TOPICS: Relative self-esteem – Self-esteem and status – Contradiction in the word self-esteem – A spiritual form of self-esteem – Negative self-esteem – Seeking approval of fallen beings – The impossible quest – Fallen beings will never approve avatars – Your unrealistic expectations about earth – Your hopes for coming to earth – Expectations that block your ascension – Self-esteem comes from who you are – How to fulfill a desire

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Ascended Master Jesus, December 2, 2017, through Kim Michaels. This dictation was given at a conference in Tallinn, Estonia.

I AM the Ascended Master Jesus Christ and I am here to give you some teachings about self-esteem that are specifically designed for those of you whom we have chosen to call avatars. We have chosen this name for a variety of reasons, as you have demonstrated by the fact that some of you have had a reaction to the word or the concept. Everything we do has the aim of raising people’s consciousness, and sometimes we must do this by being provocative, challenging some of the images and beliefs that people have. Indeed, you saw me do this many times when I walked the earth and encountered the scribes and the Pharisees and other closed-minded individuals and groups of people.

My beloved, truly, it is necessary that the nations that were under the communist yoke do something to increase the self-esteem of their people, but I wish to go beyond here and talk to those of you who have come to this earth for a particular purpose, not because you had to do so for karma or because your own planet ascended and you could not rise with it. You have come here for the particular purpose, in a broad sense, of being the open door, being an example, showing that there is an alternative to the consciousness that dominates this planet. When you came here, you may have had a certain intent, a certain goal, a certain sense of what you wanted to change on earth.

Relative self-esteem

What I desire you to recognize here is that when we talk about self-esteem in an outer way, for people in the world, it is, of course, very important that all people have a sense of self-esteem because they generally function better in their lives than if they have no or a very low sense of self-esteem. Now, in some way we could say that all people have self-esteem, it is just a matter of how they see the self, how they define the self. Do they define it in a positive way or a negative way? Nevertheless, what we can say about most people in the world is that they have a relative sense of self-esteem because it is related to something in this world. If you are an athlete who does the long jump, then your sense of self-esteem may be related to how far you can jump. If you are a businessman, your sense of self-esteem may be related to how much money you have or how much money you are making.

You see that many people in the world have created a relative sense of self where there is a scale related to some kind of performance in the world. Now, there is not necessarily anything wrong or bad about this. It is a necessary stage in the unfoldment of a being. We have said that one of the basic desires people have is to make an effort and receive some kind of positive outcome, some kind of reward for their effort. You can say that as an expression of this basic desire, you create the sense of self-esteem where there is a scale for your own performance. Naturally, the higher you can perform on that scale, the more sense of self-esteem you will have. This is what we might call a higher form of self-esteem, again in a worldly sense.

Now, there are other people who have a lower form of self-esteem where, instead of comparing their own performance to the goals they have set, they are always comparing themselves to others. Are they doing better or worse than other people? Do they have more or less than other people? This can still be seen as an expression of this basic desire to make an effort and to reap the rewards. Again, clearly a lower sense of self-esteem than when you are working on your own and comparing yourself only to yourself, but still not a destructive sense of self-esteem.

Self-esteem and status

Now then, you have another type of self-esteem that is not related to your performance but to your status in some human, artificially created hierarchy. You may have, for example, the sense that because you are the emperor or the king, you are superior to other people because of your position. You may have the sense that because you have some position in the state apparatus, you are superior to ordinary people. You see that this form of self-esteem is not tied to performance but to a certain position.

Now, in some cases, of course, it may require an effort to attain this position but the lowest level of this form of esteem is tied to a position that you have somehow gotten, either through inheritance, by claiming some kind of authority or by using force, deceit or whatever it may be. Once you have this status, you think that there is nothing that can challenge your status, that the people below you cannot challenge that status. You see that this form of self-esteem is the self-esteem of the fallen beings. They can, of course, also have a certain sense of self-esteem where being able to exercise great power gives them the self-esteem. Although this, in some sense, is tied to their performance, it is still, when your performance is measured on how well you can exercise power over others, clearly a lower source of self-esteem.

Contradiction in the word self-esteem

If we go beyond this level, we can see that when we talk about avatars, when we talk about spiritual people who are consciously walking a spiritual path (a true inner path towards their ascension), we need to take these considerations to a higher level. We need to ask ourselves if there is not a certain contradiction in the word “self-esteem.” Now, as Master MORE was talking about last night: “Can you really feel anger in a non-specific way, or do you need an object?” In the same way, you can say: “Can you really feel esteem for anything if you do not have an object that you are esteeming?”

What is self-esteem? Many people have not defined the word. They somehow think they know what it means. You are appreciating yourself. You think you are a good or capable person. You are feeling good about yourself, whatever it is. What is the self that is being esteemed? As spiritual people you can clearly see that for most people in the world, it is not

their inner beings, their Conscious Yous, their real beings that are being esteemed because their self-esteem is related to something in this world. Their inner being is not defined by anything in this world so when your self-esteem is related to anything in this world, it cannot be your true self. It can only be an outer self, an element of your outer self.

You may say, for example, the athlete who does the long jump, he has defined and created a self and when he performs well, this self feels good, feels capable, feels superior, feels whatever—but it is an outer self. Really, does it have any significance in a spiritual sense how far you can jump on the field? You see that so many other people out there have created these outer selves, these relative selves, selves that are related to a specific condition in the world. When they live up to that condition to some degree, then they can feel good about themselves and they can feel they have some value. They have some esteem in their own minds and perhaps even in the minds of others.

Naturally, we do not desire you who are direct students to be limited to this form of self-esteem. We desire you to reach a much higher level of self-esteem that truly comes from within and is not related to how you perform or what status you have on earth. Truly, when you consider the message of the new book of the contrast between a natural planet and earth, you can see that it really is not a very high form of self-esteem you can have if your self-esteem is related to anything on such a low planet.

A spiritual form of self-esteem

We desire you to go beyond this relative, worldly, outer self-esteem and gain a higher form of self-esteem. Now, it is natural that when you first find the spiritual path, you do not have a completely clear vision and understanding of what the goal of the path is and where it leads. In many cases, you may be more focused on the outer path than on the inner path. In many cases, spiritual students have created a different form of outer self. Instead of being related to something in the material world, it is related to how well they perform on the spiritual path as they understand it.

Now again, this is not particularly negative. It is just an expression of the fact that when you first find the spiritual path, you use this drive to make an effort and reap a reward to define what it means to be a good student, what it means to make progress on the path, what it means to make an effort to apply yourself. You use this to define a self and a way to evaluate where you are at in your performance, and then you can feel good about yourself or not so good about yourself according to this standard. This is, of course, a phase that you need to go through and then you transcend into a higher form of self-esteem.

Negative self-esteem

Before I talk about that, I want to talk about the fact that there are also people who have defined what I call a negative self and that leads them to have negative self-worth. In other words, you can have what we might call a positive sense of self where your performance can be higher or lower, but it is not so that you are a complete failure. On the other hand, you see, of course, in the world many people who have defined a negative sense of self where there is something wrong with them. It is not a matter of being higher or lower, it is a matter of being low or much lower.

One of the effects of a communist system is that many people have this negative sense of self-worth but it can only be bad or worse. Many Christians have had the same thing, feeling as sinners and therefore defining a negative sense of self. This may, again, have a certain scale where you can feel that you are a sinner, but some sinners are worse than others so maybe you are not quite as bad as those other people who are doing this or that. This is still very relative. You see examples of this in the world, but what I want to point out to you is that there are some of you who are avatars and spiritual people who also have, most often in past lives, defined these negative selves where you feel in some way bad about yourself. You feel that you have made a mistake in the past or that there is something wrong with you, and therefore you could not really, on that scale, go into the positive territory. You are always in the negative territory and it is just a matter of how low you are, how bad you feel about yourself.

Many of you have created these selves because you have been exposed to situations where you felt you had failed in your goals. In other words, you had a certain goal but you completely failed to attain that goal and therefore you decided that there was something inherently flawed or wrong about you. This then created these negative selves that cannot give you self-esteem but can only give you the opposite. There are, of course, many ways that you can create these negative selves, but what I really want to talk about is that in many cases, you have created these negative selves because you have interacted with fallen beings. Here is where you need to understand the dynamic between an avatar and a fallen being. Naturally, the new book gives a very, very good and detailed description about this, but it does not go so much into the deeper psychology, at least not in the aspect I want to talk about here.

The rest of this dictation is available in the book: Healing Your Spiritual Traumas.