefore, you do not see yourself as special. You see that you are an individual expression of the Buddha Nature, and so are all other people, and one expression of the Buddha Nature cannot be inherently fundamentally superior to another expression of the Buddha Nature. 

When you realize this, you realize that because I was able to raise my awareness, all other people are able to do the same. The fact that I did it means there are other people that are ready and willing and, therefore, I might give them an example. I might give them some teachings and that is why I decided to go back because I decided: “Some will understand.” I knew that most will not understand and you can look back at Buddhism over these past 2,500 years and the various sects that have sprung up and there are various arguments for why they have understood the Buddhist teaching. You can see that most have not understood but some have understood and in today’s age many more can understand even without becoming Buddhists. Even if they grew up in the western world that is not Buddhist they can still understand because these ideas are universal. 

What is a valid spiritual teaching?

You see here is another realization that you come to on the path. You realize that all of the many different religions and spiritual philosophies that you find on earth, they all claim to have some superior truth. Or rather, the followers and the priesthood of those religions claim that they have a superior truth but if a spiritual teaching has value, has validity and comes from a higher source, then, it will point to the fact that there is something beyond all of the divisions you see on earth. There is a level of awareness beyond the dualistic mind, the value judgments, the sense of separation. 

Beyond separation and division is oneness that is what any true valid spiritual teaching will point to. Therefore, it is meaningless to talk about: “Here is the superior teaching.” Because people are individuals, you cannot create a spiritual teaching that will work for all people on earth and it does not matter. You do not have to. What matters is: “Can a specific spiritual teaching help people transcend their level of consciousness and ultimately come to the point where they transcend separation and duality?” In that case, it works. If it cannot do this, it does not work. Any teaching given for this purpose can be perverted and filtered through the separate mind, so people create their own version of the teaching, which is not designed to free them from the outer mind. It is designed to validate the worldview of the outer mind or to give the outer mind a worldview that makes it feel secure and superior. 

If you take a spiritual teaching and you use it to make yourself feel superior because you think you have the highest possible teaching, you have the absolute truth, you demonstrate that you have completely misunderstood the purpose of real spiritual teachings. The purpose of a spiritual teaching is to liberate you from your own mind, the separate mind. If it does that, it works. If it does not do that, it does not work. If you use it to liberate yourself from your own mind, you are making the highest possible use of the teaching. If you use it to imprison yourself even more firmly in your own mind (because you are convinced you have the absolute world view, the highest possible worldview), then you have abused the teaching. 

It was never the intention of the Buddha to create the superior religion on earth. The teachings of the Buddha were meant to be a process whereby people can raise their level of consciousness and free themselves from the prisons of their own minds. If you turn the teachings of the Buddha into anything else, you demonstrate that you are not mindful of the Buddha’s teachings because your mind is full of beliefs that spring from that which sees itself as separate from the Buddha, the separate mind. It springs from illusion and instead of freeing you from the veil of maya, it can only trap you more firmly behind that veil because you think that your worldview is not based on illusion, it is based on some absolute superior truth. 

To say it in a very simple manner: What is higher mindfulness? It is the awareness that the goal of the path is to free yourself from your own mind, to free yourself from the contents of your own mind. Does that mean you come to a point where you have no contents? That is not what I have been saying. If you pay attention to what I have said, I have said you free yourself, you free your mind, from the contents that are based on separation and duality. As you do this, you create other contents that are based on connection and oneness. When I came back to teach, I came back with a mind that was free of duality and separation but it still had a certain individuality and it had a certain world view and it was adapted to the culture in which I appeared and I had, of course, contents in the mind.

I was not identified with those contents. I knew that the contents of the mind were simply tools for interacting with the material world and with other people. They did not define me. They could be changed. They could be different. They were not some absolute contents of the mind. You see here, I am not asking you, at least at a certain level of the path, to come to a point where you have no individuality, no personality. I am asking you to be willing to come to a point where you do not have an individuality based on the illusion of separation, where you do not have a personality based on separation and duality, where you see yourself in opposition to other people. You can build or you can uncover, because you may have built it already in past lives, a personality and individuality based on a sense of connection, a connection to your higher self, a connection to a higher realm, a connection to other people, a connection to the matter world. Then, you have a whole different way of interacting with other people and the matter world and with your higher self and the higher realm. 

You can now act based on connection and what is the natural outcome of it? It is that instead of seeking to raise yourself up as a separate individual, you are seeking to raise up the whole because you see that you are part of that whole, and therefore, the way to raise yourself, your connected self, is to raise up all life. And that, then, leads on to the final topic of concentration, of what you focus on, but this will, of course, be the topic of the next discourse. 

I have given you a demonstration of mindfulness. I hope you have experienced some sense of a higher form of mindfulness. My mind is full of the Buddha Nature. What is your mind full of?

 

Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels

 

Back to Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world

Listen to a recording of this dictation (subscribers only)

Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, January 8, 2023. This dictation was given during the 2023 New Year’s webinar – Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. The next topic is that of effort. Traditionally, again, people have defined that there is right effort and there is wrong effort. They have then striven to avoid the wrong effort and cultivate and practice right effort. This has, for many people, become a straitjacket where they barely feel that they can do anything because they are so afraid of doing wrong effort and making karma that they end up feeling that the only thing they can do is to have as little physical activity as possible and to either meditate or perform other spiritual practices most of the time. This then becomes obsessive-compulsive and people actually feel they are being very spiritual but in reality, they are not making any progress on the spiritual path. They are not climbing to higher levels. They are just treading water, becoming more and more agitated, more and more frantic in performing “right effort” as they define it. 

Of course, based on what I have given you previously, it is now fairly easy to create a different way to evaluate your efforts. I have made a great effort to explain what is the goal of the Eightfold Path, what is the goal of the Middle Way. It is to raise awareness and how do you raise awareness? In one way only: resolving psychology. This will be new and shocking to many people, even many people from the Buddhist tradition. They have gotten themselves into a state of mind where they think that right effort is certain spiritual practices. Those spiritual practices have some kind of almost magical ability to transform their consciousness and bring them closer to enlightenment, or nirvana or however they define it. 

Overcoming illusions is not a mechanical task

Now, I have said that there are valid spiritual practices that can have an effect, but how do they have an effect? They have an effect in transforming the fear-based energies that are accumulated in your emotional, mental and identity bodies, even to some degree in the physical cells. A spiritual technique can have the effect of transforming energy, but there is no spiritual practice, no matter what it is, no matter where it comes from, no matter who defined it or who released it, that can transform your state of mind, your beliefs, the illusions you have. 

An illusion is an illusion. It is not real, but as long as you think the illusion is the truth, or as long as you have not become aware that you have an illusion, you are trapped in seeing the world through the filter of that illusion. How did you come to accept the illusion? Did some demon implant the illusion in your mind? There may have been some lower being, a being with lower awareness, who projected a certain illusion at your mind. In fact, the collective consciousness is currently projecting many illusions at people’s minds. But you are an individual being. You are not a separate being, but you are an individual being, which means that you have authority over what enters your mind, what leaves your mind and what takes place in your mind. You may have forgotten that in a past life you allowed an illusion to enter your mind, but regardless of whether you remember or not, there was a point where you made a decision to accept a certain illusion as the truth. 

Now, after you stepped into the consciousness of separation, you have allowed a great number of illusions to enter your mind. This is what forms the veil of maya that blinds you to the reality that you are an expression of the Buddha Nature and everything else is also an expression of the Buddha Nature regardless of its outer form. There is no spiritual practice whatsoever that can transform your state of mind, change your beliefs, automatically free you from illusions. You can be free from illusions only by coming to consciously see them as illusions and thereby letting them go, because you see they are illusions. 

This was the case 2,500 years ago, it has been the case in the meantime, it will be the case in the future. Spiritual growth that goes towards a higher level of awareness is a conscious process of consciously coming to see illusions. What a spiritual practice can do is transform the energies stored in, for example, your emotional mind that make it more difficult for your conscious mind to see the illusions. It is not that a spiritual practice is not helpful, it is just not automatic because it will not make decisions for you. You, the Conscious You that is the core of your being, you have to make decisions, and how do you make decisions? By becoming consciously aware of things that you are not consciously aware of right now. By bringing the illusions into your conscious awareness, pulling them out of the subconscious mind, where you can see them, examine them and then, when you see they are illusions, you let go of them, you dismiss them. 

The creation of subconscious selves

Now, we have given many teachings that an illusion is not just an illusion. It is not just that you have false knowledge. It is not just that you have the belief that you are holding a rope when in reality it is a snake. Everything that happens in your mind has three elements. There is energy, there is a certain knowledge or belief and there is consciousness. When you consciously look at a particular illusion and you decide consciously to accept it into your mind, what then happens? Well, first of all, the Conscious You, that you are, is now beginning to look at the world through that illusion. 

It is comparable to you being inside a house and the house is your identity, mental and emotional bodies. There are certain windows in the house, but when you accept an illusion, you are putting a piece of colored glass in front of one of the windows, at least a part of that window. Now you are looking out through the window and what you see outside yourself is colored by that glass, so you get a distorted image. This means that you are now seeing the world as something it is not, meaning that when the energy from your higher self streams through your conscious awareness and through that filter, you are qualifying it with a fear-based vibration. An illusion causes you to have a fear-based view of life, because if you see that everything is the Buddha Nature, there is no need for fear. After you have accepted a false belief, you are then starting to misqualify, to lower the vibration of energy, through that belief. Some of that energy is projected out, some of it accumulates in your three bodies: identity, mental, emotional. 

As the energy accumulates, it starts to exert a pull on your conscious awareness, meaning that you more easily go into, for example, anger. As you are looking at the world through the filter of the illusion, you are actually imbuing that illusion with your consciousness. Because anything you focus your attention upon, you are allowing your consciousness to flow into it and through it. You have now three elements, you have an unrealistic an illusory belief, you have an accumulation of energy that gradually creates a magnetic pull and then you have the imbuing with consciousness. This means that what you are actually doing is you are creating what I call the samskaras, the patterns, but which with a more modern expression we could call a “self.” You are creating a separate self in your identity, mental and emotional minds or bodies, and the importance of this is that this self will have a certain level of consciousness. It will not have the self-awareness that the Conscious You has, so the self did not create itself. The Conscious You can create a self but the self cannot create itself. 

This means that the self cannot change itself either. It can grow in the sense that it becomes more intense, it has more and more of a magnetic pull on your conscious mind, but it cannot change itself. If you create a self based on the illusion that anger is an acceptable reaction to certain situations, the self cannot come to say: “But wait a minute, anger is not right according to the spiritual teaching, so I am just going to let myself die.” The self will never be able to do this. The self has what we might call a survival instinct. It can become more and more angry, but it cannot become less angry, not by its own effort. It can become less angry when you stop feeding it your energy and use spiritual tools to transform the accumulated energy, but the self cannot do this by itself. 

The self is literally like a computer program that can only do what it is programmed to do. As it becomes more intense, it has more of a pull on the Conscious You. You are pulled into the self and what happens over many lifetimes is that you gradually create a conglomerate of these selves that are all based on the illusion of separation, and they gradually exert such a pull that the Conscious You is pulled into this veil of illusion. You are pulled behind this veil of illusion and now you are looking at everything through that veil of illusion. You can even come to the point where you forget that you were ever outside the veil of illusion. That is how you forget that you have a connection to your higher self and you have the Buddha Nature and the Buddha potential within you. You identify yourself as a human being, either as a sinner, or as a person with great karma, or as an evolved ape. This can only happen when you forget your connection to something outside your own mind. 

Separate selves can only create karma

If you want to take a higher evaluation of effort, you can say, if you are completely identified with this conglomerate of separate selves and with the ego that is, so to speak, the container where these separate selves exist, then everything you do, every effort you make through a separate self will create karma. It will misqualify energy. It will turn love-based energy into fear-based energy and it will only tie you more firmly to the illusion that you are a separate being. This clearly is not higher effort, it is lower effort. 

What then is higher effort? It is activities that have the effect of freeing you from this identification with the separate selves and the ego. Now take care to make a distinction here. Many people from the Buddhic tradition will say: “But the Buddha vehemently denied the existence of a separate ego.” Yes, but listen to what is said. The Buddha denied the existence, the reality of a separate ego. The separate ego has no reality, it does not exist in the Buddha Nature, in the Buddhic mind, but this does not mean it does not have a temporary, fleeting existence in the human mind. As I have explained, everything is energy. Energy can take on any form, but it takes on form through consciousness, by consciousness projecting a mental image upon the energy. 

This is what you are doing as a human being in embodiment, you are co-creating by using your mind’s ability to superimpose mental images upon energy. When you do this through one of these illusions of separateness, you are creating a separate self, you are even creating the overall illusion that you are a separate being. That self, the ego, has a temporary existence. There was no higher being that created it, but you created it and therefore it exists in your mind. It does not have an objective existence, to use the expression of science, it has a subjective existence, but as long as it is in your mind, as long as the energy, the illusion and the sense of self is there, it influences your mind. This means, among other things, that the ego cannot be transformed. There are actually people who have built a strong separate self and they have become so identified with it that they think that the purpose for walking the spiritual path is to transform this separate self until it reaches a state where now it can enter heaven, or now it can become enlightened. 

This is the true meaning of the teachings given 2,500 years ago. The ego has no existence, therefore it cannot become the Buddha, it cannot be raised up and gain any kind of permanency or immortality. There are people in the Christian tradition who believe that if they are faithful Christians and fulfill the requirements of the Christian religion, then after they die, Jesus will appear and take their outer personality, the separate sense of self, into heaven. 

The impossible dream of the ego

What is the characteristic of heaven, or the spiritual realm, or whatever you want to call it? It is that it is based on the realization that all life is one, that everything is connected, that it is one interdependent whole, so how can a separate self which denies this connection, denies this oneness, ever enter oneness? It cannot happen, it cannot be done, it is simply an impossible dream, the ultimate dream of the separate self. Why do people come up with this dream? Well, because, as I said, when you step into this illusion of separation, you will feel you have lost something. You have lost your connection to your higher self. You will feel this as a loss and you will have some desire to overcome that loss, even if you have no conscious awareness of what it really means. You have a longing for something. People can cover this over for a time by immersing themselves in worldly activities as many people have done for many lifetimes, but there will come a point where your longing for something, which is basically a longing for something outside your own mind, the separate mind, will surface and you cannot deny it. 

The ego has a certain rudimentary awareness. It wants to maintain its power over your mind. When your longing for something more surfaces, the ego knows it cannot fulfill it, but it will still try to make you believe that you can fulfill this longing by perfecting the separate self. When you find a spiritual teaching, for example, that talks about raising your awareness, attaining some higher state, entering into nirvana, heaven, bliss, enlightenment, the ego will say: “Of course! I support your quest to improve yourself and reach this higher state. And you can do it by raising me up to this higher state. I can become perfect. I can become immortal.” It is a complete lie, a complete misunderstanding. The ego will never enter heaven, the spiritual realm, nirvana. It – can – not – be – done. 

A separate self cannot be transformed into a self of oneness. This is something that many spiritual people from many traditions will deny, but it is a reality. You have created these selves based on the illusion of separation. There is a specific illusion for each self, there is a certain amount of energy and it has been imbued with a rudimentary sense of consciousness, so it thinks it has some reality, some existence.

It is like the philosopher Rene Descartes said: “I think, therefore I am.” In other words, the fact that I am conscious must mean that I have existence and that is what a separate self thinks. The ego thinks that the fact that I am conscious as a separate being means I have some reality, some existence as a separate being. This is the illusion that I tried to explain 2,500 years ago by saying that there is no separate ego that has real existence. I was of course quite aware that it has a temporary existence and that the entire goal of the Eightfold Path was to help people overcome their identification with this ego. 

Overcoming the ego one self at a time

What can you do to overcome the ego? Well, there is an ego that is the core of this separate sense of identity but this is not the easiest thing to overcome. What you do is you are practical. You start by realizing that the ego is kind of a container where there are many individual separate selves in the container, and each self is based on a particular illusion. You take one self at a time and the easiest way to expose the self is to look at your reaction to specific situations. Why do you for example react with fear to certain situations? Why do you respond with anger or irritability? Why do you doubt yourself in certain situations? Why do you become aggressive or why do you submit to aggression? 

You take a specific reaction you have. You realize there is a separate self in your subconscious mind. Certain situations trigger that self into activity and when that happens, it takes over your reactions. You are not making a decision with the conscious mind on how to react to certain situations. The separate self is simply activated and takes over your reactions. This shows you that there is a separate self hiding behind this pattern. Now you can go into it. You can go into the feelings until you go through the feelings, and you can continue to examine and use your intuition until you see the belief behind it.

There can come this point where suddenly the Conscious You has stepped outside of this separate self and you are looking at it from the outside. Many people who may not even have heard of a spiritual teaching, and certainly not this teaching of separate selves, have experienced this spontaneously throughout their lives. They have had a certain outer situation, often a more severe situation that felt like a crisis, where suddenly they have felt a shift. Instead of reacting the way they normally do, suddenly, their minds have fallen silent. It is almost like they have, in an interval beyond time, they have stepped outside of this situation and suddenly they are seeing it from the outside. 

There may be in some cases a conscious thought: “Why am I always reacting this way?” This is an example of how you come to that point where the Conscious You steps outside a particular separate self and once you are outside of it, you can see it. You can see the illusion it is based on. You can see how the self is limiting you and limiting your reactions, taking away your freedom to consciously react. That is when you can make this decision: “I do not want to react this way anymore. I do not want this in my life anymore. I do not want to see life through this filter.” What can you then do? Well, it is not a matter of fixing a problem, it is not a matter of doing something to this self. Once you see the illusion, you simply need to take the step to give up the self, to surrender the self, to let the self die.

A separate self cannot be perfected. It cannot be transformed into a higher state. You simply need to let it die. A separate self is basically an attachment and how do you overcome an attachment? By letting it go. By surrendering whatever illusions and desires are behind the attachment. You think you have to achieve something in this world—basically to cover over your sense of being unwhole. When you see this, you can let it go and realize you do not need to achieve anything in this world in order to become whole. You need to give up the idea that you have to do something in this world, and then you will spontaneously feel more whole.

Why is this? Remember what I have said. You originally had a sense of connection to your higher self. You have covered it over by an illusion but the default state is for you to feel connected. When you let go of the illusion you will return to feeling connected. Now you can expand your sense of connection of course, which is what you are meant to do as you walk the Eightfold Path. The default state for a human being is to feel connected to its higher self. You can become more conscious, you can expand the connection, but you can never completely lose the potential to return to connection. The connection is in a sense always there. Your higher self is always there, it is always directing energy at you. It is just that in your mind you have stepped into an illusion so you are not conscious of that connection. Let go of the illusion and you return to a sense of connection. It is not a matter of thinking that the separate self that prevents you from experiencing the connection needs to be perfected and then you will again feel connected. Nay, you need to just let go of the self and return to the natural state of connection. 

There is no secret to growth

What does this mean? It means that any effort that reinforces the sense of separation will not bring you further along the path. Any effort that reduces the veil of maya will re-establish connection or expand connection and this is what brings you forward on the path. This means that any effort that helps you return to connection is a higher effort. As I said, this is not just a matter of the physical actions or efforts you perform. A spiritual practice in itself will not automatically bring the transformation of consciousness. Studying a spiritual teaching will not automatically bring a transformation of consciousness.

There are many, many people, many spiritual people throughout the ages in the Buddhist tradition and other traditions, who have come to believe that there is some secret to spiritual growth. They think that there is some higher teaching that they can find. Many people believe for example that there are teachings that are given for the public but then there are secret teachings that are only for the elect elite who have reached the higher level on the spiritual path. They think that these teachings are hidden somewhere and they are spending lifetimes striving to find these teachings because they think that once they have this teaching and they read this teaching, they will automatically be enlightened by simply reading this teaching. How could this happen? Yes, a spiritual teaching may help you see an illusion, but it is not guaranteed that reading a specific teaching will help you see your illusion. 

There can be two people that both have the same illusion, the same separate self. They read a spiritual teaching. For one person it means that he sees the illusion and lets go of it, but the other does not see the illusion. Why not? Well, it is a matter of whether you have realized what is the essence of the spiritual path. Is it to see the illusion and dismiss the separate self or is it to somehow raise up and perfect the separate self? We could also say it is a matter of where you are focusing your attention. Are you looking outside of yourself or inside of yourself? Are you willing to look at your own psychology, look at your own illusions, wrestle with them until you come to see through them? Or are you thinking that there is some magical thing from outside of yourself that can do this for you? Or rather, you do not even think that the outside thing is going to resolve your psychology. You think that the outside guru is going to magically bring you to enlightenment. 

What a guru cannot do for you

There is a very long tradition in the East of the guru-chela relationship. It is believed by many, many people, and it is claimed by many gurus, that a real guru has a magical ability to raise his students up (I say his because they are most often men) to a higher state, enlightenment, nirvana, whatever you call it. It cannot be done. Nobody can undo your decisions for you. You must be willing to look consciously at the decisions you made in the past to accept an illusion to create a separate self, and you must be willing to consciously make the decision to let that separate self die.

A guru might help you see the separate self. He might confront you with your ego. He might act in such a way that it brings out, it activates, one of these reactionary patterns you have. The guru cannot make the decision for you because the decision was made inside your own mind and it can only be undone inside your own mind. You may not be conscious of you making a decision many lifetimes ago, but you can still become conscious of the decision and what it entails and therefore let it go. There is no amount of external effort or external force or external guru that can do this for you. As long as you think that you can direct your attention outside yourself and make an effort to change something outside yourself, you are treading water on the spiritual path. You are not getting anywhere. Again, you can create the impression that you are, but what are you doing when you do this? 

Consider what I have said here. You have a certain number of separate selves based on illusions. They are keeping you trapped in the veil of maya. Now you find the spiritual path, a spiritual teaching. It is a valid spiritual teaching. It has the potential to help you grow by engaging in the Eightfold Path but will it? The result cannot be guaranteed because the essence of the real path is that you overcome, you make conscious and then consciously dismiss these separate selves. If you are not willing to do this or if you do not grasp it, what will you do instead? You will take the spiritual teaching and you will use that spiritual teaching to build a new separate self. That separate self would be based on the illusion that if you diligently study a spiritual teaching, if you diligently perform a spiritual practice, then you are becoming a more and more advanced student by demonstrating these outer things. Therefore, you are making progress on the path. 

Many, many spiritual people throughout the ages have had good intentions of making spiritual progress but they have not grasped the essential nature of the path and therefore they have simply created a number of separate selves based on their spiritual teaching. They have reinforced the ego, which believes that it is separate and which is always striving for some sort of superiority. Again, why is the ego striving for this? Well, the ego has enough awareness to know that it is incomplete. It does not really understand that it can never enter heaven but it knows it is incomplete. It knows you are feeling incomplete and it is constantly seeking a way to cover over this incompleteness, to compensate for it. The ego is constantly seeking to become superior in some way because it thinks, the ego thinks, that if it becomes sophisticated enough in this world, then it must be allowed entry into the higher world. 

The spiritualized ego

Many, many people who believe in a superior God have basically created an ego that thinks that if I do all the outer things right according to this religion, then God simply has to allow me to enter heaven. God has to give me immortality. The ego is sort of seeking to make a bargain with God. I do these outer things, you let me enter heaven. The problem with this is that this is all imagined. First of all, the image that the ego can formulate of God has nothing to do with the reality of the spiritual realm. You can look back to, for example, the three monotheistic religions that are based on the Old Testament image of the angry God in the sky and you can say: “Is there such a God in the sky that corresponds to this image?” The reality is that there is no such god in the sky, but there is a being created in the collective consciousness having a temporary existence in the emotional, mental and identity levels of the material universe and the collective consciousness. This is a man-made god, created in the image and likeness of the ego. It is a god that is partial to the people who are doing his bidding and those he is rewarding, but he is punishing those who are not obeying him. This can only be a dualistic god and therefore it can have no reality whatsoever when you begin to grasp what duality and non-duality is all about.

The ego is trying to do something impossible. It is trying to define criteria in this world that will guarantee its entry into the higher world. The ego is born from the illusion of separation. It can never fathom oneness. What is the ego doing? It is defining criteria based on the illusion of separation, meaning they are unreal. Reality is oneness, unreality is separation and division. You think, or the ego thinks, that you can leave oneness and go into separation and then based on the illusion of separation you can get back into oneness. This is impossible. How would it ever be possible?

You can see many religious and spiritual people who have found a spiritual teaching or a religious teaching. They have now created, or rather they have in many cases taken what has already been collectively created by the members of that religion, this elaborate view of what they are supposed to do and what they are not supposed to do. They throw themselves at this very diligently, and they are absolutely convinced that they are making progress and that one day something will happen. Jesus will appear in the sky, take the good Christians to heaven, roll up the world as a scroll and condemn everybody else to hell. The Buddha will appear to people, grant them enlightenment and leave the rest out in the cold. Some magical teaching will appear to them and when they read it they will be enlightened.

There is this belief among many people that walking the spiritual path is some glorious adventure that leads you to greater and greater sophistication and status and recognition in this world according to the criteria defined in this world. These criteria are defined by the ego, they are based on separation. How can they lead you to oneness? The spiritual path is really not a glorious path at all. It is a path of constantly looking at yourself, your own reactions, exposing reactions in your psychology and letting them die. Exposing these separate selves and letting them die. That is what the spiritual path is about. As long as you are in physical embodiment you will have certain separate selves that you have not yet discovered because if you had no separate selves, you could not stay in a physical body on a dense planet like earth.

What it means to be enlightened 

There is a very old belief among spiritual students that: “Oh, this person is enlightened, this guru is enlightened.” Well, there is a reality and there is an illusion here. On the one hand it is clear that there are people who have reached a higher level of awareness than the average person. Certainly, those who understand the dynamics of the spiritual path that I have explained here, you can all work your way gradually towards higher levels of consciousness than where you started, and certainly higher levels than the average person. However, if you think that enlightenment means that you have no illusions or no separate selves left, then you are not having the highest understanding.

There is a story of the Buddha that I reached enlightenment. I went into Nirvana and then I decided that instead of remaining in nirvana I would come back to earth and teach, and therefore I came back in an enlightened state. Which many people have projected that I was somehow a perfect being, that I had no illusions, no separate selves left. Now the reality is that I had overcome most of the illusions that you can have when you are a human being in embodiment. I had not overcome all or I could not have remained in a physical body. This does not mean that I did not reach a higher level of consciousness than the average person. I certainly did. It means that I had a realistic, you might say humble, assessment of myself. I did not consider myself to be a perfect being like some of my followers did back then, and especially have done since then. 

There is a phenomenon in spiritual movements that we might call the “dead guru syndrome.” Once the guru is dead, people start projecting their dreams and illusions upon that guru of how special he was and how perfect they were. Why do they do this? Because the more special the guru is, the more special they become as the followers or students of that guru. This builds their egos and their illusion that by following this perfect guru because the guru was so perfect, he has the magic that can transform them without them having to look at their own state of awareness and psychology. 

What am I saying here? What I am saying is simply this, as long as you are in a physical embodiment you have certain illusions that you need to overcome. This means you have to be humble, you have to be realistic and not proclaim that you have reached some kind of perfection. There are people who have proclaimed that they are the embodiment of some god, or that they have reached some state of enlightenment. There are people who have not proclaimed this themselves but they have allowed their followers to believe this without correcting them. This is not the highest view. 

As long as you are in a physical body there is at least one illusion to overcome and when you overcome it you cannot stay in the body. It is that simple. You can come up with all kinds of stories and ideas that there are these perfected beings that are living in the Himalayas that are maintaining a physical body for centuries. It is not that there is not some reality here but these beings do not see themselves the way you see them from the state of separation. They have reached a high level of awareness but they are realistic in realizing that there is something that keeps them in a physical body and in order to become permanently free of that body they have to overcome that illusion. They are realistic in their self-assessment because you cannot reach a higher state of awareness without overcoming separateness, the sense of separation. It is only in the sense of separation that some people can be higher than others. The idolatry of a spiritual guru can only spring from the sense of separation. If the guru makes a claim to be superior, or if he allows his followers to put him up as superior, he has not overcome separation. How could he have? 

The false effort of raising yourself above others

A realistic assessment when you overcome all of these separate selves is that you are an expression of the one mind and so is everyone else. Well, how can one expression of the one mind be more sophisticated, more perfect than another? Everything is the Buddha Nature. Every self-aware being is an expression of the Buddha Nature. How can one be fundamentally more special than others? It says in the American Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal.” Well, that is in a sense, a recognition that all are expressions of the Buddha Nature. There is no value judgment in the Buddha Nature. It is only in the veil of maya, the illusion of separateness, that there can be a value judgment that says one person is more special than another. 

What does this have to do with effort? Well, any effort that seeks to raise yourself up in comparison to others is not the higher effort. How could it be? As you move higher and you escape more and more illusions of separateness, you start seeing the whole and therefore every effort you make is aimed at raising the whole, not raising yourself as a separate individual. 

Seeking to raise yourself as a separate individual springs from the illusion of separation and it will only serve to keep you tied in that illusion. If you raise yourself up to be some perfected guru, and you make your followers believe it, every effort you make only serves to keep you more trapped in the illusions of separation and keep your followers more trapped in the illusion of separation. If you look closely at the quite frankly fragmentary and incomplete records of the Buddha’s life and you read between the lines, you will see this—I did not set myself up as some perfected being. Now, you can find teachings that do this but they were added later because people looked at the life and teachings of the Buddha through the veil of maya, superimposed their separate beliefs, their beliefs in separation upon it and therefore created an idolatry around the Buddha that I was so special, I was born in such a special way and therefore I was the one and only perfect guru to ever appear on earth. That is why I have the magical ability to take them to enlightenment without them having to make the difficult and unpleasant effort to look at their own psychology, to overcome their attachments. 

These are all illusions created by the separate mind. You cannot overcome separation through separation. You cannot create a separate self that grasps oneness, that experiences oneness, that comes into oneness. You cannot take a separate self and perfect it so it comes into oneness. You cannot overcome a state of consciousness, you cannot overcome a problem with the same state of consciousness that created the problem. 

Some will say I am repeating myself. If you go back and look at some of the original teachings you will see that there was often a story told to illustrate a certain point. That story was then told one time and a second time and a third time, in some cases even more than three times. Why is this? Because most people do not grasp the spiritual teaching the first time they encounter it. You have the emotional, mental and identity body. You study a teaching and you grasp it at the emotional level, then you study it again and grasp it at the mental level, then you study it again and grasp it at the identity level. What if you do not grasp it at the emotional level? You can very easily read a teaching and it does not transform your consciousness. You understand the teaching intellectually and you use that intellectual understanding to create some kind of mental image of the teaching. That is not grasping the teaching. 

What does it mean to actually grasp a spiritual teaching? Take note that I am not saying understand, I am saying grasp, internalize. When you take a specific spiritual teaching and you use that teaching as a mirror to look at yourself, to look at your own reaction, to look at your own psychology, and when you see something in yourself, become conscious of it and let it go, then you have made use of the teaching, then you have grasped the teaching. You have put it into action. 

The real purpose of a spiritual teaching

Even beyond this, what is the purpose of an outer teaching? It is to connect you to the source of the teaching. How do you connect to the source of the teaching? Well, not through the mind of separation. How can the separate mind connect to anything? How can the separate mind connect to anything beyond separation? How can the separate mind connect to oneness? 

Here you have the Buddha. I walk a spiritual path for many years, I reach a higher level of awareness, and I have an option. I can leave the earth behind permanently and go into nirvana. I will not describe what happens in nirvana, it is irrelevant to the current discussion. I have the option to leave the earth behind. Instead I choose to come back into a physical body in order to teach. What was it I wanted to accomplish? Well, I knew that my physical body had a limited lifespan. I knew that the direct teaching I could give in interacting with students could only happen for a certain time, so I aimed to give a teaching that could survive my physical body and for future generations help them walk the path. The path that I had walked myself to higher levels of awareness. 

There are other levels of that path, as I have described, that can help you take various steps. What is the core of the path, the real purpose of the teaching? Well, how had I attained a higher level of awareness? I had attained it by overcoming illusions, dismissing these illusions one at a time. After I started overcoming these illusions, what started happening? What started happening was that I connected to my higher self, to the Buddha Nature within me. I connected to the one mind and I did not do this intellectually. I did not do this from a distance. I did not do this by creating a mental image of the one mind. I did not do this by using my separate mind to create a mental image of the one mind. Nay, I did it by stepping outside of the separate mind and experiencing the one mind directly. This is the true inner purpose of a teaching—to connect you to the one mind within yourself so that you do not project that the one mind is outside yourself.

What is the reality of the teaching that everything is the Buddha Nature? You have the Buddha Nature within you. How are you going to find the Buddha Nature? How are you going to find the Buddha? Only by looking within yourself. The separate mind, the ego cannot grasp this. It will forever be looking outside yourself, outside itself. You find a Buddhist teaching that talks about the Buddha and the separate mind projects: “Ah, the Buddha is outside yourself. He is there. He is there. He is behind that rock. He is in that cave up there in the Himalayas. He is in that scripture. He is in this practice.” There is a Buddhist teacher who came up with the idea that if you meet the Buddha in the road, you need to kill him. Why? Because if you meet a person and you identify that person as the Buddha, then by doing this you will prevent yourself from seeing the Buddha Nature within yourself and this will stop your progress on the path. It is better to kill that outer person, not physically, but mentally in your mind so that you still have a chance to discover the Buddha Nature within yourself. 

How do you discover the Buddha Nature in yourself? Not through some intellectual understanding, but through a direct experience. What can give you that experience? Well, I have explained that the core of your being is this Conscious You, this conscious self. It created the outer personality. It created the contents of the emotional, mental and identity minds but it did not become those contents. You created the ego but you did not become the ego. You have only stepped into the ego as you take on a suit of armor. You cannot lose your ability to step outside of the ego and the outer mind. When you become conscious of this ability, when you cultivate it, when you use it, when you diminish the pull from the outer mind on your conscious mind, you will come to a point where you will spontaneously have this experience of stepping outside of your normal sense of self and therefore connecting to something greater, something beyond your normal sense of self. This is an experience of the one mind, of the Buddha Nature within yourself.
This is the goal of any real spiritual teaching. This is the goal of the Eightfold Path. 

The aim of your efforts

Therefore, you can now evaluate your efforts. What are your efforts aimed at? Are they aimed at raising you up to some status, based on criteria defined in this world? Or are they aimed at giving you this experience of connectedness, oneness with the one mind, with the Buddha Nature? Seeing it within yourself instead of seeing it outside yourself. What is the purpose of the Buddha coming back from nirvana to teach? Was it to elevate himself forever and make all people on earth say: “Oh, once upon a time there was this wonderful perfect being that walked around on earth. We must worship him, we must follow him and then one day he will raise us up into perfection?” Was the Buddha really on a giant ego trip to elevate himself above all other people for all time? If you believe this then you are in a state of separation and you are projecting the dream of your own ego upon the Buddha.  Better to kill that Buddha since that might lead to progress because worshipping him definitely will not lead to progress. 

What was it that the Buddha wanted? He wanted to demonstrate an example that it is possible for any human being to reach a higher level of awareness, so that by looking at the Buddha as an example, people could say: “What one has done, all can do.” If the Buddha could attain a higher state of awareness, then I can too. How did the Buddha attain a higher awareness? By rediscovering the Buddha Nature within himself. The Buddha says everything is the Buddha Nature, meaning I have the Buddha Nature within myself, meaning I can rediscover the Buddha Nature in myself by following the Buddha’s example and teachings. If I project that the Buddha Nature could only appear in the Buddha, then I am not a true follower of the Buddha. I am not using the Buddha’s teachings and example. I am creating an idol and worshipping that idol. 

Again, what should be your effort? Well, the aim of your effort on the spiritual path should be to have this experience of oneness, of connectedness. Now watch how your outer mind reacts to this. Your outer mind will say: “Ah, there must be some special effort that I can make to produce this experience, to guarantee this experience.” If you take what I have said here you will see the folly of this approach. There is no effort you can take based on the illusion of separation that is guaranteed to produce the experience of oneness. What you need to do is not make an effort, not make a better effort, not make a more intense effort. You need to stop making an effort. You need to stop making efforts through the separate self aimed at producing spiritual progress. 

Now I have said there are efforts you can make in order to overcome illusions but there is no effort you can make in order to experience oneness. In order to experience oneness, you have to stop making an effort. You have to actually silence the mind but how do you silence the mind? What effort can I make to silence the mind, the mind will say. There is no effort you can make.

The effort to stop the mind

Many, many people in the Buddhist tradition have contemplated meditation and they have seen that the mind always interferes. The monkey mind comes up with thoughts so they think they have to find some higher effort that can silence the mind. The more you try to make an effort to silence the mind, the more you are actually using the mind, so the more trapped you become in the mind. Thinking you can use the mind to silence the mind just becomes a trap, another trap. What can you do? Well, you can walk the path. You can follow the teachings I have given here. As you overcome these separate selves, there will come points where you will spontaneously have an experience of stepping outside your normal sense of self and connecting to something beyond your own mind. 

An experience of oneness is not something you can produce. It is something you receive. You might consider it a gift or a grace, but still be careful not to think that there is some external force that bestows it upon you. It just happens spontaneously as you walk the path. Therefore, you need to have patience with yourself, continue to walk the path and wait for it to happen. Be, in a sense, not attached to whether it happens or does not happen, because if you want it to happen, what are you doing? You are using the outer mind to make an effort to make it happen. and this pushes it away from you. Many, many spiritual people have actually reached a level where they have cleared out many of the obstacles in their minds. They are able, because there is enough openness in their emotional, mental and identity bodies, that they can experience a connection to their higher self. They are able to do it, but they are still in their conscious mind so focused on making an effort that they are pushing the experience away from them. 

There is no effort you can make. You can only surrender effort. You can give up. You can let go. Let go of your attachment. Many spiritual people have an attachment to having these peak experiences and the attachment prevents their minds from letting go and therefore pushes away the experience. Some people have done this for decades, even lifetimes, constantly being so focused in their minds instead of letting go. Most people who are open to this teaching already have some openness in their minds. Therefore, you could at this very moment experience connection but you can only experience it if you are able to let go. Instead of being in your normal state of mind or instead of even being in the mind that wants to have a certain experience, you go into a completely neutral state of mind. Come what may. If you have an experience, you have an experience. If you do not have an experience, you continue walking the path. 

There are efforts that you can make on the spiritual path that will help your growth. There are efforts that you can make that take you gradually to higher and higher levels. There comes a level of the path where you also need to contemplate that beyond making the effort, and I am not saying you should stop making the effort, but beyond making the effort you need to cultivate the ability to not make an effort. To let go, to surrender, to give up, to flow with the river of life, however you want to see it. You are not making an effort. The supreme effort is effortlessness. 

With this, I seal you. For me, giving this long discourse has been completely effortless. Has it been an effort for you to study this discourse? Well, then consider what I have said about letting go, because you can come to a point where studying and internalizing the discourse becomes effortless, and that is when you have fully grasped higher effort.

 

Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels

 

Back to Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world

Listen to a recording of this dictation (subscribers only)

Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, January 8, 2023. This dictation was given during the 2023 New Year’s webinar – Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. As our next step we will talk about the concept of higher livelihood. Again, the tendency has been in Buddhism to focus on the word “right” and therefore define that there are certain ways to make a living that are right and some that are wrong. What this has led to for many dedicated Buddhists is that there are not very many forms of livelihood that are considered “right.” This severely limits people’s options for finding a way to make a living. Not only that, it limits their options for fulfilling their Divine plans. 

Now consider this planet. Step back and look at earth. It is an extremely complex situation you are facing on this planet. When you look at what is happening on the planet, you can clearly see that there is a lot of chaos but there is also a certain progression. When you look back over the centuries, you see that there has been a clear progression in the raising of people’s awareness, the raising of their humanity, the emergence of democracies, a better standard of living for more and more people. There is clearly a progression in society, but what drives this progression? Well, it is that there are certain people that are able to tune in to a level of awareness that is beyond what we can call normal human awareness. Twothousandfiv ehundred years ago, I called this level of awareness the Buddha Nature. Everything has the Buddha Nature within it. Every human being has the potential to reach the Buddhic level of awareness. 

Now there are two aspects of this. One is that you rise above all the outer personality, the ego-based personality, the sense that you are a separate being, separated from other people and the world in which you live. Therefore, you rise to the consciousness where you become a Buddha because you have attained the Buddhic consciousness. This is one aspect. The other aspect is, as I have explained, that the core of your being, the Conscious You, is able to step outside of your four lower bodies, at least for a brief moment, and therefore contact the Buddha nature, this higher level of awareness. When you are able to step outside, you can receive an idea of how to improve something on earth. 

There is room for improvement

You look at the earth, you look at how many problems, how much conflict, how much chaos there is, and you see that there is no part of life and society that is beyond being improved. In every area of life there is room for improvement. This improvement comes about when there are people who are engaged in that area of life, they are able to step outside the outer situation, step outside their own minds, and receive an idea from the higher awareness—from the Buddhic awareness, the Buddha nature, that can improve that aspect of life. 

What is your real livelihood? When you are a spiritual person who is open to spiritual teachings, what is your real livelihood? It is to improve some aspect of life, to raise up some aspect of life. This means that it is too superficial to look at various occupations and say: “Oh these occupations, a spiritual person should not engage in. There are only these few occupations that you can engage in if you are a spiritual person.”

Now again we have of course, a delicate balance to find here. Surely you do not as a spiritual person want to engage in the drug trade or human trafficking. The Buddha nature has no desire to perfect the drug trade or to improve human trafficking, because these activities need to be left behind as the planet moves towards higher levels of awareness. You can look at history and see that certain things have been left behind at least by many people. The more violent aspects have been left behind in many nations where you have some law, or some stability where people are not in general seeking to harm each other. Clearly this is what will happen as the planet moves further and further along into an age that is characterized by higher awareness than what you have seen in the past. As this process unfolds there are certain things that will be left behind. We will come to a point where they will fade away. 

You can look at the drug trade that is so rampant today and you can say: “Well what is it that drives it all”? It is not the criminals that are driving it, it is the fact that there is a market for the drugs. People are buying drugs, but why are they buying drugs? Well, in large part because they are seeking relief from the pressure they feel from everyday living. Because they do not know, and have never been taught, how to deal with their own psychology and resolve the aspects of their psychology that makes them feel the pressure, they seek a temporary relief through drugs or alcohol or many activities. 

As the collective consciousness is raised and there is more of an awareness among people of how they can deal with their own psychology and relieve the pressure that way, there will be less of a need for drugs and therefore, it will gradually fade away. If there is no market, there will be no trade. The same thing of course with the entire weapons industry, the industrial military complex as it has been called. Contrary to what it may seem at the present moment, there will come a point where war will start to fade away and become simply unthinkable. Therefore, the need to be engaged in the development and production and sale of weapons will also fade away. 

This may seem like a utopian dream, but it is not that difficult to see that there has been a gradual improvement over centuries and that this will only continue and even accelerate as more and more people begin to resolve their individual psychology and therefore also resolve the dysfunctional aspects in the collective consciousness. It can be no other way. 

When everything is spiritualized

Where does that leave you as a spiritual person with “right livelihood” or rather “higher livelihood?” Well, clearly there are some forms of livelihood that you do not want to partake in. However, many Buddhists have reasoned that if you are a truly spiritual person, you should not engage in business. There are certainly certain aspects of the business world that will fade away also, but it does not mean that business will go away. There will be a business world. It may very well be that because of your experience from past lifetimes and your particular interest in the business world, you have it as part of your Divine plan to find a position in the business world and receive some new ideas for how you can improve it and move it forward. 

Would it be constructive for you to adopt this outer attitude that is prevalent among many Buddhists and other spiritual people and say: “Oh no, I cannot possibly be a spiritual person and go into business?” Well, of course it would not be constructive. You need to tune in to what is in your particular Life plan and then pursue that. 

Basically, you can say that you cannot simply divide up activities and say these forms of livelihood are wrong, these forms of livelihood are right. What is it that will happen as the earth moves forward into the age of higher awareness? What will happen is that eventually everything will be spiritualized. What is the deeper meaning of the statement that everything is the Buddha Nature? Well, it is that you cannot define this clear distinction that many, many spiritual people have defined and say, this is spiritual, this is not spiritual. You need to have a deeper awareness that in a sense everything has the potential to be spiritual, to be seen as spiritual. Now this is again one of these statements that requires some discernment. 

You can of course easily say: “Well if everything has the Buddha nature within it, then you can see the Buddha nature in every activity. So you could be a drug dealer and still see the Buddha nature in dealing drugs.” When you reach a higher level of discernment and awareness, you realize that the fact that the Buddha nature is in everything does not mean that any present manifestation is the highest possible. For what is the Buddha nature? What does it mean that the Buddha nature is in everything? Well, the Buddha nature is a level of awareness. What have I explained? There are beings who created mental images and projected planet earth from their higher level of consciousness. Human beings were then sent into embodiment to take on not only physical bodies but the emotional, mental, and identity bodies, and human beings are the co-creators on earth. 

Originally the earth was in a more pure state than it is today and humankind has over a long period of time lowered the earth from its original state. That is why you today have suffering as the dominant life experience and people are in the Sea of Samsara. This is not something that was created by some almighty God or by beings in a higher level of awareness. Why would beings in a higher level of awareness create suffering? Human beings have created the current conditions on earth, the current suffering, the current chaos and turmoil. How have they done this? They have done this, as I explained, by formulating mental images in their identity, mental and emotional bodies and projecting them upon the basic energy that makes up this material world that you are in. 

Humans created the Sea of Samsara

What does that mean? It means that any manifestation you see on earth started in consciousness. Basically, what I taught 2,500 years ago is that everything is consciousness, everything is an expression of consciousness. That is ultimately what it means that the Buddha nature is in everything because the Buddha nature is consciousness, it is a form of consciousness. What is specific of the Buddha nature is that it is aware of everything, it is aware of the whole. The Buddha nature is awareness of the whole. 

How is the current suffering and turmoil on earth created? It is not created from awareness of the whole, it is, as I have explained, created from this awareness or rather this illusion that human beings are separate beings. You were not created as separate beings. Through the choices that were made in the past, you entered into this consciousness of separation and you used the dualistic polarities, the pairs, to justify this and to create certain mental images of how the world works, who you are in relation to the world and that you have a right to do certain things as a separate being regardless of how it affects others. In other words, there came a point where humankind made a shift, where they forgot that they are connected beings, they forgot the “interdependent originations” where everything affects everything else. They entered into this state of illusion where they said: “Well I am a separate being and I have a right to do whatever I want as a separate being without considering what effect this has on the whole.” 

This very consciousness is what created the Sea of Samsara, what created the state where most people experience life as suffering. There are seven billion people on the planet who see themselves as separate beings and therefore must struggle against the other seven billion separate beings. This is the Sea of Samsara. You can again look at certain activities and you can say: Yes, these activities have the buddha nature within them because they are ultimately created out of the one mind, the one Buddhic mind, the one consciousness. But they are not created with an awareness of the whole which is what the buddha nature is aware of. They are created out of separation. 

Therefore, you can say that there are certain activities on earth that are completely based on this awareness of separation where there is no regard for the whole, for the other people, for the effect this has. There is even no regard, for people who are in this state of mind, for how it affects themselves, for what kind of karma they are making and how this will affect their future lifetimes—even if they can get away with things in this lifetime. 

Awareness of the whole or awareness of separation

This is an evaluation to apply to all human activities and certainly to livelihood. Is an activity based on the awareness of the whole or the awareness of separation? Therefore, you can see that there are some activities that are more harmful than others to life in general. Of course, you can go into something like the business world as it is today and you can say that the business world in all countries is dominated by a small power elite of people who are very much trapped in the consciousness of separation. They are absolutely convinced that they form an elite and they have a right, either it is a right given to them by God or it is a right given to them by evolution, because they are the most fit to dominate the business world. Even to the point where they create enormous fortunes for themselves, more money than anybody could possibly need by taking advantage of the labor of other people. You could go in and say: “Well the business world is certainly dominated by the consciousness of separation so if I am a spiritual person I should not engage in it at all.”

 As I said there are certain things, such as drug dealing and arms manufacturing, that would fade away because they can only harm people, but the business world will not fade away because there are constructive aspects of business. It is not a matter that business will disappear as the earth moves forward. What will happen is that business will be raised up to an entirely different level where there is more of an awareness of the whole. This has already started happening, because there are people who are becoming aware of this. There are consumers who are becoming more aware of this and therefore not supporting certain businesses or even buying products from certain countries that have a lower awareness. 

This is what you can apply when you look at what is the highest livelihood for you as a spiritual person. You do not use the outer mind to say: “Oh, I am not going to go into this field.” You use your intuition to tune in to the plan that you made before coming into embodiment and therefore you say: “Well, this is the consideration I will apply. This is what is important for me to consider. Where can I serve to bring forth some improvement in that area?” It is not just a matter of business of course, it could be politics, it could be the bureaucracy, it could be education, many other aspects of life. Basically, those aspects of life that are not completely destructive, there is room for improvement and it will only improve if somebody engages in that area. You can say that for a spiritual person it is not your primary concern to make money, it is your primary concern to give service by improving some aspect of life and society. This is one consideration. What is in your Divine plan? 

The dream of easy money

The concept of livelihood can be taken to a different level. Most people when they consider livelihood, they think it means making money. You have to take a job, you have to start a business because you have to have enough money. This has caused many spiritual people to engage in various dreams, the so-called “get-rich-quick” schemes. They hope they can find some way to make an extraordinary amount of money so they have enough money to live for the rest of their lives and therefore they do not need to worry about money, but can focus on their spiritual pursuits. 

There are many, many spiritual people who have it in their Divine plans to, as I said, engage in a particular area. The purpose is for you to be there and to bring forth some improvement, to even by just being there and being in a higher level of consciousness, pull up on other people engaged in that area. It is not your Divine plan to get rich quick, then withdraw from society and focus on whatever spiritual pursuits you see. 

Your Life plan is to be engaged in society and continue to bring forth improvement. This is not the case for all but certainly for most. You can let go of this dream of getting rich quick, finding some shortcut. It is important to let go of this dream because what is it that the economic power elite are dreaming about? Well, they are precisely dreaming about finding some shortcut to riches. And they have, many of them, found this shortcut but they can do this in only one way: By taking advantage of other people, by stealing the labor of other people, that is the only way to have some kind of shortcut. 

If you are a spiritual person and you are dreaming of making money in this way, well this is not compatible with your spiritual progress. There are spiritual people who have dreamt of doing this, spent years or decades pursuing this, thinking that: “When I just have enough money, then I can focus on my spiritual pursuits.” But it is far more constructive to work in a normal job and gradually make enough money and then see that being engaged in society is part of your spiritual growth, is part of your spiritual pursuit. Do not separate spiritual activities from worldly activities and say: “Oh if I have an ordinary job, I cannot be spiritual, there is nothing spiritual about this.” Everything can become part of your spiritual path when you use it that way. 

Livelihood and energy

Now let us step up another level. What is livelihood? Well, most people would say it is about making money but is money the real currency on earth? What have I said previously? Everything is energy. The real currency of the world is not money but energy. Now I have said that the world is created because there is, beyond the material universe, a level with unlimited energy. Some of this energy streams into the frequency spectrum, or is lowered into the frequency spectrum, that makes up the material universe. I have said that there is a constant stream of this energy coming from outside the material universe into the material universe. 

This can be proven by science. Science has discovered that the universe is not only expanding but the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Well, everything is energy. Any change can only happen when it is driven by energy. If the universe is expanding, more energy is needed for that expansion. You can only go to a higher state from a lower state by adding energy. There must be energy to drive the expansion. If the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate and for that matter has been doing so since what scientists call the Big Bang, there must be energy entering the universe from an outside source or this expansion could not happen. 

You go out into the night sky and look upon all of these stars and galaxies and you can say to yourself: “This could not exist if there was a fixed amount of energy in the universe. It would never have come into existence.” The real currency is not just energy, it is the energy that enters the material universe from a higher realm. As I have said, your mind has the potential to be an entry point for such energy. 

You can look at billionaires who have accumulated vast amounts of money and you would think that if someone has billions of dollars they would feel at peace: “Now I have enough money to take care of myself and my family for the rest of my life. What do I need more money for?” For most of them that is not what happens. It is never enough. They always want more because what if someone takes it? So it is not a matter of having enough money and then you can feel at peace. What will make you feel at peace as a spiritual person is that you have enough energy. Not in the sense that you have a fixed amount, but that you have established a conscious connection to your higher self through which energy can constantly stream from your higher self into your four lower bodies. This is what gives you creative energy, the ability to bring forth something, to manifest something, but it also makes you feel whole, complete, at peace. 

The ego will never have enough

What have I said has happened to most people? You have stepped into this consciousness of separation. You come to see yourself as a separate being. What does that mean? It means you lose your connection to your higher self. Many people have projected this image that in the distant past, people lived in a paradise, but then they did something that angered God and God banished them from that paradise. God abandoned them. Well, once you step into the consciousness of separation and create this separate self, this ego personality, this ego that is a separate self and sees itself as separate, you will feel abandoned. You will feel alone. If you believe there is some God that forced you into this state, you will feel that this God has abandoned you, but it is not the case. 

The abandonment happens in your mind. There is no real abandonment. You are connected to, in fact you are an expression of, your higher self. The you, the Conscious You that is the core of your being, is an extension of your higher self, sent into this world because your higher self cannot go into this world directly. Tour higher self had a desire to experience this world and sent the Conscious You into this world as an extension of itself, to experience the world from the inside. You can never break that connection, but you can cover it over by the ego-based aspects in your identity, mental and emotional bodies. So you are feeling abandoned, you are feeling alone, you are feeling unwhole and incomplete. That is why you feel poor, and that is why you think you need something from outside yourself to fill the void, the hole that you have inside. 

The ego will always have a void inside of it, but it is a void that cannot be filled. The ego is created in this world, so the ego can only think that the way to overcome the feeling of emptiness, the struggle of incompleteness, is to get something from this world. Money is one of those things, but there are many others. The ego is on this constant pursuit to get more and more of the things of this world thinking it will feel whole when it has enough, but it will never happen. The ego will never feel whole. 

Now the you that you are can come to feel whole in this world, but only when you are not blinded by the illusions of Maya that make up the ego. You have to systematically remove those illusions from your identity, mental and emotional bodies, and then you will establish, as you do this, a greater and greater conscious connection to your higher self. You will feel this stream of energy, and it is a love-based energy that is constantly streaming from your higher self into your mind. This is what will make you feel whole. This is what will make you feel complete. 

The real understanding of higher livelihood is that you do everything you can to re-establish the connection to your higher self, so you come to feel whole and complete within yourself. In other words, you do not need anything from this world in order to feel complete. You can still have desires to have certain things, experience certain things in the world, but you are not driven by this obsessive-compulsive need to feel complete and whole. You are not driven by the ego’s obsession with getting something from this world in order to fill the void. Because you have stepped outside of the ego, and therefore you do not experience the world through the ego, and therefore you do not feel the void. You instead experience that you are connected to your higher self, that there is a stream of love that is flowing from your higher self, and that makes you feel whole within yourself. Now you may still have aspects of the ego, you may still have certain of these, we might call them, selves that are existing in your emotional, mental, and identity bodies, and you may temporarily step into those and be overpowered by them. You have the ability to step outside of them again, reconnect to your higher self, and therefore again experience wholeness. 

Increasing the flow of energy

It is clear that there are steps on the path, so there will come a point where you start to have glimpses of a connection to your higher self, you start to have what many people call mystical experiences. Then you go back into your normal awareness, now you are again colored by the ego identified with these selves, and you react based on these selves. Once you have experienced the connection to your higher self, you can use that to step outside of your identification with the outer personality and establish more of a connection. And gradually over time you get more and more connection so that it becomes more and more rare that you are overpowered by the outer selves, the outer personality. More and more of the time you feel connected, you feel complete within yourself. This is the ultimate meaning of Right Livelihood. 

Right Livelihood is also a matter of how much energy is flowing from your higher self into your mind and that depends on two things. First of all, there has to be a more open connection. This means, as I have explained already, that you transform the energies in your three higher bodies that are blocking the connection, you remove the false beliefs so that you clear your emotional, mental and identity bodies. When there is more room, more energy will flow. 

You can actually invoke energy to flow into your lower bodies and this can be done by various techniques, including the chants of Buddhism, but also many invocations and decrees that are more modern techniques given for people in today’s world. This requires you to be somewhat open to a new way to look at things by realizing that there are actually a variety of beings that exist in the realm that is beyond the material universe. By invoking these beings you can invoke the specific energies that they represent. 

There has in many spiritual teachings been the concept that there are seven main types of energies, sometimes called the spiritual rays, that you can invoke. There are specific masters that are in charge of releasing these energies to earth. By invoking these masters you can increase the flow of energy through your being into your energy field, expressed through what many spiritual teachings called the chakras, which are the energy centers in your field. 

By becoming more aware of this, you can increase that flow, increase the stream. However, the other side of this is that you also understand the meaning of Jesus’ parable about the three servants, where the master was going away, he gave them different numbers of Talents. When he comes back, he asks what they have done with the Talents. Two people had multiplied the talents, one had buried the talents in the ground so as not to lose them, and the people who had multiplied the talents were rewarded. This shows you a general principle that when you take the energy you have received from a higher source and use it to raise up the whole, use it to serve other parts of life and to bring forth some improvement somewhere, then what you have used will be multiplied. As I explained, whatever you do, you are sending out an energy impulse that cycles through the four levels of the material universe, but if it is a love-based impulse it will go beyond the material universe, be multiplied and you will receive more energy back than you originally sent out.

This means that your life now becomes an upward spiral, where you are using energy with an awareness of the whole, you are seeking to raise up some aspect of the whole, and as a result of that, you receive more creative energy so you can give even more service and this can continue to build throughout your lifetime. You could say that building this progressive spiral of energy is the ultimate form of livelihood. It can be expressed in many different endeavors, many different activities in life, where you use this creative energy and your higher awareness, your sense of being connected, to bring forth some improvement. It is clear that if you do this you will be rewarded accordingly. 

Working to raise the whole

You see again there are spiritual people who find a spiritual teaching but they see that spiritual teaching through the filter of the separate self. They are essentially saying: “How can I use the spiritual teaching to get an advantage for the separate self? How can I use this to, for example, come to feel secure and safe?” or “How can I use it to feel better than others?” which is a desire of the separate self.  So you are trying to raise yourself up in comparison to others perhaps even by putting other people down. Well, this is not helping you overcome the illusion of separation, is it? The more you use the spiritual teaching to make yourself feel special compared to others, the more you are reinforcing the separate self and the illusion that you are a separate being. 

What is the purpose of the Buddha’s teachings and the Eightfold Path? It is to overcome that illusion. Only by questioning the illusion, by separating the Conscious You from the outer self, can you connect to the Buddha nature and therefore enter that upward spiral, whereby you gradually stop identifying yourself with the outer self and instead identify yourself with your higher self, which is an expression of the Buddha nature. You become connected first to the higher self within yourself and through that connection you are connected to other people, to the environment, to all life. You begin to act based on an awareness of the whole and that is the Buddha nature. 

This is the ultimate livelihood. You are not focused on money, you are not focused on evaluating which forms of occupation are acceptable to a spiritual person. You are focused on: “Where can I bring some improvement? Where can I be of service to the whole?” As you focus on this, new avenues will open up that you might not have been able to even imagine today. As you raise your awareness you see new opportunities and you intuitively know this is the right direction to move in. Your life then becomes an upward spiral of service, whereby you also have the means to take care of your physical body, your family and other obligations. 

You cannot just decide with the outer mind. You must tune in intuitively to your higher self, to your Life plan and always strive to go beyond the outer mind that sees itself as a separate being in a world with other separate beings. You are striving to go beyond the Sea of Samsara so you are at peace. This is Higher Livelihood.

 

Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels

 

Back to Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world

Listen to a recording of this dictation (subscribers only)

Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, January 7, 2023. This dictation was given during the 2023 New Year’s webinar – Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. Our next topic is naturally what has traditionally been called right action, but what I prefer to call higher action.

You need to take the teachings I have given about speech, about energy and the use of energy because they are also relevant to the topic of action. You may say: “How does a physical action taken with a physical body have anything to do with energy?” Well, as I have said, everything is energy. Everything you do is done with energy. I know it may be easy to imagine that you are sending out an energy impulse through your emotional body, where you might project a very powerful feeling. It might be more difficult to imagine that you are sending out an energy impulse with your physical body.

This is relatively easily resolved by realizing that your physical body is the lowest of your four lower bodies. You cannot take a physical action that is only taking place in your physical body, at the physical level. The physical level is a projection of what happens at the three higher levels. Any action you take starts in your identity body, goes into your mental, goes into your emotional and then is translated into a physical action. Whenever you take a physical action, you are sending out an impulse through all of your four lower bodies. Most people are not aware of this. They think that they can take a physical action that is only at the physical level. Many people think that if they decide to do something, they are deciding this with their conscious minds. They are not aware that they have these patterns in their three higher minds and that these patterns very much set the parameters for what they are able to decide with their conscious minds.

Stopping a runaway karmic spiral

Many people, as I said, often act like a kind of robot, like a kind of computer, where they have these patterns, these programs in the higher mind, the subconscious mind. These programs take over their reactions. Therefore they are not making a physical, conscious decision to take a certain action. It is determined by the patterns in the subconscious mind. This is where we can again say there is what will seem like a paradox. I have talked about how you can take two basic approaches on the spiritual path. You can seek to suppress certain feelings, certain thoughts, a certain sense of identity, and even suppress certain actions, but this will not help you raise your level of awareness. In order to raise your awareness, you need to go in and look at the patterns and consciously resolve them: resolution versus suppression and denial.

When it comes to action, there is a certain stage on the spiritual path where you actually need to cultivate a conscious willpower to stop an impulse from the subconscious mind, from the three levels of the mind, from being taken out as a physical action. At a certain level, you are not fully capable of resolving the patterns. You are not really aware of how to do this. You may not have the determination to do it. You may not have the willingness to look into your own mind, to look at the beam in your own eye, as Jesus expressed it.

Throughout the ages not only Buddhism but many other religions and spiritual teachings have set up this code of conduct, code of action, for what you do and what you do not do when you are a member of this religion. We cannot simply dismiss this and say that it is completely wrong, even if we use the words right and wrong in this context. I am not trying to dismiss it because an action that you take can, of course, create karma. As I explained, this is the energy impulses that go through the four levels and return to you. If you are constantly engaging in actions that create the more severe forms of karma, you can sabotage your ability to raise your awareness. So it is natural, or it is necessary, for a certain phase that you use your outer willpower to discipline your actions because otherwise you will sabotage your spiritual growth. You may be studying a spiritual teaching, you may be doing certain spiritual practices, but if you are repeatedly engaging in these actions that create the more severe forms of karma, how can you grow spiritually? Your return karma will often block or hinder your spiritual growth.

There are certain actions that have been defined throughout the ages by various religions. I certainly defined some 2,500 years ago. There are some defined in the Old Testament: “Thou shalt not….” They can have a certain effect at a certain level in terms of stopping this runaway karmic spiral that many people have been engaged in for lifetimes. At some point you must stop it, and by accepting an ideal that there are certain things that a person of your religion does not do, then you can actually make progress. This progress will only take you to a certain point because it will not actually stop the karmic spiral completely. It will prevent it from becoming physical if you do not take the physical actions, and thereby it lowers the intensity of the karmic spiral. If you still have the patterns in your emotional, mental and identity bodies, you are, of course, still projecting out through them. Only the karma is not as severe, not as intense.

The outer versus the inner path

What do you then do when you are past this stage? Which, quite frankly, most spiritually open people are. You have not, often for many lifetimes, been engaged in killing other people, using drugs or alcohol and many other such activities that I defined, even back then, as not being constructive on the eightfold path. What is the next step up from this? Well, it is first of all to recognize that it is not enough to simply define certain actions. Because the outer mind, the ego, is very clever at using a spiritual teaching to stop your progress, to hide itself, so that you do not see it and do not see the need to let it go, to dismiss it, to dissolve it. 

One of the ways it does this is to create, as I have touched upon before, this concept of the outer path, the automatic path. This path will say there are right actions and wrong actions. If you force yourself to abstain from the wrong actions, and if you force yourself to perform only right actions, then you are guaranteed to reach nirvana. At some point in the future…poof! ….you will be enlightened if you just keep following this outer automatic path. You abstain from these non-spiritual actions, and you perform spiritual actions, including the spiritual exercises prescribed by your religion. If you diligently perform these exercises, you will automatically make progress.

Now, as I have said, by abstaining from karma-making actions, and by engaging in spiritual exercises and spiritual practice, you can make progress, but only to a point. There comes that point where you will not go beyond that level until you lock in to the inner path. It is not enough to abstain from certain actions, to take other actions. You need to work on your psychology, to resolve the patterns, the illusions, these selves that you have in your subconscious mind that are like computer programs that take over your reactions. You cannot go beyond a certain point until you see and engage in this inner path. What the ego often does is, it defines the outer path and then it says that because you are so diligent in abstaining from wrong actions and performing the right actions, you do not need to look at yourself. You do not need to look into your subconscious mind. You do not need to do anything that might expose me, your ego.

Many, many people throughout the ages, not only Buddhists, but from any spiritual teaching, have believed this. Many of the people today who are Buddhists, who are spiritual people, they believe in this outer path. There is a phase where you can make progress with this outer path, but there comes that point where now it is going to hinder your progress because it will prevent you from looking into the subconscious mind.

When spiritual efforts hinder progress

There are people who have defined wrong action, right action, and who have been very diligent in living up to this definition, but they have gradually felt a certain tension, a certain unease. This is because they have some intuition that gives them a sense that they are not actually making progress with what they are doing. But their outer minds are very attached. They have a very strong attachment to this outer path. They have an attachment that says that if they were to change their approach to the path, it would prove that they had been wrong before, and the last thing they want is to be wrong about the spiritual path.

Therefore they become attached, they clutch their ideas, they cling to their present approach to the path. Because of the unease, they now reason: “I must be more diligent in my spiritual practice. I must be more diligent in abstaining from these wrong actions and performing only right actions.” First, they might reason there is no way they can live an earthly life. They must withdraw from society and enter a monastery, where they never attempt to engage in these wrong actions. Even when they are in a monastery. they feel unease, so now they feel: “I must be more diligent in my spiritual practice.” This becomes an obsessive-compulsive disorder where they end up at a point where they feel that the only right action they can perform is their spiritual practice, whether it is chanting, whether it is prostrating yourself on the floor, whether it is rotating a prayer wheel, whatever it may be. They become more and more obsessed with doing this to the point where they feel this is all they can do.

Now the outer minds whisper in their ears: “Oh, look how diligent you are in your practice. Hardly anyone is as diligent as you are. This proves that you are an advanced student, and therefore you have no need to look into your subconscious mind, to look at yourself in the mirror. Just ignore those kinds of impulses and keep your mind focused on the right practice.” People can do this for a lifetime or for decades, and they are not stepping up a single step on the real path. 

The real Middle Way

This, of course, you want to avoid, and how do you avoid it? The Middle Way, once again, which we really could call the Higher Way or the Transcendent Way. The linear mind says: “Here is one extreme, here is another extreme. There is a scale between the two extremes, various shades from black to various shades of gray, becoming lighter and lighter until you have white. When the Buddha talks about the Middle Way, it must mean that you find the midpoint between the two extremes.”

People have reasoned: “Oh, yes, I need to abstain from the wrong actions, and I need to perform a spiritual practice, but I can’t spend so much time on a spiritual practice that I can’t participate in normal, active life. I have to find the balance.” Not a completely invalid approach, but there is a higher understanding of this. The Middle Way in its original meaning, even its original expression, was not the middle way. It was not the midpoint between two extremes. It was the Higher Way, the Transcendent Way, the Beyond Way. The way that is beyond not only the two extremes but the entire dualistic scale between them, all the gradations. I have so far said that the dualistic mind defines the two opposite polarities. But the dualistic mind is fully capable of defining a gray zone between the two polarities with various shades. The entire scale, not only the two polarities but also the shades and the midpoint, is still defined by the dualistic mind.

Tuning in to your Life plan

What is the Higher Way to approach action? Well, it is to again seek to strengthen your intuition to get some sense of what is in your Life plan. As I have said before, you may have decided when you made your Life plan that there is a certain experience you can have on earth that you have not had enough of. You need to sort of indulge yourself in that experience until you have had enough of it, and you can therefore resolve the entire desire and let it go. You have transcended the activity, the desire, the experience. Now you come into embodiment. You forget this. You find a spiritual teaching that says the activity you are supposed to indulge in so you have had enough of it is not spiritual. Therefore you should abstain from it. You force yourself to abstain from this activity, and the result is what? You do not make the progress you had planned to make in your Divine plan.

What am I saying here? What I am saying is that you cannot set up an outer scale and say: “This is how a spiritual person should take action, and these are the actions that a spiritual person should never take.” For example: “A spiritual person must be celibate and abstain from sex.” Many spiritual people, especially in the Buddhic tradition, have reasoned this way. If your desire to experience sex is the last attachment that prevents you from entering nirvana, then that would hinder your progress. Of course, the ego can easily use this as an excuse and say: “Well, that sounds good, that teaching. That means I can do whatever I want. It is probably part of my Life plan that I have this experience.” This is, of course, just going to the other extreme. It is a matter of using your intuition to discover what exactly is what you put in your Divine plan. It does not matter of what other people say or what they put in their Divine plans. You need to discover what is what you put in your Divine plan, and that you can do through your intuition. Again, by using these tools to raise your awareness, overcome your patterns, transform the lower energies, you can gain clarity.

Where is your Life plan anchored? Well, it is really anchored in your higher self. Your Life plan can be considered as a book or at least a tablet that is up there in a realm of higher energies. The only way you can see it is to look, from your conscious mind, through your emotional, mental and identity bodies. But if those bodies are so full of lower frequency energies and illusions and maya, you will not be able to see the tablet, or at least you will not be able to read it.

As you start clearing out the debris in your higher bodies, clearing out the maya, clearing out the energy, well, naturally you can begin to get glimpses of your Life plan. You can therefore begin to see what is your personal balance, what activities you should engage in that you wanted to engage in, in order to overcome them and be free of them.

Another aspect of your Life plan is, of course, that there is a contribution you wanted to make to the forward progression of life on earth, of the collective consciousness, of humankind’s situation. Again, many spiritual people have set up a standard for what this should be. It might be often that they participate in certain charity work or that they perform their spiritual practice because that is their way to transform the world. Not that this is necessarily wrong, but is it what you defined in your Divine plan? Perhaps even though you are a spiritual person, there was a particular contribution you wanted to make to a specific worldly area. You wanted to bring forth some idea to promote some kind of change in, for example, business or education or health care or many other things. Perhaps you wanted to write a specific book that could help some people reach certain insights. There could be many different things. There is a myriad of things that you could have decided to do, and in most spiritual or religious movements they will not be defined as spiritual, precisely because they have this standard. Again, you might miss the opportunity defined in your Life plan. This will not help you grow spiritually, even if you perform the spiritual practice which is designed to help you grow spiritually. If it blocks a specific aspect of your Life plan, it will not help you grow spiritually. It will help you feel more spiritual, more advanced, but that is not the same as spiritual growth, as I hopefully have made clear by now.

Doing and not doing is not enough

There are many, many facets here that need to be taken into consideration, but not with the outer, linear mind. In fact, it is the outer, linear mind that often prevents you from tuning in intuitively to your Life plan. You need to neutralize that outer, linear mind that always wants to set up this standard where the two polarities are right and wrong and saying all you need to do is this and not do this, then you will reach the goal. Why will you not reach the goal by performing spiritual actions and abstaining from non-spiritual actions? 

What have I said is the goal? What is enlightenment? It is a higher level of awareness. How will you reach a higher level of awareness? Only, only by transcending your current level of awareness and continuing to do so until you reach those levels that are at least the beginning stages of enlightenment. Performing outer actions, abstaining from other actions, will not automatically transform your level of consciousness. In fact, for many spiritual people, they have gotten themselves stuck in a blind alley, where the only way they can make progress is to question their standard for what is spiritual and non-spiritual, in terms of actions, in terms of speech, in terms of their intentions, their entire outlook on life.

I have said that you live in an insecure world, that you cannot actually survive in psychologically, so in order to survive you must suppress certain feelings, certain thoughts, certain impulses at the identity level, so you can find some kind of equilibrium and continuity. At a certain level, suppression is necessary for survival, but that suppression is also what becomes the primary trap, the maya, the veil of maya that keeps people trapped in the Sea of Samsara. They do not see, because of the veil of illusion, that it is the contents of their own minds that produce their experience of life. Therefore the only way to change their experience of life is to change the contents of the mind, not anything outside of themselves, not even at the level of action.

You need to re-evaluate actions based on what they do to your level of consciousness. Some actions clearly will lower your level of consciousness. One of the most common ones is drugs and alcohol and other intoxicants. There is a rather long tradition in India of certain people, they even call themselves yogis or swamis, who use various kinds of drugs, and they think this is the way to make spiritual progress. If there was some physical substance that could bring you to enlightenment, why would you have this thousands-of-years-old tradition of spiritual teachers recommending this arduous practice, instead of just simply taking this drug? Well, perhaps it is because these spiritual teachers know that the drug is a blind alley. It makes you feel a certain way. It might make you think that because you have certain experiences, you must be spiritual. But nothing you can do to the physical brain will raise your level of consciousness. It can lower your level of consciousness, or at least block you from rising because it makes you stuck at a certain level.

If you keep doing this, it will actually even lower your level of consciousness because there will come a point where you have used drugs for a time, where you start having an inner, intuitive sense that you cannot do this anymore, you need to move on, you are not growing. As I said, this increases the tension. Now if you ignore this and insist on continuing with this practice or with stealing or cheating people or whatever it may be, then this can only be done in one way. You intensify your denial, and intensifying your denial lowers your state of consciousness. You are therefore going down the staircase of the levels of consciousness by going deeper and deeper into denial. There are other actions that can have a very similar effect but they are by many spiritual people defined as being spiritual, even holy.

There is not much information available today about the actual situation I encountered as the Buddha those many centuries ago. I encountered quite a bit of resistance from the Brahmins of the Hindu religion, who thought they had a monopoly on giving spiritual teachings in that part of India. They were very focused on outer rituals. You have all these festivals today. You have all these rituals where people go into a temple and a priest sprinkles fruit juice on them or whatever he does, and this is supposed to help you progress spiritually. This is, of course, because the Brahmins have set themselves up as intermediaries between the people and the spiritual realm or the gods as they are defined in the Hindu religion. This is much like the religious authorities of Jesus’s time, who had defined a religion that said that the only way to get to God was to go through the church and the priests, the priesthood of the church. Jesus was condemned to death and executed because he challenged this view by saying the kingdom of God is within you.

Saying that the kingdom of God is within you is essentially the same as saying that everything is the Buddha nature and that all people have the potential to rise to Buddhahood. This is what the priests of an established religion cannot stand. They create this idea that by performing the actions prescribed by the outer religion, abstaining from other actions, you are guaranteed to be saved, go into nirvana, whatever it may be. This is a very old momentum on earth, a very strong momentum in the collective consciousness. Many, many people believe this. Why do they believe it? Because it gives them an excuse for not looking into their own mind and psychology.

The fear of what is in the subconscious mind

Why do people not want to do this? Because they are afraid of what they might find there. This you cannot understand without understanding reincarnation. You can go to a child that has grown up in one of these modern affluent democracies. The child has had by all accounts an ideal upbringing with two loving parents, good teachers in school, kind siblings. The child has basically had the best conditions that anybody could wish for, but the child has such severe psychological problems that it cannot function normally in society. What is there in the nurture or nature of that child? Nobody in the family has any predisposition to psychological illness, so it cannot be inherited. There has been no trauma in the person’s childhood, so it cannot be the upbringing. How do you then explain that a person growing up in ideal circumstances still has such severe psychological issues? It can only be explained by the fact that in past lives this person experienced severe trauma.

Look at the many wars that have taken place even within the last century. How many people have been exposed to this? Now they are in their next embodiment, but they carry the trauma with them in their emotional, mental and identity bodies. There are many people in today’s world that have reincarnated many times. They have been exposed to various traumas, but they have also performed some very selfish, self-centered actions based on this illusion that they are separate beings and that what they do to others will not affect themselves. Or at least if it does not have a direct physical consequence for themselves, they have gotten away with murder. If they are not caught, they can get away with things. Now these people are in embodiment in the modern age, and one of the big changes that has happened within the last several decades in the collective consciousness is that many, many more people have started doing psychological work: doing psychological healing work, embracing various spiritual teachings, anything from mindfulness to yoga to various therapies. Therefore they have started working on their psychology.

 There is a momentum building in the collective consciousness that it is normal, natural, necessary, constructive, that you work on your psychology. There is a large group of people in the world who carry with them from past lives not only the traumas, but also the subtle realization that they have done certain things they should not have done. They do not want to look at this. They do not want to look into their psychology because they are afraid of what they might find. They are afraid that they will be overwhelmed so they cannot function normally. What do they want? They want the automatic path, where someone promises them: “You declare Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior, and you are guaranteed to be saved.” “You join this Buddhic religion and you study these teachings and you perform these practices, and you are guaranteed to be saved.” “You perform this prostration exercise 10,000 times in your lifetime of prostrating yourself on the floor, and you are guaranteed to reach nirvana.” This is what people want. 

Again, what is a higher way to look at your actions? It is to say: “What effect does it have on my consciousness? Not only in terms of, does it raise the level of my consciousness, but when I perform a certain action, what is my reaction? What is my psychological reaction to this? What does this bring up in my psychology? What is stirred up?” Then you use that as an opportunity because you realize you are a spiritual person, you want to make spiritual progress, so you have put yourself in situations where you are, so to speak, forced to take certain actions to stir up what is unresolved in your psychology. It is an opportunity to see something unresolved, to deal with it and therefore make progress, step up. Another step on the staircase. If you see yourself as a spiritual person, you need to make that shift so you are willing to do this, so you realize the necessity of doing this, and you dismiss this dream of the automatic path. You need to look at your reaction to these ideas and see the resistance you have towards looking at yourself.

Actions cannot take you to Nirvana

 Then you can take another step related to action. There are many of the traditional religious people who will say that if you take certain actions, it condemns you to hell. If you kill somebody or even kill many people, you are condemned to go to hell. This is again dualistic thinking. You are defining a dualistic polarity. There is a heaven, there is a hell, and whether you go to the one place or the other is linked to your actions. Certain actions will condemn you to hell, other actions will guarantee that you go to heaven. Again, there is a strong momentum in the collective consciousness that people want to believe this, at least if they have abstained from these actions that would put you in hell. There is no realistic basis for it.

I am not in any way denying that there is a level of existence beyond the material universe, even the four levels of the material universe. I am not denying that it is possible to rise to that level so you are free of the wheel of rebirth. You do not have to come back into embodiment, but you can permanently ascend from earth. It is there. It is a possibility, but this is not what religious people define as heaven. The difference between where you are now and this higher realm, which I do not want to put words on and describe, but the difference between your present existence on earth and the higher level, is your level of consciousness. It is not actions that determine whether you can escape from earth and rise to a higher level, where you do not have the conflicts and the Sea of Samsara that you have on earth. The only thing that determines this is your level of consciousness.

As an extreme example of this, ask yourself what kind of beings could enter this higher realm? Let us make it concrete. The Catholic Church talks about heaven and that good Catholics are guaranteed to go to heaven. Can you really see the average Catholic existing in some higher realm that is supposedly a heaven world? Take a Catholic priest. From an outer standpoint, well, you cannot do better in terms of actions than being a Catholic priest. But what if that Catholic priest has abused children? He is a hypocrite because he is pretending to be a Catholic priest and a man of God, but he is abusing children. Can you see such a person being guaranteed to enter heaven with the level of consciousness that causes him to abuse children? Would this be possible? Would this be conceivable? Certainly not for anyone who has activated their intuition. You will instantly see that the vast majority of people on earth could not enter heaven or nirvana with their present level of consciousness.

What does that have to do with actions? Well, many people are afraid, when they believe in reincarnation, that they could have performed some action in a past life that prevents them from going to heaven or nirvana, however they define it. Here is the simple truth that I attempted to explain 2,500 years ago, but I will give it to you in an even more direct form. There is no action you can perform on earth that will get you into heaven, and there is no action you could perform on earth that will keep you out of heaven. Why? Because it is not the actions that determine whether you go to heaven, but your level of consciousness. Of course, a certain action springs from a certain level of consciousness. If you have performed a certain action, it shows that at least in that past life where you performed the action, or even in this life, you had that level of consciousness, and this level of consciousness will keep you out of heaven.

If you are a spiritual person, you do not need to be afraid to look into your psychology. Because no matter what actions you might have performed in a past life, you can overcome the effect of those actions by transcending the level of consciousness that caused the action. The universe, God or however you want to conceive of it is not concerned about the actions you perform on earth. The only concern is your level of consciousness. It does not matter that you did something in a past life that is defined as non-spiritual or anti-spiritual. If you have transcended that level of consciousness, or if you are willing to transcend that level of consciousness now, then you can and will be free of the action. Therefore you will make progress on the spiritual path, based on the progress you make in your consciousness. It is not the actions that are the determining factor. It is the level of consciousness, and once you transcend the level of consciousness, you do not need to feel guilty about the actions.

How karma really works

You can benefit from invoking higher energy to transform the energetic impulse created by the action, which is what many people call karma. You can transform that—if you have resolved the consciousness. We can also say you are performing an action, you are sending an impulse into the four levels of the material universe, they reach the identity level, now they are reflected back to you, and they enter into your identity body. This is an energy impulse. What does energy do? It creates interference patterns with energy that is somewhat at the same level of vibration. If you have not transcended the consciousness that caused you to perform the action, if you still have some unresolved illusions and beliefs in your identity body, then the karmic return will interact with that, and it will be reinforced by it. This means the karmic return will now pass into the mental body, reinforced. If you still have patterns and beliefs in the mental body, it will interact with them and be reinforced even more. Then it enters the emotional body, and if you still have unresolved emotional patterns, it will also be reinforced by them, so that when it crosses the boundary to the physical realm, it might manifest as a severe consequence. 

There are many people who believe in karma who believe that if you killed somebody in a past life, that karmic return might cause you to be killed in this life. There is nothing you can do to prevent it because you made the karma, and the karma must descend, and it will result in you being killed. This is true only if you have not transcended the consciousness. If you transcend that consciousness at the identity level, the karmic return comes back, but there is nothing for it to react to. There is nothing that reinforces it. In fact, if you have created higher patterns or freed yourself from illusions and invoked energy, it can be diminished.

Now it goes into the mental. If you have transcended the mental patterns, well, nothing reinforces it, it is diminished further. The same thing happens in the emotional, and so by the time it reaches the physical, it could be completely transformed into a higher level of energy, or it could manifest in a much milder form. Instead of being killed, you might just hurt yourself in some superficial way. 

Action is, as modern physics says, tied to reaction. There is no action without a reaction, but there is no reaction without action. It is all tied together in these interdependent originations. You may say: “I took a certain physical action. That action created a reaction from other people that affected me.” Or perhaps it did not because you got away with it, but it still created a reaction in the four levels of the material universe. It also created a reaction in your mind. In fact, the action was based on a process in your mind. If you are trapped in maya and illusions, in a separate state of consciousness, the dualistic mind, your action probably sprang from reactionary patterns in the three other minds. For every action there is a reaction, but you can transcend, transform the reaction from the cosmic mirror, by transcending the consciousness that led to the action.

There are many people who believe in karma, who believe it is a punishment, but it is actually not. It is an opportunity. What have I said is the purpose of life? Your growth in awareness. How do you grow in awareness? By coming to see something that keeps you at your present level of awareness so you can transcend it and rise to a higher level. If you did not see it, how would you transcend it? Sometimes you can see it voluntarily by looking, but other times you do not see it voluntarily. Then some external circumstance forces you to see it by creating a reaction in you. Well, this is what karma does. The law of karma says, you are performing an action. You killed another human being. A severe violation of another person’s free will and right to have an opportunity to grow. If the law of karma was instant, you should be killed right away, but that means you would go out of embodiment. When you are not killed right away, you have to live the rest of that lifetime knowing that you killed another human being.

This gives you an opportunity to process it in that lifetime. Then you have succeeding lifetimes where you may not consciously remember, but you still have the psychology, the patterns in your psychology, that cause you to kill another human being. You still have opportunity to see this, to process it and overcome it. Several lifetimes later the karmic impulse comes back. It is not a punishment. It is an opportunity. If you have not transcended the consciousness, then the karmic impulse will stir up that consciousness, even if there is no outer situation that provokes this. You may not be in a situation where you are tempted to kill another human being, but the karmic impulse coming back to your identity, mental and emotional bodies will stir up what was not resolved, so you experience it and have another opportunity to look at it before the karma becomes physical.

If you are not willing to look at it, then the karma will become physical, so that now you have a physical consequence that you cannot deny. But before you have that undeniable consequence, you had an opportunity to transform your state of consciousness. You only get the physical consequence if you did not make use of that opportunity. Where is the punishment? Everything is an opportunity for those who have grasped what the eightfold path is about. Everything is an opportunity. This is what you can lock in to and come to consciously accept. You can ask yourself, you can use your intuition: “What is the opportunity here? What do I need to see in this situation? What is it in my psychology that I need to resolve in order to transcend this situation, to use this situation as a springboard for rising higher on the eightfold path?”

With this I have given you what I wanted to give you on action. I seal you in the joy of the Buddha of knowing that I have taken a higher action in bringing forth this teaching.

 

Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels

 

Back to Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world

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Listen to a recording of this dictation (subscribers only)

Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, January 7, 2023. This dictation was given during the 2023 New Year’s webinar – Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. The next topic we need to discuss here is the concept of higher speech. Again, many Buddhists have looked at this, they have taken the translation of right speech and they have attempted to define what is the right speech and what is the wrong speech. As I have explained already, this is not the highest approach. How do we go higher? 

Well, you cannot actually understand the concept of higher speech without understanding energy. Now admittedly, this was something that was difficult to explain to people 2,500 years ago, but it has become much easier with the advances in modern science. As already mentioned, Albert Einstein proved that the world is really made out of energy. This means what? It means that everything you do is done with energy. You cannot feel, you cannot think, you cannot hold a sense of identity, you cannot talk and you cannot act without using energy. I realize that many people are aware that their body needs energy and they think that you get this from your food, perhaps from sunlight, perhaps from breathing the air, but this is only the physical aspect of energy. 

It is of course not very relevant when it comes to speech, higher speech. In order to grasp the concept of higher speech, you need to realize that energy is a continuum of vibrations. There are certain energies that make up what you call the material realm, but there are many other energetic vibrations. You know from science, how they can measure energy vibrations that you cannot detect with the physical senses. There is a form of energy that vibrates within what we can call the material frequency spectrum, but beyond that is a form of energy that vibrates in the emotional frequency spectrum, another form in the mental and finally energy that vibrates at the identity level which is the highest level of the material universe. Beyond that of course is the spiritual realm of even higher vibrations that are beyond what can even be measured by physical instruments. 

You are perhaps not aware of this, but there is a limit to what instruments made out of matter can measure. It is comparable to the fact that an optical microscope cannot see any particles that are smaller than the wavelength of visible light. That is why they have constructed electron microscopes to detect smaller particles. Likewise, there could be constructed other instruments that can measure higher vibrations and some have already been constructed, but there is a limit to what you can measure with instruments created in the matter realm. Thus, you will not be able to create an instrument that can prove the existence of a spiritual realm beyond the material. It simply cannot be done. Nevertheless, these energies exist. 

The linear mind, the intuitive mind and objectivity

Now you may look at what scientists have discovered where they on the one hand have formulated the theory of the Big Bang. They say that, at the time of the Big Bang, there was really no matter as you understand matter today because everything was energy that was compressed into this infinitely small point, called a singularity. This idea of a singularity is really an outcome of the linear mind and we need to briefly touch upon this. I have said that the linear mind looks at current phenomena, it looks at the complexity that is there now, but it wants to break it down and say that the complexity comes from a simpler state guided by a few simple natural laws. If you therefore continue to go back to these lower states or more fundamental states, you eventually reach the end of the line where you have the original cause. 

According to science, this is the singularity that existed in this brief interval of time before the Big Bang. Nobody can really explain what a singularity is. Nobody can really explain how all of the energy that has created this vast, vast universe could be compressed into a single point. This is a theory created by the linear mind where it says you must be able to go back towards stages that are simpler and more fundamental until you reach the ultimate stage, the ultimate cause. It is the same as saying that sometime in the past, in the primordial soup, a lightning hit and the first single-celled organism appeared. Well, is this really the only way that this could be conceived? It is the only way by the linear mind, but what about the mind that is not linear? Today, more and more people are becoming aware of intuition. More and more people are realizing that intuition is simply a method for investigating the world you live in, and it can be as valuable and as valid as the linear analytical mind. 

The reason why modern society today is in somewhat of a stalemate in terms of growth and has created so many problems with the environment, for example, is that materialists, when they took over science, wanted to disregard the influence of consciousness. They wanted to disregard intuition because they decided that intuition was subjective and unreliable, and only the rational, linear, logical mind could be objective and reliable. This is a very artificial determination that has had widespread ramifications for modern society and for creating many of the problems you see that seem to have no solution. They have no solution with the linear mind because the linear mind can again only think in distinctions, differences, analytical ways of looking at life that create these dualistic polarities and then implies a value judgment. Once you have the value judgment, you have closed your mind. 

Science started out as an objective process of observing what can be observed. Instead of thinking that a certain doctrine accurately described the universe, even though observations contradicted the doctrine, you were willing to look at what is actually happening. This was an attempt to create some objective way of approaching the world. It is a valid way of doing it, but it is only one side of the coin of the mind’s abilities. Intuition is also a way to step away from subjectivity. When you have this experience that I described where the you, the Conscious You, steps outside of your emotional, mental and identity bodies, this is an objective experience. Having an intuitive experience can be just as valid as using logic and analysis, but scientists decided that it was only the rational mind that was reliable. They attempted to exclude intuition, claiming that this was subjective, whereas the rational mind was not subjective. This of course is a limited claim because what do you do with both minds? Whether you use logic and rationality or you use intuition, you are actually having a direct experience of something beyond your normal level of awareness. 

The question becomes, are you then willing, when you come back into your normal level of awareness, to use the experience to question your awareness, your mind? Or will you try to interpret the experience through your present level of consciousness, wanting it to fit into the perception filter, the mental box that you have? Scientists who interpret scientific observations are in many cases not neutral and objective. They certainly are not if they are materialists who have taken an ideological approach to science. They have formulated an idea of how they want the universe to work and they are superimposing it upon scientific observations, desperately wanting to fit them into their ideology. 

An intuitive alternative to the Big Bang theory

This is how they created the theory of the Big Bang. It has to have started somewhere and if you go with a linear mind to the smallest thing you can imagine, you get something that the mind cannot imagine, but it can label it and call it a singularity. What could this possibly be? Well, what if you use your intuitive mind and say, the Big Bang, or rather the process of manifestation of the material universe, did not start in a singularity.  It started in an opening between the material frequency spectrum and the frequency spectrum above it, a higher vibration beyond the material frequency spectrum. It was not necessary that all of the energy that is currently in the universe was compressed into a single point, which is clearly an impossibility. It was only necessary that there was an opening between a higher realm and a material realm and that energy could enter through that opening. 

Now, of course, you still have this artificial concept that if there was only one opening in one point, it is still quite difficult to imagine that this vast universe should have started in just one point. What if it did not? What if instead there were many openings so that instead of everything having to come through one little hole, there was a large amount of energy that was lowered in vibration from the higher frequency spectrum to the spectrum of the material universe? In other words, a simultaneous manifestation, a simultaneous entering of energy, not from a single point, but from many points. 

Then you get rid of the singularity. Now, of course, the linear mind will say, prove it. I will say, use your intuition and you can experience the reality of it. How can I say this? Because your mind has the potential to be an entry point for energy coming from a higher realm. In fact, if your mind did not have this ability, you could not be conscious. Scientists have, since the advent of materialism, attempted to exclude consciousness from scientific inquiries, saying: “We do not need to study consciousness, it can only be subjective.” 

A good scientist will know his instruments or her instruments and will be willing to look at the limitations of the instrument. Scientists could have taken an optical microscope and used it to observe the smallest particle they could observe that is bigger than the frequency of visible light. If they had been in the same mindset as the materialist, they would have said: “There is nothing beyond this smallest particle. There cannot be anything that is smaller than what we can see in this optical microscope.” You need to know the limitations of your instruments in order to know if you are making accurate observations. Well, what is the primary instrument used by scientists? It is their minds. Not only do they use their minds to formulate theories to construct instruments that they use for observations, but they also use their minds to interpret the observations.

The expansion of awareness leads to new knowledge

Now you can go back 2,500 years to when I appeared on earth and the people at the time had no awareness of anything beyond what they could see with their senses. They did not know, many of them, that there were organs inside the body. They certainly did not know about cells, about molecules, about atoms, about subatomic particles. They could observe energy such as sunlight, but they had no real concept of what energy was. They did not have the concepts of vibration, frequency, wavelengths, amplitude. They even did not have the concept of an energy wave. They could see waves on water, but not conceive of an energy wave. There was no way to have explained this to them. There was in fact no way that scientists could have formulated their current theories based on what people knew at the time. 

What is it that has happened since then? It is that humanity has expanded its awareness, but this is based on discovering but also formulating new concepts. People have many more concepts today than they had 2,500 years ago and that is why they can explain things that could not be explained back then. What scientists are not aware of is that the way you formulate a concept has an impact on how you look at the entire issue. It has an impact on what theories you can formulate, what instruments you can imagine constructing, what measurements you can imagine making, and how you interpret the measurements. You will know, if you have ever studied this, that in quantum physics there is something called the wave-particle duality. Well, what is a particle? A particle is a concept that starts in the mind that sees, that experiences, the world through the senses. 

The so-called wave-particle duality

Your eyes can see a billiard ball. They can see something that is much smaller until you get down to a grain of sand. Therefore, you have the concept of a visible particle, which scientists have then used the linear mind to extend and say there must be smaller and smaller particles until we reach the smallest possible particle. This is what the ancient Greeks called the atom, the indivisible particle. There came a point where modern scientists had discovered something that they thought was the smallest indivisible particle and they called it the atom. Later they discovered that the atom could actually be divided and there were smaller particles. These are normally called subatomic particles and they have various names. 

Experiments have proven that if you observe this subatomic phenomenon in a certain way, it behaves like a particle and if you observe it in another way, it behaves like a wave. Therefore, they have come up with the wave-particle duality, which is supposedly one of the few remaining mysteries of modern physics. The wave-particle duality is a result of taking macroscopic concepts that can be seen by the senses and projecting it on the world that cannot be detected by the senses. If you take Einstein’s theory, it says that all matter is actually energy and energy is a wave, so there are no smallest particles. In fact, at the subatomic level, there are no particles as you conceive of particles with the linear, outer mind. This is just one example of how the concepts you have in your mind influence how you look at the world, the conclusions you make, and therefore what experience you have of the world.

The idea of a personal God

Now there are many, many people who are open to a spiritual teaching and they think that a spiritual teaching can give them insights into how the world works. Of course, many spiritual teachings do that, but many people also hope that a spiritual teaching can help them change their physical circumstances. They look for some kind of magical bullet that is built into the spiritual teaching so that they can change their physical circumstances. The classical example of this is that people have conceived of the idea that up there in a higher realm, there is a personal God who is supposedly an old man on a great white throne who is looking down upon you personally and evaluating everything you do, to see whether it is right or wrong according to his ultimate standard. 

If you do what this God considers right, or rather what some human being, some human priest, a Brahmin, has defined that God says is right, then you will be rewarded by going to heaven. If you do not follow the Brahmins of your religion, you will be punished by going to hell. The hope that is implicit in this worldview is that by doing something that is prescribed by your religion, you can entice this personal God to grant you favors, to take away unpleasant experiences and give you what you desire. 

This is of course an ancient belief, and many people have lived entire lifetimes in this belief. Many people in the modern age have lived in this belief so many lifetimes that they have given up on it because they have realized that it does not actually work. At least there is no systematic way to make it work. They come into embodiment in this day and age with this deep distrust of these traditional religions that talk about the wish-fulfilling God. And the reason for this is that they have experienced that although this gives them hope, it is actually in the end a disempowering belief system. Because if this wish-fulfilling God does not respond to your attempts to manipulate him into doing what you want, then there is nothing you can do. You are literally stuck. You are disempowered. 

An empowering spiritual teaching

The reason I did not talk about a spiritual realm or gods 2,500 years ago is that I wanted to give people a method, a teaching that was empowering. What is empowering? Well, it is that you realize the fact that I mentioned earlier. Your mind is conscious because there is a stream of energy coming from a higher realm into your mind. It comes from your higher self, which we do not need to go into in any depth here, but it enters first into your identity mind. Here the energy is qualified or takes on the form of the images you hold in your identity mind. This qualifies the energy so it takes on a certain form. You can compare it to a kaleidoscope with different levels of colored beads where the light first passes through beads of one color and takes on that color and then passes through other layers. 

First you have the identity mind and here you have your sense of who you are and what you can do. If you sense that you are a passive being who has no power, this is the quality that the energy will take on as it enters your identity mind. Then it passes into the mental mind where you might have other limiting beliefs of what you can or cannot do and now the energy is qualified with that. Finally it enters your emotional mind where you may have some emotional patterns of fear, of doubt, whatever you have, that again qualifies the energy. Then it enters your conscious mind and it takes on whatever beliefs you have at the conscious level. 

What are you doing with all this energy? Well, you are using it to think, to express feelings, you are using it to speak words and you are using it to take actions, physical actions. This is not all you are doing. Your mind is actually a projection apparatus, somewhat like the movie projector in a movie theater. Instead of one film strip, it has four, each of your four lower bodies. You are constantly projecting through the four levels of your mind onto the energy that makes up the material universe. 

The cosmic mirror

You can – and some of you have heard us say this before – you can compare the physical universe to a mirror. What you are projecting out with your mind will be reflected back by the mirror. This means what? Well, this is actually the deeper meaning of the teaching that I gave 2,500 years ago of the interdependent originations. 

Everything in the physical world on planet earth is made up of these four levels, the physical, emotional, mental and identity level. There are four levels of the material universe and everything that is manifest in the physical level is a projection of the images in the three higher levels.  The physical level is like the movie screen that has images projected upon it through the projector. However, the physical universe is connected to the minds of human beings. Human beings are the co-creators. There are self-aware beings who created planet earth from the outside, but human beings are the co-creators who create planet earth from the inside. You do this through your minds by allowing the energy streaming through your mind to take on the images, the mental images, in your mind and projecting them into the cosmic mirror, projecting them onto the energy that makes up the four levels. This is the deeper meaning of the interdependent originations, something that could not be explained 2,500 years ago, but can be explained in a more easy to grasp level with the current knowledge of energy. 

You see that you live in an interdependent system. You do have an actual physical planet. We can debate how real it is, but that is not relevant right now. You do have an actual physical planet, but the physical planet is a projection coming from three higher levels. In other words, as I said about the Big Bang, instead of all of the energy that makes up the current universe being compressed into a singularity, there was a point where the universe was not manifest because there was no energy in the physical vibrational spectrum. All the energy was in the emotional, mental and identity levels. At some point there was a projection that brought energy into a material spectrum. This did not happen in one single point, but at many points that defined a certain space that was the primordial space. 

Energy kept streaming through until it started coalescing as physical particles that then became increasingly complex and organized until you had the formation eventually of all of the galaxies that you see today, or rather, even many of the galaxies that you do not see today because the universe is too big. This was a process that happened from the outside, but it happened in essentially the same way as how you are co-creating, by allowing energy to flow through four levels of the mind until the energies were brought into the physical spectrum. 

The interdependent system

You now have an interdependent system here. There are four levels of what we might call the material universe, but within that material universe there are many individual self-aware beings, human beings, who have an individual mind that exists within the larger energy field of the material realm. You have a conscious mind, an emotional, mental and identity mind. Beyond this, all of the individual human minds are connected and form what we can call a collective mind. Science has even discovered that when certain events happen, there is coherence in the collective mind, which affects random number generators. I am not seeking to prove anything here for the linear rational mind, but simply to trigger your intuitive experiences. 

Everything you do is done with energy, but you are not an island. Even your energy field is not an island because you exist within this whole, this interconnected whole. Now why is this empowering, as opposed to disempowering? Because your physical circumstances are connected to the circumstances in the four levels of your mind. They are projections. Now, it is perfectly true that your physical circumstances are not the exclusive product of the projections coming from your mind. They are also a product of the interconnected effect of the collective mind, and of course the original projections for creating the planet.

This is not a magical belief in some wish-fulfilling God who has all power to set aside the free will of eight billion other people in order to give you the specific circumstances you want, because this is disempowering. What if God does not do this, which in most cases he does not do? With this knowledge, you can take an empowering approach and say: “I may not be able to change every aspect of my physical circumstances, but I can change some aspects by changing what I am projecting out through my mind. Even if there is a physical circumstance that I cannot change this way, I can certainly change the way I experience that circumstance, the way I react to it. I can in fact come to a point where I am free to either choose a more constructive reaction, or I can choose not to react at all.” 

This is empowering, and although this could not have been explained 2,500 years ago, it was still what I attempted to explain. The key to changing any aspect of your life is to start by changing your own mind, raising your level of awareness. This is the essence of the Eightfold Path. You go through eight phases or steps whereby you gradually raise your level of consciousness.

Speech and energy

What does all this have to do with speech and higher speech? Well, speech is a use of energy. Whenever you open your mouth and utter a sound, you are using energy. Now, you are projecting even when you are silent through your identity, mental and emotional mind, but these projections do not have quite as direct of an impact at the physical level as when you either take a physical action or when you speak. In other words, when you produce an effect that can be observed by the physical senses, this has a more direct influence at the physical level than when you project something from one of the three higher levels. 

The use of your voice is a powerful instrument that can be used to qualify energy, and you will never understand the concept of right speech or as I choose to say here, higher speech, if you do not understand that your voice carries and qualifies energy. This energy will have an effect both on other people, your physical circumstances and on yourself. 

You might already be aware, because you have observed this, that many times you can have strong emotions and you can feel that there is a disturbance in your energy field. You may not be very conscious of your energy field, but you can feel that something happens. If you get very angry, it can almost become a self-reinforcing effect, a downward spiral. When you cross a certain line, as people say, you lose it. You express anger often through your voice and it pulls you into a maelstrom, into a downward spiral, that can be very, very difficult to free yourself from. You may have observed it in others, you may have experienced it in yourself. There are of course many other of such vortices or maelstroms that can affect you. This is just an example of how you are using energy. You are qualifying energy and it has a direct effect on your state of mind.

 What you need to become aware of in order to manifest higher speech is how words or your voice qualify energy and project energy. You need to not do this in a logical, linear way. There is always the temptation to set this up in a linear way, and this can be done. You have instruments right now that can measure the human voice and the vibrations of the human voice. You could use this, if you wanted to, to set up a visible, linear scale that could detect different vibrations produced by the human voice. Some have already experimented with this. You will see scientists who, for example, have experimented with sound influencing sand on a glass plate and other similar instruments. The point is that instead of setting this up in an analytical fashion, what will really help you is to develop this intuitive sense for what happens in your own energy field when you use your voice. 

How sound affects your energy field

You know that if somebody is angry with you and yells at you, it affects you. The reason for this is that the person is projecting this energy of a specific vibration into your emotional body. All energy can interact with other forms of energy. If you have certain patterns in your emotional body, if somebody is angry with you, it will stir up these patterns. You can, for example, become angry yourself. Or, you can become shameful or depressed because you feel guilty the other person is yelling at you and accusing you. 

This you can use. You already have this ability, but you can refine it and develop it so that you can sense that there are certain kinds of speech that qualify energy with a lower vibration. You can basically talk about two different kinds of vibration. There is fear-based and there is love-based. There is higher, there is lower. You can learn to feel this. You can very simply center on your heart, the center of your chest, and you can ask yourself: “Do I feel that the energies are higher or lower? Does it raise my energies? Does it lower my energies?” You will be able to feel that if somebody is yelling at you, it lowers your energy. If somebody is talking to you in a positive, loving manner, it raises your energy. 

These are the criteria that most spiritual people can develop fairly quickly. Many have of course done so already. You can evaluate how you use speech and how other people use speech. This gives you a criterion for evaluating: Is this the kind of speech I want to engage in? Do I want to create these lower energy impulses and send them at other people? Because whatever I send out, even though I may think I am directing it at only one person and we are all alone in this room and nobody else can hear me, whatever I send out goes into the cosmic mirror into the four levels of the material universe and it will return to me. 

Karma is really energy impulses

This is one way to explain the ancient concept of karma. Karma is when you use your four lower bodies to project an energy impulse into the four levels of the material universe. That energy impulse starts in your identity body, goes into the mental, into the emotional, into the physical and then is projected out. It first enters the physical realm, then up to the emotional, then the mental, then identity. Here, if it is a fear-based energy, it cannot go further. Now, it is reflected back by what I have called the cosmic mirror, so that it starts hitting you again first in the identity, then the mental, then the emotional and then the physical. This is what has in Eastern religions and philosophy has been called karma. It is simply the return to you of energy you have sent out. 

Now what if you qualify energy with a higher vibration, a loving vibration? Well, the same thing happens. It goes through the four levels of your mind, into the four levels of the universe. When it reaches the identity level, the higher vibration will not be stopped and reflected back to you. It will actually go beyond the material realm into the higher realm to your higher self. Now you will receive more energy of a higher vibration from your higher self. This will increase your creative abilities, your mental capacity. It will also serve to raise your consciousness. In other words, when you qualify energy of a lower vibration, it will be returned to you in a lower vibration. When you qualify it with a higher vibration, it will be returned to you with that higher vibration, but in greater quantity and intensity. To him that has, more shall be added. This is the idea of the multiplication of the talents described in a parable by Jesus.

 We can also say, why is life suffering on earth? Why is there the Sea of Samsara? Well, because the earth is an energy system, but currently the majority of the energy in the system is qualified with a lower, fear-based vibration. There is so much fear-based energy in the energy system and in the collective consciousness that it often overpowers people’s minds and causes them to suffer, feel depressed, feel powerless, feel hopeless, feel angry, whatever you have. All of these lower emotions have to do with the fact that the energy in the collective field overpowers the individual fields of human beings. The way to escape this is to fill your individual energy field with higher energies, higher vibrations, and to purify your individual energy field of lower vibrations. 

You see, I have said that if you send out a fear-based impulse, it will be returned to you, but what effect will it have in your energy field? Well, it will have the effect of reacting with, stirring up, intensifying the lower energies that are already in your field. You become more agitated, more frustrated, more fearful. If you remove the energy that is already in your field and remove the reactionary patterns that cause you to qualify energy with fear, there is nothing for the energy to react to. If you then fill your energy field with higher vibrations, then when the lower vibrations come back to you, they will be transformed by the higher vibration. This is again something that was difficult to explain at the time of the Buddha but is easy to explain today with simple wave dynamics. 

If you take an energy wave of a certain vibration directed at another energy wave, there will be an interference pattern between the two waves, and the result will be a third wave that has a combination of the two waves. In other words, you have an energy wave of a low frequency, you direct a higher frequency wave at that, and you can create a third wave that has a higher wave than the original wave, but a lower vibration than the wave you directed at it. The net effect is that you have raised the low energy to a higher state. 

When you consider that you have had a pattern for several lifetimes where you have qualified energy with anger, and some of this was sent out, and some of this accumulated in your energy field, then you can see that part of this pattern is not just a belief that you need to respond with anger, or that it is the only way to respond. Part of it is the energy that affects your emotions, and the more anger energy you have in your emotional body, the more you are prone to respond, to react with anger in different situations. If you remove that energy, then it will be easier for you to see the reactionary pattern, see the belief behind it, and let it go, so you can be free, and therefore rise to a higher level of consciousness, a higher level of the path. 

Using speech to transform energy

Why am I telling you all this when the topic is speech? Well, traditionally Buddhist teachings or Buddhist movements have used a variety of spiritual tools to raise awareness. They have used silent meditation, but many of them had also used chanting, chanting the Om, chanting other mantras, chanting certain syllables, and this has been used in other spiritual and religious cultures as well. The reason for this is that intuitively people from ancient times knew that using your voice is a powerful way to invoke higher frequency energy and direct it at lower frequency energy, and thereby transform the energy and set you free from the pull that it has on your mind. 

You now see that there are two aspects of having these attachments that I talked about 2,500 years ago. One is that you have a belief that is an illusion, but the other is that you have some energy qualified through that belief, and the energy pulls on your conscious mind. If you have an accumulation of anger energy, it does not take very much for you to react with anger to certain situations. You can see people who over the course of time become more and more prone to react with anger, and the simple explanation is that they have more and more anger energy accumulated in their emotional bodies, and it overpowers their conscious minds. 

By becoming aware of this, and by using appropriate tools to invoke higher frequency energy, you can free yourself from this pull. And the most powerful way to invoke higher frequency energy is to use your voice. You can of course use these traditional Buddhist chants, but there are also more modern versions, sometimes called decrees or invocations, that you can use for this purpose. What you realize here is that the original meaning of the concept of speech, higher speech, is that you learn to use your voice, the power of your voice, to invoke and direct energy so that you transform fear-based energy back into love-based energy, and therefore free your mind to look at the patterns and step up to a higher level on the path. This is the essential realization when it comes to speech. 

Many of you will already feel that when you talk in an angry or derogatory way, it lowers your energies. When you talk in a kind and loving way, it raises your energies. Again, many Buddhists have over time, and many other spiritual people have over time, decided with their outer minds that as a spiritual person, they have to always speak a certain way. They have to avoid speaking with anger, they have to avoid speaking loudly, they have to always speak softly and kindly, and they think this is enough, but what are they doing? They are using force to suppress certain forms of speech and cultivate others. 

What is it I have given you here—the alternative? You are not using force to suppress a tendency to speak with anger. You are using your voice to transform the energy that pulls on your conscious mind, and then you are using your ability to step outside your four lower bodies, look at the patterns in your emotional, mental and identity minds, and therefore dismiss the Maya, the illusion, that caused the pattern that caused you to react with anger. You are freeing yourself from the anger instead of suppressing it. There is a huge and essential difference. 

You may think that by suppressing all kinds of inharmonious speech, you have demonstrated great progress on the spiritual path, but I would rather have you dissolve one pattern than to suppress a hundred patterns. The one pattern will at least take you one step up, whereas suppressing will make you feel that you do not need to take a step up because you are already such an advanced spiritual student. Again, you can step into seeing everything as an opportunity. Many spiritual people have accepted this standard that you must speak softly, you must never lose your harmony, you must never raise your voice, you must never become irritated, and if they do, they feel very shameful, remorseful, and they come down upon themselves or they criticize others. 

Really, why would a spiritual teacher be concerned about this? Yes, if it is a pattern that repeats itself, it is not constructive, but what have I said earlier? You can look at everything that happens in your life as an opportunity to see something in your consciousness and overcome it. If you lose your harmony and speak angrily, there is no point in coming down on yourself for it or feeling shameful about it. Just step back and say: “Oh, this is an opportunity to see a pattern I have in my subconscious mind. What is that pattern? Let me go into it. Let me go into the energy, find the belief behind it, and unravel this until I see it.” This is the constructive way. This is the higher way to use speech, to look at speech, to approach speech. 

With this, I have given you what I wanted to give you on this topic, and therefore I will seal you for now in the joyful speech of the Buddha.

 

Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels

 

Back to Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world 

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Listen to a recording of this dictation (subscribers only)

Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, January 7, 2023. This dictation was given during the 2023 New Year’s webinar – Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. What does higher intent mean? What is intent? Normally people would say that I have an intention based on a desire to have something, to experience something, to achieve something. Intent implies past, present and future. It implies that in the past you formulated certain desires, a certain vision. Right now, you have the intent that this vision shall come to pass, but you think it will happen at some point in the future. But is that the highest intent? Is there not another way to look at intent?

What I have said previously is that you are living in a difficult world. Many people have a desire to protect themselves from this chaotic world. They have an intent to be protected from some of the chaos, from being overwhelmed, but they may also have a certain desire to have something, to achieve something, to experience something in this world. Again, there is of course nothing wrong with this. You are who you are right now and based on who you are right now, you look at the world, you look at yourself, you look at life a certain way. Based on this, you have certain intentions, certain desires that you would like to see fulfilled, certain things you would like to have, certain things you would like to avoid. It can be no other way.

When you start the Eightfold Path, you realize that the intent you have right now is not the highest possible intent. Now, it is not that you necessarily need to condemn your intent, to judge it as being wrong or to forcefully suppress it, but you need to realize that there are two aspects to life on a planet like earth. One is, as I have said, that there are certain things you need to do in order to survive, to keep your physical body alive, and the other is that you have a larger goal, a more long-term goal, which is to reach nirvana, inner peace, enlightenment, to walk the spiritual path, to raise your level of awareness however you define it.

You need to start contemplating that you actually have two distinct kinds of intent here. You have an intent that relates to living on earth, being in a physical body on earth, and you have an intent that relates to going beyond earth, going beyond the physical body. The challenge when you become spiritually aware is how to balance those two. This is the eternal challenge, the timeless challenge that people have faced for a very long time. How do you reconcile the fact that you are here with your intent to not be here forever or indefinitely? This is where it requires you to start a process of really questioning your intentions and your desires.

The mental strain of defining right intentions

There are many Buddhists who have looked at this concept of “right” intention, as they see it, and they have again attempted to define in an outer way that certain intentions are right, certain intentions are wrong. I need to avoid, I need to force myself to not have the wrong intentions and instead force myself to have or cultivate the right intentions. This has caused many, many, people to go into this spiral of using more and more mental strain to suppress the intentions that they label as wrong and to always be mindful, have their intention upon having only the intentions that they label as right. This can become a very intense mental effort, a big strain on them as you see not only in Buddhists but many spiritual and religious people, even many other people who are seeking to live up to some kind of ideal.

This is where we need to step back a little bit. We need to recognize here that the path to higher awareness has stages. It has several stages, and you have to start somewhere. You start at whatever level you are at when you find a spiritual teaching in this lifetime. That level varies from person to person depending on your growth in previous lifetimes. For you personally, you came into this embodiment with a certain level of intent, a certain level of awareness. You came to a point where you discovered your first spiritual teaching, you realized there was a spiritual path, there was a procedure you can follow. The way you looked at this at the time was an expression of your general level of awareness, and based on this you formulated certain intents for what you wanted to get out of walking the spiritual path. Again, nothing wrong—what else can you do?

What you need to recognize here is that as you walk the path, as you raise your level of awareness, you need to again look at your intentions for walking the spiritual path and your intentions about life on earth. You cannot simply set up this black-and-white, dualistic determination of what is “right” intentions, what is “wrong” intentions. You cannot force yourself. Or rather, you can force yourself, but it does not help you raise your awareness. It keeps you trapped at this level where you feel that because you have forced yourself to not have the wrong intentions, and force yourself to have the right intentions, you have now reached some advanced stage on the spiritual path and therefore you are better than those who have not done what you have done. This is not, as I have now said many times, not real progress.

A higher evaluation of intentions

The alternative to this is that you do not evaluate intentions based on right and wrong. I have talked about the separation, the illusion of separation and the dualistic consciousness. What is it that actually happens when you define this dualistic polarity of right and wrong? You put yourself in a state of mind where you are open to using force. The extreme outcome is as I said that you are willing to exterminate another group of people that are different from your group as you define it. For a spiritual person, you have already risen to a higher level where you are not so much focused on forcing other people. In fact, most spiritual people are not willing to force other people, but you are often willing to force yourselves. You can very easily get into this state of mind where you feel that you have to use your willpower, your attention, your focus to force yourself and force your mind.

Many spiritual people have gotten the idea that they can achieve progress through meditation, but meditation is often disturbed by what some Buddhists call the monkey mind where the thoughts go all over the place. They have developed this idea that they should force the mind to not be thinking, force the mind to not have thoughts and this can become quite a strain for some people who have done this for a long time. They may think they have achieved various results, but it is all based on force. The alternative is to question this force-based approach and realize that you do not have to use force.

This can be helped along by considering the concept that before you came into this embodiment, you formulated a Life plan. This happened along with your spiritual counselors, whoever they are depending on your background and your personal development. You had advice from more mature, more experienced teachers and based on this you formulated a Life plan. Most people on earth have either no Life plan or a very simple Life plan but as a spiritual person who is open to spiritual teachings you have a more elaborate Life plan. That Life plan has as its overarching goal your growth in consciousness, raising of your awareness to higher and higher levels. You sat down with your spiritual teachers, you evaluated: “Where am I at in consciousness, what are the patterns, the illusions that I have in my emotional, mental and identity bodies that I need to overcome in order to make progress, and how can I best facilitate this in my coming embodiment?”

This was then an overall framework for choosing when and where, under which circumstances to come into embodiment. Most spiritual people chose their parents, chose their family, chose their culture and nationality because there was something in that environment that could help you overcome the illusions, the attachments, the patterns, the reactionary patterns that you wanted to overcome in this lifetime.

Here is where you might say that there is a certain element of force because when you make your Life plan, you have a more clear perspective of what you need to overcome. Of course you know that once you descend into embodiment again, you forget that perspective. That is the nature of overcoming something. If you knew ahead of time what you had to overcome, where would be the challenge in overcoming it? How would you actually overcome it?

You have an illusion. If you know it is an illusion, you have already overcome it. The only way to overcome it is to descend into embodiment with the illusion, forget about the illusion and then while you are in embodiment, you come to see the illusion. That is how you overcome it. You still have some awareness before coming into embodiment that there are certain things you need to overcome, and you choose to put yourself in a situation where you are forced to deal with this particular aspect of your psychology. Your outer situation, the people you embody with for example, parents and siblings, they have certain patterns in their psychology that force you, or that force you to react to them so that you have a chance to see your own patterns. In a sense you could say you are forcing yourself to confront this, but you of course forget this when you come into embodiment, which is why you often react so strongly to parents, family members, your outer situation. The challenge is to reconnect to this.

The mind wants to suppress things

You see what I have said earlier, there is a mechanism in the mind that wants to suppress certain things that it sees as a threat. It could be the threat of being overwhelmed or having to question your beliefs, whatever, but you want to suppress this. When you come into embodiment, this often means that when you are in a difficult situation, dealing with a difficult person, you want to suppress the need to look at yourself. You want to suppress the feelings, the beliefs, the situation you are dealing with so that it does not disturb your equilibrium. This is again natural for a time but if you are a spiritual person, it was in your Life plan that at a certain point you would find a spiritual teaching and become consciously reminded that there is a path to follow.

What you can benefit from is that you take this teaching here and you say: “What was it when I made my Divine plan that I wanted to force myself to see? Why did I put myself in this situation? What was it I wanted to bring out in my own psychology?” By making this conscious decision, you can overcome at least some of the resistance to looking into your own psychology, to seeing why you have this reactionary pattern to certain types of people.

This is part of your formulating a higher intention where you realize that in the here and now, in your immediate situation, you have certain reactionary patterns that want you to suppress looking at your own psychology. You can choose to consciously override these patterns and decide: “No, I am willing to look at my own psychology and my patterns and see them and overcome them.” This means now you are connecting to your own intention behind your Life plan. And when you do connect to this, where is the element of force? Why do you need to force yourself to look at something when you reconnect to your desire to be free of it? When you realize that you want to be free of this, you are not forcing yourself to deal with it.

Who are you?

What you can then begin to contemplate is that there are two levels of intention. As I said, in the here and now, in your present situation, there is a part of your mind, your lower mind, what could be called the ego, that has an intention to maintain your equilibrium, to not be disturbed, to not feel threatened. You want to suppress feelings, suppress thoughts, and suppress how you see yourself. This is what that part of the mind does. It is like a computer program that cannot do anything else. This is not your highest intention. Your highest intention is what is in your Life plan where you wanted to overcome some of these patterns, perhaps all the patterns you have left. Once you recognize this, it is not that you are forcing yourself to abandon the lower intention and accept the higher intention. You reconnect to the higher intention. You realize that the you that you are, you have a higher intention. This is your intention.

The intention to suppress and avoid something is not your intention, it is the intention of the ego, the outer self. Then, you can gradually over some time come to contemplate this. Who are you? What is the you that has a higher intention than the you that has the lower intention?

This is where you can benefit from asking yourself some questions that most people cannot even formulate. For example, who are you right now, who is taking in this teaching? This is a spiritual teaching. It has an intent to help you raise your level of awareness. Who is the you that is taking it in?

You can also ask who is the you that is resisting this teaching? You may be aware that there is some effort in your own mind to make you resist the teaching. There is an effort to take your existing knowledge and beliefs and evaluate this teaching based on those, looking for something, some reason, some excuse to reject the teaching. Many people have found a spiritual teaching and found one little detail that did not agree with their present beliefs, and they have used that to say: “Well the entire teaching is false.”

Who is the you that is studying the teaching and who is the you that is trying to get you to reject the teaching? In other words, who is the you that is open and who is the you that wants you to close your mind? The you that is open is the real you. Whereas the you that resists, that wants you to close your mind is the outer mind, the ego personality that wants you to stay in illusion. This entire ego personality is based on illusion. It springs from illusion, but it wants you to stay in illusion. Who is the you that you are? Well, you can begin by striving for an intellectual understanding of this, but really it all comes down to an experience, so participate in a simple exercise.

Some of you will know this but it will be new to some people. Become aware that you are sitting here taking in this teaching. Become aware that you are most likely sitting in a chair and therefore mentally step outside of yourself, your own mind and visualize, imagine that you are now standing behind your chair looking at your body in the chair. Now realize you are sitting in a specific room but there is something outside the room. Now mentally step further back until you see the room you are in as a whole. You see your body sitting in the chair in the room. Most likely that room is in a building. Step back again, visualize, imagine the entire building, the room in the building, your body sitting in a chair in that room. Now you can step further back to the environment outside the building, look at the building, the room, the chair and so forth. You can step back and back and back, look at the entire earth, look at earth from space, look at the solar system, look at the galaxy and all the time you are looking from this perspective down to where your body is sitting in this chair.

This is a simple exercise, but some people will not be able to do it, and other people will find it easy enough at least to imagine and visualize that you are stepping back. The question now is, what is the you that can step back? What is the ability that you have in your mind to step back from your physical body?

The you that is more than the body and the outer mind

The vast majority of people on earth are so identified with their physical bodies that they cannot even imagine that they could step outside the body and look at the body. If you were able to do this, it means that you are not as identified with the body as most people are. This means there is a you that is not the body, otherwise how could you mentally step outside of it? You are not, as the materialists say, a product of the electrochemical processes in your brain. As a spiritual person you already accept that you are not your physical body. You can then contemplate that you are not your emotional body, you are not your feelings, you are not your thoughts, you are not even your sense of identity as it relates to earth. So, who are you? What are you?

By pondering this, you can eventually come to realize that as you can mentally step outside your physical body, you can step outside your emotions, your thoughts and your sense of identity and you realize that you are really like an actor. You enter a theater, you put on a certain costume, you put on makeup, you even put on a certain voice, a certain way of speaking, a certain outer personality and suddenly, you can go on stage and act as if you were a very different person from the person you are in your normal life. Your four bodies, are just like a costume you have taken on. What is then the you? The you is the core of your being.

I know that your mind is now struggling because the mind wants to do what it always does. It wants to have a description, it wants to have a label, a name, it wants to have characteristics so that it can understand what the you is. You see, when it comes to your earthly identity, your mental mind, your feelings, and your physical body, they have characteristics that can be described by the words and the mental images you use on earth. The you that you are is beyond this, it is more than the four bodies and therefore it cannot be described by the words and the mental images used on earth.

Your outer mind cannot fathom the real you and your outer mind is probably now revolting against this idea, frantically wanting to be able to grasp, label, categorize this concept. It might argue that it is nonsensical to talk about something that is real but has no characteristics that can be described. What is the purpose of a spiritual teaching? It is to help you raise your awareness, and how do you raise your awareness? By transcending your present level of awareness. What is your present level of awareness? It is the contents of your identity, mental and emotional bodies. This is what gives you an outer self, an outer sense of who you are and how you can relate to the environment you are in.

Right now, you have a certain level of awareness and when I give you the concept that there is a part of your being that is beyond this level of awareness, your mind wants to use your present level of awareness to grasp, to categorize, to label, to describe this part of your being. There are spiritual students who have spent decades trying to understand intellectually, with the outer linear mind, spiritual concepts. Some have even tried to understand this concept that there is a part of you that is beyond the mind, the outer mind, but you cannot understand it with your present level of consciousness. You can ponder it and then if you are able to let go of your present way of looking at life, you can come to have what is often called a mystical experience.

This so-called mystical experience is not mystical at all. It is based on the fact that there is a you. We can call it a conscious self or the Conscious You, but there is a you that at some point stepped into your physical body and your emotional, mental and identity bodies. It came from outside, it stepped into it, and it is using these four bodies as a vehicle to interact with your environment on earth. It is not produced by the bodies. It took on the bodies, in a certain sense it even produced the identity, mental and emotional bodies in past lifetimes. The very fact that it came into your present mind also means that this you can step outside of your mind. You might say that right now the you is conscious of itself as being the four lower bodies, but the you has the capacity to step outside those four lower bodies and become conscious of itself as being beyond the bodies, beyond the mind. This is the basis for all growth in awareness.

You may say, if again you want to use a linear awareness, that this path can be likened to a staircase that has separate steps. Right now, you are at a certain step on the staircase. The question is how do you rise to the very next step up? Who is it that rises? Well, it is not your emotional, mental and identity bodies. It is not your current sense of self, of who you are, that rises, because your current self is tied to your current step. What rises? It is the You that rises.

Self-observation is the core of the spiritual path

This happens when you look at yourself, for example, a reactionary pattern. You see that you have a tendency to react in a certain way in certain situations. Instead of thinking this is the only way to react, or this is the right way to react, you now come to a point where you say: “Why do I react this way?” I do not really want to become angry when somebody does not do what I want. I do not want to have this experience of anger. How can I be free of it, if I think it is the only way to react? Let me look at it, let me look at what is behind this. Why do I think this is the only way to react?”

Then you can come to realize that other people do not react the same way to similar situations; there are other ways to react. In fact, what the Buddha said is that there is always another way to react that is based on non-attachment. In other words, you do not have a pattern that makes you attached to reacting a certain way. This, the you can come to realize, and you can come to see that there is an illusion that made you believe this was the only way to react. When you see through that illusion, when you see that it is an illusion, that it is limiting you, holding you back, then you will, when you see this, spontaneously let go.

There is an old story used by various spiritual teachers that if you are in the dark and you grab onto something and you think it is a rope, then you might hold on to it. But if the light is turned on and you see it is a snake, then you do not have to go into a sophisticated and lengthy intellectual analysis. You just spontaneously open your hand and let go of the snake. The same here. When you see that what you thought was the only way to react or was the truth, is actually an illusion, you spontaneously let go of the illusion and then you rise to the next level up. Of course, you take with you the remaining illusions in your three bodies. As you examine the next illusion and let go of that, you rise to the next step up and this is how you gradually walk the path. But this can be done only by the You that is not the mind because the mind cannot look at itself.

Computers will never become self-aware

There is an elaborate movement in scientific circles of creating what they call artificial intelligence because many behavioral scientists, for example, have realized that human reactions are almost like a computer and for most people, this is actually true. You expose them to a certain situation—they will react the same way that they reacted the last ten times they were in that situation. The reason for this is, as I have explained, that you have patterns in your subconscious mind. A pattern normally lies dormant but when you are in a particular situation, it triggers the pattern, it takes over your reactions and now you are reacting that way. Your subconscious mind truly is like a computer in many ways. There are programs and when they are triggered, they take over your reactions, you react a certain way and then perhaps later you regret it or perhaps later you reason that: Oh, that was the only way you could have reacted.

Where the artificial intelligence people have misunderstood this is that this is not the only way to be for a human being. A human being has the potential to consciously and deliberately change its patterns so that even though you may have reacted that way the last hundred times, you can suddenly choose not to react that way in the next situation. A computer will not be able to do this. Why? Because it does not have self-awareness. It does not have a self that is aware. The you that I have talked about is the you that can become aware of itself. It becomes aware of yourself in the beginning, but also aware that it is not the outer self. That is why you (as a human being and all human beings) have the potential to consciously and deliberately change your reactions and your actions. You can choose a different reaction than you have had in the past. In the past you may have reacted based on a program where you really did not make a choice. Well, you made a choice in the distant past when you created the program but when the program kicks in, you are not making a conscious choice. That is actually why some scientists have discovered that there is a reaction in your brain before you make a conscious choice in a certain situation. That is because there is a subconscious program that has already made the choice before you become aware of it at the conscious level.

The bigger issue here is you have the potential to become self-aware. Not only about your reactions but about higher levels of self-awareness, who you really are. You are not the reactions, you are not your feelings, you are not your thoughts, you are not your outer sense of identity. You are what some people call a spiritual being. You came from beyond this environment that you call earth. In a sense the Eightfold Path, whatever you want to call the spiritual path, is a process of becoming gradually more and more self-aware. The you that you are becomes more and more conscious of what it is and what it is not.

No instant enlightenment

Now again your outer mind will say: “Well then why don’t you just give me the ultimate level of self-awareness, the ultimate secret about self-awareness so I can skip all those steps and go into Nirvana right now? I can become enlightened instantly.” You see, this cannot be done. There is no instant enlightenment and the reason is very simple. The you that you are did not come to earth originally to attain enlightenment. You came to earth to have certain experiences here that could facilitate your process towards enlightenment. You did not come to earth just to get out of here, you came to earth to have certain experiences. In order to have these experiences, the you that you are had to create contents in your identity mind first, then your mental mind, then your emotional mind. It is these concepts that set the parameters for the experiences you have had on earth, and the purpose for this was to have the kind of experiences you can have on earth until you have had enough of those kinds of experiences, and you want something more.

That is when you are ready to start the path. Until then you are having the kind of experiences you can have on earth, which currently is that you are a separate being who is in a world of other separate beings, and you are struggling against them. You may say with your conscious mind: “I never desired this kind of struggle. That is not why I came to earth.” In reality, it is. When you step back from your current experience, you realize that this is why you came to earth. You may have had different reasons for it, different motivations, different intentions behind it, but this is why you came to earth: To have the kind of experiences you can have on earth. There comes the point after many lifetimes of having these kinds of experiences where you have had enough of them and now you want something different. That is when you become open to the spiritual path in whatever version you can grasp it.

The purpose of the spiritual path is now to help you gradually become conscious of the contents that you put into your emotional, mental, and identity minds, gradually discard them so that you have less and less contents in those minds. You become more and more free. Enlightenment is really the point where you have no more contents in your mind that are based on the illusions of duality and separation. You have overcome all of the illusions that you are a separate being and that you can use some dualistic polarity to justify doing whatever you want to do as a separate being. That is when you are enlightened. You can say that as you move towards enlightenment, you take one content at a time from your mind and discard it, you let it go, one illusion at a time until you have no more dualistic, separate illusions left.

Do you lose your personality?

Now some will object to this and feel that, does that mean I no longer have any opinions, beliefs, theories about life, emotional patterns, does it really mean that I have no personality, no identity? Yes, that is exactly what it means. You have no personality and identity as it is defined on earth based on the illusions of maya, the illusions of separation and duality. You lose what most people see as their personality and identity. It does not mean you become a nobody because you have an individuality in your higher being that you can then begin to express on earth. It does mean you lose what we might call the human individuality, personality, and identity. This was, if you are open to a spiritual teaching, your greater intent before making your Life Plan.

This means that when you now look at your life and your activities, you do not have to do what many Buddhists have done, of evaluating again, what is right intention, what is wrong intention. I need to force myself to not have the wrong intentions. What you can do instead is you can say: “What is in my Life Plan about a specific aspect of my life right now?” Let us say that you identify in yourself that you have a desire to have a certain type of experience. There can be many different things on earth but for many people, you decide to have a personal relationship and you desire to have sex with another person. This is a very common desire even among spiritual people.

There are many, many misunderstandings about this among spiritual people where you still see many, many Buddhists who have taken the teachings and used the outer mind to say: “Well, any activity that is not spiritual is wrong and I need to avoid it.” There is another consideration that can be made here. Let’s say that you are making your Life Plan, you have a broader perspective than you have right now. You realize that you still have a desire to experience a personal relationship, even a physical relationship. You decide to put yourself in a situation where you can meet a person and have that kind of relationship. What could possibly be wrong with having that experience, if you evaluated that I need to have that experience for a certain amount of time so I can have had enough of it. I can therefore be free of it, and I can now focus on other experiences that I want for the rest of this lifetime. What could possibly be wrong about this?

It is part of your Life Plan, which ultimately leads you towards higher levels of awareness. Instead of forcing yourself to suppress a certain experience, you are going into the experience until you have had enough of it, you are saturated with it, and then you can evaluate, not necessarily that you have to give up the outer situation, but you can come to a point where you are free of any compulsive desires to have it. There is nothing inherently unspiritual about sexual activity, but if you are attached to it, if it is obsessive compulsive, then of course it can hinder your growth towards higher levels of awareness. If you come to a point where you overcome the attachment, overcome the compulsion, overcome the illusion that you need this in order to feel complete, then you can either choose to stop the activity or to continue with it in a different way without the attachment. Either way, it facilitates your growth in awareness.

You see again, what is your greater intent here? Is it to resolve the illusions, the maya in your mind? Or is it to use a spiritual teaching to cover over the illusions so you at the conscious level can pretend that you do not have them? You can say: “Well I understand this very advanced spiritual teaching and I have spent countless hours practicing these spiritual practices, therefore I am beyond this desire, this intent.” But you are just pretending. You are covering over the desire, and this does not help you rise to the next level on the ladder or the staircase.

Reconsider your intentions

This is the next step on the Eightfold Path, to reconsider your intentions. Your overall intention is ultimately to be free of earth, but you cannot force yourself to be free of earth. If you suppress a certain desire, you will have to come back into another embodiment in order to come to the point where you can consciously let go of the desire. Many spiritual people have forced themselves to live in a monastic situation where they had to suppress their desire for sex. They may have been able to live that way an entire lifetime, perhaps even several lifetimes, but there comes a point where they realize, when they are out of embodiment, that they have not freed themselves from the desire, they have only suppressed it. They will need to come back, experience the activity (whatever it is) until they can consciously and voluntarily let go of the desire: “I have had enough of this experience.” This cannot be forced, and unfortunately, many, many people have used a spiritual teaching to create this idea that they have to force themselves. If you really want to make spiritual progress, your intention must be to resolve, to let go, to surrender, to overcome your attachments, your patterns, the contents of your emotional, mental and identity bodies. This must be the overall intent, and when you rise to that level and become conscious of this, you can evaluate all of your other intentions.

Again, you have to make a living to feed your body and keep it alive. You may have obligations towards family and others. How do you balance being a spiritual person who is aware of this spiritual teaching with a normal family life? You can only do this by realizing that any activity (well, most activities on earth) can facilitate your growth in awareness. The whole idea that you have to renounce a worldly life and withdraw into a monastery in order to make spiritual progress is not universally true. There may be some people who have to do this for one or several embodiments, but it is certainly not the case for all people. In fact, in the specific time you are living in, it is more important than in previous ages that people are walking the spiritual path by living an active life in society. This is how many more people than in the past can be inspired to open their minds to the path when they see that they do not have to renounce a normal existence and withdraw into a monastery in the mountains in order to be spiritual.

This is an age, this is a time, where a great number of people have volunteered to come into embodiment in this time in order to demonstrate that you can find a balance between a worldly existence and spiritual growth, growth in awareness. Now, I say this is more important than ever because of the times, but this is not to say that it was not important in the past. Why do you think I called it the Middle Way? Now again, the Middle Way is an unfortunate translation of a more complex concept. Nevertheless, the Middle Way is neither the extreme asceticism that I practiced in my youthful folly, nor the completely blind worldly existence that most people practice. It is something that transcends both, where you can live an active life in society with family obligations, but you are still walking the spiritual path because your intention is to use your worldly activities to facilitate your growth in awareness.

How do you do it? Well, partly by looking at your reactions to your worldly situations. Partly by realizing that you can inspire other people by your example. What is it that happens when people withdraw from society, become monks and nuns, and live in a monastery? They avoid many of the pressures of everyday existence that trigger their reactionary patterns. They live in a controlled environment where, once they have accepted the parameters for that environment, there may not be very much that triggers their reactions.
They can make themselves believe that they no longer have the reactions, that by choosing to be in a situation that does not trigger my patterns, I have overcome the patterns, but you have not. You have of course only suppressed them.

What the Middle Way really means

The entire concept of the Middle Way is that you do not define the spiritual path in terms of two dualistic polarities, where you are either a completely worldly person or you must withdraw from the world to be a spiritual person. There is an alternative to the either-or to the black-and-white. You can find a way to be spiritual while being active in society. This is the deeper meaning of higher intention and all of a sudden, everything gains a different shading. You gain a different perspective on every aspect of your life. Suddenly, you can begin to reconsider what has been one of the greatest hindrances for spiritual people. It is the distinction between what is spiritual activities and what is not spiritual activities or even anti-spiritual activities. This of course is a topic I will return to when I talk about higher action. But still it is important when you consider your intentions that you need to overcome this dualistic view of the spiritual path.

What is one of the foundational teachings of Buddhism? It is that everything is the Buddha nature. Of course, human beings on earth do not see that everything is the Buddha nature. Why do they not they see that everything is the Buddha nature? Because their minds are blinded behind the veil of maya. But what is it that makes up the veil of maya? It is this dualistic consciousness that always creates two polarities that are opposite in a black-and-white way, implies a value judgment and says these activities are not spiritual and these activities are spiritual. If everything is the Buddha nature, does it give any meaning to say: This is spiritual, this is not spiritual? Does it not give more meaning to realize that the real goal of the path is to overcome illusion? An illusion is what covers over the Buddha nature that is within everything. This means that the real goal of the path is not to define this is spiritual, this is anti-spiritual, so I must avoid the anti-spiritual and focus on the spiritual.

The real goal of the spiritual path, the Middle Way, is to come to see that most activities on earth can facilitate your growth in awareness when you approach them with the intent to grow in awareness, the intent to look at yourself and your reactions, your illusions. That is when an activity is spiritual. To say that a certain activity is not spiritual and therefore participating in that activity, such as having a family, will destroy your spiritual growth is simply a lower level of understanding of the path. Of course, there are certain activities that will not facilitate your growth in awareness because they trap you even further behind the veil of maya, but any activity can actually be used to help you see the illusions behind that activity. I am not thereby saying that going out and killing people will facilitate your growth in awareness, but coming to see the illusions behind killing people can actually facilitate your growth in awareness.

Again, the dualistic mind always wants to create distinctions and separations to set up the polarity, but the path, the Eightfold Path, is about seeing beyond this veil of maya so you see that everything is the Buddha nature. The Buddha nature is within everything so the real intent is to come to see this, not to come to identify that this thing or this activity is spiritual, and this is not. What helps you see the Buddha nature behind the veil of maya? If something helps you see that, how could it not be spiritual? If something ties you to dualistic illusions, even using a spiritual teaching to reinforce those illusions, well how could that be spiritual?

With this I have given you what I wanted to give you in this installment. Shock waves have certainly been sent into the collective consciousness, stirring up many of the demons of Mara who are growling and screaming and trying to get people to deny these impulses and again engage in the struggle of the Sea of Samsara.

You who are open to these teachings can avoid this by turning the teachings into the Prajna boat, but you can only do this by striving to always reach a higher level of intention than you have right now. I have fulfilled my intention for giving you this teaching. I hope it can help you fulfill your intention for this embodiment.

 

Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels

 

Back to Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world

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Listen to a recording of this dictation (subscribers only)

Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, January 7, 2023. This dictation was given during the 2023 New Year’s webinar – Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. The Eightfold Path is something that many people throughout the ages who have called themselves Buddhists have used considerable mental activity to try to follow to the best of their ability, which really means their level of awareness and how many patterns they had in their emotional, mental and identity bodies. As described, it is not an easy path to follow, so I will give some thoughts about how you in today’s world can gain a new perspective on this path.

Normally, the path has been defined as eight steps, eight stages, eight qualities and they all begin with the word “right,” right understanding and so forth. But is right the right word to use when you consider the teachings about the pairs and of the duality consciousness that always wants to divide everything up into at least two polarities and then impose that value judgment that one is right, one is wrong, one is good, one is evil. Instead of using the word right, let us use the word higher, higher understanding, higher intent, higher speech and so forth.

Let us begin with what has traditionally been considered the first step, Higher Understanding. You see what has happened here is that we have now shifted. The word “right” implies finality, some ultimate stage. Right understanding implies to many people, and has done so throughout the ages, that you can reach some ultimate understanding. And if something is truly right, it should be, in the mind of many people, the highest, the highest understanding. It could not be expanded upon. It could not be transcended. It could not be exceeded. But then why did the Buddha give understanding as the first step of a path with eight steps?

There is not ultimate understanding

If at the very first step you reach some ultimate understanding, why would you need the other seven steps? You see that by switching to Higher Understanding we imply that there is always a higher understanding to be gained. There is nothing final. And certainly, it is extremely productive for people to recognize that as long as you are in embodiment on a dense planet like Earth with such a dense collective consciousness, there is no ultimate understanding that can be achieved.

This is partly because of the density of matter itself, but also the density of the collective consciousness. Now of course, over time the collective consciousness can be raised and has been raised. There may come a point in the future where people can reach a higher understanding than can be reached today, but it will still not be the ultimate understanding. This is why the Buddha did not give a religion that had a complicated cosmology that said this is how the universe really works. The Buddha recognized that the human mind, the human awareness, is limited.

Twenty five hundred years ago the collective consciousness was lower than it is today. There was even more of a limit to what people could grasp in terms of cosmological insight. Today the consciousness has been raised considerably, partly because of the influence of science. And therefore, people have a better foundation for understanding the greater truth. But it is still essential to recognize that the current level of understanding that can be achieved is limited and will be limited for the foreseeable future.

This mean as a sincere spiritual student who strives to attain enlightenment, you can never stop and allow yourself to believe that now I have achieved the ultimate understanding. Many people have done this by taking an outer teaching, be it a Buddhist teaching or any other teaching, and saying this is now the ultimate truth. Because I understand this teaching, I have the ultimate understanding. But this is a misunderstanding of what understanding means.

The limitations of the linear mind

Now, I have said that people have a higher awareness today than they had 2,500 years ago and that this has partly been brought about by science. Yet science is very much based on the rational, analytical, linear mind. What do I mean with the linear mind? Well, it wants to see everything in terms of cause and effect. It has to be possible to look at life on earth and clearly define that here is a separate cause, and this condition has an effect that started at some point. Through a series of linear steps leading from this to the next to the next, the present condition was produced.

You see many examples of this in science, but take the theory of evolution, where supposedly one cell first came into being, then two-celled organisms. Then more complex and gradually, step by step, in a linear fashion, the current species were brought forth. This is, without commenting further on the theory of evolution, an example of linear thinking. We take current conditions. We project a series of steps going from the current conditions to more simple causes. And we end up at some ultimate stage where the process began. This is, in the minds of some people, the crowning achievement of science.

It is, of course, not what I taught 2,500 years ago, when I taught about the interdependent originations. In reality everything is interconnected. There are aspects of science that have actually discovered this and recognized that you cannot separate anything. This does not mean that science has now been invalidated. There is, of course, value in looking at a particular phenomenon and trying to describe it and isolate a certain cause, so the scientific method of looking at separate phenomena and trying to find the cause is not invalid. What is invalid is when some people superimpose a philosophical, ideological overlay on this process and say that it has some objective, ultimate reality that a phenomenon can be considered separate and, therefore, it has a cause that is separate. In other words, you can look at this specific phenomenon and the steps that led from the original cause to the phenomenon, and now you can know everything there is to know about the phenomenon.

Well, clearly this cannot be higher understanding because there is no room for expansion, for transcendence, into a higher understanding. It may be fine if you take a billiard table and you place some billiard balls on it. You take a cue and you hit one ball with a cue and make it roll into another ball. Then, you measure whatever you can measure in that situation, and you say: “The original cause was the cue that struck the first ball, which then, through its direction and momentum, transferred a certain force to the next ball. Which then hit another ball, and so forth.” This is perfectly fine for describing a particular phenomenon.

How is that billiard table a separate phenomenon? How did it come into being? Was it not invented by human beings? Was it not based on certain general principles for what can be done in the material universe? Where did those principles come from? You see, as quantum physicists have discovered, you cannot actually look at a subatomic phenomenon and isolate it. Then, you use a macroscopic mental image and superimpose it upon it and say: “This is now a separate particle. And we can study that subatomic particle as we would study a billiard ball on a billiard table.”

Quantum physicists have discovered beyond any doubt whatsoever that in the quantum world there are no separate particles. They are part of a larger whole. They can be separated by a distance, but they are still connected so that a change in one particle instantly results in the change of another, separated by considerable distance. This is what one part of science has discovered. It has not invalidated the scientific method of studying particular phenomena, but it has invalidated the ideological overlay of saying that it is possible to isolate a phenomenon and reach the conclusion that this phenomenon has an isolated cause. There are no isolated phenomena and there are no isolated causes.

Seeking to control the world of separate causes

Why is this important? Well again, what did we start out by talking about? You live in a world that in the last few years has become more chaotic, more unpredictable, causing many people to feel insecurity about the future. The reaction of many people is, as I said, they want to maintain their sense of equilibrium. Their first desire is to find a way to control the world. When they realize they cannot control the world, they use then the reaction I described of denying feelings, thoughts and a sense of identity, pushing them below the level of conscious awareness so they can maintain that sense of equilibrium.

As I also described, there is a higher way, and that is to look at why you feel this way, why you think this way, why you identify yourself this way and realize that these are not separate phenomena. There is a reason for it and you can discover it. This then is higher understanding, but there is more to higher understanding. Why have I talked about the fact that there are no separate phenomena in the subatomic world? Well, because everything is made out of subatomic particles, or at least everything in the matter realm. What you normally consider the matter world, which you can detect with your senses or with scientific instruments, you see this defined in a very specific way. You see it as made up of separate things that you superimpose a mental image upon.

But what quantum physicists have proven is that there are no separate things. Billiard balls are not separate things, because billiard balls are made up of molecules, atoms, subatomic particles. Then, the even deeper layer that makes up subatomic particles, or that produces or manifests subatomic particles. This means that nothing you see in the matter world can be separated from the subatomic world. It is made out of that world.

Now furthermore, Albert Einstein proved that matter really does not exist because matter is energy that has taken on a specific form. The deeper layer, the deepest layer of matter is not actually particles. It is energy. Energy, of course, is something that really cannot be isolated as you can isolate a particle. An energy wave extends through space. It has no specific separate location. You cannot isolate an energy wave. You cannot freeze it and say now we have an accurate view of the wave, because a wave is something that is constantly moving. When I talked about the interdependent originations, it was simply another way of talking about what quantum physicists have discovered, namely that everything that you see is an expression of something unseen and that this is ultimately the expression of an interconnected, interdependent whole.

You are not separated from your environment

How does this relate to the Buddha’s teachings about enlightenment? Well, what is it you experience as a human being in embodiment on earth? Begin with the physical body. You have been brought up, even over many lifetimes, to see your physical body as a separate, somewhat isolated unit. You experience that your body is a coherent unit. You can decide to get up from your chair and take a walk outside and your body moves through the outside space as a separate unit. It may be affected by certain things, such as, if a car comes, it could potentially hit you. Or if the rain falls from the sky, you get wet, your body gets wet. But in general, you have the impression that you are a separate unit and you can move as you want throughout space as it is in your local environment.

You know, if you think about this, that the reason you can walk around on the surface of the earth is that there is an invisible force, called gravity, that is keeping you on the surface so you do not float off. You know intellectually that there are forces that are affecting your body, which means your body is not actually separated. Of course, you can go further and realize your body is made up of atoms and molecules and subatomic particles and energy waves. Therefore, it cannot be separated from this energetic environment in which you live. But still, because of the impressions from the physical senses, because of the upbringing that you have received on earth in this lifetime and the impressions from past lifetimes, most people tend to view their physical bodies as separate.

Most people also tend to view their emotional bodies, if they consider that they have an emotional body, as a separate unit. The same with the mental and the identity body. You tend to think that you have your emotions, but do you not see how many times you are affected by impressions coming from the outside, by what other people do or say to you? If somebody comes to you and is angry with you, do you not see that this affects your emotional body? How is your emotional body separate? 

Have you not experienced that somebody comes and tells you something and you are affected by this? You tend to either believe them or disbelieve them. You may go into an argument with them. Obviously your mental body is not an isolated unit.

Most people have not considered that their sense of identity is also something that is greatly affected by their environment. They do not realize how much they are brought up to have a certain sense of identity. Neither do they realize how, over many lifetimes, they have been programmed to accept themselves as human beings who are separate beings. When you start to strive for higher understanding, you need to look at this. You need to consider that at the macroscopic level, the level of the senses and the outer, linear mind, you view phenomena as separate. There is an enormous programming in your subconscious mind and in the collective consciousness that is focused on identifying differences, separate objects, separate phenomena.

Now of course, there is a very practical reason for this. You need to be able to identify separate phenomena. This is part of what makes it possible to live in the practical reality you have. Is this dangerous for me? Is this substance dangerous to take into my body? Will it kill me? Will it kill my body? And many other considerations like this. 

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong about it. The problem comes in when you superimpose an ideological overlay upon the impressions coming to you through your senses and the outer mind. Then, there is another part of the outer mind that says those things really are separate. And what you experience through the senses and the outer mind is an objective reality. There are separate things out there that are separated from your physical body, from your mind. Therefore, if your physical body cannot act on them, your mind can do nothing about it. This, of course, also influences how you relate to other people. They are separate from yourself.

Human beings cannot kill human beings

If you look at animal species, you will see that most animal species do not kill members of their own species but human beings obviously do. Now, the reality here is that a human being cannot kill another human being. If you see that person as a human being, as yourself, you cannot kill that human being. This is simply a survival mechanism at the species level. You know, because scientists have told you, that there is an individual level and a level of an entire species. Sometimes certain individuals need to do something to secure the survival of the species. This can be propagation, protection, many different things.

In order for a species to survive, there is a certain programming. There is even a certain programming in your physical body that says: “Do not kill your own species, because killing your own species is a very poor survival strategy.” All species are programmed to survive. How is it possible that human beings can kill each other and have done so for as long as you have recorded history? It is possible because you can take the sense impressions and the perception filter of the outer mind and you can create the mental image that this other person is not a human being like myself. I am not connected to that person. Therefore, I can kill that person and it will not affect myself. This is the only way that a human being can kill another human being.

What this leads to is at least the suggestion of an understanding that human beings can create a mental image that is out of touch with reality. Science has shown that everything is interconnected but human beings have throughout history created these mental images that they are separated from each other and, therefore, can kill each other without affecting themselves. Yes, of course, you have the experience that somebody can use their physical body to kill another physical body, but their physical body does not die. Of course, you also have a big part of the world that believes in karma and therefore, you are affected by killing another human being, even in coming lifetimes. So, there is a certain connection there.

Certainly in much of the modern world that has left off from any religious teaching talking about karma, you have this separate mindset that causes people to believe that what you do to others, you are not doing to yourself. You will see that almost every religion contains this admonishment: Do not do to others what you do not want others to do to you. It is, of course, based on this recognition that everything is interconnected, so what you do to others affects yourself.

Separateness leads to value judgments

What is the beginning of Higher Understanding as the first step of the Eightfold Path? Well, it is to begin to question this sense of separateness, this illusion of separateness. What is the basis for creating this illusion that you are separate beings? Well, it is what I called the pairs 2,500 years ago, but which with a more modern expression we can call the duality consciousness or the dualistic consciousness. It is this very idea that you can look at life, you can look at reality and you can say: “Here is one phenomenon that is distinct and different from this other phenomenon.” To make it more concrete, here is one group of people that are distinct from this other group of people. They have a different skin color, therefore, they are different. Here you have taken what really is just a discernment of differences in the outer characteristics.

Now, you go further. Instead of just saying this group has that skin color and that group has that skin color, you now say: “There is some ideological significance to this.” To use a classical example, there was a time not so long ago, and some people are still stuck in it, where people with a white skin color considered that everybody else with a different skin color belonged to an inferior race. This is where you take the dualistic mind and you say: “Here are some differences, differences in skin color, but they are not just physical differences.” Nay. It is not as if you took a lily and a tulip and said: “Well, they are different flowers, they have different shapes, they have different colors, but they are both beautiful flowers.” Instead you say: “Here is one human being with a white skin color. Here is one human being with a black skin color. And the skin color makes them fundamentally different. They are not simply two variations of human beings as two flowers are variations of flowers. They are fundamentally different beings.”

Not only that, they can be put into a dualistic system, which says: “This skin color is in a fundamental way different from another.” You can even impose this overlay that God created the one race superior to the other race. Then you can do a further dualistic trick of imposing the value judgment that I have talked about. You are saying the white race is superior and the black race is inferior. You can even go further, saying that it is perfectly acceptable that the white race subdues the black race and turns them into slaves. If the black race resists this, then it is perfectly acceptable that the white race kills them. Or you can have another race where you say: “The Aryan race is superior to the Jewish race. And it is perfectly acceptable, even necessary for some epic cause, that the Aryan race exterminates the Jewish race.”

You will see that when you look at history and again look at: “What have people done to kill other human beings,” you see that in most cases – and certainly in the larger cases, such as war or genocide – it is not just a killing that springs from passions, where somebody is afraid that another person is going to kill them. No, it is justified. You have a justification for why the white race enslaves the black race. You have a justification for why the Aryans attempt to exterminate the Jews. This is the duality consciousness. It is based on the sense of separation, the illusion of separation, but it takes it further and creates the dualistic polarities, imposes the value judgment. Now, those who firmly believe in that value judgment can justify almost any violation of the group of people that they have labeled as the inferior group.

The experience of superiority as the origin of suffering

What you see here is that throughout history people have come up with many, many different justifications for violating other human beings. They have all been based on the sense of separation, the dualistic consciousness, the creation of polarities and the imposing of a value judgment. Now, from a certain perspective you can say: “But this is what gives these people a specific experience.” I have talked about those who have a desire to feel superior to others. This duality consciousness, this value judgment is just an excuse that gives people this experience that they are superior.

Certainly, this can be said to be the case but what is the consequence of this? The consequence is that when you go into this dualistic consciousness, this sense of separation, you can only suffer. You can say that the dualistic consciousness, the sense of separation, is actually the origin of suffering. You can also say that there is no way to escape suffering as long as you are in this dualistic, separate state of consciousness. Which is what I, 2,500 years ago, called Maya, illusion. This is the deeper meaning, the higher understanding of Maya: You are in this illusion that you are a separate being.

What happens when you identify yourself as a separate being? Well, suddenly you are separated from other people, you are separated from your environment here on earth, and you are separated from anything outside your environment, meaning outside the material universe. You are not alone on earth. There are billions of other people here. There is a physical environment that sometimes manifests natural disasters. As a separate being, you will see yourself as being threatened by conditions in your environment.

This is what causes people to go into this attempt to gain some control over their environment. People do this at the physical level through physical force, violence, by either subduing other people so they can be controlled or by seeking to exterminate those other people so they are not there. People also do it at the emotional level, where many people are engaged in this constant process of seeking to control the emotions of people around them in order to avoid negative or unpleasant emotions in themselves. Likewise, many people are engaged in this game of seeking to control other people’s thoughts, beliefs, understanding, and even control their sense of identity.

The irony of separation

Can you perhaps begin to see the irony here? Here is a person. He identifies himself as a separate being, a separate human being. He has a separate physical body. He has a separate emotional body, mental body, identity body. He is afraid that something is going to happen in his environment that will kill his physical body. He attempts to use physical means to control his environment. This is, however, very difficult to accomplish, and no one has ever fully accomplished it. No matter how powerful of a dictator they have become, they have not been able to fully control their environment.

The person also attempts to control the emotions and the mental minds and the sense of identity of other people around him. But why is he doing this? He is doing it to avoid certain emotions, certain thoughts, and a certain doubt about his sense of identity. In other words, the person is seeking really to control his own mind but because he is in the state of separation, the consciousness of duality, he thinks the only way to control his own mind is to control his surroundings, his physical situation, the emotions of other people, the thoughts of other people, the sense of identity of other people.

This, of course, means that this person is in a perpetual struggle against other people. Those other people also see themselves as separate. When the first person tries to control person number two, person number two feels threatened by this, feels that the first person is aggressive towards him or her. They resist this. This is the Sea of Samsara. Most people on earth are trapped in the sense of separation, the consciousness of duality, and they are seeking to control other people in order to attain some state of equilibrium, peace in their own minds.

Now again, you can say: “Well, people have free will, so aren’t they allowed to have any experience they want?” Of course. I am only pointing out that the experience that people have through Maya, through separation, through duality, is a struggle experience, and a struggle experience can only create suffering. It may give you a temporary elation, where you feel now you have achieved some ultimate state of power or control or peace. But it will always be threatened and you will always know this. Why will you know this? Because if you attain a state of power through force, you are aware of force. You are aware that there might be other people who will try to take away what you have attained through force by using more force than you used to get it.

Look at how dictators, almost all of them, become increasingly paranoid throughout their lives. No matter how much power and control they have in their country, they are always afraid that somebody can take it away. That is why they must continually have a secret police that seeks to identify and kill those who could potentially be a threat. Look at how many billionaires have more money than they could ever spend, but they are always afraid that somebody might try to take that money. They have to protect it or they have to make even more. It becomes a never-ending spiral, because you are trying to do the impossible. You are trying to control your state of mind through controlling your environment. Again, perfectly acceptable if you want to be in the Sea of Samsara, but then you do not need the Eightfold Path.

The Eightfold path is the alternative to suffering

The Eightfold Path is not what many Buddhists have come to see it as. It is not the only road to salvation or Nirvana. It is not a superior path. It is not something that was ever meant to be forced upon people. It was never actually my goal that these teachings should be spread throughout the earth and that all people should belong to an outer religion of Buddhism and that this should be forced upon them. The Eightfold Path is an offer to people who have had enough of being tossed about by the waves in the Sea of Samsara. They are looking for something else, and they are open to the thought that in order to get something else, they cannot continue to do what they have been doing so far. They need to do something different.

What is the first step towards a higher understanding? It is first of all to recognize that your mind has limitations. You do not have the highest understanding right now. In fact you do not have a higher understanding. Because at the present moment you have a certain level of understanding, but there are higher levels possible. In order to get those higher levels of understanding, you have to do something different. Something you are not doing now. What is it that is different? Well, it is that you have to at least grasp the necessity of transcending Maya, illusion, the illusion of separation, the illusion of duality, the dualistic polarities, the value judgment, the sense of superiority and inferiority. You have to question this entire mindset. You have to start questioning it.

It cannot be done all at once. There is a need for a certain continuity. It is a gradual path of questioning these illusions of Maya. It takes time. In fact it takes lifetimes, but many people in embodiment today – especially in the more modern, more developed nations – they have done this in past lifetimes. They have started the process in past lifetimes and all they need to do now is to reconnect to the reality that they need to question their minds, the way they look at life, their approach to life, especially this illusion of separation, the pairs, the dualistic polarities.

The human mind can become a closed system

This begins with this recognition that again was difficult to give 2,500 years ago, but it can be given today. The recognition is that the human mind has a tendency to become a closed system. You are not an island. No human is an island. You are not a separate being. You are connected in many different ways beyond the visible level. Not only to other people, but to the environment you live in and to some source beyond your environment, which we do not need to go into right now. But you need to know that there is something outside the matter world. This is who you are. This is how you came into being.

You do not see that right now. The reason you do not see it is because your mind has become clouded by Maya, by many different illusions and reactionary patterns in your emotional, mental and identity bodies. The Eightfold Path is a process of gradually, step-by-step, one at a time, bringing these illusions and reactionary patterns into the conscious mind, examining them critically, evaluating their consequences, even their validity, their consistency. Then, coming to the conclusion that this particular illusion and pattern limits me and I have had enough of this limitation, because it always keeps me trapped in this turbulent Sea of Samsara.

You have the concept that you have the Sea of Samsara, but on the other side of the sea, or at least on one side of the sea, is the other shore. You can get there by using a boat, a Prajna boat, which is made up of the teachings and the practice. Again, you cannot take the outer teaching, study it, practice the practices and think that you will automatically get to the other shore. You will do it only by self-examination, looking at yourself, looking at your beliefs, your patterns. Asking yourself why you are reacting this way, why you are thinking this way, why you see yourself as this kind of person. Gradually questioning all of this, dismissing one illusion at a time. This is the Prajna boat. This is what carries you once you are in it, once you have locked in to what the path is about. This is what carries you across the Sea of Samsara. It does not mean you will not be tossed by the waves, because you will. But at least you have something to hold on to that can carry you further.

This is the beginning of wisdom, the beginning of understanding. Your mind can become, or rather has become, a closed system. Why do I say this? How can I say this? Well, do you feel you are the Buddha right now? Do you feel you are enlightened, that you are in a state of Nirvana or Samsara? Do you feel that you are at peace? Then, that shows you that your mind is a closed system. It is closed because you have used the mind’s ability to suppress emotions, thoughts and a sense of identity, to suppress anything that disturbs you, but this also becomes a straitjacket that holds you, that traps you. Because whenever a new idea comes to you, it has to be fit into this system, this subconscious database that you have that evaluates all new ideas, saying: “Is this dangerous? Is this true? Is this something I should consider or not consider?”

How can a spiritual teacher help you?

Again, what did I say is the dilemma of a spiritual teacher? Well, a spiritual teacher is not trapped in Maya, is not in the Sea of Samsara, but you are.
How can the spiritual teacher help you escape Maya? What is Maya? You have a belief that in reality is an illusion, but you believe it is the truth. You are convinced that it is the truth. This is the way the world is. It is this belief that keeps you trapped in Maya. How can a teacher help you? Well, you must come to see that your belief is an illusion.

This means the teacher must challenge your belief. The process I described means that there is a part of your mind that wants to suppress any challenge to your beliefs. Many people have come across a spiritual teaching that was not the teaching they already had. They have looked at it, but their conscious minds have never actually grasped the significance of the teaching. Because their subconscious minds have rejected or colored or interpreted the teachings. Now, as I said, you can do nothing else. You have to start somewhere. When you find a spiritual teaching, you will interpret it through your present level of consciousness.

Again, this in itself is not so much of a problem. The problem is if you do not realize that you are limiting the teaching, that you are superimposing something upon the teaching that will prevent you from taking the next step on the path towards enlightenment. You see, there are many, many people – whether they are Buddhists or the more New Age, mystically minded people you see today – who have looked at the concept of enlightenment and they have superimposed an image upon it based on their present level of consciousness. Many people have a certain set of beliefs that they are very attached to. They hear about the concept of enlightenment and it sounds good to them. But without realizing it, they are projecting the image that when you are enlightened, you have the validation of your present beliefs, you see that your present beliefs were actually the ultimate truth.

Of course, when other people become enlightened, they will see that your beliefs were the ultimate truth and therefore, you were right all along. This is another aspect of this desire for superiority. Surely an enlightened being would agree with me, with my present beliefs, the present way I look at life. But you see, if you are not enlightened. How could an enlightened being agree with you? You are not enlightened because you have illusions. An enlightened being has no illusions, has transcended illusions. Thus, how could an enlightened being agree with you that your illusions are not illusions, but are the truth? This is not a realistic scenario. Those who believe in it will just keep themselves trapped in the Sea of Samsara, their minds taken over by Maya. They are behind the veil of Maya.

The beginning of the Eightfold Path is the willingness to question your own mind, to see that it becomes a self-validating, self-reinforcing closed circle. And the willingness then to take the teaching and instead of trying to get the teaching to validate your present beliefs, you use the teaching to question your present beliefs, your present illusions. This is what the Eightfold Path is about. Until you have this understanding, you cannot really start the true Eightfold Path. You will instead start a false path based on using your present beliefs to define what is right understanding, what is right intent, what is right speech, what is right action, what is right livelihood, what is right effort, what is right mindfulness, what is right concentration. It is all “right” because it validates your present beliefs.

Your present beliefs are illusions. How could a true teaching validate them? You have only two options here. Either the Buddha gave a false teaching or your present beliefs are illusions. You cannot have it both ways. The choice is always to question your own mind, your own perception, your own way of looking at life. This is when you start the path, the path that leads to enlightenment. You can also take the Buddha’s teachings and create a false path that leads you further and further into illusion. This may give you some sense that you have reached some superior state compared to other people, because you have this advanced teaching, you have practiced it so many times and all of these things. It may change your experience of life, but it does not raise your consciousness on that ladder that leads to enlightenment. You are still in the diving suit.

This was my second installment for what I wanted to give you for this conference. I will, of course, have more to say about the other steps on the Eightfold Path. With this I seal you in the clear, undivided understanding of the Buddha.

 

Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels

 

Back to Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world

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Listen to a recording of this dictation (subscribers only)

Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, January 7, 2023. This dictation was given during the 2023 New Year’s webinar – Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. Padmasambhava and I have taken up counsel to see what we might give you, who are our direct students, to help you in this specific time. We have also looked at what we might give that could help other spiritually open-minded people and what could help the planet in general. Naturally, by so many of you connecting via the internet, giving your decrees and invocations in unison, you are also tremendously helping the planet. 

Now, what can be said about life on earth that has any meaning for the greatest number of people? Well, what could be said is that life is difficult, life is a challenge, or as I said 2500 years ago, life is suffering, the First Noble Truth. This is probably something that most people on earth would agree upon. If you step back and ask another question: “What is life on earth, what could it be compared to?,” then here is one possible way to look at it. 

How it feels to come into embodiment

You will know that in the old days they had these big diving suits, a heavy waterproof suit that you put on, a big metal helmet that had only very small openings that you could see out of. I know that most of you of course have never worn such a suit, but still, you can probably imagine that putting on such a suit feels quite restraining. It is heavy, it is bulky, it is stiff, it is difficult to move in it. Then, of course, you are tied to the surface with a rope and with a hose through which is pumped air into the helmet. Imagine what happens when you go under the water in such a suit. You already feel restricted by the suit, but once you are under the water there is pressure on your body from the water pressing against the suit. The deeper you go the more pressure. At the same time on the surface, you can at least see quite far through the small openings in the helmet, but once you are in the water, depending on the clarity of the water, you cannot see very far. Now consider that in order to go under the water you have to wear weights. It can be boots that are weighted down, you can have weights in your belts, in order to even go to the bottom of the water. Well, this is what it is like for a spiritual being, a non-material being, call it the soul or whatever you want to call it, to come into physical embodiment.

Not only are you wearing one diving suit, you are wearing four. When as a being you descend into embodiment, you first descend into what we have called the identity body where your identity is centered. Now, this identity that you have in your present lifetime may be very much affected by the environment into which you were born, the culture, the way the people there look at themselves, even what we have called the collective consciousness. You were brought up to identify yourself a certain way.

Then, the next body, the next diving suit, you put on is the mental body, where you have the way you look at life, the way you look at the ‘how’ of life, whereas the identity body might be more the ‘what.’ The mental body is what can you do, what you cannot do, how do you need to do things and many subtle ways that you look at life and define what kind of a person you are, what your options are, what your choices are. 

This is the mental body where you can argue for particular viewpoints, you can argue against particular viewpoints. You can see that the mental bodies of different people can come up with very different conclusions. They might even look at the same ideas, the same evidence. One concludes that there is no God, there is nothing beyond the material universe. Another concludes that there must be something beyond the material universe and of course, a myriad of other questions that people can disagree on. This is very much something that takes place in the mental body, but of course it starts in the identity body because some people are brought up and have accepted the identity as religious people, others as non-religious people or a variety of other identities that people take on.

Then, of course the third body you take on is the emotional body where your feelings are centered. Again, depending on where you grew up, you have been brought up to take on certain patterns that determine how people in your culture react to certain situations. Some people are very passive, they have a tendency to submit to authority, are not wanting to make decisions, not feeling they have any right to demand anything. Others are more aggressive, feel they have a right to demand or even impose their will upon others. Others feel they have a right to become angry, some even feel they have an obligation to subdue their feelings and not become angry or show any other feelings. Again, a myriad of responses. 

Then, of course, finally there is the physical body which is the most restraining of the four because it is the densest. What you can say is that for a non-material being to come into these four bodies is enormously restraining. This is just the four bodies you took on in this lifetime in order to be in embodiment. Of course, Buddhism and many spiritual philosophies from around the world recognize reincarnation. It is not just what you have taken on in this lifetime from the culture in which you grew up. You carry something with you from previous lifetimes where you also have taken on a certain identity, certain mental patterns, certain emotional patterns and here you could say that at least the physical body is new every time but still there can be patterns from the past that determine how your physical body is, how it functions, even what diseases it is prone to. 

You see here that when you step back and look at life you can see that once you are inside these four bodies, these four diving suits and once you have gone under the water that is the collective consciousness, the energy field of earth, you cannot help but feel restrained. It is simply impossible. It is impossible to be in embodiment on earth without feeling this enormous pressure. 

What really causes suffering

This is a deeper meaning of the First Noble Truth that life is suffering. Life on a planet like earth with the density of matter, the density of the collective consciousness, the many conflicts that are happening constantly between people is suffering. You cannot escape it because this is the environment you are in. What can you then do? Well, you can of course do many things and we have given many  teachings but let us here focus on the Second Noble Truth. Suffering springs from what has often been translated as wrong desire. However, the deeper meaning, the higher understanding, is that it is not ‘wrong’ in opposition to ‘right.’

It is a specific type of desire that causes suffering and there are of course, various levels of understanding that can be given. What I am saying here is not an attempt to invalidate the way most Buddhists have for the past 2500 years interpreted the Buddha’s teachings. It is not an attempt to say that they are wrong in their interpretation. But what you do see, not only in Buddhism but in most religions and even in some non-religious philosophies on the planet is that people have this tendency to define something that is right in opposition to something that is wrong.

This is of course, the essence of the dualistic consciousness. There are two opposite polarities but they are not just opposites as for example, black and white. There is a value judgment associated with them and this means that people see one polarity being right and the other polarity being wrong. This means that many Buddhists throughout the ages have looked at desires this way and they have attempted to come up with a definition that says these desires are the wrong desires that the Buddha talked about and these other desires are the right desires that the Buddha talked about. But this is a superficial level of understanding at best. 

One could also say it is not what the Buddha meant at all. It is not what I was talking about 2500 years ago because I gave the teachings in the Dhammapada about the ‘pairs.’ When you talk about right and wrong, you have created a pair and this traps you in this dualistic state of consciousness. In fact, it is this dualistic state of consciousness that is the cause of suffering. Now, I said that you cannot descend into embodiment on a planet like earth without feeling this pressure but this is because the collective consciousness on earth is so very strongly affected by duality, by the pairs, by the dualistic polarities, by the value judgment: good and evil, right and wrong and so forth. 

Now, many people of course in the world will not be able to grasp this. They will not be able to grasp duality. This is where as spiritual teachers we are always facing a certain limitation. We might say, to go back to the analogy of the person wearing a diving suit, that people on earth are wearing this heavy diving suit, they are weighted down by all kinds of things so they are at the bottom of the water. What is weighing them down? Well, their physical bodies, their emotional patterns, their mental beliefs, their mental holy cows and even their sense of identity. These contents of the emotional, mental and identity bodies are the weights on your diving suit that are holding you down to the bottom of the ocean.

The challenge for spiritual teachers

Here we have people on earth, they are in this very constraining suit of these four bodies weighted down at the bottom of the ocean. Depending on the clarity of the water where they live, they can only see so far. Yet here we are as spiritual teachers we, have freed ourselves from the weights, we have freed ourselves from the diving suit, we have risen above the surface of the water, we are up in the clear sunshine where we can see very, very far and here we are trying to communicate with people who are down at the bottom of the ocean, wearing this heavy suit and not being able to see more than three meters beyond their own nose. 

When you step back, and you can mentally step back from the diving suit, you can see the problem. We as spiritual teachers are experiencing a completely different reality than what most people are experiencing being at the bottom of the ocean. We are trying to tell people that there is an alternative to what they are going through. There is a different perspective, a different way to look at life and we are trying to tell them, first of all, that it is desirable to gain this greater perspective. We are even trying to tell them that although they cannot gain the complete perspective that we have when we are not in embodiment, they can at least attain somewhat of a wider perspective while they are in embodiment. 

But how many people can even lock in to this? How many people can even grasp that there is a different way to look at life than the one they have been brought up to look at life in this embodiment and what they have taken on in many past lifetimes? How many people can grasp this? 

What has happened, for example, with the philosophy of Buddhism and many other spiritual and religious teachings is of course, that here is a philosophy that is given from a higher perspective, a wider perspective than what most people have on earth. But people have not been able to step up and attain that perspective, which of course is not what you expect as a spiritual teacher. As a spiritual teacher you expect that people can follow a gradual path from their current level of awareness, their current perspective so they can gradually step-by-step expand their awareness, broaden their perspective and come at least closer to what you have as a spiritual teacher. Yet what inevitably happens, and it happens to all religions and spiritual philosophies, is that there are some people who are attracted to the philosophy and so they must (and they can do nothing else) approach it with their current level of consciousness. This means that they will inevitably project certain things upon the spiritual teaching. We can also say that as they take in the spiritual teaching from the outside, in order to reach their conscious minds, the spiritual teaching must be filtered through their emotional, mental and identity bodies, even their physical bodies and brains.

You could say that you are wearing these four diving suits and in the very center of these suits is you, the essence of who you are as a self-aware being. But you cannot see the world directly as it is, you can only see it through the four diving suits, the four bodies that form a filter. So, here is an impulse coming to you from the outside as a spiritual teaching, and in order to reach you as a conscious being who can think, make decisions, it must be filtered through these four bodies, these four levels of the mind. 

How can a spiritual teaching work?

Depending on what is in your four bodies before the teaching even reaches you, it has been filtered and colored. The question is: “How can a spiritual teaching work?” Well, it can work only if the you, that you are, understands the central dynamic of a spiritual teaching. What is the purpose of giving a spiritual teaching? The purpose is to show you that there is a way beyond your own mind, that you can go beyond your current perspective, your current level of consciousness, and that the teaching is meant as a tool for you to achieve this journey, this process of going beyond your present perception of the world, your present perception filter, your current way of looking at life.

If a person does not grasp this, what will happen? Well, the person will take the spiritual teaching and will now superimpose upon the teaching what it has in its three higher bodies. It will superimpose certain emotional patterns, certain mental patterns and a certain sense of identity. One typical outcome of this is that there are many people in the world who have a desire to feel superior to others. They will often then take a spiritual teaching and they will use whatever the teaching gives to construct this overlay upon the spiritual teaching that makes it seem like those who are followers of that teaching, those who are living up to this outer set of demands, following these rules, practicing these practices, that they are superior to those who are not in that teaching. 

You see virtually every religion on earth where the people feel that they are superior to those who are not in their religion. Many, many Buddhists feel this way. Of course, many Christians, Hindus, Muslims, what have you, feel the same way. And this is just one example among many of how people, when they do not grasp the central dynamic of a spiritual teaching, will superimpose the contents of their own emotional, mental and identity minds at the subconscious level upon the spiritual teaching. They are in essence pulling the teaching into their diving suit. 

I said that when you are in one of these diving suits you do have a hose that pumps air into the helmet but you also have a rope that ties you to the surface. What is a spiritual teaching? Well, it is the rope. The question is what are you going to do with that rope? You can see that many, many people around the world are not even aware that there is a rope. They are simply wandering around at the bottom of the ocean with their very limited perspective and they are looking for something. But many people who have found a spiritual teaching have realized: “Oh, here is a rope I can hold on to.” But now the question is: Do they understand the purpose of the rope? Do they say: “Oh, there must be something at the other end of the rope and if I pull myself up alongside the rope, I will get to that something at the other end?”

 And this of course is the purpose of the rope. You can pull yourself up, but those who do not understand the central dynamic of a spiritual teaching, they will do something else. They will pull the rope towards them until they have pulled all of the rope down to their level and wrapped it around themselves so that they often now, after entering a religious or spiritual teaching, they are even more restricted than in their original diving suit because now they have wound this rope that was meant to free them more tightly around themselves so they can barely move because now they have all these ideas of how a Buddhist or a Muslim or a Christian is supposed to behave or not behave, feel or not feel, think or not think, identify themselves or not identify themselves. 

The desire to escape the pressure

This is the situation on earth and this now brings us back to right desire. Wrong desire causes suffering therefore, people who have pulled the rope down to themselves reason that if they just identify what the right desires are and cultivate them, they must escape suffering. But this is not going to work. Many, many people, not only Buddhists, but from other spiritual and religious teachings, have proven that it will not work, but explaining why it will not work is impossible for people who have not understood that the purpose of a spiritual teaching is to help them see something that they cannot see right now, to help them see something that is beyond their present state of mind. 

What is the difference between an unenlightened person and an enlightened person? It is only one thing, the state of mind. In order to move towards enlightenment, (and the Eightfold Path is defined as a process of moving towards enlightenment) you have to start at your present level. You cannot jump from here to there in one giant leap, at least most people cannot. The Eightfold Path was given as a systematic gradual step-by-step process whereby people can approach enlightenment. There are many things to be said about this, which I will return to. But the basics of the Eightfold Path is there is a process that leads you from here to somewhere else.

What is that somewhere else? Well, it is, as I have said, where you have freed yourself from the limiting perspective you have right now and attained a broader perspective, a different state of mind. In other words, you can from one perspective say that the difference between an unenlightened person and an enlightened person is their level of awareness. And you can define then a gradual path that leads from your present level awareness towards higher and higher levels of awareness until you reach some state where you are free from the most common human limitations. 

We could in one sense define that the desires are what causes your suffering, but what kind of desires? And this requires us to take a deeper look. Most people, because they are wearing this diving suit, feel restricted. They feel they are up against a set of limitations for what they can do or what they cannot do. They often feel forced to do many things because of circumstances. 

At the most basic level you have to feed your physical body. And unless you were Prince Siddhartha who grew up in a palace where everything was given to him that he needed, you most often have to work in order to feed your physical body, so right there many people feel forced by this. But there are many other things that make people feel forced. Many pressures on the emotional body. Many patterns in the mental mind where people feel forced to deal with certain ideas. And of course, the sense of identity where you are under pressure to identify yourself as part of this group or that group. And maybe even that you are part of this group which means you are against this other group and you have to fight them and struggle against them. We can say that many people feel they are under pressure. And what do they desire to do? What are the desires they have? Well, they desire to remove the pressure or at least to find a relief from the pressure. You have many, many desires that are related to the pressure that people feel in their present situation, whatever it may be, depending on where you have grown up.

You have a set of desires, you want to escape certain limitations, you want to have a relief from certain pressures. The question is: “Can such desires be fulfilled?” And the answer is of course: yes and no. There are many people who have achieved some lowering of the pressure of existence. Many people for example, in certain parts of the world, have an education, they have a job that gives them a stable and steady income where they do not have to worry about the necessities of life. That is all taken care of. But does that mean they are free from pressure? They are free from some pressure but certainly many people have other pressures that are weighing upon them. 

You see in general that you can achieve some freedom from certain pressures of life but it is very, very difficult to achieve freedom from all pressures of life. And why is that? Well, it is because you are seeking freedom from the pressures but where are the pressures located? Where are the pressures experienced? Now you may say: “I am in this diving suit under the water and the weight of the water is putting pressure on me, so, by the mere fact that I am in embodiment on a dense planet like earth with the density of the collective consciousness there is an external pressure upon me.” And this is true, there is. 

The central understanding of a spiritual teaching

The central understanding of a spiritual teaching is that there is a difference between the external pressure and your internal experience of it. Again, many people throughout the ages have failed to grasp this. They have studied a spiritual teaching that contained these ideas in whatever form they were given, given the particular time and culture in which they were given. But they have failed to grasp that there is a difference between the external pressure and your internal experience of it. What does this mean? 

Well, you are feeling the pressure from the world. Now, you find a spiritual teaching and here is again one of these dilemmas for us as spiritual teachers. We are above the pressure. We do not feel the pressure. We experience how much more free and joyful we are because we are not feeling this pressure. We realize what pressure you are under. But we also see that many people are so burdened by the pressure that they cannot think very far ahead. We have to give them some kind of motivation that motivates them to even study this spiritual teaching we are giving, and to engage in this process of following the teaching, applying the teaching. 

What motivates people that are under this enormous pressure? Well, they want to be free of the pressure. The spiritual teaching must make some implicit promise that you can be free of the pressure. Of course, this promise is true—and at the same time, it is untrue. Because, if you look at the spiritual teaching and as I said, pull the rope down to your level and tie it around yourself, then the promise is not true because the spiritual teaching will not free you from the pressure. Why? Because the pressure that you experience is not the external pressure. 

What did I say earlier? Any impulse that comes to you goes through your emotional, mental and identity body before it reaches the you, the conscious being inside the four suits. So does the pressure. There is a pressure from the outside world, from the collective consciousness. There is no denying it. I am in no way trying to say that there is no pressure on you. But your experience of the pressure takes place inside your mind, and it is a matter of what emotional patterns do you have, what thoughts do you have, what beliefs and what is your sense of identity. This is what creates your experience of the pressure. The pressure is there. But it is how you experience the pressure that affects you. 

How to use a spiritual teaching

Again, here you are. You are in embodiment on a very difficult planet. You find a spiritual teaching. How can you make use of the teaching? Let us say your goal is, you want relief from some of the pressure you are feeling. And now you are saying: “Here is the teaching that makes this promise that I can find peace of mind or enlightenment or nirvana.” But how can this happen? Is it likely that by you finding a particular spiritual teaching and deciding to study and follow that teaching, that you can remove the external pressure upon you? Well, of course it is not. Because, that external pressure is partly created by the density of matter but also by the density of the collective consciousness, which involves all other human beings on the planet. 

How is you finding and following a spiritual teaching going to change this external condition? How will you, sitting somewhere in a Buddhist monastery with your legs crossed and giving chants or studying sutras, going to change the density of matter and the collective consciousness? This has never been a promise made by a spiritual teaching that came from beings who have freed themselves from the pressure, from the diving suits. Those who have attained freedom would never make such a promise. What is the only remaining option? It is, that following a spiritual teaching will not remove the pressure, it will change the way you experience the pressure. There is nothing else that a spiritual teaching can do. It can only change your inner experience. It cannot change the external situation.

This is, of course, a statement with some qualifications because everything is an expression of these interdependent originations, which I will talk more about later. Therefore, by you changing your consciousness, you will also change your external situation. But for now, we need to realize that no matter how much you change your consciousness, you will not change the basic fundamentals of the density of matter and the density of the collective consciousness. This overall pressure you cannot expect to change. But what you can expect is that by following a spiritual teaching, you can change the way this affects you, how you experience life on earth. And this is the core of any spiritual teaching. This is the reality of any spiritual teaching. The primary goal of any spiritual teaching is to help you identify the weights that are weighing down your diving suits at your emotional, mental and identity level, help you look at these, bring them into conscious awareness and say: “Do I want to keep dragging this around with me?”  And if you say no, you let it go.

The impossible desire

 What is constructive desire and non-constructive desire? Well, the desire that is based on your present level of awareness and your desire to escape the pressure that you are feeling, is a non-constructive desire because it keeps you tied to your present level of awareness. It works against your growth towards higher levels of awareness. How can it be otherwise? As long as that weight is in your diving suit, in the belt of your diving suit, it will weigh you down, because gravity will pull on it. The gravitational force of the collective consciousness will pull on it. It can be no other way, it is simply basic physics, basic natural law. Only, it is a physics that is beyond the material level but incorporates all of the levels of the material world, the emotional, mental and identity. 

Like attracts like, there is a gravitational pull, and it will pull on anything that you have in your emotional, mental and identity minds. It can be no other way. What is it that most people, when they first find a spiritual teaching, desire to do? They desire to escape the pressure by using their present contents of the emotional, mental and identity bodies. In other words, what have I said? Your experience of the pressure is determined by the contents of your three bodies, the three levels of your mind. It is because of those contents that you are experiencing the pressure the way you currently experience it. 

Now, you find a spiritual teaching that makes a promise that you can escape the pressure. And you are thinking that by just studying the outer teaching and performing the outer practices, I can escape the pressure, without doing anything about the contents of my emotional, mental and identity bodies. In other words, you can escape the experience without doing anything about the very conditions that are producing your experience. 

It cannot be done. It never could be done. There is no shortcut that you can ever come up with that will make this possible. It is an impossible desire. Therefore, from a certain perspective, we could say it is a wrong desire. It is certainly what I meant with the teaching I gave 2,500 years ago. You have to refine your desires, so that you do not desire some kind of shortcut to escape suffering, to escape the pressure, without looking at yourself and your own mind. Seeing the conditions that are creating your experience of the pressure—this is the only realistic way to look at a spiritual teaching. 

The need for continuity

Now, what prevents people from grasping this or what is meant in the Second Noble Truth about desires? Well, it is what is in the Third Noble Truth, their attachments. People have a need that is not generally recognized by society, even by the modern psychological profession. We can call it a need for security, a need for safety, but it would be more constructive to call it a need for continuity. 

This need springs from your reaction to the pressure, the external pressure. If you look at this from a certain perspective, you could say that all human beings have the potential for what is often called a mental breakdown. More and more people, even in the modern world where they do not have the physical challenges of maintaining an existence, are experiencing these mental breakdowns. Things become too much, too overwhelming and they cannot deal with life. They cannot function as it is considered normal in their society. What is behind this? Well, what is behind it is the very simple fact that you live on a planet where the pressure that you are exposed to in your physical body, your emotional body, your mental body, your identity body, is so big that nobody can deal with it. 

You cannot mentally, psychologically, survive the pressure you are under on this planet if you have not found a way to protect yourself from the pressure. In other words, the pressure itself is too great for people to bear. Now, why do many people then manage to live some kind of normal existence? Because, you also have the ability to shut out some of the pressure. This is what I mean when I talk about you have certain things in your emotional, mental and identity bodies that act as a filter between you and the world around you. You have these filters so you can shut down, you can suppress certain feelings, you can suppress certain thoughts, you can suppress a certain pressure on your identity and therefore, you are not overwhelmed, you can function. 

What we can say is that the vast majority of people have built this sense of equilibrium that allows them to function normally. But they are constantly under pressure and therefore, there is always the risk that something can happen that breaks the equilibrium, people become overwhelmed, and it is just too much for them. This mechanism of the need to maintain this equilibrium, is then what causes people to be attached. There are certain emotional patterns that you are attached to because even though you do not realize this consciously, you sense that they protect you against these overwhelming feelings. Same way with mental patterns. There are, for example, many religious people who are very attached to certain patterns that prevent them from having doubts about their religion. This is what causes attachment. 

Now this was a teaching that could not be given 2500 years ago because the collective consciousness was much lower. And very few people, hardly any people, would have been able to grasp it. Because of the advances in the modern world in many fields, not just psychology but also psychology, it is now possible to give a deeper teaching. Basically, we can say that most people have, in order to survive psychologically on this planet, built certain defenses that protect them against being overwhelmed. But these defenses also prevent you from going beyond your present level of awareness. We can say that the diving suit keeps you dry and the weights keep you upright. But it also keeps you inside the diving suit and at the bottom of the ocean, so here is another of these dichotomies, dilemmas, enigmas, about the spiritual path. In order to change your present experience of life, you have to look at some of these very things that are both protecting you and restricting you and this is precisely what the Eightfold Path is designed to help people do. Of course, the Eightfold Path is not the only way to do this. There are many other ways that are valid ways for describing the process, but my attempt here has been to break down this process as much as at all possible, make it as universal as possible. 

Understanding what the Eightfold Path is designed to do

Let us give a summary. Suffering is caused by the pressure you are exposed to. The pressure leads to desires to escape the pressure, to have a relief from the pressure. They are desires that cannot free you from the pressure because if you have a desire to escape the pressure without looking at what causes the pressure, which is your internal conditions, then those desires cannot free you. Engaging in the true process of the spiritual path, whether you call it the Eightfold Path or something else, requires you to look at some of these mechanisms that from a certain perspective protects you against being overwhelmed by the pressure, but from another perspective keeps you in the pressure indefinitely. You are protected in the diving suit, but you will never escape the diving suit unless you look at what it is that keeps you weighted down.

This is what the Eightfold Path is truly designed to do. It is not an external measure that changes the external conditions so that you now do not have the conditions that cause you to feel the pressure or the suffering. The Eightfold Path is not designed to be some magical process that changes your external conditions. It is designed to be a gradual, systematic process for changing your internal conditions so that you change your experience of the external conditions. 

This is the essence, not only of Buddhism, but of every other constructive spiritual philosophy. Those who grasp this will make progress on the Eightfold Path, or whatever you name the path. Those who do not grasp this will actually use the spiritual teaching to tie themselves more firmly to their present level of awareness. They will reinforce their perception filter and they might go around feeling they are very special compared to those who are not in their teaching, feeling they are very advanced because they have attained this high degree of understanding, intellectual understanding, of the teaching. They have also done all of these practices for so many years that they come to feel they must have attained some progress. 

Now, we need to ask a question. Is it possible to find a valid spiritual teaching, to study it and to diligently practice whatever it prescribes without making progress? The answer is, of course, yes. And let us first look at the three bodies. In your emotional body you have certain patterns of emotions that cause you to react certain ways in certain situations. This is the weight you have in your emotional body. You have various weights that are various reactionary patterns. What is the way to be free and to rise on the path towards higher levels of awareness? It is to look at these weights, examine them, examine why you react this way, what is behind this reaction, what is the belief behind it, and then consciously dismiss it. That way you take one weight out of your belt and let it drop to the bottom of the ocean. You are lighter, it is therefore easier for you and you actually come up a step on the gradual path.

We can say also that you are under the water in your diving suits but you come upon a ladder. You grasp on to the ladder, and when you throw out one weight, you can take one step up the ladder. But until you have thrown out that weight, you can hold on to the ladder all you want but you cannot take that next step. This is the true way to make progress—to look at yourself, look at your emotional patterns and dismiss some of them. But what have I said earlier? People are under so much pressure that they cannot psychologically function. They have learned to set up a mechanism that suppresses certain emotions. Many, many people, not only in Buddhism but in other spiritual and religious traditions, have used the spiritual teaching to reinforce this mechanism of suppressing certain emotions. 

You will see, in almost every spiritual movement, there are certain people who have been in that movement for a long time, who have diligently practiced whatever practice it has and who walk around with a certain aura of calmness. They walk slowly, they have certain movements, they talk a certain way. It seems like their emotions are always under control, are always calm. But in many cases, they have simply used the teaching to reinforce or build new mechanisms for suppressing their emotions and this does not lead to progress. You can say: “But these people are experiencing life differently than from before they found the teaching, so have they not made progress in changing their inner experience? You just said that the central aspect of life on earth is your inner experience, your life experience. And these people have clearly changed it.”

Well, yes, but what I am saying here is that there are two ways to change your life experience. You can suppress or you can dissolve. You can suppress your feelings and you can attain some sense of inner peace and calmness but it will be fragile, it can easily be disturbed. This is one reason why you see that in many religious and spiritual traditions, certain people insulate and isolate themselves from the world, for example by living in monasteries or living in certain communities or whatever you have. They can maintain their fragile sense of inner peace because in their outer environment they are rarely disturbed, it is rarely challenged. This is not what leads you to take the next steps up the ladder and it is something that can easily be disturbed when external conditions change. 

Many, many people, not only spiritual people but many people, have experienced, and in the last several years starting with the pandemic, now the war in Ukraine, then the economy, their sense of equilibrium has been disturbed. It is understandable. I am simply pointing out that if your sense of equilibrium can be disturbed by external conditions, it is because there is something you have not resolved and this comes from the mechanism I described. You have something that suppresses, which you have not resolved because you are attached to keeping that sense of equilibrium. 

You must be willing to be disturbed

What does this mean? It means very simply, in order to really grasp what the spiritual path is about, in order to really lock in to that path, you have to be willing to be disturbed. Now, I am not saying that you have to be willing to experience a mental breakdown or be overwhelmed, because the Eightfold Path and any other spiritual path, is designed to be gradual. It takes you gradually up the ladder without you being overwhelmed. But you have to be willing to be disturbed a little bit and this is where many, many people have not grasped the importance of this. 

Many people, if you look at your lives and look at your path, you can see that when you first found the spiritual teaching, you had a desire to have this inner peace. It is not an illegitimate desire, but it has caused many people to use the spiritual teaching to create certain parameters around their minds, where they think that they can achieve inner peace by suppressing their feelings instead of looking at them and dissolving them, dissolving their pattern. 

Why do you react with anger in certain situations? Anger is a feeling. It is a kind of energy but as I have explained, your emotional body is the lowest level of your mind. Above it is the mental, above it is the identity. Energy flows into your mind from your higher self. It enters first in the identity, then the mental, then the emotional. Your emotions do not just appear out of nowhere in the emotional body. They are the result of certain thought patterns you have in your mental body and even a sense of identity you have in the identity body. This is what gives you your current sense of equilibrium. 

Again, I am not finding fault with this. You can do nothing else on a planet like earth. You have to have a certain sense of identity. You have to have certain mental and emotional patterns in order to deal with your outer situation. But in order to make progress on the path towards enlightenment, or whatever you call a higher state of consciousness, you have to be willing to examine these patterns and you have to say: “Why do I respond with anger?” Well, it is because you had a certain expectation of what should or should not happen in your outer situation. That expectation was not met. But it is not really the fact that the expectation was not met that causes the anger. It is because, when the expectation was not met, your equilibrium was disturbed. Your equilibrium covered over a deeper sense of feeling powerless and when your sense of being powerless is stirred up, you feel anger. Anger is the default reaction against feeling powerless. Some people, in their anger, now take actions they normally would not have taken and in some cases, it helps them change the outer situation. In some cases, it only makes it worse. But in all cases, it reinforces the pattern. 

The real way out of this is to trace the feeling of being powerless and the expectations of what should and should not happen up through your emotional body, your mental body and to your identity body. What are the patterns you have that make you feel powerless, that make you feel that certain things should and should not happen? This is the path. The Eightfold Path is that you gradually, systematically, examine the patterns in your mind, bring them into conscious awareness. You take a look at them and say: “I see that this pattern protected me from being overwhelmed but why am I at risk of being overwhelmed? It is because there is a deeper pattern of how I relate to the world that I live in. I have a choice to make. I can continue to suppress and hope that this continues to work, but then I will not climb up the ladder. I will not actually walk the Eightfold Path, no matter how much I study the teachings or practice the practices.The alternative is, that I can actually realize what the Eightfold Path is about, and systematically examine my patterns, my reactions to the world.” 

I talked about those who have been in a spiritual teaching for a long time and I said that some have learned to suppress their feelings, so they always appear calm and collected and at peace, or in control. But there are also many people who have used the mental mind, the intellect, to study the teaching. And they have, now at the mental level, reinforced the patterns that allow them to maintain a sense of equilibrium at the mental level. This is something you do not see only in spiritual or religious teachings. You do in fact see many, many examples of people who have used the mental mind to create this sense of equilibrium. And what is it based on? It is based on the sense that they understand intellectually, analytically, rationally, how the world works and they think they have grasped certain patterns, certain natural laws, certain God-defined principles. And because they understand this, they think they can control the world, or at least their external situation. 

The outcome of this is that you have so many people who have created a mental idea of how the world is supposed to work and they are seeking to project this with the mental mind upon the universe. And they think they can reduce the functionings of the universe to these few simple rules and therefore, they feel they have the world in control. What they have done is, they have used the spiritual teaching, or it could be a political ideology such as communism, or even scientific materialism, to create this mental image of how the world works. But what did I say was the purpose of a spiritual teaching? It was to free you from your present state of awareness. That means freeing yourself from the patterns you have in your mental body. And again, those patterns protect you from, for example, being overwhelmed by doubts.

Many religious people have created these patterns that say: “Oh, this I do not have to think about. I do not have to think about anything that questions my spiritual and religious teaching. It is unnecessary because they are wrong, they cannot be right, so therefore, I can dismiss them without thinking about them.” This is what allows them to maintain that sense of equilibrium. But the problem is of course that the world is rather chaotic. People have many different beliefs and belief systems and religions and ideologies. There will always be something in the world that threatens your beliefs. 

How to transcend your current level of consciousness

Many people have also built this sense that as long as I study this spiritual teaching and perform the practices prescribed, I am guaranteed to reach the goal in the end. Many Buddhists to this day, and throughout the ages, have believed that: “If I study only the Buddha’s teachings, focus only on the Buddha’s teachings and I diligently practice the practices described by my version of Buddhism, I am guaranteed to reach enlightenment or nirvana. Because the Buddha was a true spiritual teacher and he made the promise that if I walk the Eightfold Path, I will reach enlightenment. And since the Buddha is a true spiritual teacher, that promise must be a true promise.” 

What did I explain earlier? We have to make a promise that appeals to people at their current level of consciousness. But you cannot take that promise, interpret it through your current level of consciousness, come up with a certain idea of how you are supposed to walk the Eightfold Path and then when you walk it, based on your current level of consciousness, this will guarantee that you transcend your current level of consciousness. It cannot be done. 

You cannot transcend your current level of consciousness by remaining at your current level of consciousness. How would this be possible? No matter how elaborate mental constructions you come up with, they will not help you transcend the perception filter you have in your mental body. You must be willing to be disturbed, to have doubt about at least one aspect of the current way you look at life. You must be willing to ask some difficult questions and to consider what is behind your current mental pattern. 

If you will not do this, you can again suppress all doubt and make yourself feel convinced that you are right but you are not climbing up to the next step on the ladder. You just stand where you are. You clutch your beliefs. And you become, perhaps during a lifetime, more and more convinced that you are right because there are other people around you who have the same mental patterns and you reinforce each other that you are the ones who have grasped the Buddha’s teaching. But you see what I have explained here. You are currently at a limited level of awareness. The Buddha is beyond limitations, has a level of awareness that is beyond any of the limitations that people have on earth. You will not reach the Buddha’s level unless you systematically, gradually, transcend your current limitations. It cannot be done. There is no way to do it. 

Where does this lead us? You are a spiritual person. You have studied a spiritual teaching for a long time. You have practiced the practices prescribed diligently for a long time. Have you not made progress? Well, most people have because they have been willing to look at something, examine it, let go of it. Some people have not because, as I said, they have used the spiritual teaching to reinforce their patterns. Many have reinforced their sense of identity that they are special compared to those who are not in that spiritual teaching, who cannot understand it the way they understand it, or who have not been as diligent in the practice. They reinforce the identity that they are special but this of course keeps them trapped in the diving suit. They may have changed their life experience in the sense that they feel more and more special, but they are not climbing up the ladder. 

What a spiritual movement cannot do for you

Most of you have made progress. But you can make more progress by becoming more conscious of what I have explained here—the real process of transcending your level of consciousness and that there is always this need to be disturbed. As I said earlier, many of you will recognize that when you first found a spiritual teaching, you thought: “Ah, now I have found what I was longing for. Now I have come home. This is where I really belong, in this teaching, in this community with like-minded people and when I stay here everything will be good. I will have that sense of inner peace that means I can cope with being on this planet.” 

Now many of you have experienced that you had great enthusiasm when you found your first spiritual teaching and movement. But then something happened that disturbed you, disappointed you. You suddenly saw that this was not what you thought it was. Some people have given up on the spiritual path because of it, others have found a way to go on. But have you fully grasped that there is no spiritual teaching or movement that will automatically give you what you desire? 

Many people have found one spiritual movement, been disappointed, but then they have found another one and they have reasoned: “This is it.” Or rather they have reasoned: “This must be it because I cannot bear to be disappointed again, therefore I will suppress anything that questions my second spiritual movement or my third, whatever it may be.” But the only way to make true progress is to use an outer teaching and an outer movement to question your sense of equilibrium. Now you may say: “But when I found my first spiritual teaching, I had a desire to find inner peace from the pressure of this world. Is this a wrong desire?” Well, yes and no. In a sense you could say that it is a valid desire, because ultimately when you attain enlightenment or nirvana, you will be free from the pressures of this world. But how is that freedom going to be achieved? Some will say: “Well, it will only be achieved after this world. When I am no longer in embodiment, then I can find true peace.” 

But you see, all teachings that talk about karma and reincarnation, whether they are Buddhist or Hindu or the more modern teachings that talk about the ascension process, they are all implying that if you have not reached a certain level, you cannot free yourself from the wheel of rebirth, you will come back into another embodiment. Ultimately, you could say it is not a matter of when your current physical body dies that you will attain peace. You will only attain this peace from the pressures of this world when you can graduate from the wheel of rebirth, or reach your ascension and you no longer have to come back into embodiment. 

This is, of course, what we teach today. But this was not a realistic teaching to give for the broad population 2500 years ago. Therefore, the focus back then was on giving people the Eightfold Path that would help them change their experience while they were in embodiment. And this is, of course, the perspective that is relevant today as well. What we seek to teach you is how to change your life experience so you can attain inner peace while you are still in a physical body and therefore exposed to the external pressure. This is partly because if you can attain this, you will hold a tremendous balance for the entire planet. You will help pull up on the collective consciousness when you attain a higher level of awareness while you are still in a physical body. For many of you this is what is in your Life plan—to attain this higher sense of peace while you are in a physical body. 

Suppression or resolution

Now, you can see throughout history that many, many people have isolated themselves from the world, living in these monastic communities, where their outer environment is very controlled. They are protected against some of the violent actions that are happening in the world and so they are in a very controlled environment where their sense of equilibrium is not disturbed. Many people have spent an entire lifetime in such an environment without actually making progress. They have not stepped up the ladder. They have only used the outer environment and the teaching to reinforce their sense of equilibrium that is based on suppression. This of course, is not what we are calling you to do today. 

We are calling you to find a way to walk the path so that you attain true peace, a peace that is not based on suppression, but on resolution. You do this while you are still in a physical body so that you can pull up on the collective consciousness and also become an open door whereby you can receive ideas and impulses from a level of higher awareness that you then can express in this world. If you can make this fundamental shift, your entire approach to life can change very quickly. You gain now an entirely different view of what life is about. 

Do you see the fundamental difference I have described here? There is one approach. You are seeking relief from the pressures of being in this world. You are seeking some kind of inner peace however you define it. But the way you seek to attain it is to use a spiritual teaching and practice to suppress your emotions, to suppress certain thoughts, to suppress a certain sense of identity so that you build up this false sense of having control of your emotions, being intellectually superior, and therefore, being fundamentally superior to those who are not in your teaching.

The other approach is to seek resolution. What is the difference in how you look at the world? Well, when you are seeking to suppress something, you are looking at the world as a potential threat. Anything that happens that disturbs your equilibrium is a threat to your sense of equilibrium and therefore it needs to be suppressed. You need to find a way to dismiss it as quickly as possible so you can get back to your sense of equilibrium. You have built patterns in your emotional, mental and identity bodies for doing just that— suppressing anything that disturbs your equilibrium. 

When you take the other approach, you are willing to be disturbed. And you can actually shift into saying: “My true goal is to resolve all of these patterns in my emotional, mental and identity bodies that are keeping me tied to the earth, that are keeping me in the diving suit, that prevent me from climbing up the rope, walking up the ladder, being more and more free. I want to walk the true path of the Buddha, the true Eightfold Path, not the outer path but the inner Eightfold Path.” 

What does this mean for you? It means that when something happens outside of yourself that disturbs your sense of equilibrium, this is not a threat. It is an opportunity. It is an opportunity to say: “Why do I feel disturbed by this? What is the emotion I am feeling? What is behind the emotion? Let me, instead of denying the emotion and trying to suppress it, let me go into it. What is it I am really feeling here? What is it that is behind this? What is the thought process that I can identify? What are my beliefs about this? What kind of a worldview have I built that allows me to feel I am in equilibrium but it also holds me at a certain level? I cannot actually grasp the spiritual teachings that I am studying because of my mental patterns. They always have to fit into these mental patterns instead of disturbing them. And then when I go beyond this, what is my sense of identity relating to earth?” 

For example, you might encounter a negative reaction from other people to something you are doing. You might at first feel anger about this. When you go into the feeling, you see that first of all you feel powerless to change other people’s reaction to you, the way they look at you. But you also feel that you should be able to change their reactions because you want to be at peace with everybody. You do not want people to be angry with you and you cannot see any other way, at least your emotional body cannot see any other way, than to change their reaction so that you do not have the feeling that you have disturbed other people. Then you may go up into the mental realm and see: But why do you have these beliefs? Do you have perhaps a sense that you understand free will, you respect the free will of others, and you feel that you should be able to live on this planet without ever disturbing anybody, without having them become angry at you, without having them accuse you of doing something wrong. You are always looking for a way to make peace with people, to come up with some argument that makes them see why they should not be angry with you, why you are really a good person and so forth. 

Then you can go up to the identity level and realize that perhaps you have a sense that you are not really allowed to be here on earth, you are not really allowed to express yourself, at least not if this disturbs or provokes other people. You feel that you should be able to live here without disturbing anybody. You are always looking for a way to withdraw yourself from situations where you do disturb other people, so that you can still feel that you can be here without constantly being confronted by people who say you have no right to be here. There can be many other patterns but this is just an example that applies to many spiritual people. 

What you can then do is start looking at these patterns and gradually, over time (and it may take a long time) work on them, come to see them, gradually resolve them, until you realize that you do have a right to be on earth. You do have a right to strive for a higher level of consciousness, a higher level of awareness. You do have a right to express this, even if it disturbs other people. You can even come to realize that it will inevitably disturb other people because this is what happens to anybody who raises their awareness beyond what is considered normal in any society. You will disturb their sense of normality, their sense of equilibrium. 

Most people have created this sense of equilibrium that they have a right to be the way they are and when something from the outside disturbs that sense of equilibrium, they become angry and aggressive. They have defined a sense of normal that this is all you can be as a human being. This is the way you need to be. When this is disturbed, they become angry and what are you doing when you are walking the spiritual path? You are gradually raising your awareness beyond what is normal in your society. Will it disturb people? Well, how could it not? 

Being willing to disturb people

Now, it is not recorded in the Buddhist teachings or myths of just how much resistance, opposition, anger that I encountered as the Buddha when I started teaching. It is more recorded in the Christian scriptures of how much opposition Jesus encountered when he started teaching. But all spiritual teachers have encountered this to some degree. Some have managed to withdraw, as I eventually did in the Sangha. Because that is one valid way to teach, that you withdraw from the world, you let people come to you who are open to your teaching. 

The other valid way, as exemplified by Jesus, is to go out there in the world and disturb people. What did Jesus do? If you look at Jesus’ entire three-year mission, what did he do? He disturbed people’s sense of what was normal. He said: “There is more to being a human being than what you are experiencing right now.” And what was the reaction? Total rejection. The people would rather have a murderer set free than to have the person who disturbed them set free. Because the murderer they could deal with. That was normal. Some people kill others. But coming to say that you can be more than a human being, that is outrageous. We will not be disturbed so we will kill the one who disturbs us. 

You see most spiritual people are reluctant to disturb others. But what is it that will bring the golden age of Saint Germain, the age of higher awareness into manifestation? It is that some people must demonstrate that there is more to life than what the population considers normal and you must do this by being out there in whatever capacity. It does not mean that you have to do what Jesus or the Buddha did. It does not mean that you have to be killed or persecuted, but you will disturb people and you need to find a way to be at peace with this in order to fulfill your Divine plan. Now this is not necessarily where you start out on the path. You can have a long period of time where you resolve these patterns so that you are not disturbed when other people react to you. 

I know very well that this has been a long discourse. But I wanted to set a foundation so that I can give you some deeper teachings about the Eightfold Path and how you can then move towards this real sense of inner peace that is not based on suppression and denial but based on resolution and a more enlightened view. 

With this, I thank you for your attention so that I could project this through your minds and chakras into the collective consciousness, where it might reach many people who will never hear of this messenger, this teaching, who will never hear of the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha or never accept it, but it will still have an effect on their consciousness. They will suddenly come to see something they had not seen before and therefore they will be able to use whatever spiritual teaching they have at a higher level. 

You see again, our goal is to raise people’s awareness. It is not our goal to bring everybody into one particular spiritual teaching. But it is our goal that all people who are open to a valid spiritual teaching will reach higher and higher levels of grasping that teaching. You are, in a sense, the catalysts for reinforcing that movement, which of course has been going on for a very long time, even before I gave the teachings as the Buddha 2500 years ago. It is an ongoing process that has been there from the creation of this unascended sphere, even previous spheres. It is the out-breath and the in-breath of God. Being part of this in-breath, being conscious that you are part of the in-breath, can be very helpful in attaining that sense of peace that even though you are living in a world that has many disturbing manifestations, you are here to be part of that ongoing timeless process of raising everything gradually towards higher and higher levels. What could possibly disturb you, other than an unresolved pattern, a separate self that you have not let die, an attachment to that separate self or to that pattern?

 By coming to see this, by working on it until you have separated yourself from it and you suddenly see it from the outside, you see how it limits you and you can let it go—that is how you attain gradually greater and greater peace. There is no magical formula. You cannot suddenly snap your fingers and attain inner peace. But you can go through this transformation and how quickly you go through it is only a matter of your willingness to look at what disturbs your peace. With this, I hope I have both disturbed your peace, your sense of equilibrium, but given you a deeper sense of peace. I shall certainly return to give you deeper teachings, and to disturb you even more, as you are willing. 

Be sealed now in the joy of the Buddha that I Am.

 

Copyright © 2023 Kim Michaels

 

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