Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

You have heard the expression that someone is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and it describes what the ego will continue to do until you allow it to die. The round hole is a symbol for the letter “O,” which stands for Oneness. The square peg is a symbol for the four levels of the material universe, which the ego sees as the only road to eternal life.

In reality, the only road to salvation, the ascension or the eternal life is the Path of Oneness whereby you come back to the correct sense of identity as a co-creator with your God. You will enter God’s kingdom only by attaining a sense of oneness with God whereby you can say, as I did: “I and my father are one!” The ego was born when you decided to turn away from the Path of Oneness and instead join the path of separation. The ego can never come into oneness with God. You created the ego because you separated yourself from God, and thus when you come back to oneness, the ego will no longer be needed and should be allowed to die.

Obviously, the ego will never recognize this fact, and it is constantly trying to build the false image that you can be saved without overcoming the ego, without letting it die. The ego is trying to create the appearance that you can be saved by living up to certain requirements in this world. The ego is trying to use something from the four planes of matter in an attempt to force its way into the kingdom of oneness. That is why anything created by the ego will be a square peg that will never fit into the round hole of the kingdom of oneness. That is why I gave the following parable:

1 And Jesus answered and spake unto them again by parables, and said,
2 The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son,
3 And sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come.

8 Then saith he to his servants, The wedding is ready, but they which were bidden were not worthy.
9 Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage.

11 And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment:
12 And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless.
13 Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
14 For many are called, but few are chosen. (Matthew, Chapter 22)

The reality is that the wedding garment symbolizes the Christ consciousness, which is the only way to establish oneness with God. As I explained in the previous discourse, the ego is born of separation from God, and thus everything the ego believes, every mental image it creates, springs from the mind of anti-christ—the mind of separation. These images can never form the wedding garment that gives access to the kingdom, and the ego will always remain in the outer darkness of its own making. As long as you identify with the ego, you too will remain in the state of consciousness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

What is the you that can escape the ego?

Obviously, you do not have to remain trapped by the ego. The inner message of every true spiritual teaching – often disguised in metaphors or mythical stories – is that you can slay the dragon of the ego, be rescued by the knight on the white horse of the Christ self and inherit the kingdom of God. But what is the “you” that can do this? We have called it the “Conscious You.” You might also call it the “Conscious I” or the “conscious self.”

This Conscious You is the core of your lower being. It is an extension of your spiritual self, your I AM Presence. It was designed to descend into the material universe to both experience this realm and bring the light of your I AM Presence – your God Flame – into this world, helping to turn it into the kingdom of God. The Conscious You is what makes you aware that you exist, and it is also the part of you that makes conscious decisions.

The Conscious You is meant to be the master of your lower being, which we can call your container of self. You are meant to make most of your decisions at the level of the Conscious You, under the direction of your I AM Presence and spiritual teacher. When you turned away from your spiritual teacher, you lost that divine direction, and thus you had to make decisions alone. This became painful for many co-creators, which is why they gradually allowed their egos to make more and more decisions for them.

We might say that the problem faced by most people is that they have put the Conscious You to sleep and have allowed the ego to run their lives. That is why many of their decisions are not made at the level of the conscious mind but are made through a subconscious process ruled by the ego. We can compare the ego to a computer that is not actually able to think but that has a sufficiently sophisticated programming to give the appearance that it can think.

This analogy is fruitful when compared to my previous analogy of the forest and the trees. The ego has created a large number of relativistic, dualistic illusions that are like individual computer programs. You might compare them to the trees in the forest, and each program is designed to handle specific situations in life. When you encounter a particular type of situation, one of these programs kicks in and takes over your reactions to the situation. You are no longer making conscious choices as to how to best handle the situation; it is all run by the computer of the ego.

You probably know that a computer has a number of specific programs that all function within the framework of what is called the operating system. This is what gives the computer its identity as a Windows, Macintosh or UNIX computer. The operating system is the ego itself, and it compares to the forest in the previous discourse. This operating system is the very core of the ego, and it was born out of the decision to turn away from your teacher. The specific reasoning that the Conscious You used in order to justify turning away from the teacher became the very core of your ego. This is important because when you realize that your ego was born out of this decision, you see why the ego will never question the validity of that decision. The ego is like a computer that can never question its operating system but will forever continue to function according to its programming.

The ego literally lives and dies by the original decision to turn away from God. If the Conscious You ever looked at that decision, realized that is was not a constructive choice and replaced it with a better decision – by choosing life over death – the ego would die. The Conscious You can now begin to understand that the ego will do anything in its power to prevent you from ever uncovering and reevaluating the original decision that created the ego. Returning to the computer analogy, you know that an individual program cannot alter the operating system—it must function within the framework defined by the system. The ego seeks to make the Conscious You so focused on its individual beliefs – the trees – that you will never see the underlying belief – the forest – that created the ego.

Even many sincere spiritual seekers have been fooled by this trick. They have realized that there is an entity – whether they call it the ego or something else – that is blocking their spiritual growth. They have realized that it is necessary to cut down some of the trees in the forest in order to remove the veil of illusions that separates them from God. They have not yet seen that there is something hiding behind the trees. Although many seekers are sincerely questioning aspects of their egos, they have not yet seen behind the veil to start questioning the ego itself. Obviously, a beginning seeker is not yet ready to do this, but many of the people who have been on the spiritual path for decades – or even lifetimes – could benefit immensely from considering the teachings I am giving. They are ready to begin to question the basic illusions of their egos.

You are more than the ego

The first step towards overcoming the ego is to realize that there is more to “you” than the ego and its individual illusions. You need to realize that you are more than a highly evolved animal, that you are more than the computer programs of the ego. When you look at the world, you will see many people who have not yet come to that realization. These are what the Bible calls the “multitudes” and you will note that I spoke to them in parables and then gave my disciples a more sophisticated teaching.

My disciples had realized that they were more than their egos, but they had not begun to truly see their egos. This is comparable to the situation of many spiritual seekers today. In today’s world millions of people are at the same or a higher level of spiritual maturity as were my disciples 2,000 years ago. If you are consciously aware of the spiritual path, you already know there is more to “you” than the ego, that there is more to reality than the material world. In order to take the next step, you need to come to a more sophisticated understanding of the “you” that is more than the ego.

The crucial understanding that most spiritual seekers are missing is the realization that the Conscious You is designed to make decisions and that it makes those decisions based on its sense of identity. The Conscious You is an individualization of God, but in time and space, the Conscious You is who it thinks it is, who it sees itself as being. The Conscious You has the ability to identify itself as absolutely anything it can conceive and accept as real. The Conscious You can identify itself as a highly evolved animal, and it will then make decisions as an animal. If the Conscious You identifies itself as a mortal sinner, it will make decisions as a sinner—and it will consider it blasphemy to see itself as a son or daughter of God.

The Conscious You is designed to be a co-creator in the material universe, and it expresses its creative abilities through the filter of its sense of identity. Every decision the Conscious You makes is colored by the sense of identity you have come to accept, based on your upbringing in this life and your experiences from past lives. The Conscious You is never confined to or permanently trapped in its current sense of identity. The Conscious You has the ability to mentally project itself anywhere it wants, meaning that it can also project its sense of self outside its current identity—the identity built in this world.

It is this very ability to separate yourself from your current sense of identity – and realize there is more to life – that is the key to all human progress, be it material or spiritual progress. If you could see yourself only through the filter of your current sense of identity, you could never rise above that identity. Human beings could never come back to oneness after they had descended into the consciousness of separation.

The essential key is that the Conscious You can step outside your current sense of identity at any moment. Nothing binds the Conscious You to your current sense or identity—except your belief that there is nothing outside of it or that you cannot escape your current sense of identity. The catch is that most people have come to identify themselves with their egos to the point where they cannot conceive and believe that they can escape the ego at any moment. In a sense, this belief is true because you cannot simply walk away from the forest of the ego. You must systematically cut down the trees – illusions – of the ego before you can see your true identity. Even though these illusions must be removed, the Conscious You can – at any moment – choose to stop identifying itself with the ego, and this will make it far easier for you to let go of the ego. This process is what I described in the following quote:

3 Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
4 Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?
5 Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. (John, Chapter 3)

Being born of the Spirit means – among other valid interpretations – that you realize that the Conscious You can walk away from the mental prison of the ego and reclaim its true identity as a co-creator with God. You can realize that your current sense of identity is deeply affected by the illusions of your ego and the illusions of the collective consciousness of humankind. It is based on the sense of separation from God, and thus it is mortal because anything that is outside the kingdom of oneness cannot have eternal life. Your mortal sense of identity is unreal and can never inherit the eternal life. That is why I said:

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. (Matthew 16:25)

If you seek to hold on to the sense of identity – life – built by the ego, you will not find eternal life. If you are willing to lose that sense of life in order to win the Christ consciousness and come back to oneness, you will indeed find eternal life.

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