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Ascended Master Saint Germain through Kim Michaels, September 24, 2023. This dictation was given at a conference in Almaty, Kazakhstan—Being the River of Life in action.

I AM the Ascended Master Saint Germain and I am free. Why am I free? Because I am flowing with the River of Life. There is no freedom outside the River of Life. And as I say this in the physical octave the demons of Mara, the dark forces, the prince of this world, are raising up their ugly heads above the water where they normally hide and they are objecting, for they say there is only freedom in being a separate being and raising that being up to as far as it can be raised until it becomes a god in its own right.

A false dualistic image of God and freedom

But you see, how could there ever be a god that was separated from the Creator? There is nothing in this world of form that could exist without the Creator. The concept that you could create a separate self that could reach the same status as the Creator can only come from a mind that is completely trapped in illusion, in maya, in delusion. How can you be free in illusion? You can only be free in reality. All of these dark forces who have attempted, some of them for a very long time, to attain this ultimate freedom where they think they have power to do whatever they want, they are not free.

There is an ancient lie put out by the fallen beings after they came to this planet that you only gain freedom by rebelling against the will of God. But when you rebel against the will of God, which god are you rebelling against? Well, only the man-made god, the angry being in the sky. What have the fallen beings really done? They have first defined a false god in such a way that it seems like this god wants to control everything you do. Then they have defined the concept that only in rebelling against this god do you gain freedom. Only in total selfishness, self-focus, self-centeredness, do you gain freedom.

These are the two dualistic polarities they are projecting out there, just another of the myriad examples of how the duality consciousness defines these dualistic extremes and then projects that the only way to look at the issue is that there is the truth and there is the error. But, as we have said so many times, neither the dualistic so-called truth nor the dualistic so-called lie have any reality to them. They are both illusions. The real Creator is not the tyrant in the sky, for the real Creator has given you free will, has given you self- awareness by giving you a portion, an extension of its own One Mind and it has given you freedom to do whatever you want with that self. You have the freedom to go into illusion and take your illusions or your delusions of grandeur as far as you can possibly take them before you finally have enough of it. And all will have enough of it. At least, so far, all have eventually had enough.

In REALITY all life is one

There is no freedom in being apart. You cannot see yourself as a separate being and be free. Why is this so? Well, it is not for outer reasons. It is not because God is punishing you or limiting you. It is because your life experience depends only on the contents of your own mind. Whatever sense of self you define, you are trapped in that self. If you define yourself as a separate self, you are trapped in that self. And therefore, the very way you define your self, takes away your freedom. You may define the self in such a way that you think you have freedom because within this world view that you have defined, you think you can do anything you want. You think that in total selfishness, in total disregard for other forms of life, you gain total freedom. Yet, this is an illusion and why is it an illusion?

Well, this is one of the central enigmas on earth. It is an illusion because in reality all life is one. As other masters have said, take the statement: “only Brahman is real, the world is an illusion” but if only Brahman exists, then there is nothing outside of Brahman, so the world must also be Brahman, meaning, everything is one in the interdependent originations that the Buddha talked about so long ago.

The reality is that everything is created out of the Creator’s being and therefore, everything is one in the Creator’s being. And therefore, the illusion or the impression or the world view or the experience that you are a separate being who can do whatever you want, can only be an illusion. That illusion does not exist in any kind of reality. That illusion exists only in the mind, the mind of self-aware beings who have chosen to go into the illusion of separation rather than remaining in the reality of oneness or at least connectedness.

You start out as a connected being. This is the natural state. You can then expand your sense of connection until you cross a certain threshold and now connection smoothly merges into a sense of oneness, which then eventually merges, not into a sense of oneness, but an experience of oneness. But because of free will, a self-aware being has the right to move into a different state of consciousness where it does not see itself as one with the River of Life. Because even when you start at the 48th level on a planet like earth, as we have explained, you have some sense of being connected to the River of Life. You may not call it the River of Life, you may not see it that way, but you still have some sense of being connected and there is only one thing you can be connected to, the River of Life, that is created out of all of the beings who are transcending themselves, moving back or rather moving towards that state of the Creator consciousness.

What is real oneness?

So there is no freedom outside of oneness and this requires some contemplation from those who are willing to deal with this seeming enigma. And on a planet like earth, it requires special consideration because you know very well as spiritual people that there is something called the collective consciousness, the mass consciousness. And there are those fallen beings who will point to this state on earth and say: “Well, if you are talking about oneness, then this surely must be oneness, that you follow the collective consciousness.” You have all been brought up not knowing this, your parents did not know this, often your society did not know it, but you have all been brought up to follow the collective consciousness in your country. But this is not oneness because the collective consciousness on earth is behind this veil of the illusion of separation so you have been brought up to follow the collective consciousness which is in a state of separation. But this is not oneness, because what is oneness?

Well, the ultimate state of oneness is the Creator. Do you see any society on earth that has this concept, that thinks it is moving towards oneness with the Creator? Nay. Every society on earth has defined itself as being separate from other societies. That is why you have conflict on earth. You have a localized sense of oneness in one country that says, we are Americans, we are Russians, we are English, and this is oneness to be like we are. But of course, there are other countries that define oneness differently and so there is conflict between them and this cannot be ultimate oneness. It is a localized sense of oneness based on the illusion of separation, therefore not real oneness.

What is real oneness? Well, it is to realize that earth is one planet in an immense universe. Look how this latest space telescope has expanded the vision of astronomers so that they are astonished at what they have seen because it does not conform to their cherished paradigm. You see continually how large of a universe you are in. You know there is a force of gravity, or at least what scientists call the force of gravity, that is connecting everything in the universe. You actually know, based on science, that your earth is not a separate entity. You are connected to the whole.

The earth is flowing with the whole as the universe is expanding. The earth is being pulled along by some force that drives the expansion of the universe. Scientists think this is gravity, or whatever they think it is, but they have not discovered what this force is. But it is actually what we could call the unifying force, which we might as well also call the River of Life, the Holy Spirit, the Buddha Nature. And even if all people on earth could agree on what it means to be a human being, this still would not be oneness, for you cannot attain oneness looking only at a planetary level.

It is so localized, so incredibly localized, and therefore you need to recognize, when you become a spiritual person who realizes there is more to understand about life than what you were told in kindergarten or Sunday school, you need to realize that you need to look beyond this local perspective. You need to see that there is something beyond the earth. There is something beyond the material frequency spectrum. And when you consider what that is, you realize that there are other self-aware beings who are not confined to physical bodies in the physical octave of earth. And if you want to attain oneness, talk about oneness, you need to connect to those beings because they are the ones who are currently forming that unifying movement of the River of Life.

Reaching the Creator-consciousness

Now there is another enigma that crops up in the minds of some people who will say: “Well, it sounds like there is some cosmic force that are drawing everybody into oneness, the out-breath and the in-breath of God, so God is drawing everything back to itself. And this must mean that ultimately you disappear as an individual being when you go back to oneness.” And that is how it seems from a being who is trapped in separation. And of course, you could say, is there some validity to this? Well, yes. When you are drawn into oneness, the separate self disappears and is no more. But your real self, your I AM Presence, the individuality anchored in that Presence, does not disappear when you are in oneness because even when this creation created by your Creator has run its ultimate course, it will not be so that all self-aware beings disappear back into the Creator.

Instead, all of the self-aware beings who have been willing to use the opportunity given to them will have reached the Creator-consciousness. And, of course, then people will say: “Well, what does that mean?” Well, it means that when you reach the Creator-consciousness, you can choose if you decide to create your own world of form. “Well”, people will say, “does that mean there are other worlds of form, other universes besides ours?” Well, of course, there are. “Well, how many are there?”, they will say. And the answer is, a number that you cannot fathom with the consciousness people can attain on earth.

No beginning, no end

There is an unfathomable number of universes, more and more created all the time. And then people will say: “But how did this all start? When did it all begin? There must have been a beginning. There must have been a time when there was no world of form and then the first world of form came into being and how did that happen? Where did that come from? Where did the first creator come from?” But these are questions that spring from the mind of separation, what we have called the linear mind.

The linear mind looks at the River of Life, and when we give the concept of the River of Life that is flowing, the linear mind will want to say: “When did the flow start? When did the River of Life start flowing? What was before the River of Life when there was no flow?” And we have given you the teachings that there was a time when there was only the Creator, the Creator created the void, projected a sphere in the void, projected forms in that sphere. So, your world of form did have a beginning but the entire process of creation never had a beginning. And you can say, what value does it have for you to contemplate this? Well, it actually has value in the sense that if you are to join the River of Life, you need to find a way to neutralize your personal individual linear mind. Because the linear mind will keep coming up with all of these questions, seeking to draw you into reasoning: “When did it start? What was before? What is the cause of it? There must have been a time where there was nothing.”

But there was never a time where there was nothing. There was a time where your world of form did not exist. There was a time where your Creator had created a void, and in that void, there was nothing, or rather no thing, because no form had yet been defined. But there was a creation before yours, and before that there was another creation. And there comes a point where when you look at this from the linear mind, you will see that the linear mind cannot cope. It cannot keep going back to something before. If you keep thinking that there must have been an ultimate beginning, and keep thinking, well, before this there must have been something, and then there was this, but before that there must have been something, and you keep going back, there comes a point where the linear mind cannot deal with this.

This is a perfect example of what we have tried to explain with your separate selves. The separate selves project there is a problem that you must solve. The linear mind is a separate self. It projects: “But there must have been a beginning, when was the beginning? What was before the beginning?” But you can keep going back. Why? Because you are in time and space, and you do not have unlimited time and space to keep going back to what was before. It is the same as we have said before, that if you start counting, one, two, three, four, forever more you can be counting, except you cannot count forever because you do not have forever in this lifetime.

But you could theoretically have a person who was ten years old and decided: “I am going to start counting, and I am going to continue counting for the rest of my life.” And that person might count to a very high number, but he could not count to the ultimate number because there is no ultimate number. You see here that you can be trapped in this linear mind for the rest of your life, asking all of these questions. But there is no solution to it because you will never find an ultimate beginning, partly because you have limited time, but really because there is no ultimate beginning.

What do you want?

The solution to this enigma is not to solve the enigma at the level of consciousness where the enigma is defined, but to step outside of that separate self that projects the enigma and just say: “Why do I need to know how this all started when I could just jump into the flow and flow with the river and it would be much more free and much more enjoyable to flow with the river than standing here on the bank wondering, how did the river start back there?”

The question to ask yourself is this: “Do I want the ultimate understanding with the linear mind or do I want the experience of flowing with the River of Life”? What does it take to flow with the river? Just jump in. But as long as you are standing there on the river bank holding on to this dilemma that you want resolved before you can jump in, well, you cannot get in, can you? But what will the river do? It will continue flowing. Are you harming the river by not jumping in? No. Are you harming yourself by not jumping in? Yes. Maybe not from the perspective of the separate self, but from a larger perspective you are.

The current of ascending from earth

How did I become the Representative of Freedom, the Seventh Ray of Freedom for the earth? I jumped into that particular current of the River of Life that is the Seventh Ray of Freedom. How could I jump into that? Well, because I had ascended from earth. How did I ascend from earth? By jumping into the River of Life of this current that has been created on earth by all those who have ascended before. And now, of course, you are going to say with a linear mind: “Aha, Saint Germain! You are saying that there was a time when nobody had ascended from earth.” Yes, of course I am.

You are in a world of form that had a beginning. Yes, your world of form had a beginning. The world of form as the larger reality had no beginning. There was always a world of form. There was always a flow, because a world of form is never static. It is always transcending itself and when one world of form reaches its final cycle, another is created or many others are created and this has always been so. There was never a time where this started. But there was a time where the earth has been created by the Elohim in its pure state. There was a wave of lifestreams that took embodiment on earth and after some time, quite some time actually, the first being ascended from earth.

This was, of course, easier back then because the earth was a natural planet. But nevertheless, the first being ascended, another ascended, more and more ascended and so over a very long period of time, many beings ascended and created this momentum, this River of Life of ascending from earth. Then came a second wave of lifestreams, a third and a fourth and in the fourth there were suddenly more people that could not ascend and this then eventually led to the downward spiral that led to fallen beings being allowed to embody here and the earth was then no longer a natural planet. It became more difficult to ascend from earth but still it was possible partly or in large part because so many beings had ascended while the earth was still a natural planet. There was created this current in the River of Life and the current did not in any way become weaker because the earth became an unnatural planet.

What happened was it became more difficult for people in embodiment to tie into that current but the current is still there. It is still very powerful. It is being enhanced whenever a being ascends from earth. All I did jump into that current in the River of Life. That is how I ascended. That is how Jesus ascended. That is how Gautama ascended. That is how everyone that has ever ascended has done so. It is not that I was so special, so advanced and that is why I ascended. There are, especially in previous dispensations, many, many ascended master students who have this idolatrous view that Saint Germain must have been so special and look at his past embodiments and he ascended and he was the Wonder Man of Europe and now he is the God of Freedom for the earth. He must have been far more special than I am. But think about this.

Equality of the ascension process

What is the requirement for jumping into the River of Life created by the ascension of all those beings who came before? The requirement is that you are willing to let go of everything in your four lower bodies. Your emotions related to earth, your physical body of course, your emotions, your thoughts relating to earth, your sense of identity relating to earth. You have to let go of all of it. What does that mean? That means that when you ascend, you are standing there — it is even meaningless to say you are standing because you are beyond the physical body but we use images sometimes that you can relate to.

There you are as the Conscious You which is what have we said? Pure awareness. Meaning, there is no identity in the identity body, there is no thoughts in the mental, no feeling patterns. You are just pure awareness. And the pure awareness of my Conscious You is not more advanced than the pure awareness of your Conscious You. I return to that state, stop seeing myself as what I was in my last embodiment or what I had been in previous embodiments on earth. I gave up, I let die, I surrendered all of the identity I had relating to earth. I was in that same pure state that your Conscious You was in when it descended and as your Conscious You will be when you ascend. It is completely meaningless to say that my Conscious You should be more advanced or sophisticated than yours. I just jumped in.

Now, if we are to be more accurate, we must say that this does not mean that everybody is the same when they ascend because as we have explained, as you are embodying on earth, your I AM Presence is learning from your experiences and this goes into your causal body and, of course, different beings use their free will in different ways. It can be so, of course, and it is so that one person’s I AM Presence might have reached a higher level than another depending on how you make use of the opportunity to be in embodiment. But nevertheless, the I AM Presence does not compare itself to others in a dualistic manner so again it is meaningless to say all of this. It is as if some students have thought that : “It was easier for Saint Germain or Jesus to ascend than it will be for me”, and this simply is not the case.

We are all equal to the law of the ascension. We all have to follow the same process. We all have to let go of everything and so when you begin to contemplate this you realize something profound. You actually realize that you do not have to be someone special from an earthly perspective in order to jump into the River of Life. You actually have to stop seeing yourself as someone special in order to jump into the River of Life. And when you look at earth you see an interesting phenomenon there.

Transcending the need to be special

You see that, first of all, you have, of course, the fallen beings who are always trying to set themselves up as being special and the fallen beings will often be very insensitive to life, exercise power and all of this. But you also see that there are people who are not in the fallen consciousness or who have transcended the fallen consciousness and who therefore become spiritual teachers, spiritual gurus of various kinds. And when you look at spiritual movements, spiritual gurus out there, you see that almost every movement has some claim of being special. Often based on thinking that the guru has reached some high special level and, as we have said, there is a certain enigma there because how are you going to attract people’s attention if you do not claim that you can do something for them that they want.

But what I am wanting to point out here is that, if you have a spiritual guru who either claims to be special or allows his students to project that he is special, that person, despite the claims made has not jumped into the River of Life. Whatever he is teaching, whatever seeming power he may have to make people fall over and faint or shake or whatever, it is not coming from the River of Life. Where is it coming from? Well, the lower realms, the astral, the mental, whatever. But you see when you really reach higher levels of consciousness towards the 144th level you do not see yourself as special. Why not? Because what does it mean to reach higher levels of consciousness? It means that you begin to not only understand but experience the oneness of all life. And when you experience the oneness of all life these dualistic value judgments of being more or less special or more or less sophisticated, they just fade away.

You do not even see yourself as being special because you have overcome this dualistic consciousness. In other words, you do not see yourself as being special because you do not see yourself as being special. It just fades away and you do not even think in these terms. And the reason this is important is that you all need to recognize that you do not have to be someone special according to any standard in this world in order to jump into the River of Life, in order to open yourself to the River of Life.

Are you willing to open yourself to the River of Life?

We understand very well the enigma that we are putting you all in who are our direct students. Do you understand the enigma you are in? You are sitting here. You are listening to a human being who is taking a dictation from an ascended master. You believe this messenger is a messenger and I am an ascended master speaking through him. You know it is not everyone who does this. Most of you realize you could not do this. You are experiencing a flow of the River of Life through this messenger and you might think: “Well he can do something I cannot do so he must be special compared to me. Perhaps he has become able to open himself to the River of Life but I am not because I am not at that level. I have not been on the path for 47 years. I have not gone through all of these initiations. I have not been trained to be a messenger.”

All of this has nothing to do with opening yourself to the River of Life. What have we said, other masters, in these previous days? The River of Life does not conform to appearances in this world. If you think that you have to be special, you have to walk this path of initiation in order to open yourself to the River of Life, you are still trapped in this outer linear mindset. What is special about this messenger? Well, he came to see the illusion of this mindset and he decided that regardless of how he looked at himself, regardless of whether he thought he was worthy or not, he was willing to open himself to the flow of the River of Life. And again, it is not that you have to do the same that the messenger does. But you can decide to open yourself to the River of Life. There is nothing that prevents you from doing this except your own willingness or unwillingness to open yourself.

Of course, you have separate selves, perhaps you have certain separate selves that block you. Perhaps this messenger overcame those separate selves at some previous time. But that is not, still not, something that makes it impossible for you because you can use our teachings to identify those separate selves, let them go and then you are free to stand there, look at the River of Life and decide: “Do I jump in or do I hold on to whatever I am holding on to?” The decision is yours, I am only pointing out to you that if you have in your mind this mechanism that thinks that: “Yes, maybe someday in the future when I am more advanced, when I have passed more initiations then I can open myself to the River of Life” — this is all separate selves.

And of course, you have free will, you have a right to let these separate selves limit you. Some of you though, I am pointing out, you have a fear of what might happen if you open yourself to the flow. Other masters have talked about this, the experience of being persecuted in past lives or even in this life, getting into trouble for speaking out. But this is again something in your mind that you can come to see and let go of.

Now many of you, as we have said, have already experienced opening yourself to the River of Life. And when you have had that experience once then you know it is possible. Then it is just a matter of opening yourself again. And one of the biggest hindrances for opening yourself again is the outer mind, the linear mind that now wants to analyze: “Oh, what happened? How did other people respond? Should I have said this? Should I have said that?”

Shift your mind

But as we have also said, this is completely unnecessary. What I propose here is this: shift your mind. Contemplate this shift until you can actually shift. The purpose of the River of Life is what? It is to show people, demonstrate to people, help them experience that there is a reality—you can talk about illusion or Maya and say that most people are enveloped in this veil of Maya— and the River of Life, when it flows through you, demonstrates there is a reality outside the veil. There is something beyond the veil. This is the purpose.

What sense does it make to take the consciousness that is creating the veil, that is making up the veil, the standard of the fallen beings, these appearances in the world, this cultural overlay, and use that to analyze the expression of the River of Life. You can shift your mind and say: “I do not need to analyze what happened. I just need to wait for the next opportunity where I can open myself to the River of Life and let it flow through me. And whatever is expressed is whatever the River wanted to express and I do not need to know with my outer mind why the River of Life said that to that particular person. I do not need to look at how the person reacted to what was said and then decide ‘Oh, I cannot do that again’.”

No need for evaluating

Do you begin to grasp what I am trying to say? Most of you do not, I sense, so let me step back and see if there is another way to express this with words. The veil of Maya really has only one function and that is to hide the reality that there is something outside the veil. The veil of Maya has the function that it colors everything you see when you are inside the veil. The veil of Maya also gives a certain sense of reality to what you see inside the veil. Everything is an illusion but because you are looking at it from the inside you experience that it is real. That is why people are trapped in illusion, in the Maya that the Buddha talked about which causes suffering. The veil of Maya has the function that it causes you to evaluate everything based on the standard that the veil defines for what is real.

And as you see on earth there are nations where they define reality one way and others where they define it another way. You have religions that define that they have the ultimate reality and other religions define that they have it. You see that there is no one definition of reality when you are inside the veil. But there are many people who think that they have the ultimate reality and this is what keeps people trapped.

Here you are, you are now an ascended master student. You are hearing this concept of the River of Life. You have all the teachings we have given. But still there is this overlay that causes you to evaluate everything. You think that you should also evaluate the River of Life and how it flows through you. Here you are, you open your mind, the River of Life flows through you, you are saying something to another person. Then the flow stops and now you go into evaluating with the outer mind what happened, what was said. You might do this for some time, even for a long time after this happened. But what are you doing? You are taking an illusion and projecting it upon the reality that was flowing through you. And this is what we have all been trying to say at this conference. This is what does not make sense. It is completely unnecessary. I know it takes some time to free yourself from these selves that project this at you. But it is necessary for you to acknowledge with the conscious mind that all of this is unnecessary.

Here you are. There is an opening. The River of Life flows through you. The flow stops. You go back to your normal life and your normal state of awareness. But you can make the decision to say: “I will not evaluate what was said. I will just wait for the next opportunity where I sense that the River of Life is knocking on my mind wanting to flow through me and then I will allow the River to flow through.”

To give you an example, you know the messenger has recorded these YouTube videos. He has said himself he could not have done this a few years ago because he was not free enough to have done it. And the reason he was not free is that after he had recorded these videos and put them out there, he would have been evaluating and analyzing what he said: “Should I have said something different? Should I have not said this?” On and on and on as all of you have experienced, your minds can go on and on and on looking at the past. But you see, it is not necessary to evaluate. You just open yourself again to the flow of the River of Life. And then the River of Life might express something differently that addresses what was not addressed in the previous expression, because you cannot cover everything. I am an ascended master, but I am still speaking through a messenger who is in time and space. I cannot cover everything in one dictation. That is why we give progressive revelation.

The focus on yourself

Again, a long discourse that may seem overwhelming, but I am not done. What have I been leading up to? What is it I am really trying to get you to see? Let’s approach this from a slightly different angle. We have been giving these direct teachings now, through what we have called a messenger who gives a dictation, for a long time. It started in the 1930s with Guy Ballard in the I AM movement, went through several other movements, and this messenger is the latest part of this progressive revelation. What we have seen over these many years is certain patterns. We have seen many, in fact millions of students who found these teachings, who studied them, who applied them, who gave the decrees, who may be part of an organization, or they were just doing it as individuals, studying and practicing the teachings.

We have seen many of these students who have taken this valid teaching we have given them and applied it to the best of their ability, often with great determination and great eagerness. And we see that most of these students have made progress. But even among those who have made progress, there is only a relatively small number of students who have really crossed that threshold where you can say they have manifested Christhood, they have attained personal freedom, inner freedom. What I would like to discourse a little bit on here is why is it so that relatively few students make it? Why is it that some students do not make it? What is the difference? And you can, of course, look at different factors, but there is one factor that I want to bring to your attention here.

Again, let me use the messenger as an example because he is in the public eye and then I do not have to be too direct with the rest of you. If you could look at this messenger when he first found the spiritual path of an ascended master teaching in 1983-84, you would see that he was very much like most of you are. He was very focused on himself, and this does not mean that he was selfish. Most of you are not selfish, you are not egotistical, you are not narcissistic, you are not hurting other people, at least not deliberately and knowingly. You might hurt other people without realizing it, but all human beings are— in that predicament. But this messenger was very focused on himself.

And as we have said, or as the messenger said rather, there is a certain enigma there. You are a spiritual person because you are willing to look at yourself and this almost inevitably leads us all to become very focused on ourselves. Again, we are not talking about selfishness in the worldly definition. I am talking about a focus on yourself, focus on evaluating: “Did I do the right thing? Should I have done this? Should I have said this?” And you might say that— if you look at this messenger and many of you— that he had what most spiritual people have, a certain inferiority complex because he was not really sure he had a right to be here.

This is part of your birth trauma as an avatar because the fallen beings do everything they can to make you feel you have no right to be on earth. You find a spiritual movement and now you are seeking to use that movement to compensate for this inferiority complex. This does not mean that you go into a superiority complex. It does not necessarily mean this. There are some students, a certain number of students, who go into this feeling of superiority. But this messenger largely avoided that trap as many of you have done. What he did do was that he applied himself to the spiritual path for the purpose of overcoming this inferiority and getting to a point where he could accept that: “I have a right to be on this planet” and many of you can see the same in yourselves.

What I am saying with this is that the messenger had a focus on himself. Whatever happened, whatever situation he encountered, he was always evaluating, there was this self in him that was evaluating: “What does that mean for me? How do other people look at me? How should I look at myself?” Again, it is not selfishness as it is normally defined, but it is a self-focus, a self-centeredness. You are, when you are in this state of mind, actually thinking, and this messenger can recognize this in himself, you are actually thinking that the entire world is looking at you, and, by the way God is looking at you, and: “Oh, now that I have heard about these ascended masters, surely the ascended masters are looking at me all the time. And they are always evaluating—did I make a mistake? Was it good enough what I did? Could I have done something differently?”

It is again this focus on yourself because you have a separate self that thinks that everything you do is so important —it is so important you do not make a mistake. Can you take what I have said here, can you tie it into what other masters have said? There is an appearance in the world that hides the River of Life, and the purpose of the River of Life is to give you an experience that there is something outside that appearance and that that something is more real than what you see from inside the appearance. Likewise with this focus on self. You think it is real. This messenger for the first 10-15 years he was on the path he thought it was real, that he had a focus on himself. He thought: “Oh, El Morya is looking at me all the time evaluating whether I am doing the right thing, whether I am a good chela or not, so I better give some more decrees. I could have given more decrees. Why didn’t I? I should be more diligent”.

And all this does is make you so focused on yourself. It makes you so tense, so incredibly tense. Can you recognize this in yourselves? This tension? I am not blaming you. My only desire is to see you be free from the tension as I have become free and as the messenger has become free, and as all of you can become free. You see what this tension does? It prevents you from opening yourself to the River of Life because you are always worrying: “How is this going to reflect on me? How is it going to make me look in the eyes of other people? How is it going to make me look in my own mind? How is it going to make me look in the mind of the ascended masters?”

The great opportunity

So, before you can even open yourself to the flow of the Holy Spirit or the River of Life, you have to have a guarantee that it is not going to make you look bad. Where is that guarantee going to come from? Certainly not from the River of Life because the River of Life says these appearances that you are so concerned about are completely unreal. We want to set you free from this illusion. But do you see what you are saying? You do not want to be set free because you think it is so important to continue looking at yourself this way. And therefore, you are essentially saying to the River of Life: “Do not set me free, leave me alone, I will figure it out somehow, I will be able to do it myself.”

This messenger did think that because he had this high teaching from the ascended masters and all these decrees, he could eventually make it. But he came to a point where he realized that this was unreal, this was vanity, this was nonsensical and that is when he surrendered. And that is when he could then start training for his mission. But even so, this does not mean that he had overcome all of this focus on self because he still had separate selves from past lives.

And again, be careful here, we are not blaming you for this. We realize that you have all been exposed to abuse from the fallen beings and therefore you have created these separate selves to deal with this. We only say, all of this trauma, if you look at the world and look at people who have exposed to trauma, natural disasters, wars, diseases, all kinds of things, if you went to these trauma counselors, you would see that the main effect of a trauma is that it causes this focus on self. All I am pointing out here is that when you look at these many decades where we have given these teachings and all of these students we have attracted, there is a relatively little number who use the teachings to overcome this focus on self, but most students have not done so.

Why am I telling you this? Is it to make you feel bad? No. It is to make you realize that of all of these students that have found the ascended master teachings, you are the ones who have the best opportunity to overcome this focus on self. Why? Well, partly because you have been given the teaching about the separate selves that no previous ascended master teaching has given. But why were you attracted to this teaching, this dispensation? Why are you even open to this? Because in past lives you already came close to this point where you can begin to look at this focus on self and overcome it.

You see, there is always a correspondence between the teaching and why you are open to the teaching. It is because you have a realistic possibility to apply the teaching. When you take this, not only what I have said in this dictation, what other masters have said at this conference, what we have said at previous conferences about the separate selves, you can start becoming aware of this. Because what is the effect of this focus on self? It is that you are not aware that you are focused on yourself.

What am I doing with this dictation? I am taking a step that we have been leading up to very gradually because all of this that we have given you about the separate selves has been leading up to this point where we can say: The ultimate separate self you have to overcome is this self that makes you so focused on yourself as a separate being as however you see yourself. Where you take yourself so seriously, you think it is so important everything you are doing, you think you could make this terrible mistake or maybe that you have made this terrible mistake and therefore because you made this terrible mistake you can never really be free of it, you can never really be redeemed, you cannot just walk away from it.

Walking away from your personal burden

You could say that all of you are carrying a personal burden that you think you cannot walk away from. Most of you have not even seen that you are carrying this burden. You might have seen other things in your psychology that you have overcome but you have not seen that you are carrying this burden and if you are to look at this burden you will see that at the bottom of it is this belief that there was something you did in the past that is still affecting you and that you cannot just walk away from, because it actually happened and nothing you do can undo it. This is the fallen being speaking. This is the fallen being projecting into your mind.

We have said it before but I will say it again. The lie the fallen beings are projecting is that even though you have free will you can make a choice with your free will that has such consequences that you can never be free from the consequences. In other words, you can basically make a choice with your free will that suspends your freedom of will because you cannot overcome the choice or the consequences. This is the lie. This is the central lie about free will. But free will—as we have said over and over again, if you have not taken note go back, look at these dictations, see how many times we say this—free will is free. That means you can make any choice you want but you can also undo or rise above any choice you have made by making a more aware choice.

But this personal burden I am talking about, this focus on yourself makes you think that even though you have overcome other things from your past or other things in your psychology, there is this one thing and this one thing is something that is different from the other selves that you have overcome because this is something so serious that you cannot just look at this and say: “I am just walking away from you. I am refusing to try to solve this problem or compensate for what happened in the past. I am just walking away because you are not real. You are not me. I made the choice, yes, but I have not become you. You are just a self and I am letting you die.”

You think you cannot do that. You have done it with other things but you think you cannot do it with this thing. And this is what we see going back through the decades. So many students, they made progress but then there was that one personal burden, this focus on self that they could not overcome. They could not break through it. And this is the one thing, this personal burden is what really prevents you from surrendering yourself entirely to the River of Life and flowing with that river because you think you cannot just jump into the river. You have to hold on to this on the shore.

Just let it go!

Now, some of you have experimented. So, imagine here is the River of Life flowing by, you are standing on the bank and this personal burden is a tree and you are holding on to that tree, but you are dipping your toe into the river. And you are thinking: “Oh, that was not so dangerous. How about I stick my whole foot in? Oh yes, that is okay. Now the whole leg. Or maybe I should just jump in with both legs. But you are still holding on to the tree because you definitely have to hold on to that tree. Even though you are on the spiritual path, and even though they are talking about freedom—no, I have got to hold on to the tree.”

And some of you have managed to bend the tree over so you can jump into the river and even get your head under, and you are feeling the flow of the river and you are thinking: “Ah, I am in the River of Life!!” But then if you look closer you realize yeah, you are in the River of Life but you are not flowing with the River of Life because you are still holding on to the tree. And what is it that we all desire for you? We desire you to come to the point where you look back and say: “Oh, I am holding on to this. Why? Why am I holding on to this?”And then you realize that there is absolutely no cosmic law or no circumstance on earth that says that you have to hold on to this. And that is when you then look back and say: “What if I just let go? What if I just let go?” And when you let go, that is when you are in the River of Life, that is when you are flowing with the River of Life. And that is the hurdle we would love to see all of you overcome. We would love to see each and every one of you overcome that hurdle.

I hope that what we have given you here can help you at least be aware that you are holding on. That is the first step. And then maybe get up the courage to look at: “Why am I holding on? What is the belief I have about myself that makes me think I cannot just let go? I cannot just walk away from this? I cannot just flow away from it?” You remember the statement of Jesus: “The prince of this world comes and has nothing in me?” What is it that the prince of this world has in you? Whatever it is in your mind that you think you cannot let go of, that is what the prince of this world has. And the prince of this world is frantically in a panic projecting you cannot let go. You can let go of other things, but this thing you cannot let go of. But it is all a lie. It is all unreality.

Nothing on earth defines you

There is no cosmic law, no law of God, no law of karma. And there is no circumstance on earth that can prevent you from letting go. And why is this? Because you are the Conscious You. You are not a product of earth. You are not defined by any condition on earth. Why did I start out by saying that how I ascended? By returning to that pure awareness of the Conscious You. What does that mean? It means that when the Conscious You experiences itself as pure awareness, it experiences: “I am not defined by anything on earth. I am not defined by the physical body, by my emotional patterns, by my thought patterns, by my sense of identity. Nothing of this defines me.” Which means what? It means you can let go of all of it. You can just let it go and you are still who you are.

But what I am talking about is that you can do this before you ascend and it is not a matter of letting go of your outer personality or sense of identity or mental patterns. It is not a matter of letting go of all of it because you need a certain outer personality to express yourself in the world. But it is a matter of letting go of this one burden you are carrying that makes you so focused on yourself. Because when you let go of this burden then your four lower bodies become the open door for the River of Life to flow through you and be expressed.

And when you do this, you will feel the freedom of oneness that you can never feel when you have this personal burden because look at it, do you feel free when you carry this burden? Do you feel free when you are so focused on yourself and that all of your mental faculties are tied up in evaluating: “How does this make me look?” You are not free. But when you let go of it, you will be free. Even though you are still in a physical body and your outer situation has not changed, but you can be free to express yourself to allow the River of Life to flow through you without analyzing. You just focus on what is the next thing the River of Life wants to express. No need to look back.

In fact, you might say that this is one of the signs of spiritual growth is you do not look back. Of course, this can only be achieved when you let go of these separate selves that will always try to pull you back to some event in the past and say you cannot overcome it. But you can. Again, we can say what is it that the prince of this world or the demons of Mara are projecting at you? They are projecting at you that conditions in this world and something you did in this world can influence you indefinitely. In other words, something you did in the past can influence you today and can continue to influence you indefinitely into the future.

But what have we said so many times? Earth is a theater, earth is a reality simulator, the entire purpose of the world of form is your growth in consciousness. From God’s perspective, from cosmic law, there is no condition in the material world that will ever define you that will ever be able to hold you back. What holds you back is only what you are holding on to in your mind and there is nothing outside of your mind that prevents you from letting go. This is the one realization that all of the dark forces do not want you to come to. That you can stop taking them seriously. Stop taking yourself seriously. Just let go of what they are saying and just let go of what you are holding on to. Tell me how are you ever going to be free without letting go? How are you free as long as you are holding on? How will you ultimately be free? By letting go of everything.

In a sense you could say that the ascension is the ultimate freedom because you let go of everything on earth. But as the Buddha was trying to explain 2,500 years ago and as Jesus was trying to explain, it is possible to be in embodiment and still having let go of the attachments so that you are now free even while you are still in a physical body limited by various conditions, but you are still free in your mind.

With this I have come full circle. I have given you what I wanted to give you, except one thing. I want to give you my love and it is so primitive to say this with words. It is so primitive to have to talk about love with words. But I hope you can tune in to this flow of energy that I released through these spoken words and beyond the words. I hope you can tune in and I hope you can experience that I, Saint Germain, I love you, each and every one of you.

In a sense you could say: “Well does Saint Germain love me because I am a good student or because he thinks I can help bring the golden age?” But that is not the case. I love you because you are you. You are you. There does not have to be a reason other than that. See again, if you hear me say I love you and your outer mind is projecting, what does that mean? You cannot experience. So just let go and experience. Flow into the experience of love.

And with this I seal you in the Freedom Flame that I AM, but the Freedom Flame that is also and ultimately, Love.