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 

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

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

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

Back to Being a spiritual person in a chaotic world