TOPICS: Seeing contradictions or seeing beyond them – Misunderstanding non-attachment – Seeing the limits of the linear mind – When enlightenment blocks enlightenment – The limitations of understanding – Enlightenment is not a concept – Mind over matter – Attaining mental freedom from the past – Everything is appearances – Taking the teachings too seriously – The trap on each stage of the path – Enlightenment is not a goal –
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Ascended Master Gautama Buddha, May 6th, 2017, through Kim Michaels. This dictation was given at a conference in Seoul, Korea.
The Buddha I AM, Gautama is my name. I would like to take this opportunity to talk about some topics that may not seem to be saying anything about Korea. But perhaps in not saying anything about Korea, I shall nevertheless be saying something about Korea for those who are able to grasp it.
If you study the magnificent discourse given by Jesus on the Path to Christhood, you will see, my beloved, that there are certain stages of this path. Especially, when you approach and go beyond the 96th level, then there will be some challenges that you will be facing, that you will have to deal with, in order to climb higher towards the 144th level. We can consider these challenges as certain paradoxes, as certain enigmas, that you will need to resolve before you can rise to a higher level of the path. There are a number of these enigmas, and I will not go into all of them but I will comment on some of them.
Seeing contradictions or seeing beyond them
Now, you see, my beloved, when we of the ascended masters approach unascended humankind and attempt to give you a teaching, then we face a very specific challenge that few people in embodiment have understood. The fact of the matter is that when you are an ascended master, you have transcended the linear, dualistic, analytical mind. Therefore, you have a more spherical awareness; you do not see everything through this filter of polarities, of extremes, of value judgments and a value scale. You do not have a linear mind that compares one statement to another and perhaps sees a contradiction because the two do not seem to be saying the same.
We know, of course, that people who are unascended are indeed in this state of mind of very easily seeing contradictions because they interpret everything with the linear mind. They think they have to take this statement literally, they think they have to take that statement literally; and when you take two statements literally, they seem to be in contradiction. Now my beloved, there are many spiritual students who have begun to study spiritual, or for that matter religious, teachings and then they have seen what they perceived to be contradictions. Many in the western world have used the seeming contradictions of religious scriptures to reason with science or materialism that all religion is made up and that none of it really makes sense.
This of course is the extreme outcome of using this linear mind. Even many religious or spiritual people do find contradictions, often between two different spiritual teachings. This makes them think they have to choose that one of them is right and the other one is wrong. There are even those who begin to see contradictions within one spiritual teaching and it confuses them, it even causes some to give up on the path. My purpose here is to give you some remarks that can help you get beyond this stage, for it is indeed a stage on the path where, in a certain sense, you have risen above the linear mind but you have not consciously broken through and freed your conscious mind from the linear way of thinking. You are not consciously seeing the limitations of the linear way of thinking and therefore you can still be disturbed by these seeming contradictions.
At a very general level, my beloved, I can tell you that, of course, there can be certain instances where there may be statements that are contradictory. We cannot, when we bring forth a teaching through an unascended messenger, guarantee that there could not be certain errors that creep in and there might be a few contradictions here and there. But when you come to a more mature level of the path, you will not let one error or one contradiction cause you to reject the part of the teaching that is still valid. That having been said, in the vast majority of cases, what seems like a contradiction only seems like a contradiction because it is viewed through the filter of the linear mind.
The constructive response when you see a contradiction is to say: “I need to raise my consciousness so I can gain a higher perspective on the issue. There must be something I have not seen, something I have not understood and when I see it, it will resolve what right now seems like a contradiction.” Then, you open yourself up to direct, intuitive guidance from the ascended masters, from your I AM Presence, from your Christ Self to resolve the enigma. Or you study further teachings because you realize there may be other teachings that could help you resolve the enigma.
Misunderstanding non-attachment
As one example of what many people have seen as contradictory, you can take the mission of the Buddha itself. I taught, even 2500 years ago, that the goal of my teaching was to give you a path that could help you rise above the normal state of consciousness by attaining complete non-attachment. Yet my beloved, if I personally had achieved complete non-attachment, why would I bother to teach?
In other words, many people interpret the concept of non-attachment to mean that you do not care what happens on earth. They reason that if the Buddha truly had non-attachment he should not care what happened to other people so why bother to go out and give them a teaching that might help them escape the wheel of suffering? Why would the Buddha not simply be non-attached and move on, leaving people to make the same discovery he had made and thereby free themselves if they could. If they could not, he would leave them to continue on the wheel of rebirth, suffering until they had finally had enough and awakened themselves.
You see my beloved, non-attachment is not the same as not caring. It is, however, not a caring that is a human caring. It is not based on fear. It is not based on wanting to force other people or wanting to force a change in the world. The fact that you are non-attached does not mean that you will choose to do nothing. It means that you might choose to do something to help others, or you can choose to move on. If you choose to help others, you are not coming from the human level of wanting to see a specific result. You are actually not teaching for a specific purpose, you are not seeking to achieve a specific result from your teaching. You are teaching because you want to share what you have discovered, you want to share who you are. You are therefore not seeking to force others; you are offering them an alternative to the prevalent state of consciousness on earth.
There are those for whom this will seem like a subtle, perhaps even nonsensical distinction. This, I recognize, is the case. I cannot help you resolve these paradoxes if you are not at the level where you are willing to do what I just described and raise your consciousness. If you are always projecting out that the problem is out there, that the problem is with the teaching or the teacher, then you cannot resolve these paradoxes. You will then have to enter the School of Hard Knocks and receive a sufficient number of knocks until you become willing to say: “Perhaps it is me that needs to change, perhaps the block is in my consciousness rather than being a fault with the teacher or the teaching or other people or the world?”
Seeing the limits of the linear mind
Some of you might know the story told about my life that after I had qualified for Buddhahood, after I had entered nirvana and considered going out of nirvana in order to teach, I was confronted with the entire force of this world, saying that there was no point in me going out and teaching. The state of consciousness I had reached was so fundamentally different from the state of consciousness that all people are in, that there was no way they could understand or grasp my teaching. In other words, it could not make a difference.
My response to this was: “Some will understand.” During the past 2,500 years, some have understood but only a few. We are, however, now at a point in time where many more are ready to understand and that is, of course, why I now present myself as an ascended master, as one among many ascended masters and attempt to give you a teaching that is adapted to the modern age.
Again, before I decided to do this, I had to face this force that is not a conscious being. It is simply that when you as an ascended master consider what you can do for unascended mankind, you need to tune in to where mankind is at in consciousness. Then, you are confronted with the difference between the collective consciousness and your own state of consciousness and there is a certain moment where you feel the impossibility of bridging the gap. Therefore, you have to deal with that, you have to in your mind find a way around it so that you look at where people are at in consciousness and you consider ways of helping them rise above that and tune in to some aspect of your Presence, your Being.
This dictation is one expression of this, as all of my other dictations have been and as all dictations from ascended masters are. What I am seeking here is to help you see the limitations of the linear mind because the linear, rational, analytical mind is indeed much more dominant in today’s world than it was 2,500 years ago.
The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Healing Your Spiritual Traumas.
Copyright © 2017 Kim Michaels