Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

Another subtle consequence of the epic world view is that it projects the idea that on earth a specific outcome must be achieved in order to manifest God’s plan and avoid the worst possible disaster. This is a very serpentine idea that has trapped numerous spiritual people in various blind alleys so I will look at it from different angles.

Any experience can help you grow

I have said that you have free will and you have the right to have any experience possible on earth until you have had enough of it and want something higher. What determines the kind of experience you desire to have? Naturally, you cannot desire to have an experience that you cannot see as a possibility. Before the fallen beings arrived on this planet, many of the experiences that people today take for granted simply were not available. Large scale conflict, what you today call war, had not taken place on this planet so having the experience of being a warrior or a general commanding vast armies was simply not in the field of view of human beings. They couldn’t even desire it because they couldn’t see it as a possibility.

This is where certain fallen beings would take what I said earlier and say that this proves people were restricted in how they exercised their free will. The fallen beings have given people greater freedom of will by showing them options they could not see on their own. From a certain perspective, I would even say this is correct. Why did the karmic board allow fallen beings to embody on earth? Because the inhabitants of earth had already gone into the struggle consciousness. By allowing the fallen beings to embody here, the struggle would be intensified and this would have the effect that people would more quickly have had enough of the struggle.

From an overall perspective, any experience that is possible in the material universe can serve to take you to the point where you have had enough of that kind of experience and want something higher. Any experience you can have through separation can serve to take you to the point where you have had enough of the struggle and want more, therefore reaching for the Christ consciousness.

What we need to add here is that what the fallen beings did was to help people see options that would limit their self-awareness even more than what human beings had envisioned themselves. The fallen beings did not actually free people. They deceived them into limiting their self-awareness whereby they blindly follow the fallen beings. As I have said, this can also expand your self-awareness but only when you awaken from the illusion.

What we now see is that in the original scenario, lifestreams would be on a path that would gradually expand their self-awareness. It was a steady upward curve where people never took a backward step. After the fallen beings arrived here, most people have gone into a downward spiral of limiting their self-awareness. The downward momentum continued until people had created such an intense struggle for themselves that they could no longer stand it and cried out for deliverance.

People have then gone through a very abrupt awakening, have asked for our help and we have given it in order to help them climb to a higher level of self-awareness. Some have then been ensnared by another serpentine illusion and have again started limiting their self-awareness. Again, they had to hit bottom before they asked for help and again we delivered it.

From a purely pragmatic perspective, this process can eventually lead people to have seen so much struggle that they give up the entire struggle consciousness. This will also lead to a growth in self-awareness, but it will include infinitely more suffering than the steady upward progress designed by the ascended masters. Beyond the suffering, there is also a mechanism that makes the epic dramas a very serious trap that can delay the awakening for many people.

The cost of making choices

In the original scenario, people would make choices, observe the consequences and then use their experience to make new choices. In this scenario, it never even entered their minds to consider that they might have made a wrong choice. Why would they think so when every choice led to consequences that caused them to expand their self-awareness and experience life as richer than before?

With the advent of the fallen beings and their epic dramas, a new consideration was projected into the collective consciousness, namely that certain choices are right and certain choices are wrong. How was this achieved? By defining that there is a specific outcome here on earth that must come to pass according to God’s plan. This led to a very subtle shift in people’s approach to life.

Before, people had the approach that the goal of life was the growth in self-awareness. Any choice you make leads to consequences and you learn from the consequences by evaluating: “Do I want more of this or do I want less of this?” The overall result is that you learn from all choices and that you expand your self-awareness. You know what works for you and what doesn’t work for you, which means you also learn who you are. We might say that people’s focus was on producing a result that reaches beyond the material world, namely growth in self-awareness.

In the fallen scenario the focus of life suddenly became to produce specific results here in the material world. It was projected that producing this material result was more important than your individual growth in self-awareness. You should submit your individual will and growth to bringing about this collective result. There was now a new way to evaluate the consequences of your choices. It was no longer about what leads to growth, it was a matter of what was right and wrong based on the superior standard (a standard defined by the fallen beings).

The arrival of the fallen beings happened a long time ago, so long ago that it can’t easily be fitted into the current understanding of human history. For a very long time, countless people have fed their energy and attention into creating a spirit in the collective consciousness. This spirit, or beast, has become very powerful and there is now such a force directed at people that most people simply cannot see what is right and wrong about right and wrong. They uncritically accept that there is an overall standard for what is right and what is wrong and that such a standard was defined by God. They unknowingly submit to the beast and become blind followers of the fallen leaders. In order to rise above a certain level of Christhood, you have to come to see the fallacy of this entire mindset so let me give you a teaching on this.

All human beings have been affected by this spirit that there must be a standard for right and wrong. Many spiritual seekers have transferred that to their spiritual teaching and even our students believe the ascended masters have defined a standard for what is right and wrong. What is the most subtle psychological effect of this mindset? It is that if you make certain choices, those choices were wrong. Because of the intense momentum created over eons of time, it is very difficult to admit a mistake because most people cannot stop themselves from going into deep feelings of guilt, self-blame, fear and other negative emotions.

The subtle psychological consequence is that before the advent of the fallen beings, it was very easy for people to change their choices. If a choice produced a consequence they did not want more of, they simply made a different choice, abandoning the old one. They didn’t think: “Oh, I made a mistake, I was wrong and that makes me a bad person.” They simply changed their minds and moved on.

Today, admitting that one of your choices was not the best one carries a major penalty. You made a mistake that can be wrong in an epic sense with all of the negative emotions that might produce. What is the effect? That it has now become very tempting to avoid admitting that you “were wrong,” making it much more difficult for you to change direction in life. Once you have gone into the epic mindset, it becomes very difficult to get back out.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Freedom from Ego Dramas.