How
to make LIFE decisions
A
discourse by Jesus
NOTE:
This teaching was given on September 2, 2006, after the NEW
DIRECTION was implemented.
I understand that many people will read my latest
discourse on making LIFE decisions and wonder how you can make such
decisions. Many people find it difficult to change their behavior or
their outlook on life and often feel as if the harder they try, the
harder it gets. Some have already gone through the process of deciding
to make certain changes to their lives, but they quickly slide back
into the same old habits. Some decide to study spiritual teachings or
practice spiritual techniques, but after a short or long while, they
feel as if nothing has really changed. So let me offer some thoughts
on how to make LIFE decisions. I will be saying some of the same things
I said in my latest discourse, but I will be saying them in a different
way so as to hopefully help those who feel they do not yet have the
full grasp on how to make life-changing decisions.
The first thing you need to understand is that you cannot make a LIFE
decision with the outer mind and will. It must be a decision that comes
from within, from the Conscious You itself. So you cannot bring about
a life decision with the outer will, you cannot force it, you cannot
take heaven by force. However, neither can you bring about a LIFE decision
by passively waiting for it, thinking it will one day happen by itself.
We might say that you cannot force a LIFE decision no matter how hard
you try, but neither will it happen if you are not trying.
What I mean here is that a LIFE decision is a natural – even spontaneous
– result of the right frame of mind, namely a frame of mind in
which you have clarity. When you see how the ego has been hurting you,
you will spontaneously make the LIFE decision to let go of a particular
ego game. Imagine that you think you have been holding a rope in your
hand, but you suddenly see that it is a snake. You don’t have
to reason about what to do; you simply let go of the snake. So the key
is to put yourself in a state of mind where you are receptive to the
insights that can bring about a spontaneous decision. However, you don’t
have to simply wait passively for a clearer vision to happen. You can
take active measures to bring it about, but it must be the right measures.
Knowing better
The Master El Morya is fond of saying, “If people knew better,
they would do better.” This is a true statement—when you
recognize that “knowing better” does not refer to outer,
intellectual knowledge but knowledge that has become internalized. In
the last discourse I said that the real problem is that you have accepted
a lower sense of identity based on a lack of true knowledge. When you
internalize knowledge, that knowledge becomes part of your sense of
identity and then expands your identity. And when you accept this new
identity, you will begin to act accordingly, meaning that you will effortlessly
do better than you could do with your old sense of identity.
For example, virtually everyone has an outer knowledge that smoking
is dangerous to their health. Yet those who still smoke have not internalized
this knowledge. They do not truly know better because they have not
fully understood how smoking affects them. They do not actually “see”
that smoking is hurting themselves, and that is why they can keep smoking.
Yet once you have an intuitive experience that shows you how smoking
affects you, you will suddenly realize, “Why am I doing this?”
At that point, it will be easy to stop because you realize that smoking
is no longer compatible with the type of person you are.
Based on this, we can get a slightly different perspective on the master
strategy of the ego. What the ego and the prince of this world are truly
trying to do is to prevent you from knowing better. If you truly saw
that you have an ego, that it is not the real you and that everything
the ego does leads to suffering, you would instantly commit yourself
to rising above the ego—thus making the master LIFE decision that
puts you on the spiritual path. If you truly saw the nature and consequences
of a particular ego game, you would instantly refuse to play that game,
thus making an individual LIFE decision that would take you one step
up the spiral staircase.
We can now see that the ego’s survival depends on it remaining
unknown to the Conscious You. The ego thrives in the shadows and in
order to survive – or even expand its power – it must
remain hidden. It now becomes clear that the ego will do anything in
its power to prevent you from seeing the ego and seeing through its
games. It wants you to keep thinking you are the ego rather than realizing
that the Conscious You is separate from the ego. It wants to prevent
you from recognizing the ego games and their consequences.
The ego has several layers of defenses aimed at preventing you from
fully seeing it and its affect on your life. To illustrate this, let
me go back to my example of an alcoholic. Few people consciously decide,
“I’m gonna become an alcoholic.” They slide into it
gradually, often by using alcohol to dull the pain caused by a problem
they cannot or will not solve. Yet dulling the pain instead of dealing
with the problem causes more pain, and in order to avoid that, they
drink some more, quickly sliding into a pattern that takes over their
lives.
What is the first step toward recovery? Many people drink too much,
which is plain for all to see—except themselves. They will deny
that their drinking is a problem and refuse to acknowledge themselves
as alcoholics. Thus, as any therapist can tell you, the first step toward
recovery is the recognition that there is a problem. That is why it
is so valuable when society recognizes a problem, perhaps by labeling
it as a disease, and then focuses more attention on the problem and
its consequences for individuals and society. Organizations such as
AA have done an immense service by focusing attention on the problem
of alcoholism and the potential for getting help. Unfortunately, Western
civilization has not yet recognized the problem of the ego, but this
will change within a decade or two.
The ego’s first line of defense is to prevent you from even realizing
that there is such a thing as an ego or seeing that it is the cause
of your suffering. Most people are completely unaware of the ego and
think their suffering is either normal or unavoidable. They have not
realized that the ego is a problem and thus cannot even begin to overcome
it. For many people this is simply because they have never been told
about the ego in a way they could understand. For others it is because
they are not willing to even consider the possibility that their suffering
could be caused by something inside themselves. They want to keep seeing
themselves as victims of outside forces, so they have an excuse for
not taking command of their lives.
After you recognize that there is a problem, the next step is to recognize
that YOU have that problem. This is where the ego is often most successful
in terms of fooling people. It is so easy to see the splinter in your
brother’s eye and so much harder to see the beam in your own eye.
And the ego is extremely skillful in making people think it is not their
fault—as we will see when we examine the ego games. Many spiritual
people have attained an intellectual understanding of the ego, but they
have not fully “seen” that they have an ego and that it
runs their lives.
Once you recognize that there is a problem and that you are affected
by that problem, you need to come to the recognition that if you are
to overcome the problem, YOU are the one who must do something about
it and you must begin NOW. The ego will do anything it can to make it
seem like you can’t or don’t need to take action to overcome
the ego. It is even possible for people to think that the ego is an
external condition over which they have no control. This is much like
an alcoholic who thinks he is the victim of a disease that cannot be
cured but only held at bay.
Another area where the ego is often successful is in getting people
to postpone – indefinitely – dealing with the ego. The ego
is a master procrastinator and will seek to get you so occupied with
other things that you never quite get the time to deal with the ego.
Or it will get you to think you don’t need to deal with the ego
today—you can do it in the tomorrow that never comes.
After you recognize that the ego is a problem, that it affects you,
that you have to deal with it and that you have to do so now, what could
possibly go wrong? Well, you have to understand what you are dealing
with and how to best overcome it. This means understanding the nature
and origin of the ego and seeing through the ego games. The latter is
another area where the ego is often successful in fooling people. It
is often quite difficult to identify a seemingly innocent habit as an
ego game and actually see that you are trapped in that game.
Human beings are very adaptable, which has the positive quality of allowing
them to survive many different conditions. Yet adaptability can also
be used by the ego to make you tolerate ego-games. You have become so
used to them that you think they are harmless or even normal. The good
old argument that if everyone is doing it, it couldn’t be wrong
is still very effective for most people. Yet it is a simple fact that
if everyone is blinded by the ego, then everyone will indeed be wrong.
What is my purpose for listing the ways the ego is trying to prevent
you from getting to the point of taking action and making a LIFE decision?
Simply to make you aware of the areas where the ego will seek to hide
so that you can begin to understand the mechanics of how the ego seeks
to blind and pacify you. I hope you can begin to see that the ego was
created because the Conscious You refused to be aware. Thus, the key
to overcoming the ego is to take back awareness and increase your understanding.
The ego truly has no actual power over you, and it can only influence
you as long as you do not see what is happening. As you become aware
of the ego and its games, you are well on your way to rising above it
all. Yet you must seek the right kind of awareness.
What to look for
There is outer knowledge and there is inner knowledge. There is intellectual
knowledge and there is true understanding. There is the dualistic, relative
“truth” of anti-christ and there is the undivided truth
of Christ. As long as you look at life through the filter of the dualistic
mind, the ego will always be able to hide from you. Thus, to expose
the ego, you need to reach beyond the state of consciousness of the
ego. You need to reach for vertical knowledge instead of intellectual
knowledge. Some psychologists have great intellectual knowledge about
the psyche, but they are no closer to seeing the ego in themselves.
Some spiritual seekers have great intellectual knowledge about spiritual
teachings, but they still have not understood the essential element
of the path, namely that you must overcome the ego.
Consider the following situation from the Bible:
3 And the scribes
and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when
they had set her in the midst,
4 They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in
the very act.
5 Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but
what sayest thou?
6 This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him.
But Jesus stooped down, and with [his] finger wrote on the ground,
[as though he heard them not].
7 So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said
unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone at her.
8 And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
9 And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience,
went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last:
and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
(John, Chapter 8)
Here we have a group of people
who were absolutely convinced that they were right, but in reality they
were blinded by their egos. I, as the representative of the Christ mind –
as the Living Christ – served to jolt them out of their spiritual
blindness and make them look at the situation without the filter of
the ego. Thus, they gained a new clarity and walked away from an inhumane
act. I wish I could have been as successful in many other situations,
but alas people were too blinded by their egos and too unwilling to
walk through that veil of illusions. Anyway, what you need in order
to overcome your own ego is that kind of new perspective, so you see
what you could not see before.
Now consider the story of the Gordian Knot, a story I have inspired
Kim to use several times. An intricate knot was placed in an ancient
temple and an oracle had prophesied that, “He who can undo the
Gordian knot will become ruler over all of Asia.” Many people
tried to untie the knot, but finally a young man named Alexander drew
his sword and cut the knot in two. Alexander – who became Alexander
the Great and did conquer Asia – did not try to untie the ropes.
He looked at the problem in a different way and found the only practical
solution. Thus he UNDID the knot as the oracle had said.
The moral of the story is that you cannot solve a problem while you
are trapped in the same state of consciousness that created the problem.
You current problems were all created because you made Death decisions,
decisions based on the dualistic logic of the mind of anti-christ presented
by your ego. If you try to solve those problems with the same frame
of mind, you will only dig an even deeper hole for yourself. Instead,
you must do something different, bring a different element to replace
the illusion.
This is illustrated in the old analogy that you cannot remove darkness
from a room because it has no substance. No matter how much you analyze
the darkness, you will still be in the dark. The ONLY way out is to
realize that darkness is not a substance in itself, but an absence of
something. Once you bring what is missing, the darkness disappears.
Likewise, the mind of anti-christ has no reality to it but is simply
the absence of the reality of the Christ mind.
That is why Albert Einstein
said, “If you keep doing the same thing and expect different results,
you are insane.” Most human beings are engaged in the insanity
of trying to solve the problems created by the ego while still using
the consciousness of the ego. It simply cannot be done.
Zen Buddhism is known for using koans, which are short, often contradictory,
statements designed to jolt the mind into looking at a situation in
a different way. A koan is not meant to give you a specific piece of
information or even understanding. It is actually meant to short-circuit
the normal thinking patterns of the brain so that you suddenly step
outside of your normal mental box. A koan is designed to help you realize
that there is a state of consciousness above and beyond the dualistic
state of mind that has become the normal state for most people.
I often used similar statements because it was my goal to help people
connect to the Christ mind. As I said:
God is a Spirit:
and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
(John 4:24)
The ego thinks entirely
in a horizontal way, meaning that it simply cannot reach beyond a certain
level. It is as if the ego is trapped in the basement of a house and
cannot see that there is anything above it. Yet my father’s house
has many mansions, and there is an entirely different way of thinking
that is above the dualistic thinking of the ego. This is the kind of
thinking that you need to be aware of and you need to open your mind
to receiving intuitive insights that will jolt your mind out of its
own patterns.
Most people are not willing to think outside the box, and that is why
their minds are closed most of the time. They want every new idea to
conform to their present beliefs, to fit inside their current mental
box. Yet you can make the decision that you will be aware of the mind’s
tendency to close up and that you will counteract it. You can decide
to put yourself in a receptive frame of mind where you are always open
to a truth that your ego cannot see. You can decide that you are willing
to look for the beam in your own eye and that you will be alert to your
ego’s attempts to make you focus your attention elsewhere. This
is a state of listening grace and I talked about it when I said:
He that hath ears
to hear, let him hear. (Matthew 11:15)
But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for
they hear. (Matthew 13:16)
Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom
of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. (Mark
10:15)
By becoming more aware of
the need to reach beyond the ego’s mental box, you will put your
mind in a state of receptivity and you will begin to receive the insights
that will form the basis for LIFE decisions. Take note that this is
not a passive state of mind. You are not simply waiting for the truth
to find you. You are actively looking for the truth by studying anything
that is available on the ego, on psychology and on spirituality. Yet
you are not studying to get intellectual, horizontal knowledge. You
are studying to get intuitive breakthroughs, “aha experiences,”
that give you vertical insights.
Always looking beyond duality
The master key here is to realize that you must always strive to increase
your vision and discernment so you can look beyond the ego games. And
as we will see, there are several layers of ego games. In the beginning
you cannot see through all of the ego’s illusions, so you will
still be making dualistic decisions, but some of them will have less
destructive consequences than others. This is not to say that dualistic
decisions are necessarily bad. Some can be a step in the right direction,
but you will not truly rise above a problem until you make a LIFE decision.
To use my previous example of alcoholism, there are many people who
drink too much but who have not come to the recognition, “I’m
an alcoholic and I need help!” Thus, coming to this awareness
is clearly a step in the right direction because it represents a higher
level of awareness. Entering a treatment program or in other ways putting
a stop to drinking will clearly be beneficial to the person. However,
living the rest of your life with the sense of identity that, “I’m
an alcoholic” is not the highest possible outcome.
Coming to the awareness that “I’m an alcoholic” is
not a LIFE decision. However, if you follow it up with expanding your
spiritual understanding, you can come to the realization that you are
a spiritual being. And when you accept this new identity, you have made
a LIFE decision. You have now allowed the old identity to die and a
new identity has been born, according to which drinking is no longer
an option. You are not even tempted to drink because it is incompatible
with your new identity and world view.
Again, how can you come to the point where you can make such a LIFE
decision? You must begin by expanding your awareness, which has two
aspects:
Many people come to realize
that certain habits have negative consequences, but they do not understand
that they are ego games. Thus, they have to fight hard to overcome a
habit. Yet if you work on both aspects of expanding your understanding,
it will become much easier for you to let go of the old way of thinking.
The reason being that you will not actually feel you are giving up anything.
Many people who stop drinking feel they have given up something that
was pleasurable and they feel a loss or vacuum inside. Yet once you
attain a higher spiritual understanding, you can overcome this illusion
of loss.
You now have a new sense of identity instead of a vacuum, and thus you
are not giving up anything. You are simply letting something old fall
away as it is being replaced by something better. It is similar to what
happened in your teen-age years when you one day realized, “I’m
not a child anymore!” At that moment, you accepted a new identity,
and it was now easy to give up playing with toys. You did not have to
force yourself to stop playing with dolls or toy cars, you simply lost
interest and focused your attention on a new type of toys that were
suited to your new identity as a teenager.
I know some will say they would have been better off if they had stuck
to their childhood toys, but the teenage stage was a necessary step
on the path to adulthood. Eventually you gave up seeing yourself as
a teenager and accepted yourself as an adult. My point being that you
have already made a number of LIFE decisions that took you to a higher
sense of identity. In other words, making LIFE decisions is not something
mysterious or out of this world; it is a normal part of life. You simply
need to become more aware of these kind of decisions and then focus
your attention on taking the next step. You need to let the old identity
as a “normal” adult fall away and accept a new identity
as a spiritual being. When you do this, you will naturally stop doing
what normal adults do and instead begin to do what spiritual beings
do.
Opposition to progress
Many people feel like there is an opposition to making a LIFE decision,
like something is pulling them back into old patterns. Some people even
experience making a LIFE decision but are still pulled back into old
patterns. The reason is that there truly is a gravitational force that
pulls you down the spiral staircase. This force has several components,
and we will take a look at them next.
At the core of every ego game is an incorrect belief, meaning a belief
that is based on the dualistic illusions of the mind of anti-christ
rather than the reality of the mind of Christ. As long as this belief
remains in your consciousness, it will pull on your mind and it will
literally pull you into patterns of thoughts, feelings and actions.
Thus, you will not be free until you have overcome the incorrect belief.
However, this can be complicated by the fact that a belief can have
several layers. We might say that there is one deeper belief that is
held in place or hidden by smaller beliefs, almost like smaller rocks
holding a big boulder in place. Until you move the smaller rocks, you
simply cannot get the boulder rolling.
As I explain elsewhere,
the material universe has four levels that correspond to the four levels
of your mind:
-
The identity level is
where you have beliefs about who you are and how the world is.
-
The mental level is
the level of thought and this is where you have beliefs about what
you can and cannot do.
-
The emotional level
is the level of feeling, which gives you the impetus to act. However,
feelings can also be triggered by outer circumstances and thus prevent
you from acting or get you to do something you really did not want
to do. This is where you have beliefs about what you should and
should not do.
- The physical level is
the level of the body and outer mind, and this is where you decide
what physical actions to take. This is where you have beliefs about
how your actions affect yourself and other people.
In most cases, an ego game
will have components or beliefs on all four levels, and in order to
fully escape the game, you must resolve them at all four levels.
As an example, let us go back to the alcoholic. At the conscious level,
the person has the belief, “I’m not an alcoholic. I’m
not drinking too much. I can handle this. I could stop any time.”
Yet at the physical level is where people usually experience consequences
that can be difficult to deny. For example a person who is drinking
might lose a job, destroy a relationship or be told by the doctor that
if he doesn’t stop drinking, he will be dead in six months. This
might cause the person to abandon the belief I just described and cause
him to stop drinking.
Obviously, this is a step in the right direction, but the person did
not start drinking because of the belief that he is not an alcoholic
and can stop any time. So if he does not go beyond the level of the
outer mind, the beliefs at the higher levels of the person’s mind
will still affect him and that is why he will have a life-long struggle
with alcoholism. At the emotional level there might be a belief which
says, “I should not be feeling this pain but since I am the victim
of it, it is okay to dull the pain by drinking. I deserve a relief.”
Obviously, as long as that belief remains in the person’s emotional
body and as long as he feels pain, it will give him an emotional craving
to drink and he must fight it daily.
At the level of the mental body, there might be a belief which says,
“I can’t solve this problem so I can’t avoid feeling
the pain of it. And since there is nothing I can do about it, my only
option is to get some relief so I can deal with today.” Again,
this belief will continue to pull on the person’s thoughts until
it is removed. Finally, in the person’s identity body might be
the belief, “I’m just a human being and I’m worthless.
Life has no purpose and there is really no point in me being here.”
This belief is the boulder, and if you could get it to move, it would
pull the lower beliefs down with it.
It is quite possible that the Conscious You can step outside of your
current situation, uncover the incorrect belief at the identity level
and resolve it. Thereby, the lower beliefs will simply fall like dominos.
The problem here is that in order to do this, the Conscious You has
to be able to pull back from your situation. You will have to look at
the forest instead of the trees. And the ego will seek to lock your
attention at one of the lower levels.
As long as a person is drinking too much, all of his attention is focused
on the physical level. It is a matter of getting the next drink and
avoiding the consequences of his drinking. So it may be necessary for
a person to stop the physical habit before his attention can be free
to look beyond the physical level. Likewise, some people are so focused
on the emotional level that they can never step back and realize their
feelings are caused by their thoughts. And, of course, some people are
so focused on the mental and intellectual level that they do not realize
their thoughts are simply the slaves of their sense of identity.
My point here is that by seeking the kind of intuitive insights I talked
about in the previous sections, you can ideally step back and uncover
the incorrect belief at the identity level that is the cause of your
problems. By pulling the plug in the bathtub, all the dirty water in
the tub will run out. Yet in many cases, it is too hard for people to
free their minds from one of the lower levels. Thus, it may be necessary
for you to first focus on overcoming an incorrect belief at the level
of the conscious mind, at the emotional level or at the mental level.
Only when you free your mind from its obsession with one of the lower
levels, can you step back and look at the big picture.
The energy connection
As explained elsewhere,
everything is energy. The four levels of your mind form an energy field,
and you are alive and conscious because there is a stream of energy
flowing from your I
AM Presence through your four lower “bodies.” All of
your mental processes make use of that light and thus the light is inevitably
“colored” by the beliefs you hold in the four levels of
your mind. A belief that is based on the mind of anti-christ will lower
the vibration of the light so that it cannot flow back up to your I
AM Presence.
Part of this “misqualified” energy will accumulate in your
personal energy field—often called your subconscious mind. Because
this energy is electromagnetic energy, it exerts an electromagnetic
force on your thoughts and emotions, pulling them into certain patterns.
If you often respond to situations with anger, energy qualified with
the vibration of anger will accumulate in your emotional body and this
will pull you into responding with anger more easily. The more energy
that has accumulated, the lower your anger threshold will be.
My point here is that if you have a lot of a certain type of misqualified
energy in your personal field, this energy will have a twofold effect:
-
The energy will act
as a magnet that pulls your conscious awareness away from seeing
the big picture. You become so focused on the kind of actions, feelings
or thoughts that correspond to the energy. You are not actually
choosing your actions, feelings and thoughts because you are pulled
into a pattern that is eating up your attention. Thus, the Conscious
You will find it much more difficult to step back and say, “Why
do I keep doing this?”
-
The energy will form
a veil that prevents the Conscious You from making contact with
your Christ self, your spiritual teachers and your I AM presence.
This also makes it harder for you to have an intuitive experience
or see the underlying truth in a spiritual teaching you are reading.
In summary, the energy pulls
your awareness into lower activities and prevents you from receiving
the insights you need in order to know better. It now becomes obvious
that you need to do something to get rid of this accumulated energy,
and the most efficient way is to use a spiritual technique designed
for this purpose. Obviously, the technique I will recommend is Mother
Mary’s rosaries that are designed to both transform negative
energy and help you resolve dualistic beliefs. Thus you get a double
effect from the rosaries.
Quite frankly, there are very few people who could not benefit from
giving the rosaries as a preparation for making LIFE decisions. And
there are many people who have so much misqualified energy that they
simply will not be able to make LIFE decisions until they have cleared
out so much of it that they free their attention from the magnetic pull.
Only then will they have enough self-awareness to see beyond the mental
box created by their egos.
Another
consequence of having misqualified energy in your personal field is
that it creates a connection between your mind and the mass mind. Consider
that you walk by a building that contains a huge electromagnet. Your
body is not magnetic, so you feel nothing. Yet now consider that your
pockets are full of iron weights. You will now feel the pull of the
magnet. Thus, if you have a lot of misqualified energy in your personal
field, you will feel a pull from the mass consciousness and this will
only make it much harder for you to make LIFE decisions. Again, the
only way out is to transform the misqualified energy by using a spiritual
technique. Then the prince of this world will come and have nothing
in you whereby he can pull you into self-destructive patterns.
Before we leave the topic of something pulling you into old patterns,
let me briefly mention habits. The subconscious mind functions much
like a computer. Once a program has been created, it will keep running
until you remove it from the computer’s hard drive. You can make
a LIFE decision that removes the false belief that created the program,
but you still have certain grooves that exist in the subconscious mind.
Once a trail is formed in a jungle, the animals will follow it and that
makes the trail wider meaning more animals will follow it. Likewise,
a trail in your subconscious mind will cause your thoughts and feelings
to follow certain patterns. The trail was established through repetition
and it will require repetition to erase it.
My point being that even after you make a LIFE decision you will still
have to erase the habit established after you accepted the old belief.
This will take some time and that is why you should be prepared to affirm
a LIFE decision a number of times after you have made it. In fact, some
people have volunteered to help resolve patterns in the mass consciousness,
and they might have to reaffirm certain LIFE decisions for a long time,
even a lifetime. Thus, you should not be discouraged by this but simply
keep affirming the decision whenever something pulls you back toward
the old pattern.
The right relationship between you and your beliefs
When you look at the world, you will see that some people are willing
to die for their beliefs or they are willing to kill others in order
to destroy what they see as a threat to their beliefs. Some of these
people are even seen as heroes who take a stand, and some people even
think I was willing to die for my beliefs. This is an incorrect understanding.
A belief is something that is expressed in words, and anything that
is expressed in words has entered the realm of duality where it is subject
to different interpretations. Here is an example of a belief: “My
religion is the only true one and God wants all other religions destroyed
so it is acceptable that I kill non-believers.” In short, you
should never be willing to die or kill for a belief.
You might indeed take a stand for a higher principle, and that is what
I did by letting myself be crucified. However, I did not do this out
of any self-centered motivation or attachment. I did it in an attempt
to awaken others by showing them that their beliefs were contradictory.
They claimed to believe in a religion that said “Thou shalt not
kill” yet they were ready to kill me to preserve their religion.
How can you preserve a non-violent religion through violence?
It is not my intention here to go into a complex philosophical discussion,
so I am leaving certain things unexplained. My purpose here is to show
you the basic principle behind making life decisions. The simple fact
is that you have become blinded by the dualistic illusions of the ego,
and therefore you no longer see Christ truth. Your vision of truth is
being blocked by your current beliefs. Thus, in order to attain the
vision of Christ that makes it natural and effortless to make a LIFE
decision, you must be willing to look beyond your current beliefs. And
you cannot do this as long as you are attached to those beliefs. Being
willing to kill or die for your beliefs is simply the extreme form of
such attachment.
There are many people who will notice that as they read these ego discourses,
they have a certain uneasiness somewhere in their minds. If you look
closer, you will see that there is a reluctance to have your current
beliefs exposed as being erroneous. There can even be a fear that if
your beliefs are exposed as errors, something bad will happen or you
will suffer a loss. What will be left if you lose your beliefs?
I am in no way finding fault with people who feel this way, I am simply
pointing out that as long as you have these feelings, you will make
the spiritual path much more difficult for yourself than it needs to
be. I have a desire to see all sincere seekers walk the path as quickly
and as painlessly as possible. And in order to do that, you only have
to shift your perspective on life a little bit. You have to turn the
dial of consciousness slightly, so that you look at beliefs in a different
way.
What is the new perspective? Well, as long as you have any kind of attachment
to your current beliefs, it will cause you pain to let go of those beliefs.
And for each step you take on the spiritual path, you must let go of
an erroneous belief, meaning that each step will cause you pain. When
you are reluctant to let go of an erroneous belief, it is because there
is a part of you that is identifying itself with that belief. That part
is, of course, the ego which does not want you to grow and is using
your present beliefs to hold back your growth.
What is the hidden message that the ego is giving you? It is that you
should not let go of a particular belief because there is nothing beyond
it—it is infallible. Thus, if you allow your ego to make you attached
to your beliefs, you are essentially refusing to expand your understanding
and acquire the broader perspective that will bring about a LIFE decision.
Am I saying that you need to let go of all your beliefs? Not necessarily,
but I AM saying that you need to BE WILLING TO LET GO OF ALL YOUR BELEIFS.
If there is a belief that you are not willing to question, then that
unwillingness comes from an attachment and an attachment can ONLY come
fro the ego.
How do you escape this trap? There literally is only one way. The Conscious
You must come to the realization that YOU ARE MORE THAN YOUR BELIEFS!
As I have explained, the Conscious You is an individualization of God’s
being and God is clearly beyond any belief in this world. God is the
Spirit of truth and that is why you must worship him in Spirit and in
truth instead of worshiping him through dualistic beliefs and earthly
doctrines. God's Spirit is beyond ANY belief that can be put into words.
The trick is, of course, that only the Conscious You can experience
the Spirit of Truth, whereas the ego can never do so.
If you can make that shift in consciousness, you can realize that the
real you can never lose anything by letting go of an erroneous belief.
How could YOU lose by letting go of a belief that limits and imprisons
you in a false sense of identity that causes constant suffering? Only
the ego can lose when YOU let go of a false belief so the ego can no
longer control you.
Can you see how this shift can make the path easier? When you know you
are more than your beliefs, you can quickly overcome all fear of taking
a look at your beliefs and all fear of what will happen if a dearly
held belief is exposed as erroneous. Instead of resisting the process
of having your erroneous beliefs exposed, you actively seek out such
exposure. Not all at once so you lose your bearings, but you commit
yourself to an ongoing process of gradually exposing every wrong belief
that has ever entered your mind. And once you see such a belief, you
can simply let it go as effortlessly as you let go of a snake. You will
then begin to make spontaneous LIFE decisions and that is when your
progress on the path will accelerate beyond your present expectations.
Being teachable
As one last thought on how to get yourself in a state of mind where
LIFE decisions begin to happen spontaneously, ask yourself the following
questions, “Am I teachable? Am I willing to follow a true spiritual
teacher who exposes my false beliefs? Or would I rather follow a false
teacher who tells me what I [in reality your ego] want to hear?”
This is the quintessential question that separates the true spiritual
seekers from those who might claim to be very spiritual or religious
but who have not yet understood what the path is about or have not made
a commitment to their own growth. It literally separates the sheep from
the goats.
The situation is undeniable. In order to make progress on the spiritual
path – in order to take the next step up the spiral staircase
– you must overcome the false belief that caused you to descend
to your current step. If you could see the fallacy of that illusion,
you would not have descended that step or you would already have gone
back up. So what is blocking your progress is that there is something
you cannot see, and as long as you cannot see it, you will remain trapped.
The key to breaking the gridlock is that you must receive the crucial
insight that allows you to expose your current belief as false and replace
it with the truth that makes you free. Where is that insight going to
come from? It cannot come from inside your own mind, inside your current
mental box. If the insight you need was inside the box, you would already
have found it. Take another look at my statement:
And why beholdest
thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but perceivest not the
beam that is in thine own eye? (Luke 6:41)
Why is it so easy for people
to see what is going on in other people’s lives and so hard to
see the same problem in their own lives? Because when you are inside
the mental box created by the ego, you cannot see your situation as
clearly as when you look at it from the outside. So the insight you
need must come from a source that is outside your mind and above the
level of duality. That source is a spiritual teacher.
This does not mean that you have to make a direct or conscious contact
with a being in the spiritual realm. As El Morya says, “If the
teacher be an ant, heed him,” The meaning is that the teacher
often appears in an unexpected or humble disguise. The teacher might
be a book or it might be another person who tells you what you cannot
see on your own. And as I have already mentioned, when the student is
ready, the teacher WILL appear. So there is ALWAYS a teacher with you
who can give you exactly what you need in order to take the next step
on your path. The big question is whether you can recognize the teacher
and whether you are willing to heed the message?
What you can do right now is to make a commitment that you will always
look for the teacher. You will allow the teacher to tell you what you
cannot see and what your ego does not want you to see. You will look
for a true teacher who challenges your illusions instead of a false
teacher who makes you comfortable in your illusions. And you can decide
that you will strive to be teachable for the rest of your life, always
looking for the teacher who can take you to a higher level. You can
decide that you will have ears to hear and eyes to see.
The path is an ongoing process
There are many people who fall prey to the ego’s tendency to look
for an automatic or guaranteed salvation, as I explained in the first
series of discourses. They think there is some kind of ultimate teaching,
information or insight and once they have found it, they will be home
free. They think one magical decision will whisk them to the top of
the spiral staircase.
Yet as long as you are in embodiment, you will be dealing with the mind
of anti-christ. You can free yourself from your own ego, but you will
still be exposed to the mass consciousness from without. Thus, it is
essential for you to go into a frame of mind in which you see the path
as an ongoing process. Instead of looking for some final solution, you
look forward to receiving progressively higher insights for the rest
of your lifetime.
When you do this, you are no longer looking for some ultimate teaching,
which means the ego cannot make you believe you have now found an infallible
truth and you can stop looking. Thus, the ego cannot make you stop at
a certain step, causing you to think you do not have to take the next
step. In the last discourse I said that you must not allow the ego to
supply the information upon which you base your decisions. The reason
is that if you do so, the ego WILL make you think you do not have to
go further because you are saved where you are. It will make you think
your current step is the last step you need to take.
The web of illusions spun by the ego is very subtle, and you should
consider that the path has several levels. Thus, instead of allowing
the ego to make you feel comfortable at your current level, you should
always be looking beyond it. In fact, I will now begin to describe the
individual ego games and I will divide them up according to the four
levels of the mind. This will help you see that you need to keep going
until you reach the highest level and overcome your false sense of identity.
However, it will also serve to encourage you because you will realize
that you have risen above the lowest level.
There is a subtle difference that you need to ponder. The ego will try
to make you feel comfortable with your current beliefs so you do not
move on. Yet fighting this tendency does not mean you have to live the
rest of your life in a state of dissatisfaction or lack. Once you realize
you are more than your beliefs, letting go of an old belief does not
cause you pain. It causes you to feel freer and that gives rise to joy.
Thus, you can enjoy the journey without falling into the trap of becoming
so comfortable that you stop the progress. And when you reach that childlike
innocence, you can approach the spiritual path with the same excitement
as a child who has discovered a wonderful new playground to explore.
At that point you have entered the kingdom of Heaven even though you
have not yet reached the top of the spiral staircase.
Let me return to my statement that you cannot bring about a LIFE decision
no matter how hard you try but that it will not happen if you are not
trying. We now see that as long as you try by using the mind of anti-christ,
you cannot attain the Christ vision that is the foundation for a LIFE
decision. Yet if you just passively wait for a decision to happen, you
will get nowhere. The key is that there is a middle way between trying
with the human mind and doing nothing.
That narrow way is to put yourself in a frame of mind where you are
seeking first the kingdom of God – the Christ vision – and
then letting all other things – including LIFE decisions –
be added unto you spontaneously. It is a state of graceful expectancy,
where you make yourself – your mind – a chalice and allow
God’s truth to flow into it and replace the darkness. You see,
upholding the ego’s illusions is what requires a constant struggle.
Attaining Christ truth only requires you to stop struggling. And that
is the true meaning of having the innocent mind of a child. You separate
yourself from the ego’s attempt to control everything and instead
– to use another of Morya’s expressions – you TRY
by letting Theos Rule You. You allow God within you to be the doer instead
of letting the ego be the doer.
I can of mine own
self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because
I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent
me. (John 5:30)
Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?
the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father
that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. (John 14:10)
Try to read those two statements
with the feeling that you are the Christ speaking them. Then pay attention
to how your ego will resist the message.
Back
to Main Ego Page
Back
to top
Copyright
© 2006 by Kim Michaels |
