Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

We have now reached a turning point in my discourses on the ego. My first nine discourses form the Alpha polarity. My last discourse on magnificent confusion forms the nexus of the figure-eight, and we will now enter the lower figure, the Omega polarity. [The previous discourses are included in the book Freedom From Ego Illusions]

The first discourses presented the overall view, the big picture, so that you have a foundation for knowing that you are more than the ego. It was an attempt to show you the forest without focusing on the individual trees. Why did I start out this way? Because you are not only a person who is lost in the forest, you are a person who has grown up in the forest. Your upbringing has not given you a clear understanding of the real cause that makes your life an ongoing struggle.

I had to start out by showing you that you are lost but that there is something outside the forest. It is not until you recognize yourself as lost that you can start looking for a way out instead of feeling hopeless – or even content – in the shadow of the trees. You now understand that the core of your identity is the Conscious You and that you are MORE than the earthly identity built by your ego.

You should also recognize that you already know you are more than the ego because it is the Conscious You who has studied my previous discourses on the ego. You have done so only because you want to be more than what you are right now. You don’t really think it was your ego that compelled you to read these long and somewhat complex discourses on the ego, do you? You should allow yourself to recognize that you already know there is something outside the ego forest.

However, having a mental image of the forest is not the same as being outside that forest. You still have to follow the trail that leads you out, and for a time your vision of what is outside will be blocked by a number of individual trees. In this book we will look at the individual trees, namely the games that the ego has constructed in order to keep you trapped in the forest. The strategy of the ego is to get you so entangled in the branches of one or more individual trees that you forget about the trail.

Let me assure you that having made it this far, especially if you have recognized that you are in a state of magnificent confusion, is an accomplishment. My first discourses were actually designed to act as a filter to filter out those who are not ready to let go of their egos. I am in no way passing judgment upon such people; I am simply stating the fact that not everyone is ready to see through the ego and let it die bit by bit.

Virtually every human being on this planet is somewhat blinded by the ego. Most people are not ready to even acknowledge the existence of the ego, let alone take a long look in the mirror and recognize: “I have an ego, and I need to rise above it!” Such people will have taken one of the “easy ways out” that I offered between the lines in the first discourses, and their egos will have found an excuse for not continuing. Anyone who starts the series will have had certain seeds planted, and in good time they will sprout and come to the surface of awareness so that the person can take another look at the ego.

If you have sincerely studied my previous discourses, you are ready to begin looking at the specific games that your own ego is playing. You have already overcome some of these games or you would still be so identified with the ego that you would not be open to this teaching. As I describe the games, I hope you will begin to recognize that as a spiritual seeker, you have risen above some of the most destructive ego games.

I hope this will give you some encouragement in realizing that you might be further along on the path than you thought. Even if you have only overcome the very lowest ego game, you are still in a much better place than those who are trapped in that game. I hope you will recognize that if you have overcome one ego game, you can overcome them all, for they are truly all cut from the same cloth. As I will explain further, the ego has only one game that comes in numerous disguises, some more subtle than others. Once you see the basic strategy of the ego, you can more easily expose the rest of its games.

I hope you will honestly look at yourself, recognize which games you have left behind and build a positive momentum. As you build this momentum, you should be able to acknowledge when you come to the first game that you have not yet – completely – overcome. Then you can use your momentum to avoid a negative reaction – such as guilt or denial – and simply acknowledge that since you have already risen above one or more games, you can surely rise above this next one as well.

As you continue to build on your accomplishments, you will reinforce the momentum until it becomes an unstoppable force that pulls you through the forest and simply cuts down the trees that are in your way. Before you know it, you will see the light filtering through the trees, and one day you will break through the last brush and enter the open field where your eyes can finally see the horizon of Being.

Think about what it is like to be lost in a forest. The biggest problem is that you have no absolute point of reference, you have no horizon but only a very limited field of view. You only see trees and have no way of knowing which direction to follow in order to get out of the forest. As you cut down the individual trees, you will eventually catch a glimpse of the horizon, and now you will have a firm direction to follow. In the beginning it might seem like overcoming the ego is hopeless, but if you keep overcoming the individual ego games, you will one day break through and catch a glimpse of your own higher being. From then on, you will never again be completely lost in the forest.

The master game of the ego

Although I will describe the individual games used by the ego, I will start out by describing the master game. You may not be able to clearly see this game at this point, but I want to plant the seed in your mind so that it can germinate and eventually break through to your conscious awareness.

As I explained in my first discourses, the Conscious You created the ego by deciding that it would no longer make decisions. This is illustrated in the old fairy tale about the sleeping beauty. The princess is the Conscious You and one day she falls victim to a plot hatched by the evil Godmother, namely the prince of this world. The princess falls asleep and an impenetrable forest grows up around her castle. The forest, of course, is the ego and the individual trees are the illusions of the ego, the ego games. One day a prince comes by, penetrates the forest and kisses the princess, who awakens. The prince symbolizes the Living Christ who can take on many forms, both as an outer teacher and as the inner teacher of your Christ self. Regardless of the form, the Living Christ always serves to awaken the Conscious You to the need to come up higher.

In the fairy tale, the prince and the princess live happily ever after, and here is where the fairy tale departs from reality. In the real world, the Conscious You is not home free by being awakened. It – you – must personally cut down all of the trees that surround the castle, and only then will you live happily ever after.

The master strategy of the ego involves two elements. The first one is that the ego will do anything it can to prevent the Conscious You from awakening to the realization that there must be more to your identity. For the majority of human beings, this strategy is still working, and they still identify themselves completely with the identity that the ego has built in the material world. The fact that you are reading this means that you are a spiritual seeker, and thus your ego’s first strategy has failed. You know there is more to your identity and you are actively looking for it.

You are now the target for the ego’s second strategy, which is to prevent you from clearing the thorny trees around the castle. Each tree represents a decision, a decision based on the mind of anti-christ, the mind of duality and separation. This is where I would like to leave the fairy-tale analogy behind and instead refer to the image of a spiral staircase. Each decision that was based on the mind of anti-christ took you further down the spiral staircase, the staircase that leads into the darkness of separation from your higher being. This is what the Bible refers to as “the valley of the shadow of death” (Proverbs 23:4).

The separation from your I AM Presence and your true sense of identity truly is the consciousness of spiritual death. The decisions based on the illusions of the mind of anti-christ brought you further into the consciousness of death. We might say that each of these decisions was a Death decision. One kiss from the prince is not enough to raise you out of the shadow of death. You must consciously walk the staircase and undo each of the decisions that brought you down the staircase. This is precisely what the ego will do everything in its power to prevent you from doing.

In order to take a step up the spiral staircase, you must come to see through the dualistic illusion that brought you down to that step. You can do this only by seeing the Christ truth that counteracts the illusion, the truth that makes you free. You must then choose the truth of Christ over the “truth” of anti-christ. You must choose life over death. I would like to call each of these decisions a “LIFE decision.”

The ego will do anything to prevent you from making these LIFE decisions. In order to accomplish this overall goal, the ego – and the forces of anti-christ – have invented a number of subtle games. The goal is to keep you entangled with a particular illusion so that you cannot let go of it and rise to the next step on the path.

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