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Ascended Master Sanat Kumara through Kim Michaels, June 6, 2025. This dictation was given the conference in Seoul, South Korea: Being the Living Christ in everyday life.

I AM the Ascended Master Sanat Kumara. Some have called me the Ancient of Days. Some have called me the Eternal Youth. Well, which is it? Can you be both? Well, in the eyes of humans, you can. Of course, you can say that I am not a new lifestream. On the other hand, I ascended from this sphere, so I am not as ancient as some of the ascended masters who ascended before me. On the other hand, I am the eternal youth because how did I ascend? I ascended by embodying an aspect of the Christ consciousness and it is the aspect that makes everything new.

Christ makes everything new

Now, you take Jesus who said: “Unless you become as little children, you shall in no wise enter the kingdom.” The meaning is, of course, that for children everything is new, everything is exciting. I focused on that aspect of the Christ consciousness before I ascended. I embodied it, and that was what carried me through to the ascended state. I was always open to something new and I avoided the opposite quality where you become sophisticated: You know everything. You have it all figured out. There is nothing new under the sun. I have this under control. This is what the fallen beings feel. They have it all figured out. As Maitreya said: “It is all an illusion created in the mind.” It seems real only to that mind, which has so disconnected from the Christ mind that it is not even looking for anything new, because it values control above all else.

How are you going to ascend? Well, it may seem as if these later dictations we are giving have transcended the purpose of this conference of being the Christ in everyday life. We admit that what Maitreya gave you was a teaching that may not have much practical applications in your everyday life, so I will endeavor to make my teaching a little more practical. It could basically be said to be this: Stop taking yourself so seriously.

Taking the path and yourself too seriously

You see, there comes a point on the path of Christhood where you need to step back and say: “What is the path all about? How have I approached the path so far?” Many of you will see that you found the teachings, you locked in to what the teachings are about, at least as you could see it at the time. Then you made a decision to dedicate yourself to the path. Now, as happened to this messenger, you became almost obsessive-compulsive about doing everything right, as you could see it. You wanted to do all the decrees and invocations. You wanted to read all the dictations. You wanted to go to conferences. You wanted to study all of these things and at the same time, you have an everyday life.

You cannot just focus all your life and all your attention on the teachings, at least not for most of you. Many of you have children. You have jobs. You have obligations. So, you build this tension that spiritual people have experienced throughout the ages, and which has become this tradition in the East, that in order to be really spiritual, you have to forsake the world and withdraw from the world. Again, we are not blaming anyone.

When we look back through the ages on planet Earth, we can see, and we have experienced (those of us who have been in embodiment on Earth or on other planets) that it is very difficult on an unnatural planet to balance spiritual growth and everyday life. It is an enormous challenge. We also see that in the Aquarian Age, we are moving into an age where it is not the ideal that most spiritual people withdraw from the world. On the contrary, the ideal is that people stay in the world, at least most of them, and they express their spirituality in their everyday life. They do not separate the two. How can this be achieved?

Well, what you can see in yourselves, for many of you, is that after you dedicated yourself to the path, you experienced this tension. That is part of why, as others have talked about, that you became more stressed after you dedicated yourself to the path. You were pulled in two different directions and you felt there was this tension between everyday life and spiritual growth. What was the result of this stress? It was that many of you started taking yourself and the path very seriously. Again, we are not blaming you. Take care what we are always saying: “Those of us who have been in embodiment on Earth have experienced what you are experiencing.” We all, at a certain point, became too serious about spiritual growth.

Now you can say that as you are moving from the 48th to the 96th level, you need to have enough dedication that you can pull yourself above the collective consciousness, and therefore you need to have a certain dedication, a certain focus, a certain discipline. You need to have certain priorities set so that you realize what is more important to you in life. Because in a sense, when you set your priorities, it becomes easier to say: “Well, these are my obligations in everyday life, and these are my spiritual activities and I have decided on a certain balance between them, and I maintain that.” Nevertheless, the effect for most people is that you take yourself very seriously. You take the spiritual path very seriously, but this is also an inroad for the ego to color your view of the path.

The ego is very serious about itself

The more seriously you take yourself and the path, the more the ego can influence you. For that matter, even the fallen beings have a certain ability to project something into your mind when you take yourself very seriously. They, of course, are the ultimate examples of beings who take themselves so seriously that you could not even really imagine. Most of you have not encountered the lowest consciousness fallen beings and you do not need to. I am just telling you that if you could see their consciousness, you would not believe how serious they are about themselves, how important they feel they are, how epically significant they are. They think that even God himself is watching them and tiptoeing around them, and is concerned about their power. This is what they believe—that they have achieved a power here on Earth, and that God is afraid that their power will be bigger than his. It is probably true for the false God that they have created. He might be worried about them, but the real Creator is, of course, not.

There comes that point, certainly as you move beyond that 96th level, but it will even help you to realize this before you get to the 96th level, where you need to look at this and say: “Am I too serious? Why am I so serious?” Well, it is because you have assigned some epic importance to the spiritual path in general and to your personal progress on that path. You have defined a goal for your spiritual growth that has some epic significance to you at least. You might even think that it has epic significance to the ascended masters. This is actually one of the primary reasons why people can reach the 96th level, fail the initiation to let go of the focus on self, and therefore, start going down again where they now seek to elevate the separate self to some ultimate spiritual status.

You just take yourself so seriously, or rather, the separate self takes itself so seriously, because again, what is the Conscious You? Well, it is pure awareness, neutral awareness. Is there any room in pure awareness to be more or less serious? Where would that room be? Being serious can only be in a self. It may not be a dualistic self. It may be the spiritual self that has taken you close to the 96th level. If that self begins to take itself too seriously, then it cannot see that it was just a vehicle, like the bottom part of a rocket, meant to take you to a certain altitude, and then it is supposed to fall away so you can rise higher. If that spiritual self is not willing to fall away, fade away, then it can have such a pull on the Conscious You—if the Conscious You does not realize the need to stop being so serious.

The fallen beings are very serious

Master MORE had a previous embodiment where he coined the phrase: “The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.” You laugh at the devil and he goes away. There is a profound truth here. The fallen beings are so prideful. They take themselves so seriously. They expect that everyone else is going to take them as seriously as they take themselves. When they encounter someone who does not take them seriously, who is laughing at them, or who is demonstrating that he will not submit to them, he will not be disturbed by them, he will not fight them, then they do not know what to do.

You need to come to that point where you do not take the fallen beings seriously anymore. How can you come to that point if you take yourself seriously? Because then you think that it is so important that you grow, so you can do something epically important for the masters to free the planet from the fallen beings, or whatever you may think.

There are innumerable ways that spiritual people can define some epic importance to their path. As the messenger explained, he came to a point where he saw that his approach to the spiritual path had been colored by the ego and part of it was that he had taken himself so seriously. He thought it had some epic importance for the future of the planet and for the cause of the ascended masters that he made progress on the path. He came to see this, the futility, the vanity of this and he partly realized this because he had had enough inner experiences with an ascended master’s consciousness that he realized that an ascended master is like the rock of Christ.

Your ego does not influence ascended masters

You can, with your outer mind, with your ego, project all kinds of things on the ascended masters: That you are doing this epically important thing and that you are making all these sacrifices for the masters’ sake and therefore, the masters surely must one day recognize you. Yet it has no influence on us as ascended beings. We are the rock of Christ. We will not be moved by your egos, no matter what your egos think. When you are willing to experience this, to acknowledge this, you can see the futility of thinking that your ego can build up some sense of importance that we are going to respect—and then you can let it go. You can, as the messenger described, really encounter the Presence of ascended masters. You might actually get a vision of what you really can do for us, when you are not doing it from the ego, depending on what is in your individual Divine plan.

What you see here is that, as we have said before, many spiritual students have a fairly good vision of “what” needs to be accomplished in their lives, but they are lacking in the vision of “how” it can be accomplished. You may actually have a correct vision that in this lifetime you have the potential to do something in society or do something for the ascended masters, but your ego has colored how you think this is going to happen because you think you can do it through the outer mind and the ego. You can let that fall away, when you realize it cannot be done through the ego, in fact, you cannot do it, because as Jesus said: “I can of my own self do nothing. The father within me is the doer.”

Who is the father within? Well, it is the Christ mind. It is your I AM Presence. It is the ascended masters. That is the father within. Then you realize: I can of my own self do nothing, nothing that is worthwhile, nothing that will bring the Earth higher in consciousness, for everything I do that is colored by the ego only serves to reinforce the consciousness that is keeping the planet trapped. It is only when I let go of this sense that I, as a separate self, can do something valuable in a spiritual sense. Then, you can really begin fulfilling your Divine plan because you are not the one doing it, although you are the one doing it from another perspective. The outer self, the outer you, is not doing it but the Conscious You is being the open door by being neutral. If you are neutral, can you take yourself seriously? Can you be serious? Cannot be done. I am not here saying that you need to say: “Oh, I am going to start cracking jokes all the time. I am going to start having fun. I am going to start doing all these things that are fun so I can soften up.” Not really necessary for all of you. It may be for some of you.

The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Being the Living Christ in everyday life.