Why
Are You Here?
NOTE: This article is based on a presentation delivered at the Shangra-la
Easter conference, 2005.
A number of years ago I was participating in a spiritual retreat. We
heard a lot of spiritual teachings, and sometimes one sentence just
stands out in your mind. You can hear a long teaching and there is one
sentence that has a special message for you. So one day a teaching brought
up the question, "Why are you here?" And for some reason that
just stood out in my mind in glowing neon.
After we had finished that session, I went up in the hills and sat down.
It was one of those days you see in Montana; they call it Big Sky Country
because the sky was completely blue, there was not a cloud, there was
no wind, and the mountains were like chiseled against that blue sky.
And I sat there and I looked up at those mountains and I looked up at
the sky and the question just rang through my soul, “Why are you
here?” And it wasn’t just why was I there in that particular
spot, it was, “Why am I here on Earth?”
The question was so powerful that it hit me with full force, and for
a few moments I was stunned. And then I fell silent and from deep within
my heart, deep within my soul, the answer came, “I am here because
I love God.” And it came from the deepest part of my being; it
rang out, "I just love God." And then came the second part,
“And I want everyone else to feel that love for God.”
And it was the most profound experience, it was like one of those life-changing
moments when you realize that you have just broken through to a new
level and your life has taken a whole new turn.
Searching for your mission in life
From my early childhood I had, like many other spiritually minded people,
a very strong sense that I had a mission, that I had something to do,
that I had to leave my mark on the world and somehow help change the
world. I found the spiritual path when I was 18, and at that time I
realized that my mission was not a worldly mission, it was not about
accomplishing something in the normal sense of making money or having
a career. When I was in high school, it was my intent to go into politics,
and for a couple of years I used to joke, “When I become prime
minister of Denmark, things are really going to change.”
I really saw that as my mission but then something happened. I realized
that there is so much compromise in politics, and I knew I couldn’t
compromise when it came to by deepest beliefs and principles. So I gave
up on politics and I was kind of left in a vacuum. It was just about
a year later, when I was 18, that I found the spiritual path and I realized
that my real mission was a spiritual mission.
The point is that for many years I knew I had a spiritual mission but
I did not know what it was or how to fulfill it. I kept wondering, “Why
am I here? What am I supposed to do?” And I went through the whole
range of the delusions of grandeur, where I thought I was going to be
a savior, I was going to bring forth some new idea and all kinds of
things that your outer mind can conjure up. And when I found my first
spiritual teachings, in a sense these delusions became magnified because
there are so many things in spiritual teachings about helping the masters,
saving the planet, raising the consciousness, turning around the downward
spiral and all this stuff.
My ego fed on that, and I suppose a psychologist would call it a savior
complex, but I think there is much more to it than what a worldly psychologist
would see in it because they do not understand the spiritual equation.
And I truly believe that a lot of us came in with a deep soul desire
to help improve conditions on the Earth.
Discovering why we are here
Many spiritually minded people have a strong sense of mission, the sense
that we are here to do something important. Many people are open to
the idea that our souls work out a divine plan before we take embodiment,
and it outlines what we are supposed to do here on Earth. Unfortunately,
most of us forget that plan once we are stuck in the denser energies
here on Earth. What is left is a sense of mission, a sense that we need
to find something.
I think my experience illustrates what has happened to many people,
namely that when we find some kind of spiritual path or spiritual organization,
we think “Ah, this is it, I have found it.” I remember very
clearly how I felt after I had found my first spiritual organization.
It was Transcendental Meditation, and it had the philosophy that we
needed to get one percent of the world’s population to do meditation
and then it would have the effect, they called it the Maharishi effect,
of raising the consciousness of everyone.
And on the soul level I knew there was some truth in that, namely that
a few people can be the forerunners for raising the consciousness of
humankind. And so I really thought that we just need to convert everybody
to Transcendental Meditation. Yet after a couple of years I became disillusioned
with that, I realized that my understanding was too naive, that there
was something missing.
Later I found the Ascended Masters’ teachings and I felt there
was so much more truth in those teachings. And for several years I thought,
“Well maybe we just need to convert everybody to the Ascended
Masters' teachings.” So I joined a church and at the time I had
the experience I just described, I firmly believed that it was my role
to become a minister in the church and to go out to preach the word
about the ascended masters and their teachings. And that was how we
were going to turn around the planet and that was how I was going to
make my contribution. I didn’t have the illusions that I was going
to do it alone, I had to let go of that when I was 19.
It was not until 1994 that I had the realization that I am here because
I love God. So for quite some time I was thinking that it was a matter
of getting everybody else to see the truth in a particular teaching.
In other words, my outlook was focused on a particular organization.
I wasn’t focused on awakening people to the spiritual side of
life; I was focused on making them members of a particular spiritual
organization. And so here I was with this whole mindset, and when my
soul rang out the message, “You are here because you love God,”
I realized instantly, at a deep level, that everything was going to
change. I knew that all of these outer things, that I thought was my
mission, had to be thrown out and I needed to look at something deeper.
There was a deeper mission behind it.
At first my outer mind wouldn’t accept this change of events;
it wanted to hold on to what was familiar and what made it feel comfortable.
And so I did what we all do, I tried to rationalize it and explain it
away, “No that can’t be.” But over the next couple
of years it grew on me and I just knew that it was not my role to become
a minister in any particular church, it was not my role to promote one
particular organization or one particular belief system.
There was something deeper, something beyond, that was my real reason
for being here. And I am not just saying that because it is true for
me; I think that is true for most people who are on the spiritual path.
I have seen so many people who become focused on a particular organization
or guru, but I don’t think people can discover their higher mission
until they look beyond anything in the outer world. You have to know
who you are before you can know what you are here to do. The reason
being that what you are here to do is an extension of who you are.
Stop limiting God in you
After I had my breakthrough experience, I went through a period of several
years during which the dominant thought in mind was, “I have to
stop limiting God in me, I have to stop limiting God’s ability
to work through me, to express himself through me."
And at first it was very, very difficult to get my mind around what
it means to let God work through you. We have Jesus saying, “I
can of my own self do nothing, it is the Father within me who is doing
the work. And as I hear so I speak and it is not me who is speaking,
it is the Father within me who is doing these works." But it was
very hard for me to figure out how a God that I saw as being outside
of myself, as being up there in Heaven as an exalted, perfect being,
can work through me down here on Earth. And for several years I struggled
with it. I couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t get it.
And then I had an experience several years later where I had that moment
of total surrender, which is describe elsewhere (Kim’s
story). It was a moment where things came together. For years I
had been striving to find my mission, and I had invested all of my feelings,
all of my energy, thinking, “I have to find my mission. I have
to fulfill my mission and do what I am here to do.” Yet when I
experienced total surrender, it all came together and I had this moment
of truth where my soul thought, “Well, what if I am not going
to do anything that is outwardly visible to change the Earth. What if
I am never going to write books or start an organization or be part
of an organization or do anything that anybody will notice. What if
all of these dreams and feelings that I have had for 30 years, what
if they never came to pass. Could I live with that? If I died right
now, could I go in peace or would I have to come back to Earth?"
Over the years I had come to the point of understanding that the most
important element on the spiritual path is surrender. It is not really
about all the things you hold on to and gather to you, not even knowledge,
not even understanding. The real key is what you can let go of. This
is illustrated in Jesus' saying, “The prince of this world comes
and has nothing in me.” There was also the Buddha who was tempted
by the demons of Mara as he was ready to go into Samadhi. The central
issue is that if there is something in us that makes us attached to
something on Earth, then that will be our downfall because that is what
is going to prevent us from moving on to the next level. It is going
to prevent us from coming closer to God and being one with God.
I finally realized that even the spiritual path that I had been on for
many years, and all of the energy and all of the striving that I had
put into it, had actually become a millstone around my neck that was
weighing me down. And so I came to the point where I just fell on my
knees and I surrendered and said, “God, you can take me home right
now." And I felt from deep within my soul that I could actually
let go at that point. If I didn’t do any more than I had done
at that point, which really wasn’t anything visible, I could live
with it. I could be at peace with leaving the Earth behind.
I should probably add to this that ever since I was a child I always
had the idea of being a writer and reaching out to millions of people
across the whole Earth, and this was always in my consciousness. So
at the time I had that surrender experience, I had not become a writer,
I had not written any books that had gone out and been published and
become best sellers. And I had to face the question that if what I felt
had been my life’s plan didn’t come to pass, could I live
with it? And I realized I could, I could really leave in peace because
I felt I had made my peace with the Earth and with my life on the Earth
and I could go if that was what God wanted.
Who am I really?
Shortly after that it suddenly came to me to think, “Well, who
am I?” First it was, “Why am I here?" but then, “Who
am I really?” And we have so many things we have put on us from
the world, our family, our name, our national origin, race, ethnic background,
all of these outer things that define who we are, including all of the
experiences we have had in our lives. And so I started thinking about
whether that was really me? And I realized, "No that isn’t
me." So what is me? Well, maybe it is my Christ self, maybe it
is my I AM Presence, and then I thought, “Well, the I AM Presence
is a concept that the Masters have given us, but it really is just a
concept; what it is actually? What’s behind it? What is the real
truth, the real core of who I AM?
What came to me was the statement from the Bible, "Our God is a
consuming fire." And you have Moses ascending the Mountain of God
to receive the new law. And God appears in the burning bush as a flame.
And so it came to me that the core of my identity is a spiritual flame,
a spiritual fire. And that was when I realized the concept of a God
Flame. And I realized that when I strip away all of the outer things,
I am a flame, a spiritual flame of God. And when I realized that, I
understood that the reason I AM here is to be that flame in this world,
to express and radiate that flame. And it is just like the sun that
radiates light and that is all it does because that is what it is.
When I realized that I am a spiritual flame, I also realized that my
personal flame is love. That is the core of my flame and that is why
I came here. “I AM here because I love God, because I AM the flame
of love, love for God in all of his manifestations." I also realized
there was a second aspect of my flame and that I was here to bring truth.
So it is like the Alpha and Omega, the yin and the yang. And I realized
that we have an Alpha aspect of our God Flame, and for me it is love,
and we have an Omega aspect which is the gift we are here to bring into
the world, and for me it is truth. And I realized they work together.
I am not here to bring truth in the sense that I go out and challenge
people and tell them that everything they believe is wrong and attack
their beliefs. The key to my mission of bringing truth is to let the
flame of love to shine through everything I do, so that I bring truth
in a very loving way.
And when I realized that, it was like all of the outer desires for what
I was going to do in an earthly sense, whether I was going to write
books, or whether I was going to be involved with an organization, they
all fell away because that wasn’t the primary reason I was here.
I was simply here to Be and to anchor in the physical universe, the
flame of Loving Truth. And if I did nothing else but unite with that
flame and allow God’s flame to shine through me, I had done everything
I had come to do.
I could, for that matter, be totally unknown by the world and I could
sit in a cave in the Himalayas or I could have some menial job. At that
point I had an office job, and I realized I could just do that and live
a supposedly normal life, but if I was in attunement with my flame and
I radiated its qualities, that would be enough to change the Earth.
And I realized that was the only way I could be an instrument for changing
the Earth; it wasn’t by doing all the outer things. I couldn’t
create a plan and say, "I have to do this, I have to do that, I
have to start an organization, I have to write so and so many books."
None of that would change the world. And that’s when I realized
the deeper meaning of Jesus’ statement, “I can of my own
self do nothing.”
I can’t do anything with the outer mind. The only way is to let
God within me do the work. And it is God within me, it is not God "up
there." It is not God outside of me because after all, who am I?
I am a flame of God. So I am an expression of God. In my particular
case, it is loving truth, and that is who I am. So it is not some outside
force that is going to express itself through me. It is me realizing
who I AM in the kingdom of God within me and letting that light shine,
“Let your light so shine before men,” as Jesus said.
What is your flame?
The reason I am bringing this up is that I often hear people describe
how they have always been wondering why they are here, what they are
here to bring. And what I am saying is that there is an important factor
here in realizing that we are not here to necessarily do some outer
things because we really can’t do it with the outer mind. Obviously,
this doesn’t mean that we won’t do outer things. After I
had my experience of realizing what my flame is, I have written several
books. They haven’t become best sellers yet, but if God is willing,
it will happen. And if God is not willing I am really not attached to
it.
So for those of you who have thought about what to do with your lives,
perhaps feeling that you should do this or that you can’t do that,
my suggestion is to try to let it go. Try to surrender it and say, "Maybe
that was just my outer mind. Maybe that was just the programming by
the world, saying this is what I have to do and this is how I have to
do it. Try and let it go. And try and meditate on the concept that who
you really are is a God Flame. And your first priority is to reconnect
to that inner identity, as Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom
of God and his righteousness and all else shall be added unto you.”
And the meaning of that is, seek first to discover your God Flame of
who you are and let that light, that righteousness of your God Flame,
shine through everything you do. And then all of the outer things you
are supposed to do are going to fall into place. Because as long as
you are out of alignment, out of touch with your God Flame, no matter
what you do with your outer mind, you can’t force it, you can’t
make it happen.
So try to sit back and surrender what you thought you were supposed
to do, what you thought you couldn’t possibly do. Just let it
all go. It is only the world's programming, your ego's programming,
your fears, your doubts, your sense of unworthiness. Let it all go and
really meditate on your God Flame and let all the outer thoughts and
desires go into that God Flame.
After I discovered my God Flame, I realized that what was standing in
my way of being who I am as a flame of God was the opposite of my God
Flame. And it is going to be that way for each and every person, namely
that what stands in your way is the opposite of, the perversion of,
your God Flame. In my case it was doubt, and fear, which is the opposite
of truth and love.
What is the best way to consume fear and hatred? Well, it is through
love, because love will consume all unlike itself, so the perfect love
will cast out all fear. What is the best way to consume doubt and the
lies that spring from it? It is truth and the certainty that comes with
it. So if you can tune in to your God Flame and let all of your limitations
flow into that flame, your flame will consume it and set you free from
it.
I am bringing this up because in order to let that process happen, you
have to be willing to surrender to the will of God. And we have all
been programmed to see God as being up there in Heaven outside of ourselves,
far from ourselves. So we have all been programmed to believe that God’s
will is outside ourselves. God is this angry being in the sky who is
constantly standing there pointing his finger, “Do this, don’t
do that. You’ll go to hell if you do this.” And that is
the programming we have to overcome because in order to be who you are
and be your God Flame, you have to stop seeing God’s will as separate
from your own will. Which is exactly what the Will
of God Rosary is designed to do; it is the essence of that rosary.
(For further teachings on the Will of God, see this section)
You need to realize that what you have so far seen as God’s will
is not the will of some angry being up there in the sky, it is the will
of your soul and your Higher Self. That will is for you to be who you
are and to express your God Flame through all aspects of your being
down here and let it radiate out to Earth and give that gift to others.
Because when you share your God Flame, that flame can awaken a soul.
No amount of words you could say is going to awaken a soul, but one
morsel of your God Flame can awaken a soul. And they can then start
the path which can lead them to discover who they are and why they are
here.
So I feel that what we have been dealing with in these 33 days of doing
the vigil of the Will
of God Rosary (At the time this presentation was given, students
of this website had just completed a vigil of giving the Will of God
Rosary once a day for 33 days.) is the anti-will, the lower will that
opposes God's will. This is the whole mind-set of the God in the sky
who is imposing his will on us. And it is something that is very, very
old on this planet. It is very much engrained in every culture on this
Earth, and we have all been brought up with it. We have all been programmed
with it. But I believe that those who have been participating in this
vigil to the Will of God have blazed a trail through that anti-will
and the anti-mind that will make it easier for others to follow.
And I believe that as we have done so, we have had to deal with these
elements of the anti-will and the anti-mind, the rebellion against God’s
will and the tendency to see God’s will as oppressive. I believe
that we can all have certain elements of that in our consciousness that
we have been dealing with. But beyond that, I think that all of us have
been dealing with planetary issues. We are all like the top of the pyramid
and behind us, beneath us is a whole pyramid of other souls and we are
blazing a trail that they can follow because we dare to work with this
in ourselves. And a lot of the times we take on things that are really
not our own psychology, but we take on a part of the world’s psychology.
Overcoming opposition to being who you are
When you understand that you often take on some of the world's issues,
it becomes easier for you to handle your situation because you can depersonalize
it. And when you are no longer so emotionally involved or attached,
it becomes easier to step back from your situation and look for a new
approach. And one possible new approach is to know your God Flame because
now you see that during your whole life you have been dealing with problems
that are the perversions of your God Flame. And you often seem to get
nowhere when you are trying to solve these problems with your outer
mind.
Yet when you can begin to let your God Flame flow through you, you will
see that it will dissolve such problems almost as by magic. The only
trick is that for your God Flame to work, you have to have those issues
resolved in your own psychology. You have the old saying, "Physician
heal thyself," and in this context it means that you can't help
resolve world issues until you have resolved your own personal issues.
So if your God Flame is Loving Truth, you must be willing to resolve
all issues of anti-love and anti-truth in your own being before you
can begin your greater mission of letting your God Flame dissolve fear
and doubt on a planetary level. As Jesus said, we first have to remove
the beam in our own eyes before we can remove the mote in the eye of
the world.
If we return to the statement in the very beginning that the Earth can
seem like a god-forsaken planet, we can now see why. The Earth seems
god-forsaken because we are meant to be the individualized extensions
of God. It is up to us to bring God’s presence to this Earth,
and we do so by letting our God Flames, by letting our light, shine
before men. Thus, it is only because so many of us have forgotten our
God Flames that the Earth seems to be a god-forsaken place. When you
and I and enough other people dare to let the inner light shine, this
Earth will be transformed into a planet where God’s presence is
felt tangibly through his sons and daughters. That is the true meaning
of bringing God’s kingdom to Earth and the true meaning of the
second coming of Christ. And that is what this website is all about.
If you explore the teachings on the rest of this website, you will see
that they are all designed to help you reconnect to your God Flame,
resolve any personal issues that block your God Flame from flowing through
you and finally to help you express that God Flame. This ads an entirely
new dimension to your life. Being your God Flame in action is the ultimate
sense of purpose and fulfillment. Nothing else will fully satisfy you
in life because deep within your soul, you have the memory of who you
really are. Your soul will never be fully satisfied with anything on
this Earth because you can be satisfied only by knowing your God Flame
and expressing that flame in this world.
NOTE: You can discover your God Flame through intuitive insights. The
following section
contains tools for attuning your mind to your Christ self . The
Rosary to God's Will is also an important tool in this process.
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Copyright
© 2005 by Kim Michaels |
