Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.
We now need to pull together some of the ideas we have considered in the previous chapters, so we can get a clearer picture of what happened to those students who separated themselves from the teacher. We have seen that a new student starts out with a limited self-awareness and sense of identity, much like an infant on Earth. As the student grows, it builds a sense of identity, but the identity is heavily influenced by the environment—again much like a child on Earth. As a child on Earth is influenced by two factors, so is a student in the cosmic schoolroom. The two factors are its parents and its peers. I represented the parent to the students in the Garden of Eden and, of course, the other students were the peers. A student can develop an identity that goes in one of two directions. It can grow closer to the teacher or it can grow further away from its teacher, much like a child on Earth grows closer to its parents or closer to its peers.
We now come to a subtle but crucial point. I have said that the path I offered my students was the Path of Oneness, whereby students would come into oneness with me. I realize that for people on Earth this will sound like my students had to become slaves or clones of me or that they had to submit their own will to my will. Yet it is essential for you to understand that oneness does not mean sameness.
As I have explained, a new co-creator is an individualization of God’s Being and is created for the purpose of starting out with a separate sense of identity and then growing to the full God consciousness. In doing so, the co-creator becomes one with its Creator without blending back into the Creator’s Being. If a co-creator – as a unique individual – became the same as the Creator, the individual being would cease to exist. It would simply blend back into the Creator’s Being from which it came, much like a wave that blends back into the ocean when a storm subsides.
Yet the true purpose of creation is not that you struggle for a long time to build your identity and reach a higher state of consciousness only to disappear as an individual lifestream. On the contrary, the purpose of creation is that your individuality grows until it becomes immortalized—which means it can continue to grow indefinitely. However, because everything was created out of the Creator’s Being, your path toward God consciousness is to follow the trail that leads you back to your source. When a self-aware being attains a sense of oneness with its source while still preserving its individuality, it has attained God consciousness; it has become a God in its own right. In order to follow the trail that leads back to its Creator, a lifestream must become one with its higher being and the spiritual hierarchy that leads from itself to the Creator. Yet for new co-creators this can be difficult, which is why they are offered the intermediate step of oneness with a teacher.
The mechanics of the path are simple. The goal is to help you grow out of a very narrow, self-centered sense of identity by helping you become one with something that you see as larger than yourself. As you do this, you will eventually expand the boundaries of your sense of self until you realize that God is not greater than or outside your self because God is your Self.
I presented this Path of Oneness to the students in the Garden of Eden. Because it is a huge challenge for a new student to attain oneness with the Creator, I offered the students the Path of Oneness with a representative of the Creator with whom they could interact. By first becoming one with me, a student could go on to become one with its higher being. And then it could work its way up through the levels of the spiritual realm until it attained oneness with the Creator. Because the student started as a separate being, that first step into oneness with the teacher is clearly the most difficult. Once you have experienced coming into oneness with a larger being, it will be far easier to do so again with an even larger being, continuing on to the Creator.
Do you see what this truly means? I realize that many students – and most people in their current state of consciousness – think they suddenly appeared out of nowhere as separate beings. This is precisely what gives a student the opportunity to start out by seeing itself as a separate being and then gradually reconnecting to its source. Yet the reality of the situation is that you did not appear out of nowhere. As I described, the Creator projected itself into the very first sphere in the form of self-conscious beings. These beings then projected extensions of themselves into the second sphere and this process has continued all the way to the material universe. You are not a separate being that appeared out of nowhere. You are an extension of a spiritual being in a realm above the material universe. Yet that being is an extension of a being in a higher realm and so on until you reach the Creator itself.
In other words, all life is truly part of this Chain of Being and the Path of Oneness is a process of gradually expanding your sense of self by coming into oneness with the being out of which you came—continuing to do so until you reach the Creator and attain God consciousness. We might say you have come into being as the last link in a process of spiritual beings, a spiritual hierarchy, projecting extensions of themselves into a lower sphere. Your highest potential in life is to follow that Chain of Being back to your ultimate source. Doing so is the only way to attain a sense of meaning and purpose and overcome the sense of being alone or abandoned. It is only when you realize you are part of a larger whole that you will feel truly fulfilled and at peace. Obviously, every spiritual being that is above you in the Chain of Being, including the Creator, wants you to have that feeling and does not want to see you remain in a state of separation that can only cause constant suffering. Your spiritual “parent” loves you as itself because it sees that you are itself. You will feel fully enveloped in love only when you come to the realization that you love God as yourself because God is yourself, your Higher Self.
For the students in the Garden of Eden, I, Maitreya, was the lowest representative of the Chain of Being. They could not yet see the Chain of Being itself, so their opportunity was to come into oneness with me as the first step and then go on to become one with a Being on the next level up.
I know very well that many of the more mature spiritual seekers on Earth will look at the imperfect spiritual teachers or religious leaders they see on this planet and reason that they have no desire to come into oneness with such teachers. This is understandable, but the point of this book is to show you that there is an alternative, namely to come into oneness with your own Christ self and ascended teachers who have risen above the consciousness of anti-christ. You can go beyond any outer teachers and messengers and establish a direct, inner, personal contact with the spiritual teachers who are above the duality of the ego. And if you feel a reluctance to come into oneness with the beings who are above you in your own Chain of Being, then I must tell you that it is the ego that feels this reluctance. For the ego knows it will die when the conscious self overcomes separation and comes into oneness.
Yet consider that a physical teacher or messenger can still help you establish your direct inner connection, and thus it is valuable to learn from such teachers and honor those who demonstrate an example of the Path of Oneness. Therefore, heed the teacher, even when he appears in the humble disguise of an ant. The challenge of the ego is that it forms a closed box around your mind, and in order to break free, you must attain a connection to something beyond your own mental box—for while you are inside it, you cannot see beyond it. Thus, other people who are outside your box can become your teachers, and that is one of the main values of a true spiritual community, as we will discuss later.
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As I said earlier, when a child on Earth grows, it smoothly transitions from one sense of identity to the next. And when this happens, the previous sense of identity dies and a new one is born. Although this is a distinct event – one identity dies and another is born – the child obviously has a continued sense of awareness and thus rarely even notices the transition. This was much the same for the young students in the Garden, who gradually transitioned from a very limited to a far more sophisticated sense of identity.
Yet even a child on Earth eventually reaches a sense of identity where it becomes more self-aware, more conscious of the fact that it has the power to deliberately change its sense of identity instead of having it shaped by outer factors. This is the point where the child takes responsibility for itself and becomes an adult. Obviously, I am describing an ideal scenario, and I am fully aware that many people on Earth can live an entire lifetime without actually taking responsibility for their lives and consciously changing themselves. Nevertheless, my point is that as the students in the Garden matured, they approached the point where they needed to consciously let the old identity die and build a new one. This was a change that was fully as dramatic as the change from a teenager to an adult on Earth, and students responded with a wide range of reactions.
Some sought to postpone the change, seeking to hold on to their childhood sense of identity. Others rebelled against the change and refused to let go of their old identity, while still others pretended like nothing needed to happen. As I described earlier, the Garden was a very loving environment, and I fully respected the free will of the students. Thus, I gave them a great deal of latitude, not only in terms of what kind of identity they would build but also how long they would take to approach the final exam of the cosmic school.
Nevertheless, the Law of Free Will demands that a student cannot take forever to reach the point of taking responsibility for its life and thus becoming self-sufficient. This is a point that has been much misunderstood by people on Earth, so we will look at it in the next section. However, my point here is that there did come a point when I, as the responsible teacher, had to confront students and tell them they could no longer postpone the essential choice, the choice expressed by Hamlet in Shakespeare’s famous play, the choice to be or not to be.
A student will eventually come to a turning point where it will have to make a choice between the path of life and the path of death, between the path of becoming MORE or the path of becoming less, between the Path of Oneness and the path of separation, between the true path and the path that seemeth right unto a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death. As the teacher in charge, I had to confront students with the necessity to make that choice, and it was in doing so that I had to run the risk that some students would rebel against having to choose. They could instead choose not to choose, whereby they would separate themselves from me and remove themselves from the Garden of Eden. More on this later, but let us first overcome some common misunderstandings about free will.
NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.
Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.