Letting go of mental images of yourself, the masters, and the path


Listen to the audio book version of the dictation.

Ascended Master Lanto through Kim Michaels, May 21, 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 Lord Lanto, as you probably have guessed, based on Master MORE opening the conference, it is again, as we have talked about before, a little bit of a dilemma to talk about the seven rays in a linear fashion, especially when it relates to co-creation, because the question is: Is co-creation a linear process? And that is one of these philosophical questions that I will throw out here and then leave for now but return to later. 

Co-creation vs. De-creation 

What you have heard from Master MORE and Mother Mary is setting the foundation for grasping what co-creation is all about. But I wish to take this another step further. Co-creation—as opposed to de-creation, or at least as different from de-creation. What is the central difference? Well, we have explained very carefully over the years that when you descend to the 48th level of consciousness, you have an intuitive sense of connection to something outside your own mind. As long as you are basing your co-creative efforts on that intuitive connection, you are co-creating.

Even if you do not have a perfect vision, which of course you do not at the 48th level on a planet like earth, of what you are connected to. Even if you do not have a clear vision where everything, all images you are projecting out are based on the Christ mind. They are, as Master MORE said, based on your current level of consciousness. And on a planet like earth, with the density it has, the 48th level is not particularly high. But still, when you focus on your intuition, when you seek to get the highest image you can get intuitively, when you are willing to look at the outcome of your experiment and your reaction to it and therefore, raise your consciousness, then you are co-creating. When you go below the 48th level of consciousness and you lose your intuitive connection, then you are not co-creating. You cannot be co-creating. Even if you are creating something, as Master MORE said, that actually benefits other people, you are still not co-creating, because you cannot co-create if you do not have an intuitive connection to something outside your own mind .

The dream of perfect materialization

Therefore, what is duality? What is separation? What does it mean to go below the 48th level? What are you actually doing? Well, you are not co-creating, but you are still experimenting with your co-creative abilities. You are just exercising those abilities in a specific way. And that is, of course, not as a connected being, but as a separate being. What do you do as a separate being? Well, you are essentially thinking that in your mind you are capable of defining a mental image, projecting it upon the Ma-ter light, and you think that the Ma-ter light should conform to your image. In other words, you are thinking you should be able to formulate a mental image, and manifest it in the physical, exactly as it is in your mind. There should be a one-on-one correspondence between the image in your mind and what is manifest physically. That is what you think. And the further you go below the 48th level of consciousness, the more you become convinced that this is the right approach.

The fallen beings at the lowest level of consciousness are absolutely convinced that this is the right approach and that by continuing to seek to find a way, some magical way, to make the universe conform to their mental image, they will one day be successful. And some of them base this on experience where they have been able to, for example, create a company and grow it to be dominant in the market and employ hundreds of thousands of people or they have set themselves up as dictators for a nation, ruling the nation, perhaps conquering other nations. Based on these experiences, they convince themselves that it should be possible to have a one-on-one correspondence between the image in their minds and the physical conditions they face. 

Is a one-on-one correspondence realistic?

Now, as Master More explained and Mother Mary explained, this is not actually realistic. You will never have a one-on-one correspondence between the image in your mind and the physical conditions you face. Why not? Because no man or woman is an island. You are not the only person on the planet. You are here with eight billion other people who also have mental images in their minds that they are projecting upon the Ma-ter light. There will never be any being in embodiment, even on a natural planet, but certainly not on an unnatural planet, who will have a one-on-one correspondence. This dream of the perfect materialization of your image is an impossible dream and you, the spiritual people, need to give it up if you still have remnants of it in your mind. And it is easy to even take ascended master teachings and think that: “Oh, but when Saint Germain was the wonder man of Europe, he could take a diamond that had a flaw in it, and he could go through this chemical process and remove the flaw. It should be possible, if I really have a connection to the ascended masters, if I really refine my co-creative abilities, I should be able to have a one-on-one correspondence. Because if my image is based on the Christ mind, it should be manifest.” But this is what Mother Mary tried to explain to you, it is an unrealistic expectation.

Experimenting below the 48th level

Back to, what are you doing when you are exercising your co-creative abilities below the 48th level of consciousness? Well, as I said, you are experimenting: What can you do with your mind? What are the capabilities and the limitations of the human mind? What can you do, what can you not do? But beyond all of this, the overall experiment that you are conducting is, when will you reach a point where you have had enough of exercising your co-creative abilities as a separate being? When will you consciously recognize that you no longer want to be a de-creator, you no longer want to use your mind’s abilities as a separate being. You are ready to consciously, voluntarily, give up this way of exercising your free will and your co-creativity. You will, therefore, give this up permanently and now you will change your entire approach so that you are not trying to create a mental image in your mind alone, you are reaching up, connecting to the ascended masters who are representing the entire hierarchy reaching up to the Creator.

And this entire hierarchy is what embodies the wisdom that has been gained from the moment this world of form started, until today. What you are connecting into is this collective experience with co-creation. And therefore, you are able to tie in, we might say, you do not have to reinvent the wheel that has already been invented by tens of thousands of now ascended beings before you. And this, of course, makes it more likely that your co-creation will succeed. But it also, of course, brings you in alignment with the Christ vision, both the higher vision of what is possible and the practical vision of what is possible in your current situation here on earth. 

Giving up duality 

You see how this ties in with Master MORE so carefully explained that if you have a mental image of the ascended masters, you cannot co-create with us. And as Mother Mary said, you are not co-creating with us then, you are co-creating with a mental image in your own mind, you are co-creating with your own mind. But that is actually de-creation, that is just continuing the process of thinking that your mind can formulate an image, project it upon the Ma-ter light, and have the Ma-ter light out-picture, have one-on-one correspondence between the image and the physical conditions.

In other words, what we are trying to help you see here is that over the many decades, we have given teachings as ascended masters, but also given other teachings that we did not say came from ascended masters. We have seen that there are some students who have not grasped this. They have simply not grasped this particular consideration that I am presenting to you. And based on us seeing this, we have, in this dispensation, very carefully built up by giving you gradually a deeper and deeper understanding of the duality consciousness and what it is. 

And as I said, the central realization you need to come to before you can start co-creating is precisely that you are allowed to go into duality, you are allowed to experiment with it as long as you want, but this is not co-creation. You will not start co-creating until you voluntarily and consciously give up exercising your free will and your  co-creativity as a separate being. We have also very carefully built up this understanding that in duality there are always two polarities, and they are always associated with the value judgment. One is right, one is wrong, one is good, one is bad, one is real, one is unreal. And when you are in duality, while you are still in duality, you think one of them is right. This is not duality, this is the way it is. 

Seeing the teachings through a dualistic filter

Now you hear about ascended master teachings, and if you do not grasp what duality is, you can transfer the dualistic worldview to ascended masters, and you can now, in your mind, think that whatever the ascended masters give us as teachings, that is right, as opposed to other teachings from the fallen beings that are wrong. But that is too simplistic. This is what we have very carefully, since the beginning of this dispensation, built up to. Our teachings are not right, compared to other teachings that are wrong. Our teachings are beyond the dualistic scale. The difficult thing to grasp for many people, as we have seen it over the years, is when you are in duality, you can only see through that filter, that coloring, and therefore, you cannot see that there is an alternative to duality.

You can think intellectually, analytically. You can see the dualistic polarities, the dualistic extremes, but you think that because we ascended masters are beyond it, our teachings are not dualistic. And that is correct, our teachings are not dualistic, but the way students look at our teachings can still be dualistic. In other words, there are some students that find our teachings, even in this dispensation, they hear about the duality consciousness, but they are thinking, they are not looking at our teachings in a dualistic way. They are looking at our teachings in a non-dualistic way, in a neutral way. But that is not always the case. In fact, most of you have to go through a process before you let go of the dualistic coloring that you superimpose upon our teachings and upon us. And this is a very delicate process, a very difficult process on a planet as dense as earth, where you have the saying of Jesus, be ye wise as serpents, harmless as doves. 

Becoming wise to dualistic tricks

And it does not really mean that you become as wise as the serpents, because the serpents are wise in a dualistic way. They are very skilled at using the duality consciousness to create a veil of confusion. They are very skilled at creating a dualistic coloring and superimposing it upon any idea, even the teachings of the ascended masters, pulling our teachings down into the dualistic quicksand. You are not becoming as good as the serpents at using duality, you are becoming wise to the serpents and the dualistic tricks they always use. 

And harmless as doves means you are not seeking to fight them, to prove them wrong, to become smarter than them or even to oppose them. You are going beyond their level of consciousness. And what is their level of consciousness? Simply this, they still think they are so wise, so capable, that they can formulate an image in their minds of how the universe actually works, without connecting to the ascended masters. And if you seek to become as wise as them, you are still trapped in that same mindset. You are still thinking your mind can formulate an image of how the world really works. And you even think that because you have found the ascended master’s teachings, you can formulate a better image based on our teachings. 

The gradual process of escaping duality 

Be very careful here, listen to what I am saying. We are not blaming you for doing this. We have been in embodiment on earth. And when we first started awakening and questioning duality, we reacted the way you did because you cannot do anything else on a dense planet like this. You cannot instantly awaken and see through all of the dualistic illusions. It is a gradual process, but at least you can begin the process by becoming consciously aware of what I am telling you. And you need to recognize here that in the beginning, when you find the ascended master’s teachings, when you begin to work with them, study them, integrate them, your mind will have a mixture. You will still have many dualistic ideas, beliefs, approaches, a certain coloring of duality, that you superimpose upon us. And there is nothing wrong with it in the sense that it is unavoidable. It is, of course, not constructive and it will prevent you from co-creating with us. 

The challenge of connecting to real ascended masters 

Do you see what we have been trying to say so far? Co-creation requires you to connect directly to us, the ascended masters, not to an image of us that you have in your minds. Few of you realize, in fact the messenger himself does not even realize, how difficult of a process it was for him to become a messenger because he had to question all of the images he had of the ascended masters. Even the images he had taken on by being a part of the Summit Lighthouse dispensation for so many years, where there was a certain coloring of what ascended masters are. Again, it is not that it was wrong, it was what could be given at the time, given the collective consciousness and that this was the last dispensation of the Piscean Age. We are not blaming anyone for this, we are not looking back and saying, “oh that was wrong”, we are saying that was what was necessary at the time, the practical reality.

But in order to become a messenger for us in a new dispensation in the Aquarian Age, he had to question his own images so that he was not projecting upon us what we should say, what we should not say, or how we should say it. And in the process of doing this, he encountered people who had very specific images of ascended masters based on Summit Lighthouse, I Am Movement and so forth, and who wanted to project this upon him, that if he was a real messenger for the ascended masters, then what he got from us should live up to these people’s images based on previous dispensations. But you see what this does. First of all, these people are still in a state of mind where they believe they can formulate an image of what ascended masters are like, and they believe that we should then conform to it. We have no right to shock them, to surprise them, to say something they do not expect. And if we do, then we are not the real masters. Or the messenger did not get it right. It was his consciousness that was interfering.

Crossing the gap 

But you see, they had not begun to grasp what I am hoping you can grasp. They were not co-creating with us. They were co-creating with the images in their own minds. And that means there is a gap between the image and us. And given that we respect free will, we must then stand back. And as Master More talked about, the closing of the figure-eight flow, well, it never closed because their energies rose to a certain level, but there was still a gap up to our level, and they could never cross the gap. And we could do nothing about it. 

What we are endeavoring to do here is to help you cross that gap. But that means using your wisdom of the second ray to see what the serpentine mind does. You can say, again, “do not be too linear about this”, but you can say that there is a fallen mindset that is, for most of these fallen beings, geared towards, as I said, superimposing an image on the Ma-ter light and having that one-on-one correspondence between the physical manifestation and the image. Their attention is directed outwards, here in the material universe. But then there is the serpentine mind which is also directed upwards and believes it can superimpose images upon the spiritual realm, upon God. The serpents believe that not only can they formulate an image of how the material universe works, but also how the spiritual realm works, how God works, how God is, how ascended masters are. 

Escaping your mental images

And we have again been very careful in this dispensation of building up these teachings so you can see the fallacy there. What is the purpose of the Christ mind? It is to help you escape duality. You are allowed to go into separation. The law of free will allows this. The Christ consciousness is set up so that no matter how deeply you go into separation, you can connect to something outside your own mind that can help you question your illusion, therefore, take a step up in consciousness, a step closer to the 48th level. But how do you do this? Only by connecting to something outside your own mind.

What is the purpose of ascended masters? Because we are, of course, the ones who are administering the Christ consciousness to earth. It is to help you escape your current mental image, not to validate it. You see, if we validate your mental image, we are not helping you escape it. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. There are certain binary conditions that are either or. As we have said, you cannot be a separate being and be connected at the same time. It is not possible. You cannot be unascended and ascended at the same time. It is not logical. We as ascended masters will never conform to your mental images. As long as you are so in love with your mental image of us that you will not allow us to surprise you, we must stand back and say: “Well, they have chosen. They have chosen their mental image of us over us, and we must respect that choice. And therefore, we must leave them in the state of separation.” And this is a process that continues all the way to the 96th level of consciousness. Because as you climb, even after you have again established a connection and you are climbing the course of self-mastery towards the 96th level, you still have mental images of us, of the spiritual realm, of yourself. 

The 96th level 

The whole course in self-mastery is, of course, set up to help you gradually shed these images. But at the 96th level, you need to pass that initiation that we have also now at several conferences described, where you let go of the focus on self. And although we have described this focus on self in various ways, the essence of it really is this: You are seeking to define an image in your mind. You are still thinking that you can define an image in your mind of how the world should work. And you are even thinking that as you climb the spiritual path, as you study and apply the ascended master’s teachings, there will still come a point where now you have defined the ultimate image of how everything works. And you are even thinking that one day the Christ consciousness, the ascended masters, will validate your image.

Seeking validation for your self-image

And that is what causes you to be focused on self, because you are seeking validation. This does not mean you are not making progress on the path. You are climbing from the 48th to the 49th level by giving up one separate self, one illusion. You keep giving up illusions until you reach that 96th level. And you have given up a lot of illusions, but you have still maintained, I am saying you because we all did the same thing when we were in embodiment, you have still maintained that last self-image of who you are, what you are, what kind of a world you are in, what the spiritual realm is like, what your ascended masters are like. You are still maintaining that illusion that you can define it and that it will one day be validated. And in your mind this image has an epic importance. It is for you, when you are seeing through the filter of that image, a matter of life and death. It is of epic importance that this image is validated. And basically, many people, as they climb towards the 96th level, they are always seeking validation. You are willing to let go of certain illusions. You are saying: I was not right about this, I did not understand this fully. You are letting go of this, you are letting go of that, but you are still hoping that there is this one thing that will be validated. And you are hoping that the ascended masters’ teachings, or even our appearance will validate that last image. 

And there are a certain percentage of students, I will not put numbers on it because I do not want to discourage you, but there is a certain number of students, certain percentage of students that get it, that begin to question this image before they reach the 96th level. And there are others that do not even have a clue that there is something to question. They are climbing to the 96th level, being willing to give up all of these illusions because they think this particular focus on self is not an illusion, it will be validated. And they think that personal Christhood means the ultimate validation of their self-image. 

But you see, in reality, this particular self-image, this particular focus on self is not epically important. It is epically important to the ego because it is the last remnants of ego that you carry with you from below the 48th level, the dualistic ego that you took on and created below the 48th level. You are shedding it gradually, but there is that core of that dualistic ego that you carry with you to the 96th level, and that you really cannot give up as the last ghost until you are crucified on the cross. And until you have the realization that Jesus had on the cross, I am not talking physically crucified, I am talking metaphorically, where he realized that his image of what should or should not happen to him had to go because it was an illusion. God would not validate his self-image by taking him down from the cross. He had to let his body die on the cross. 

Feeling psychologically crucified 

And it is the same thing with you. You have to come to a point where you are ready, willing, to see this self-image and give it up. And if you have started questioning this before you reach the 96th level, you can do it without being crucified. But if not, you will find that you will gradually work yourself into a situation where you feel psychologically, mentally, crucified. You have no place to go. You cannot stand your current conditions. You cannot stand your current sense of self. And therefore, you feel like Jesus on the cross, that your expectations of being validated will never be fulfilled. And therefore, hopefully hanging on the cross, you can give up that last ghost, otherwise you start going below the 96th level, seeking to still validate that sense of self. But if you have started questioning this before you reach the 96th level, you do not have to get to the point where you feel crucified, because you can come to see that this self is no different from all the other selves you have given up.

To the ego it has epic proportions, but to the Conscious You it is just like any other self. It is based on an illusion. It is based on a certain belief, a very sophisticated belief perhaps. But it is all an illusion. And when you see this, it is actually no more difficult to give up the self at the 96th level than it was to give up all the other selves you have given up. 

You see, you can build a momentum that makes it easier for yourself to give up the last element of the ego. But if you do not see it, then you will literally have to do it the hard way by coming to the point where you feel crucified. And then there is the possibility that you will take yourself down from the cross by going into denial about the need to give up the ghost. And therefore, you go below the 96th level and perhaps even go below the 48th seeking to validate that last self. And you seek to build on to it, make it more and more sophisticated. And the difference here is really whether you get what the messenger asked to be expressed yesterday in one of the answers he gave. 

Do you get that the spiritual path, the path to Christhood, the path to the ascension, is about giving up? Or do you think it is about acquiring some special ability defined here on earth, that is seeking validation? Do you think the spiritual path is about validating the separate self or giving up the separate self? 

 

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The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Co-Creating with the Ascended Masters.

Copyright © 2026 Kim Michaels

 

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