Listen to a recording of this dictation (subscribers only)
Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, December 31, 2021
I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. What a joy it has been for all of us to watch you, our direct students, over this past year. Many of you have made use of our teachings and have made tremendous progress on your spiritual path. I may not be seen as the one who is the first to give praise, nevertheless I want to acknowledge this progress, it has been considerable for many of you who are using these teachings.
When I say spiritual progress, of course, I mean progress in resolving your psychology, the psychology that keeps you attached to earth, for this is what spiritual progress is all about. We have before talked about how we face a certain dilemma when working with people of earth. Jesus has said we are like used car salesmen who use the bait and switch technique. We must give you a teaching that appeals to you to get you in the door, and then hope you can adjust and recognize what the spiritual path really is all about.
There is, of course, when you look at the planet as a whole, a considerable amount of people who call themselves spiritual but who are still on the outer path. They think it is a matter of using a spiritual technique, studying a spiritual teaching, learning it intellectually, following a certain guru and then they will automatically one day reach whatever they see as their goal. As we have explained so many times, this is, of course, not the case. It is an illusion promoted by the fallen beings, the false teachers who want to keep people trapped here on earth, trapped under their control.
What is it that can allow any force, be it human beings or non-embodied beings to have control over you? Well, aside from a dictator who has physical control over you, it can only be psychological control. What allows someone to control your psyche? It is that there is something in your psyche that they can use to control you. The prince of this world has something in you whereby he can rule you. He can make you do what he wants you to do. He can make you react as the demons of Mara attempted to make me react, when I was ready to go into Nirvana.
Why are you not ready to go into Nirvana? Because the demons of Mara, they have a reaction in you that they can use to get you involved in the play, as I said last year. What pulls you into being focused on the play that is being enacted on earth? There is some attachment. Many of you have heard the word attachment, even for years. But have you grasped what it really is?
What is an attachment? Well, you take the situation described in the New Testament. A young man comes to Jesus and says: “Master, I really want to follow you, but please let me go and bury my dead father first.” Jesus says to him: “Let the dead bury their dead.” There is the situation where Jesus came to his future disciples that were mending their nets and said: “Leave your nets and follow me.” The young man who wanted to bury his father had an attachment to some kind of custom. If the other disciples had not been willing to leave their nets instantly, it would have been because they had an attachment.
In other words, what is the spiritual teacher always seeking to accomplish? It is to help you move from the level of consciousness you are at right now, to the next level up. Therefore, the teacher always comes and says: “Come with me to the next level.” Now, if there is something in you that you are attached to, you will say: “Oh! I will follow you master, but I just have this or that or the next thing I have to do first.” You cannot follow the master. You may say: “But surely I can follow the master later.” Of course, you can, we are not saying it’s all or nothing—it’s now or never.
On the other hand, do you consider that you have a divine plan? Do you consider that in that divine plan, you yourself when you were looking towards your coming embodiment – this embodiment, you had a higher vision. You defined a goal, and you could see that for you to reach the goal that you defined in your divine plan, you would have to go through a process, because you would have to move from the level of consciousness that you had when you came into embodiment, to the level that was necessary for you to fulfill the goal defined in your divine plan.
You also defined a timeline, saying ideally you would like to reach the goal before you were out of embodiment, or at a specific time, at a specific age. Therefore, there was not too much time to dilly dally, to go on tangents, to go into blind alleys. You had a certain timetable that you defined for yourself. When the master comes to you, he is not coming because he wants to force you. He is coming because in your divine plan you wanted him to come and remind you that it is time to move on. If you now say: “Oh master, leave me alone for a while, I am busy here.” It is not the master you are letting down, it is your own divine plan and so this is why you can all benefit from keeping this in mind: What did you define in your divine plan? What was it you wanted to accomplish in this lifetime?
Then you can look at yourself and say: “I see that in these last couple of years, I have become attached to certain viewpoints, certain issues that have taken up a disproportionate amount of my attention. And that have actually pulled out of me a certain amount of mental and emotional energy, because I have been thinking about these issues, going over them again and again, going over scenarios in my mind and trying to convince other people that I am right. I have had strong feelings about these issues.” And if you see this in yourself you can say: “Does this help or hinder my divine plan? Does this help me move closer to my goal or does it keep me stuck at a certain level of consciousness? Is it therefore an attachment?”
Then you perhaps have a better foundation for deciding: “It is time to let it go. Because compared to my divine plan, how important is this issue, whether it is this, that or the next thing? How important is it? Will I say to Jesus: What is that to me, I will follow thee.”
Will you say to the teacher: “I will follow you. I will leave my nets. I will let the dead bury their dead. I will let the dead discuss, debate this or that issue. I will just LET IT GO and move on.” This is the difference between those who can make maximum use of a spiritual teacher and those who cannot. It is the difference between those who meet the goals in their divine plan and those who do not.
If you were to compare this dispensation that we have given through this messenger, to the previous one of the Summit Lighthouse, you would see that many people in the Summit Lighthouse had a much clearer sense that the path was about discipline, it was about following the teacher, following the guru, going in a certain direction. They were much more goal oriented.
In this dispensation we have not put any pressure on you. We have left it up to you how you will implement the teaching, what pace you will set for your growth. However, this is not to say that one approach is better than the other. They are just two different ones, because if you also look at the Summit Lighthouse you would see that many, many people had a clear goal, they were very disciplined, they were very determined with their outer mind to do so and so many hours of decrees a day, pass their tests and all of this. But, they did not actually make much progress because they still had an attachment. They had an attachment to doing things a certain way, they also had attachments to strong viewpoints, to strong opinions including the view of their own importance as spiritual students, as the ones who were bringing in the Golden Age of Saint Germain, or saving the world for Saint Germain as they saw it.
It does not matter which approach we take as masters, there is no guarantee that the student will respond. It is up to the student to respond. You see, for example, that this messenger has not presented himself as a guru, has not gathered to himself a group of followers where he can come out and say: “You have to do this. You have to do that.” But he has provided you with an example. He was very goal oriented. When he found the spiritual path, when he found the teachings, he did apply himself. He did come to a point a long time ago now, where he decided to start working directly on his own psychology. He was very disciplined, very willing to look at his psychology, to study teachings and books. He has been very willing to take the teachings we have given through him. He has not reasoned that “Oh, the reason the masters can give these teachings through me is that I have already passed these initiations.” He has not allowed himself to reason that. He has looked at the teachings, taken the teachings, looked in the mirror and said: “How does this apply to me?”
You, of course, all have the same potential, we are not trying to elevate him, we are trying to say: “What one has done, all can do.” How determined are you to fulfill the goals that you defined in your divine plan for this lifetime? Where do you feel you are at? Are you willing to ask yourself, or ask one of us, ask one of the Chohans? As you are now taking up this vigil again on January 2nd are you willing to ask Lord Lanto and then the other Chohans: “Show me where I am at on the path. Am I behind my divine plan or am I in step with it. Show me then what I am lacking, what my attachment is that is holding me back.” This is a tremendous opportunity for you as a community with this vigil. It can bring tremendous growth to you, those of you who will apply yourselves.
Now, this messenger has, as I said, been willing to apply the teachings, look at his own psychology, not only to deal with the cosmic birth trauma of coming to earth, but also in realizing something that we have not yet really talked that much about. Namely, that he did not come to earth with a completely resolved psychology. He was not ready to ascend when he came to earth. He came to earth with a certain attitude, a certain mindset and as he has been willing to realize, that mindset made him think that he was here to help raise the earth, to help free other people.
In reality he is here to free himself from the mindset that was holding him back on a natural planet. The same, of course, applies to all of you who are avatars. All of us who came here to earth as avatars. Why did we come to earth? Well, it was not as you might think because we were bad, or evil, or selfish, or self-centred and therefore we deserved to come to a planet like this. No! We did actually come here to help raise the earth by having a higher state of consciousness than most people on earth, so we could pull up on the collective. But we did not come here specifically to change specific other people and to accomplish specific things on earth.
In other words, before I came to earth as an avatar, I did not come here specifically to start the religion of Buddhism. Before Jesus came to earth as an avatar, he did not come here specifically to be the Christ in embodiment and to start a major world religion. Contrary to what our followers want to believe about how special we were, we were not special compared to all other avatars that had come to earth. We had the potential that they all have, but this was something that could only unfold as we responded to being on earth, as we started overcoming our initial reaction, our birth trauma and our reaction to this planet, and overcoming also this psychology that brought us to earth.
What is the next level of teaching that we want to give in our progressive revelation about avatars? Well, it is that as an avatar you start out on a natural planet, meaning, there are no fallen beings, there is no large part of the population who have gone into duality and separation, it is a potential that you could go into separation, as it was on earth before it became an unnatural planet, but it is not a guarantee.
You start on a natural planet, but you start out pretty much as we have talked about on earth, you start out with a point-like sense of identity. And you start on a natural planet – which is not the same as earth – but on a natural planet you start at the lowest level of consciousness that is there on that planet (because it is only on an unnatural planet where you start at the 48th level and there are levels below where you start.) On a natural planet you start at the lowest level of consciousness that the planet is designed for. Then you gradually raise yourself up to the highest level that is currently there on that planet.
What happens on a natural planet is, of course, that there are some lifestreams that go through this process faster than others. There are some that apply themselves more, make use of whatever teachers you have on a natural planet, and that means that they now reach the highest level of consciousness that is there on their natural planet.
The question is—what do they then do? Because there is not any point in them staying on that planet, at least not beyond a certain time. You may for a time serve as leaders, but there will come a point where you long for something else. You know there is a next step you need to take. There are two options available for avatars who have come to this level. One is that there are other natural planets that have higher levels of consciousness than the one on which you started. You can move to one of these planets. The other option is that you can move to an unnatural planet.
Now, why would you as a being who has reached the highest level of consciousness possible on a natural planet choose to go to an unnatural planet? Well, that depends very much on where you are at in consciousness. Now, I am saying that on a given natural planet (and you did not all come from the same one, of course) but on a given natural planet there is a highest level of consciousness. But this does not necessarily mean that you are ready for your ascension. It is not so that when you walk the process that is possible on a given natural planet, you will automatically be ready to ascend and become an ascended master.
The reason for this is that in order to become an ascended master, you need to completely resolve the enigma of free will. You need to truly internalize what free will is – what it means. And you need to resolve why it was a stroke of genius by the Creator to give all self-aware beings free will. In truth, the concept, of course, was not invented by our Creator but has been there in many other creations. However, not in all creations, as some Creators have experimented with not giving completely free will, but they have all learned a certain lesson that it does not work to restrict free will. That the only way to create a sustainable creation – world of form, really is to give complete free will.
In order for you to ascend from an unascended sphere, you need to resolve this enigma. Some will say: “Well, I will attempt to do this on this higher natural planet.” But there are others, who quite frankly have the courage to say: “I do not think I get this, I do not think I get free will. I do not understand why our Creator gave everybody free will.” Some of you then look at unnatural planets and you say: “When I look at an unnatural planet, I really do not understand why our Creator gave people free will. But I want to grasp this. I want to grasp it and that is why I am willing to embody on an unnatural planet. I am willing to experience in my own being what it means that there are people who are trapped in duality, where I cannot persuade them. That there are fallen beings who are so trapped in duality that they not only cannot be persuaded, they will try to silence me or prove me wrong, or even convert me into their state of mind.”
In other words, there is a certain amount of people, beings on a natural planet who say: “I really want to resolve this and perhaps the best way for me, is to go to an unnatural planet where the view I have built about life and about creation, and about free will on my cosy natural planet will be challenged.” In other words, you are saying: “I want to have my viewpoint challenged. I want to go to a place where there is no argument I can come up with that will convince people, as I am used to from a natural planet.” When you are a leader, when you have a high level of consciousness on a natural planet, you are used to thinking that you can come up with a reasoning process that will help people at lower levels of consciousness see that “you are right” and therefore they will follow you, they will follow your advice and your directions.
This is what it is on a natural planet where people are open to learning something they do not know today. That is not the case on an unnatural planet as I am sure you will all agree on. That is why there are some of us, I am not necessarily saying that we were more advanced, or more eager, or more courageous than others, but we decided: “We want to challenge ourselves by embodying on an unnatural planet.”
What those of you who are ready for this teaching can benefit from doing, is starting very slowly, very gradually to consider how you look at this issue of free will, how you deal with it. What is your view of it. What is your (so to speak) default reaction, your gut reaction to it. When you see the mess that human beings have created on earth, when you see how the fallen beings have abused their own free will and have violated the free will of others, what is your reaction? Then you can start looking at what is the attitude, what is the belief behind this reaction, this gut reaction. What is it in your head that you think about free will? Then you can go to the identity level and start considering: “How do I see myself as a being with free will interacting with other people with free will? How do I see myself as a being who has at least started to rise above duality, interacting with people who are in duality and who therefore really are not exercising a free will because their will is not free?”
You can then start clarifying this, and thereby you can come to see what was the dilemma that you had not resolved on a natural planet concerning free will. You can then start looking at the earth and really considering: “How can I resolve this?” We have already given many teachings that can be helpful to you and you can look at them. But we will also give more in the future, this is, of course, just the beginning of a new level of teaching.
What is it for you that you feel about free will? What do you think about how free will works and how it could work differently? How do you see yourself as a being with free will in relation to other people? How do you think you are ever going to get out of this planet, this madhouse as a planet, as some of us have felt including myself at a certain stage? What will resolve it, what are the attachments you have about free will that are keeping you here? Not because you are actually forced to be here, but because you do not want to leave here until you have done what you came for. You do not want to leave until you have resolved the enigma that brought you here, that made you decide to come here.
What you can begin to do here, is you can perhaps begin to shift your attitude to having been on earth and having experienced what you have experienced, including the birth trauma, including the entire frustration of seeing how people are hurting themselves, how they do not want to stop hurting themselves. They do not want to know how they are hurting themselves. They do not want to listen to you who knows better and who could help them escape suffering. They want to stay in their suffering and they will not only ignore you, they will actively reject you, put you down, ridicule you, even torture you or kill you in order to silence you. How do you deal with this? How do you look at this?
Well, what you can do is you can do what this messenger has done. You can say: “Was I a complete idiot for choosing to come to this planet? Did I deserve what has happened to me? Should I feel guilty for what I have done on this planet, for the way I have reacted?” Of course, you can perhaps begin to shift this and say: No, you were actually very rational, very mature, very willing to grow and that is why you decided to come here. It was a growth-based decision. It was not that you were forced. It was not that you could not get any further on a natural planet, so you had to embody on earth. You are here because you made a decision that this would give you maximum growth.
You can then begin to look at another thing that can help you deal with being on earth, and that is this. As an avatar when we come to earth, we have said, you go down to the 48th level of consciousness in order to embody. Of course, as you go down from the 144th level, you take on one illusion for each step you go down. This becomes your perception filter that obscures your vision, your memory of having been on a natural planet. But, it does not mean that there are not certain things you take with you.
It is not a clear memory that you have for having been on a natural planet, but it is a certain attitude to life, a certain attitude to yourself that you have as an avatar, even when you are at the 48th level of consciousness. Of course, as you raise your level of consciousness it becomes clearer and clearer. You take this messenger as an example again, and again it can be different for each one of you, but many of you will recognize what I am saying here. This messenger felt there are certain mistakes he should not make here on earth. There are certain things on earth he should not do. There is a certain level to which he should not sink on earth, he should stay above some of the mess found on this planet. He has always in this embodiment and in past embodiments going back to the very first embodiment, been very hard on himself.
Many of you will recognize this. You can be very forgiving towards other people, but you are not forgiving of yourself, because you came here with a certain attitude to life that was based on how life is on a natural planet. What did that mean? It meant you have created a certain standard for yourself of how you should behave, what you should and should not do. And if you go against that standard, you feel you have done the worst possible thing that anybody can do in the entire universe.
Now, what have we said about the fallen beings, what have they done to screw up things on earth? They have created a standard and projected that everybody should evaluate everything based on that standard. The difference here is that the standard created by the fallen beings is a dualistic standard springing from the duality consciousness. As an avatar on a natural planet who has reached the highest level of consciousness, you are not in duality. You have not created a standard based on duality.
But do you see what this means? You come now to a planet where everything is infused with, polluted with, duality, but you still think that there are some of the things in duality that you should not do and there are some of the things you should do. But you do not realize, because you cannot realize it until you reach a certain level of consciousness and have a certain level of Christ discernment, you do not realize, that you cannot tell the difference between your own standard and the standard of the fallen beings.
You think that if you do certain things that are not according to your own standard, you have done something wrong. On a natural planet you had a standard for evaluating your behavior. You did not think in terms of right and wrong, you did not apply a value judgment because that is duality. But now you are on a planet infused with duality and you start applying this right and wrong, dualistic value judgment to yourself. That is why you feel: “But I have done this, how am I better than the fallen beings, am I not just as bad as the fallen beings?”
Of course, the fallen beings will mercilessly exploit this. What is the way out of it? You cannot undo what you did. You cannot change what happened in the past. What you can do is say: “Okay, I did what I did, but what I did back then, even if it was five minutes ago, is no longer there. It is not a physical manifest reality. What affects me from what I did is my reaction to it. What is my reaction based on – the creation of separate selves.”
So you can look at these separate selves, you can use our tools to resolve them, but you need to go beyond just this. You need to actually say: “But some of this is not a separate self created here on earth. It is an attitude I brought with me from a natural planet and I need to resolve it. I need to just let it go and say: There is absolutely no meaning to applying a standard from a natural planet to when I am embodied on an unnatural planet. What does it matter what I did on this dense chaotic planet? What does it matter if I made a mistake here? What is the point in even evaluating – was it a mistake, was it not a mistake? What I did was based on a certain level of consciousness with certain separate selves. If I overcome that, I am free of it. I should be free of it if I am willing to set myself free of it.”
In other words, what I am trying to say here is this. We have all done exactly what you have done. We came with a standard, we did something here on earth that we felt was not according to our standard. We fell into this abyss, this black hole of self-blame, self-pity and loathing and self-hatred and anger against ourselves for having not been perfect and always being in control of our reactions. It is almost as if we had the expectation that on the natural planet we were always as they say “cool, calm and collected” and we had the expectation that when we descend into this total chaos, that is planet earth, we should still be able to be “cool, calm and collected”, always in control of ourselves.
Well, my beloved it is a completely unrealistic standard. Nobody has ever been able to live up to it. Nobody, regardless of their level of consciousness has ever been able to live up to it. Not I the Buddha, not Jesus the Christ, not Maitreya – not anybody who has embodied here has been able to live up to it. It cannot be done. Because, you must descend to the 48th level and you will react based on the 48th level of consciousness. How else could it be?
It is the mechanics of taking incarnation on an unnatural planet. You will react in a different way than you did on a natural planet. You cannot keep your cool and why should you? Why should you have to? Why should you hold yourself to that standard? What I am saying is this. We all did this, we all fell into this abyss of self-blame. We all crawled out of it step-by-step by grasping on to this rope ladder that the ascended masters were lowering down to us, climbing up hand over foot, one step at a time. We came to the edge of the abyss, but the only way to get out of the abyss was to look at this and say: “Why am I blaming myself? Why am I feeling guilty? Why am I angry with myself? Why do I think I should have been perfect, that I should never have reacted? Why do I think this way? Is it really reasonable, does it make any sense?”
And then you come to that point, not as an outer decision with the outer mind, you just see it. What you actually see is the self that you had on a natural planet. Because on a natural planet, how do you grow, how can you grow? On a natural planet you start at the lowest level of consciousness on that planet. What does that mean? Well, there are certain illusions that you have not resolved. Because even a natural planet has illusions otherwise how would there be levels of consciousness? How would there be growth if there were not levels of consciousness? How do you grow? What have we told you, how do you learn anything?
You are a co-creator, you learn by co-creating. How do you co-create? You create a mental image, you project consciousness and energy through it onto matter and it takes on form. Then you evaluate. But what are you doing when you are co-creating? We have said you are creating a mental image, yes, but you are actually creating a self, you are creating a sense of “This is who I am, this is my identity, this is my mental body, this is my emotional body and this is my physical body. This is who I am.” And this becomes a self that you are projecting through.
Now, as you grow to higher levels of consciousness, you let one self die, you create another one, just as you do on earth. The difference is, of course, you are not going into duality but you are still creating selves. As you are raising yourself up on a natural planet, you are creating a more and more sophisticated sense of self. Just as we have said you do here between the 48th and the 96th level. This is just a process of growing in consciousness.
But how do you ascend? Well, you ascend by overcoming those selves. Those who came to the top level of their first natural planet and moved on to the higher natural planet, they took the selves with them they had and that became their starting point on the second planet. Naturally, when you decide to come to an unnatural planet, you also take those selves with you and they to some degree become the starting point for your attitude to yourself here on earth, even your attitude to earth.
What do you need to do in order to ascend? What did we all need to do, those who have ascended from earth? We needed to look at those selves and let them go. They are much easier to let go of, because they are not based on duality, they are not the same kind of illusions. On the other hand you can only let go of them when you see them and on an unnatural planet as dense as earth, it is much harder to come to see these selves that you brought with you from a natural planet.
That is why you first need to resolve the birth trauma and many of the selves you created here on earth before you can start looking at what brought you here. But there are quite a number of you who have used the teachings we have given on the avatars, healing your spiritual traumas and so forth. Therefore, you are now ready to take this next step and start looking at the selves that you brought with you, resolving them so that you can come to this point, where you can not only look at earth and say: “There is nothing that pulls me here.” But you can look at the entire unascended sphere and say: “There really is no other natural planet that is pulling on me. I am ready to ascend. I am ready to leave this unascended sphere behind completely.” That is how you become an ascended master.
With this I have given you what I wanted to give you for this New Year’s instalment. We shall see what other teachings we desire to release about this throughout the year. I want to thank those of you who have taken our previous teachings, because you have been the trailblazers who have opened up the collective consciousness to where we could release this as a physical teaching. Once again, my deep gratitude, my ongoing gratitude because any dictation we give is, of course, just one dictation in an ongoing chain of releases.
I know sometimes, some of you can feel, the messenger even feels sometimes that “This dictation was special, this was at a higher level, this was almost complete in itself.” It is good that you have this feeling but, of course, any dictation is just one pearl in the necklace of pearls that stretches out into the future, no way of telling at the present how long it will continue, but certainly we look forward to a long ongoing string of pearls of higher awareness.
Copyright © 2021 Kim Michaels
* As a thoughtform for this coming year we will use the Sun thoughtform from last year:
“Gautama Buddha, you are the perfect mirror for earth”.
“Saint Germain, you are the perfect mirror for the economy”.
“Mother Mary, you are the perfect mirror for women” .
* You may be interested in reading the question and answer about An avatar and the selves created on a natural planet
and also other questions and answers about free will and about avatars.