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Ascended Master Kuan Yin through Kim Michaels, March 22, 2025. This dictation was given at a conference in Holland: Locking in to Your Divine Plan.
I AM the Ascended Master Kuan Yin. I have been called the Goddess of Mercy. I am in the East often seen as embodying the Bodhisattva ideal. What is a Bodhisattva? Well, it is said to be one who hears the cries of the world, and therefore, chooses to remain with earth to help alleviate suffering. As you have seen in this Invocation for Locking into your Divine plan, suffering is indeed one of the enigmas that must be solved before you can ascend from an unnatural planet, whether it be earth or one of the others.
The enigma of suffering
What is the enigma of suffering? Well, when you experience suffering yourself or when you experience other people who are suffering, what is it that happens? Well, if you experience other people who are suffering, you might feel compassion, empathy. If you experience it yourself, you usually do not feel empathy or compassion for yourself. You just become so colored by the suffering that you are focused on yourself. This, of course, is not the Bodhisattva ideal. A Bodhisattva is not a being who is focused on itself. You must have transcended the focus on self. But in order to transcend the focus of self, you must, of course, transcend your suffering. But what causes your personal suffering is, of course, the subconscious selves that we have given so many teachings about.
I am simply mentioning this so that those who might find this teaching and still feel they are suffering, can realize that we have given you the tools and the teachings that will allow you to gradually, over some time, raise yourself above suffering by resolving these subconscious selves. And when you resolve these selves, when you go through this process of resolving selves, you will experience something that many people have not actually realized—what the experience is, what it means. Think about yourself, how in this lifetime you may have experienced various forms of suffering. You may have taken these teachings, you may have used other forms of therapy, psychology, whatever has been available to you, but you have raised yourself above the kind of suffering you felt in the past.
Psychological condition is an inner experience
What is the conclusion you can reach when you raise yourself above this suffering? It is: Suffering is an experience. So many people in the world have not realized this. They look at people who are suffering, whether they are suffering from a physical illness, a mental illness, or poverty, slavery, imprisonment, other forms of physical conditions. They tend to focus on the physical conditions and say: “This is the cause of suffering and therefore, in order to help people overcome suffering, we must change these physical conditions.” There is the assumption that physical conditions are the cause of people’s psychological conditions, and that if you change the physical conditions, then automatically the psychological conditions will change. This can indeed happen in some cases, but as has also been proven by the more developed nations, it may not happen in all cases. For you have nations where people have grown up with physical conditions that really should have prevented them from suffering, but these people are still suffering now because of psychological conditions.
But what is a psychological condition? Anything that happens in your psychology, anything that happens in the psyche, what is it? An experience. It cannot be anything else. Of course, science in its current materialistic focus cannot really admit this, for they cannot explain what is an experience. They have been researching the brain for decades now with ever more sophisticated instruments—physical instruments mind you—and they have been trying to find a correlation between a specific measurable state in the brain and common experiences, such as the color red. And despite all this research, all this measuring of the brain, they have not found that correlation between a brain state and an experience. And that is why they are reluctant to admit that psychological conditions are experiences, because they will not make the leap, the quantum leap, to realize that there might be states of the mind that are independent of any physical condition.
You see what scientists have been doing. They have been looking at people’s psychological state. They have been saying: “This must be caused by a physical condition in the brain and if we can only discover the correlation between what happens in the brain and what happens in people’s psyche, then we can change what happens in the brain, and therefore we can change what happens in the psyche. If we can find the suffering center in the brain and learn to manipulate it, we can remove the cause of suffering.” But the reality is that this will never happen. It does not matter how much you investigate the brain. You will never find a correlation between a brain state and a particular experience, because the experience takes place in what we have called the emotional, mental and identity levels of the mind and it is there you need to find the cause of suffering.
The gap: the inner image vs. the outer reality
If we look beyond the brain, if we look beyond the physical world, then what is suffering? It is an experience. It is an experience in the mind. Certainly, it can be triggered by physical conditions. I am in no way trying to explain away that if people experience physical pain or poverty they will not be suffering. But I am saying it is actually possible to experience such physical conditions and still transcend suffering. This is not what most people can do, but many yogis and advanced spiritual people have certainly proven this.
What is suffering? It is an experience. But what kind of experience? What is the essence of suffering? In its essence, suffering is the experience that there is something that is happening to you that should not be happening. Or there is something that should be happening, but that is not happening. You see, it is the inner experience that you have a mental image of what should or should not be happening in the world but the world is not living up to your mental image. There is no correspondence between your mental image and the world outside of your mind, or even the world inside your mind, so there is a gap. There is a discrepancy between what you think should be happening or should not be happening and what is actually happening. This is the simple psychological mechanism that causes all suffering, regardless of the outer form of the suffering, or rather the inner form, how the suffering takes place in an individual person’s mind.
It still all comes down to this. There is something that should be happening, something that should not be happening. But where is that taking place, that evaluation, that judgment after appearances, we might say? There are certain appearances that are good or right. There are certain appearances that are bad or wrong and when there is a gap between your judgment, your standard for what is good or bad, and what you are actually experiencing, then that is the cradle of suffering. What determines how intense the suffering becomes? How attached you are to your mental image, or what the world should be like, compared to what the world seems to be like. In other words, the greater the gap between the two, the more intense the suffering.
But what is causing that suffering? It is your inner sense of what should or should not be happening. Your insistence on holding on to your mental image of what the world should be like. Your unwillingness to adjust your mental image based on what the world seems to be like. The more of a gap, the more of an unwillingness you have to adjust your inner image based on the outer reality, the more intense the suffering.
But what determines the mental image you have, or what the world should or should not be like? It is something you have partly created in your own mind, but partly taken on from the outside. You may have grown up in a certain family, a certain culture, a certain nationality, religion, and so forth. You may have in your family: “There are certain things we do not do in our family, there are certain things that should not happen to us in our family. We have always been well-to-do in our family. Nobody should be poor. Nobody should criticize us because we are good people doing the right thing. In our nation, we are superior to those other nations that we might be in conflict with. They are the ones doing wrong to us and they should not be doing it. Our religion is the only true one. All other religions are false. Therefore, everybody should be converted to our religion.”
The standard
You have this mental image of what should or should not happen in the world, and the more the rest of the world refuses to conform to your image, the more you suffer. The more attached you are to the image, the more you suffer. There can be an image you have taken on from the world that causes suffering, but there is also, as we have explained before, the larger view that there is a standard against which everything on earth should be measured. As we have said, the fallen beings only had to do one thing to create a mess on earth—to project out that there is a standard. Mind you, nobody has ever been able to define the standard, but nevertheless, there is a standard and everything should be measured against the standard and the standard, of course, has a value judgment, right and wrong.
The fallen beings have never clearly defined a standard because they realize they do not have to, because people are so eager to create their own individual standard, such as Christianity is the only true religion. Then other people decide, based on the idea that there can only be one true religion, which is the standard, they decide no, Islam is the only true religion and so you have the Crusades and many other examples like that in history. The fallen beings did not have to define a universal standard. They just had to project the idea that there is a standard, and then people would define individual standards in different groups and therefore, the fallen beings knew they will always clash.
You see, if the fallen beings had defined a standard that everybody should live up to, then everybody might have been striving to live up to the standard. And it could, of course, it would have been a dualistic standard, so it would not have led people to the ascension but there would not have been as much conflict because everybody was trying to live up to the same standard. But by not defining a standard, the fallen beings knew that people would define different standards for different groups, and therefore, they would clash and you would see all the conflict that then causes all the suffering, and so forth.
The choice
But what is the standard? What is it based on? Well, you can say it is based on the duality consciousness. The whole idea of a standard is dualistic in nature. There is a standard. There is a definition of what is right, and automatically everything that is different from what is right is therefore wrong. Clearly a dualistic polarity between right and wrong. And you can say this is the essence of the duality consciousness where there will always be two polarities. Yes, you can say that. But nevertheless, what causes people to accept the idea that there is a standard, that there must be a standard?
What causes people to accept a particular standard? It is that they make a choice. Yes, of course, you can have been brought up in a certain culture and family where standard has been put upon you from without, but you have still chosen to accept it—maybe in childhood, maybe in past lifetimes, because you have been embodied in that culture for several lifetimes. Many people in the world have embodied in the culture they are in right now for several lifetimes. They have chosen to take on that standard. They have chosen not to question it. And you may say, “But did they choose this consciously? Did they know what it entailed?” And that is where we must say yes and no. They may not have been fully conscious of the choices. They may not have been fully conscious of the consequences. But still, they chose with a level of consciousness they had at the time.
The way out
As we have said, everyone starts at the 48th level, at least on earth, and you can choose to go below the 48th level. It is a choice. Are you fully aware what the choice means and the consequences? No, but it is still a choice. And the importance of realizing this is very simple, because you need to ask yourself a question: “Once people are in the state of mind where they suffer, are they condemned to remain there for all eternity? Are they, by their choice to go into duality, condemned to an eternity of suffering in the dualistic hell? Or is there a way out?”
Well, if their suffering was put upon them from external conditions and external causes, there is potentially no way out if they cannot change the external causes. But if their suffering was the result of a choice they made, there is the potential they can escape suffering by making another choice. And even if their choice to go into duality was not a fully aware choice, there is still the potential that by becoming more aware, they can choose to go out of it. That is why it is essential to realize: Number one—suffering is an experience. The cause of suffering is inside the mind of the person suffering. Number two, the beginning of all experience—and the ending of all experience—is a choice. Any experience starts with a choice, and it can only be changed by making a more aware choice.
Suffering is not wrong
What does this lead to? It leads to the realization that suffering on earth is not wrong. When I say this in the physical and it goes out into the collective consciousness, there is an instant reaction, an uproar. “This can’t be right. Look at all these conditions. Look at all these children that were born into poverty or with this or that handicap. How can this be a choice?” But you see, you have two options here. If suffering is caused by outer conditions, if people do not have the power to change those outer conditions, they cannot escape suffering. But if suffering is caused by a choice made by the individual, the individual can escape suffering by making a different choice.
There is also, when I say that suffering is a choice, suffering is an experience, there may also be a reaction in the minds of many spiritual people, especially avatars. Many avatars chose to come to earth because they had reached a certain level of development on their natural planets where they felt they had learned most of what there was to learn on a natural planet and they were looking for some other environment where they might continue learning or continue expressing their co-creative abilities.
Seeing suffering as a problem
Many of you who are avatars, myself among them, looked from a natural planet on an unnatural planet (in this case, earth) and looked at the suffering. But what did we decide? We decided: “Oh, suffering is a problem. People should not be suffering. It is unpleasant to suffer.” And mind you, when you come from a natural planet, you have not experienced suffering. You have experienced, mind you, that there is a gap between the mental image you hold in your mind and physical reality on a natural planet. This is the whole idea of the co-creative process. You are using the conceptual mind, as we have explained, to formulate a mental image that you project upon the Ma-ter light. And even on a natural planet, it takes a little time for the image to be manifest physically, so there is a gap for a time between your mental image and physical reality. But you have experienced on a natural planet that eventually you can manifest your mental image, or at least you can very easily adjust your mental image to something that can be manifest and you have never seen that as suffering. You have never seen the gap as causing you to suffer because you are in a positive state of mind where you are realizing: “It is just a matter of time or it is just a matter of adjusting my mental image, and then it will be manifest.”
You have never experienced what you see people on earth are experiencing, the kind of intense suffering and naturally, when you first see this, you are shocked. And you may say that from a natural planet you are hearing the cries of the world and you are saying: “What can be done? What could I do? How could I help change this situation?” This is all natural. It is understandable. It is not the highest view, mind you, but it is understandable that we have reacted that way. But you see, many others came to earth as avatars with this view: “Oh, suffering is wrong, or suffering should not be happening. People should not be suffering, and therefore, there must be a problem on earth that is not there on a natural planet and therefore, there must be a solution to this problem. And the reason why the inhabitants of the earth have not found that solution is that they are not able to see it, so somebody must go down there and see the solution and tell them how to get out of suffering, and then surely they will listen and the planet will be raised up to a natural state.”
Understandable to think this way from a natural planet. But is it the highest view? Now take what happens to us as avatars. We decide to take embodiment on earth. We come into the dense physical body, the density of this planet, which we could not grasp from a natural planet. We could see that it was denser, but we could not comprehend the immense difference between the density of matter, the lightness of matter on a natural planet, and the density of matter on earth. Even this was a shock. Even integrating with a physical body was a shock. But then we come here and we experience that the earth inhabitants, they are suffering. We are not suffering in our first embodiment. We are demonstrating that you can be even in the dense physical body and not suffer. But do they care? Do they even notice? Do they want to hear how to get out of suffering? No. They want to continue in their suffering.
It dawns on us—we thought from afar: “Oh, they do not want to suffer. They want to get out of suffering and if we just tell them how, they will immediately embrace that”—but now we experience they do not want to listen to us. Do they not want to get out of suffering? We cannot understand it. Then we are attacked, viciously put down, hammered down, as Nada put it, by the fallen beings. Now we receive the birth trauma and what do we do? How do we reason: “Oh, this should not have happened to me. I am only here to help make things better. Why do they attack me? I have the best of intentions. Why are they seeking to destroy me? This should not have happened to me.”
The problem solvers
And in that switch of the mind, what do we do? We buy into the standards of the fallen beings. There is something that should not have happened, something that should have happened, something that is right, something that is wrong. What does that mean? Well, we become trapped in the fallen beings and their mindset that there is a problem that must be solved. There are, of course, a myriad of problems that are defined on earth, a myriad of problems. But now we as avatars, we buy into this. We may still hold on to the central problem is suffering or we may be focused on different individual problems that we see as causing the suffering of a large group of people. So, religion is a problem. Politics is a problem. Poverty is a problem. Disease is a problem. All of these problems. And now what do we do? We go into this state of mind that we are the problem solvers. “We are here to solve specific problems and we are, in an overall sense, here, to solve the problem of suffering.” And this causes us to go into this mindset where we are looking, as I said about science, we are looking for a physical cause of the problem. We think that if we can discover the physical cause and solve it, we can alleviate suffering. But what did I say? What is suffering? It is an experience.
How do you change an experience through a physical cause? Yes, you can say there are nations that have become more affluent. They do not have poverty. They do not have enslavement. They do not have people being suppressed and not being able to speak their minds, and this has alleviated suffering. But has it changed the basic dynamic of people’s minds that they see a gap between what they think should be there and what is there? No. They just find another way to define a gap: “Something that should be there, but is not there. Something that should not be there, but is there.” And this can go on indefinitely and it will not change until people start changing the mind, which of course many people have started doing, especially in the more affluent nations where they have been willing to look at the psychology.
No physical solution to the physical problems
But why has that happened? It has happened because there are some avatars that started coming to this simple realization—there is no physical solution to the physical problems. Why? What is it that you carry with you from a natural planet that all of us forgot for a while after we came to earth? But what is it you carry with you? It is the simple realization that we have given before. Consciousness comes before the physical manifestation. Anything that is physically manifest is a projection from the identity, mental and emotional level. It is like the movie on the film screen being projected by the film strip in the projector, the three strips in the identity, mental and emotional. This is what we know on a natural planet. This is what people have forgotten on an unnatural planet and you can say that this forgetting is the cause of their suffering because that is why they cannot get out of suffering. They are looking for a physical solution where there is no physical solution.
The only solution is to change what is happening at the three levels of the mind, the higher levels of the mind. And many avatars have started awakening to this—re-remembering this realization. And that is why there has been this upward movement of people becoming more aware of their psychology. And yes, you can certainly say that in more affluent nations where people do not have to spend all of their energy making a living, feeding the physical body, they have more room to look at the psychology, which of course is Saint Germain’s motivation for releasing technology. But still there has to be that shift of the mind.
Considering the enigma of free will
What is it you can do as avatars? Well, you can do two things. Even those of you who are original earth inhabitants who are able to recognize these teachings, what can you do? You can realize that there is this tremendous movement that has started of people realizing that in order to really be happy and achieve peace of mind, you need to learn how to work with the mind. You can join this movement. You can become part of it. You can educate yourself. You can seek to help other people. But especially those of you who are avatars, but also earth inhabitants, it is important to consider many of the things we have said before, but what I am also explaining more directly in this discourse—the enigma of free will.
And what that means is two things. First of all, you can seek to help people, but you do not help people by forcing them in any way, even in subtle ways. Because many avatars, after the original birth trauma, we still had the desire to help other people. But now we got into a state of mind where we did not want to force people physically, but we wanted to push them psychologically because we had the mental image that people should not be suffering and even though they will not listen to us, they should listen to us, so we should find a way to push them into listening. But you see, this will not actually help, it will not actually add to the upward spiral.
You have to switch your mind so you are completely non-aggressive, non-forceful in how you approach other people, but that also means you have to make an evaluation, not a judgment based on a standard, a dualistic standard, but you have to evaluate, are people open to being helped by you or are they not open? If people’s minds are closed, you simply ignore those people and move on to people who are open and you do not feel that you are not good enough because you cannot help these people. The importance of realizing that suffering is an experience and that experience started with a choice and it is sustained by a continuous string of choices, is that you must leave some people to suffer because they want to suffer. Listen to what I am saying and then listen to your own reaction when I say this—there are people who want to suffer.
Seeing suffering as a problem is an experience
Many avatars will be thinking, but suffering is wrong, suffering is unpleasant, suffering is a problem. Yes, suffering is a problem for you because you decided that suffering is a problem. But when you acknowledge that suffering is an experience based on a choice and that people have been given completely free will as to what experiences they want to have, then how can you say that people’s choices are a problem? If they have free will, and if you respect that they have free will, how can their choices be a problem, regardless of the consequences?
You see, people who are suffering, they made the choice that is giving them their current experience. You can say that the difference between a natural planet and an unnatural planet is that on a natural planet nobody has chosen to suffer, but on an unnatural planet the majority of the inhabitants have chosen to suffer, but they did this by exercising their free will. Which part of free do you not understand? Suffering is just an experience. There is nothing wrong with choosing to have that experience for a time.
Is suffering, objectively speaking, a problem from the viewpoint of God or the ascended masters? Is suffering a problem? Nay, for we respect free will and when you respect free will the choices people make are not problems, the consequences of those choices are not problems. They are just consequences that people experience. Why do you see suffering as a problem? Where does the problem of suffering exist? Outside your mind in some objective reality, or is it perhaps that the problem of suffering only exists inside your mind? Why does it exist inside your mind? Because you made a choice to see suffering as a problem.
Am I saying you made the wrong choice? No, but what I am saying is that your seeing suffering as a problem is just an experience. The people on earth who are suffering, they are having an experience. You thinking that their experience is wrong because it causes suffering and that it should be solved, it is a problem that should be solved, that is also an experience in your mind. There is a problem and you are here to solve it. That is an experience. There is nothing wrong with it, but it was an experience you could not have on a natural planet.
A new choice
There is nothing wrong with you choosing to come to an unnatural planet to have the experience that other people’s suffering is a problem and you are here to help solve it. There is nothing wrong with it. I am only pointing out that it is not some objective reality that brought you to earth, it was your desire to have a certain experience, and why am I pointing this out? Because how can you ever be free of earth? How can you ever be free to ascend? Only when you realize that you chose a certain experience and now you have had enough of it, and therefore you can let it go. You can make a more aware choice.
You see, you have again two options. Either you keep focusing your attention on the suffering on earth and therefore you are saying, whether you are consciously aware of it or not, you are saying: “I cannot ascend from earth until all suffering is gone and earth is a natural planet.” Fine, then you are certainly not going to ascend at the end of this lifetime, even if you were born yesterday, or the other option is to realize that the only way you can ascend before suffering is removed from earth is by you deciding: “I no longer want to experience that I am here to solve the problem of suffering.”
Now, there may be many of you who will feel: “But I really do want to stay here with earth and help build Saint Germain’s Golden Age, manifest Saint Germain’s Golden Age.” There is absolutely nothing wrong with making that choice.
I am only pointing out that for those of you who have it in your Divine plan to ascend at the end of this lifetime, you must solve the enigma of suffering that brought you to earth, because until you resolve that enigma you cannot ascend. You are not free. You will be standing there looking that last long look at earth and you will focus on some group of people that are suffering and say: “Oh, I cannot leave as long as they are suffering.”
If you want to ascend at the end of this lifetime, you must be able to stand there, you are looking at this group of people that are suffering, that group of people that are suffering, and you must be able to have that release where you say: “This is not my problem to solve. I have had enough of the experience of seeking to solve that problem”, and therefore you can turn around and walk away.
Changing the consciousness, not the consequences
Now, it is clear that when I give you a very direct teaching like this, which you might not have expected from the Goddess of Mercy, but truly, an aspect of mercy is to clarify your choices. This is the highest aspect of mercy, is to clarify the choices you have. When I give a direct teaching like this, some of you will say: “But Kuan Yin, you are saying to me that my wanting to solve problems on earth is just an experience I am having and it is only in my mind, there is no objective reality to it, but what about Saint Germain wanting to manifest the golden age? Is that not an objective reality outside of my own mind? Do not the ascended masters who are still working with us, do you not want to raise up the earth? Do you not want to see progress? Do you not want to eventually alleviate all suffering and bring the earth back to a natural state?”
Well, yes, there is an objective process of raising the earth, alleviating suffering, bringing earth back to a natural state. There is that objective process. It is not that you came here just for subjective reasons, but you see, there are two aspects of this. You see, Saint Germain is an ascended master. He is an avatar. He came to earth as an avatar. He went through the exact same process you have gone through of receiving the birth trauma. If you have not realized it yet, there is a tendency, especially in previous dispensations of ascended master teachings, to see that we of the ascended masters are so high above you. That is the case for some of the masters who have not taken embodiment on earth, the Elohim, the Archangels, many of the higher masters, certainly, but those of us who are with earth, working with you more directly, we have taken embodiment on earth and we have gone through the exact same birth trauma that you have gone through. But we have raised ourselves above it and ascended, and therefore, we have transcended the view that suffering is a problem that must be solved. Let me try and explain this from a slightly different perspective.
You may look at people in a third world country who are born into abject poverty and you may say: “This is a problem, their poverty is a problem, we need to change the economy in that country so that people can become more affluent, that will alleviate their suffering.” And certainly, I am in no way saying that people on earth should not strive to improve physical conditions, but we of the ascended masters realize that changing the physical conditions will not necessarily change people’s state of mind.
Our goal is not to remove all poverty from earth from an outer perspective. There is often this magical thinking that: “Oh, God could just change everything on earth so there was no more poverty”, but from an ascended perspective we see that the only way to change things on earth is to change people’s state of mind so that they voluntarily change. They make more aware choices so that they see the correspondence between their state of mind and the physical conditions. That is what we are seeking to do from the ascended level. We are not simply seeking to change physical conditions at the physical level. For us, everything is consciousness. Shifting individual consciousness, shifting the collective consciousness, that is the solution, not the outer physical changes. We have transcended the view that suffering is a problem.
In a sense, you could say that as an ascended master, you look at earth and you do not see a problem. You simply see people at a certain level of consciousness. They are making choices based on that level of consciousness and those choices have certain physical consequences and psychological consequences. Instead of changing the consequences, instead of changing the effects, we are seeking to change the cause, raise the consciousness so people can make more aware choices, because for us, it is not, as Saint Germain has said several times, a matter of manifesting a golden age with elaborate cities and beautiful places and incredible technology.
For us, the goal is raising consciousness so people can make more aware choices. They are making the choice. They are not being forced to. We have no force, no desire to force. This gives you two options, both as avatars and as original inhabitants who are open to this teaching. You can seek to overcome the consciousness that there is a problem that must be solved, and therefore, when you do this you will be more able to tune into Saint Germain and receive his ideas and designs for the golden age.
If you want to stay in embodiment for several more lifetimes to help manifest the golden age, then by overcoming this consciousness of the problem, you are better able to tune in to Saint Germain and other masters and receive these ideas, and of course, by overcoming the consciousness of the problem you are free to ascend if that is what is in your Divine plan for this lifetime.
Clarifying your choice
You see the shift I am seeking to help you make. I am not seeking to in any way force this upon you, but let us just be honest, right? As long as you think suffering is a problem, you are suffering because as long as you see that other people are still suffering and the problem has not been solved, you are suffering, you are under stress, you cannot be at peace on earth, you cannot enjoy life on earth.
How do you help alleviate suffering? Well, if you are suffering, are you not adding to the suffering, the energetic burden of suffering? How are you alleviating suffering if you are suffering, and what is the only way to overcome your own suffering? It is to overcome the view that suffering is a problem and that you are here to solve it.
I completely respect your choice, but as an expression of mercy, I am clarifying your choice, leaving it completely up to you what you will do with this teaching. With this, I have given you what I wanted to give you, and I seal you in that pure, uncompromising, unconditional Flame of Mercy.
Copyright © 2025 Kim Michaels