Ascended Master Padmasambhava through Kim Michaels, March 8, 2026. This dictation was given at the conference in Vilnius, Lithuania: Making a Difference in a Turbulent World.
I AM the Ascended Master Padmasambhava. I have been deliberating—if you can say that an ascended master deliberates—what I could possibly add to what has already been given, or rather, what I could add without overwhelming you completely.
Via Dolorosa
What I will begin with is referring to the legends of how I brought Buddhism to Tibet and I supposedly called a group of Tertöns, my students, who would in a future time be treasure hunters and find the treasures that I had hidden. And many people, especially in Tibet, have taken this quite literally and think that I, in some kind of hidden mountain cave, hid either various objects or books with teachings, advanced teachings that they could find. And some people have even gone in search of such caves, which of course is a very big task in Tibet, where there is no shortage of mountains, always difficult to climb, but some people have felt that the more difficult they are to climb, the better the chance that there is a hidden cave.
And this is something that it is important to ponder if you want to make a difference in a turbulent world. Because there is a certain amount of spiritual students, there is in fact collective beasts or rather several created, that want to make it seem like the spiritual path should be hard. You have in Christianity the Via Dolorosa. You have in Hinduism various teachings about this long, arduous, difficult path. And there are some people who seriously believe that the more difficult, the more hard, the more disciplined they are on their path, the better off they will be in heaven, however they conceptualize it. There are even some ascended master students that feel that the more difficulties you encounter while you are in embodiment, the more spiritual attainment you build and therefore, you will be in a higher rank of ascended master after you ascend.
The spiritual path as an epic drama
But if you take the teachings we have given, you can say that you cannot do anything on earth that will give you a higher position in the ascended realm because in order to ascend, you have to let go of everything on earth. What you are actually doing is you are taking what you see down here, what you see in the physical realm, what you see in the spiritual teaching, what you see in your own mind, and you are creating a mental image of what it means to be an ascended master. And you are then projecting that and thinking that reality will live up to your image but as we have explained now so many times, nothing in the ascended realm will live up to any image, for the Christ will never live up to an image created on earth. How could it free you from the illusions if it conformed to and validated the illusions?
When you see that the spiritual path should be hard and difficult, it is really a reflection of what we have called the epic mindset where you have created a drama.
You have turned the spiritual path into a drama and you think that the more heroic your path is of overcoming difficulties, slaying the dweller, slaying the dark forces, the more of a heroic welcome you will receive in the ascended realm. And part of your motivation then is not just to ascend, but to have some kind of superior reception in the ascended realm because again you think that your vision is shared by the ascended masters. And that is why you have in some previous dispensations seen this epic mindset comparing an organization to Camelot, the Knights of the Round Table, and this heroic quest for the Holy Grail. But how do you find the Holy Grail? By slaying dragons that you encounter on your path? By rescuing damsels in distress? Or by finding hidden treasures? Nay, the Holy Grail is within you, for the Holy Grail is the Christ consciousness.
Designing a new sphere
The hidden treasures that I talked about so many years ago is the Christ consciousness and you find that in the kingdom that is, we might have mentioned a few times, within you. As long as you are looking outside, be it in a cave or somewhere else, you will never find it. You cannot find it. You cannot find something if you are looking where it is not to be found. Does that mean I am saying that the concept of the path is worthless as some of these new Neo-Advaita, non-duality teachers are saying? That is not what I am saying. The path has value, but not for the reason many people think.
Let me give you a different perspective on this idea of being a treasure hunter looking for hidden treasures. First you need to recognize here that the real treasures you are looking for is not something I left behind. It is an entirely different kind of treasure. Let me reach back to one of the questions answered earlier. Is there going to be another sphere after this one? And the answer is yes, there is going to be an eighth sphere. Is it going to be designed by the ascended masters from the sixth and the seventh sphere? Yes, that is correct. Even some of you when you ascend will choose to be part of designing that sphere and we have said that the next sphere will be denser than this one. But of course, us who have experienced life in this dense sphere, the seventh sphere, we will take our experiences and use them as a foundation for designing the eighth in such a way that even though it is more dense, people can still find the path and make their ascension.
The cosmic archive of duality
But how are we going to do this? Well, we have talked about various reasons why avatars choose to come to an unnatural planet. We have talked about your vision. You had a certain motivation, you wanted to achieve something. But there is a deeper explanation for this, which we were not aware of when we left those natural planets to embody on an unnatural planet. But the deeper reason is to find treasures that can only be found on an unnatural planet. Why is this so? What is it that can only be found on an unnatural planet, not on a natural planet? Well, it is the kind of experiences you can only have on an unnatural planet, experiences of duality.
You can say that in the spiritual realm, in the sixth sphere, there is a structure similar to a building but more complex. Nevertheless, you can visualize it, if you desire, as a building. It is an archive building. It does not store written records or books or photos. It stores something that can best be compared to holographic images, three-dimensional. In reality, they are actually four-dimensional. They are, in a sense, like a three-dimensional movie that can be played and there are many of these, also some from natural planets, of course. But there is a special archive that is only for these records from unnatural planets and the purpose of this is to store experiences that can be used when we design the next sphere so that we can incorporate these experiences.
You can basically say that we are looking at how far into duality could people go on earth, how dense, how elaborate of a separate self could they create on a planet with a vibrational level of earth, with a planetary matrix of earth. And then, through a very intricate process that I will not describe in detail, we will, when this sphere ascends, some even before, we will begin to look at these stored experiences and say: “How can we use these experiences to design the seventh sphere and certain planets in this sphere in such a way that there is a built-in safety mechanism, so that even though matter is denser, beings can still find the path and follow it?” It is as if the dualistic experiences that people have had in the seventh sphere become the foundation for designing the next sphere in such a way that people do not have to learn the same lessons over again. They may create other deeper levels of duality and separation, but at least there is some trail they can follow.
The goal is to experience duality
Avatars, part of your task on earth, is basically to have certain experiences. Saint Germain talked about how any experience you have had, anything you have done, was not a mistake. It can be turned into an asset that can help you help others. This, of course, applies very much to the rest of your embodiment in this lifetime and if you have future lifetimes, but it also applies to this higher perspective that your experiences can help the lifestreams in the eighth sphere. This means it does not matter what you have experienced. In fact, you could say from a certain perspective, the deeper you have gone into duality, the better, when you rise above it again because the purpose is, of course, not to store how you go into duality and stay there indefinitely, but to store how you come out of it again, how you come out of that level of duality. And, of course, when you ascend, you will have overcome anything you have experienced in this and previous lifetimes. There is nothing unresolved when you ascend and that means that when you ascend, none of what you experienced matters.
When you look at this, that you are going to die, and when you die you leave your current concerns behind, then you can see the same thing. When you ascend, you leave it all behind. So why be reluctant to look at it? Why seek to suppress it? Why seek to hide it? It is by looking at it that you transcend it, and that process of transcendence then rises up to the archive. We can call it the akashic archive, although it is not exactly the same as the akashic records and therefore you are helping, contributing to the design of the next sphere.
Separate selves as hidden treasures
Now, if a Tibetan Buddhist heard this teaching, he or she would, of course, say: “Oh, that is not what it means. We have our interpretation of what these treasures are.” That is fine. Let them have their interpretation as long as they need it.
But you who are ascended master students can realize that any experience of overcoming a limited sense of self is a treasure. Why is it hidden? Well, because until you have overcome the limited self, you cannot see it as a treasure. You will see it as a prison, as a limitation, as suffering, as: “Woe is me, why is this happening?” Our hope is, of course, that by giving you these teachings you will be able to look at your life and say: “I do not need to hide anything anymore. I do not need to try and hide it for other people. I do not need to try and hide it for myself.” First of all, it is important to stop hiding it from yourself. You look at it, you go into it, and you look for the hidden treasure, the lesson of how to transcend it, how to transcend the self, the separate self that gave you that experience.
Someone the other day was talking about pain, deep pain. There comes a point where the only way to overcome pain is to go into it. Your instinctual response or reaction is, of course, that when you feel this inner pain, you want to get away from it, you want to ignore it, you want to turn your back on it. The last thing you want is to go into it but what if I told you that behind the veil of the pain hides the hidden treasure? And the only way to find it is to go in through the pain. You cannot find the treasure by running away from the pain, or for that matter, away from anything. For the treasure is the experience of overcoming another experience, a limited experience and if you do not allow yourself to experience the limited experience, how can you overcome it? How can you find the treasure?
Padmasambhava’s Tertöns
Now there are, of course, different meanings of this treasure, because there are certainly some people in embodiment who are tied to me as their guru, as an ascended master. They are meant to find a different kind of treasure. By the way, these people, most of them are not embodied in Tibet, but scattered all around the globe. Some of you are among them, not many, but some. What are my Tertöns meant to find? What is the treasure waiting for them behind the veil of their experiences of their pain? Well, I am the treasure waiting for them. You are linked to other ascended masters, and when you really go through the pain and resolve the selves, you find your master, your I AM Presence as well, but your ascended master or masters. So that is the treasure.
And of course, when you do find the master, the experience of the master’s consciousness gives you a different perspective. How many of you recognize that before you found ascended master teachings, you had a much more limited perspective on life, and finding the teachings has changed your perspective. But many of you have also had the experience of a master’s presence and being and consciousness, and that changes your perspective even more. When you directly and consciously experience an expression of the Christ consciousness, you have a frame of reference, as we have called it, but you really have an experience that changes your life permanently, forever. You cannot go back, you cannot unsee what you have seen, and that is, of course, a treasure to be sought after.
The path defined by the ego
But now, going back to this idea that the path should be difficult, what determines how your path is going to be? Some will want to look at the image that there is a path of initiation defined by some higher spiritual being, ascended masters or others, or perhaps by these beings who gave the Masonic teachings, the 33 levels of initiation, or the 33 steps to Christhood, or whatever they call it. They will say: “There is a path of initiation defined by the ascended masters, and you must take one initiation at a time and climb on that predefined path. May you pass every test.” From a certain perspective, you can say, yeah, there is a path, because we of the ascended masters are, of course, using our experiences of ascending from this sphere, to define a path that can help others. Those of us who are ascended from an unnatural planet look at how can we design a path that will help people on earth, and we give a teaching accordingly.
However, many people have this view that this is some predefined automatic path, where you just need to find the clue that solves the riddle, and then you turn the key in the lock, and a hidden door opens, and you walk through. But that is not how it is. Even though there is a certain path of initiation defined by us, each of you must follow it in your individual way. And what determines how your particular path is going to be? Well, the separate selves you have in your consciousness because the initiation you must pass is that of coming to see the separate self you have at your current level of the 144 levels, letting it die, so you rise to the next. That is how you pass a test.
It is not some mystical process of finding some hidden clue or hidden riddle that you solve, or completing a task, or slaying a dragon, or whatever it may be. Not even slaying the dweller, as it was talked about in a previous organization. It was a metaphor given at that time that was valid for the level of consciousness of the teaching. But you are not slaying a separate self. That is the magic of the higher teaching. You are just letting it die, but before you can let it die you must come to see it from the outside by the Conscious You separating itself from it and that letting go is passing the test.
But what have we also said? A separate self is designed to give you a particular experience and you are allowed to have that experience. In fact, you created the self because you wanted to have that experience and you are allowed to have that experience as long as you want, until you have had enough of it and can let it go.
What determines how long and how difficult your path is going to be? It is how many of these epic selves you have created and how long you need to have the experiences through a particular self before you have had enough and can let it go. You are making the path difficult for yourself. You are making the path long and hard and how are you doing it? By having this image that walking the path is an epic process that has some epic importance and that will lead you to some epic reward. But this is all defined from the dualistic consciousness. This is not the path that we have defined. We have defined a path of freedom from all these dualistic selves and images.
You see here, there is a certain stage on the spiritual path, and it applies to all spiritual people. But every teaching, every organization has their own version of it. Previous ascended master teachings had the image of Camelot, the quest for the Holy Grail, the heroic quest to find this hidden treasure. But this is driven by the ego who thinks that if you complete the quest that the ego or the fallen beings have defined, you will get the reward that the ego wants. You will be special. You will be anointed. You will be elevated to some position of authority or power. Power over matter. Mind over matter. Tell me, having power over matter, why would it matter in the ascended realm? Why do you need it when you have ascended?
The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Making a Difference in a Turbulent World.
Copyright © 2026 Kim Michaels