Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

In this discourse I will address an ego game that most religious people, even most spiritual seekers, have not understood. If you can come to see through this game and learn to recognize it in your own life, you can take your spiritual growth to an entirely new level. In order to understand this game, let us begin by looking at my statement to Nicodemus:

And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven… (John 3:13)

Traditionally, this has been a mysterious quote that most Christians have found it difficult to interpret. Let me give you a deeper understanding. I have explained that the core of your being is the Conscious You. If this concept is new to you, simply take a moment and become aware that you are sitting “here,” reading this discourse. Instead of being absorbed in reading, you are now conscious that you are a “self” reading these words. You have mentally stepped outside your current situation, and you are no longer fully identified with it.

Where does this ability come from? It comes from the fact that you are the Conscious You and that this Conscious You is an extension of God’s own Being. This is what gives you self-awareness because the Creator has individualized its universal, omnipresent self-awareness for and as your localized self-awareness. This means you are more than anything in this world, including your body, outer mind and material circumstances.

As a result, the Conscious You has the ability to return to the awareness of who it really is and stop identifying itself with and as any identity you have built during your sojourn in the material realm. This is also what gives you the ability to mentally step outside a particular ego game, see it for what it is and make the decision to separate yourself from the game by no longer identifying yourself with the illusions that propagate the game and turn it into a catch-22.

The Conscious You is the “man” who descended from heaven and it has the ability to ascend back to heaven. In contrast, the sense of identity based on the illusions of duality – what many people call the soul – does not have the ability to ascend back to heaven. As explained, the ego was born out of your separation from your own higher being, and the ego has built a mortal sense of identity for you.

Now, at this point I am deliberately facing you with a choice. You may have been programmed by your previous spiritual world view to believe that the soul – or mortal identity – can somehow be saved, that it can become acceptable in the eyes of God and gain entry into heaven. Most religious people believe this and even most spiritual seekers or New Age people believe the same although based on a different reasoning.

I am deliberately challenging you to question this belief and your reasons for accepting it. If you are not willing to question the idea that the mortal identity can somehow be saved or resurrected, then you have no chance of escaping the ego game I am addressing in this discourse. You will indefinitely be condemned to repeating that game, seeking for ever more sophisticated ways to do what is truly impossible, but which the ego will never see as impossible. For those who have ears to hear, let me move on to explaining why the ego’s game is truly impossible.

Understanding why death cannot overcome death

Let me briefly summarize the process of Creation [For more about this, see The Power of Self]. You were created as an extension of the Creator. You were meant to grow in self-awareness from a very localized sense of self toward the state of mind in which you experience oneness with your source and oneness with all life—what is commonly called “enlightenment.”

This process was meant to happen under the guidance of a loving, spiritual teacher and with your awareness that you are part of something greater than your localized self. You would never feel alone or abandoned but instead feel your Creator’s unconditional love for you.

The process was also meant to happen as a result of your free-will choices, for that is truly the only way you can grow in self-awareness. Self-awareness can only come from within, it cannot be forced upon you from without. Free will inevitably gave rise to the possibility that you could choose to separate yourself from your teacher and forget about your spiritual source, even come to believe there is no God and no higher reality to your own being.

If you had not chosen separation, you would have grown in Christ consciousness because “Christ” is the term for the universal awareness that is designed to maintain oneness between the Creator and its creation. The separation could happen only as a result of you choosing to experiment with the consciousness of anti-christ, eventually becoming so blinded by it that you lost your awareness of your Self as an immortal spiritual being and came to see yourself as a mortal human being, perhaps even as a sinner by nature.

Before you separated yourself from your teacher, you had a sense of identity as an extension of a greater Being, as being part of the Body of God. The separation literally caused this sense of self to die, and instead a new sense of self was born, a self based on the illusion that you are a separate being who is disconnected from God and from other separate beings. This is a mortal sense of self because it is based on an illusion and created with an inescapable fear of annihilation, a fear of death.

In contrast, the Conscious You cannot die, for it is an extension of the Creator’s Being. The Conscious You can create and accept any identity it chooses, and it can believe it is a mortal being, accepting the fear that comes with such a sense of identity. We might say that this causes the Conscious You to go through a form of spiritual death—however it can be resurrected from that state of death, which is what I came to demonstrate.

The essential realization is that the separate self is the ego, or at least the seed of the ego. The ego is born from separation, and the ego has built a sense of identity for you that is based on the illusion of separation, the consciousness of duality. Because the ego was not created by God but is born from unreality, it can never be saved, it can never enter the kingdom of god. Which means that the ego can never overcome the fear of annihilation, the fear of death.

When the Conscious You begins to accept – identify with – the mortal identity created by the ego, it is inevitable that you will feel the fear of death. This is a fear that you simply cannot live with in its full intensity. You have to find a way to reduce this fear to a level of intensity that you can live with. You cannot escape the fear until you separate yourself from the ego, but you can push it aside so it is somewhat livable. You now have the foundation for understanding the basic dynamic of the ego:

Your ego is born from your sense of separation from your own higher being, your I AM Presence.

Your ego has created a sense of identity that is based on separation.

Separation is unreal and thus the ego’s identity is unreal, meaning it cannot live forever—it is mortal.

The consequence is that the ego can never escape the fear of death. When the Conscious You accepts the mortal identity as its real self, you too will feel the fear of death.

You cannot live with the fear of death, and you are compelled to look for a way out.

The very central dynamic of the ego is that it must constantly seek for ways to neutralize the fear of death so that you can live with it. It must do so in such a way that you do not discover the real way out, namely to return to your original identity as an immortal spiritual being. If you do, the ego will die and you will ascend.

Because the ego has a survival instinct, it will do anything to prevent you from discovering that the ego is based on an illusion but that you are real. It will do anything to prevent you from questioning the mortal identity and the illusions upon which it is based.

In order to neutralize the fear of death, the ego must create the illusion that the mortal self can be saved, can somehow become immortal and does not have to die. When the Conscious You believes this, you will believe that you can be saved without giving up or separating yourself from the mortal self.

In reality, this is a losing battle, for the Conscious You can never fully forget its intuitive knowledge that there must be more to life—that there is more to you.

The ego is very skillful in postponing your return to your spiritual identity – the process of enlightenment – and it has come up with innumerable subtle schemes for doing so. This is what I called the “broad way that leads to destruction.”

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