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Ascended Master Paul the Venetian (4), January 4, 2015 through Kim Michaels

I AM Paul the Venetian, Chohan of the Third Ray. Why is it so important that, at the third level of initiation at my retreat, you experience unconditional love? Why is it so important that you start having some conscious awareness of unconditional love and that you are loved unconditionally? It is important because it prepares you to handle the initiations at the fourth level where you encounter the energies of love combined with the Fourth Ray of Purity. Purity is always a special challenge for students on the spiritual path.

The initiations of the Fourth Ray

The first three rays are very much a preparation that is meant to take you to the point where you can handle the initiations of purity. The central challenge with purity is that when you encounter the Fourth Ray, its piercing, white light exposes with great clarity the impurities in your being. It is very possible that, upon seeing the impurities that you have not been able and willing to see before, you become greatly disturbed. You might begin to feel that because you have such impurities, how could you ever be redeemed? When you have experienced that God’s love is unconditional, you will know that whatever impurities you discover in your being, you could never lose God’s unconditional love.

The impurities that you discover can only be conditions in the material world. How can any conditions in the material world make you unworthy of receiving the love that is beyond all conditions and comes from a higher world? I know you can understand this intellectually, but until you experience that love is unconditional, you will not be ready for the initiations at the fourth level. Of course, I will not allow you to have those initiations until I know you are ready to handle them without going into a spiral of self-condemnation.

The inevitable pain of seeing an impurity

As much as I would like to make the path easier for you, I must also say that at the fourth level there is a certain inevitability that comes into play. One of the impurities that you have in your being is precisely the tendency to condemn yourself, to judge and put yourself down. You have this in your being if you have lived and grown up on planet earth. It cannot be any other way because this planet is so heavily infused with the judgmental consciousness of the fallen beings. You all have it when you come to my retreat. There is no way around this.

When you discover that you have the tendency to judge, it is almost inevitable that you will judge yourself for having this impurity of judging. You are not entirely free of the consciousness. Do you see this, my beloved? Do you see the mechanics I am attempting to explain here?

How do you become free of an impurity? You must begin by consciously seeing that you have the impurity. The moment you see that you have the impurity, you still have it; you are not free of it yet. When you see that you have any impurity, you will tend to react through the impurity of judging yourself. At the fourth level there is a certain pain that is inevitable. For that matter, there is a certain pain that is inevitable at every level of the path.

As we, who have been in embodiment on earth, all know, it is not pleasant to look at oneself and see that one has an impurity; one has some habit pattern that is self-destructive. It is never pleasant to see this. It is always a shock, but when you have experienced the unconditionality of love, you can begin to build a more constructive way to deal with this shock.

What is it that happens when you experience love as being unconditional? Which part of you, of your psyche, of your being, can experience unconditional love? Do you think the ego can experience unconditional love? Obviously not. Can the analytical mind experience unconditional love? No, because it wants to give it some sort of characteristic that it can use to analyze and catalogue it. Unconditional love is unconditional because it is beyond anything that can be defined on earth.

The only part of your being that can experience unconditional love is the Conscious You. The Conscious You can experience unconditional love only when it steps outside of the soul vehicle, your four lower bodies, the outer mind, the ego, whatever you want to call this conglomerate that is your vehicle for expressing yourself in the material world. When you step outside of this, even for a moment, that is when you experience unconditionality.

The Conscious You has no reaction

You can use this experience, once you have become consciously aware of having had it, to start looking at how you react when you are confronted with something in yourself that you need to see. You can begin to ask yourself: “What is it that is reacting this way? Is it the Conscious You that I really am, or is it some aspect of the outer soul vehicle, possibly the ego or an internal spirit or simply a habit pattern I have built up?” This is when you can begin to fathom one of the central reasons why we have given the teachings about the Conscious You. The stark reality, that can be extremely difficult to grasp at first, is that the Conscious You actually has no reaction to anything on earth.

You may have heard the story of Gautama Buddha sitting under the Bo tree in meditation, but before going into Nirvana, being confronted with the demons of Mara. The demons attempted to pull him into a reactionary pattern, but because he had attained complete clarity in knowing he was pure awareness and not any aspect of the outer mind, he could avoid reacting to the demons. There was no condition in him that could cause the conditional demons to pull him into a conditional reaction.

This can be very difficult to grasp at first. Even many ascended master students struggle with this—if they do not use the mechanism to outright reject the idea of the Conscious You. It is so easy to reject something when you do not like the ramifications of it. I can assure you that your ego does not like the idea that the core of your being reacts to nothing on earth. Why not? Because what is the ego’s only way of capturing you? It is to get you to react.

You may think this sounds like a contradiction. The Conscious You has no reactions to anything on earth, but the ego can capture you by getting you to react. How is this possible? It is possible because the Conscious You does not react when it knows it is pure awareness, but the Conscious You can step into an internal spirit or a certain perception filter. Now, the Conscious You is experiencing the world through that filter, and the filter is reacting. When the Conscious You has forgotten that it is pure awareness and identifies itself with the filter, then the Conscious You experiences that it is reacting.

How do you become the Buddha? By beginning to become aware that, although there is an outer mechanism in your psyche that is reacting to the world, that mechanism is not you. You are more than this. As you purify your Conscious You from all illusions of Maya – the illusions that you are this, that or the next thing here on earth – then you can become aware that you are pure awareness. When you know you are pure awareness, you know you do not have to react to anything on earth.

In fact, you are not reacting. You become the open door where you are experiencing a condition on earth, but you are not reacting to it. You are letting the experience go right up to your I AM Presence. You allow your Presence to experience and process the condition, depositing a positive, life-supporting experience in your causal body. Do you see the essential difference?

When the Conscious You forgets who it is, it thinks it is an independent, separate being. The Conscious You then thinks that it is the one who has to react to everything in the world, who has to do something in the world, who has to accomplish something, who has a responsibility. You think that you are the doer, as Jesus taught so many years ago: “I can of my own self do nothing.”

When the Conscious You thinks that it is the doer, it thinks that it is the one that has to process everything that happens on earth. You do not have to process anything that happens on earth. You experience it, and then you let the experience rise to your I AM Presence and let your I AM Presence process the experience. Then you wait. If there is an outer reaction to be done, you let it come from the Presence instead of deciding with some aspect of your outer mind what response should be forthcoming.

You do not have to react right now

One of the primary mechanisms used by the fallen beings, by your ego, and by other people in order to manipulate you is to get you into a situation where you feel: “Here is something I have to react to right now! There is no time to step outside of the outer self, to let the experience rise to my I AM Presence and to neutrally and calmly wait for a response from the Presence.” They want you to believe that you do not have time. You have to react right now. “I want an answer right now. You need to take action right now.”

Do you see how this is one of the dynamics in any love relationship? Many of you have experienced having partners who get upset or emotional and what is the worst thing you can do to them? It is to ignore them, to not react to them being upset. Then they get really upset. What do you do instead? You go into the outer self and now you react through the outer self.

My beloved, can you honestly look at your life and see that reacting to a situation through the outer self ever improved things? Did it not instead create a reaction in the other person that led to another reaction in you? Pretty soon, you had created a downward spiral where none of you could now react to each other with love. You were locked in reacting through your own psychological wounds, and none of you were able to pull yourself out of this and stop the tension, the argument or whatever pattern you were trapped in.

The rest of this dictation is available in the book: The Mystical Initiations of Love.