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Ascended Master Hilarion through Kim Michaels, June 7, 2024. This dictation was given at a Deep Healing Retreat Conference in Tallinn, Estonia.

I AM the Ascended Master Hilarion. What I would like to do with this release is to give you an exercise for dealing with thoughts, but I need to set a certain foundation first.

Where do thoughts come from?

The brain

Many spiritual teachers, many philosophers, many scientists have wrestled with the question: “Where do thoughts come from?” Some of course think they come from the physical brain and indeed some thoughts do come from the physical brain. This does not mean that the mind can think in a higher way, in a creative way, but it does mean that the physical brain can produce thoughts that many people think are creative thoughts.

What is a creative thought? Well, you cannot actually define creativity, for creativity is that which defies definition. When you define something, you create a mental box. What is creativity? You go beyond your mental box. However, you attempt to define creativity, creativity will leapfrog your definition and go beyond it. But the thoughts that the brain can create always happen within a certain box, defined by the programming of the brain. And that programming, of course, is a result of the process of evolution, evolving the DNA in the physical brain, the cells, the synapses and all of the machinery of the brain that has taken millions of years to develop. And this apparatus that you call the brain is much like a computer. It is programmed to respond a certain way to certain stimuli.

Some thoughts come from the brain. For some people, almost all of their thoughts come from the brain, and they can live an entire lifetime without really thinking beyond the brain.

Projections from the outside

Where do thoughts come from? Well, many thoughts actually come to your mind from outside your mind, outside your four lower bodies, outside your physical brain and outside your emotional, mental, and identity bodies. They can be projections from the collective mind, they can be projections from a certain other person’s mind or they can be projections from beings who are demons, discarnate souls, or even fallen beings. Many thoughts that people have are projections from these forces.

For some people, almost all of their thoughts are these kinds of projections and they can live their entire lives having their mental body dominated by these projections from the outside. They never actually think. It is either the brain or some projection.

The emotional body and the mental mind

Then, of course, thoughts can come from your emotional body, where you can become so agitated in the emotions that this takes over even the mental mind or at least affects the mental mind and gives rise to certain thoughts, often fear-based thoughts. Then, of course, some thoughts come from the mental mind itself, where the mental mind is beyond the brain even though it is tightly interwoven and integrated with the machinery of the brain. But the mental mind can think beyond the brain and this is what we call the linear mind, the analytical mind and the conceptual mind to some degree, at least the lower level of the conceptual mind. This mental mind can actually think. But this does not mean that for most people the mental mind is thinking because the mental mind is below the identity mind.

And this is essential for spiritual seekers to understand and to grasp because this means that even if you are free from the thoughts produced by the brain, even if you are free from thoughts projected from the outside and even if you are free from thoughts projected from your emotional body, your mental mind is not free to think anything it wants because the mental mind can think only within the parameters defined by the identity mind.

A paradigm at the identity level

There is some discussion among philosophers and scientists about something called a paradigm. This is an overall view of life. One example of a paradigm was the medieval Catholic doctrines and beliefs. They formed a box, a boundary that defined: “This is truth, this is based on Catholic doctrine and Catholic doctrine is infallible, therefore, this is truth.” You are not allowed to think outside of that box. This was not defined at the mental level. It was something people accepted at the identity level when they accepted: “I am a Catholic.”

A more modern example of a paradigm is scientific materialism where you take certain scientific findings, you superimpose an interpretation or a worldview upon it and you then say: “Everything that happens in the material universe can be explained by causes in the material universe.” This is again a paradigm, a mental box. You are not allowed to think outside of it and this is what you accept at the identity level when you accept: “I am a scientist,” meaning I am a scientist based on the material paradigm, the materialistic paradigm. Once you have accepted such a paradigm at the identity level, your mental body cannot by itself think outside the paradigm.

Now, there are many more personal examples of this where you may have accepted a certain identity where for example you grew up in a working-class family that spent all of their adult lives working in factories and you grew up accepting: “I am a worker, I am a working- class person.” Therefore, your mental mind cannot think: “I could get an education, I am too smart to work in a factory.” You just accept this is your lot in life.

Of course, there are many other examples. If you accept that you are a certain kind of person, you have a certain kind of psychology, you are just a human being who cannot be anything more, or because you had a difficult childhood, you are a wounded or flawed being, you have a flawed psychology. You can even think: “I am a bad person,” and therefore your mental mind thinks within this.

This has two effects. First of all, it validates the paradigm because your mental mind will select so-called evidence that fits the paradigm. As we have said, the intellectual mind can argue for or against any cause or any theory, and it does this by selecting and selecting out. It selects evidence that validates the paradigm, and it selects out evidence that contradicts it. This is why you can have two people who look at the same evidence and reach opposite conclusions.

As part of healing, you obviously need to make changes in the way you think, but you cannot make changes in the way you think at the mental level unless you become aware of the paradigm at the identity level that limits your thoughts, that limits your entire thinking process and that limits your ability to ask questions that go beyond the mental box that you are now in. While I realize that your bodies are tired, and even your mental minds might be tired after a long day and possibly traveling yesterday, I actually aim to take advantage of this because if you can keep yourself from going to sleep, the fact that you are tired only makes it easier for you to step outside the mental mind.

Exercise for stepping outside of the mental mind

Let me take you through a little exercise. And as Mother Mary did earlier, when the exercise is done, I want you to have your notepad and pen ready so you can write down whatever comes to you when I tell you to write.

The monkey mind

Now, I want you to take note of whatever thought that comes into your mind when I say a specific word. Be ready to notice what happens, what thought comes into your mind when I say this word, and the word is “water.” Take note of the thought and then try to hold on to that thought. Just try to hold on to the thought that was released by the word “water” and see how long you can hold on to it. Is it not difficult? Does it not change very quickly? You may remember the first thought that came up about water, but there are other thoughts that are coming up that are impinging themselves on your mind. All of a sudden you have a whole set of thoughts released by the word “water.”

My only purpose for doing this is to help show you and to help you mentally consciously tune in to the fact that thoughts change all the time. Thoughts are constantly changing. What does this mean? Well, it does not mean anything particularly sophisticated. I am not asking you to grasp or reach for some far-flung, high and mighty intellectual understanding here. I am just asking you to realize that thoughts come and go, are replaced by other thoughts, and that one thought rarely stays in your mind for very long before there are other thoughts impinging upon it, seeking to draw your attention to them.

If your thoughts change all the time, is there any constant in the mental mind? You will say: “Well, I have certain beliefs, and I may have had those for a long time, even for many lifetimes.” But do these beliefs then reside in the mental mind, or are they the paradigm, the mental box, defined at the identity level? Now consider one of the beliefs you have held for a long time, and then focus on that belief and see how very quickly thoughts come up. You could look at it this way. Maybe you could ask this question: “Does it really mean this? Does it mean that?” All kinds of thoughts come in relating to this belief you have held for a long time. What does it mean? Could you interpret it in other ways? All kinds of thoughts come up.

This is what many spiritual teachers, especially in the East, have called the monkey mind because like monkeys always jumping around, so is the mental mind. Now, I am not trying to say that this is wrong. The mental mind is actually designed to work this way, so that you can more quickly respond to situations on a planet like earth, where it might be necessary to very quickly respond to a situation that is life-threatening. In order to stay alive, you might have to respond very quickly, and therefore, the mental mind must be able to very quickly shift from one thought to another. Now, you may say: “But I have grown up in a society where my life is not threatened every five minutes.” And this is true. But you still have to adapt very quickly to many situations. Just imagine driving a car, and how quickly some other car may drive into your lane, and you have to respond quickly. Just imagine how you are exposed to new ideas all the time, information overload. But you would be even more overloaded if your mind could not respond and change very quickly. I am not saying this is wrong.

Thoughts from above

But what does it mean? Well, it means that if you are looking for some constant in your life, the mental mind is not the place to look for it. The identity mind is a better place to look for something constant because you have these paradigms, these worldviews that might last over time. But still, are they not changeable? Well, of course they are. They can change, and they do change. You will not have the exact same contents in the identity mind when you leave embodiment as when you come into embodiment. If you want constancy in your life, the place to look for it is not really your physical body, your emotional body, your mental body or your identity body. Where do you look for it then? Outside of those bodies when the Conscious You steps outside and connects to your I AM Presence. And when you connect to your I AM Presence, you can experience it, and later, as a result of the experience, you can realize that thoughts can also come from your I AM Presence. Thoughts do not only come from below, they can also come from above. And they can also come from the ascended masters that are your personal guides and teachers.

What do you want? Do you want thoughts that are projected at you from the outside, that are created in the four levels of the mind, or that come to you from a higher source, your I AM Presence, your ascended masters? And of course, since you are here, I am making the assumption that you want at least some of your thoughts to come from your I AM Presence and the ascended masters.

The exercise

My aim is to show you a very simple process that you can go through. You do not even have to listen to this dictation, even though it may certainly help you to do so. But if you can sit down in a quiet room, in a reasonably comfortable chair, that is of course an advantage. Then, you close your minds. You close your eyes. You close your eyes and you first focus on your physical body. You might tune into your breathing. It goes in, it goes out. It goes in, it goes out. It constantly changes.

In this constant change, where is the constant? Therefore, nothing is constant in your physical body. All of the cells in your physical body are replaced every seven years. How can there be anything constant there? Now, you are mentally raising yourself above the physical body, allowing the Conscious You to rise, as Mother Mary said. When the Conscious You is not pulled downwards into the four lower bodies, it will spontaneously rise. You just allow it to rise.

And now there are some emotions that come to you. And within just a few seconds you can see that these emotions are constantly changing. Nothing is constant there. You allow the Conscious You to rise beyond the emotions and now you go to the mental level. And you see that your thoughts are changing all the time and new thoughts are coming in. Again, nothing is constant. You allow the Conscious You to rise to the identity level. And you see certain images that are coming into your mind, coming at you, but you realize that even they are changing. When you really focus on a certain image, it is hard to pinpoint exactly what that image is.

You may think you are of a certain nationality, but what exactly does that mean? See how it changes constantly. Other images, other interpretations coming up. Again, there is nothing constant. Again, you just allow the Conscious You to rise beyond the identity body. And now you are outside of these identity, mental, emotional and physical bodies. But you do not allow yourself to dwell in this state of pure awareness or neutral awareness because that is not the purpose of the exercise. You instead allow your attention to go from this sense of calmness towards your I AM Presence or towards an ascended master of your choice. And now you are just formulating the question: “Help me see the paradigm that limits my thoughts.”

Write

And then I want you to write down whatever comes to you when I say so. Without thinking and without analyzing, you just write down the first thing that comes to you, without thinking about it as you are writing it down. And I am going to tell you when to start writing, but first I will count. I will not count from ten to zero.

I will count from one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. And notice how your mind is thinking: “When is he going to tell me to write? When is it going to end? How far is he going to keep counting?” 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. Again you are thinking: “How long can he keep going? What is the purpose of counting? Is there some test here? Am I supposed to think a certain way?” No, you are supposed to not think. Just listen to the count. 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37. When you do this on your own, you keep counting until all that is in your mind is the numbers, the next number. You just keep counting until the mind is somewhat neutral. And then you give yourself the command: “Write now.” Did you get it? I said: “Write now! Write now!” [two-minute pause]

I asked you to stop writing for now. You can always do this exercise on your own, whether you do it with the recording or not, and therefore you can get more clear directions. But again, as with Mother Mary’s exercise, the key is to go into a neutral state of mind and not think about what you should or should not write.

An image of a spiritual person

You can gain immense benefit from listening again to the discussion you had this afternoon about how you can have this mental image of yourself as a spiritual person, what a spiritual person should be, and how this can become a track, a program in your mental mind. You have decided with your identity mind: “This is what it means to be a spiritual person, and I am a spiritual person.” And this becomes the paradigm, the mental box, that sets the parameters for how your mental mind is thinking. You are thinking about how to live up to that image, how to fulfill that image, how to make sure that you are never wrong and that you never fail to live up to it. Therefore, your mental mind is always thinking within these parameters.

And what does it do? It pulls the Conscious You down to the mental level. But at the mental level you cannot hear, you cannot receive thoughts from your I AM Presence and your ascended teachers. They will be filtered out because the thoughts we will give you will not conform to your paradigm. Your mental mind will filter them out, or if you were to receive a thought after all, it would instantly start arguing against it or imposing an interpretation upon it.

Superimposing interpretation on the direction from above

Many of you will recognize that you sometimes have this experience where you receive some kind of thought, some kind of direction. This happens when the Conscious You, without you even realizing it, just slips outside the identity and mental bodies and you receive a direction, an intuitive direction from above, but then you switch right back into the mind. Now your mental mind starts doing a number on the direction by interpreting it: “Could it really be true? Could it really mean this?” But even beyond this, your mental mind might actually superimpose the interpretation on the direction, that the direction means you should do a certain thing.

But if you step back, you realize: “This is imbalanced, this is far too extreme, this is actually black-and-white thinking.” Or it may even be that this is gray thinking because you should not actually do what the direction was about. This is the power of the paradigm. You are getting a direction from us that is a valid direction, but you are consciously aware of it for such a short time interval that you are pulled so quickly into the mental mind, and the mental mind now superimposes some interpretation on it.

It can, for example, be that you should become even more extreme at applying a spiritual teaching or a spiritual technique—that you should give more decrees or more invocations, or you should be on a more strict diet, or you should take other extreme measures like fasting for longer and longer, or trying to live off of your breath, or staring at the sun, or any number of these extreme unbalanced practices that you see out there in the spiritual field—the so-called spiritual field.

Whereas the direction you get from us is not dualistic, it is not in this extreme, that extreme, neither is it in between—it is beyond it. But if you are so attached to your paradigm, to your thoughts, to your image of what it means to be a good spiritual person, you cannot actually even think about what the direction means because you only see it through the mental mind that has already put an interpretation on the experience before you can actually formulate it as a thought, as words. This can happen so quickly that you do not even notice it.

We have so many times given directions to a spiritual person, or even to not openly spiritual people, and it is a valid direction that enters their mind from above, but the Conscious You is so quickly pulled into the mental mind that the Conscious You does not actually experience it. It experiences the movement of the instruction, but the meaning is all created or superimposed at the mental level. This is what you need to strive to neutralize.

You neutralize it, of course, by using the tools and teachings we have given to expose these subconscious selves. But once in a while you also need to do the exercise I have given and just write down what comes to you. The more neutral you can be, the more valuable what you write down will be, because the less the mind has this possibility of superimposing that interpretation upon it that makes you unable to see beyond the mental level.

Using intuition to validate the paradigm

If you will make use of these tools, I and any other master who is close to you and your I AM Presence will help you come to see the paradigm that limits your thinking and is so quick to superimpose thinking upon intuition. Contrary to what some people believe, intuition is not thinking. Neither is it your identity, your mental image at the identity level. It is beyond it. But of course, in order for your mind to implement your intuitive direction, it has to be translated into words and images that your mind can deal with. But what I am trying to help you see is that there is a difference between translating an intuitive experience into words, and superimposing a mind-created interpretation upon it.

Like Archangel Raphael said, some subconscious selves are necessary for the Conscious You to integrate with the four lower bodies. Your Conscious You needs to take on certain selves in order to function in the identity body and in order to function in the mental body, and these will affect your intuitive insights by superimposing images and words upon them. But there can also be those structures in your mind that are created based on and in reaction to conditions on earth, created from below the 48th level, from the duality consciousness. So many of the ideas in the world spring from the duality consciousness. You cannot avoid having taken them in, in this life or past lives. When an interpretation is superimposed upon your intuition, it obscures the intuition and actually pulls it down and attempts to use the sense of reality you get from the intuition to validate some paradigm, some thinking, some idea.

For a very long time, for many many centuries, Jesus has attempted to approach many many Christians and give them an intuitive experience of His Presence. But so many of these Christians, instead of really considering what this experience means, have allowed themselves to be pulled right down to the mental level and now they have used the experience as a validation for their Christian beliefs–the very beliefs that spring from the consciousness of anti-christ.

But Jesus attempted to give them the experience that there is more to him than the doctrines and the dogmas of the Christian religion, even the scriptures. But they would hear none of this, so they thought: “I met the Lord and He confirmed that my literal interpretation of the Bible is the absolute truth. Hallelujah! This is proof of my faith.” It is no such thing! It was an attempt to pull you out of your Christian mental box that has nothing to do with the true teachings of Christ. It was an attempt to have you go through the experience I went through on the road to Damascus as Paul, where I also had a paradigm, a mental box, that caused me to reject Jesus. But I had a direct experience and instead of rejecting it, I was willing to let the scales fall from my eyes, so I saw the Living Christ.

How many Christians are willing to do this today? Well, never mind, I am not addressing them, but I am hoping that you can see that what the Christians have done with the doctrines of the Christian religion, many spiritual people have done with a spiritual teaching. And it can even be done with an ascended-master teaching and this is not why we give our teachings. This is not why we give you intuitive experiences.

We do it to help you come to the point where the Conscious You realizes: “I am not the outer mind. I am more than the outer mind. And I am not so in love with the contents of my outer mind that I will use them to invalidate or cover over that experience that there is something real outside the contents of my outer mind. For I love that something more than my own mind and the contents that were created here on earth. I love my I AM Presence, I love the ascended masters, I love the Creator, I love something.”

Vanity of the mental constructs

Find something you love more than your own mind, for that is really the only way to begin the process of pulling the Conscious You out of its identification with, its fascination with, its state of being hypnotized by the mental mind that can seem so clever at coming up with arguments. But they only seem clever when you have confined yourself to the paradigm that the mental mind operates within. Then they seem clever, but when you allow the Conscious You to rise beyond that paradigm, you suddenly see them for what they are– vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Truly, all of the mental ideas and philosophies and beliefs that human beings have created throughout the ages, this is all vanity. It is an attempt to glorify the outer mind. And they think they can raise it up to such a sophisticated status that God will have to let it into the kingdom of heaven.

Well, as an ascended master, I can assure you that none of these mental constructs will ever make it into the spiritual realm, they will never become permanent. But you can become permanent when you realize and accept that you are more than anything the mental mind can come up with, can argue for, can reason about, or can prove to its own satisfaction. When you experience you are more, you realize that your mental mind may be satisfied that it has proven a certain point, but you are not satisfied for you want more. And that is the state we would like to see you rise to, because then we can truly help you, because now you can hear our directions and avoid letting the mental mind obscure their real meaning.

Defining vs. discovering how the world work

Do they even have a meaning? Not a meaning that the mental mind can fathom, but the Conscious You can experience that they have meaning as a frame of reference for looking at the mental mind and unraveling the illusions because naturally you must come to consciously see the illusions that you have without being fully conscious of what you were doing or accepting in this or past lifetimes. The scales will only fall from your eyes when you are willing to see them and look at them and challenge them one by one.

That is what we will help you do because only when the mental scales fall from your eyes can you be healed. For only then will your mental body come to accept its rightful place as the head of the household compared to your emotional and physical bodies. But you are not the ultimate head of the household, for you are under—the mental body is under—the identity which is under the I AM Presence and the ascended level, when the Conscious You does not identify itself with the contents of the mental or identity bodies.

This is our aim. For one of the major factors that keeps you out of wholeness is this thinking process at the mental level, where you think that the mental mind can define how the world should work. The mind cannot define it. It can discover and come to grasp how the world actually works, but only when it is under the supervision of the identity body, the Conscious You, the I AM Presence and the ascended masters. Otherwise, it will be lost in its own reasoning process that becomes the closed self-validating system we have talked about.

I have taken advantage of your physical and mental fatigue to give you a message that hopefully has gone in at a deeper level. And you can certainly listen to it, read it and take it in at the more mental level. But again, be careful about analyzing. You will not grasp my message by analyzing. But the mental mind can grasp it when it finds its rightful place in the lineage reaching up. I AM part of that lineage. I ascended by accepting that I AM part of that lineage and you will only ascend when you accept that you are part of that lineage.

You can intellectually understand that you are part of the lineage, but you cannot accept it on the mental level. Only the Conscious You can accept it, for there is no argumentation that will prove it. It is a direct experience and you can have it and we will help you have it. And when you have it, you will know that everything in the material world is subject to the higher realms that it is created out of. Therefore, your mind can have mastery over matter within the parameters set by the physical octave and its current density on earth. But this is a subject we will return to later.

For now, I seal you in the healing flame that I AM, the flame of vision that I AM. For it is truly only a higher vision than the mental body that will empower you to grasp how to have the mastery of mind over matter. Thus, be sealed in this emerald green light that allows you to see behind the matter screen. Hilarion, I AM.