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Ascended Master Portia through Kim Michaels, June 6, 2025. This dictation was given the conference in Seoul, South Korea: Being the Living Christ in everyday life.

I AM the Ascended Master Portia. What I wish to talk about here is a phenomenon that we have often observed among spiritual people, not only in ascended master movements, but in many, if not all, spiritual movements. It is this phenomenon that here you are, you are living your life the way you were brought up to live your life, you may have various issues, various problems you are dealing with or you may live a relatively normal life where you feel that something is missing. Then you find a spiritual teaching, a spiritual guru, a spiritual movement and you decide to join it. You decide to make an effort to really study the teaching, apply the practices, perhaps you even uproot your life, move from where you live to be in a spiritual community as many people around the world have done.

After you make this commitment to the spiritual path, you often have what we could call the honeymoon period where everything is wonderful. You are literally in love with your new spiritual focus in life, you feel excited about life, about your future, you feel that you are discovering new things all the time. You have a hope that you will one day reach whatever goal is defined in your spiritual movement and you are very optimistic about the future.

When people stress about spiritual growth

Then after some time (it may take months, it may take years, for some it takes decades) there comes a gradual shift or perhaps even a sudden shift where now you start to become more and more tense. It is like the innocence of that first period gradually fades away and now you become much more serious. In many cases, people think that this really demonstrates that they have made a higher commitment to the spiritual path, they take it more seriously, they are making more of an effort, they have a stronger commitment. What actually happens is that people become stressed.

In the beginning, your spirituality was a sense of joy, a sense of opportunity, an innocent looking forward to the future. Then, after some time you become tense, you become serious, everything seems to be so serious, there are mistakes that could be made, tests that may not be passed. You may not live up to certain demands, whether they be defined from without by the guru or the organization or whether they be defined from within. You become stressed, you start to become dissatisfied, perhaps you feel that you are not living up to the expectations, the demands or the standard, perhaps you feel that other people are not living up to it. Perhaps you feel like you are not reaching the people you think you should be reaching, you feel like you are not attracting new people to your group or your movement and suddenly there is a certain sense of stress that creeps in.

Now again, as we have said many, many times, we are not in any way blaming you for this. We are not trying to say that this should not be happening. It happens to the vast majority of spiritual people, and ascended master students are no exception. Perhaps they are in some cases worse because they think they found the highest spiritual teaching so they need to live up to the highest possible standard. What I would like to address here is why this happens.

How subconscious selves color your approach to the path

Now in a sense we have already addressed it because, as we have explained, when you first find a spiritual teaching or movement, your view of life is colored by the ego, by the subconscious selves. What happens is that in the beginning there might be so many new things that are happening to you, so many new teachings you come across, that for a little while the ego, the subconscious selves, lose their grip over your mind because you are just so excited and you are flowing with this excitement, exploring something new. It is like being in love with a person where everything is new and everything is exciting and you are optimistic about the future.

Then, after a while, gradually the selves now start finding a way to again exert influence over you and they start very subtly coloring the way you approach the spiritual path. What do the selves do? Well, they do the only thing they can do and as Mother Mary explained, the ego is on this impossible quest to compensate for the loss of connection to your higher self. It can happen that gradually you take this impossible quest of the ego, you transfer it to your spiritual teaching, your guru, your path and now you think that the movement, the teachings have defined this path, these demands that you are supposed to live up to and you are not sure that you can.

Actually, this is your intuition, not your fears. Well, it can also be your fears, but often it is your intuition that is trying to tell you that you cannot live up to these outer demands. Why? Because what is it that the ego attempts to do? It attempts to take something in this world and try to use it to compensate for the loss of connection to your I AM Presence. Since nothing in this world can replace that connection, your intuition is trying to tell you that you making this commitment to follow all the outer rules, standards and demands is not actually going to get you to where you hope you are going.

When you are trying to fulfill all of these outer requirements in order to create a feeling within yourself, namely the feeling of being connected to your I AM Presence, then you will experience, usually after some time (in a few cases after a long period of time) that you are not there. You are not living up to the demands, you are not getting the results you thought you were going to get. This then causes stress, it causes strain and many of you think that: “But then I have to apply myself even harder. I have to give more decrees, I have to get up earlier and give the decrees, I have to do all of the outer things right.” You put yourself on this treadmill where, as you know on a treadmill, you can run faster and faster, but you are still not getting anywhere.

Recognizing the cause of your stress

What is it we desire to see for our ascended master students in this dispensation? If you have gotten yourself into this state of feeling stressed, feeling dissatisfied, feeling like you are not there, you are not achieving the results you should be achieving, we desire to see you get out of that state. We desire for you to again recapture that inner sense of feeling that the path is exciting, that you are constantly moving forward, that you are constantly taking steps that are making you feel better about yourself and your path. What is the only way that this can be done? It is by resolving the subconscious selves that color your view of the path.

If you find yourself being in this position, where you do not have the joy that you used to have, then be willing to look into your subconscious mind. It is not as difficult as you might think, you just need to be willing to acknowledge: “Ah, but I have lost some of that innocence, I do feel stress, but why? What is it I really feel? What are the thoughts behind it? What is it that causes me to be in this bind, in this dilemma, in this catch-22, where I am pulled in different directions. and therefore I cannot possibly be at peace?”

You can unravel this, use the tools, use the teachings we have given about the subconscious selves, and come to this point where you can see the mechanism. Because the selves are based on duality, they first of all cannot take you to the goal, but they are also pulling you in opposite directions, and this is what causes the stress. When you see two selves that are pulling you in opposite directions, then you can look for the illusion in each self, and come to see that it is really just an illusion, that it was not real, that it was the ego trying to define the path to Christhood, but it can never happen. How do you come to that realization? Well, by reaching for the Christ mind, which is right there with you—it is not way up there. The Christ mind is not far removed from you, the Christ mind is always within you, the kingdom of God is within you, and so it does not come with observation of the outer rules, it comes with observation of the inner selves.

A black-and-white view of Christhood

There is a subtle point that may require some contemplation, because there is a tendency (more so in previous dispensations, but even in this) that students can come to see the Christ mind in this black-and-white light, of the black-and-white thinking of the ego. They think, as we have talked about: If you are the Christ, you are always right, you have the ultimate truth that will resolve any conflict.

You see, in the Christ mind, is there any stress in the Christ mind? Does the Christ mind ever get stressed? Why would it? It is experiencing oneness with the Creator, with the source, why would it feel stressed? Does the Christ mind need anything on Earth? Nay. What could the Christ mind possibly need from Earth? What could it need from form? What could it need from matter? The Christ mind is connected to the source of all life, the Creator itself. The Christ mind could never feel lack, could never feel stress. Therefore, when you begin to lock in to the Christ mind, you can gradually overcome the selves that cause you to feel stress about the spiritual path.

You can come to see that these selves, they want you to feel stressed because of two reasons. First of all, when you are stressed, when you are divided within yourself, you are qualifying energy with a fear-based vibration, and that feeds the selves. They can only absorb light below a certain vibration, and so they need you to be stressed in order to feed them. The other thing is that when you are stressed, what are you doing? You are focusing on outer things. Oh, there is this path, I have to follow it, there are all these demands, there are other people, there is a guru. There are these ascended masters up there that are making demands on me, they are looking down on me every second, seeing if I pass my tests. I must pass my tests, but I do not know what the tests are, so how can I pass them? At least if I stress about it, it might seem like I am serious, I am a serious student, more serious than those other students who are not stressed.

You see how the effect of this is—what? You are looking “out there,” you are thinking that when you find something out there, when you achieve something out there, then you will feel at peace, then you will feel fulfilled. How will that ever happen? As we have said, the ultimate fulfillment is to experience a connection to your I AM Presence, to the Christ mind, to the ascended masters. As long as you are looking outside yourself, how can you discover the Kingdom of God that is within you? How can you say to Christ: “This does not matter to me, what is that to me, I will follow thee?”

Is the Conscious You stressed?

When you see this, when you see that the selves are just trying frantically to pull your attention away from the one thing that can give you what you need, then you can begin to separate yourself, to separate the Conscious You, from them. You can ask yourself a simple question: “Where is my stress located? Is it located in the Conscious You?” Well, some people think it is, because they are so identified with the outer selves that they think that I, the Conscious You, I am such a good ascended master student, and therefore, I have to live up to these outer demands.

You see, the Conscious You—what have we said so many times? Is the Conscious You your physical body? To help you wake up: answer! Is the Conscious You your physical body? No. Is the Conscious You your emotional body? No. Is the Conscious You your mental body? No. Is the Conscious You your identity body? No. The Conscious You is more. If the Conscious You is pure awareness, neutral awareness, is not affected by anything on Earth, why would the Conscious You be stressed?

You see, the Conscious You cannot be stressed. Why are you then feeling stressed? Because the Conscious You is experiencing stress through a separate self. The self is stressed because the self is based on duality, and what have we said? There is an existential stress in the duality consciousness. No one is more stressed than the fallen beings. When you realize this, you can see that you are not stressed. You cannot be stressed. You can only experience it and when you see that stress is simply an experience, you can ask yourself: “Why did I want to have that experience?”

You have most likely never thought about it this way, and your outer mind is going to say, the selves are going to say: “Oh, but it is not that you chose to have this experience. That is just how life on Earth is. Look at all these outer conditions, look at all these problems, how could you be embodiment on Earth and not be stressed?” It is easy to believe that life on Earth, on an unnatural planet, is so difficult, that Earth is so dense, that there is so much conflict that you can only be stressed.

We recognize that we have all felt a certain stress from being on an unnatural planet, but still you do not have to be stressed. The Conscious You does not have to be stressed when you realize that nothing on Earth can touch you when you are in touch with pure awareness, neutral awareness. If you are neutral, what can stress you? What can pull you in opposite directions? What is stress? You are always pulled in opposite directions, at least two different directions, maybe even more if you have several selves that are pulling on you. You can therefore, begin to ask yourself these questions: “Is the Christ mind ever stressed? Is my I AM Presence ever stressed? Why would the Conscious You be stressed?” You can realize that it is not.

Are ascended masters stressed?

Now there will be, perhaps, for some of you an outer self that says: “But are not the ascended masters stressed? Do they not want Earth to become a natural planet? Do they not want the manifestation of Saint Germain’s Golden Age? Do they not want me to manifest Christhood, to give all these decrees, to help raise the collective consciousness?” We have seen in previous dispensations how ascended master students could become so focused on changing the world that they actually thought that their stress came from us, that we were the ones who were putting this stress upon them, wanting them to do all these things, wanting them to do more than could possibly be done. This is not a reality.

Ask yourself: “Why would an ascended master be stressed?” You have ascended by leaving behind all attachments to anything on Earth. What does this mean? It means that we are not in our minds looking at Earth and thinking there is a huge deficit, there is a huge gap. Look at conditions, how they are. Look at what Saint Germain’s Golden Age will be like. Look at the huge difference and look at these people, especially our own students, who will not give all these decrees that we want them to give so we can close the gap. You think this is how we think, but this is not how we think, because if we thought that way, we would not have ascended, we would be in embodiment like you. You see, yes, of course we want Earth to become a natural planet. Yes, of course we want Saint Germain’s Golden Age to be manifest. But we are not wanting this from a sense of deficit, but from a sense of flowing with the River of Life. There is a huge difference, and the difference is, as we have now talked about, in vibration, reading the vibration, as Master MORE said.

When you are coming from this deficit approach, there is a specific vibration. It is fear-based, it causes stress, it causes you to feel obsessive-compulsive, for example about decreeing or studying the teachings. You can learn to read that vibration. You can realize that this kind of vibration does not come from the Christ mind. Then, as you tune in to the Christ mind, after working on the selves, you will experience the difference in vibration between the Christ mind and this lower vibration. You can come to experience the vibration of an ascended master, as Master MORE talked about with the unconditional love, because we all have unconditional love. I can assure you that unconditional love is unconditional. Master MORE’s unconditional love is not more unconditional than my unconditional love, for there can, of course, be no gradations, no comparisons in the unconditional. It is more than the love you know on Earth and when you experience that, you can begin to free yourself from this sense of stress.

The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Being the Living Christ in everyday life.