Seeing Opportunities for Self-Transcendence 

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Ascended Master Serapis Bey through Kim Michaels, January 7, 2016.

I am the Ascended Master Serapis Bey. We have now turned an important corner in the progression of this book and the course you are taking under me as the Chohan of the Fourth Ray. As I said in my last discourse, you have now come to a point where you have a greater acceptance of me as a facilitator. You are running on your own inner motivation for walking the path. I do not need to present you anything that you can react to or react against. We need to go with your own motivation, and I simply facilitate your own discovery of what takes you higher on the path.

We have now come to the level where you face the combination of the Fourth Ray of Purity with the Fifth Ray, which has often been called the ray of vision or the ray of healing. These two are, naturally, linked. Why do you need to be healed? Because you are unwhole. Why are you unwhole? Well, because you have a distorted or limited vision, you do not have a whole vision. Naturally, purifying your vision is a key to healing as it is a key to growth. The Fifth Ray, of course, is also the ray of manifestation, materialization, using your vision to produce changes in the material world.

When you come to this point and you have the desire to purify your vision, then I will take you through a series of steps in your finer bodies. What I will do in this discourse is to take you through a series of steps in your conscious mind that can help you tune in to and also pass the initiations in my retreat. You can thereby pass the initiations consciously and anchor the lessons in your conscious mind as well as your three higher bodies.

How fallen beings distort vision

The first thing I would like to present to you is the concept of how the fallen beings have used vision and are using vision. You will, of course, see that there are a number of ideas in the world that are aimed at limiting people’s vision, distorting their vision or guiding their vision into a certain track, a certain dead end, as we might say. I have talked about ideas that have a certain energetic hook built within them, but these ideas often form a filter. If you want to have a visual illustration, you may envision that in front of your vision, there is a device similar to a kaleidoscope.

You know that a kaleidoscope has certain panels inside of it with glass beads that the light shines through, and the light is colored by the glass. You know that these can be rearranged so they form various patterns. The ideas created by the fallen beings are like these panels in the kaleidoscope that distort your vision.

You also know that in a kaleidoscope you normally cannot see through, you cannot see anything on the other end. What I desire you to see here is that your three higher bodies, your identity, mental and emotional body, form a kind of kaleidoscope.

How is a kaleidoscope compared with binoculars? If the kaleidoscope was totally cleared from any colored glass patterns, you would be able to see clearly what the material world is like. Because you have certain colored patterns in the three higher bodies, your vision is limited and distorted, colored by these ideas that you hold. The fallen beings are very active and very aggressive in promoting ideas and constantly seeking to get people to believe in them. What I want to draw to your attention here is that the fallen beings actually have a much easier task than you might think.

If the fallen beings can get you over a certain hump, then they do not have to be concerned with you anymore. Your mind now becomes a closed circle that is a self-reinforcing limiting spiral, a downward spiral. The fallen beings no longer need to limit your vision because once they have pushed you over a certain hump, you are limiting your own vision.

The purpose of expanding our sense of self

How does this happen? Well, let me explain to you something about how the material universe works. You understand that you are a spirit spark, you are a spiritual being. We have explained that what descends into the physical body, as an extension of the I AM Presence, is the Conscious You. We have said that this is pure awareness, meaning that it really does not have any built-in, inherent limitations. You can take on any role you want to play in the material universe, but you can also free yourself from the role because the Conscious You is not changed by the role. This is illustrated by my image of the kaleidoscope-binocular. The Conscious You is not changed by the panels that are put into the kaleidoscope. Its vision is changed, but the Conscious You itself is not changed. You can therefore remove the panels and clarify, purify, your vision anytime you want.

The purpose of the material universe is that Spirit – which you may call God or the Creator as you like, or you may call it an ascended being in the ascended realm – looks at this unascended sphere and sends an extension of itself into it. The purpose is that this extension starts out with a very limited, a very localized, sense of self. Through its interaction with the material world, this extension then expands its sense of self until it reaches the point where it can ascend from the unascended sphere and become an ascended master.

From there, you can continue to raise yourself to higher and higher levels of consciousness, up through the previous ascended spheres all the way to the Creator consciousness. When you reach that Creator consciousness, you now have the same awareness as your Creator, the same level of awareness and creativity. Because you were not created at this level, but have gone through the entire process of gradually growing, you have a much greater experience, a much greater awareness of how to express your creative abilities. This means that you are much better equipped to creating your own world than if you had not gone through this process.

If you had been created on a blank page, you would have had to experiment with your creative abilities and possibly make mistakes. The wisdom is that you start with much more limited creative abilities than that of a Creator so your mistakes are much more limited and much more easy to overcome. When I say “mistakes,” I, of course, am using a word familiar to you. From the ascended state of consciousness, we do not look at it as mistakes but simply as experiments that were not a full expression of who you are. This, of course, applies to you as well in the material world. This is why we have no condemnation of you, the sense of shame and condemnation being created by the fallen beings.

The basis for a limited vision

When you first descend as a new being into an unascended sphere, you have a very localized sense of self. At this point, you have, as the popular saying goes, only one way to go: “The only way to go is up.” As you gain experiences in an unascended sphere, you gradually expand your sense of self. As Maitreya explains in his book, there comes a point where you need to no longer follow the teacher who is assisting you in expanding your sense of self. You come to the point where you need to become self-sufficient, and that means you need to experiment on your own instead of only doing what the teacher tells you to do.

It is, of course, at this point that you must face the initiation represented by the duality consciousness. This is the initiation where instead of seeing yourself as an extension of the hierarchy above you, as I have talked about in my previous discourses, you come to see yourself as an individual being, an isolated being, a separate being. You think you are creating on your own power, your own experience. Everyone must deal with this state of consciousness to some degree.

This does not mean you have to go into it and stay there and get lost in it. It is, of course, a possibility that some will choose to go into it. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, as it is just another experience. What can happen at this point is that you form a desire to go into a state of forgetting who you are and then from there, growing back to a higher awareness of who you are. Again, this is not wrong, this is simply another experience that is possible in an unascended sphere. This is a point where you can lose your conscious tie to your spiritual teacher and thereby lose your conscious awareness, your sense of identity of yourself as a connected being that is part of something greater than yourself.

How do you have this experience? As I said, you start out with a very localized sense of awareness, sense of self. You are aware that you are a part of something greater, you are connected to something. You start your creative efforts in a protected sphere where you are in constant contact with a spiritual teacher. This means that in the beginning phase of your growth in self-awareness, you are expanding your sense of self. You therefore come to a point where you have a greater sense of self than when you started. You also have a greater sense of self than what can be fit into the experience as a separate being.

How can the Conscious You go into what for most human beings on earth is the normal sense of self and experience that from the inside—and at the same time be completely convinced that this is real? How do you gain this sense of reality that you are a separate being, that you are living in a separate world where there is no direct connection to God and perhaps there is no God? How does this become real to you?

Well, it can become real only by limiting your vision. It is as I say, you start out with a binocular and then you put certain colored panes of glass in it that limit and distort your vision. Again, there is nothing wrong with this. This is actually not a fall; it is simply one possibility for expanding your self-awareness.

What you do as a co-creator is that you deliberately put yourself in a limited state in order to grow from there. You want to have the experience of going into an unascended sphere, taking on the body and mind of a human being on earth and at first being completely lost in that state. Again, when you do this, you are in a sense in the same situation as when you were first created: The only way to go is up. Being a human being on earth is such a limited state of consciousness that you really can only go up in self, or at least that is how it was in the original state.

The original intent that you had was that you would go into the identity as a human being and you would gradually expand on it until you were ready to ascend from the unascended sphere. What I am saying here is that in the original design, your original intention, you would gradually grow in self-awareness. You would constantly be moving up in self-awareness. You would start out with a limited vision and you would gradually purify your vision until you again saw yourself as part of the spiritual hierarchy above you.

What the fallen beings add to this mix, and what they added to the situation on earth after they were allowed to embody here, is that you can become stuck in the role, you can become stuck in the limited vision. Instead of constantly and gradually moving up to a purer and purer vision, you either get stuck at a certain level or you even start going down to a more and more limited vision.

The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: The Mystical Initiations of Intention.

Copyright © 2016 Kim Michaels