Listen to the audio book version of the dictation.

Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, May 24, 2026. This dictation was given at the conference in Kazakhstan: Co-creating with the ascended masters on the seven rays.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. So many things have been accomplished at this conference. We have given more teachings than we originally planned to give because of the response of you who are here physically and those of you on the two webinars. For this I want to express my gratitude for we are always gratified when our students rise higher and we can give more teachings.

The progressive revelation

You may contrast this with the religion of Buddhism, who is still 2,500 years later, looking back to what I gave back then thinking that since I was a fully enlightened being, what I gave back then must be complete, it must be enough, it must be all I could ever give. This is of course because they think that since I was an enlightened being and since I have now entered Nirvana, I must be perfect so there is no growth possible for the Buddha. So how could the Buddha have grown in the past 2,500 years and now have a higher teaching than what he gave back then? They are denying both that I can grow and that the collective consciousness can grow so that I might have a higher teaching today, but I also may be able to give a higher teaching because people of today can receive it, they can receive a teaching they could not receive back then.

Jesus of course feels exactly the same way. The archangel Gabriel feels the same way about Islam. For surely Gabriel could give a higher teaching for Muslims today than could be given at the time of Muhammad if only Muslims were open to it, which of course the vast majority of them are not as the vast majority of those who call themselves Buddhists are not open to the possibility that the Buddha could give a higher teaching as the vast majority of Christians are not open to the possibility that the real Jesus could have a website and give a higher teaching.

We honor those who are open, not only you who are our direct students but many other people around the world who are open either to new spiritual teachings or just new ideas of how to improve some aspect of life.

The purpose of the 12-year cycle

Now of course as an ascended master with Buddhic attainment my mind is not easily disturbed, it is not easily boggled but still, it can be said to be mind boggling that the people on earth can look at the current state of this planet and reason that no better condition is possible or even decide to cling to a traditional lifestyle or traditional values.

Do you see what is in a sense the greatest enemy of progress? Contentment, the sense that things are good enough as they are or that they cannot become any better. So, what is our overall purpose for this 12-year cycle of receiving an extraordinary amount of light that magnifies imbalances? In a sense what we are doing with the release of this light is to create chaos, upheaval. Yes, but what does the chaos do? It breaks up the sense that things could not get better and opens more and more people to the necessity for change, for improvement and therefore, more and more people also become open to the simple equation that has always been guiding progress.

You cannot improve things by continuing to do what you are doing now. You must be willing to try something different. You must be willing to experiment instead of continuing to do the same thing and expect that one day you will get different results. In other words, the purpose of the 12-year cycle is to help people escape the insanity that they think they can mindlessly continue doing the same thing and one day somehow, they will be in heaven, or heaven will be on earth. Now again our gratitude for you all being willing to be part of this 12-year cycle, this release of light and even the acceleration of the light that has taken place during this conference.

The crucial initiation to leave duality behind

With this I want to shift and focus on not just the initiations you face above the 96th level, but really the crucial initiation you face on your journey towards the ascension. Other masters have painted this expansive cosmological picture, but all of this journey you have gone through from a very one-pointed, single-minded, localized co-creator to where you are at today, what has been its purpose? Well, partly that you gain experience, but really that you pass one particular initiation.

Now we have talked about this, that when you come to earth from a natural planet, you are exposed to this birth trauma and this projection that you are wrong, then you will begin to evaluate, was I wrong for coming to earth? This messenger has described how he went through this process and it took him a long time to resolve this enigma.

And truly it is necessary for you to evaluate this because you have descended to an unnatural planet that is ruled by the duality consciousness. You have been exposed to it in a very aggressive form, but what is really the purpose for your doing this? It is to come to the point where you consciously understand duality and therefore, based on this realization of what duality is, you can make a fully conscious decision to leave duality behind. I am not saying that you need to make this decision now. I am not expecting that you will instantly make this decision by hearing my teaching about this. It may take time for you to implement it, but I have determined that this is the time to explain this initiation more fully.

Letting go the desire to make a difference on earth

What this messenger went through for some time was that he started contemplating why he came to earth, how he looked at earth, how he looked at suffering, how he looked at free will, how he looked at himself and his own role on earth, what he desired to experience, out-picture, accomplish on earth. And of course the dilemma is you come here not because you want to enjoy life on this planet, because you had much greater enjoyment on your natural planet than you could ever have on earth by doing the activities that are possible on earth, you come here because you want to help.

As Padmasambhava explained, an expression of Christhood is to help raise that part of the whole that is still trapped in duality. You come here because you have a desire to see some positive outcome. You are, so to speak, sacrificing, making a sacrifice to come here and you would like to at least see that you coming here made a difference. The earth is in a better place because you have been here than if you had decided not to come here. This is perfectly natural and unavoidable. But of course, you experience that you have not achieved the result you were hoping to achieve before so you go about for some time evaluating: “Did I have an unrealistic expectation? Do I need to give up my expectation?” And this messenger struggled for some time with this until he decided that: “Yes, I just have to give up all expectations I had before coming to earth. All images of me being the prince on the white horse, helping people, making a difference. It seems like none of it can be fulfilled.”

Was it wrong to come to earth?

He even looked at his work for us since 2002 and said: “Look, I have received all these teachings from the masters. I have published them on the websites. I have published them in books. Has it made any real difference on a planetary level? He was not discounting the fact that it made a great difference for many of you. But still he was evaluating, has it really made a difference on a larger scale?

And of course, it had not because not that many people have found the teachings. This tied him into this initial disappointment of feeling like he could not accomplish on this planet what he thought he could accomplish before he came. He just did not have the attainment he had on a natural planet and that he was used to. It felt like to him he had lost the attainment. He really was not capable of achieving anything on this earth and this over time led him to evaluate: Was it the wrong decision to come to earth? When you let go of all of the expectations, all of the images of what could happen, what you could do or achieve, was it wrong to come to earth?

And it is a natural stage that we have all gone through, who have embodied on an unnatural planet and what the messenger did is what we have all done. You use the rational mind to evaluate this because as we have explained now, you use the conceptual mind to project an image, you use the rational mind to evaluate the return current, so you use the rational mind. You could say in fact that, before you came you used the conceptual mind to formulate an image of what you could achieve on earth and then you came here, projected this, experienced that the return current did not conform to your image and now you are using your rational mind to evaluate. Of course, you have had many embodiments where you used the rational mind to evaluate how could you change yourself so you could achieve results on earth. But this is beyond. You use the rational mind to evaluate the decision to come to earth and the rational mind always wants to understand. It wants to look at the cause behind the effect.

Why did I decide to come to earth?

What we have all done at this phase is we have tried to analyze and rationalize: “Why did I make that decision? What was there in my psychology that led me to look at earth the way I did that caused me to make the decision to come to earth?” Because you think, the rational mind thinks, that if I can just understand all of the components that were part of the decision-making process, then I will be able to understand why I made that decision because there must be a reason, there must be an explanation. And if I understand it, then I will achieve something. We are not necessarily clear about what we will actually achieve if we understand why we made the decision. Maybe we think we could change the decision or at least change the way we look at the decision. We feel like if we understand why we made the decision, something must come out of that. Something good must come out of us understanding why we made the decision.

This can become a trap, a blind alley. There are in fact people who have gone above the 96th level, they have achieved personal Christhood. But now they have become focused, obsessed one might say, about resolving this enigma of why they came to earth and instead of expressing their Christhood while they are still on earth, they go into thinking about this and they cannot focus on anything else. Some have even withdrawn from life to speculate about this, and you can be stuck in this no-man’s land, this quicksand, for a very long period of time, almost indefinitely.

The epic drama vs. just an experiment

What is it that can resolve the enigma? What can cut the Gordian knots? It is one very simple realization, but of course it may not be so simple to reach it. But the key realization is, what was your decision to come to earth? And the answer is, given by Master MORE at the beginning of the conference, it was an experiment. But in order to fully realize that you have to be willing to acknowledge that after coming to earth and being exposed to the attack by the fallen beings, your view of your decision to come to earth became colored by duality. In order to deal with the shock, the trauma of coming to earth and realizing that your expectation could not be fulfilled, you created an epic drama around it. And as a result of this epic drama, you want to feel that your decision to come to earth has some significance, some significance at the personal level, even at the cosmic level. It must have had some significance and that is why you are desperately looking for the explanation.

You are feeling that there must have been some point where you saw the various options for coming to earth, and you saw some significance of choosing to come to earth, and that is why you chose it. And perhaps if you understand the significance of the decision, you can accept your decision because what you are really seeking is to overcome this sense, this fear, this anxiety that you could have made the wrong decision. If you can understand the significance of the decision, maybe you can come to the point where you can accept your decision and accept yourself for making the decision, instead of thinking: “Was there something wrong with me? Did I make a mistake? Did I fail an initiation?”

And again, you can speculate about this. You can look deeply into your being and search. You can reach up to your I AM Presence. You can cry out to the ascended masters: “Show me, just show me, show me why I did this.” And again, you can be trapped there almost indefinitely. Is there a way out?

The only way out

Well, yes, or I would not be speaking as an ascended master. Is there more than one way out? No, there is not. There is only one way out of this dilemma, and that is to come to this very simple realization. It is actually beyond that your decision was an experiment. And the profound (you will notice my tone of voice) the profound truth is that your epic decision to come to earth was just a decision. It was no more significant in a cosmic perspective than you deciding to express yourself in some creative way by doing a painting or modeling something or doing something else on earth.

What I am seeking to show you here is you are a co-creator. Your entire purpose for existence is to grow in self-awareness. How do you grow? By making decisions. If you never made a decision, you would never grow. Any decision you make can help you grow, because you experiment and see the outcome. And therefore, if a decision helps you grow, it was not right, not significant, it was just a decision that helped you grow. What about decisions that do not help you grow? There are no such decisions. Any decision you ever made can help you grow when you realize it was just a decision. Again, the entire evaluation was a decision. Right or wrong only exists in duality.

The way you grow as a co-creator is you make a decision, you experience the outcome. You make another decision, you experience the outcome, you make another decision. It may seem as if many decisions are small decisions that do not have great consequences, but the decision to come to earth was a big decision that had big consequences for you. How can that just be another decision, like deciding whether to put on a green shirt or a blue shirt in the morning? But that sense that your decision to come to earth was somehow different from other decisions, that sense is what keeps you trapped and what prevents you from ascending from earth. Coming to earth was just a decision. Experiencing your birth trauma, as shocking as it was, and creating the primal self was just a decision.

Now you may say: “But I have carried that decision with me ever since and it has affected me. How do I be free of it?” And see, you think that because the decision had unpleasant consequences, you have to find out why you made it. You have to somehow do something about the consequences or about yourself. You have to do something to be free of that decision. Now you are reaching back to a decision you made in the past, thinking you have to change something, but you cannot change the past. How can you be free of a past decision? By realizing that the entire purpose of being a co-creator is to make a decision, experience the consequences, make another decision. How do you become free of a past decision? Not by changing anything related to that decision or the consequences. By just making another decision.

How to be free from earth

How do you let go of that self-focused self at the 96th level? Not by resolving anything in the self. Not by changing the self. By just making the decision to let go. You change direction. Every decision you make gives you an experience that helps you make a different decision. It is not a matter of better or worse, right or wrong. As long as you make decisions and flow, you are growing. The moment you stop and say: “Oh that was a wrong decision, I have to compensate or I have to figure out why”—you are no longer flowing, you see? No, you do not, and I do not blame you. For this is, as I said, the most subtle initiation on earth in an unascended sphere at all.

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The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Co-Creating with the Ascended Masters.

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