TOPICS: When people will not address problems – The Japanese atrocities in Korea – Avoiding stagnation – Moving away from elitism – Not talking affects your personal lives – Seeing yourself as a decision maker – More direct relationships – Feeling embarrassed about sharing feelings – How the collective consciousness can be raised – Freely expressing feelings –

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Ascended Master Portia, May 4th, 2017, through Kim Michaels. This dictation was given at a conference in Seoul, Korea.

I am the Ascended Master Portia, and I come to give you a new perspective on the Asian mindset beyond what we have given you previously. You have a concept that is almost universally known, namely that in Asia you have a tradition for not being direct, for being very concerned about saving face, not losing face. You have a tradition for showing what you see as respect for others by not being very direct in addressing certain issues or problems; but always addressing them by circumventing the issue, perhaps talking about it in an indirect manner.

Now, my beloved, this is not a particularly Asian mindset in the sense that you find it everywhere on the planet. There are some areas of the world where people have begun to go beyond it and become more open, more direct, in dealing with various issues. If you go a little bit back in time, you will see that in all cultures they have had this tendency that there were certain things you could not talk openly about. There was a tendency to feel that one had to preserve one’s face, one’s honor, one’s appearance. Even to the point where people were willing to engage in a duel against somebody that they felt had insulted them. Many, many people have died unnecessarily because of such an obsessive need to maintain face, to uphold their honor and to defend their honor.

When people will not address problems

Now, the theme of this conference is to radiate the golden age consciousness. I can assure you, my beloved, that in the Golden Age this concern about saving face or preserving honor or preserving appearances, preserving tradition, this will melt away and people will find a way to talk with each other much more directly. There will not be this sense of taking offense because someone else is more direct in expressing their view, their opinion. What I would like to bring to your attention is that this mindset, that you call the saving-face or the Asian mindset, actually has it’s origin with the fallen beings because they are the ones who always want to hide something. They are the ones who have always try to create a certain facade where people cannot openly and directly speak out against them, against their actions, but first of all: They cannot speak out against their privileged positions.

My beloved, let us take an example that you are all familiar with of the recent president. She was engaged in what is now openly called corruption. At the time this was not really seen as corruption but simply the way one did political business, so to speak, and had traditionally done so. The people who were doing this were not actually feeling or thinking that they were engaged in corruption. I am not saying I agree with them; I am simply describing what they felt. Therefore, when there was the very beginning of this talk about inappropriate actions, there were many people who felt that this should simply be silenced to death. There should not be made a public issue of this because it was necessary to preserve the face of the nation. Some people even felt it was disrespectful towards the president to bring up such an issue.

As we have said, in the Golden Age there cannot be corruption in a government. We have also said that there cannot be a truly free nation, a truly democratic nation, a nation with equality, if there is corruption. Corruption basically allows the existence of a privileged elite who are able to extract favors or pay for favors or intimidate people into giving them favors that maintain their privileges. This culture of not being willing to talk openly about issues allows that the privileged elite can continue to exist and they can continue to have privileges that basically most people do not even know about. They do not even understand what privileges the elite are holding because this is never talked about. Only those who are directly engaging with members of the elite know what is going on whereas the broad population do not understand what privileges this elite has. However, if the broad population did know what privileges they have and what effect this has on their own lives and on the nation, they would clearly see this as wrong. They would see this as a form of corruption.

Does it actually serve the nation that you are so concerned about saving face, even saving the face of the nation, that you will not openly talk about issues because you do not want to embarrass the nation. Therefore, you would rather silence these problems. This, my beloved, cannot stand in the Golden Age and it cannot bring a nation into the Golden Age. There is a need to make the calls, for you who are our students, that people will gradually go through the process that you have seen in other nations of overcoming this desire to silence things, this unwillingness to talk openly about issues.

The Japanese atrocities in Korea

You see, my beloved, there are nations that have this to a much more extreme degree than Korea. You know all how it is in Japan, you know how it is in China and how there is even more of a need to save face. It can be very difficult for you to even talk about issues with Japan, for example, even so that you in Korea feel that Japan is far more difficult to deal with than your own nation. As an example of this, you all know of the atrocities committed by Japan during its various occupations of Korea.

There are many Korean people who feel it would be appropriate for Japan to make a formal apology for this, especially for the most recent violations. You also know that this has little chance of being forthcoming in the near future because Japan is largely unwilling to even talk about the issue. This is, of course, not because the Japanese are bad or evil people, but they are so caught up in this necessity to save face that they cannot even conceive of openly admitting that they were wrong and that what they did was wrong.

You see that what this prevents the Japanese from doing is actually moving on from the past and leaving the past behind them. The Japanese are tied to their past, they are tied to a tradition that really has outlived its purpose. What is the overall effect of this? It is that the Japanese nation is stagnating in many ways. You can see this most clearly in the way Japan used to be such a large and growing economy but how the Japanese economy has stagnated. This is an expression of the fact that the Japanese mindset has stagnated, it has come to stand still. They have become stuck, and this is partly because they are unwilling to acknowledge that Japan has made errors and that Japan carries a tradition that is outdated and that needs to be left behind. If you cannot talk about such issues openly, if you cannot even look at the issue, look at the tradition and look how it has become outdated, my beloved, how can you then free yourself from it? The simple fact is that you cannot.

This is not a matter of an Asian or a western mindset. It is a matter of a universal psychological mindset that is simply a human dynamic. You can only move on from something if you are willing to look at it to see that it did not serve you, to see how it was limiting you. Then, as Mother Mary said yesterday, when you see how something is limiting you, you can spontaneously let go of that attachment. You cannot see this if you are not willing to look at it. You cannot look at it if you are so afraid of losing face that you would rather ignore something because you know, my beloved, that you cannot change fact.

The Japanese know what they did during the war, they know that they cannot look at it without admitting that this was wrong and therefore, they will not even look at it. As a result they cannot free themselves from it but this is not just a matter of what Japan did to Korea. It is a larger issue of Japan not being willing to look at its past traditions. Therefore, it cannot free itself from those traditions, it cannot move on, it cannot find new solutions, it cannot find a new approach. As a result, it is stagnating and lagging behind.

Avoiding stagnation

Now I am using this as an example because I know that the people in Korea are more dedicated to growth and they do not want to go through this same phase of stagnation that they see in Japan. You understand, my beloved, that the only way you can avoid going through that stagnation phase is if you are more willing to look at yourselves than the Japanese people are. It is not that the South Korean nation has made such grandiose mistakes that you need to be afraid to look at them.

What I am simply pointing out is that you who are our students need to make the calls so that there is an awakening in Korea that we need to be willing to look at all issues in our society and to talk about them openly without being so worried about saving face that we cannot acknowledge that there are certain things that have become outdated. They no longer serve the nation, they no longer serve the people and therefore, we need to leave them behind but before we can leave them behind, we must look at them. Before we can process it collectively, we must be willing to talk openly about this.

Moving away from elitism

You also need to recognize, as you saw in this invocation you gave and as you heard in Gautama’s dictation last year, that it is absolutely necessary for the Golden Age to be manifest that the society moves away from a division between an upper class and a lower class, a privileged elite and the general population. In the Golden Age there can be no elitism, no favoritism. How can you acknowledge that you have privileged elite if you cannot talk openly about this issue? Therefore again, you need to make the calls that people will be willing to talk about this.

Really, my beloved, it is not truly a matter of losing face. You do not lose face by acknowledging a problem and moving beyond the problem. Thereby, you actually gain honor, you gain respect, you gain self-respect, you make progress. The question is again, as we have said before, there needs to be made a realistic assessment: “What is most important to us? Is it more important to us to save face, to preserve tradition, to not be direct? Or is it more important for us to make progress towards a better society?”

Of course, there are those who will say that it is more important to preserve tradition but who are those people? They are the ones who belong to the privileged elite and who know that progress can only cause them to lose their privileged positions and they do not want to lose those positions. They do not want to share their wealth and their privileges with the people because they have adopted this arrogance (that originally came from the fallen beings) and they believe that they are somehow better than the population. They are in a higher class of beings and therefore they are entitled to these privileged positions. They are entitled to these inordinate profits and to gather so many riches to themselves that they do not even know what to do with it. Therefore, they believe that in order to uphold their profits and their privileges, it is acceptable and unavoidable to have a nation that is out of balance so that wealth is concentrated in the hands of an elite, instead of spread to the entire population.

My beloved, we have said before that if you make a realistic assessment of what is best for a nation’s economy, you will actually see that a more equal distribution of wealth will lead to a greater growth of a nation’s economy than allowing that wealth to be concentrated in the hands of a small elite. You can go to the United States today, which calls itself the richest country in the world, and it is the richest country in the world but it is unfortunately the top two percent of the American population who has control over the majority of those riches. This has actually had a greater impact on slowing down growth in the American economy than any other factor. If you took some of the money that is concentrated in the hands of the top two percent and distributed it more evenly among the population, then that population would start spending the money they have on improving their standard of living. This would very, very quickly lead to an increase in all sectors of the economy, except maybe the defense economy and therefore, everyone would prosper from this.

It is simply not sustainable in the long run that you allow this concentration of wealth in the hands of a privileged elite. This, by the way, is one of the reasons for the stagnation in the Japanese economy. Japan also has a very small elite that has managed to extract these inordinate profits from Japanese companies instead of sharing them more evenly with the workers who actually made those companies function. The same, of course, is the case in South Korea right now.

Therefore, we ask you to make the calls that people will become more aware of this, that they will become willing to see the issue and to actually deal with this directly without feeling that they would insult the nation or destroy the nation’s reputation. You cannot, my beloved, solve a problem without talking about it openly, just as you saw with the impeachment of the president. If some people had not been willing to talk about this openly, if they had not been willing to talk about it amongst themselves; then how could the people have gathered in those places in Seoul and demanded a change? How could this have happened if there had not been this willingness to talk openly about an issue?

Not talking affects your personal lives

Improvement in a democratic society requires the willingness to openly talk about issues. Otherwise, how can a democracy possibly function? How can you have a majority of the people accept a new idea or the need for a change if there is not the willingness to talk about an issue? I ask you to make calls on this on the national level but I also, as the feminine polarity, I ask you to consider what this means at the personal level. I can tell you, my beloved, when I look at the Korean people and when I look at you who are our students, I can assure you that you have not even begun to understand how deeply rooted it is in your culture and your personal psychology, this unwillingness to be direct and to talk openly about issues.

This affects your personal lives to a degree that you cannot even imagine. I am therefore, asking you who are our students to begin to consider this so that you can gradually become more aware of it. I am also asking you to make calls on it, both for yourself and for the Korean people. I am asking you to realize that this affects, first of all, how you look at yourself. You have from early childhood been brought up to feel that there is a certain standard for your behavior, there is a certain standard for what you can say and what you cannot say. This especially applies to authority figures, from your parents to your teachers in school to the leaders of society or the corporations where you work. You have been brought up to feel that it is shameful for you to speak out in a way that these authority figures would feel was offensive.

My beloved, do you realize how deeply this affects your self-image and the way you look at how you can interact with other people? It is quite frankly a psychology that has many layers. We, of course, will not go into all of them now but I do want to mention some of them. Such a culture, of course, is not limited to South Korea or to Asia but found in many countries in various versions. Most people who have grown up in such a culture have come to accept an image of themselves as belonging to a certain station in society. Most of you have been brought up to feel that you are not part of the privileged elite, you are not part of the upper class, you are a part of the common population, the common people, the lower class. Therefore, you have been brought up to accept that you have no right, no authority to even have opinions about the upper class and what they are doing and not doing.

You have been brought up to passively accept your station in life and to not even have a personal opinion about certain matters that you feel are outside your sphere of influence. They are simply not within your right to even have opinions about. This, of course, is a mechanism that the fallen beings have engineered and that they love because it allows them to exercise power without the people realizing how they are being manipulated and controlled. They know, of course, that once the people know what is happening, realize what is happening, they will not submit to it. They have seen so many times that when the people become aware of what the elite is doing, then the people will object to this. They will refuse to submit. Somehow the elite will lose their privileged positions, lose their power, and they will have to accept changes in a society.

They have attempted to create this psychological barrier where you do not feel worthy to even have an opinion and, of course, you do not feel worthy to strive for a position where you could have an influence on your society. You have been brought up to accept your station as a worker or as an office worker or perhaps even in the bureaucracy but you are not truly one of the decision makers. You who are our students, you need to look at this mechanism because we need you to accept yourselves as decision makers.

Seeing yourself as a decision maker

We are not thereby saying that you need to strive for a powerful position in society, but what we are saying is that we need you to openly and honestly look at your society and decide what is acceptable for you and what is not acceptable for you. Can you see, my beloved, that if you who are ascended master students do not even dare to look at an issue and say: “This behavior of the power elite is not acceptable to me,” how shall then the rest of the population, dare to say: “This is not acceptable to us?” If people are not willing to decide what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, then how can the collective consciousness shift? If the collective consciousness does not shift, how can there be change? It simply is not possible, my beloved.

You who are our students, you need to be very, very direct and very openly looking at yourselves and seeing where you have these mechanisms where you almost subconsciously submit yourself to a certain station. We need you to recognize that you are spiritual beings and as spiritual beings, there is no upper class and lower class. There is no value judgment where some people are more valuable or have a higher authority than others. You all have the authority that you are sons and daughters of God, that you are spiritual beings. We need you to accept this so that you feel that you are worthy to make a decision about what is acceptable and what is not acceptable in your country. Only then, can we truly begin to use you as the electrodes, as the catalysts for shifting the collective consciousness.

More direct relationships

My beloved, another aspect of this is that we need you who are our students to be forerunners in finding a new way to interact with each other. There is a tendency, especially in Asia, where people are not so open in talking about personal issues, especially about their feelings. I am not here necessarily talking about feelings such as whether you feel angry or whether you feel tired. I am talking about how you feel about issues, how you feel about life, how you feel about yourself. In other words, it is a deeper sensation that actually goes all the way to your sense of identity. You will see that there is a tendency in Asia that even though people can have known each other for many years and therefore from a certain perspective would say that they are friends, they often are not friends at a deeper personal level. They often do not feel free to share their personal lives with each other and you will see, for example, that there is a tendency that the relationship between coworkers in Asia is much less personal than in certain other nations.

I am not here, again, trying to set up a situation where you feel that you are inferior to the western nations. I am simply trying to point out to you here that this is not a matter of becoming westernized. We, the ascended masters, are not asking you to become westernized, in the sense that you imitate what is happening in the West. We are asking you to recognize that we of the ascended masters are promoting a certain shift in consciousness and that there are certain parts of the world where they have, in certain aspects, responded more quickly to this tendency than you have done here in Asia. One of these areas is developing this more open and more direct form of interacting with each other. You can go back and see that western countries had a very similar culture to what you have today here but they have overcome it during recent decades, at least to some degree. People are more open, they are more willing to talk about issues in an open manner.

You need to see that it is simply that there are certain people in some western nations who have responded more quickly. By you doing the same, you are not becoming westernized. You are simply following the trend that we of the ascended masters want to see because, as I said, in the Golden Age you need to be able to interact with each other more freely. You need to be more open about talking about issues. We hope that you who are our students will be willing to look at yourself personally and also see how you have been affected by this culture.

If you compare television programs, even the more popular ones that may seem to have very little content, you can actually, by looking at how such television programs, portray the interaction between people. You can see a difference in mindset and how the mindset has begun to shift in certain nations. Even the popular television programs portray that people interact more freely, more openly, are more open to talking about deeper personal feelings and sensations. I am not here saying that these programs are a model to emulate in your culture. I am just pointing out that even though they are not necessarily from a high level of awareness, they do show the trend and how there has been a shift and there has in some nations been a greater willingness to talk about more personal issues.

Feeling embarrassed about sharing feelings

As we have said before, my beloved, there comes a point where society has reached a level of material affluence where the next logical step is that you are no longer concerned about the material welfare of the citizens of that nation. You start becoming concerned about the mental, emotional, the psychological welfare. How can you promote psychological welfare, if you cannot talk about how people feel, how they experience life and if they cannot share their feelings more openly? My beloved, I know well that for many in your culture it would feel deeply embarrassing for you to share your feelings. I ask you, who are our students to look at yourselves and see why you feel this is embarrassing and you will see that it is because of the programming you have been brought up with.

You have been programmed to think, my beloved, that you should – twentyfour hours a day, throughout your entire life – act as if there is a very critical judge who is watching your every action, your every word, your every thought and your every feeling. My beloved, can you identify in yourselves this mechanism where you feel that there is always any angry judge watching you and ready to condemn you if you do the slightest thing that is outside the acceptable norm? Can you recognize this, my beloved? Then I ask you to realize that as ascended master students this mechanism is a great hindrance to your spiritual growth. It is especially a hindrance when you do what people everywhere have a tendency to do. You transfer it to us and you think that we, who are ascended masters, are like that angry judge and that we are watching your every move and wanting you to live up to a standard that we have defined.

My beloved, we are the ascended masters; we are not the fallen beings. We are not acting like the fallen beings. Please, make an effort to realize that we are not acting like the fallen beings. We do not want you to feel bad about making the slightest error or stepping outside the norm. We are not judging you. We are not looking at everything you do, my beloved. We are not critical of you. I know that we often tell you things that you have to change, my beloved, that you have to look at but we are not doing this to criticize you or put you down. We are doing it to set you free because you cannot become free without seeing what is limiting you. Our only desire is to set you free, my beloved.

We are not looking at each one of you personally. We are giving you general directions, my beloved. Please make an effort to realize that we do not have angels or ascended masters that are assigned to each of you personally in order to watch and judge and evaluate every action, every word, every thought, every feeling you have. We give you freedom, my beloved. We hold the immaculate concept for you but we give you freedom to follow our directions at your pace, as you are able and willing to do so. We are not judging everything you do; we are not looking at you with this disapproving mood that wants to condemn you for every misstep. On the contrary, we give you great freedom, my beloved, and I truly wish that all of you would begin to contemplate how it is so easy for you to transfer this image that you have a judge that is judging you.

This image may come from a religion, where the Christian religion has been the primary tool used by the fallen ones to spread this awareness. But it truly goes beyond religion because it is a psychological mechanism that the fallen beings have managed to insert in most people around the world. My beloved, they may have projected the image that it is God who is the angry judge but who is really the angry judge? It is, of course, the fallen beings themselves; they are the ones who want to put you down. I ask you to recognize this and to recognize, my beloved, that it is not constructive to your spiritual path to have this mechanism where you feel like someone is always watching and before you do or even think anything, you have to evaluate whether it is right or wrong according to the angry judge’s standard.

My beloved, if there was one thing I would wish for you it was that you could be free of this mechanism, that you could be free to do what we have talked about so many times: flowing with the river of life. Being spontaneous, being joyful, not having to worry about everything you do and say, but allowing yourself the freedom to express yourself however you feel like expressing yourself at the moment. It is not so disastrous if you say something that you later want to change. How will you learn what you want to express if you do not experiment, my beloved? It is so important for you who are our students to consider this because if you can free yourselves from it, then you can be much more of an open door for the ascended masters.

How the collective consciousness can be raised

My beloved, what we would like to see is that you come to a point where, when your I AM Presence wants to express something through you, you allow this to happen. When we of the ascended masters want to give you an idea or give you a momentum of energy, then you allow this to happen. As it is right now, most of you have a certain freedom to allowing us to work with you when you are doing your spiritual work. For example, when you are studying our teachings or when you are giving our invocations, then you feel free to be an open door for a flow of energy from us. Then you may feel more open to receiving an intuitive insight but many of you, if you are honest with yourself, will see that you have a certain division in your lives. When you are engaged in spiritual activities, you feel it is appropriate for you to be attuned to us and to be an open door for us. When you are engaged in normal life, you almost subconsciously switch into living up to the demands that you feel have been put upon you for your entire lives.

It is as if you subconsciously shift and say: “No, in this situation I cannot be open, I cannot be the open door for the ascended masters because it would not be appropriate.” My beloved, how shall you change the collective consciousness unless there are individuals who are willing to do something that is beyond the norm, beyond the standard, beyond what is considered appropriate?

You see, my beloved, the fallen beings would love to have the general population feel that the only way for them to live, the only way that is appropriate for them, is to have blind obedience to the fallen beings. How has the collective consciousness been raised so that there are actually now societies that do not have a dictatorial leadership, and therefore can be free to express what the power elite in the old days thought was not appropriate? It is only because some people have been willing to express what was not considered appropriate according to the standard of their society and their parents. I am not asking you here to do something that is outrageous or unbalanced. I am simply asking you to realize that we need you to have the courage to go beyond what it considered appropriate. One way you can do this is to act on creating more deeper, personal relationships where you are more free to express yourself and what you actually feel about certain situations.

Freely expressing feelings

You see, my beloved, the culture I have talked about, the culture of wanting to save face, of not wanting to be direct, is a very great hindrance to the growth of a society because there are so many things that cannot be expressed. There is often a tendency to look at this in black-and-white terms and thinking that the only alternative to your traditional way of expressing yourself here in the East is what you see in the West where people are very blunt, very direct and are what you call disrespectful and impolite. But this is not the only alternative.

There is an entirely other way to interact, which we have talked about before, that we would like to see in the West as well. It is where people feel free to express how they feel. For example, if another person is doing something to you that has a negative effect on you, you do not necessarily have to state that the person is wrong and should not be doing this. The alternative is that you feel free to express yourself and describe to the other person how that person’s actions make you feel. This will in many cases cause that person to realize something they had never even thought about because they had never thought about how other people experience their actions. In some cases, this will then open up for a new way of interaction where everybody can be more free to express themselves and people can be more aware of how their actions affect others. This can create a positive culture where you can become more open to about talking about issues without going into the unbalanced extreme of being so blunt and impolite and confrontational, as you sometimes see in the West.

You understand, my beloved, that any tendency can be taken to an unbalanced extreme. As you see in Japan and China, the tendency to be unwilling to talk openly has been taken to an extreme. As you see in some nations in the West, the tendency to be open and direct has been taken to an extreme. We are asking you to find the middle way where you can be open in expressing it. It is not impolite, my beloved, it is not improper to tell someone how their words or actions affect you. It is simply being willing to be yourself and to express who you are and to state what you feel. You are not telling the other person what to do or not to do. You are simply expressing how that person is affecting you and then allowing the person to decide what to do with this. At least, you have stated who you are and how you experience the situation. This would be a great progress, if you could develop this culture amongst yourselves as ascended master students but also, of course, make the calls that there will be an awareness of this in society.

My beloved, I know these are sensitive topics for you. I know that we are touching upon things here that are so deeply ingrained in your culture that it can almost be difficult for you to understand what I am saying because you have not even seen this issue. It is the example we have given so many times that if you were born with red glasses, you would think that everything has a red tint and you do not realize that there is a way to look at this without the glasses. Therefore, we realize this is a process but we hope that you who are our direct students can begin this shift that will spread through the collective consciousness.

My beloved, can you not see that if you look north of the border; you have a society where people are even more afraid to express themselves because they fear physical retribution. They fear that someone will report them to the police, the secret police, and they will be imprisoned or their family members will be subjected to severe penalties. You have the freedom here. You will not be subjected to physical penalties by being open and honest about yourself and your feelings. I ask you to consider how you can be the forerunners for a shift in the culture where you become more willing to talk about these issues of how you experience life in your society and how you experience your interactions with other people.

My beloved, I thank you very much for your attention and for your willingness to be the open doors whereby I could radiate these ideas and the love of my heart into the collective consciousness of this beautiful nation. Truly, we would love to see the Korean people be free to express the love, the beauty and the creativity that we know they have within them. We know it is there in their three higher bodies and we would like them to be free of these mechanisms that prevent what it is there in the higher bodies from descending into the physical octave. After all, what are we about as the ascended masters? We are about having a higher matrix descend into the physical, this is how we can manifest a Golden Age, my beloved.