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I am going to give a little
talk about something the masters wanted me to talk about just to open
it up. And they hope that those of you who want to will also tell
a little bit about it. And the topic is, “What difference did it make
in my life that I heard about the ascended masters.”
And so it's not that my story is any more important than yours. It's
just that I'm going to break the ice, and then I hope some of you
will think about that, what it meant for you and see if you want to
summarize that. I think it's important to have a witness like that,
especially because we have some people at this conference who've known
about the ascended masters for 20-30 years or more.
So in order to really understand what hearing about the ascended masters
meant to me, you just have to know a little bit about my background.
I grew up in Denmark, I had parents that were what you would call
lower middle class, or working class, probably lower middle class.
We never lacked anything. I had a very harmonious childhood, I can't
really say I had any major problems.
But there was always something missing. And I knew there was something
missing. I just didn't know what it was. And I think that goes for
most spiritual people—that we just can't be satisfied with the ordinary
materialistic lifestyle that we grew up with here in the western world.
This became very obvious to me between the age of I think about 11
and 16. I had a newspaper route in the afternoon. So after school
I would take the newspaper around in nice upper middle class neighborhood—very
nice houses, fairly new neighborhood. I did well in school, I knew
I could get an education and I could have everything these people
had, including the cars and the kids and the gardens and the dogs
(by the way the whole thing about dogs being man's best friend, it
doesn't apply to newspaper boys. I just want to give you that little
bit of information here).
So I worked around there for four years and I got to know the people
quite well. And I just knew I couldn't live my life that way. I just
could not fit into that, because it was almost like they had stepped
into a mold, and you knew that their lives were going to be very comfortable
materialistically, but that beyond that there was going to be no content
in their lives. And I wanted something more than that. I had no idea
what it was, I couldn't formulate it, but I just knew there had to
be something.
During high school we had a very good teacher in religion who was
kind of a what you would call a New Age seeker, although that term
really wasn't used in Denmark at the time. But we had some good discussions,
and sometimes I sat there in class and I felt if just I could shift
my perspective a little bit, I had to be able to see something that
was just beyond the normal material world—there had to be something
more to life, I just could not grasp it.
Finding the spiritual path
But then when I was 18 I moved away from my parents to go to college,
and at that point I really started searching. I knew there had to
be some kind of knowledge. So one day, probably about a week after
I moved away from my parents I walked into this used bookstore, and
for some reason I started looking through the books on spirituality.
And I pulled out this book, it was called Autobiography of a Yogi
by Paramahansa Yogananda. I opened the book and it had pictures in
it of him and several other saints. And when I saw the pictures, I
just knew I had to buy the book.
And the revolution that that book did for me was that number one,
it showed me what I had been longing for my whole life, which was
that there was a spiritual side to life, that there is more to life
than what we are brought up to know, both in the churches and in the
schools. Because, of course, in Denmark I did not have a particularly
religious upbringing—my parents weren't particularly religious. But
obviously, I had heard the usual Christian doctrines and we had teachings
about it in the school, about the Bible. We also had teachings about
biology and the theory of evolution. So we were given the usual schizophrenic
upbringing that most of us have had.
And what I realized when I read the book by Yogananda was that for
thousands of years, in fact going further back than we have recorded
history, there have been people who have solved that dilemma between
the outer dogmatic religion and the denial of God that science has
come to represent. And they have found the middle way, where it is
not a matter of just believing some outer thing about God, but we
can actually experience in our hearts a deeper truth, we can know
for ourselves. Because the whole path that Yogananda describes is
one of expanding your consciousness until you have these inner spiritual
experiences so you know what's real. It's not just a theoretical,
analytical path that he was describing. And to me that really hit
home.
Beyond the intellect
As I was growing up to be 18, I had many times where I looked at the
world and said, "We have got to find something beyond the intellect."
Because I looked at history, I looked at some of the things that were
going on in the world, including war – I was always very aware of
war – and I said, "It just doesn't make sense that we can continue
this kind of self-destructive behavior. There has got to be a way
out of this, out of this dilemma where one war sets the stage for
the next and we never seem to really make any progress." And
I started realizing that we have to find a way to know what was real,
know what was true, that wasn't based on the intellect. Because I
had a very active intellect but I had started noticing that my intellect
had certain limitations.
In Denmark where I grew up, there were at the time many people who
believed in socialism; it was quite strong. It wasn't a socialist
country, but there were socialist parties in parliament who argued
for becoming a more socialist country. And I could see that they were
quite intellectual. And I could also see that the Christians in the
state church in Denmark were very intellectual. But it was like none
of them had anything that would reach beyond the intellect. So they
could argue and argue, and one side would be absolutely convinced
that they were right. They could not understand why the other side
couldn't see it, because they saw so clearly how right they were.
And the other side, of course, felt the same way.
So how do we ever resolve that when we have two sides that are arguing
against each other? I realized there could not be a resolution through
the intellect. And when I read Yogananda's book I realized that the
key to resolving these issues was to actually reach beyond the intellect
to a higher experience, what we would call an intuitive experience.
And that was what the book was all about. And it showed me that for
thousands of years there have been people who have been deliberately
and consciously pursuing this path of going beyond, not only the intellect
but the whole human consciousness, the human ego as we would call
it today.
Beyond human evil
One of the things that was very important to me growing up in a country
like Denmark was the second world war, Hitler and Nazism. It wasn't
that it was something that was talked about in our daily lives of
course, but my parents were alive during the German occupation of
Denmark. I had a teacher in high school who had been in a concentration
camp for several years because he was in the resistance movement.
So it was very much something that we were aware of. We saw films
about the concentration camps, and even as a child I was always very
concerned about this issue of human evil and how we can overcome it,
how we can deal with that. Because I realized even as a child that
the second world war was over and Nazism was gone, but now we had
communism in Russia and other potentials for war. And so how could
we ever really make progress unless we found, as I said, some way
to reach beyond the human intellect and human opinions.
And what I started to see in Yogananda's book was that here was a
whole group of people that were precisely engaged in that quest of
reaching beyond the human struggle. And they had been doing so for
thousands of years. And they had experimented and found a viable path
whereby we can raise our consciousness and go beyond all of this outer
conflict. And I started seeing, even at the age of 18, that to me
this seemed a more viable path than anything I had seen in socialism,
in science, in traditional religion. And so I threw myself at that
with all the attention I had. I started studying, started practicing
meditation techniques.
The existence of spiritual masters
In the book Yogananda talks briefly about a concept that the spiritual
teachers in embodiment were working with spiritual teachers that were
not in a physical body. One of his gurus dies and then after that
Yogananda still has some contact with him. So to me that was the introduction
to the potential that there could be spiritual teachers in a higher
realm that were also working with humankind to help us rise above
conflict and struggle.
A couple of years after I read Yogananda's book, I found a series
of books called Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East,
most of you are probably familiar with them. And I know there are
some detractors out there on the internet who say that Baird Spalding
never went on this expedition, there was never any expedition like
he describes. But that doesn't bother me because even when I was 19
and I read the first book, I never thought there was an actual expedition.
I always looked at it more like Jules Verne who tells the story of
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—obviously there was no submarine like
that, but it was still a very interesting story.
And so I thought the books still had value because they had a lot
of valuable teachings in them. And the books described this expedition
from the west, and they comes to India and Tibet and they travel through
the mountains and experience a lot of things. And there was a couple
of the books where they were in some kind of very remote temple and
they met these beings that actually literally appeared to them out
of thin air and then gave them teachings. And at that point, I read
the book and I realized that this wasn't necessarily something that
had factually happened. But nevertheless, the words that were supposedly
said by these beings rang true in my heart. So I was willing to say
that even if the actual physical circumstances were not exactly like
they were described in the book, the concepts and ideas brought out
by these teachings rang true in my heart. And I was willing to recognize
that truth, even if I did not have an outer factual proof that my
intellect could grab onto.
A broader world view
So that was when I started realizing that if we are to find a way
beyond the human intellect, we can't expect that that way can be proven
by the intellect—because of the intellect's built in limitations.
It's the reason, in my opinion, why science is in this dilemma, where
they have to say there is nothing beyond the material universe because
with their present scientific instruments and methods they can't prove
it. Now maybe they will never be able to prove it, maybe they will
never be able to construct an instrument out of matter that will be
able to prove there is something beyond matter. Maybe not—you can't
see an atom with an ordinary binocular. But maybe it's just that science
has not been looking in the right direction, they haven't been applying
the methods and the instruments they already have because of the paradigm
that they have chosen to limit themselves by.
So I started seeing this, and I started opening my eyes to basically
realizing that what I had been brought up to know from both traditional
religion and science was a very limited world view. And there had
to be an entirely different world view. And a couple of years after
that, I actually heard about the concept that we today call the Ascended
Host or Ascended Masters. And again, I became aware that there was
actually a number of different organizations that claimed to have
received teachings directly from a spiritual realm, that were given
to us to help us basically escape our limitations and our egos and
all the struggle we see.
So that was a total revolution for me because all of the things I
had sensed growing up suddenly came together. And I realized that
it is actually possible to make sense out of life. It is possible
to answer our questions about life, "Who am I? Where did I come
from? Do I have a purpose for my life?"
Life has a purpose
And probably the most important idea was the
concept that we have lived before. I cannot remember when I first
heard about the concept of reincarnation, but I do know that the moment
I heard about it, I immediately accepted it. Because it just was the
only thing that made sense to me, of how we could be such complex
beings. I was probably in my teens when I started realizing that we
human beings are extremely complex. And the whole idea that this should
be a product of our genes and our environment in one lifetime, 15-20
years, it just didn't make sense to me that we could have such complexity
in our psyches. And so the concept that I had lived before was just
immediately obvious to me.
And with that concept also comes the idea that we have a purpose for
our lives. We are not just thrown in here like victims, whether it's
an angry God that sends us down here to be punished or whether it's
some kind of chance occurrence that we are here. There is a purpose,
we have chosen to be here, we have a specific goal for our lifetime,
certain things we want to learn. And really, the overall goal for
that is a transformation of our state of consciousness—so we go beyond
that outer awareness, that ego-centered awareness and become more
selfless.
Going global
A couple of years ago I read a book by Lance Armstrong, the cyclist
who won Tour de France seven times. He described his life and how
he was just starting on his cycling career when he was diagnosed with
testicular cancer. And the doctors wouldn't tell him his chances of
survival, they gave him the impression it was 50/50, but in reality
they gave him a five percent chance of survival because his diagnosis
came very late. So he describes how he struggled with cancer. And
in the beginning, of course he was totally focused on himself and
how could he overcome this disease, and he was going to beat it, like
it was a race on his bicycle.
And then after a few months of being in treatment in this cancer center,
he had a talk with his head nurse that had helped him. And he suddenly
started realizing that he had shifted his consciousness. He was no
more so concerned about himself, he was more concerned about how could
we beat this disease, find a cure, so that other people didn't have
to die. And the nurse looked him straight in the eye and said, "Lance
you've gone global!" And what she meant was that she had seen
this before in cancer patients, that a certain percentage of them
keep being focused on themselves, but a fairly large percentage of
cancer patients – once they have faced death – they develop a more
global awareness. And they say, "This isn't just about me anymore.
What can I do to help other people? What can I do to help the planet
progress?"
And the major benefit that I received from hearing about the ascended
masters is that I realized that I myself – and I think all spiritual
people, all the people who have some spiritual inclination – we all
have that global awareness. We all have a desire to reach beyond ourselves,
to not just live that ordinary human life where we are focused on
ourselves and our family. But we want to help the planet progress.
We want to come up higher, not just in our own consciousness, because
we're not doing it just for our own sake. We're doing it because we
want to improve the whole, we want to raise up the planet. And that's
what we're about.
No ultimate system but ultimate beings
And to me the revolution with the Ascended Host was that we don't
just have to do this alone. We don't just have to do it by working
things out with our intellect, by using this philosophy or that philosophy.
One of the things I saw growing up in Denmark was this tendency to
believe that there has to be this ultimate philosophical system—whether
it's Christianity, or socialism, or whatever you have. And if we just
follow that system, then we'll have some kind of paradise on Earth.
And I had become disillusioned with that at a very young age. Because
when I was going to college, there was a teacher there who actually
had me read some of the writings of Karl Marx. And my brain just couldn't
even follow it, I mean my brain was starting to short-circuit. It's
very convoluted the way he argues, and his language is very complex.
I just realized that this couldn't possibly be the answer to humankind's
problems. And I couldn't see traditional Christianity as the answer
either, because in Denmark the state church is very watered-down.
There's no spirituality in it, it's just an outer dogmatic tradition—we
do this and we know that's why.
So what I realized with the ascended masters is that we actually have
access to a source, to a group of beings, who have risen above this
whole human ego and power struggle and all these limitations. They
have raised their consciousness to the point where they have gone
completely global, there's no selfishness in them whatsoever. And
to me that was an extremely important concept, because I started to
understand that some of the people who had done the most good in the
world were the ones who were the most selfless. And some of the people
who had done the most evil, like Hitler, were the most self-centered
and self-focused.
And so I realized that if we had access to a group of beings who were
completely beyond the human self and the human ego, then that was
where I wanted to be. Because I knew that was a viable source for
not only expanding my own consciousness but also receiving a greater
understanding of what's really happening on the planet and why society
basically seems to be stuck in the same problems that we can't get
out of. And I started to realize that the society we see, the society
we've created, is a reflection of our state of consciousness, our
outer knowledge, but also the degree of selfishness—how global are
we in our awareness, and how focused are we on just “me, myself and
I.”
Overcoming war by raising consciousness
And I saw this growing up in Europe. You are very well aware of the
history of Europe, where the countries in Europe have always been
fighting these wars about superiority—who is the most important country
in Europe, who has the most power. And it just becomes meaningless
when you actually learn the history of it—there was this war, there
was that war and they never seemed to resolve anything. There never
seemed to be any real reason for it other than this particular king
wanted to be more powerful than the king in the other country, so
they were willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of people in
order to settle who was the most powerful.
And it was just a completely meaningless series of conflicts. And
so I realized that this was because our consciousness was still so
focused on the ego, and that the only way to really, seriously change
society was to raise our consciousness—not only individually, but
also collectively.
While I was in high school, I took a branch of high school where we
studied politics. And it was my intention to go into politics because
I thought that was one way to help improve the world and improve society.
But after I had studied it for some time, I started realizing that
politics at the time was so steeped in compromise. And I started realizing
that it wasn't really a matter of doing what was right in a higher
sense. It was a matter of what was best for the party.
In other words, at that time you had five political parties in Denmark
and they had been there for decades. Some were based on a more conservative
philosophy, others were based on a more socialist philosophy. But
it was just the usual, in that it's like you adopt a certain world
view, a certain philosophy, and then whatever problem comes up, you
have to fit it into that box and solve it within that philosophy.
Even if you don't actually have a good solution within that system,
you can't go beyond it. If you are conservative, you have to find
a conservative solution. If you are a socialist, you have to find
a socialist solution.
And it reminded me of the old fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen,
where you have a house with three sisters and one is kind of the shunned
sister and the other two are the most important sisters. And the prince
is looking for a bride who can fit the glass slipper, and so the representative
comes with the glass slipper to the house, and they want the two sisters
to try it on, and one cuts a heel and one cuts a toe in order to fit
in the glass slipper. And that's kind of how we approach political
problems—it has to fit in our glass slipper, whether it's the socialist
glass slipper or the conservative one. So we just have to somehow
force our problems into our mental box so we can solve them, because
we can't possibly go beyond our mental box.
A vertical expansion of our world view
And it's kind of like the old saying, “If the only tool you have is
a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.” And I started realizing that
that didn't make sense to me. And as I have learned more about the
spiritual side to life and the teachings of the ascended masters,
I realize more and more how little that approach to life makes sense
to me.
The reality is that if we have a problem that we can't solve with
our present world view, then we should expand our world view. And
if we are willing to expand our world view, then there are teachings
available to us that can help us do that. And they have, for that
matter, been available always in all societies. There has always been
some spiritual teaching that could take us beyond the mainstream.
But today there is more teaching available than ever before, and it
is more readily available to people around the world.
To me it is incredibly exciting to be part of that, because I clearly
see that what has created progress in human society is that we have
expanded our consciousness to some degree. It's just that most of
what we have done so far has been more of a horizontal expansion—we
know a lot about the world today through science. But I see that there
are more and more people who are spiritual, who realize that instead
of looking for a horizontal expansion of our understanding, we need
to go vertical, we need to go higher, we need to reach beyond our
present level.
And to me that's the most important concept of the ascended masters.
That's what they are here for. Those of us who are willing to reach
beyond the old ways of looking at things—the ascended masters are
right there to give us a higher teaching. And as the masters say,
their motto is. “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”
And I think all of you will probably see that in your own lives, that
when you come to the point where you really have decided in yourself
that you want a higher understanding, you always find something that
helps you move forward. And it's been the same with me, whenever I
really needed a new way to look at things I found some outer teaching
that helped me.
Knowing truth within yourself
But what I really came to understand is that beyond an outer teaching,
we can actually develop our ability to know truth in our hearts. And
we can develop a direct, personal, inner connection with our higher
beings and with the ascended masters. So we don't need an outer church
to tell us what's true, because we know in our hearts what's true.
And I think that if there is going to be a major revolution that brings
humanity beyond this consciousness where war is a constant threat
in the background, if we are really going to rise above war, then
it has to come by millions of people around the world standing up
and saying, "We've had enough of political ideologies, we've
had enough of materialistic science, we've had enough of traditional
religion, we've had enough of all this that we have to accept an outer
belief system and fit everything into that belief system. We want
a society that's based on what's right, not according to some outer
philosophy, but according to what we know in our hearts."
How spiritual people can change the world
And I believe that most spiritual people on this planet, whether they
are in this or that formal religion, whether they are in this or that
New Age movement, whether they are not in any movement—if we really
think about it, the difference between us and most people out there
is that we know something is true in our hearts and we are willing
to recognize that, we are willing to act on it.
The problem is that so far most of us have just done this in private,
we've just done this focused on our own consciousness because we feel
when we start talking about our spiritual beliefs, we feel rejected
by the world. Because, again, people say, "Oh you don't fit in
my mental box, I'm not going to listen to you." But I think that
if we can leave that behind us and really dare to speak out about
who we are, what we believe in, what we know is right, I think that's
the only thing that can shift the collective consciousness to the
point where we leave behind this conflict. We simply have to say,
"Enough is enough! We've had enough of these wars, we've had
enough of the struggle and we want a higher approach to conflict and
problems."
And I think if we start in the West, we will see other cultures around
the world will gradually be pulled along with it. Because we'll simply
create a movement in the collective consciousness that will awaken
other people and make them realize that they don't want the conflict
either, they've had enough of the struggle, enough of this fighting,
and we have to find a higher approach because this is the only way
out of it. So that's what I truly believe is going to happen within
the next decade or two. There's going to be a shift in the collective
awareness.
World change starts in consciousness
One of my favorite examples of such a shift is in the 1800's, when
suddenly the nations of the world decided to come together and create
a treaty that banned slavery. And it's an incredible example, when
we think about it. I mean we've grown up in a society where it's been
outlawed, so we take it for granted. But slavery had been part of
the world culture for literally as far as we know, back in recorded
history. Every society had slaves, people that were literally considered
property, no more than things. And then suddenly they decided, “We
can't do this anymore.”
Well, where did that decision come from? There was no economic incentive
to abolish slavery—it's free labor. I mean it's every capitalist's
dream. So why give it up? Well, it was given up because there was
a growth in the collective awareness that made people realize that
human life has value. It has an intrinsic value. It's not according
to any religion, it's not according to any political philosophy. It's
just right because it's right! We can't treat other human beings as
property.
This all came out of that whole growth in Europe and the United States,
where democracy gradually started to emerge and we started realizing
that human beings have rights. And the whole concept is that we human
beings have rights that are not defined by any power on Earth. They
are defined by a power that is beyond the human power struggle. That's
why they are worth something.
I remember a number of years ago the Chinese prime minister came to
the United States to visit Bill Clinton, who was the president at
that time. And they had a discussion about human rights. And the Chinese
prime minister flat out stated, "Of course human beings have
rights, but the rights of the Chinese people are defined by the state."
And Clinton tried to tell him that that wasn't really rights, and
that was the essence of it—if our rights are defined by any power
on Earth, they are not actually inalienable rights, because the power
on Earth that defines those rights can decide to change them or override
them at any point.
And so what I'm saying here is that what happened at that time that
led to the emergence of democracy and the abolishment of slavery was
that there was a shift in the collective consciousness. Our awareness
was raised to the point, where we realized that human beings should
have rights, that governments should respect those rights. And one
of those rights was that human beings cannot be sold as a piece of
property.
The shift in awareness
And I think we are right now going through that exact same, and even
greater, shift in awareness. Where within the next decade or two,
I think our collective consciousness will shift dramatically. And
one of the outcomes of that is we will realize that war simply is
no longer an acceptable solution to conflict. It was never really
a solution, but it's not even an acceptable way to deal with conflict.
And to me, that's always been very dear to my heart. I remember even
as a five year old child I started realizing the problems with war
and the dangers of war. And I couldn't understand how – here we have
this incredibly advanced society – how we could still have wars. It
just didn't make sense to me. We can't claim to be the most advanced
civilization on Earth and we still have war and that's the only way
we can deal with problems.
So to me I have realized over my lifetime that one of the key elements
of my divine plan is to help raise humankind beyond the consciousness
of war. And I think many spiritual people have that same desire. And
to me the Ascended Host have given me so many tools for doing that,
and that's why, from the moment I heard about the Ascended Host, my
life took on a whole new meaning. I realized that there is a purpose.
And I have felt excited over the last almost 30 years to be part of
that movement of the growth in awareness in our society, that I believe
will inevitably shift the collective consciousness. It's just a matter
of how long it takes, but you look back at history and you see that
there has been many other shifts, and I believe we are right in the
middle of a really, really big shift.
And in 10 years, maybe a little bit more, we are going to look back
and say, "How could we ever accept war for so long?" Because
now we are going to see how obvious it is that this is not a way to
deal with conflict. And I believe that, as a result of that shift
in consciousness, not only will we have more peace, but we will also
have an incredible expansion of human knowledge, human technology,
new energy technologies. All kinds of things will start shifting.
It will be an even greater shift than the Renaissance or the industrial
revolution.
So I guess I could say that the real essence of finding the teachings
of the ascended masters was that before I found them life seemed to
have no real purpose to me. Because I couldn't see the materialistic
lifestyle as an end in itself. But ever since then it's been an incredibly
exciting growth process, and I think life – not just my personal life
but life on this planet – is incredibly exciting. And we are all very,
very privileged to be alive at this time because we are part of what
I think later will be seen as one of the major, major shifts in humankind's
growth process.
So that was basically what I wanted to say, and I hope you all feel
part of that excitement. Because it really is a tremendous time to
be alive.
Copyright
© 2008 by Kim Michaels |
