Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.
As we have seen, the entire purpose of life is that you grow in self-awareness, which means that you overcome the limited and narrowly focused self-awareness with which you started the journey. You broaden your self-awareness, and in doing so you rise up the Chain of Being that leads toward full God consciousness. Yet in order to rise to another level, you must come into oneness with your own higher being. And the first step in that process is that you come into oneness with the spiritual teacher.
The challenge here is that if a student has been blinded by the consciousness of separation, the duality of anti-christ, it cannot see the Chain of Being and thus it can only see the teacher as being outside itself. Therefore, it will feel that if it gives up its separate sense of identity, it will have no identity left and will suffer a loss. Or it will feel it gives up its freedom to make its own choices by submitting to the teacher. Some students even felt that having to consider how their choices affected other students was a restriction of their free will. Since no self-aware being can bear the thought of having no identity, students who are blinded by the illusion of separation cannot give up their old sense of identity, and thus their new sense of identity cannot be born.
If a student has overcome the mind of anti-christ and seen through its illusions, the student will know that by giving up its old sense of identity, it will instantly be reborn into a new and higher sense of identity. Thus, such a student has no fear of loss and will gladly give up something that is less in order to gain something that is MORE. Yet when a student has become blind, it thinks giving up something can only lead to loss, and thus it will hold on to the old as if it was a matter of life or death. This literally puts the student in a catch-22 from which there is seemingly no way out.
Is there a way out? Of course, but the only way is that the student’s conscious self comes to realize that it has been blinded by an illusion. What has really happened is that the conscious self has come to identify itself as the student’s current sense of identity. Thus, the conscious self thinks it will die if that identity dies.
Let me expound on that thought. I have so far said that the conscious self of the student is charged with building the student’s Omega identity, the identity that allows the student to interact with its environment and express its spiritual identity and creative powers. It is perfectly natural that the conscious self identifies with the identity it has built, but the conscious self is always more than any identity. The identity is like the costume in a theater that the actor of the conscious self wears during the play. Thus, if the sense of identity dies, the conscious self will not die, nor will it have no identity. It will instantly create a new sense of identity.
The only way out of the dilemma is that the conscious self realizes it is MORE than its current sense of identity and that its self-awareness is not the sense of identity but is simply expressing itself through that sense of identity. However, before the conscious self can attain a higher sense of identity, it must let go of its identification with the old identity. It must let the old identity die, which is exactly the process that Jesus demonstrated when he was hanging on the cross.
The cross symbolizes – among other things – your old identity that has put you in a position where you cannot move. You are paralyzed by your own self-created limitations. Even Jesus felt this way on the cross, crying out that God had forsaken him (Matthew 27:46). This signifies that even Jesus had certain expectations that made it hard for him to give up his old sense of identity. What was the essential key that set Jesus free from the catch-22? It was that he finally resigned himself to his own higher will and gave up the ghost (Matthew 27:50). He gave up the ghost of his old sense of identity, and by being willing to let the old self die, he opened the door for his resurrection into a higher sense of self. The cocoon must be left behind before the butterfly of self can take flight.
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We now come to a subtle idea that will take some pondering. I have said that it was my goal to raise up the students to become self-sufficient. And I have said that the students needed to come into oneness with me. Does this sound like I am contradicting myself? If so, that is exactly how some of the students felt, but why did they feel that way?
They did so because they had become so blinded by the duality consciousness that they could not see what the path is all about. The reality of life is that you are part of the Chain of Being. You are a separate being in the sense that you have individuality, but you are not separated in the sense that you are disconnected from your source or from other beings. Because you started out with a limited awareness, you built a sense of identity based on the illusion of separation, meaning that you saw yourself as separated from other students, from your teacher and from your source. This sense of identity was based on ignorance and thus it was imprisoning you in a limited state.
What is the natural next step on the path? It is to escape this limited sense of identity, and how can you do this? You can do so only by realizing that although you have individuality, you are not a disconnected being but a part of a larger spiritual being. You are a wave on the ocean of self rather than a drop of water floating around in empty space. What I presented students in the Garden was a way to escape the limited, disconnected sense of identity by becoming part of something beyond that limited sense of self, something bigger than the limited self. The true path to spiritual freedom is to become one with your own higher being, rather than remaining trapped in the limited sense of identity that says you are a disconnected being.
What needed to happen to the mature students was that they would consciously recognize this dynamic and then voluntarily give up the sense of being disconnected from their teacher, their fellow students and their own higher selves. What I truly offered to the advanced students in the Garden was a true sense of community in which all are united – all have come into unity – around the true purpose of creation, namely to grow in self-awareness and to take command over the material realm. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of those students who failed to see this opportunity or who deliberately refused to let go of the limited sense of identity and come into unity with a greater sense of identity. They would not come into unity and thus could not remain in the community of the Garden.
Do you see the point here? Coming into oneness with me as your teacher did not mean that you would lose your individuality or free will. It meant coming into oneness with the will of your own higher being and the purpose for which your higher being sent you into the material realm. I was not forcing you to become something that you did not want to become. I was trying to help you reconnect to the will and vision of your own higher being, which is the only way you can ever feel fulfilled and at peace. As long as your lower being is out or harmony with your higher being, you are what Jesus called a house divided against itself (Mark 3:25).
The Path of Oneness must start somewhere, and for the students in the Garden of Eden it started by becoming one with me as their teacher. You come into oneness with the teacher in order to escape your old sense of identity as a disconnected being. You do this by consciously accepting a new sense of identity as one with a higher being rather than remaining separated from it. However, oneness means oneness in vision, purpose and the knowledge that following God’s laws leads to growth whereas going against them leads to suffering. It does not mean loss of individuality or freedom. In fact, a separate identity is what takes away your freedom, and only through oneness with your own higher being can you experience true spiritual freedom.
NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.
Copyright © 2007 Kim Michaels.