TOPICS: Superiority and inferiority – What is the Middle Way? –

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Ascended Master Gautama Buddha, October 22, 2006 through Kim Michaels.

May the peace of Buddha abide in you, so that you can stay on the middle Way. For my beloved, when I appeared on earth, those almost twenty-five hundred years ago, I came into a situation and a culture that is much similar to what many of you experience today. Buddhism did not appear in a vacuum. It appeared in a culture that was dominated by Hinduism, or should I say by a false Hinduism that had evolved over centuries.

And it had all of the characteristics that you see in any religion on earth, namely a leadership who thought that they had power over the members, that they had the power to determine whether the members would be saved or not because they thought that they were God’s representatives on earth. And then you had a large group of followers who passively did whatever they were told, thinking that only by this blind obedience would they enter heaven.

My teaching that I gave forth was fully as revolutionary as the teaching of Jesus, for I also taught that the kingdom of God is within you. And the key to your salvation, the key to enlightenment, is found within your own mind. It is found by working with your mind, by overcoming the state of consciousness that binds you to the wheel of suffering, the endless dualistic struggle that has been going on since someone in the fallen consciousness first descended to earth.

Superiority and inferiority

If you are willing to take a look again at spiritual and religious organizations, you can see that so far most religions on this planet, certainly most Christian churches, but you will even see that many spiritual organizations have followed that same pattern, and that pattern is very clear. These organizations are dominated by two kinds of students, two kinds of people.

There are those who are the proud, those who take up leadership positions, who love to have power, who love to feel they are above the other people because they do this or that outer thing. So this then is the one polarity of pride that is represented by what modern psychology calls the superiority complex.

And yet you see another polarity, a majority of the people, who from a surface perspective might appear to be the meek and the humble, yet if you look closer, you will see that they are not truly meek and humble for they are simply in the opposite polarity. And instead of wanting to stand out from the crowd, they want to disappear into the crowd and become invisible. For they have indeed embodied what psychology calls the inferiority complex. They feel so unworthy to do anything on their own that they want an outer savior to do all the work for them.

Do you see that there is a codependent relationship between those who feel superior and those who feel inferior? Those with a superiority complex need to feel that they are better than others, they need to feel that someone looks up to them. And those with an inferiority complex gladly fill that role—for it also serves them, for they can then feel that they have to do nothing. They don’t have to stand out from the crowd, they can be invisible and yet feel that these wonderful leaders that they worship will surely take them to the promised land.

Can you not see that this is very true of the Catholic Church? Can you not see that it is true of certain spiritual organizations, where you find this codependent relationship between people trapped in superiority and those trapped in inferiority? What is the way out? Well, the way out is – of course – to realize that both the inferiority and the superiority complex spring from the human ego and its duality. It is really just a matter of which dualistic extreme you have entered into, whether into the extreme of superiority or the extreme of inferiority.

What is the Middle Way?

Yet in either case, you have left off the Middle Way. And what is the Middle Way? The Middle Way is those who are balanced. For they know who they are. They have discovered the kingdom of God that is within them. And when you know who you are, you have no need to feel superior to any other human being.

For you know you are a unique individual created by God. And all of these dualistic evaluations and judgments have become irrelevant. They have no consequence to you. Likewise, you also know that you are not inferior to anyone on earth, no matter what their position or rank might be in some outer organization, and no matter what appearance of authority or importance that organization might have.

For you know that there is a higher reality than what you see on earth. And therefore, you know that status among men means nothing in the eyes of God. Did not Christ say that the low shall be raised and the high shall be made low, that those who are first shall be last, and those who are last shall be first? Did he not say that he who would be greatest among you should be the servant of all? And did I not give forth teachings, likewise, about overcoming—not just the pride, but also its opposite polarity of the false humility that truly covers over the inferiority complex.

The essence of what is going on on this planet is that people must come to the point, where they rise above the dualistic struggle, the dualistic extremes, and find that balance, that Middle Way, that is really not midway between the two extremes but at a higher level, where duality has become irrelevant, it has become of no consequence. And the questions that spring from the dualistic mind are simply no longer of any importance to you, because you know there is a higher, living truth that cannot even be expressed fully in the words of duality. And so, you can come up higher. Yet my beloved, there is an even higher understanding of this that we desire to give you and I will leave that to my brother Maitreya.