01. How to find answers to life’s questions

Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.

This book is a gift to those who consider themselves seekers of truth, meaning that they have come to the conscious realization that they want real answers to the fundamental questions of life:

Who am I, where did I come from and why am I here—meaning both in existence and here on this planet called Earth?

What is the purpose of life in general and what is the specific purpose for my personal life?

Who is God and what is God like?

What is my relationship with God and how can I deepen it?

What is the ideal role of religion in my relationship with God and why does religion so often limit rather than expand my relationship with God?

What do I mean when I talk about real answers? There are numerous belief systems that claim they have complete, absolute and infallible answers to the fundamental questions of life. Let it be made clear that it is not the purpose of this book to create another belief system to compete with the many systems that claim to have the exclusive answers to life’s questions.

This book will not give you the answers to life’s questions. It is designed to assist you in receiving these answers from the only place they can be received, namely a source inside yourself. That source is the Spirit of Truth (John 4:24), and the answers you get from it are living answers, the Living Truth that is beyond words.

As a true spiritual seeker, it is essential for you to recognize the limitations of words. Words are inherently ambiguous, and the same statement can trigger mutually exclusive interpretations from different people. That is why most of the people who claim to be religious are caught in the age-old game of thinking that their particular expression of “truth” is superior to others. Thus, they have abandoned the quest for the Living Truth in favor of seeking to prove the superiority of a dead truth, a truth that has been frozen in time by being clothed in words. Let it be understood, therefore, that as soon as a spiritual concept has been reduced to words, it has entered the realm of duality, and from that point it is subject to interpretation by a specific part of the human mind, namely the analytical mind that is so easily controlled by the ego.

One of the main purposes of this book is to explain – in a way never done before – how the human ego interferes with your relationship with God. This will take some time, but what you need to be aware of from the beginning is how the ego uses words to block your growth, while your Higher Self seeks to help you see beyond the words to the hidden meaning:

The ego will seek to make you interpret any statement I make at the level of the words by taking it literally. It will seek to make you compare the statement to your existing belief system and reject anything that contradicts or goes beyond what you already believe. The ego is always seeking to put your mind in a mental box in which it feels it has you under its control. Once you are there, it seeks to prevent you from expanding the box or stepping outside the box. There are billions of people who claim to be religious but who have not realized that their egos have used their religion to build a mental prison for their minds. Thus, this book is a gift to those who have realized or are willing to realize that there is a force in their own psychology which seeks to hinder their search for the Living Truth. In order to find truth, one must transcend this force.

Your Higher Self is seeking to help you look beyond the outer words and use them as a springboard for reaching for a direct, inner experience of the Spirit of Truth. The truth you receive from this inner source is the Living Truth that cannot be confined to words. Nevertheless, it can be experienced through your intuitive faculties, and this experience can be triggered by words. When you do experience the Living Truth, you realize that it cannot be confined to any belief system. Thus, the quest to prove the superiority of one belief system is futile. In reality, many belief systems can serve as stepping stones for the direct experience of the Living Truth. When used as such, they serve their rightful purpose, but when used as weapons to prove the ego’s superiority, they form an impenetrable barrier between you and God.

This book is a gift for those who have passed one of the most important turning points on the spiritual path, namely where you realize that you want the Living Truth over anything offered on this planet, including the many dead “truths” that come from the duality consciousness of the ego. You want truth more than the comfortability and seeming security offered by the mental box of the ego or a ready-made belief system. You have realized that the outer “truth” offered by so many belief systems will never satisfy your inner longing for truth. I hope you will also realize that the reason for this is that only the Living Truth will satisfy your longing. And this truth can be known only through a direct, inner experience.

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What does it take to have an experience of the Spirit of Truth? It is likely that you have already had at least glimpses of this living experience. However, most people are not quite able to have a clear experience of the Spirit of Truth, for they do – as Saint Paul expressed it – see through a glass darkly (1Corinthians 13:12). That filter – which stands between your conscious mind and the Spirit of Truth – is created by the ideas and beliefs that your ego and the world have programmed into your mind. It is therefore an eternal dilemma that in order to have a progressively clearer experience of the Spirit of Truth, you must be willing to gradually purify your mind from beliefs that spring from a lower source—and rest assured that I will expose this source and its illusions as the book progresses. One of the most important abilities on the quest for truth is the willingness to examine one’s beliefs and let go of all beliefs that are found to limit one’s quest for the Living Truth.

It remains the greatest limitation for humankind’s spiritual teachers that so many of those who sincerely seek truth have not yet recognized the conflict in their own psyches. If you do not recognize the existence of the ego, it can so easily cause you to doubt and rationalize away the directions you get from your Higher Self or your direct experiences of the Living Truth. If you are still caught in the trap of seeking to fit every new insight into the framework of your existing beliefs – seeking to defend your world view rather than expand it – then you will be your own worst enemy, going back and forth without ever finding satisfying answers to life’s questions. The challenge for any seeker of truth is whether to cling to what is familiar and seems safe or whether to reach for an understanding that simply cannot fit within the confines of one’s existing beliefs.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.

Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.