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Ascended Master Guru Ma through Kim Michaels.

You do not ascend by taking action on earth. You ascend by reflecting on the actions you have taken, and the actions you have not taken, on earth.

Without taking action there is nothing to reflect upon. Without the reflection there is no self-transcendence. Without self-transcendence there is no ascension.

The ascension comes when you have reflected upon your actions, come to understand the self that was the foundation for those actions and you have then decided: “I AM more than this self. I no longer want to be this self. I will let it die so that I can be reborn as more.”

I AM the Ascended Master Guru Ma. I am a recently ascended master, having ascended on July 4, 2012. I am giving this and the following teachings precisely because I have ascended so recently. There are people on earth who believe that once you ascend, you have attained some state of perfection. The outer mind, the intellectual mind, wants to believe that if you are perfect, you cannot change. The ascension does not mean a static state of perfection; the ascension means that you rise through a much swifter process of growth and learning than what you can experience on earth.

Truly, it can be said that when you ascend is when the process of growth really begins. As an ascended master, you grow very rapidly. You quickly transcend the state of consciousness you had immediately after your ascension, and in a short period of time – measured with earth years – you have moved very far beyond the state of consciousness, the sense of self, that you had while you were still in embodiment on earth.

When you have been an ascended master for a short period of time, as measured with earth time, you have gone so far beyond the state of consciousness people have on earth that you can barely remember what it was like for yourself to be in embodiment. This makes it somewhat more difficult to speak directly to the people who are still in embodiment. This is precisely why it has been determined by our councils that I should be the one to step forward and give this series of discourses on what it means to ascend, what it means to be a newly ascended master, what it means to be in your last embodiment and what you have to go through in order to qualify for your ascension.

I have also been selected to give these discourses because in my last embodiment on earth I was a public figure. My name was Elizabeth Clare Prophet, and I was known as the leader of a New Age spiritual movement, named the Summit Lighthouse or Church Universal and Triumphant. My wonderful “admirers” in the press loved to call it “CUT.” CUT was the name they gave us and it was indeed an amusement, although I must say it is far more amusing today than while I was in embodiment. Of course, everything that happened to me on earth is far more amusing today than while I was in embodiment—and so it will be for you after you ascend.

Why Would You Want to Ascend?

What does it mean to ascend? It means that you transcend the self you had while you were on earth. It is precisely the self you have right now that makes you take seriously the conditions you encounter on earth. It is the self you have that makes you attached to certain things or conditions on earth. It is the self that makes you feel burdened by what you encounter on earth. The ascension is the process of shedding this self so that none of its cares and attachments mean anything to you anymore.

Non-attachment to what people think

I know this will sound harsh to some people. I know that many of the people who knew me while I was in embodiment will want to maintain the view of me that they had or still have. It does not matter whether they count themselves as my faithful followers and accept me as a genuine spiritual teacher or whether they count themselves as my critics, having adopted a negative view of who I was and what I did. Many people are still attached to the view they had of me.

They will want to maintain that view, and therefore they will not want me, the ascended master that I am now, to come and disturb them in their view of me. I actually have no intention of disturbing anyone’s view of me. I am not here to explain, apologize for or make light of anything I did or did not do in my last embodiment. If I had any desire to affect any person on earth or to change their view of me, I would not be an ascended master. You cannot ascend if you are concerned about your public image in your last embodiment. Then you will have to take another incarnation, seeking to overcome your attachment to your public image. You ascend only when you have overcome all of your attachments to anything that happens on earth or to the way human beings in embodiment on earth look at you or anything that you did or did not do.

Attachment is not the same as love

Again, I know that some of those who knew me in my last embodiment will feel that this is harsh. Those who see themselves as my faithful followers will want to feel that I still care about them. They will want me to uphold their image of me. It is not that ascending makes you not love people on earth. When you ascend, you transcend all attachments to any person on earth. Even those who were your family or close friends and associates in your last embodiment need to be transcended, or at least your attachment to them needs to be transcended.

This does not mean that you do not love them, but you do not love them in a human sense. You do not love them as they see themselves. You love them for how you see them, now that your consciousness is freed from the mental box – the perception filter, the self – that you have in the unascended state.

Anyone and everyone who is still in a physical body – regardless of their level of attainment – still have a perception filter that must be transcended in the process of the ascension. There is no one who ever has ascended while retaining the slightest portion of the earthly perception filter. No one ever will ascend and take any aspect of the human with them into the ascended realm.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available, as the Introduction, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 in the book Don’t Drink Your Own Kool-Aid.