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Ascended Master Hilarion through Kim Michaels, January 12, 2017.

I AM the ascended master Hilarion. At the third level of my retreat, you are facing the initiation of the Fifth Ray combined with the Third Ray of Love. When you come to my retreat and participate in the classes at this level, I am attempting to help you reconnect to the original love that caused you to come into embodiment. The other chohans have, of course, helped you do the same thing. I try to do it specifically to help you see that there is a vision that is part of your Divine plan and you love this vision more than any vision you have had so far on your spiritual path.

The hard way or the love way

You see, my beloved, there are two ways to give up something on earth: the hard way or the love way. The hard way is when you come to a point where you realize that you have been suffering from an illusion, you have been holding an illusion in your mind, and it simply is not in accordance with what many people call reality. Reality, of course, is a dubious concept because what many people call reality is only the temporary manifestation brought about by the fact that the earth has sunk so far below its original level.

Nevertheless, there are many people who have had one of these awakening or hitting-the-concrete experiences or they have suddenly realized that what they have believed to be true is not true at all. This is the hard way to give up something. It is not that, as the ascended masters, we are against students giving up something the hard way because it is better that you give up something and move on than you keep holding on to an illusion. We are not seeking to have you give up something the hard way; we are seeking to have you give up something by reconnecting to the love in your being so that you can let it go from a position of love because you know there is something more. When you give up something the hard way, it is often as if you feel like something has been taken from you. You feel empty, you feel like your world has fallen apart. You feel like there is a vacuum inside of you and you do not know what is going to fill it.

What I hope to help you achieve at this level of my retreat is to reconnect to the love you have for the higher vision so that you can see that this higher vision is so much more than what you have seen so far. Therefore, you want to see that vision and it is no difficulty to let go of the old vision because you know you would get so much more instead. This is fairly easy to achieve at the etheric level in the identity body at my retreat. The difficulty is, of course, to bring it down into your conscious mind and that is the purpose of giving this outer dictation that you can read and study. We, of course, have no desire to take you through a process at our retreats where you attain a higher consciousness in your identity body but it is not carried through the mental, emotional and into the physical, conscious level. What can you do at the conscious level to connect to what you are going through at my retreat? Well, you can build on what I gave you in my last discourse where I said that you have a higher vision in your Divine plan. You can realize what I also said, namely that in order to grasp a higher vision, you must first be willing to let go of your current vision. Here, we run into a peculiar problem.

The desire to feel important

There are people who have started the spiritual path and even people who have started this course of self-mastery with a particular vision, a particular goal, a particular desire. They have, for instance, a desire to be important people who are doing something important for saving the earth or raising the consciousness, for bringing in the Golden Age of Saint Germain. This is a positive vision. There is nothing inherently wrong with it, but mixed into this is a certain ego desire to feel that you are special compared to other people because you are following the ascended master teachings, a particular guru or a particular outer teaching.

You are doing so many things, giving invocations and decrees, you are working on your psychology, you are doing this, you are doing that. There is an element of ego desire in this of wanting to feel that you have done something special, you have done something decisive. Therefore, you are more spiritual, you are in a special category of people. Here comes the real subtlety: You now think that God or the ascended masters should pay special attention to you or should reward you in some way.

It is very possible to build a desire where you think that your spiritual path is moving you towards a goal where you can manifest a particular outer situation. I have said that some people have the goal of manifesting a nice house, a perfect spouse and plenty of money. Many spiritual people also have the goal of either manifesting recognition from the world, recognition from the ascended masters or at least the sense that they have done something decisive to bring about a new age on earth.

Now, you may say: “Is there anything wrong with having this desire?” This is where things get subtle, my beloved. You understand that the entire purpose of the ascended masters is that we want to meet people at whatever consciousness they are at. If a person at the absolute lowest level of consciousness currently allowed on earth could attune to us, we would be willing to work with that person. We would meet that person at the person’s level of consciousness and seek to help that person come to the next level up. This is our general approach to helping people on earth. In practice, there is, of course, a barrier where many people below the 48th level of consciousness cannot connect to us and therefore we cannot work with them directly. As soon as a person is able to tune in to us in some way, even if only in glimpses, we are willing to work with that person and therefore we must, of course, meet them at the level of consciousness they are at.

Giving up your lower vision

When you start this course of self-mastery, you start (in many cases) at the 48th level. Some can even start it a bit lower than the 48th level and so it is natural, unavoidable and fully acceptable to us that you need a motivation to start the spiritual path, to start this course. Your motivation is, of course, based on your desires, based on the vision that you have at that level of consciousness. Again, there is nothing wrong with this. You are at a certain level of consciousness and you cannot at that level see beyond a certain threshold. You cannot grasp a higher vision than what corresponds to your level of consciousness. Naturally, your outlook on life and your desires, ambitions and goals are influenced or based upon the vision that you have at that level.

What we are also seeking to help you see is that you need to continually move up. There are people who come to this level at my retreat and they have followed the course of self-mastery so far, but they have not given up the desire they had when they started. They still have in their minds that as they go through this course, they should build a certain self-mastery that should give them control of mind over matter and help them manifest the same outer situation that they desired when they started the course.

Now, my beloved, I do not think it is possible to go through this entire course and maintain the same vision and the same desire you had when you started. I can assure you that if it was possible, you would have failed the course. What you would do when you reached the 96th level of this course was (and mind you, I am saying the 96th level of this course and not the 96th level of consciousness) is that you would use whatever momentum you had gathered on the path to manifest this specific outer situation you desire. Instead of taking you higher towards the 144th level and Christhood, it would actually start taking you lower again. You would start going into using force to manifest that vision and therefore you would start descending the levels of consciousness.

You see, my beloved, it is an absolute requirement to pass the initiations of the course that you are willing to let go of the old vision in order to grasp a higher vision, a higher desire, a higher goal. This is where, at this particular level at my retreat, you need to really take a look at how you are using vision.

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