Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

In previous discourses I have hinted at the fact that the ego has certain built-in contradictions and we will now take a closer look at them. The fact is that the ego is based on an inescapable contradiction, and therefore the ego will always be a house divided. If you allow the ego to make you divided against yourself, then you simply cannot stand in the light of Christ truth. You are not going to enter the kingdom of God while you are lying down. You are going to enter only when you stand on the one truth – the rock – of Christ.

In order to understand the ego’s systemic division, we need to take a closer look at your own being and your purpose for being here. Everything is made from an interplay between two polarities, namely the expanding force of the Father and the contracting force of the Mother. In every aspect of life, there are two forces at work. This is a truth that all spiritual seekers should fix in their minds so they never forget it.

The consequence of this truth is that in every situation, there is a high and a low potential. A sustainable creation can occur only when the expanding and contracting forces are held in balance—so they enhance each other. This is the high potential. The low potential is that one force becomes dominant, which inevitably leads to an imbalance that will cause the situation to deteriorate. If the expanding force is too strong, everything will be exaggerated, and if the contracting force is too strong, everything will collapse upon itself.

What is it that keeps the two forces balanced? It is the Christ mind, the principle of the Son, which is designed to ensure oneness between the two aspects of creation. From the viewpoint of a human being, the two forces represent Spirit and matter, the spiritual realm and the material world. The Christ mind is designed to ensure oneness between Spirit and matter, which can happen only when matter outpictures the blueprint designed by Spirit—the blueprint that is stored in the universal Christ mind.

On a personal level, you have a spiritual aspect of your total being, which we normally call your I AM Presence. You also have a material aspect of your being, namely your four lower bodies. In order for you to fulfill your highest potential, you must have oneness between your spiritual self and your lower self. We might say this has always been the essential challenge for spiritual people. The Bible describes it clearly:

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. (Romans 7:19)

Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. (Matthew 26:41)

What can ensure this oneness in your being? Only the Christ mind, but the Christ mind will not do this as an external force that imposes oneness upon you. It will do it only when it becomes an internal force, and that will happen only when you – meaning the Conscious You – makes the decision to unite with the Christ mind, to become the Living Christ. To do this, the Conscious You must take full responsibility for your life and being, even for your salvation. It must be willing to make the critical decisions and seek balance in every situation.

Once you have the Christ mind, finding balance is not difficult, but in order to have that mind, the Conscious You must accept full responsibility, and that is often a major stumbling block for spiritual seekers. That is why the ego is so often successful in getting people to follow the outer path, the automatic path that does not require you to take full responsibility for making decisions. That is why the false teachers so often trick you into believing they can make decisions for you.

The birth of the ego

In a previous discourse I described how you became enveloped in the consciousness of duality, the consciousness of anti-christ. This caused you to make limiting decisions, until you came to the point where the Conscious You decided that it would no longer make decisions. You were alive and you were in a particular outer situation, and these facts were not changed by your decision not to make decisions. Your outer situation demanded that decisions be made, and since the Conscious You would not make them, someone else had to make decisions for you. That someone was what became the ego.

Let me make sure you understand the basic dynamic here. You decided that you did not want to make decisions because it seemed like all your decisions led to undesirable consequences. You felt: “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.” The only reason your decisions produced undesirable consequences was that they were based on the murky waters of the duality consciousness. This caused you to take everything too far into one of the two extremes, and the result was that every situation led to suffering. If your decisions are based on the clarity of the Christ mind, they will always lead to growth, and then there is no burden associated with making decisions. You decided to stop deciding only because you had lost contact with the Christ mind—or a spiritual teacher who served as your link to the Christ mind.

When you decided to stop making decisions, you had already created a certain momentum of making decisions based on the dualistic mind. We might say you had created a computer program in your subconscious mind. When the Conscious You stopped making decisions, that computer program took over and quickly developed into the ego. The ego is more than a computer program in that it has a survival instinct and is thus an aggressive force in your being. Once you have given the ego control, it will rather die than give it up—because giving it up means that the ego will die.

The ego was born out of your separation from the Christ mind, and thus the ego can perceive only the consciousness of anti-christ, the consciousness of duality. The two basic forces of creation do not stop operating because you make a decision so you are still faced with situations in which the two forces exist. Here is the vital difference:

When you look at life through the clarity of the Christ mind, you see the expanding and contracting forces as complementary. You see how to balance them so that every decision you make is balanced and produces growth.

When you look at life through the filter of the duality consciousness, you see the two basic forces as opposites. Instead of complementing each other, you now see them as canceling out each other. The reason is that when you do not balance these forces in your own being, they will seemingly cancel out each other. The inevitable result is that your decisions will produce an imbalance that leads to suffering. You are constantly struggling against one or the other force.

To your ego, the two basic forces are seen as enemies that are out to oppose its control over your circumstances. Since the ego can never grasp the Christ mind, this is a fundamental problem that can never be solved at the level of the ego. The ego will always look at life through the duality consciousness, and therefore it can never balance the expanding and contracting forces. The ego’s decisions will always produce suffering.

The ego is on a constant see-saw between one of two extremes. It will first go into one extreme, for example by letting the expanding force dominate. This leads you to be caught in the black-and-white thinking described earlier. When you have finally had enough of this form of thinking – and its unbalanced results – the ego will not admit its mistake, for it can never see its mistake. Instead, the ego will take you towards the other extreme, namely gray thinking. When you have had enough of that, the ego will take you right back towards the other extreme, and this can go on for numerous lifetimes.

It can go on indefinitely, unless the Conscious You finally has had enough and decides that it will take back the responsibility for making decisions. The problem here is that taking back responsibility is not enough. You must also understand that in order to make right decisions, you must reach for and put on the mind of Christ. Because most religions teach the outer path to salvation, most people simply do not know that they need to do this or how to do it. They continue to cling to the dream of an outer, automatic path to salvation, which leaves them at the mercy of the ego and the false teachers.

There is only one thing that will bring about a solution to your problems and an end to your suffering. You must restore balance to your own being by restoring balance between the expanding and contracting forces, your spiritual self and your lower self.

The only factor that can restore this balance is the Christ mind, the one, undivided truth of the Christ mind. The Christ mind will not enter your being unless it is invited. Your ego will never invite the Christ mind to enter, for it cannot even see the Christ mind as a solution to your problems. If it could, it would know that the entry of the Christ mind would mean the death of the ego. The Christ mind can enter only when invited by the Conscious You.

The trick is that the Conscious You cannot invite the Christ mind to enter until it has taken full responsibility for your life and salvation by deciding that it is willing to make decisions and to take the decision-making power away from the ego. The other trick is that the Christ mind will not enter as an external force that will fix your problems for you. The Christ mind can work in your life only when it becomes an internal force because the Conscious You has decided that it is willing to put on the mind of Christ and become one with your own higher being. You are willing to base your sense of identity in the material world on your spiritual identity. You are willing to be here below all that you are Above. This idea deserves further scrutiny.

Why are you here?

The ego sees only the material world and it sees everything through the duality consciousness. To the ego there is no spiritual purpose for life; the purpose for life must be defined in, defined by, the material world. The human ego has defined any number of “life purposes” that people spend lifetimes pursuing—always without finding happiness, fulfillment, peace of mind or a sense of purpose and meaning.

The real purpose of life is your growth in self-awareness. This growth comes from fulfilling your role as a co-creator with God. Your Being is designed in the image and after the likeness of God, meaning that you have the creative powers that you need in order to use the Ma-ter light to create form. You descended into the material universe in order to multiply your creative powers and take dominion over the earth, meaning the mastery of mind over matter. You will be fulfilled only when you fill this role—a role you chose before coming into embodiment.

What does it mean to take dominion over the earth? As everything else, it has a Father and a Mother – an Alpha and an Omega – aspect. The Alpha aspect is that you must start by taking dominion over your own being by establishing oneness between your spiritual self and your lower self. The key to this is that the Conscious You decides to fulfill its proper role of being the Christ in your being and balancing the father and mother aspects, Spirit and matter. The Omega aspect is that you take dominion over the earth and do your part to raise it into the kingdom of God. You do this by both exercising your creative powers and by using the Christ mind to help other people rise above the duality consciousness.

The key to this phase is that the Conscious You decides to take up its role of being the Christ on earth by challenging the consciousness of anti-christ wherever it is encountered. We might say that when you are in embodiment, your own consciousness is the Alpha aspect of your life and your environment is the Omega aspect. Once again, your role is to establish oneness between the two so that your environment reflects your inner being that reflects your spiritual self.

As always, the key is to have the Christ balance between the two basic forces. If you let the ego run your life, it will still seek to fulfill your goals in an unbalanced way:

Dominion over self. If the expanding force is dominant, your ego will seek to control every aspect of your life. You will attempt to force yourself by strictly following an outer system, be it a religion or a diet. This is the dream that by living up to outer requirements, you will be saved without looking at the beam – the ego – in your own eye.

If the contracting force is dominant, your ego will take the “if-it-feels-good-do-it” attitude. You will be completely unable to discipline yourself or free yourself from the control of the ego or other people. You will feel like a total victim of outer circumstances and find a million excuses for not changing your life.

Dominion over the earth. If the expanding force is dominant, you will attempt to force other people to become a member of your belief system, thinking that the end of saving them can justify the means. This is what you see in fundamentalist people from any religion, even the fundamentalist people in a political ideology or the ideology of scientific materialism. This leads to black-and-white thinking.

If the contracting force is dominant, you will think you have no right to influence other people and that you should be tolerant of everything. Any idea is as valid as any other so live and let live, for love is all you need. This leads to gray thinking.

The key to fulfilling your divine plan – the plan you made before coming into embodiment – is to bring the Christ mind into your life so that it can balance the two basic forces. Instead of the perpetual tension between the two forces – leading to conflict, loss and suffering – your life can become an upward spiral of greater freedom and fulfillment. The Christ is not somewhere between the two extremes but transcends both extremes because it is above and beyond the duality consciousness. The Christ mind clearly sees that the earth is out of alignment with the Creator’s vision and laws, which will eventually cause the material universe to self-destruct. It therefore sees that the only solution is to bring the earth back into harmony with the purpose of creation. The Christ mind realizes that the mother aspect cannot be allowed to evolve on its own, creating its own laws instead of following the Creator’s laws. The material realm must always be an expression of the spiritual realm, yet this can happen only when the co-creators that embody on this planet decide to become the Living Christs. They must take dominion over the earth rather than letting the earth have dominion over them.

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