Ascended Master Lord Maitreya through Kim Michaels.
We have now arrived at a crucial point that has traditionally been the one thing that has prevented the top ten percent from taking dominion over this planet. That point is how you deal with other people, and it is absolutely essential that the spiritual people of this age make an uncompromising commitment to finding a way to treat each other that is not dualistic in nature. This chapter will offer some suggestions.
One of the most persuasive dualistic lies is the concept that the end can justify the means. Another equally subtle lie is that everything that happens in the material universe is ultimately real or permanent. And the third lie is that what happens in the material universe really matters in this world. When these three lies are combined, you have the perfect storm that causes people to be completely enveloped in, blinded by and emotionally attached to an activity in the material world. They now start acting as if the outcome of their efforts is a matter of some ultimate importance, such as life or death or the end or salvation of the world. And since their efforts have an epic importance, it is justifiable that in order to accomplish their goals, they treat people in a way that is clearly against their own religious teachings. After, all what does it matter that we mistreat people if we do it to save their souls or save the world—or so the ego reasons.
This form of religion-based insanity simply must come to an end, and I am calling on those who have read this book to be the forerunners for a new culture that treats people on Earth the way beings in the spiritual realm treat each other. That means without deception, manipulation, pretension, judgment, controlling love, unkindness or any of the other dualistic games. I am calling on people to find a way to have non-dual interactions.
The reality – as I have explained it in previous chapters – is that nothing in the material universe is ultimately real in the sense that nothing in this world has yet attained the permanence you find in the spiritual realm. This world is not a quarry where people chisel sculptures in stone, it is a sandbox where mistakes can – relatively speaking – easily be erased. Thus, the actual events that happen in this world cannot have ultimate or everlasting importance. Your salvation does not ultimately depend on your outer actions in this world but on your state of consciousness. Of course, what you do in this world is a reflection of your state of consciousness, but the point is that it is by reforming your consciousness, not your outer actions, that you qualify for eternal life.
What has ultimate importance is not what happens outside of you – the results of your actions – but what you allow to happen inside of you in response to what happens outside of you—your reactions. Consequently, it is not appropriate to act as if any activity on Earth can mean the end or the salvation of the world. The Earth should be viewed as a theater where everything is simply the stage, set pieces and props. “All the world’s a stage” as Shakespeare – a messenger for the Ascended Host – put it. Human beings are actors who have temporarily taken on a costume, namely the physical body and outer personality. You know that what happens in a play is just a story, so what is the purpose of the play? Well, a good play has the effect of transforming both the actors who perform it and the people who watch. My point being, that planet Earth is a theater that is designed to give the actors – human beings – an opportunity to engage in a play – in which they can play any part they want – and thereby be transformed and reach a higher state of consciousness. The important thing is not what actually happens in the play but that the actors are transformed. The process is more important than the results, the journey more important than the destination.
The spiritually mature people need to develop a realistic sense of what is important and what is not. For example, it is not of cosmic importance that a particular religion gathers members and becomes the dominant one in your country or the world. The measure of success from a spiritual viewpoint is not the same as it is from the viewpoint of most humans. The Ascended Host have no desire to see one religion become dominant, for we see religion only as a tool for raising people’s consciousness. If a religion – however small – truly transforms people and helps them come closer to Christ consciousness, then the religion is a success. Yet if a religion only takes people into a state of spiritual blindness or fanaticism, then it is not a success, even if it managed to convert the whole world. What shall it profit a religion if it gains the whole world yet loses the souls of its members?
My point is that the real goal of the Ascended Host is to raise people’s consciousness, not to achieve any particular outer goal on Earth. Surely, we would like to see the manifestation of a Golden Age of peace and prosperity, for such an age would give people a better opportunity to focus on spiritual growth. Yet the emergence of such an age is only a side-effect of raising the consciousness of a critical mass of human beings. Thus, our real goal is always the raising of consciousness, and it should be your goal as well.
An extreme example of the unbalanced approach to earthly activities is war, where the individual is unimportant and where any number of individuals can be sacrificed for the goal of defeating the enemy. The mission is more important than people. Yet I hope you can now see that this is in complete opposition to how the Ascended Host work. For us, the mission is never more important than the people, for the mission is the people. We are only concerned about raising people’s consciousness and we never compromise that goal in order to accomplish an outer goal on Earth. Thus, I want the spiritual people to adjust their thinking and likewise never compromise the true goal of raising up people.
What would be the point in the spiritual people using this book to start a new religion and start acting as if it is the ultimate religion that must replace all others, thus treating people the way every other religion does? There would be no point, and thus it is essential for you to spend some effort on adjusting the way you look at the purpose of religion. You need to study how religions treat people and learn from them for better and for worse. There are plenty of bad examples, but there are also some good ones.
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In order to develop non-dual interactions, you will – as always – have to start at home by pulling the beam from your own eye. The foundation for dealing with others in a non-dualistic manner is that you first learn to deal with yourself in a non-dualistic manner. When Jesus told you to do unto others what you want them to do unto you (Luke 6:31), he was really saying that what you do unto others, you have already done to yourself. If you treat other people with anger, it shows that at subconscious levels you are angry with yourself.
The most important step in the right direction is for you to depersonalize your life. You need to seriously consider my teachings on your true identity and fully internalize that the core of your being is the conscious self. This self is more than your body and outer personality, even more than the personality you have built over many embodiments. And when you begin to reconnect to your higher being, you realize that anything that happens on Earth is of lesser importance than your progress on the Path of Oneness. Therefore, you should never let anything on Earth come between you and that oneness, you should never allow anything to prevent you from taking the next step on the Path of Oneness. The only way to attain this goal is to never take anything personally, to overcome the attachment that – as the Buddha said – causes all suffering.
You need to overcome the sense that you are a victim, which is one of the hallmarks of the fallen consciousness. So let me ask you to consider a simple question. Do you have a written contract, signed by God, which says that if you agree to take embodiment on Earth, you are guaranteed certain benefits and you are protected from certain unpleasant circumstances? And if you have no such contract, why would you live your life as if you did, thereby thinking you are entitled to certain things and becoming dissatisfied when you don’t get them? Many people seem to think that it is a basic human right that life lives up to their expectations. In reality, your basic right is to experiment and to experience the consequences of your choices, whereby you can rise above your dualistic expectations, even rising above the human condition.
The single cause of all human unhappiness is unrealistic expectations, and those expectations are created by the human ego and the false teachers. These beings are very skilled at putting people in a catch-22 in which they expect that life should be a certain way, but the expectation is completely unrealistic. Thus, people spend their entire lives chasing a carrot dangling in front of their noses, while having no chance of ever reaching it. People are condemned to living unfulfilled and unhappy lives in which they rarely grow spiritually because they don’t overcome their false expectations and often simply “give up on life.”
As I have explained, planet Earth is currently a mixed environment, so it simply is not realistic to expect some kind of heavenly perfection. To avoid expecting too much and taking life too seriously, you need to become conscious of the fact that nothing on Earth is ultimately real or is of epic importance. You are like an actor and your body and outer circumstances are simply the stage for a play. You know very well that an actor in a play is a real person who puts on a costume and makeup. If the actor is good, he might identify himself with the part to the point of temporarily feeling as if he really is Hamlet. Yet when the play is over, he takes off the costume and reverts back to his real identity. If an actor refuses to take off the costume and continues to act as Hamlet outside the theater, you would immediately see this as a form of insanity. So as a spiritual person you need to separate yourself from the collective insanity of identifying yourself with and as the role you are playing here on Earth, thereby taking life too seriously and taking everything that happens to you personally.
Ideally, you should never take anything that happens to you personally, for you should realize that you are a spiritual being who cannot be affected by anything that happens on Earth. As Jesus said, fear not him who can kill the body, but fear him who can destroy both the body and the soul in hell (Matthew 10:28). Yet who can destroy your soul? You might have been conditioned to believe that the devil or other dark forces have the power to destroy your soul against your will, but I hope my teachings have shown you that this is not so. No force in this world can destroy the real you—except of course the being who controls your free will, namely yourself. You are the only one who can destroy your soul, for you are the one who defines your identity. Surely, you can reject this responsibility and allow others – including your ego – to make decisions for you, and then they can potentially destroy your lower identity. Yet you have to allow them to do so and you can – at any time – take back your power to define your identity. In reality, there is no such thing as a hell from which you cannot escape—it is a concept created by the false gods to scare people into submission.
You need to take back command over your mind and redefine your sense of identity, so you realize that you are a spiritual being who is temporarily playing a role in the stage production called “Planet Earth.” Thus, you should take it no more seriously than you would take a stage play. You have heard the saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Likewise, offense is in the mind of the person taking offense. Surely, some people may deliberately try to offend you, but you are the one who must decide whether you will let them offend you and thereby allow them to have power over your mind. Your mind is your castle, and the conscious self should be in complete command of what happens inside your mind.
The most important realization for any spiritual seeker is the fact that there is no direct cause-and-effect relationship between what happens outside your mind and what happens inside your mind. For everything that happens outside will affect your mind only by going through you—that is, if you accept the call to have dominion over your mind. You are the one who decides how outside events affect your state of mind, and the – often overlooked – key to spiritual mastery and freedom is to have dominion over how outside events affect – or rather, do not affect – your mind. In order to have dominion over your life, you must take dominion over your responses to outer situations. You must get yourself in a frame of mind where you are never forced by outer events to go into negative thoughts and feelings. Instead, you have complete freedom of choice as to how you react to outer events. You never let other people force you into a negative reactionary pattern, and thereby you never give them power over your mind. This can be done only when you depersonalize your life so you do not take anything that happens to you personally. You can control your actions only by first controlling your re-actions.
What other people do to you, they are only doing to the outer person they see, and you know you are far more than that person. In fact, you might consider that what other people do to you, they are not actually doing against you. They are simply acting out their roles in the planetary drama—acting out their own unresolved psychology. Even if they have identified themselves with their roles, that does not mean you have to identify yourself with yours or identify them as theirs. Let us take a closer look at this concept.
NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Master Keys to Spiritual Freedom.
Copyright © 2007 Kim MIchaels.