Dication by Ascended Master Jesus, November 16, 2002 through Kim Michaels

We have now come to a topic that I consider to be extremely important, but which many religious and spiritual people ignore. I have already told you that your lifestream has been on this planet for a very long time. One glance at history should demonstrate that you have most likely been involved with one or more wars or other atrocities. It should be obvious that such traumatic experiences can cause your soul to become wounded and bruised. Therefore, it should be easy to see that you have a need to heal your soul.

The word “soul” comes from the Greek word “psyche.” Psyche and soul are interchangeable terms. In the terminology that we of the ascended masters use today, the soul is a vehicle that the Conscious You creates in order to interact with the physical body. Your soul does follow you over many lifetimes, but in the end, you can ascend only by giving up the soul, by letting the soul – the sense of identity based on the soul vehicle – die so you can be reborn into a new identity based on the Christ mind. As I told Nicodemus, only the being that descended from heaven can ascend back to heaven. That being is what I have called the Conscious You, the pure aspect of your lower being. If your soul has been severely wounded, it can be difficult for you to stop identifying with the soul, and thus you cannot give up the soul, give up the ghosts that make up the soul. [For further teachings on the soul, see the book The Power of Self.]

I have told you that the essence of the path to personal Christhood is that you must put off the old human, the sense of identity based on the death consciousness, and put on the new human, namely a sense of identity based on the Christ Self and your God-given individuality. The biggest obstacle to this process is that people tend to become very attached to certain aspects of their lower sense of identity, the soul. The cause of this attachment is the emotional wounds that your soul has received in the past.

Your emotional wounds can cause you to become attached to elements of your false sense of identity or to certain false ideas. In many cases, a traumatic experience from the past caused you to accept a false belief about yourself, about God or about some aspect of life. The traumatic experience also caused your soul to experience intense emotional pain. The pain generated a pool of negative energy, and this energy is stored in the soul (in your personal energy field).

If you have not healed your soul, the emotional energy is still there. Therefore, any attempt to reconsider the false belief will inevitably open up the old wound and cause your conscious mind to reconnect with the negative energy. As a result, you will re-experience the emotional pain. Many people are afraid of reconsidering a false idea because they do not want to deal with the pain. However, it is a brutal fact of life that in order to free yourself from your false beliefs, you must be willing to open the Pandora’s box of your past.

Many people are afraid to open this box and look into their own psyche. In fact, I see many people who use religion or spirituality as an excuse for not dealing with the wounds of the psyche. These people focus their attention on the outer aspect of religion or they focus on practicing a spiritual technique. They reason that if only they follow all of the outer rules, go to church every Sunday or practice some spiritual technique then they can somehow avoid having to deal with the pain in the psyche.

I am very happy to see the numerous self-improvement techniques that are available today. Not all of them are beneficial, and not all of them were inspired by the ascended masters. Yet many of them do come from us, and we have released them to assist you on your path. However, I must tell you that a spiritual technique cannot replace the need for psychological healing. You cannot simply pray, meditate or sit in a Yoga posture and assume that this will automatically heal your psychology.

Why a spiritual technique cannot heal you

Let me explain why a spiritual technique cannot heal your psychology for you. The human experience is produced by the choices you make by exercising your God-given free will. When you experience a traumatic situation, there are two aspects of that situation. One aspect is the outer situation, for example what another human being does to you. Another aspect is the inner situation, namely how you choose to respond to that situation.

I want you to understand that I am in no way saying that it is right to harm another human being. If someone harms you, that person will inevitably make karma. However, it is a brutal fact that the cause of a psychological wound is not the other person’s actions. What causes the wound is your inner reaction to those actions.

Human beings react very differently to similar situations. One person might think that a situation is no big deal, and that person simply moves on without being emotionally scarred by the situation. Another person can use the same situation to build a negative self image that can stay in the soul for lifetimes.

The causes of your psychological wounds are the decisions you made concerning how you responded to traumatic or painful situations. Therefore, the essential key to healing your wounds is that you must consciously go back to the original choice and make a better decision. For example, a child who is sexually, physically or emotionally abused often builds a negative self image dominated by guilt and a sense of unworthiness. No amount of prayer, meditation or yoga exercises will remove that negative self-image (as we will see in the next section, a spiritual exercise might remove the negative energy created in the original situation). To remove the false image, you must replace the original decision (or decisions) with a new and better decision based on the understanding that you are a spiritual being created in the image and likeness of God.

There are many techniques on the market today that can assist you to go into the depths of your psyche and free yourself from the negative gravitational pull of your past. I can assure you that if some of these techniques had been available 2,000 years ago, I would have had all of my disciples go into some form of therapy or psychological healing.

I consider it absolutely vital that you make a conscious and determined effort to heal the wounds in your psychology. These wounds form a dead weight that will greatly hinder you as you attempt to climb the path of Christhood. Why drag along this heavy weight when you can remove it by applying a suitable method of psychological healing?

The healing of your psychology is an extremely important topic, and I simply do not have space to cover all of its facets in this book. However, we of the ascended masters have provided several other books that outline the practical steps to healing your psychology. One final thought. I earlier told you that by turning the other cheek you will avoid making personal karma from a situation.

However, this also has an inner aspect. If you can turn the other cheek and react with total forgiveness then you will avoid creating an emotional scar in your soul. You can simply let go of the situation and move on as if it never happened. As you grow in Christhood and heal your psychology, you will attain the ability to respond with love, forgiveness, harmony and peace to any situation that life throws at you. The ability to have full control over your inner reactions to outer situations is the very key to personal freedom. It is also the key to spiritual freedom.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book: The Mystical Teachings of Jesus.