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Ascended Master Guru Ma through Kim Michaels.

I AM the Ascended Master Guru Ma. What is the main message I would like to get across in this book? The main message can be summed up in a statement made by El Morya: “The trek upward is worth the inconvenience.”

When you look at earth realistically, you see that the collective consciousness forms such a strong magnetic, downward pull that it is extremely difficult for people to pull themselves above it and walk the spiritual path towards a higher state of consciousness. It is extremely difficult to ascend from earth, it is not an easy task, my beloved.

You also see that the fallen beings, the false teachers, have done everything they could think of to lay traps that pull you into blind alleys. They either take you away from the spiritual path altogether, or the delay your progress for a very long time. Quite frankly, they can think of a lot. They are very creative in their destructive way. If they could have turned that creative drive into producing something positive, something that raised up the All, well, then the earth would long ago have ascended to a higher level.

What I am saying is that it is very difficult on earth to walk the spiritual path and to qualify for your ascension. It is not by any means an easy task. This means that walking the path is inconvenient. It requires effort, it requires determination, it requires vision, it requires drive, an extraordinary drive.

The spiritual path can also be enjoyable

There certainly is a phase on the path where you need to be so focused on yourself – on the path, on the spiritual teachings and the spiritual disciplines that you know are valid – and you just do not have the opportunity to look right or left. It is very tempting to say that you have to be focused and disciplined for your entire lifetime, yet this is not necessarily the case. Yes, you have to be focused and disciplined, but you also have to be aware that the path has stages. There does come a stage on your path where you actually do have time, do have opportunity, do have attention to focus on enjoying life. The path is not all about sacrifice.

I know very well that when you look at the life of Jesus, you will see that he had a very intense life, especially the last three years. He was very focused, very driven, but yet if you could see him in reality – beyond what is recorded in the scriptures – you would see that he had moments of joy. He had moments where he just enjoyed life. I, myself, remember one time where I happened to come upon him sitting in the hills, looking out over the Sea of Galilee. Our eyes met, and I saw in him something I had not seen before.

I saw that he had no thought, no concern, for the future; no regrets about the past. He was just in the moment, he was living in the moment. He was one with God, one with everything, and he was radiating a vibration of joy that filled my being so that I started physically shaking all over. This only lasted for a split second, but that was all I could bear, given the state of consciousness I was in at the time. The experience has never left me. It has left an imprint on my being so that I know it is possible, even when you are in embodiment on earth, to tune in to the ascended realm, to the ascended state of consciousness, in which you see everything on earth for what it is: Outplayings in the cosmic sandbox, mirages projected by the minds of men and those disembodied beings attached to earth.

You are not here to produce a physical result

You see, as it says in the scriptures: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” You see that it is all unreal and that it has no real bearing on who you are as a spiritual being. When you see this, you see that your real task here on earth is not to do something in the outer, not to produce a certain visible result. Your real task here on earth is to be the open door for the light of your I AM Presence. When you are that open door – nothing less, nothing more – then you will feel the ultimate joy.

The ultimate joy you can experience on earth is to be attuned to the particular God quality of your I AM Presence and to be the open door for radiating that God quality in the material world. When you feel the light of your Presence flowing through you; that is the ultimate joy you can experience while you are in embodiment on earth.

There comes those upper levels of the path where you need to consciously set aside some time to just focus on your Presence and not let your attention be drawn into all these things that you think you have to do or accomplish on earth. I can assure you that when I look back on my last embodiment, one of the things that I would have done differently today was to spend more time just focusing on the Presence.

When I say this, I realize that it is an impossibility. I was not able to do this because of the state of consciousness I was in. Yet I do wish that I had had the prompting from somewhere to make a shift in consciousness so that I could focus more on just being one with the Presence, rather than being so pulled into doing all these outer things of what I thought was my ultimate task on earth.

The difficulty of being a spiritual guru

Again, life on earth is no easy task. It is difficult to walk the spiritual path, but how difficult do you think it is to be a spiritual leader, a spiritual guru and a messenger for the ascended masters? It is quite difficult.

There is enormous opposition. There are so many traps set by the fallen beings to prevent you from being successful in this task. You are dodging so many bullets coming at you all the time from the outside world, from the astral plane, from the mental plane, from the lower identity realm. You are dodging bullets coming from human beings, even those who are your own followers, those on your staff and in your own family. You feel like you are a living target and that they are taking potshots at you 24 hours a day and you have to be constantly alert.

When you become the open door for the Presence, you become transparent. There is a part of the path where you need to have the shield of Archangel Michael to deflect what is coming at you from the world. When you become one with the Presence, you do not need this shield for you now have become the open door, meaning that the bullets pass through your lower form and into the all-consuming fire of the I AM Presence. It is like building a cannon that can send a bullet to the sun, the bullet will be consumed before it ever reaches the surface of the sun—if one could define the surface of the sun, which you cannot.

There comes that point where it is possible to shift your consciousness so that you focus not so much on the outer tasks that you think you have to accomplish. It is understandable that this is difficult. I, myself, felt that I had made so many sacrifices in my life, that I had walked such a difficult path of overcoming so many obstacles, and why had I done this? Because I felt there was a goal, there was something I had to do for the ascended masters. My love, my drive, to serve the masters was so strong that I was willing to sacrifice virtually everything in my personal life in order to fulfill my mission. I was willing to set aside personal desires. I was willing to face many situations that I would rather have avoided and nevertheless still overcome, still keep moving, still keep going forward.

I felt that the legacy that I had to leave for the planet was the teachings and an organization that could promote the teachings. What have I said earlier? When you are too focused on something, you begin to drink your own Kool-Aid. You begin to think this is the only way you can be, this is the only thing you can do. Of course, this shuts down certain opportunities for your Presence to express itself freely through you. You are not completely the open door.

I was a sponsored messenger anointed by the ascended masters. I had very high spiritual mantles, higher than anyone is capable of holding right now. Nevertheless, I was not the completely open door. I was open to taking the dictations, but there were certain ideas I had about what it meant to be a messenger – what it meant to be a guru, what my mission and my work was – that actually closed certain aspects of my personal doorway to the full expression of my I AM Presence.

Each and every one of us has his or her personal service in life. It is not for all of you to be a messenger, to be a spiritual guru, to be a public personality, to have a public role. There are millions of people on earth who are meant to walk the path towards the ascension without taking a public role. For such people the ultimate service you can give is to be the open door for the light of your I AM Presence. For those of you who do have a more public mission, the best way to fulfill that mission is to be the open door for your I AM Presence so that you have the minimal amount of resistance in your outer mind that unwittingly, unbeknownst to you, controls the flow of the Presence.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available as Chapter 20 and Chapter 21 in the book Don’t Drink Your Own Kool-Aid.