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Ascended Master Portia through Kim Michaels, April 18, 2025. This dictation was given at 2025 Easter Webinar for Ukraine.
I AM the Ascended Master Portia. I wish to continue Mother Mary’s release and talk about this interface, we might say, between the individual and the whole.
The flock mentality
Now, if you look at animals, you will see that many animals and birds often move in flocks, in herds and there is therefore, a flock mentality or a herd mentality. What actually happens, in many of these, is that there is no individuality in single animals. You can look at a single animal and you cannot really see any individuality as you see in humans. This is, of course, because as we have explained, animals do not have an individual soul unless they have been in close contact with humans, so they have a group soul. Yet, when we look at humanity, we can see that those who are at the lowest levels of consciousness, those who have the least humanity, they also have more of a flock mentality. They do have individual souls, but they are not very strong, they are not very developed. In other words, they have not multiplied the talents they were given by the individual lifestream that they have.
They have stayed at a certain level and have attempted to adapt to their environment, so they are basically moving along with the collective consciousness. They are moving along with the herd, with the flock and in general, the lower the level of humanity, the more of a herd mentality you see. This, of course, explains why populations who have a large number of these people, a large percentage of these people, they are more susceptible to be taken over by a dictator because the people do not have a strong enough individuality to resist a person with a very strong will and an aggressive intent.
The cosmic mirror
Why do they not have it? Well, because they have not developed it on an individual basis. They have not raised themselves above the flock mentality. What does it take for a person to raise him or herself above the flock mentality? Well, you have to accept individual responsibility. What does that mean? It means you accept that there is a connection between what you send out and what comes back. We have, many times, talked about this concept that the universe is the cosmic mirror, but you do not have to accept this idea. But you do have to accept what is found in most religions around the world, namely the Golden Rule. Do to others what you want others to do to you. Do not do to others what you do not want others to do to you.
What is the basis for this rule, as we have explained? It is that the universe is a mirror and the way you treat others sends an impulse into the cosmic mirror and it can only be reflected back to you so that others will treat you the way you are treating other people. When you have not accepted this, you are in a state of mind of feeling powerless, essentially powerless because when you accept that what you send out will determine what comes back, you can say: “Oh, I am not getting back from the cosmic mirror what I would like to get back. How can I change this? Oh yes, I change what I am projecting out and then I will get something else back.”
The desire to be special
If you do not accept this and you experience that you are not getting back from life what you want, you have no idea how to change it. Or at least, you cannot accept that you can change it by changing yourself, by changing your state of mind or by changing what you are projecting out. Now what happens? Well, you feel powerless personally. You cannot change your situation by changing your state of mind. What happens? Well, here comes a strong man who says: “I can make sure you get what you want. You just have to support me and then we will force those other people to give us what we want because it is these other people, it is the evil west, that are keeping us from having what we want.”
People with a herd mentality, they follow the leader. Now, there is another aspect of this, which is that when you have this herd mentality, you do not have a strong enough individuality to really have self-esteem and you feel powerless. You feel like you are nobody because in the herd you are nobody. You are not standing out from the crowd in any way. But what if the herd was special? What if by belonging to the herd and following the leader, that would make you special? Now you may say: “Well, why should these people who are following the herd have a desire to be special?” Well, because all self-aware beings are created to be co-creators. They are created for the potential to raise their consciousness, the potential to be more.
Now, when you do not use this to strive for the Christ consciousness, when you go into duality and separation, you still have the desire to be more, but now it becomes perverted into being more than others. Instead of being more than you were before by becoming more connected to your I AM Presence, you now want to be more than others. You want to be more in this world. You want to be superior to others. This is when you see this dualistic polarity that emerges where you have both the inferiority and the superiority complexes. You cannot have one without the other, even though some people have managed to suppress their inferiority and feel very superior, like for example, the dictatorial leaders.
They feel superior because they have suppressed their inferiority, but the price they pay is that they have to continue to suppress it. They have to continue to do something on the outer to demonstrate their superiority. Here you have a large group of people who have not raised their individuality. They attract to themselves a dictatorial leader who has suppressed his inferiority, and he now tells those people: “By following me, you can be special. You can be superior to those other people and those other people we, of course, have to suppress so we can dominate them.”
This is the entire dynamic of the Soviet Union, where the core Russians felt superior to all of the other people east of the Urals, in the other republics, but even those in the Soviet Union felt superior to those who were not in the Soviet Union. And today, those who are members of the Russian Federation feel superior to those who are not. As we have said, Ukraine has not sufficiently transcended this Soviet-era mindset, where the same dynamic was there in the Ukrainian population. But Ukraine has gone beyond where Russia is, even before the war. But the war has actually been an opportunity to transcend this even more because, as Mother Mary said, this forces you, in a sense, to rethink everything.
Inherent human rights
What will it take to make this transition, where Mother Mary was talking about finding a balance between the individual and the state, or the whole? Well, the difference between a dictatorial state and a democratic state is the concept of individual human rights. In a dictatorial state, the individual has no inherent rights. Now, what do I mean by inherent rights? It has no rights that are independent of the state. In other words, a dictatorial nation may define that its citizens have certain rights, but it is the state that defines those rights. The entire idea of a democratic nation is that each individual has rights that are not defined by the state and cannot be violated by the state. This is the entire difference, the essential difference, between a dictatorship and a democracy.
A democracy does not define the rights, they are inherent. By the very fact that you exist as an individual, you have these rights. They were not defined by the state, they cannot be violated by the state, and that is why in a democracy, the individual is sacred. It is primary, and the state is there to serve the individuals and of course, also make sure that the individuals do not destroy each other, but that they find a way to cooperate so that they are stronger by cooperating than when they are fighting each other.
You can say that in a democracy, there is ideally, I am not saying this is attained by very many nations, but ideally, there is a symbiotic relationship between the individual and the state, because the state is supposed to guarantee the individual’s rights, but also guarantee that each individual exercises its rights in a way that does not violate the rights of other individuals. In a dictatorship, the dictator can define the rights of the people, and in most cases defines them in such a way that the state is primary and that the individual simply has to follow the herd and do what the state tells them to do.
This is clearly what you saw in the Soviet Union, it is clearly what you see in today’s Russia, you see it in China, you see it in Iran, you see it in North Korea, you see it in other dictatorial states. You see that Ukraine had started to move away from this before the 2014 invasion, and it has made continuous progress along these lines, but there is more that can be done, more that needs to be done.
Individual responsibility
What needs to happen here is a gradual shift in the collective consciousness because what does it mean that the individual has rights? We have often talked about the two sides, the Alpha and the Omega, the Divine Father and the Divine Mother. The alpha aspect is that you have rights, the omega aspect is that you have responsibility. You cannot have individual rights without individual responsibility. Why not? Because all individuals in a democracy have the same rights. That means you have certain rights, but you do not have the right to take away the rights of other individuals.
In a dictatorship, not all people have the same rights because the dictator has specific rights, but those who are part of the state, like for example, the Communist Party elite in the Soviet Union, they have special rights as well, and they could violate the rights of other people and get away with it, because they had power without personal accountability. They could always hide behind the party. In order to make the transition from the Soviet-era mentality, Ukraine needs to focus on this—individual rights, individual responsibility.
The vicious circle of corruption
One aspect of individual responsibility is you are not violating the whole. This can be done in many ways but let us focus on one of the major problems in Ukrainian society—corruption. You may have attained some position in the government and you may have been brought up to think that if you have such a position, you have a right to take advantage of it and accept certain bribes. This is the Soviet-era mentality. In a democratic nation, a government official does not think it has the right to take bribes. It has a responsibility to fight corruption, because corruption damages the whole and it damages other individuals. You are saying, perhaps: “Well, but these officials in Ukraine are not making much money. They could not survive without taking bribes. Yes, that may be so. But why are they not making enough money? Well, because the state cannot afford to pay them more. But why cannot the state afford to pay them more? Oh, it is not taking in enough taxes. But why is it not taking in enough taxes? Because there is not enough economic activity to generate the taxes. And why is there not enough economic activity? Oh, because of corruption that limits individual initiative.”
You see, it becomes a vicious circle, the serpent swallowing its tail. But in democracies, they have broken this vicious circle, and it is because they have accepted that you cannot have individual rights and freedoms without individual responsibility and accountability. And that means you cannot have a government that exercises power over the people and where those who exercise that power cannot be held accountable for misusing the power.
Many people in Ukraine are fully aware of this. They have already started making this transition. I am simply pointing out that it has not reached critical mass and it needs to. How is it going to do so? Well, the development has already started, but you who are the spiritual people can certainly accelerate it by making the calls for this and by of course, making the transition yourselves.
Special privileges without accountability
A democracy cannot function if there is not personal accountability, personal responsibility. What do you see in the United States right now? You see a person who has set himself up as, let us call it, a mini-dictator, an autocrat, who is telling the people who believe in him: “I can solve all of your problems. Just give me the power.” Why do people submit to this? Because they have not accepted personal accountability. Therefore, they think that the reason they are not having the lives they want is because somebody is taking it away from them and the strong man will deal with these people and make everything great again.
But the reality is that these people are not getting the life they want because they have not taken responsibility for what they are projecting out. And because they have not taken responsibility, they have not seen that there is a power elite that has taken over the democracy that was meant to guarantee all people equal rights, so you see the dynamic. If you have not taken responsibility for yourself, you actually do not want everybody to have equal rights, meaning equal opportunity. You want to belong to a special group of people who have special privileges so that you do not have to look at yourself. Just by the fact that you belong to this special group of people, you have privileges, like the party elite in the Soviet Union, like those people Trump is in the process of installing in the government, who have special privileges without accountability. This is the same in Ukraine. There are still people who want special privileges without accountability, without transparency. They want to have a special privileged lifestyle.
Multiplying the talents
Do you grasp the difference I am pointing out here? Perhaps not yet, so let me attempt to step back. What is it that a democracy demands of you as an individual living in a democracy? It is simply that you follow the law that Jesus described in a parable about the talents. All people in a democracy supposedly have equal opportunity to improve. This does not mean they have the same position or the same status or the same standard of living, but they have equal opportunities to improve themselves by multiplying whatever talents they have been given according to their past karma and so forth.
A democracy demands that you are willing to multiply the talents by taking responsibility for your own situation and by consciously deliberately changing what you are projecting into the cosmic mirror. If you are not willing to do this, what kind of a society do you want? You want a society where you can sell your soul to the party and the party then puts you, because of your loyalty to the party, in a privileged position where you can exercise power without accountability because you cannot lose that position unless you do something really, really stupid.
But you see, why did the Soviet Union collapse? Why will the society that Trump is attempting to create in America collapse? Because when people are put in a position of power without accountability, they will not multiply the talents. In a democracy with a free economy, those who multiply the talents, who are willing to change themselves, they will get ahead. In a closed system like the Soviet Union, those who are loyal to the party will get a privileged position and once they have it, they are interested in maintaining it, not transcending it. They want to maintain status quo where they have privileges rather than expand the economy, grow the economy.
But when you are willing to multiply the talents, you want a society that is open-ended, that is constantly transcending itself where the economy is constantly growing because you realize you will do better and everybody else will do better. But you see, when you go into the closed mindset of not wanting to multiply the talents, you do not want everybody else to do better. You want to stay in your privileged position, which means you want to hold everybody else back, which means you want to hold the economic growth of society back and therefore, everything stagnates.
The necessary shift in Ukraine
What is it that Ukraine needs to go through in order to become a modern democratic nation that is ready to be part of the EU? It has to overcome this desire in the collective consciousness to attain a privileged position and maintain it. It has to shift into being willing to grow. A society that is constantly growing, constantly adapting, not only to changes in the world but to changes in itself. This is what a functioning society is. It is constantly growing, there is constant growth. Why? Because there is opportunity and there is enough people who are taking advantage of the opportunity to improve their own lives and when enough people are seeking to improve their lives, it improves the whole.
You cannot have growth in the economy without having people who are willing to multiply the talents. You cannot multiply the talents unless you take responsibility for your own state of mind, what you are projecting into the cosmic mirror. Right now, there are still many people in Ukraine who are either longing to get back to the privileged positions they had before the war or who are longing to get into a privileged position like they saw their parents had.
There are many people who are thinking, how can we take advantage of all the economic help that Ukraine is being given so that we can create a little privileged position for ourselves? They are thinking about themselves, not about the whole. They are thinking about themselves and how they can acquire something and then hold on to it rather than thinking, how can we continue to transcend ourselves and achieve more? There is the desire to grasp a limited portion of the pie and hold on to that. Or there is the desire to expand my portion of the pie. When you seek to grasp onto a portion of the pie and hold on to it, the pie is not growing. But when you seek to expand your portion of the pie, you are expanding the whole pie. And that is how a nation grows. That is how a nation can grow from the economic level that Ukraine had before the war to what you see in Western Europe.
As we have said before, Ukraine has the natural resources. Many people are willing to work. As you see of some of the refugees that left Ukraine at the start of the war, many of them have found work and are willing to work hard in their new countries. There is absolutely no reason, no physical reason, why Ukraine cannot have the same level of the economy as you see in, for example, Germany or Holland or other nations. The only difference is the difference in mentality, the unwillingness to multiply the talents by taking responsibility for oneself, changing one’s state of mind, transcending one’s state of mind. Multiplying the talents begins with multiplying your sense of self, your sense of what you can and cannot do, accepting that you can grow rather than seeking to remain in a fixed position for the rest of your life where you are comfortable in a privileged position.
Letting go of the sense of superiority
Back to the inferiority-superiority dynamic. You have a desire to transcend. When you go into duality, you are perverted. Now you want to have as much as you think you can have and then hold on to it. You can have this desire to attain something in this world where you are better than others. This is what creates a power elite. But it is also what creates a permanent underclass of people who have accepted that they cannot do anything to improve their personal situation because they are just workers or they are pensioners and this is going to be their living standard for the rest of their lives, but they feel superior by being part of the flock.
This is clear in Russia today where many of the people, in fact all of the people who support Putin and the status quo, feel superior because they are Russians. You also have people in Ukraine who feel superior because they are Ukrainians ultimately coming from the Kievan Rus. But you have also a sense of superiority that the Ukrainians are now fighting for the world, for Europe, to hold back Russian aggression. I am not denying that there is a certain validity to the claim that by fighting against Russia it limits Russia’s capacity to go further.
But you see, first of all, the Ukrainians are fighting to have an independent nation. You need to have a realistic view here because what you see, as we have pointed out now, both Mother Mary and I, in the Soviet mentality is this sense that people feel inferior because they know that the state does not value them as individuals. But they feel superior by being part of the state, but Ukraine needs to leave that mentality behind. Why? Well, again, it is do you want to be dominated by Russia or do you want to become an independent democratic nation? If you become an independent democratic nation, what must you do? You must overcome the sense of superiority because the idea of a democracy is that all people are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights. Therefore, ideally, no nation is superior to any other.
I know very well that there are nations in Europe and elsewhere who feel that they are superior still, even though many of them have started to overcome it, at least in Europe. But what I am pointing out here is that the current sense of superiority, even the sense that we Ukrainians are saving the world from Russia, this must be let go because it blocks you from making that shift into the democratic mindset. And if a critical mass of people in Ukraine cannot make that transition, then Ukraine as a nation cannot make that transition. And if you cannot make that transition to the democratic mindset, you will not survive Russia’s onslaught. You will not form the karmic mirror that Mother Mary talked about. You will instead be divided in yourself, and Russia will surely take advantage of this, multiply that division, and you will see internal strife, internal fighting in Ukraine that will weaken Ukraine’s resistance to Russia.
Magical thinking vs. the willingness to shift
The opportunity for the transition is there. Many people have already made it, but a critical mass has not yet been reached. And that is why you who are open to our teachings can have a major impact on making the calls on this and, of course, going through the transition yourselves. We have given so many teachings on democracy. Have you studied them? Have you truly internalized them, what it means? Because if you who are the spiritual student do not internalize it, how do you expect other people in Ukraine to do so?
I am simply pointing out here, Ukraine is on a threshold. It is standing on the one side. It has lifted the one foot. It has started to move that foot over the threshold, but it has not yet moved it so far that the weight shifts and now it crosses the threshold. But the opportunity is great and it can be done, but it is a matter of choosing. And that is why we are not putting the responsibility on you, the few ascended master students, but we are radiating this into the collective consciousness. There are even people in the government, including the President, who has not yet fully made that shift into the democratic mindset.
It is not to blame anybody. We are simply stating the fact that the shift has not happened. It is close. It is almost there. It is just a matter of shifting a little bit so that the weight shifts and pulls you over the threshold. But there is still the risk that you could fall back and stay on the same side of the threshold. This may be a somewhat somber message—or is it really an opportunity to shift?
You see, there is a certain, what shall we say, naivete, that is found in Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian people, and of course many other people around the world, but let us focus where we are at. And it is a form of magical thinking where you think something is magically going to happen that is going to bring change and you are waiting for this magical thing to happen, this magical thing that suddenly will resolve the war and everything will be good. But the magic that will bring the change is you transcending yourself and many other people transcending themselves so that the whole shifts. That is the magic that brings change.
It is this magical thinking that makes people think that a strong man can solve all our problems. The Russians are still trapped in it. Ukraine has started moving beyond it, but there is still remnants of it. We are still waiting for some magical thing—if only we had those weapons, if only we had those weapons—but it is the shift in consciousness that is the magic. But that is brought about by people willing to look at themselves, not by thinking that change is going to come from the outside. This is what has happened in democratic nations. This is what happened in the Baltic countries. This is what happened in most of the Warsaw Pact countries. It can happen in Ukraine. It can happen in Ukraine faster than in most of these other countries because the war puts this pressure on you but it requires the willingness to shift and that shift is the opportunity.
Right now, the people living in Ukraine have the opportunity of a lifetime to shift. Will you grab it or will you stand there not knowing if you are willing to change, to give up the idea that something outside of you must change so you do not have to? This is the challenge. And I am hurling that challenge into the collective consciousness because I am the Goddess of Opportunity. And this is your opportunity.
With this, I have given you what I wanted to give you in this installment. I may return to give you some more thoughts. We shall see how the days unfold. But I thank you for giving me the opportunity to address this, to use your chakras and minds to project it into the collective consciousness of Ukraine, Russia, all of the nations who were part of the Soviet era, where it can go far and wide and begin the shift that will lead people to see that life is an opportunity, not a burden put upon them, but an opportunity. And the opportune moment is now.
With this, I seal you in the Flame of Opportunity that I hold for earth.
Copyright © 2025 Kim Michaels