TOPICS: The key to freedom in not the ascension - Nirvana is not annihilation - The double illusion - Deliver the Living Word - Overcome the focus on self - Beware of the ego trap of turning the path into a struggle - You cannot lose by sharing your light - How to become awake - Progressive revelation -
Ascended Master Gautama Buddha, October 20, 2006 through Kim Michaels.
The Buddha I AM. Gautama was my name when I walked the earth. And though I still answer to that name, I have a higher name that I shall one day reveal to you, when you are ready to receive it because you have attained a higher integration with your own inner name, your own higher being that you are.
My Beloved, after I had entered Nirvana and had returned to the material universe to preach, I encountered three men who were struck by my peaceful radiance. They were struck by my God Flame radiating its light through my outer form. And so they asked me several questions about what I was. Was I a God, an angel and other questions. Who among you know the answer I gave them. What did I say to them when they asked, “What are you?” [Audience answers, “I am awake!”] That is right. I simply said, “I AM awake!” So my beloved, what do we of the ascended masters want to see for our students in embodiment? [Audience answers, “For us to be awake!”]
That is right. We want you to be awake as we have become awake. Whether we attained that sense of awareness after we ascended or while we were still in physical embodiment, you have the potential to become awake while you are still on earth. And therefore, you can become free of the state of illusion, the state of sleepwalking through life, whereby you feel that life is a treadmill, where you go around and around and you never seem to get anywhere. And life seems to have no purpose or deeper meaning or direction. Look at humankind and ask yourself the question, “How many people on this planet are even somewhat awake, to the point where they are consciously aware that as they go through their daily lives they are more than that?" And thus, because of that awareness they have a deeper appreciation for life.
When you are awake, the essential realization is that you are more than these outer manifestations. You are more than your outer situation. You are more than your physical body. You are more than your lower mind, your outer personality that has been shaped by this world. You are more than this. And what happens when you know that you are more? Well, you are not fully identified with this world, with your lower being and the outer personality, even the ego. And when you are not fully identified with it, your mind is not trapped in the mental box created by the ego. And thus, at least once in awhile, you can step outside that mental box and look at life from a broader perspective. You can look at the big picture. You can see the forest instead of pounding your head against one tree trunk.
The key to freedom in not the ascension
And this, of course, is the key to freedom. The key to freedom is not that you leave behind this physical body for good in the process of the ascension. My Beloved, are you awake? Did you hear what I said? The key to freedom is not that you leave the material universe behind in the process of the ascension. It would seem I am contradicting earlier teachings, in which we of the ascended masters did focus on the ascension as the goal of life. So why do I now say that the ascension is not the key to freedom? Because you cannot ascend unless you are awake.
And becoming awake is not a mechanical process that can be obtained by following certain outer rules or doctrines or rituals. It is a creative process that can be attained only through awareness that becomes internalized and therefore results in the ultimate LIFE decision. A decision that is not produced by you, that is not willed into being, but a decision that comes spontaneously from within because one day you decide that you are willing to be awake. You are willing to go beyond the state of consciousness that you have been in so far. You are willing to rise to that higher state of awareness, where part of your attention, part of your being, part of your sense of self is always outside your current situation, is always looking at the big picture, looking from a broader perspective. And therefore never looking at life fully from inside the mental box of the ego.
This is not an awareness that will come spontaneously. It is not a matter of meditating X hours a day for X number of years. It is not a matter of doing any other ritual. It is an awareness that must come ultimately from within. But it is an awareness that can be cultivated by your willingness to always look beyond the immediate situation, to always look beyond the current box of the ego, so that you do not identify fully with that box and become trapped in it.
This awareness of being fully awake is what we desire to see for all of you. And the reason for this is that we have become awake, we have become free, and thus we want all of you to attain that same freedom, that same joy, that same state of bliss. This is the peace that passeth understanding, the bliss that is beyond any outer conditions. For it does not depend on any conditions in this world, for you realize that the key to bliss is to connect to the source of bliss. And the source of bliss is not found in the material world. It is found in your own higher being, from which the source of life itself comes for you.
Nirvana is not annihilation
My Beloved, you were not created with no purpose. Life is not a treadmill. I am fully aware that some of my followers – or those who claim to be followers of the Buddha – have created a world view that they claim is based on my teachings, a world view that states that life is just a process of being created, of rising to the level of the Buddha consciousness and then merging back into, disappearing back into, Nirvana where you are obliterated. Well, it is a fiction of the human imagination, for Nirvana is not annihilation. It is a higher state of life that most people on earth cannot fathom. And therefore, to them it might seem that when you enter Nirvana, you disappear. But you only disappear from the sight of those who are not awake, who have not risen above duality.
You see, the teachings given by Mother Mary and Jesus on the ego and the duality consciousness are indeed the quintessential teachings for the Aquarian Age. For humankind is ready to recognize the existence of the ego. And they are ready – with some serious coaching – to understand the concept of duality and how it influences your thinking, how it blinds you to reality, how it binds you to this treadmill of always fighting some opposing force, never being able to reach your goal, never being able to break through and get where you want to be in life.
And the reason is that you have been fooled by the ego and the prince of this world to believe that your bliss is in this world. And thus, you have been told to follow your bliss and seek it in this world. For in order to attain it – they say – you have to overcome this opposing force. And so you get locked into this battle of fighting against the opposite duality. And this is a battle that can go on indefinitely—until you run out of time.
For when you are engaged in this battle, you are indeed creating your own opposition. You are polarized to one of the dualistic extremes, you are unbalanced, you are off the middle way. And in that imbalance, you create the opposition to your every effort because you project an unbalanced view into the cosmic mirror. And the mirror has no choice but to project an unbalanced material circumstance back to you as a result.
So being awake truly means that you realize the mechanics of the dualistic struggle, and that you decide that you will raise your awareness so that you become aware of the dualistic forces in your own being, the forces that divide you against yourself, that divide your lower being against your own higher being. And thus, in this division, you create those circumstances that oppose your goals.
And in a sense, this is a grace, for it is a safety mechanism built into the material universe. It is simply designed to make sure that when you go out of balance, when you go off the middle way, your imbalance creates an opposing force that seeks to pull you back to balance. So the further you go into one extreme – the harder you push to get to that goal that you have set for yourself – the more you create the opposition that opposes your effort and seeks to pull you back to center.
The double illusion
But, of course, you do not see it that way. You do not see that the material universe is providing a service to you by seeking to counteract your imbalance. Nay, you allow your ego to tell you that the universe is opposing what is your right—your right to be free and do whatever you want, regardless of the material universe, the law of balance. Not only do you create an imbalance that creates an opposition, nay you then rebel against the opposition that you created, projecting that it was not created by you but by some external force, be it the devil or by other people.
Now you are fighting two battles. And out of two battles will spring a third battle, and out of the three battles will spring a fourth. And pretty soon you are so enveloped in all these dualistic battles, that you have no attention left over to step back and say, “Might there be a better way? Might there be a middle way? Might it be possible to step off the treadmill of fighting dualistic battles and find a way to go beyond this struggle?”
This is the message of my life, where I first – growing up – lived a material, worldly life, then jumped to the opposite extreme of living in a forest, torturing myself and my physical body because I thought my physical body was the enemy and that I had to discipline and control it. The true reality that most Buddhists have not yet understood is that I truly realized that my body and the material world was not the enemy of my spiritual growth. I saw the enemy, and it was me, my lower being, my ego, my attachments, my expectations that life should be a certain way.
So what we truly desire to see for our students in this age is that you come into this awareness and rise above the dualistic struggle in your own being. But we desire to see this not simply for your own sake, not simply for your liberation or for your own bliss—we desire to see it because in this age we have a need for those who are willing to demonstrate the spiritual path for others.
Well, how do you demonstrate the spiritual path for others? The ultimate way is not to lecture or preach by giving them an outer intellectual teaching. No, the ultimate way is to be who you are, to be awake so that you can radiate the light that you are. This does not mean that you need to be silent, for, truly, I also gave teachings. I did not simply say “I AM awake” and let that be it. But when I gave those teachings, I did not give them the way they appear today, twenty-five hundred years later, where they have been written down and translated and retranslated and transcribed and retranscribed, and thus have been somewhat diluted, as any teaching that passes through the minds of many unenlightened human beings.
Deliver the Living Word
No, what I gave was the Living Word that was endowed with my God flame, with my Inner Being. We desire all of you to be able to deliver that Living Word. And I do not mean that you have to stand here in front of a group of people and give a dictation from us. I mean that as you speak to people, whether in a lecture situation or one-on-one, you are speaking freely from your Inner Being. You are letting your light flow so that the words are not the essence, the words are simply chalices for the light.
The words carry the Light, and they enter the other persons’ energy fields and uplift them and transform them. And they are suddenly awakened to the realization that there is an alternative to the state of consciousness of sleepwalking through life, because they see in you something more. They see you are awake, you are excited, you are enthusiastic, you are being who you are, you are at peace. They sense your bliss, and they say, “I want that!” And then you can tell them, “You can have it. And if you want a suggestion, here is the path I have followed. Your path will be different, but at least you have a starting point.”
All of you who are willing to study and internalize these teachings have the potential to reach that state of radiating your inner light of being the example of the spiritual path, the path of self-transcendence, the path of becoming more. Truly, we of the ascended masters are able to raise the vibration of a forcefield. And this is one of the reasons we give dictations that are an expression of the Living Word. But you too can do this. You too can be the open door for raising the vibration, for quickening other people, raising their consciousness, so they realize that there really is more to life. And if he can find it, if she can find it, maybe I can too.
For as we have said before, Jesus, Gautama, Krishna, Maitreya, Mother Mary, Saint Germain, El Morya, we are not the best examples for people, because they have already put us on a pedestal and think we are beyond the scope of normal human beings. And thus, they don’t think that they can follow our examples. And that is why we need you to demonstrate the path so that they can identify with you, be awakened, be inspired, be uplifted by your mere presence. For it is the presence, the I AM Presence, that uplifts, that raises up, that accelerates, that multiplies so that your talents are multiplied and you become more.
So my beloved, we of the ascended masters have need of you to be our counterparts in the material realm, to be our spiritual twin flames that you can be the open door here below, that our greater light can shine through and uplift those who have not yet seen that there is an alternative to sleepwalking through life, through living for three-score and ten without ever experiencing a moment of awareness, of being awake and truly appreciating what life is.
Overcome the focus on self
Yet as Mother Mary said, for you to reach that state, you must overcome the focus on self, on the little self, the narrow self, the self in the box. You must cultivate a greater love. You must find your greatest love, the love for which you came here originally—the gift that you wanted to bring to earth. The gift that you simply desired to express, and your desire is so strong – your love for that gift is so strong – that you were willing to come here to express that gift.
You must, if you are willing to be awake, reconnect to that greater love and let that love grow, so that it will become a magnet that simply pulls you out of that normal state of drudgery, of sleepwalking. And you are awake because you love to be awake, you love to feel that light flowing through you. You love to see it uplift other people. You love to feel that you are a part of the ascended masters and our endeavor to raise the consciousness of humankind.
Beware of the ego trap of turning the path into a struggle
There are of course many traps that the ego has devised for preventing you from reconnecting to your greater love. And one of the more subtle ones is to set up an unrealistic expectation for what the spiritual path should be like, and thereby cause you to pursue spiritual growth in an unbalanced manner, whereby, as I said, you create your own opposition. Your spiritual path, instead of becoming a process of greater and greater liberation, becomes an ongoing struggle that becomes harder and harder, until you finally break under the strain and give up and say, “I never want to have anything to do with that again.”
If you will be honest, you will see that many spiritual people have gone through this process—have broken under the strain and have given up on the spiritual path. Or they have decided that this is the level where I am comfortable and this is the level where I am willing to serve, but I am not willing to go beyond it. Some of these people have an expression that you will hear many times, if you listen. And that expression is, “I don’t need another messenger. I don’t need another guru. I don’t need another spiritual organization. I don’t want to go through all that again.”
Well, my beloved, we of the ascended masters fully agree with the “never again” sentiment. For we do not desire anyone to repeat such a cycle of turning the spiritual path into a struggle. We do not desire to see anyone repeat their mistakes. Yet I must tell you that behind the statement, “I don’t need another messenger, guru, organization or teaching,” behind that statement is what both Mother Mary and I have talked about: the self-centeredness, the focus on self.
Listen to the statement: “I don’t need.” It is all about “I,” it is all about “me.” For these people have become self-centered. And the goal of their spiritual path, of their involvement with a spiritual movement, was not to rise above self-centeredness and come into service to all life. No, their goal was to glorify the lesser self, to justify the lesser self, and to attain something that made them seem better than others because they had done these spiritual things.
If you are willing to be honest, you will see that self-centeredness is the real enemy of spiritual growth. But there is no guarantee that by following an outer spiritual teaching – even a teaching that is true and given by the ascended masters – there is no guarantee that this outer teaching will take you beyond self-centeredness. Because the only thing that will take you beyond is the decision that you are willing to come above it, you are willing to be awake.
You have a right to BE on earth
Surely, you will be rejected by some. Surely you will be condemned by others. Surely you will be told that you are not allowed to do this, you are not allowed to be loving and kind, you are not allowed to be in peace, you are not allowed to be happy, you are not allowed to be in bliss. Who do you think you are in this world, where everything is so serious and life is such a drudgery that you can come here and radiate this peace and love and light—and thereby disturb those who are so identified with the dualistic struggle that they have convinced themselves that there is no alternative. And here you come and radiate this love and they realize that there is an alternative, but in order to attain that love they have to give up their mental boxes.
And so, they will resent you. But my beloved, that is part of the test. For it was because you let other people cause you to stop your light from shining that you left off the true path of self-transcendence, the path of becoming more. And thus, many of you who are the spiritual people are once again facing that initiation.
Will you let other people – whether it be your family or those that used to be your peers in a spiritual organization, or the world at large – will you let them stop from you from letting your light shine? Or will you finally become that sun and let your light shine, no matter what the world thinks about it or says about it. For after all, you, no matter what the world says, you have a right to be on earth and to BE on earth all that you are Above, to let that light shine, to bear witness to your truth.
Do you hear me? You have a right to Be the Christ, to Be the Buddha, to Be your God Flame. You have an absolute God-given right. And those who oppose you and want you not to disturb them have no right to make that claim. For they have violated their free will and they seek to pull others into that violation.
Free will does not give you the right to destroy others. And that is precisely what those who are trapped in the consciousness of the fallen angels will not realize. They have no right whatsoever to kill those who bear witness to the light. Nor do they have a right to kill them emotionally and cause them to shut off their light or feeling so bad about themselves that they dare not express anything beyond the ordinary.
You see, you have a right to Be here. You have a right to disturb other people. And they have a right to be disturbed so that they are forced to face the choice—to Be or not to Be. And even if they deny it – the denial of Being, the Being they see in you – it will do something, it will start a process in their Beings. And I must tell you that in many cases a soul encountering a person with spiritual light and denying that light will not forget that experience for many embodiments. And the experience will come back and haunt that person until finally the person is willing to look at why it felt so angry. And then, in looking at this, many people have risen above it and have come up higher and have started the spiritual path, just because sometime in the near or distant past they encountered one person who dared to express their light.
You cannot lose by sharing your light
So you are planting seeds. And sometimes the seeds have to stay under ground for a very long time before they germinate and sprout. And some of the seeds do fall on barren ground and never have the opportunity to sprout. But I tell you that no encounter you have, where you let your light shine, is for naught. For if nothing else, regardless of the reaction of the other people, when you express your light with love, with non-attachment, you close the figure-eight flow. And your light will be multiplied and you will receive more light from your I AM Presence that will make the sun of your heart shine even brighter.
When you are Being who you are, when you are expressing your light with non-attachment, without imposing any intellectual reasoning or rules or restrictions upon it, then you can never cast your light before swine. You can never waste that light. For the light that is given with purity of love cannot return to you with any lower vibration, regardless of what other people do, regardless of them misqualifying some of the light you give them. That is their choice. That is their karma. If your intention is pure, you will not make negative karma. You will make positive karma and have your light multiplied. For truly, God is not an unfair taskmaster. God does not punish you for doing good deeds, when those good deeds are done selflessly and with non-attachment.
There does come a state, where you reach a certain freedom, a certain willingness to be who you are, where you transcend the level of duality, the level where you can make mistakes, where some actions are right and some are wrong. Instead, you rise to a level, a higher level, of right that is not in opposition to wrong. And thus, your actions simply cannot be mistakes, no matter what happens in the outer. The action of sharing your light, of letting your light shine, cannot be a mistake. For you have cast your bread upon the waters, and it shall not return unto you void, but it shall return unto you multiplied by your own I AM Presence and by the ascended masters—out of whose beings you are an extension.
How to become awake
My Beloved, becoming awake is not a matter of finding the philosopher’s stone or some secret formula. It is a process, and the essence of that process is self-observation, the willingness to look at yourself, to look at the beam in your own eye, instead of focusing on the mote, the splinter, in the eye of another. For when you are willing to observe yourself without attachments, without seeking to see only what your ego wants you to see, then you have already started separating yourself from the ego and its illusions.
And this separation is the key to a greater awareness, a greater self-awareness, whereby you realize that you are more than that little self that lives in this small box and is so focused on itself and thinks the rest of the universe should be here to serve it. Instead, you see beyond it and you start seeing glimpses of the Higher Self that you are. And that will reconnect you to the higher love that you are and for which you came to earth.
And suddenly you will start realizing that although life can have its ups and downs, behind these outer appearances is a deeper reality. And in that deeper reality life on earth is an incredible opportunity, an incredible gift. An incredible opportunity to express yourself, your creativity, your inner being and to uplift others, to re-polarize an entire planet to the highest vision of God.
Take some time once in awhile out of your busy daily schedule and contemplate what a wondrous opportunity you have by being in a physical body in this material universe. Look beyond your daily situation. Look beyond your challenges. I know that they sometimes are severe, or at least seem to have a certain reality. But once in awhile look beyond them and see that behind every challenge is an opportunity for self-transcendence. And when you look for that self-transcendence, then you will not think that you are the doer who has to solve all of these problems, that you know you cannot solve with your outer mind. Instead, you will immerse yourself in the flow, whereby the light of your I AM Presence will flow through you, and that light will then dissolve those problems that seem like insurmountable obstacles to the outer mind.
And thus, when you take time to appreciate life, then life will become easier to appreciate. And then your life will no longer be the drudgery of the dualistic battle against forces that oppose you at every turn. Your life will become what we all desire to see for you, an upward spiral leading to greater and greater freedom, until you finally break through and achieve that complete non-attachment that is the true key to peace and bliss.
Progressive revelation
I, as all of us, have much more to say. For we of the ascended masters are in the River of Life. And in the River of Life self-transcendence is endless, is beyond limit. And thus, our teachings can keep transcending themselves and going beyond the former expressions. You see, my beloved, it is not the outer teaching that is important. It is the flow of light through the outer teaching that is important. Do not turn our outer teachings into graven images, that you hold on to in a misplaced loyalty of thinking you have to remain loyal to the ascended masters by sticking to an outer teaching that we ourselves have transcended.
How can you be loyal to us by holding on to the past? The only way to be loyal to us is to move on with us, to transcend yourself, to become more as we are becoming more. Whether you do this through an outer teaching, whether you are inspired by outer messengers, or whether you do it through a completely internal process – where you yourself receive the Living Word in your own heart – the important thing is to flow.
We of the ascended masters cannot be put into any mental box created by the human ego or by any person in this world. We never have fit into those mental boxes—and we never will! Look at our lives. Buddhism did not appear out of nowhere. Buddhism was my attempt to shake up the mental box created by Hinduism, which had locked people into a rigid outer framework that denied their freedom to Be. Jesus’ life was an attempt to shake the mental box of Judaism and shake the Jews out of their self-created mental boxes, that they had created based on the teachings and the example of Abraham and Moses, who were both willing to go beyond their mental boxes and leave behind the old and reach for the promised land—which is not a physical land but a state of consciousness.
How hard can it be to figure out that everything in a spiritual teaching is a symbol for a higher reality? How difficult is it to understand this one truth and therefore escape that momentum, that planetary momentum, of focusing on the outer word rather than reaching beyond those words to the Spirit of Truth, the Living Buddha, the Living Christ, rather than the dead Buddha and the dead Christ that have been encapsulated in words or images that are not changing?
This, my beloved, is the one truth that we desire all of humankind, at least the top ten percent of the most spiritual people, to understand—that there is a deeper reality beyond the outer expression, that there is a spiritual truth beyond the outer expression of truth. If you want a suggestion for your life’s mission, then make that your life’s mission—to get that truth out and to help everyone you encounter see that there is more than that outer expression. And the more is to reach for the Spirit of truth until you become one with that Spirit, your own higher being, and therefore become the open door so that the Spirit can flow through your words.
Make that your goal in life—to become the open door for the Spirit of truth, or the Spirit of Love, or the Spirit of Peace, or the Spirit of Divine Direction, or the Spirit of any God quality for which you have that greater love that propelled you into the material universe to express it and bring that gift to uplift everyone and raise them above that state of non-awareness, that state that Jesus called death, which is spiritual death.
Recognizing that you are still in a physical body which has some serious issues with hard chairs, I shall restrain myself from further discourse and simply say, there was not one ascended being in heaven who did not look upon your interchange this afternoon without feeling a great sense of joy. For in the freeness of your expression, your togetherness, you attained that state that was there in Maitreya’s Mystery school and was that state of togetherness that is the true key to learning, to growing, to coming up higher.
So we looked upon this gathering with great joy. And we look forward to the coming days. And we hope you can maintain that Spirit which was – when you think about it – a spirit of the innocence of the child. If you can all become as little children, then Jesus will appear and talk to you on Sunday. For he says, “Let the children come to me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God.” So be willing to come into that child-like innocence of being open to a higher truth, an inner direction for your personal life and what service your own higher being desires to render to humankind through you. Thus, I bid you, good night!
Copyright © 2006 by Kim Michaels
Source: http://www.ascendedmasterlight.com/ascended-master-light/date/21-2006/135-are-you-awake
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