Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels, May 22, 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 Mother Mary and my purpose for giving this visualization is because I do sense that many spiritual people, many ascended master students find it difficult, at least at a certain stage of the path, to let go. And in a sense, we realize and experience that the more teachings we give the more frustrating it can be for some of you. You hear about separate selves, you hear that you are supposed to let go of them and you are wondering, how can I let go? You hear about this self-focused self, the last self you are supposed to let go of and you are wondering how can I let go? I want to let go, how can I let go?

The purpose of the teachings

This is again one of these enigmas on the spiritual path, and the enigma is this, words are not the same as the experience. We can give you words that you are supposed to let go, but the words cannot mechanically, automatically, magically produce the experience. And the enigma we might say for all spiritual teachers is how can we help the students have the experience of shifting their minds. How can we use words to help people have that experience? And what we have attempted to do through this dispensation is give you this new teaching about these subconscious selves and of course about the Conscious You, so that we have attempted to help you grasp the process whereby you use the outer mind to look at a certain pattern in your psychology, a certain reactionary pattern, and you realize that this pattern resides in what we call a subconscious self.

And you realize, because we are telling you over and over, that a subconscious self is made, is built on, based on a belief, a decision you made. You were in a frustrating situation and you made the decision, not in these words of course, but you made the decision of how you were going to deal with that situation so you could psychologically survive, maintain some sense that you are in control.

So, you see the dilemma, perhaps? You are in a very difficult situation on this dense planet called earth, where there are all kinds of frustrations, contradictions, attacks on you. There is a situation that overwhelms you, it is too much, you cannot deal with it, but you cannot get away with it either. You are making a decision that helps you overcome the sense of being overwhelmed. You are somehow making a decision to deal with that overwhelming situation and after having made that decision and created the self, the self can suppress the sense of being overwhelmed.

The purpose of creating a self

You feel you have established some sense of equilibrium. Some sense of being in control of your state of mind, but it is of course based on suppressing something, denying something, because you are not able to really look at it in the situation and process it. Now you have built this subconscious self that is basically meant to help you, give you that sense that you have some grip on your situation on this planet, so you can survive psychologically. But the self of course is based on a limited view, is based on a dualistic belief and therefore, the self has built in contradictions. And therefore, when you are now approaching life through the coloring of that self, you will experience other situations that are difficult to deal with, perhaps overwhelming, and that means that even though the self in that particular situation helped you deal with the frustration, the stress, the self itself produces more stress, more frustration.

The catch-22

But the self also forms a catch-22, because what was it the self did in that very difficult situation? It helped you maintain a sense of equilibrium, a sense of being in control, a sense of being able to cope, to deal with life. But now, long time after you created the self, you are becoming aware that you have a certain frustration in your mind, a frustration with life, perhaps a frustration with the spiritual path, you are not getting the results you were hoping for so your frustration is building and the frustration is actually, at least in part, created by this self. But in your mind, you cannot really look at the self, you cannot really ask the question: “Do I need the self anymore? Is it helping me or hindering me? Should I let it go?” You cannot ask these questions because you are thinking: “But the self helped me deal with life and helped me gain a sense of being in control, and if I let go of that self, what will happen? Will I not again be overwhelmed? Will I not be even more frustrated?”

And the reaction is understandable, but it is also illogical and non-constructive. It is not reality. You see, something can be understandable on this very difficult, unnatural planet, but still not be real or constructive. And the problem with the self is that the situation that created the self happened a long time ago, when you were relatively new on this planet. You were shocked by the situation that caused you to create the self, because you were surprised, you did not expect it. You never thought this would happen to you. But you see, since then, you have been in embodiment on this earth many times. You have experienced many of the things that are happening on earth, but never happened on a natural planet.

You have gained more maturity, more experience with earth. If you let go of the self, you will not react the same way that you did when you created the self. You will not be overwhelmed. You will not be plunged into a black hole. You will in fact be able to look back at the situation and say: “Yeah, I see why I reacted that way back then, but I also see I would not react that way today. I do not need the self that was based on that old reaction.”

How to let go

Still, even if you see this with the mind, with the rational, logical mind, that is not the same as letting go of a self, or letting go in general. You see how many times in this conference and even previously, we have talked about letting go. But how do you let go?

Again, I cannot give you words that will produce the shift so you actually let go but I can give you some directions. You need to tune in to this inability to let go. You need to seek to clarify, to look at it from different angles so you come to see it. I am not talking about understanding it. There is a need for understanding with the rational mind, as I just gave you. What I am talking about now is just seeing it. Because most of you, when you cannot let go, it is because there is something you have not seen. You have not seen it clearly, you have not seen it for what it is. What you can do is just observe. You feel frustration, just observe it. You are just observing it. You are not evaluating, you are not analyzing, you are not thinking, you are just observing. You allow yourself to experience the feeling, go into the feeling. Wherever it takes you, it is still just an experience you are having.

Seeing a self from the outside

You are just experiencing, you are just observing the feeling until somehow, something emerges, a clarity where you see the self from the outside. You see it is not you. That is all I am asking, that you see that the self is not you. Do you grasp what I am leading you towards? How can you come to see a self, how can you even think about a self, if it was you?

If you had become the self, if you are the self, you cannot see it from the outside.You cannot even conceive of it, of there being a self that is different from you. The very fact that you have studied these teachings and tried to work with them, shows you something very simple. You see, a separate self could never grasp the teaching. It could never decide to apply the teaching. A separate self could never decide: ”I want to get rid of myself.” Only the Conscious You can do this, because you are not the self.

The Conscious You is you

Now you can perform a little trick on yourself here, however you conceive of the Conscious You, however you might be able to experience the Conscious You, just focus on that. What is the Conscious You for you? Then try to step outside the Conscious You and look at it from the outside. What exactly is it? How do you see the Conscious You?

If you do not quite get it, imagine that I am now asking you to become aware of your physical body and you are looking, you do not necessarily have to open your eyes, but you are visualizing, you are looking, and now I am asking you to step outside your body and look at yourself with your physical eyes. Of course you know you cannot do this, but you see, this is a metaphor for the Conscious You. The Conscious You is you. It cannot ever see itself from the outside. It cannot step outside of itself and that is how you can know that you are not a separate self. You have not become the self and all I am asking you here is to contemplate, perhaps experience, that you are not any particular self. You have no form. You are not a self. You are you, and if you can experience that, perhaps this might help you letting go of that which you now see is not you because when you see what you are, you also see what you are not. And therefore, that which you are can let go of that which you are not.

“Why aren’t you there yet?”

Now there is a certain wisdom that has been given over again in Buddhist teachings, especially for example in Zen Buddhism and it is that some students get into this mindset that they see the spiritual path, they see in their minds the goal of the spiritual path. They see the means defined in their particular teaching for moving towards that goal and they dedicate themselves to this. They are very eager, they are doing everything just right, all the outer things they are doing right. But then after they have done everything right for a time, they build this frustration: “Why have I not attained the goal? Whatever they see the goal as, why have I not attained it? Why am I not there yet?” You know how if you get into the car with the children and you have a long drive and you know it is going to take hours and hours, but after five minutes the children say: “Are we there yet?”

And that is what some of your subconscious selves are saying, only they are saying: “Why are you not there yet?” And if you listen to these selves, you might build a certain frustration, and what Buddhist teachers in their monasteries and ashrams have been trying to do over the centuries is to somehow shock students into suddenly shifting out of the frustration. And they have done it in various different ways. There is an old story of a teacher who was dealing with a frustrated young monk and he suddenly without any thought slapped him on the face and the person became enlightened. And that might work on occasion, unfortunately it has caused an awful lot of slapping in Buddhist monasteries and not quite a corresponding level of enlightenment.

Frustration is an inner experience

But other methods have been tried, such as telling the student to stop trying, stop your efforts and sometimes when students actually stop doing the outer things, but also stop in their minds wanting to get somewhere, suddenly they shift. One other way to go about this is to realize, based on our teachings, that everything is an experience. Say you are very frustrated, you have not gotten results on the spiritual path. What is that? If you step back and look at the frustration, what is it? Is it not an experience? Why are you wanting to have that experience? And you will say: “But I do not want to have this experience, I want to get out of this experience, I want to have peace of mind, I want to experience enlightenment, I want to experience the flow of the ascended masters, the Holy Spirit, I want to experience everything else but this frustration.”

Really? Is that what you want? Why have you then chosen to go into the frustrated experience? And why are you continuing to choose to keep yourself in it? And you might say: “But I have not chosen it, it just happened because I do not get the results.”

Frustration is created and resolved within!

I see. So you are not then grasping our teachings that the inner experience you are having is not caused by outer conditions but by the conditions in your mind. What is the experience you are seeking? Peace of mind? Enlightenment? Whatever it is, what is that? It is an experience. How can you ever have an experience that is not taking place inside your mind? How could that be possible? How will you shift from your experience of being frustrated to the experience of having the result you want on the spiritual path? How do you shift from one experience to the next?

Well, before you can get out of your current experience, you have to let go of it and what prevents you from letting go? Some condition inside your mind. You may think that doing some outer practice will remove it, but it will not. Why have you not shifted? Why have you not let go? Because there is something in your mind that you have not seen. There is something in your subconscious mind that you have not made conscious. You have not fully acknowledged that the frustration is produced inside your mind and therefore, it can only be overcome inside your mind.

And you have not acknowledged that you created the self that gives you the experience of being a frustrated being and therefore, you have the power to uncreate that self and you are in fact the only being in the universe who can do it. No enlightened masters can come and undo in your mind what you have created with your free will. So why do you want to have the experience of not being there yet? There must be a reason. It must be doing something for you. What is the frustration doing for you that you value more than this experience of peace that you say you want?

Building your self-mastery

Again, I am just throwing out ideas to help those of you who feel this frustration come to see what you need to shift so you can let go of those selves, any selves, but also that last self-focused self at the 96th level.

What are you? This is just another attempt, another experiment. What are you? You are an experiencer. What is the spiritual path about? It is not about having a spiritual experience. It is not about being enlightened, being awakened, ascending. The spiritual path is about self-mastery. What is self-mastery?

Many students over the decades have thought it is some magical ability that you acquire as you follow this strict disciplinarian path of the ascended masters. But self-mastery is very simple. The ability to choose your inner experience. What prevents you from having that mastery is that you have a self that has the belief that is based on the belief that your inner experience is a product of or dependent upon something outside yourself.

This might be something in the world, such as the perfect partner or lots of money. Or it might be something beyond this world, such as a spiritual master appearing to you, touching your third eye and suddenly you are enlightened, but none of these can do it for you.

Self-mastery is when you choose your state of mind, and how do you choose your state of mind? Well, first of all by realizing you are not those subconscious selves that are pulling on you. But even when you experience yourself as the Conscious You, as pure awareness, it does not necessarily mean you can choose your state of mind. You have to build up that mastery. But you cannot really start the process until you recognize that your state of mind is a product of conditions in your mind, in the four levels of your mind. Then you can gradually build the mastery in the Conscious You of choosing your inner experience independently of external conditions.

What one has done, all can do!

Is it easy? Not really. Is it possible? Definitely. Is it worth it? Absolutely. I have gone through it. Serapis Bey has gone through it. Master MORE has gone through it. Even Jesus went through it, even though it took a little nudging from mom for him to achieve it much more than is recorded in the scriptures. So really, what you should say: “These ascended masters are not so special that they can achieve something I cannot achieve.” You should say: “Well, if these colorful characters could do it, then certainly I can achieve it too.” And of course in a sense, all of our teachings are aimed at helping you make that shift of seeing something in your mind, experiencing that it is not you, and therefore, realizing that if you let go of the self, you will not disappear, you will not die, you will not lose anything. You will gain freedom, peace of mind.

This was what I came up with for now. Perhaps more will come up later from other masters or myself, but my final thought is, try to acknowledge the frustration you feel. Then try to see that the frustration always has an external object. There is always a reason why you are frustrated but the reason why you are frustrated is not why you are frustrated. That is just what the self is projecting at you. The frustration is just the self. It is an internally produced experience and if you can acknowledge that it is an experience, you can say: “Why am I continually choosing to uphold that experience instead of one time choosing to let it go?”

With this, I have given you my thoughts for now, and I will then leave this subject, this topic alone. But I am not quite done, but that will be a separate dictation.

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