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Kim Michaels, October 24, 2019.

NOTE This talk was given by Kim Michaels at the conference in Washington, D.C. where the dictations in this book were also delivered. It is included here because Mother Mary refers to it in the first dictation.

Listening to all of you earlier, I realized that we all have, all of us, certain similarities in our paths and how we found the teachings and the masters, and I just wanted to say a few things about that.

I guess we could say, if we want to be very linear and systematic, that there are three stages of the spiritual path. First, you are running away from something, the next stage you are running towards something and the third stage you stop running. You can look at yourselves and see where you are at on that. I think it is not everybody, but many people I have met started the spiritual path because they had some kind of problem. For many it could be a health issue. They started looking into diet and alternative medicine and eventually spirituality as a way to heal a physical problem. It could also be a specific outer problem they had, for many people a lack of money and they got into some kind of teaching with positive mental attitude and how to manifest things. For others, it was a difficult childhood, difficult upbringing, psychological problems or various issues.

What I am saying is that you have a specific problem that you want to get away from and there is nothing wrong with that. I am not trying to say there is anything wrong with this, we all have to start somewhere. I have met many, many people on the spiritual path who had a very difficult childhood and that was one of their prime motivators for why they started looking into something new, something different. In many cases, the church they grew up in did not help them deal with that difficult childhood and maybe even made the problem worse and so, it is a very necessary phase to go through.

What eventually happens to many people is that they find some kind of healing or there is some kind of resolution to the issue so that it’s not so dominant in their consciousness anymore. Then, they move into that next phase where, now instead of getting away from a problem, they see a positive goal. They shift and now they see that the spiritual path offers you a positive goal that you can run towards, and it can be in many different ways that people see this. It can be a higher state of consciousness, it can be peace of mind, freedom from many issues, psychological issues.

We are running towards something and for me, I was blessed by not having a difficult childhood. I had a much easier childhood than most people I’ve met on the spiritual path. I was not really running away from something, but when I found Yogananda’s book Autobiography of a Yogi when I was 18, it gave me a positive vision that there is something to strive for and there is a higher state of consciousness that we human beings can attain. That was my primary motivation for engaging in the spiritual path.

From the outer to the inner path

For the first many years on my path, I was running towards that goal of a higher state of consciousness. In the beginning, I was, even though I saw my goal was a higher state of consciousness, I really had no idea what it was, what it meant, or how to get there. I was very much on the outer path, as I call it, because I thought it was a matter of studying an outer teaching, practicing a technique and doing these outer things. If I did enough outer things, then eventually someday: click, I would be there. In a meditation movement I was in, it was that you do meditation, in Yogananda they had the Kriya Yoga technique and of course, when I found the ascended master teachings, it was giving decrees.

Looking back at it, in the beginning, I thought, because that was just the culture in the ascended master movement, if you give enough degrees, especially violet flame, you will have transmuted all your karma, all your substance in your psychology and one day you will just sort of be there. There were people who thought that if they gave enough decrees for the rest of their lives, they would automatically ascend after that lifetime.

I came to a point where I started questioning that because there was actually a point in the late 80s and the beginning of the 90s where the masters started talking about the need to resolve psychology. I think I always had a certain understanding that I needed to change myself in order to make progress, but in the beginning I had not connected the two. I still thought that if I kept doing the decrees (and I was very, very conscientious about decrees, I would decree for hours a day for many years) that would give me some automatic progress. I am not saying it doesn’t, because as the masters say we have two aspects of the limitations in our psychology and one is just energy that is accumulated. And when you give decrees, you are transforming that energy so, it does have an effect.

The other aspect of the limitations in our psychology is some kind of belief, or as the masters call it now, some kind of self or internal spirit and that internal spirit is based on, it started with, a decision we made in a past life where we experienced something, a trauma. It could be, as the My Lives book said, the first embodiment where we encountered earth or the fallen beings. When we experienced that trauma, we made a decision. We made a decision that created the self that is programmed to uphold that decision, and until we see that decision consciously and change it, we will not be free of it.

There is, in my view, absolutely no technique out there ever invented, that will automatically bring you to a higher state of consciousness. Anybody who says so, I just think they are lying, or they do not know what they’re talking about. The reason for this is that I have come to a much greater understanding of free will than I had when I started the spiritual path. We made a decision and until we consciously see that decision and say: “I no longer want that decision to dominate my life,” until we do that, we are not free of it. If you really understand free will, once you have made a choice, the only thing that is going to override that is you making another choice.

There was a point where I started shifting and I started realizing there is an inner path and that it isn’t enough to do these outer things, but I actually need to look at my psychology. That happened for me in the early 1990s where I started realizing that in my ascended master movement, we gave hours and hours of decrees and decree services for world conditions. The motto we had was: “We are changing the world for Saint Germain.” I am not saying that was invalid, but you had a Sunday service that started in the morning and went to the afternoon. Then, you had a Wednesday night healing service. You had a Friday night ascension service that could be four hours. You had a Saturday night Saint Germain service that was four hours and then at one point, they also came up with a Tuesday night El Morya service. Almost every night, you could go to one of these services and decree for three or four hours. On top of that, we had other things. There was a point where we had these labors of Hercules we had to decree for, and we could have decree services where we decreed at high volume for seven-eight hours.

I came to a point where I recognized in myself that I had used this goal of saving the world for Saint Germain as an excuse for not looking at my own psychology. So I started looking at my own psychology, went to a psychologist, did various kinds of therapy, inner child, Gestalt, EMDR, all kinds of therapies. That was where I started to go more on the inner path because I started to look more at myself and I started to decree more on my personal issues. Still, I understood it was about changing myself, but I did not understand what it involved. I did not understand what I just said that it’s about me seeing a decision I made and consciously changing it. So, I was still running towards a goal, but I did not really have a vision of what the goal was and I did not really know how to get there.

Overcoming the gap

That’s what the masters have talked about a little bit in the last couple of years. Master MORE gave a profound dictation about it. There’s a gap. When I look at many of the spiritual teachings I have studied or been involved in myself, I can see the pattern. You find it in traditional churches as well. They define a goal for you and they define certain methods that you are supposed to do, certain things you are supposed to do. But there’s a gap so even if you do all of those things, you are never going to get there. You are never going to cross the gap.

If you look at the many, many people in the world today who are atheists, agnostics or angry with Christianity, it’s because for several lifetimes, they have believed in the Christian promotional line that if you are a good Christian and you believe in the Bible and you follow the outer rules of the church, you’ll go to heaven after this lifetime. So, they live a whole lifetime

believing this, then they make the transition and instead of meeting St. Peter who was saying: “Here is the door,” they meet some other master who says: “You are going to have to go back down to earth.” When you have done that several times, you might get a little annoyed and you might come in with a certain mistrust of the Christian religion.

It’s the same thing with many spiritual teachings: there’s simply a gap. There is simply a gap between the goal, that is to find enlightenment, a higher state of consciousness, and the method they give you for reaching it. It is always tempting to say, but now we have all of these teachings the masters have given, starting with the My Lives book and Healing your Spiritual Traumas and the other books. So now we have the methods for crossing the gap. I do believe that we have the methods that can work for some people, but I do not allow myself to believe it could work for all people, because people are very different.

There are different things they need and the reason why I am saying this is that I still do not think that if you read the My Lives book and you started with Healing your Spiritual Traumas and you studied those dictations and gave the invocations and did that for all of the five books, I still do not think you would automatically have healed your traumas. It will not happen automatically, no matter how good of a teaching you have, no matter how good of a technique you have. So what I am hoping to convey here is that there is no automatic path, neither this nor anything else.

There can be tools that can be good, but in the end it is about us seeing something that we have not seen before. So the question is, what is going to trigger that for each one of us? I can see in myself its been many, many different things. All of the things I have done in my life have helped me as I can hear from many of you that you have also been helped. You were in a certain teaching, you studied it, it took you to a certain level and then you needed something else to get to another level.

That is why I will never claim that this is the highest possible teaching, it can heal all your problems because it’s so individual. What it really is a matter of is coming to that realization: There’s something I need to see that I have not seen and in order to see what I have not seen, I have to do something different. I have to think differently. Because with the approach I have taken so far, if that approach could have shown it to me, I would have seen it, but I have not seen it. It is Einstein again, if you keep doing the same thing and expect different results—you know.

Looking at our reactions

So again, we are all different, but for me, it has helped me tremendously, first of all, to be aware of this and also look at my own reactions. There came a point where I realized that when I react to other people, it does not show me something about them and their faults. It actually shows me something about myself, my own mechanism that is keeping me trapped. That has helped me look at my reaction and there came a point where I realized that it was such a powerful story for me to read about Gautama Buddha. Here he is, he is ready to go into Nirvana and he is sitting under this Bo tree, which is just a tree, where he is sitting there meditating and there is one final initiation he has to go through. It is that he has to sit there and watch as all the demons of Mara, all the demons in the world, are parading before him. In Buddhism when they tell the story, they just make it seem like it was an easy initiation for him, he was the Buddha ready to go into Nirvana. But it actually was not because what I realized, and I felt I got this from Gautama intuitively, was that this was his temptation. It was not a temptation like you normally talk about temptation, to drink or eat another piece of chocolate or whatever. It was “his” temptation. Could they come up with something in this world that he would react to? Was there some reaction in him, or like Jesus said: “The prince of this world comes and has nothing in me.”

So, Gautama Buddha is sitting there and the demons of Mara can do anything they want. They can come up with absolutely anything. Could they come up with something that could make him react? We are not just talking about a negative reaction, it could be something as subtle as, here are some people, you could help them, you could help them change. Or here is something you have not finished that you could do and you are the only one who could do it. It could be any kind of temptation. So, if there was anything in this world that he was attached to, that he felt he was not done with, they could have gotten him to react and he would not have been able to go into Nirvana.

How do you go into Nirvana? Again with the ascended master movement, they had some requirements for the ascension: balance 51% of your karma, fulfill your Divine plan and your sacred labor. Well, what exactly does that mean? What does it mean to fulfill your Divine plan and your sacred labor, what is that? For that matter, how are you going to ascend with 51% of your karma? Are there ascended masters up there with 51% of their karma and unresolved psychology?

When I pondered this, I saw intuitively that there comes a point, and this was before I knew about the 144 levels, but I still saw there comes a point where you are standing here, and here is a gate and it leads to the ascended realm. Before you can walk through that gate, you have to turn around and look at earth. You have to look at this planet and everything on it, and is there anything that pulls you back here? Anything you feel you want to do, you want to experience, you have not finished? Is there anything that pulls you back here? Then, you are not ready to walk through that gate and ascend because what is the ascension? It is that you are permanently and forever leaving the earth behind. You are saying: “I’m done with earth! There is nothing I want to do here, nothing I want to experience. I am completely done.”

In the ascended master movement, it was almost portrayed like you just give enough violet flame and you “pop up there” and you are an ascended master looking down on earth. But why did you come to earth in the first place? You made choices, right? So, aren’t you going to have to make a choice to leave? Yeah, and it’s the choice that there is nothing left for you to do or experience on earth. I realized that the goal of Buddhahood is non-attachment and it’s the same with the ascension. Non-attachment means again, there is nothing on earth that’s pulling on you, that you have to do. I also realized that it was my reactionary patterns that made me want to do something on earth or feel like there was something I had to do, that it was all my reactions. So, I started pondering this a long time ago. I started really looking at this, what am I attached to, what are my attachments? This has followed me ever since. It’s been a long process. I am not trying to in any way say that this can be done in five minutes. The spiritual path to me is not a quick fix. It is not an instant gratification. It is a lifelong process.

The rest of this talk is found in the book: Ending the Era of Elitism