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Ascended Master Maitreya through Kim Michaels, June 8, 2025. This dictation was given the conference in Seoul, South Korea: Being the Living Christ in everyday life.

I AM the Ascended Master Maitreya. What does Christhood mean from my perspective, as holding the office of the Cosmic Christ for Earth? Well, in previous dispensations it was said that Lord Maitreya was what was referred to as “God” in the story of the Garden of Eden. Now this, of course, was a statement that needs to be understood at a deeper level.

It needs to be understood that Lord Maitreya is a title that can be held by different ascended masters, not just one. The being that I am today, holding this title, is not the one that was there in the Garden of Eden, even though, of course, there was no physical Garden of Eden exactly as it is described in Genesis. Again, everything in these scriptures need to be taken as a symbol, not as a literal reality.

What is a spiritual teacher?

Nevertheless, given that I am now holding this office of the Cosmic Christ, what is this office? Well, you might say that the Cosmic Christ represents the concept of spiritual teachers. I say “represents” because, again, spiritual teachers can be understood at different levels.

Yet, when you look at how our world of form was created, you can say that from the very beginning was built into the design of this world the concept of teachers. In the first sphere, the self-aware extensions of the Creator had a teacher, which was the Creator. In the second sphere, the ascended masters from the first sphere became the teachers of the unascended beings in the second, and so on. That is why the ascended masters of the sixth sphere were the original spiritual teachers for the unascended beings in this seventh sphere.

I started as a being, an unascended being, in this seventh sphere as you all did. I originally had spiritual teachers from the sixth sphere, but then, when I ascended, I took up this office of the Cosmic Christ for Earth and therefore, I now represent this concept, this lineage of spiritual teachers.

Now, you may say: “What is the purpose of a spiritual teacher?” When people first hear about a spiritual path that leads to higher levels of consciousness, and hear about the concept that it is beneficial or even necessary to have a teacher, then they project a certain image on it based on how they are looking at teachers on Earth. Most people on Earth have, of course, gone to some form of school where they sit there passively and they are receiving teachings from a teacher that stands at the head of the class or on some kind of podium, and he is teaching them outer knowledge.

Many people, when they first hear about the spiritual path, they think that a spiritual teacher is supposed to teach them some kind of outer knowledge that then helps them walk the spiritual path. Sometimes, even more than that, there are many students that think that a spiritual teacher is supposed to impart to them some kind of secret knowledge, some kind of esoteric knowledge, that will help them make swift and easy progress on the spiritual path. These people think that making spiritual progress is a matter of knowing something about the spiritual realm, but also about this process that leads to spiritual growth. What many people also project on the concept of a spiritual teacher is that he is supposed to give them a breakdown of what the spiritual path entails.

The spiritual path is not a linear process

In other words, a systematic linear process like you, for example, see in the schools where you learn mathematics in a gradual way by starting with simple counting, then addition, subtraction, multiplication, then more advanced forms of math. Or as you learn for example in an engineering school where you learn to make certain calculations of how you can create a new technological device, for example. What this causes many people to project upon a spiritual teacher is this idea that the spiritual path can be reduced to a linear process that is mechanical in nature.

When I say mechanical, what I mean is that people project that the spiritual teacher has some knowledge, some formulas, some ability. This means that anybody who puts themselves down in front of the teacher and listens to the teacher’s imparting of knowledge is guaranteed to achieve the defined result, be it a higher state of consciousness, Christhood, the mastery of mind over matter, the ascension or whatever it may be that people desire as a result of walking the spiritual path. In other words, many people find a spiritual teaching or guru (or even hear about the concept of a spiritual guru) and they project that this guru should give them some mechanical way to raise their consciousness, a way that is guaranteed to work if they just follow the teacher’s instructions.

Now, where does this entire idea come from? Did it come from the ascended realm? Did it come from the Christ mind? What have other masters so carefully explained about the Christ mind? It does seek to unify you with your source, with your Creator, but it does so within the Law of Free Will. What does that mean? It means that in order to come into unity with the Christ mind, you must make choices, conscious choices, aware choices.

What does this mean? It means that you can have two people who are both listening to the same instructions from the same teacher, but there is no guarantee that the two people will make the same choices to take in, to internalize and to apply the teaching. This means that a true spiritual teacher is not teaching a mechanical path. A true spiritual teacher cannot guarantee the results. There is no guarantee that you will receive specific results if you follow a true spiritual teacher, for it depends on the choices you make, and what are those choices? Well, the real choice is, or the real decisive factor, is: Will you apply the teachings and be willing to look at yourself, your own psychology?

Why the path is not mechanical

The student that makes the most progress on the true path is the one who is willing to look at the beam in his or her own eye. There may be another student who is less willing to do so, or not willing to do so at all, because that student is expecting the mechanical, guaranteed results. There may be students who can listen to a valid teacher, a true spiritual teacher, without getting any results.

Where does the concept of a mechanical, guaranteed path come from? Well, it, of course, is based on the ego, which as we have so carefully explained, is always seeking to compensate by achieving some ultimate status in this world. In the physical realm on planet Earth, you do indeed see that there is a certain mechanical aspect of how matter works. Look for example at modern technology. Look at science, which in its quest for objectivity, has attempted to reduce the universe to a kind of machine. If you know a certain formula, if you apply a certain technology, then anybody who applies that formula can create a toaster that is guaranteed to work and toast bread.

The ego then reasons that since the physical world has mechanical properties, the spiritual world should also be mechanical, and therefore, there should be a mechanical path. Now of course, the concept of a teacher who can guarantee results also comes from the fallen beings, but even before the fallen beings came to Earth, there was a certain belief in the collective consciousness that if we could only get everyone to conform to the world view that was promoted by society at the time, then the results would be guaranteed. The planet would survive and there would be an ideal society for a thousand years.

What is a false teacher?

As we have explained, this had put the Earth into a self-destructive spiral and that is why the fallen beings, along with avatars, were allowed to embody here to break up the uniformity. The fallen beings, of course, did break up the uniformity, and part of the way they did this was that they set themselves up as teachers. They claimed to be true teachers and what they did was: They looked at the people on Earth, they looked at their state of consciousness and they said: “Our goal is to get people to blindly follow us. How can we best do this? Well, we must look at what people want to believe and then tell them that we can help them achieve the goals they want to achieve and then they will follow us.”

You see here, the fallen beings have a specific goal. Their goal is not to raise up human beings. Their goal is to make human beings submit to the fallen beings, so they first of all give them energy, but so that they also blindly obey them. The fallen beings are not concerned about teaching something that is true or valid. They are in fact concerned about: How can we best deceive people so we achieve our goals? They saw that there was this tendency to believe in this mechanical workings of the universe, and they said: “Ah, we will construct the idea that there is a spiritual path that leads beyond suffering to higher levels of awareness, and we will present it as a mechanical path where if people blindly follow us as the teachers, we will guarantee results.”

They created what we might call false mystery schools, and they snared many people into believing this, following this path. They did this partly because the fallen beings in previous spheres, some even before they fell, had learned to take advantage of certain mechanical properties of matter so that they could have a certain control over matter. This meant that they could impress people with these, what we might call party tricks, that they could perform.

This was another factor that attracted people to think that: “But these people can produce these phenomena, so therefore, their teachings must be valid and if I follow this path, I too will have this mastery over matter that people desire, that the ego desires.” Because what is it the ego desires? Ultimately, it would like to have control over matter. You see here, again, there is no blame from our side. We are simply pointing out that: You are living on a planet called Earth, it is an unnatural planet, there is a very dense collective consciousness. There are fallen beings here who have for a long time projected a false path, so it is inevitable that you have been affected by this (in this lifetime or previous lifetimes, does not matter). When you find the teachings of the ascended masters, you carry with you this programming, we might say, that the spiritual path should have certain mechanical aspects. What we have carefully done through this messenger, almost from the very beginning, is to gently challenge this view, gently and gradually, because we saw the need to be gentle and gradual about this.

Challenging the image of a mechanical path

For example, we saw in previous dispensations where most people believed that if they just gave enough Violet Flame, that alone would qualify them for their ascension. Giving decrees has a certain mechanical aspect, in the sense that giving the decree produces a certain effect. Giving the decree from the heart and with a greater flow of the Holy Spirit through the decrees produces a bigger effect. Nevertheless, if you give the decrees, it does produce an effect. It balances karma, it transforms fear-based energy in your three higher bodies, and this does help you grow on the path. As we have also explained so many times through this messenger, unless you also resolve psychology, there is a limit to how high you can go. We have for a very long time presented the path in a different light, namely that it is not mechanical, because the decisive factor for your progress is your willingness to apply the teachings to yourself, look into your subconscious mind, and resolve what we now call the subconscious selves.

We started out by calling this the ego, but I have now given you more advanced teachings so that the ego is not this big amorphous entity that can be very hard to see and relate to, whereas it is easier to look at one specific self and overcome that. Nevertheless, what I am working towards is this realization that there has for a very long time on Earth, certainly since the fallen beings were allowed to embody here, been two different paths presented on Earth. A mechanical, which we have also called the outer path, and a mystical inner path.

This gives you now a frame of reference for evaluating what spiritual teachings or movements or gurus you have encountered in this lifetime. Why would you need to do this, if you have now left some of these movements behind and moved on to an ascended master teaching? Well, because there was a reason that you found those spiritual movements and teachings. You were attracted to it because it was part of your Divine Plan and there can be various reasons for this. One of the reasons that applies to most of you is that you actually needed to have a certain experience with different spiritual teachings, and most of you needed to have the experience of at least one teaching that was more the mechanical, outer path.

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