TOPICS: What if the revolution had not happened? – Information poisoning – How the power elite uses information – Art bypasses the linear mind – Freeing the artist in you –

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Ascended Master Nicholas Roerich, June 16, 2013, through Kim Michaels. Given at a conference in Novosibirsk, Russia.

I AM the Ascended Master Nicholas Roerich.

I come on the wings of the music you have just heard, music that has a transcendent quality. Not only is the melody itself stirring something in the heart, but the voice of the singer is able to carry that transcendent quality that is spiritual light. The human voice has an amazing capacity to carry light. It also has an amazing capacity to carry darkness. Yet let us be, as I was in my last embodiment, the artist that focuses on the beauty, not ignoring or denying the ugliness, but nevertheless dedicating a lifetime to showing the transcendent beauty.

You may look at the thousands of paintings that I left behind, and you might ask yourself: “What was old Nicholas trying to convey?” I was trying to convey the transcendent beauty of spiritual light. Why did I choose tempera instead of oil? Because it has the ability to be mixed into these lighter hues, these delicate hues of colors that are the closest thing you can come to being able to out picture with colors, that the physical eye can see, the transcendent beauty of spiritual light.

What if the revolution had not happened?

You may know from even a brief study of my life history and that last lifetime, that I was born in Russia but had to flee and only escaped within a hair’s breadth of being captured, imprisoned, and most likely killed. What a sorrow it was for Helena and I to have to leave Russia for we saw all too clearly what was coming. We saw that despite the imperfections of the Tsarist system of government and the current Tsars’ inability to flow with the necessary changes, we still saw that the changes were coming. Certainly not as fast as some would have liked, not as fast as we would have liked, but the changes were coming.

You might well spend some time studying, if you feel so inclined, Russian history in the few decades before the revolution and in the few decades after. Ask yourself what would have happened to Russia if the revolution had not happened, and if the evolutionary changes that had already begun before the revolution, had been allowed to grow to their fullness. What would have happened to Russia, to Russian culture, to the Russian mindset, to Russian art, to music, even to the economy? What would have happened, my beloved?

Do you want to have a visual illustration of what would have happened? Then go to one of the art museums that display the art made during the communist period. Look at these huge canvases with their bombastic presentations of the glory of the army and military might, of battle scenes, of the so-called glory of being a worker bee in the system. Look at them, look at the faces of the people, look at the shapes, the lines, and how they are drawn. Look at the colors, take a long look at the colors. Then, when you have absorbed this, go to a museum or go to a book and look at my paintings, look at the colors, look at the shapes, but oh look again at the colors. Then feel the difference in your heart of what communist art causes to arise in your heart compared to the sensation that you get from meditating on my pictures. This will give you a sense of what would have happened to Russia if the October Revolution had not taken place.

You may well cough [someone in the audience coughed] for it is difficult to even ponder this without feeling a release of emotions. I, as do many other ascended masters, hold the Christ vision for the Russian people. I see the beauty that is the potential for the Russian people, for culture, for art, for government, for the way people treat each other. I see the potential, I see how it was squashed and how it still has not even recovered in some areas to the point where it was at before the revolution. Although in other areas it has started to recover, even to go beyond what it was before the revolution. Yet there is no area of Russian society that has caught up to where it would have been had the revolution not happened.

This is something I wish to express in the physical for it was a great burden to my heart in my last lifetime, and although an ascended master does not feel human emotions, we can still look at earth and sense the emotions that people have, we can connect to these emotions. We do not get lost in them as many people do, and as we all did while we were in embodiment, but by connecting with them we get an important sense of what you are going through and we also hope that we can convey to you that we know how you feel.

We do not blame or condemn you for having certain feelings. We acknowledge the difficulty of being in physical embodiment whether it is in Russia or in most other nations. We acknowledge how difficult it is to face these challenges that you face in a modern world, in many ways much more complex than what I faced during my embodiment when the world was in some ways more simple, more compartmentalized.

Information poisoning

Do you realize, my beloved, that while Helena and I were living in America and were striving to bring forth teachings from El Morya; Guy and Edna Ballard were also Messengers for Saint Germain? Do you realize that we never connected, we never heard about each other; that is how compartmentalized the world was at that time. Today, you have such an explosion of information that there is so much information impinging on your minds that there are literally people in this world who suffer from what should be classified as a new disease: information poisoning.

When I ponder my state of mind in my last embodiment, I see clearly that for me to fulfill my mission of making the art, bringing forth certain ideas, bringing forth certain teachings, I had to focus my mind very narrowly on this task. If I had had to take in as much information as many of you have taken in in your lifetimes, it would have been much more difficult for me to fulfill my task, my divine plan. Now, I know that consciousness has risen and many of you are able to take in more information than I was so many years ago, so many years ago that it seems like ages ago. When you compare the amount of information that the average person took in almost a century ago to what the average person takes in today, it is an incredible difference.

Many of you can handle dealing with much information. But I still ask you to consider that when you get a little more mature on the path, it might be necessary for you to make an effort to focus more directly on what you begin to see as your divine plan and to deliberately refuse to take in some of the information that you have become so used to taking in that you almost think you could not live without it.

You know, my beloved, there are many remote areas of the world that would get along just fine if you did not know what was happening there. The people on the other side of the planet would most likely go about their business even if you did not know what they were doing. I am not saying you should close your minds, but I am saying that in the modern world it is very necessary to be on guard for what you actually take in.

How the power elite uses information

I hope you realize that if you go back several centuries, the power elite at the time attempted to control people by controlling the information to which they had access. Look at how even the Catholic Church for centuries had burned all the books of the Greek philosophers, would not even allow the Bible to be translated into other languages than Latin and controlled the information that people had. Look at how they tried to suppress the scientific information when it started coming out. Then realize that up until the modern era, the power elite of the world were doing everything they could to suppress information. But in the modern, era especially with the advent of the Internet, it became clear to them that it was no longer possible to suppress information.

What they have done instead is do the opposite, actually do everything they can to not only put more information out there so that you are exposed to more information that you can take in, but to deliberately put out information that seeks to sow the element of doubt in your mind. For everything you believe in there are two or three things out there that will tell you that what you believe is wrong. If you pay too much attention to it, you might end up not knowing what to believe. Of course, we of the ascended masters do not ask you to believe anything, but to experience the light. But you see my point.

The Internet has become a source of both information and disinformation. In the old days it was a matter that you only had access to very limited information, but now there is so much that the problem is not so much to find a true teaching, but to actually filter out all of the many untrue teachings and claims out there.

Do you realize that there are dark forces in the astral realm who are seeking to counteract and destroy any information that we of the ascended masters have brought out over the last century? They work through people in embodiment who have opened their minds and hearts to this, who have therefore allowed their minds to be taken over by the dark forces who often write or speak through them. They have done everything they could to discredit the ascended masters, messengers of the ascended masters, specific teachings we have given.

I experienced a certain ridicule during my lifetime, but I have seen how the teachings have been ridiculed since. So did all who have been messengers of the ascended masters, for it is simply part of the job, as we might say. Yet as students of the ascended masters I ask you to be aware, to not let all of the disinformation out there override or take away your inner sense of the reality of the spiritual light. It is so easy for the outer mind, the analytical mind, to twist and turn everything. There is no argument, no statement that could be given, even by the ascended masters, that could not be counteracted or doubted by the arch-deceivers of the world.

People who discredit ascended master teachings

The reason for this is that we of the ascended masters must express our teachings through words, and words have the ability to be twisted and turned. Words cannot express an absolute truth. That is why I started out talking about my attempt to paint the ineffable light so that people might look at a painting and experience the light not in their minds but in their hearts. We hope that those who find the written teachings of the ascended masters, will also be able to look beyond the words and find the light in their hearts.

We see that this is harder with words. Why? Think how Guru Ma told you about how you have grown up to be programmed to focus on certain things, how you have been programmed to create this external self. Well, you have all created an external self that thinks it has to know everything, it has to be able to analyze the words, and twist and turn, and figure out this, and figure out that. Or maybe it thinks that it has to be able to put anything on a linear timeline.

How many students have been confused by taking a teaching from the ascended masters given through one dispensation, reading a teaching from another dispensation, overlooking the fact that 95% of the teachings are in agreement and instead focusing on the few instances where there is some disagreement that can be seen only through the linear mind. Then they reason that either one of the teachings must be false or they are both false and the ascended masters are not real at all.

This is precisely the energy that Lenin was the master of projecting out through his writings and his spoken word. He was a master of planting that doubt so that people did not know what to believe. You will see that there are people even today who have attacked the ascended masters teachings with that same energy.

When you look at this from the ascended realm, you, of course, have total respect for free will. But I would like to express in the physical that we sometimes look at people and wonder how one can be so eager to make so much karma. Then, of course, we look again and we realize that the people do not believe they are making karma, for they believe they are doing what is right, perhaps even justified from some higher authority, perhaps even from the ascended masters. The ability of the human mind to justify the ego games is literally boundless, as Lenin proved in his writings.

Art bypasses the linear mind

Truly, that is why I was a painter, for art – as music and other forms of culture – can bypass the analytical mind more easily than words. The analytical mind is so used to dealing with words that when it reads words you will notice in yourself how that linear mind kicks in, and now wants to compare everything it reads to what it has in its database. But sometimes art and music can bypass that mind. You realize, do you not, that when I talk about information poisoning, the poison enters through the linear, analytical mind that thinks it has to be able to know everything, take in information and organize, categorize and analyze all of it.

But you see, YOU are not the analytical mind; you are a pure spiritual being. You have the ability to withdraw your attention from the analytical mind and focus on the heart, on the ineffable spiritual light, and connect to the ascended masters. This is the most precious gift that you have.

My desire for all of my paintings was to help people reconnect in their hearts. My desire for taking the long journey that we took, starting here in Novosibirsk, was to reconnect to the history, the origins, not only of the Russian people but of the spiritual traditions of the world that I knew where anchored in Shamballa in the Himalayas. Seeing the loss of culture and loss of the historical continuity that was a result of the revolution, I was hoping to reconnect, I was hoping to find some way to reconnect the Russian people to their own higher history, their higher potential.

Certainly, it could not be done through art alone, aside from the facts that my art could not be distributed widely during Soviet times. Nevertheless, art can be a facet of the diamond, as can music, dance, other expressions of culture. I simply point you to the fact that not all of you have as your divine plan to spread the teachings of the ascended masters in a worded form. Many of you have the capacity to go beyond words, to find expressions that are beyond words, beyond what the analytical mind can take in and deal with. This messenger obviously has as his divine plan to bring forth teachings in words and this is what he has chosen, even though he has been an accomplished painter in his past lifetimes. Yet not all of you are meant to do this, so tune in.

Freeing the artist in you

I wish to free the artist in those of you for whom this is part of your divine plan. So much of the art you see in the modern world is made by artists who have no desire whatsoever to express the ineffable light. They only have a desire to express the chaos in their own subconscious minds.

Could you see the art museums of the world being filled with photographs of the garbage dumps of the Middle Ages? Those garbage dumps were there. You could even find a certain artistic beauty in them, if you really tried hard, perhaps harder than I was ever willing to try. But they are long gone. Does it have any relevance to the world that there was a garbage dump in France 400 years ago outside of Paris that looked a certain way? Would it have any value to the world if you had a photograph of that garbage dump hanging in the Louvre?

Then, does it have any value to the world that you have a painting hanging in the Louvre that pictures the garbage of the subconscious mind of a particular painter who lived a century ago and is no longer in embodiment? He has, by the way, either gone to the second death or raised his consciousness so his subconscious mind no longer looks like that painting.

Is there really value in the young generations of children walking endlessly through the halls of these museums, looking at these paintings, not knowing what to make of them? They have been told that this is art, but in their hearts they cannot for the life of them see the value of this. Yet what is the effect? Again, they feel: “Perhaps I should accept this? Perhaps I should take this in as art? Perhaps I should expect that these are the limits for artistic expression in the modern world? Perhaps time has run away from making art that is beautiful, that expresses the transcendent light?”

Nay, my beloved, time has not run away from the art that expresses the ineffable light. Time is running towards a period where art will be used more and more for expressing the ineffable light. That much I can tell you for sure, seeing the portents of the coming age. Beauty is the forerunner of the golden age. There must be artists who can capture the beauty that is not yet seen in the physical and who dare to use their abilities as best they can to attempt to express it in ways that can be seen and heard and felt. This is the essence of art.

I AM the Ascended Master Nicholas Roerich. In my last embodiment I was an artist, a true artist. I am an artist today. I am also an ascended master who is willing to work with and sponsor any artist among you. Do you feel any hankering for art, any desire to express yourself in artistic ways? Then you are most welcome to appeal to my heart.

Go within your heart. Study my paintings, look at them and then look beyond them and ask yourself: “What is the spirit of the painter who painted this? I want to connect to that spirit,” and there I am. Find me in the paintings, but also find me beyond the paintings. For I too am much more beautiful than any of my paintings.