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Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, April 25, 2021. This dictation was given during the 2021 Webinar for Russia – Overcoming the consciousness of superiority and the sense of being unwhole, traumatized and focused outside oneself.
I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. It is my privilege, my joy and my choice to seal this conference as I have sealed so many others. But of course, it is also my choice to give a certain teaching.
When you look back at that time, so long ago, so many centuries ago, when I walked this earth in embodiment as Gautama, what did I say? I formulated The Noble Truths, one of which is that life is suffering. What was my goal with the teaching I gave? It was of course, to set people free from suffering.
But when you look at Buddhism, what was it? Some have called it a religion. Many people in the West have called it a religion because they do not understand what Buddhism truly is. They have often not bothered to even study it. They may look at some of the practices performed by modern Buddhists, but they have never bothered to study the teaching and truly understand what Buddhism is. For that matter, many modern practitioners of Buddhism do not understand what Buddhism is. Buddhism has also been called a philosophy. But is it really a philosophy? Does it talk about the creation of the universe and cosmological topics? Nay.
Buddhism is a very practical thing. It is really a psychological tool, a psychological system, if you will to use the word system, a psychological method. The entire purpose is to set people free from suffering. And where does the suffering take place? In the psyche, in the mind. What is the key given to overcome suffering? It is to overcome attachments. What is an attachment? It is not something that comes with your email. Nor is it some physical thing attached to your body. It is an attachment in the mind. It is a psychological condition.
What then is the key to Buddhism? It is to resolve the psychological conditions that make you attached to the things of this world. The phenomena in this world, the dualistic pairs, the events, other people, places, that make you attached to certain physical things and events, certain emotions, certain thoughts, a certain sense of worldly or earthly identity.
How do you resolve this? By working with your psychology. Why did I not simply say that 2500 years ago? Because the collective consciousness was so much lower than it is today that it was impossible to give people these concepts about the psyche that we can give you today. People simply did not have the foundation for understanding it. As you can clearly see that they did not have the foundation for understanding many of the scientific concepts that you learned about in elementary school. This collective consciousness simply was not there.
So what have we of the ascended masters been doing for the past 2500 years and even for longer? We have been gradually bringing the collective consciousness upwards, bringing various fields of knowledge forward, bringing language forward, so that we could give these concepts that we can give you now about the human psyche, about how it works about the four lower bodies, about the flow of energy, about the separate selves and how to resolve them.
When you look back at this very long time span, you can see how many small elements needed to be put into place in order to bring planet earth to the point where this teaching could be given, where it could be received by a critical mass of people who by practicing it would bring the collective consciousness forward.
It is only a matter of time, and a relatively short time, before these concepts will be common knowledge. This does not mean again that the majority of people will recognize ascended masters. But they will recognize these concepts of how to take command over your own mind, your own psyche, and how to systematically, deliberately, consciously change your state of mind so that you rise above suffering, overcome the attachments that cause your suffering and attain some measure of what I call bliss, but which is really not what most people conceive it as where they think it is some form of extreme happiness.
Nay, it is rather what we might call peace of mind which comes from being in a neutral state of mind. This means that you have no attachments. The demons of Mara may come to you when you are sitting in meditation and try to pull you into a reaction, but they have nothing in you whereby they can pull you to react to them. You are simply non-attached to any condition on earth.
But take note of the distinction. Non-attachment does not mean that nothing matters, and that you do not care about anything. It means you are not attached. You are not looking at life on earth, approaching life on earth through the dualistic mind. You have risen above it. You can still engage in life, you can still feel joy, but it is not the joy that has an opposite of sorrow. You can feel happiness, but it is not the happiness that has an opposite of unhappiness. You are from a dualistic perspective in a neutral frame of mind. As you see these statues of the Buddha, where he sits with this enigmatic, slight smile that demonstrates that non-attachment, but still an inner peace and inner joy.
What is it that I, the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha, desire for all people? Well, it is of course that they attain this. At least that they attain some state of inner peace, some state of healing of their psychological wounds and traumas, overcoming these attachments that put them under stress. Twenty-five hundred years ago, I said life is suffering. Today with the vocabulary that is available, we could say that life is stress. Life is tension, inner tension. What is stress? Well, there can be physical stress, but stress is primarily a psychological condition. You feel stressed. Yes, you can say you are stressed, but it is still a psychological condition.
When I, as the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha, look at the Russian people, what do I see? Well, I see that many of them have been under tremendous stress for several lifetimes. Many of those who embody in Russia today are also under tremendous stress. Just their daily lives give them such a sense of being stressed that it is overwhelming to many, it is too much for some, and they go into various forms of addiction to numb themselves with chemicals, or certain activities that take their minds off this stress they are feeling. Some will do almost anything for a brief reprieve from that sense of almost unbearable stress.
How can you expect people who are under such stress to be sensitive to life? They are not sensitive to their own lives. How can they be sensitive to others? How can you expect them to take responsibility for their own lives, for their nation, involve themselves in various aspects of society? How can you expect them to do anything but try to cope with the stresses of daily life?
Saint Germain talked about raising the Russian people to the point of material affluence, where they do not have to spend all their time and attention on making a physical living. But this of course, has an Omega side, which is that, as has been demonstrated by many people in the West, you can have good material conditions and still be under psychological stress.
It is clear that much of the stress that many people are feeling in Russia now does come from the struggle to make a physical living. And much of that would be relieved when the conditions are better materially. But still of course, this is just the first stage, and the second stage is the healing of psychology so that the people of Russia also begin to overcome that inner psychological stress that is not actually caused by the material conditions, but only exaggerated by those material conditions.
The real cause is what has happened to them during Soviet times, during tsarist times and even during modern times, and they need psychological healing for this. What is the key to it? Well, it is of course to recognize that you feel stressed because there is a mechanism in your psychology that makes you think that you yourself can only be a certain way, or that life can only be a certain way.
This is an attachment to a particular view of life, to a particular way of looking at life, a particular perception filter. You have in the past been exposed to trauma, manipulation, propaganda, that caused you to accept a certain view of life. For example, that life is a struggle, that you cannot trust the state, that you cannot trust other people, that everybody is out to get you, that everybody is opposing you, that nobody is giving you the respect you want, or many other things. You think this is the only way to look at life.
And as a result of that, you think that when people do not do what you want them to do, you can only react by feeling stressed, by feeling upset, by feeling angry, by lashing out, by being aggressive and trying to silence them instead of working with yourself and asking yourself why what they say upsets you so. And then realizing that anything that upsets you is not the outer condition. It is the inner condition, the attachment in the psyche. That is what upsets you. The key to not being upset, the key to overcoming the stress is not to change the outer conditions, not to change other people, but to change the inner condition so that you can face the same outer conditions. Look it straight in the eye and say: “So what? You think you have power over me? You think you can force me to react a certain way? Nay. That was the past me. But the me that I am today, you have no power over me.”
This is of course, not limited to the Russian people. It applies to all people on earth. And I do not expect that the Russian people will turn to Buddhism in the foreseeable future. But certainly, I do expect that our ascended master students will use these ideas, use these tools, and that you thereby will pull up on the collective consciousness so that people begin to grasp and accept these ideas without even realizing that they are based on Buddhic teachings or they come from the ascended masters or whatever.
We are not looking to turn Russia into a Buddhist nation, or an ascended master nation. We are looking to get people to accept a set of universal ideas that helps them improve their personal lives.
Now, I wish to give some teachings that are building upon what Mother Mary gave earlier in her magnificent discourse on how to overcome the sense of being stuck on the spiritual path. My perspective on this is of course, what I have already given you, which is the key of the Buddhic teachings: overcoming your attachments. But I especially wish to focus on one aspect of this one type of attachment. And it is what you would normally call expectations.
Now, as mother Mary and Jesus and others have said, when you first find the spiritual path, be it in an ascended master teaching or elsewhere, you are at a certain level of consciousness. You come from a certain background, you have certain ideas and beliefs that have entered your mind in this and past lifetimes. And you can do nothing else but start at that point. But what makes a person decide to engage in this unfamiliar concept of a spiritual path to higher states of consciousness? What motivates you to put forth an effort to study the sometimes complex teachings, to practice these somewhat strange rituals, and to spend much time and energy and effort on this?
You have to have a motivation. And what motivates people is of course, that they have an expectation of something. And if you look at human existence, if you look at this and past civilizations, if you look at human history, you see a pattern emerge. This pattern is: you make an effort, and then you receive a reward.
You can see this going back into the mists of history. You make an effort, you receive a reward. This is of course, a concept that we might say is natural. It is part of the path of a lifestream that starts out as we have said with a point-like sense of identity, and gradually expands it. You make an effort, you receive a reward.
On a natural planet you make an effort by formulating a certain matrix in your mind, and then you see the physical manifestation of that matrix and that is your reward. This is the beginning stages of being a co-creator. And what is it that happens on a natural planet? It is whatever matrix you can hold in your mind with sufficient intensity, you can manifest.
This of course, is not the same on an unnatural planet where matter is more dense, where the collective consciousness is dense, where there are many, many people that might oppose you and especially where there are fallen beings. We can say that there was a natural concept of making an effort, receiving a reward, but the fallen beings have manipulated that concept. They have perverted that concept and used it to manipulate people in a myriad of subtle ways.
One of their favorite games is to give people an expectation that if they make a certain effort for a long time, they will receive a certain reward. And then they get people to make the effort, and they do not get the reward. And then they come and say: “No, but you didn’t work hard enough, you have to make an even stronger effort.” And then people do that, and they still do not get the reward. And the fallen beings have created a sport that is: how many times can you make people continue to believe that if they make an even harder effort, they will get the reward?
In Russia, you see a version of this that says: “If you, the Russian people, will sacrifice enough on behalf of the State, you will get a reward.” In the Catholic times, the version was: “If you make enough of an effort to follow the dictates of the church, to fight for the church in the crusades, to give your money to the church, to do this and do that, you will be rewarded after this lifetime.” It is simply a sport for the fallen beings to take people through these cycles of making an effort, being disappointed, getting them to make a new effort, disappointing them again, and so on until the people have finally had enough and say “Stop.”
Likewise, of course, with the spiritual path. As Mother Mary talked about the outer path, you think that if you do all of these decrees and invocations, study all these teachings, come to conferences, do this and do that, you will receive a certain reward, however you look at it, based on the state of consciousness you have when you find the path. Then you do this for 5,10, 15, 20 years, until you finally feel disappointed, and perhaps leave the teachings, or perhaps go into denial and continue making the effort thinking you will be rewarded after this lifetime.
The reality is, my beloved, there was a time when you found the spiritual path in some form or another. You had a certain level of consciousness and based on that level of consciousness, your background, not only in this lifetime, but in past lifetimes, you created a motivation for yourself for following the spiritual path based on a certain expectation.
You accepted that you would have to make an effort. But you expected that when you did make the effort, you would receive a certain reward. You may have found the spiritual path in some other form but at some point you come to the ascended master teachings. Now you take the teachings of the ascended masters, and you again motivate yourself. You create a motivation for yourself that says: “If I do this, as defined by these teachings, I will get this reward.”
There are many, many people throughout the world who have expected that if they follow a certain spiritual teaching or guru, practice certain techniques for a while they will receive, they will attain a higher state of consciousness, cosmic consciousness, unity consciousness, enlightenment, whatever they call it.
You as ascended master students are not, most of you, different. You have a certain expectation of what will happen when you apply yourself to the path. Again, there is no blame here, what else can you do? You must start where you are. You will get absolutely nowhere if you do not do something. If you do not make an effort, you will make no progress, so you need a motivation for making that effort, and that motivation is based on the level of consciousness you have, the way you look at the path, the way you look at yourself, look at God, look at the ascended masters, many complex issues. Each of you might have your own motivation. There is nothing wrong with this. It is perfectly inevitable that you do this.
But how do you then avoid coming to these points where the motivation you had when you started has taken you as far as you can go, and now as Mother Mary described, you need to step up to a higher level but your outer mind does not know how to do this, so you start feeling discouraged, you start feeling you are not growing, you are not making enough progress, it really does not mean anything anymore. How do you avoid this reaction?
Well, there is only one way and that is to recognize that as you walk the path, you will from time to time have to take a look at your expectations. You will have to realize that the expectation you had was limited by the level of consciousness you had. But now that you have made the effort, applied the teachings, you have risen in consciousness. This means you can now grasp a higher motivation and you can form a different expectation of what will happen.
The question really is, do you understand this, can you grasp this with your outer mind as well and recognize that, as Mother Mary said, the path has stages? And in order to get from one stage to the next, you have to see something that you did not see on the former stage. It is the only way to grow. Especially, you have to recognize that you always need motivation. How else would you make the effort on a dense planet like earth? And in order to get motivation you need to have a certain expectation of what the reward is going to be.
We see students who find an ascended master teaching, they formulate an expectation that they will get some physical result. It might be the healing of their bodies. It might be wealth. It might be certain conditions that they desire, physical conditions. It might be certain abilities to manipulate matter and manifest things that will impress other people.
There can be many different motivations and expectations. But these are physical expectations. They will take you to a certain level of the path, but there comes that point where you are not going to grow further unless you look at these expectations, realize that they are limited and that they limit you, and that if you want to make more progress on the path, you need to simply let those expectations go by letting the selves that hold those expectations go.
This is not necessarily an easy process, but we have actually given teachings on this from various perspectives. You need to recognize the simple mechanism here. Jesus said 2000 years ago: “He who seeks to save his life shall lose it. But he who is willing to lose his life for my sake, shall find it, shall find real life, a higher form of life.” What it means is simply this: you have formulated an expectation at a certain level of consciousness. How will you see the next level of consciousness? How will you see a higher expectation that can take you to the next level of the path?
Here is the mechanism: you cannot see the next step until you have let go of your present expectation. This does not mean you need to do it when you have just come into the teachings. But when you come to this point, where you feel like you are stuck, you are not getting anywhere, that is when you need to step back, look at your motivation, look at your expectation. What kind of a reward are you expecting? Then you need to let that expectation go. To let that self die. Use the teachings on how to let go of separate selves. Let it die.
Only when you have let go of that expectation that has now outlived its purpose will you see the next. That is why the spiritual path is in a sense a process of death and rebirth. You have to let something old die before the new can be born. Before you can be reborn as a new being in Christ. It cannot be any other way. It is not that we have not said this before in various other ways. We are attempting to say it in more clear ways with a particular focus. How to get unstuck on the path.
The lowest level of expectation people have is for some physical outcome of the path. The next level up might be on some psychological outcome. It might be healing of psychology. It might be attaining certain powers. It might be attaining a certain level of consciousness.
This messenger never had the physical expectations. He always looked for a raising of consciousness because he understood that this was the key to the path. But for many years, he was motivated by the expectation that one day he would reach an ultimate level of consciousness. And he often thought: “Well, I haven’t reached that ultimate level of consciousness. But I know the path works, so there must be something I haven’t resolved in my psychology. So I keep working on my psychology and then if I keep working hard enough, until I resolve everything, then I will have that ultimate state of consciousness.”
This worked for him for many years. It can work for many of you for a long time. It has worked for many of you for a long time. But this messenger came to a point where he realized, not that he was in any particular crisis, but he simply realized that this was a limited approach. It was not until he had the teachings on the separate selves and the 144 levels of consciousness, that he realized that there is an illusion at each of the 144 levels of consciousness. The illusion, of course, is that there is something you have not seen, which is that there is some self you have not seen through and let die. There is some psychology you have not resolved.
That was when he realized that you will not actually fully resolve your psychology until you ascend. When he realized and acknowledged this, he was no longer like the donkey running after the carrot and pulling the cart. Now he could stop and say: “First of all, I’m done running after that carrot. I don’t even want that carrot. I don’t even like carrots.” Then he could turn around and look at the cart and say: “I’m done pulling that cart for this expectation that one day I’ll have this ultimate breakthrough and I will be in a higher state of consciousness. Why should I pull this expectation which actually burdens me?”
That is when he could then shift his entire approach to the spiritual path and say: “Why should I feel inadequate or bad about being at the level of consciousness I am at? Yes, I have still some psychology that needs to be resolved. But why should I feel bad about it? It’s just the way the path works on earth. I am at a certain level of consciousness and I have certain unresolved psychology from that level and up to 144th level. It can be no other way. Why should I blame myself for not being at 144th level yet? I’m at the level I’m at. My concern is to take the next step.”
He went into a state of mind where he was no longer feeling behind, he was no longer feeling inadequate and he was no longer resisting seeing something in his psychology. He was just neutrally waiting for the next thing to come up so he could look at it, work on it, let the self die and move up to the next level. And lo and behold, what did he achieve by going through this shift?
Well, in a sense he reached the ultimate level of consciousness that you can reach on earth. Namely, being at peace with being here. Being who you are at the moment, knowing you will continue to grow until you reach the 144th level, because you know you are not resisting it. You are not resisting seeing something that you need to overcome. That is the ultimate state of consciousness you can have on earth, because it gives you a sense of inner peace.
Of course, you might still have some illusions you have not seen that can give you certain reactions to certain conditions. But still, it will be much easier for you to work through that and come back to the state of peace. Or perhaps work through it without leaving the state of peace. You are in this neutral state of mind. You realize you are not seeking extreme happiness. You are not seeking bliss. You are not seeking some ecstatic experience, some dramatic peak experience. Y
ou are actually seeking the neutral state of mind so you have as few reactions to conditions on earth as possible. When you do have a reaction, you just look at it. What is the self behind it? What is the belief? You keep turning it around, looking at it from different angles until one day, you wake up in the middle of the night, and you suddenly see it: “Ah! I don’t have to do anything on earth. Ah! I don’t have to convince anybody on earth about anything. I don’t have to accomplish anything on earth, I don’t have to get a certain result on earth.” Because you realize now that there really is nothing on earth you actually want. There is no reward you could get on earth that you really want.
What you want, the reward you want, is your ascension. Well, you may want a certain reward of giving service on earth. Helping other people. Certainly, this messenger gets a certain sense of joy from having done the work he has done and from doing it still. But his real motivation is to ascend. That is what it needs to be for those of you who are in what in your divine plan is your last lifetime on earth.
Many of you have defined the goal for this lifetime to qualify for your ascension. This is in your divine plan. This means that you have often in your divine plan defined a certain timetable: “I need to grow at a certain pace in order to make it in a normal lifespan.” This is one of the reasons why you sometimes feel like you are behind, because you are behind the timetable you set for yourself, because you have not let go of that expectation. You are still stuck in wanting something on the path, wanting something on earth, some reward on earth, rather than the ascension.
What did Jesus say 2000 years ago? Those who want their reward on earth can have their reward. But those who really follow Christ are those who want their reward in heaven. That is of course, your ascension.
Many of you can come to a point where you have followed a certain motivation, you have followed a certain expectation as far as you can go. Now you are no longer making the progress you want and suddenly you can come to look at your previous motivation, and you feel the limitations of it. You experience this feeling, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. You see the meaninglessness of pursuing this goal that seemed so important to you a few years ago. But you have not let the self die. You have not let the expectation go. That is why you can not be reborn and see the next level for you, and that is why you feel stuck.
Again, as Mother Mary said, this is a very individual thing. What is your particular expectation? And what is your particular definition of the path you need to take to reap that reward? How is that formulated in your mind in words? Perhaps also in images, but especially in words. How would you describe it?
Step back and consider this. How would you describe your motivation, the reward you are seeking, and the way to get there as you have seen it so far? Then look at it, compare it to what we have said, that it is not the highest possible motivation. How does it relate to your ascension? Is it not really your ascension that is the highest motivation for you? Then adjust your expectation. Let the former expectation go. You will see a new one. You will see what is the next step. It may not be the ultimate one, but it does not matter. It is the one that can take you the next stage up on the path until you might again have to let go of that expectation and refine it.
Then you can come to that point, as the messenger has reached some time ago, you do not need expectations. You are not looking for rewards, certainly not a reward on earth. You are not waiting for something to happen. You are simply being who you are, experiencing life, expressing whatever comes to you from within to express, and you are content with this. You are at peace with it. That is again the highest state of consciousness you can reach on earth. It is not the 144th level, but it is the highest experience you can have.
You understand, perhaps, that there is a difficulty in using words to describe this process. We have given you this concept of the 144 levels of consciousness. In a sense, you would say, that means you cannot reach the highest possible state of mind until you are at the 144th level. But this is actually not the case.
There is a certain staircase you are following towards the ascension. It has 144 steps. And when you reach the 144th step on that staircase, you can ascend. For each step there is an initiation you have to pass, something you need to see. But these are steps you take, but the question now is: “What is your state of mind, your attitude, your approach to walking the staircase?”
That is what I am talking about. You can reach a certain state of consciousness, a certain approach, a certain attitude to life on earth, to the spiritual path, to making progress that is neutral, that is at peace, and this is the highest state of mind you can be in on earth. The highest approach you can attain. You may think that Jesus had attained a higher state of consciousness than this, but he did not. You may think that I attained a higher state of consciousness as the Buddha. But I did not. I reached the highest state of consciousness that could be reached at the time, given the level of the collective consciousness.
These are some thoughts that if you ponder them, if you allow yourself to absorb them, you can get yourself unstuck if you are willing to let these expectations and these selves die. Even if you do not know what comes in their place. Even if you think nothing will come in their place. Even if the selves are saying you will die if you let them die. Because you know you will not die by letting a self die, because you can never die. You can only be reborn into a higher state by letting a limited self die. This, I hope, all of you have grasped by now. I hope you have not only understood it intellectually, but you have experienced consciously letting a self die and then feeling that greater freedom that comes from it.
With this, I have given you what I and what we wanted to give you for this conference. We are grateful for this opportunity to address the topic of Russia. We are grateful that so many people from Russia have tuned in to this webinar, that you have put your attention on this, that you have been willing to have your chakras and auras be the broadcast stations whereby we can broadcast these ideas into the collective consciousness.
We are grateful that so many people from the former countries affected by the Soviet Union have also been part of this conference, and also of course, people from other parts of the world. You have all multiplied that momentum, the omega aspect of the alpha aspect of our release taken in by you, and therefore through your consciousness by you being in physical embodiment, being broadcast into the collective. It is a magnificent service that you have rendered. We are grateful. You have our great appreciation, our great acceptance of who you are right now on your path, our great love of only wanting to help you make progress and go beyond it.
With this then I seal you in that flame of Buddhic joy which is really that neutral state of the inner peace, the peace of mind. So be sealed in that flame of the neutral peace of the Buddha.
Copyright © 2021 Kim Michaels