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Ascended Master Elohim Astrea through Kim Michaels, April 8, 2023. This dictation was given during the 2023 Easter webinar – Taking Christianity and yourself down from the cross.

I AM the Ascended Master Elohim Astrea. I have decided to take this opportunity to give you some insights into how the Karmic Board evaluates situations on earth and seeks to help people, including how I seek to cut people free so that after they leave embodiment they can go to the highest possible place that will help them move forward in their individual paths.

Ascended masters want to help all people grow

I will focus on the war in Ukraine and I will, at least to begin with, focus on what happens to soldiers who leave embodiment. First of all, you need to recognize that we who are the ascended masters do not have the same view of situations on earth as human beings do. This is not said to blame human beings. It is natural that when you are inside a physical body, you come from a specific background, you look at situations in a specific way. But we, of course, have transcended all of these human biases and viewpoints, so we look at it from the perspective of the Christ mind. The Christ mind sees, of course, the oneness between all expressions of God’s consciousness because without Him was not anything made that was made, so God’s consciousness is within everything and everyone.

We see that all human beings are sons and daughters of God, or at least started out that way, and they have since then descended, many of them, to a lower sense of identity. Our task as ascended masters is to help all people make progress towards coming to the point where they can recognize their origin, their identity, and they do this, of course, by coming to see beyond these outer divisions that divide people and put them in conflicts on earth. What I am saying here is that when we look at a situation like the war in Ukraine, we do not have human judgments. We are not judging that this is wrong, that is right, although we, of course, clearly see that what Russia as a nation is doing in Ukraine is a violation of the law of free will. Nevertheless, what I am specifically focused on here is how do we seek to help the individual people, and especially the soldiers, the civilians that have gone out of embodiment as a result of this war. For us there is no difference in our desire to help both Ukrainians and Russians, but there are some differences in how we can go about this. But these differences in how we seek to help people, they are not coming from us or from our consciousness. They are coming because the people on the two sides have different approaches, different states of mind.

Let me begin by talking about Russian soldiers. Many of you who live outside of Russia have studied what has happened. You know that many thousands, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, have been killed. You also know that there have been some atrocities, some war crimes, committed by Russian soldiers against civilians and of course, against Ukrainian soldiers. You know that in medicine they have a principle called a triage. If they have a large number of casualties, they rank them in three different categories based on whether they can be helped and how they might best be helped. In a sense we have a similar evaluation when we look at Russian soldiers, and we must look at their state of consciousness: the state of consciousness they had before they entered the war, what has happened to them in the time they have been in the war and of course the state of consciousness they now have when they leave embodiment.

Russian soldiers who cannot be helped

There are some Russian soldiers that we cannot help. This applies specifically to those who have committed the worst kind of atrocities or war crimes. Those who have killed civilians, raped women, targeted civilian buildings and infrastructure even if they have done it with rockets at a distance. They are often so entrenched in a certain mindset, and the mindset is basically this: at a deeper level of their being they know that what they are doing is a violation of free will, but at the surface levels of their minds they will not, they cannot, bear to admit this. There are especially many among the professional soldiers used by the Wagner group that fall into this category. In other words, we have to look at: can we help people at all? And if their minds are completely closed, if they are not at all willing to consider what they are doing from a higher perspective, we cannot help them. What I am explaining here is that if you look universally at human beings, you will see that when a human being leaves the physical body, that human being has a unique opportunity to look at its life and its state of consciousness from the outside, so to speak, from a higher perspective. However, if the person was in a very closed state of mind before the person left embodiment, then they will be unable or unwilling to do this. They will be unwilling to look at their life because they could not bear to see from a neutral perspective what they are actually doing, what effect it had on other people and what effect it will have on themselves in the future. You could say they cannot bear to acknowledge what karma they made.

These people we cannot help. Therefore, where do they go when they leave embodiment? They go to various levels of what we have called the astral plane which is the lower emotional realm where people with a closed mind have gone. Some have been there for a long time because they are in such a low state that they cannot go back into embodiment. There are realms in the astral plane that are like the hell that many people envision. In fact, the poet Dante who saw the nine circles of hell had a vision of some of these levels, not all of them but some of them. There are these levels of the astral plane that have a certain hellish appearance and these very closed-minded soldiers, they go there. And there they are exposed to people or lifestreams at the same level of consciousness. And they are even exposed to some of the same dynamic that they were exposed to in the Russian army or in the Wagner group where they have superiors who are very abusive, who do not care about them, who will abuse them in various ways and so they find themselves in conflict. As they were in conflict while they were alive they are in conflict after they leave the body.

There is not much more to say about this. The specific conditions in the astral plane are not particularly important other than to say that people are, of course, attracted to a specific level that corresponds to their own level of consciousness, where they are confronted with beings who are doing to them what they did to others in their last embodiment, especially during the war. In other words, they are experiencing that they are on the receiving end of what they did to others so they can experience what it is like to be exposed to basically themselves. What was it like to be on the receiving end of what they did in the war? Because this is, and we look at this with a long history of working with human beings, sometimes the only way that a lifestream can be turned around, can turn itself around, can come to see that: “I no longer want to experience this, which means I have to change myself.” It does not work for all of them but it works for some. The specific conditions they experience are not that important.

Russian soldiers who are confused

Now there is another category of lifestreams, of soldiers, and they are the ones who, in some way or other, have bought into the mindset behind the Russian invasion. There is a certain mindset in the army and among the population that have bought into the idea of Russian superiority, the Russian empire, that Russia has a right to invade Ukraine for various reasons. In other words, they have entered the war with a certain, what we might call, ideological mindset, even though it is not what you would traditionally call an ideology such as communism. But it is still an ideological mindset where they have bought into this narrative that Putin and the Russian power elite have created around the war about Russia’s greatness and the Russian empire, and the need to restore the Russian empire and to defend Russia against NATO or even liberate the Ukrainian people from the Nazis in Kiev.

Whatever excuses are out there in the Russian propaganda space, we might say, they have bought into it. They have believed in it. But they have experienced that the war was not at all what they expected, so when they leave embodiment they are somewhat confused. And the confusion means that their minds are open. There is at least some openness in their minds. And this means that we now have an opportunity to work with such people. And what is then done is that the soul or the lifestream is taken to a place that is pleasant to the lifestream. This does not mean that they get 70 virgins in heaven as the Muslims imagine, but they are taken to a place that we might call a place of peace and rest where they can receive healing at a psychological level. And then, gradually as they calm down, as they feel some rest and healing, we offer them the opportunity of looking at their life, looking at their mindset, the mindset they were brought up with, the mindset they had during the war, looking at it from a neutral perspective. And if they take this opportunity then some of them can be helped, some of them cannot. Those who cannot be helped, in other words those who are not willing to accept what they see from a neutral perspective, they go back into the same mindset they had when they were in embodiment and refuse to question it. There are also some that do not even take the opportunity to look at it neutrally. They want to hold on to that mindset. In that case we again cannot help them. We must let them go and they will also gravitate to a certain level of the astral plane.

Russian soldiers who can make a shift

But those who take the opportunity, those who are willing to look at their mindset from a neutral perspective, even look at their actions and even look at the greater context of Russia and why Russia entered this war, they will be helped to very gradually, and this does not happen all at once, but it happens very gradually, come to see more and more, come to, so to speak, look at certain elements of their mindset and their actions, and Russia, from a neutral perspective. This means they will make some kind of shift. How big of a shift they are able or willing to make is an individual matter. But those who at least make some shift, some of them stop at a certain point. They are willing to make some shift, but they are not willing to go further. They then go to a level of the astral plane that is higher than the people with entirely closed minds. They are not quite exposed to exactly the same, but they are exposed to what corresponds to the level of consciousness they did not want to transcend, they did not want to look at.

But there are others who are willing to look and who gradually go up to where they can see that they had allowed themselves as they were growing up, as they were drafted for the war, as they entered the war, they had allowed themselves to come to believe in a complete illusion, a complete fabrication. The entire Russian mindset, justification, propaganda apparatus around the war is completely unreal, complete fiction. It is a complete lie. And some of these soldiers that were killed at the war can rise to that level where they eventually become able to see this. And this means they can now go to a higher level.

They do not actually even go to the emotional realm. They go to the mental realm where they can now receive help in greatly expanding their understanding of the world and how the world works and how they can come to see through the illusions that they could not see through while they were in embodiment. There are special levels of the mental realm that are set up directly to help this. They are somewhat similar to the retreats of the ascended masters, but they are, of course, not ascended master retreats because those are only found in the higher identity realm. But they are specific, you might say, a combination of a school and a healing center where people can receive help to expand their understanding of how the world works, how they can avoid in their next embodiment being pulled into a similar complete fiction. It does not have to be in Russia, it can be elsewhere.

Russian soldiers who believed official propaganda

Then there is a third category and they are the people who, before they entered the war, did not actually buy into the Russian propaganda. They could see that it was not justified to launch a war against the neighboring nation and some of them could see this because they grew up in a Christian environment and despite what the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has said about the war being justified by God, they could see that as a Christian it can never be justified to kill other people.

Some of them had still volunteered to be in the army because they were willing to defend their home country, but they could also see that when you are attacking another country, you are not actually defending your home country. There were others that simply did not believe in what they were told, that had their own opinions as they were growing up and many of these had not volunteered for the army, but they were drafted into the army. This category of people were already open to seeing through the illusions before they left embodiment, and they often conducted themselves in the war in such a way that they did not commit any war crimes or cruelty, and they tried to the best of their ability to avoid killing anyone. When these soldiers leave embodiment, they are already ready to receive our help, so they can very quickly come to look at the entire situation from a neutral perspective and therefore they can quickly rise to this level of the mental realm where they can receive further education and healing.

The punishment of your own state of mind

Now, even though we cannot help the lowest category of soldiers, I still want to make a few remarks about what actually happens to them. They go to a level of the astral plane where they are exposed to the exact same kind of mindset, the exact same kind of insensitivity to life, the exact same kind of cruelty that they had. But now, instead of being the perpetrators who had victims such as unarmed civilians, they are the victims, and there are others who are insensitive to them, cruel to them, exposing them to all these things that they themselves did. The question now is, how long do they stay in this environment? And that depends very much on how closed their minds are, and how closed their minds are depends very much on what they had actually done while they were still in embodiment. How many people had they killed or tortured or raped or whatever they did? Because the more actions you commit that you know at a deeper level are not right, the more closed your mind becomes. There is a consideration you can make here and it is not really something we need to make as ascended masters, but I want to make you aware of it because it can help you understand the situation.

You have, of course, the traditional teachings about karma and many people see karma as a form of punishment. You do something wrong such as killing other people and you are sent to this level of the astral plane in this hellish environment exposed to this torture as a form of punishment. This is how many people come to see what they call bad karma. But this is, of course, not how we of the ascended masters see it. Nevertheless, if you take this traditional view of karma you would say that if you look at a particular soldier, the more people he killed in the war, the more severe of a karma he made and the longer time he would have to spend in this hellish environment before he had been punished sufficiently. Therefore from this perspective, it was actually better that he was killed when he was because if he had stayed in embodiment he could have killed more people and therefore made more karma.

As I said, karma is not, from the ascended perspective, punishment. But what is punishment, even though nobody does this to anybody, the ascended masters are not inflicting punishment, what is punishment is your own state of mind, so as I said, the more people you kill the more entrenched you become in your state of mind, the state of mind that allows you to kill people and justify it, or continue to do it even if you do not need to justify it. The more entrenched you become in your state of mind and therefore in a sense it is easier for the people who were killed quickly than it is for those who stayed in embodiment longer and killed more people. You can see how you can say, as many among the Russian people say: “Oh, it was so sad that our soldiers were killed.” But in some cases it was actually a grace that they were killed because they would have been much worse off if they had stayed in embodiment and killed more people.

This, of course, does not mean that we of the ascended masters wish that people die or go out of embodiment. I am simply giving you this consideration because part of what I am attempting to do here is give you a different perspective on situations like this. What can we say now? We can say that from the ascended perspective we only have one concern, and that is: How can we help people grow? How can we help everyone grow? And as I said, some people we cannot help directly, they must simply continue in the school of hard knocks as they have been in, often for lifetimes, in order to get to that low state of consciousness where they can do what they did.

But there are some we can help and we attempt to help them, and our purpose is always to help them grow. And our purpose is when a person has gone out of embodiment that we can help them heal and grow to the point where when they come into their next embodiment, they can come into a higher situation than what they came into in their last embodiment. Those who we cannot help, who go to these hellish levels, they stay there for a certain time and then at least some of them will at some point go back into embodiment. But they will not come back into a better situation than they had in their last lifetime. They might actually come back in a worse situation. And some of them will embody in Russia again, some of them will embody in North Korea, some of them will embody in China, but many of them will embody in Africa in areas with this tribal warfare.

Those whom we can help and who raise their level of consciousness, they will embody in more beneficial situations that are more beneficial for growth. Some of them will still embody in Russia, but come in with a higher level of consciousness and of course Russia will change, but others will embody in other nations, some even in the western democracies. Of course, a considerable portion of the Russian soldiers who die in Ukraine and are willing to be helped will in their next lifetime embody in Ukraine. Such is the case in many cases where there has been war between nations. As we have said before, many of the Nazi soldiers and officials from the Second World War have embodied in Israel.

The change is coming in Russia

Another consideration that I want to bring to your attention here is that there are some of you that look at Russia and you think that: “Well, nothing much has changed. Most people are still positive towards the war, the economy is not doing so badly, when will it ever change?” Well, as Mother Mary actually said in an answer at the last webinar, if you could see what is happening at the identity, mental and emotional levels, you will see that change is coming in Russia, and Russia will change in the coming years. Regardless of how long the war keeps going, Russia will change. The change has already begun. It has already become irreversible. And you can see this on the outer by the fact that the authorities are becoming more and more frantic on clamping down on anybody who criticizes the war. You can see that even some teenagers have been arrested for just mentioning the forbidden word on social media. And what kind of nation does that except a nation that is desperate? It is a sign of desperation. In fact, any nation that kills or imprisons its own citizens is a clear act of desperation. And desperation comes because even though they do not acknowledge this consciously, they know it is slipping away from them. They cannot keep this up indefinitely.

The pull on the collective consciousness of Russia

But what I wanted to talk about here is that when you look at these soldiers that have left embodiment as a result of the war, they are no longer in a physical body. But you should not think that means that they are completely disconnected from Russia. As we have explained, every nation has a collective consciousness. It has an emotional, a mental and an identity component. And the Russian soldiers that have been killed in Ukraine are still tied into that collective consciousness, in the emotional, mental and identity realms. Even the soldiers who have gone to these hellish realms are tied into the Russian consciousness. They are pulling on the Russian consciousness. Those soldiers who have received our help, accepted our help and have risen to higher levels of consciousness, they are pulling the collective consciousness up. But those soldiers who have gone into the astral plane, they are pulling the collective consciousness down. And what this means is that they are pulling on the decision makers from Putin and all the way down, and the other soldiers in the army that are in these very closed states of mind. This means they are pulling them to become more and more extreme, willing to take more and more extreme measures, which you have already seen, but will see more and more, depending on how long the war goes on. And the purpose of this, of course, if there was a purpose, it is really the outplaying of free will, but the potential positive outcome that can come out of this is that things can become so extreme that those who are still in embodiment start to see it, start to acknowledge that this is too much, this is too extreme.

Why are they doing this to me?

Many of the soldiers who are still in Ukraine and who have not been killed, and many of the soldiers who have been wounded and have gone to Russia or are still in Ukraine, they have started to see this. For example, you have a soldier who has bought into the entire Russian propaganda effort that he is there to fight for his country and do something important for his country, risking his life to do something important for his country. He comes into Ukraine. He is, first of all, not given any training, not given proper equipment, maybe not even good food, tents or sleeping bags. He is thrown out there in a group of people. They do not have the right weapons. They do not have the right support. They might even not have the right leadership or not have good leadership. And then he is told to run over an open field towards Ukrainian soldiers who are sitting in fortified positions in trenches. And he might have a rifle, but they have machine guns. And anybody who has minimum intelligence can see this is suicide. And anybody can see that you are not serving your country this way. You are not helping your country because you will be shot and you have no chance of shooting the enemy.

What could possibly be the purpose of this? If you survive this situation, then it does start a thinking process. It cannot help but start a thinking process that says: “Why? Why do they want me to die without even having a chance of fighting? Why are they sending me out to die? Why don’t they care about giving us training and equipment? Why don’t they have good leaders? What is the purpose of this war? Why are we doing this?” All of these kinds of questions. And they may not be willing to talk about it. They may not even really be willing to think about it consciously, but the questions are percolating in their subconscious minds. It cannot be any other way because you cannot face death without having a question come up in your mind: “Why? Why is this happening to me?” And when you see that your country is forcing you into the situation, you cannot help but wonder: “Why are they doing this to me? They say that Russia is an important nation. Therefore, I am important as a Russian and it is important that I serve my country. But then they put me in a situation where I am not serving my country. I am just dying for no purpose whatsoever. Why are they doing this to me?”

A great upheaval

And you will see, if you could see what we see from the ascended realm, how in the mental body of Russians, of Russia as a nation, all of these questions are swirling around. They are gaining momentum. It started with the soldiers at the front and with the more aware people, but it is percolating through wider and wider rings of the population, depending on their level of consciousness. Those at the highest levels see it first. Those at the lower levels will be the last to see it. But it is moving through the consciousness. Then, of course, you have at the emotional level, how can you be sent against machine guns without proper equipment, without having feelings? How can you feel that you narrowly escape death without having strong feelings? Well, you cannot, except if you are a psychopath or a narcissist who is completely numb. But normal people will have very strong feelings.

You might be a Russian mother who is patriotic, and therefore, you are proud when your son goes to war. But when he comes back wounded, or when he is reported dead, or when he is reported missing, or when you do not receive any information about where he is and whether he is alive or not, you cannot help but have strong feelings. The same for any kind of relative. If you could see the Russian collective emotional body, you would see this great upheaval. You would see the forming of these vortexes that are pulling more and more people into them every day. Then you could go to the identity level, and you can see that, again, there are questions arising about the Russian national identity. And this actually started when the war started, because the people who had the highest level of awareness, many of them left. But you may think they are outside of Russia, but of course, they are still tied in to the emotional, mental, and identity bodies, and they are also pulling on them.

The irreversible cycle of change in Russia

After the war started, many people in Russia started quietly questioning the national identity: “Do we really need to see ourselves as an empire? Do we really need to seek superiority? And especially, do we need to seek it through force?” What does this all lead to? Well, it leads to the consideration that when Putin made the decision, and the people around him made the decision, to invade Ukraine, he started an irreversible cycle that will bring change to Russia. It was not that change was not already happening in Russia, primarily because of all the many spiritual people in Russia, whether they are following this dispensation or other spiritual teachings. There was growth in Russia, and as we have said before, the ideal scenario was that this had continued gradually. But what Putin did was put Russia into a spiral where the gradual change has been suspended, and instead more dramatic changes will happen. There will have to be a more dramatic outer event that wakes up the majority of the Russian population quicker than they otherwise would have done. And this is irreversible. It cannot be stopped.

Naturally, from the ascended perspective, we would have preferred a peaceful, gradual growth of both Ukraine and Russia. But again, everything is subject to the law of free will, and the Russian people are certainly not without responsibility for the power elite doing what they did, and therefore the Russian people will also be affected and will have to change much faster and in a much more abrupt way than they otherwise would. Even in Ukraine, as we have talked about with the division before the war, this has now been accelerated to the point where Ukraine needs to develop a national identity that it did not have before.

The situation of deceased Ukrainian soldiers

What about Ukrainian soldiers? Much the same considerations apply there in the sense that there are a small number of Ukrainian soldiers who are in a very low state of consciousness. They are killing without feeling any empathy or remorse. And they, of course, will also, if they are not willing to change, go to these levels of the astral plane. But the vast majority of Ukrainian soldiers that have left embodiment have been in a category where they have immediately been willing to receive our help, because they have not been in the mindset that the Russian soldiers are in. They have seen that they are being attacked and they are defending their own country, their own family, against the attackers. It is not that they cannot see that killing people is wrong. They know this. They just feel that they have no other option than to defend themselves.

The healing process and the sense of brotherhood

When they leave embodiment, they are generally more open to looking at their state of mind and actions from a neutral perspective, so many more of them can actually be helped and rise up to these levels of the mental realm. And what happens in these retreats in the mental realm, it is not that we have one for Russian soldiers and one for Ukrainian soldiers. They are put together. And now they interact and they come to look at the situation with a common understanding. They actually often forgive each other and they come to a greater sense of brotherhood and oneness as a result of this.

There is a certain healing process that is starting there that in the coming years can influence both nations and hopefully help them move on quicker than otherwise. Because once these soldiers leave embodiment, the Russian soldiers who can be helped, they do not have a desire for Russia to win and for Ukraine to be conquered or destroyed. And the Ukrainian soldiers that leave embodiment, they do not have a hatred of Russians. They do not want Russia to be destroyed, but they, of course, want Ukraine to remain as a separate nation. And most of the Russian soldiers reach the same conclusion. They see that this was simply a move that was a complete fiction. The justification for the war was a complete fiction because Russians and Ukrainians should be able to live together in peace and see each other as brothers. And they want this much more than they want Ukraine to be conquered and Russia to be a great empire. These soldiers can come to an understanding. There are examples of a Russian soldier killed a Ukrainian soldier and the Russian soldier was later killed or even the other way around. And they meet in this retreat, and now they can reconcile. They can forgive each other. They can realize that this was not personal, that this was something they were forced to do by circumstances. There is a healing process that is beginning from the soldiers from both sides who have accepted our help and risen to a higher level.

Rising above all attachments and conditions on earth

These are some of the considerations that we wanted to give you in order to give you a different perspective. You understand that when you are in human incarnation, when you are in embodiment, you look at situations and you often form a specific outcome of what you want to see happen. And even from the ascended perspective, we look at the situation and we want the Ukrainian people to have their own separate nation and we want the Russian people to grow as much as possible as a result of this. Whether they can maintain Russia as a collective nation is not a given. It is an insecurity right now what will happen to Russia as a result of this war. But beyond such concerns, and you can say even these concerns are based on the desire to help as many people as possible grow, our overall concern is to help people grow. It is not that we are attached to, or focused on, a specific outcome. We always focus on helping people grow and then the actual outcome in the physical is of secondary importance, because the way we look at the world is that everything is an opportunity to grow.

And what did Jesus say in his first dictation today about the Easter story? The purpose of any story is to have a positive impact on those who receive the story. Well, everything on earth is a story, so we are looking at all conditions as just a story that has the purpose of giving people an opportunity to grow. And we are always seeking to help any group of people grow and therefore use whatever story they accept to help them grow. And therefore, the actual physical conditions, the actual physical outcomes, are for us a means to an end.

Of course, you can look at human history and see that when people go into the duality consciousness, when they go into the illusion of separation, then they cannot see the outer conditions as a means to an end. They become an end in itself. And that is why they become so attached to manifesting a specific outcome that they are willing to kill or go to war in order to manifest it. You can become so attached to your dream of creating a great empire that you are willing to go to extreme measures in order to manifest it. But of course, when you do this, you also encounter an extreme opposition and therefore you usually end up destroying yourself and often the empire you were seeking to create, as you clearly saw with Hitler and his desire to create a nazi empire that enveloped the entire earth.

If there is a lesson of history, this is certainly one of them: that if you become attached to an outcome, then that outcome must at some point be shattered for you to become free of your attachment. And that is why as a spiritual student it is so important to look at your attachments. Are you attached to a specific outcome? And then begin to question it. But that is, of course, what Jesus has already expounded upon, so I will not go into it further, even though it is, of course, my role as the Elohim of the Fourth Ray to cut spiritual people free from their attachments, from the collective consciousness, from the astral plane, from the mental realm, from the identity realm.

With this, I thank you for your attention. I thank you for your willingness to wrestle with these conditions. And I hope that those of you who are from Russia and Ukraine can see beyond this conflict and see that you are not first of all Ukrainians and Russians. You are first of all spiritual people and you all came from the same source and you are all on the path of returning to that source by rising above all attachments, conditions, sense of identity on earth. This I will gladly help you accomplish as you call to me to be cut free.

Astrea, I AM.