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Ascended Master Hilarion through Kim Michaels, January 10, 2017.

I AM the Ascended Master Hilarion, Chohan of the Fifth Ray. The purpose of this book is to give you the outer stimuli, the outer reminders, that can help you pass and integrate the lessons you receive at the etheric level when you attend my retreat at this level of this course of self-mastery. We will begin, in this first lesson, by looking at an aspect of the Fifth Ray that is normally seen as vision.

It has been said in ancient scriptures that: “Without vision, the people perish.” This is somewhat of a dubious statement, for is there anyone who does not have vision? All people have vision whether they are aware of it or not, whether they are classified as visionaries or not. Every human being has vision. The problem is that people are not aware that they have vision and they are not aware of what they do with it. It is not actually correct that without vision the people perish, we need to look at what kind of vision people have.

Vision is not passive

You who are familiar with our teachings know something about duality and non-duality. Therefore, it should be clear that the real statement should be that: “With a dualistic vision, people perish.” When they do not have the Christ vision, the vision based on oneness, then they will perish. Why is this so? Because it is through the faculty of vision that you project into the cosmic mirror. As we have said, now many, many times: “What can the cosmic mirror do except project back to you what you are projecting out?” This, then, brings us to the central initiation that you face at the first level of my retreat.

The vast majority of people on this planet have grown up with an incorrect vision about vision. They think that vision is passive. If you think back to what you learned in school, you learned that your eyes are receiving instruments. They take in the light that comes to them from your surroundings and then you see what is actually there. Nothing, my beloved, could be further from the truth. You do not see what is actually there.

We have attempted to explain this many, many times, but at this first level of my retreat you simply cannot move on to the next level until you actually, truly get this point. It is not enough to understand it theoretically and intellectually. You need to get it as this total experience that shifts your consciousness so you realize in all four of your lower bodies that vision is not a passive faculty. It is, indeed, an active faculty where you are constantly projecting out, and what you project out very much affects what you see.

It is really that what you are projecting out affects what you think is coming to you from without. What you see is not what is coming to you from without; what you see is (as the scientists of quantum physics have started to realize) something that is produced inside your mind. There is no way that you can ascend to the 96th level of consciousness without getting and integrating this reality. We might say that for the remainder of this course of self-mastery, one of the primary tasks is for you to clarify, to clear, your vision so that you are aware of what you are projecting out. You have mastery of what you are projecting out and therefore you have mastery of what is coming back from the cosmic mirror, which only reflects back what you are projecting out.

A subtle illusion on the path

This, incidentally, is a great hurdle for many of the students who come to my retreat. It is entirely possible that you can have walked the path up until this point, of having gone through the initiations under the first four Chohans, but you still have not let go of one of the most subtle illusions on the spiritual path. This is the illusion that comes directly from the fallen consciousness; it is the illusion that Jesus talked about when he said: “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.”

The fallen beings have for a very, very long time attempted to take heaven by force. Now, you cannot take heaven by force and therefore Jesus’ statement is not entirely transcribed correctly, for he knew, of course, the reality. You cannot take heaven by force because you cannot go beyond the four levels of this unascended sphere while you are in embodiment in any of those four levels. You cannot affect the spiritual realm.

What you can do, is that you can seek to force the flow of energy to go in such a direction that you take on certain powers, certain abilities, that are beyond what is considered normal on this planet. As we have said before, it is entirely possible to force certain abilities. As Serapis Bey discoursed on, there are certain false teachers who have set themselves up so that they have various abilities that can impress their students. Well, my beloved, if I was to select a spiritual teacher, I would not select one who had certain abilities, but I would select the one who had the purest vision. What do I mean with “pure vision?” Well, that will become clear as we go through the steps in this book.

For now, I want to stay with this idea that there are people who come to my retreat at the first level and they still have not let go of the idea that this course of self-mastery, that the spiritual path in general, is about acquiring certain abilities, certain extraordinary abilities. What is even more devastating is that many people have not understood, have not truly grasped, that the spiritual path is not about acquiring a mechanical ability. This is subtle, I know this very well, but I need you to ponder this very subtle difference.

Now, I have just told you that the universe is the cosmic mirror. It can only reflect back to you what you are projecting out. This does sound like the universe is functioning in a mechanical way. In a way, we could say that the universe is as mechanical as a mirror because what you are projecting upon the Mat-er Light, well the Mat-er Light will take on the form of the image you are projecting in a rather mechanical way. It is not like the Mat-er Light is creative in giving you back what you are sending out. It is giving you back exactly what you are sending out. The subtlety comes in because there is no way to cheat the system—you understand?

No way to cheat the system

There are many, many gurus and teachers out there in the field of New Age, Positive Mental Attitude, self-empowerment (or whatever they call it) who will attempt to make you believe that by following a few simple steps, by learning a certain formula, by giving certain affirmations, then you can, so to speak, turn your life around very quickly. In very simple ways, you can attract to you the most wonderful love partner, all the money you could ever need or whatever else it is that you desire. This is not so my beloved—right? There is no way to cheat the system.

You may go in with your conscious mind and select some kind of course that is offered out there and you may focus your conscious mind on a positive view of life. You may create treasure maps, you may write down exactly what you want, you may go through all of these exercises and you may focus your vision on something. You may put as much energy as you can muster into projecting that vision into the cosmic mirror, but if you only do this with your conscious mind, it can only have a limited effect. You are still projecting a different vision – and possibly a contrary vision – with your sub-conscious mind, the three levels of the emotional, mental and identity levels. What you are actually doing (as we have said before) is that instead of resolving the programs or the internal spirits in the three higher layers of the mind, you are creating a new program, a new spirit, and now it is only a matter of which spirit is stronger. Even if there is one spirit that is stronger, the others are still there and the others are still projecting out.

We might go back to the old statement: “Without vision, the people perish.” We might say: “Without a unified vision, the people perish.” What are you projecting out if you do not have a unified vision? You are sending “mixed signals,” as they say, and what will the cosmic mirror reflect back to you? Of course, an outer situation that is affected by this. This is why I say that there is no way to cheat the system, there is no mechanical way. You cannot create a mechanical formula that will give you the exact conditions you want. You may create some formulas (as I said) where you can temporarily get certain abilities. It is possible for people (and some people have done this) to attract to themselves, for example, great riches in this lifetime.

This does not mean that they have put aside the Law of Karma. Therefore, in a future lifetime they will have to experience the opposite polarity of the unbalanced vision that they projected out. What I am saying here is this: At this first level of my retreat, students need to come to the realization that all of these false promises out there are false. You also need to understand why they are false. They are false partly because what they make you do is create a program with the conscious mind but they do not resolve the other programs in the other layers of the mind. They are also false in the sense that you have to make a choice between what it is you want in life. Do you want self-mastery or do you want certain physical, material conditions or certain experiences on earth?

The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: The Mystical Initiations of Vision.