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Ascended Master Serapis Bey through Kim Michaels, January 10, 2016.

I AM the Ascended Master Serapis Bey. We are now at the sixth level of my retreat, the level where you face the combination of the Fourth Ray of Purity and the Sixth Ray, which has often been called the ray of service and the ray of peace.

What is the connection between service and peace? We have told you that you descended to earth with a higher purpose, a purpose that is beyond what most people can see with their conscious minds. You descended here because you saw that this is a low planet with much darkness and that conditions need to be changed on earth. You came here because you thought that by taking embodiment, bringing your light, expressing your individual creativity, you could make a difference and indeed help raise the earth to a higher level where it can spin off some of the darker manifestations you currently see, such as war and other forms of man’s inhumanity to man.

We might say that a huge part of your motivation, your intention, for coming to earth was to give a service that would help bring the earth to a higher level. It is therefore built into your deepest intention that you want to improve the earth, to raise up the earth.

When service takes away your peace

What I aim to show you now is how your desire to give service to earth can take away your sense of peace. This is unfortunately something that can be reinforced by you finding the spiritual path and following a spiritual teaching. There are various spiritual teachings out there that are influenced by the subtle ideas of the fallen beings, especially the epic mindset. These teachings will directly give their followers the sense that they are here to change specific conditions on earth. Even the ascended master teachings, that we give, can reinforce this epic mindset and a desire to see specific changes on earth. We are, of course, often asking you to make calls for specific changes. Mother Mary’s book on war, for example, gives you tools for making specific calls that will help eradicate war from the earth (Help the Ascended Masters Stop War). How, then, do you balance the desire to see specific changes with your inner peace?

It is obvious that we of the ascended masters want to see specific changes on earth. We obviously want to see war banished from this planet. We want to see the earth accelerated into a higher state where war and the lifestreams who embody the warring consciousness are simply spun off because they cannot remain with the accelerated vibration of the planet and the collective consciousness.

Nevertheless, as I said before, we want to see this within the context of the Law of Free Will. We want to see that a majority of the people on earth use their free will to raise their consciousness beyond the consciousness of, for example, war. How can they do this? They cannot do so by being forced to do so.

Do you not see, my beloved, that we are not asking you to make calls and invocations that are forcing people? We are asking you to make calls that are raising their insight, their knowledge, their vision so that they can voluntarily make these changes.

Do you not see by now that one of the essential differences between the ascended masters and the false hierarchy is that we have total respect for free will and the false hierarchy have no respect for free will whatsoever.

The fallen beings force people to react

What is it that the fallen beings have done from the moment they came to earth? They have forced people into reacting to them and against them. Do you not see that this is one of the mechanisms behind war and all kinds of violence? You are in a physical body, you have to live somewhere in order to exist and provide for yourself and your family. You live on a piece of land, if some other group of people assemble an army and come marching into your territory in order to take it over and potentially kill you and your family, then you are forced to react to that in some way.

This is how the fallen beings have forced people into these reactionary spirals that become self-reinforcing. You see, for example, in the Middle East how people have, for thousands of years, been trapped in the same kind of reactionary spiral. The fallen beings hardly need to do anything to keep it going because the people are doing so of their own accord. They cannot pull themselves out of these spirals. You see, of course, that these spirals are the antithesis to peace. There can be no peace among people when they are trapped in such a spiral. There can be no peace within people when they are trapped in such a spiral. These spirals that take away people’s peace may not be warring among nations or ethnic groups. They can be spirals within families or at workplaces where you are, again, trapped in reacting to or reacting against other people. Some people, whether it be in their marriage or among their brothers and sisters or parents, have been trapped in a spiral with the same souls for lifetimes. They keep reincarnating in the same family groups because they cannot break out of the spirals they have with the other souls in the group.

You, of course, are a spiritual student, an ascended master student. You have already pulled yourself out of the more obvious of these reactionary spirals or you would not have raised yourself above the 48th level of consciousness. What I am seeking to help you see here is that there are other reactionary spirals that are more subtle.

One of these spirals is the sense that because the fallen beings have forced people into a downward spiral, you who are the spiritual people are justified in forcing people out of the downward spiral for their own good. This is the essence of the epic mindset where you think there is an epic battle between good and evil and you are taking the side of good. Because evil is so aggressive, it is necessary for you to use force to defeat evil or to free people from the clutches of evil.

This is the justification behind all the kinds of force-based measures taken by religious people, spiritual people or other types of well-meaning people who thought they were working for a good cause but were still using force. At your level, at the sixth level of my retreat on the Fourth Ray, you have freed yourself from these spirals, but have you completely freed yourself from the subtle mindset behind it?

Service and success

Even if you are not reacting directly against other people or seeking to force them, you can still be affected by this subtle sense that you are here to give a service to earth and that the measure for evaluating whether you are successful in giving this service is that you see specific outer changes. My beloved, as long as you think that your service on this planet depends on producing specific outer changes that are tied to the free-will choices of other people, then you can never attain inner peace.

You may say, as many students do when we discuss this at the etheric level: “But Serapis, are you saying we are not here to give service and produce specific changes? Are we not here to help remove evil from the earth?” Well, the answer to that question is: “yes and no” because it depends on how you look at it.

We have before used the image that you can have a group of people who are trapped in a dark cave. Because they are in darkness, they cannot see where they are or what they are doing so there are certain choices they cannot make consciously. If you slowly increase the level of light in the room, the people will gradually begin to see more clearly. As their vision clears, they will, from within, begin to make more conscious, more aware choices. It has been said by Master MORE that if people knew better, they would do better and it is true for all except the fallen beings. It is even true for the fallen beings, but they will never get to know better until they shift their consciousness and swallow their pride, which is very difficult for them to do.

For all other lifestreams, if they truly see that there is a better option than what they have chosen so far, then they will, in most cases spontaneously, choose that option. As the old story goes, if you think you are holding a rope and the light increases and you see that it is a snake, you will spontaneously let go of the snake.

Your job is not to produce specific changes by forcing other people. How do you, for example, force people to become peaceful? It is force that takes away their peace and makes them go to war with each other. How does more force remove the force that is already there and has created havoc on earth? It cannot be done!

The fallen beings have created all kinds of subtle ideas that say, not only that it can be done but that it is the only way it can be done. The end can justify the means. This has never been and never will be the method of the ascended masters. We work with free will, within the Law of Free Will. Increase the light and people will make better choices. If they do not, then stand back and let them go into a downward spiral until they have had enough of that experience and cry out for more, as they inevitably will when the knocks become hard enough.

Can you see, my beloved, that there is a conflict between your original, pure love-based motivation for coming to earth and the motivation and the view that you have in your conscious mind and in your three higher bodies? Can you see that what I am pointing out to you is that as long as there is a conflict between the two, you cannot find inner peace on this planet?

You cannot be at peace with being in embodiment on earth as long as you think you are here to produce specific changes that are dependent on the free-will choices of other people. You must come to the point where you realize that your service to life does not depend on any condition or any person outside yourself.

When we discuss this at my retreat, when we sit in groups and discuss this topic, students often react by saying: “But how do we then give service? We cannot see how we give service.” What have we said is the goal of the path of self-mastery? It is to be an open door for the light that comes from your I AM Presence and from the hierarchy of ascended masters above you.

The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: The Mystical Initiations of Intention.