Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

The ego will never take responsibility for anything. This doesn’t mean that people blinded by their egos wont take responsibility for anything. In its never-ending pursuit of seeking to avoid accountability, the ego will indeed seek to make you refuse to take responsibility for anything. If that doesn’t work, the ego will gladly seek to make you take responsibility for things for which you are not responsible. It will seek to make you take on more and more responsibility until you think you are responsible for saving the world. This is commonly called a savior complex, and I can tell you from personal experience that you have to overcome it before you can actually become a world savior.

Why the ego cannot take responsibility

Why wont the ego ever take responsibility for anything? Why wont the ego ever stop and say: “It was my fault?” How could it?

I have said that the ego is created out of duality, which always has two opposing polarities. When the Conscious You creates the ego, you do not create one ego, you create two aspects, two spirits. The two original spirits that form the core of your personal ego have since morphed into a multitude of other spirits. Which one of them is responsible for a particular action?

For each action there is not just one spirit involved. The spirits form a hierarchy so for a particular action, there is a line of spirits that all form part of the basis for responding. Which one of them should be held accountable? None of them made the decision and none of them were the sole foundation for the decision so how could any of them be said to be responsible? There are examples of people forming a mob and the group now acts as one entity. How do you single one person out from a mob and say that he or she is solely responsible? Even if you could eliminate all other spirits and get down to the two original ones that form your personal ego, how could one of them be said to be responsible? Why this one and not the other one?

However, when you go to a deeper level, you see that the ego cannot take responsibility because it does not have self-awareness. This is a subtle point that it will be difficult for many students to get, but it is still important to ponder it.

There is an inherent danger in describing the ego. Due to the mechanics of language, it is necessary to name something in order to talk about it. In naming something “the ego” it is easy to give the impression that this is now like a living entity that exists inside your mind, your subconscious mind. When we talk about a spirit, it can sound like we are talking about an entity that is like a person but with no physical body. After all, I do say that the ego is seeking to deceive and manipulate you and that it seeks to stay hidden from you.

Again, we come to a subtle distinction. The ego, even some of the more sophisticated spirits, do indeed have a rudimentary form of consciousness. This does not mean they are like persons. How do we make the distinction? As one example, take animals. An animal in nature has a certain state of consciousness and it is able to observe its environment and respond to stimuli. Scientists normally say that an animal responds based on instinct instead of conscious, reasoned decisions.

Many people will, of course, dispute this because they have pets that they feel have a distinct personality. However, animals that come in close contact with humans are often more sophisticated because they can have an individual nature spirit rather than being part of a group soul. A pet that has been loved by a human and had much contact with that human can become an individualized being that can start the process of expanding its self-awareness. Even a pet will not become individualized in its present incarnation. It will become individualized only as a result of receiving a spirit spark.

As another example, consider the debate about whether it will one day be possible for scientists to build a computer that has the same level of consciousness as a human. There are indeed many people who go through an entire lifetime functioning largely as a computer, meaning every aspect of their lives is determined by the spirits in their subconscious minds. These people never actually make a conscious, reasoned decision. From this perspective, it would be possible to build a computer that could function the same way as many people. What scientists will never be able to do is build a computer that has the higher potential of a human being, namely that of being self-aware. A computer can only act on its programming. It may be able to change its programming in response to its environment, but it will never be able to make a conscious, free choice.

An individual spirit is like an individual computer program. The ego can be compared to the operating system, meaning the overall program that defines the environment or interface of the computer. You may create a program that sorts the emails you receive, throwing some of them away and giving others a special status. If an email gets thrown in the Spam folder, can you say that the program is responsible for doing this? The program simply did what it was programmed to do and had no choice in the matter so how can it be said to be responsible?

Even the ego cannot be said to be responsible because the ego does not make choices—it makes selections. Take note of the difference. You have, over many lifetimes, created an array of spirits that are designed to deal with specific situations. As a general example, say someone blames you for being wrong. You then have a spirit that immediately – and often without you making a conscious choice – starts defending yourself by seeking to refute what the other person is saying. You might also have a spirit that starts attacking the other person, seeking to make him seem wrong in some way that justifies you ignoring what he is saying.

How did these two spirits spring into action? They did so because the ego activated them. The ego did not look at the situation and make a conscious, reasoned choice about how to respond. It simply looked at the situation, determined that it was an attack, and then it selected which spirit or spirits should be activated in order to deal with the situation. The ego did not create the spirits; it simply selected from an array of previously created spirits. You see then that the ego cannot make choices; it can only make selections. Which now makes us realize that responsibility can be assigned only to a being that is capable of making choices rather than selections.

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