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NOTE:
This teaching was given on July 20, 2006.
Kim: Jesus, on a regular basis I talk to or get e-mails from
people who have realized they have followed a spiritual or religious
teacher they now consider false. Some have come to this conclusion
on their own, some have read something elsewhere and some have read
what you say on this website.
Some of these people are quite concerned about how this might influence
their spiritual path, even into the future. I see this concern as
centered around the following:
-
Some people
are afraid that if they could be fooled by a false teacher once,
what is to prevent them from being fooled again. Some even take
this to the extreme of not wanting to ever trust any teacher.
-
Some people
have a deep sense of regret, feeling they should have known better.
Some even feel that their Christ self or the masters should have
warned them.
-
Some people
are concerned that they might somehow have been permanently affected
in a way they cannot escape.
I wonder if you
would like to comment on this topic, since it seems to be a stumbling
block for many people who sincerely pursue spiritual growth.
Jesus: The topic of false teachers is an extremely
important topic for all spiritual seekers. The reason I have not commented
on it at length before is that I wanted a certain amount of teachings
on the human ego to be brought forth first. Thus, I can shorten the
discussion on false teachers by referring to the series on The
least you should know about the human ego.
Let me first say that there is no reason for a sincere spiritual seeker
to feel bad about having followed a false teacher or teaching. As
I explain in the ego discourses, every aspect of life on this planet
has been affected by the duality consciousness. Thus, there is hardly
a single person on this planet who has not been exposed to false ideas.
It is virtually impossible to grow up anywhere without being “brainwashed”
with ideas that spring from the mind of anti-christ. Most people have
been exposed to such ideas in a more organized form, either as an
orthodox religion, scientific materialism or simply the general world
view that people have in their family or society.
My point is that there is no practical way to embody on Earth without
being exposed to false teachings. As a spiritual seeker, you should
simply accept the fact that you have been exposed to false ideas since
childhood and that a major part of the spiritual path is to purify
your mind of the false beliefs that have been programmed into it.
I understand that many seekers feel bad because they have now identified
a particular teaching or guru as being false, and they realize they
have been fooled. Yet let me ask you this: “What is best? To
realize you have been fooled or to still be fooled?” Obviously,
once you realize you have been fooled, you are no longer fooled. You
have demonstrated that you have some degree of Christ discernment,
so why feel regret? What you need to do is to prevent your ego from
getting you to shut down or divert your quest for truth. Instead,
you need to build on your accomplishment and continue to sharpen your
Christ discernment—which is the only and ultimate defense against
false teachers.
Do you get my underlying point? Life is a process of building your
personal Christhood. This involves increasing your ability to discern
between what comes from the One Truth of the Christ mind and what
comes from the innumerable dualistic “truths” of the mind
of anti-christ. Currently, life on this planet is heavily affected
by the mind of anti-christ. Thus, it is inevitable that you grow up
being affected by false teachers and teachings. This is currently
part of life on this planet, so there is no reason to complain about
it, although it is important not to affirm it as a permanent or unavoidable
condition. Instead, a spiritual seeker should accept that part of
walking the spiritual path is to learn how to see through and free
yourself from false teachers.
This is not just for the sake of your own growth, but also so that
you can demonstrate for others how to overcome a false teaching and
still move on toward personal Christhood. Most of today’s spiritual
seekers volunteered to be the forerunners and demonstrate how to move
into the consciousness of the Golden Age. Thus, stop feeling bad about
having been exposed to false teachers. It is part of what you volunteered
to do, so get on with it and make the best of whatever situation you
have encountered. You are here to demonstrate how to overcome, so
get on with overcoming! Physician, heal thyself—and then move
on to healing others!
Defining false ideas
When talking about a topic, it is often wise to define it first, so
let us attempt to define what we mean when we talk about false teachings,
and let us begin at the level of a single idea. As I explain in the
ego discourses, many religious people are caught in black-and-white
thinking, and they would define a false idea this way: Our religion
is the only true one, thus any idea that is different from, contradicts
or goes beyond the official doctrines of our church is a false idea
and the work of the devil.
I hope those who are open to this website can see that this is not
a very useful definition. Likewise, those who take the gray
approach might think there are no false ideas and that any idea
is as valid as any other idea. Or they might define a false idea as
follows: The true, universal teachings all stress the need to be loving
and kind, so any idea that does not affirm that this is all we need
to do is a false idea. Again, this is not a very useful definition,
so we need to take a different approach.
There are many people who would love for this planet to be a very
neat and tidy place, where it is easy to divide things into good and
bad. Yet as I explain in the ego discourses, the reality is that because
of the influence of the duality consciousness, everything is rather
murky. The most dangerous consequence of the duality consciousness
is that it creates a veil – what the Buddha called Maya –
and the effect is that it becomes difficult for people to discern
what is true and false in an absolute sense. This also makes it difficult
to discern between true and false ideas.
For example, many people would like to believe that if a statement
is made by a true spiritual teacher, then it will be absolutely, universally
true and it will be true for all time. Many Christians would like
to believe that every statement I made 2,000 years ago lives up to
these demands. This desire is, of course, created by the ego and its
attempt to define an automatic path to salvation. The ego is attempting
to make you believe that because you now belong to a particular religion,
you no longer need to exercise your Christ discernment but should
unquestionably accept the outer doctrines of your church. My point
is that you can NEVER let down your guard and your responsibility
to discern from within.
Let me give an example. I once made the remark:
3 The Pharisees
also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful
for a man to put away his wife for every cause?
6 Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore
God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. (Matthew,
Chapter 19)
Many Christians, including
the Catholic church, interprets this to mean that I said divorce is
universally wrong. In reality, this teaching was given to address
a specific situation, namely that many men at the time viewed women
as a piece of property meant to bear children, keep house and be available
for sexual pleasure. So when their wives became old and were no longer
attractive, many men simply abandoned them and took younger wives.
At the same time, women had no way to make a living, so this was extremely
inhumane and also created a major social problem. Yet in today’s
age, one cannot interpret this remark to mean that divorce is universally
wrong because other considerations now come into play.
Take another example:
Jesus saith unto
him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the
Father, but by me. (John 14:16)
This remark is true, but
only when one understands that I was speaking as a representative
of the universal Christ consciousness. It is this universal state
of consciousness that is the open door to the kingdom of God and not
a historical person. People can access this universal mind directly
in a way that is not dependent upon an external savior or an external
church. Thus, although the remark is true, it has been misused by
countless Christians to justify all kinds of abuse, from the crusades
to discriminating against one’s non-Christian neighbors.
My point here is to show that it is not quite that simple to label
an idea as false. What is true in one context and time period can
be false in another. What is a true remark can still be misinterpreted
and misused by the duality consciousness. My point is to show that
the old, black-and-white belief that an idea is either true or false
is not useful for a mature spiritual seeker. You need to deepen your
ability to discern.
As I explain in the ego discourses, the true goal of spiritual growth
is to rise above the duality consciousness and be reborn into the
Christ consciousness. Thus, the goal of a true spiritual teacher is
NOT to give forth some absolute truth – for any idea expressed
in words has entered the realm of duality – but to help a specific
group of people rise above specific dualistic illusions. In other
words, the teachings given by the Buddha are as true as my teachings,
but they were given to different people in a different culture and
they address slightly different aspects of the duality consciousness.
My point is that a more useful measure for evaluating an idea is to
look at its intent. Is the idea given with the intent to set you free
from some aspect of the duality consciousness?
A true idea is given to set you free, whereas a false idea is designed
to trap you in the duality consciousness. I realize this will be disappointing
to some people, for they are still looking for the black-and-white
way to label a false idea. Yet there is only one way to escape false
teachers, and that is to sharpen your discernment, which is a creative,
not a mechanical, process.
As explained in the ego discourses, the ego cannot see the Spirit
of Truth but is always seeking to take a statement from this world
and elevate it to the status of infallibility. Yet the only real way
to discern between true and false teachings is to base your discernment
on a direct, inner experience of the Spirit of Truth. The Spirit of
Truth is beyond specific words, as words can be interpreted in different
ways by the duality consciousness.
Yet there is only one Spirit of Truth, and once you experience it,
you will know that it vibrates above a certain frequency level. Thus,
you can – in your heart, not your head – compare the vibration
of any idea to the vibration of the Spirit of Truth. If your mind
is pure and your intention loving, you will know whether any idea
springs from the Christ mind or the mind of anti-christ.
As you sharpen this ability to read the vibration of an idea –
which includes the intent behind it – you will have the ultimate
measure for exposing a false idea. In fact, most spiritual seekers
– especially those who have already seen through a false teaching
– have already started developing this ability. They simply
need to continue without letting their egos, their emotions or their
intellectual minds interfere with the process. Practice does make
perfect, so if you don’t keep practicing, you will stagnate.
In short, a false idea is an idea that is designed to trap you in
the duality consciousness and prevent you from transcending the ego.
Defining a false teaching
Let us now take this beyond a single idea and look at how to evaluate
a spiritual teaching, meaning a body of ideas assembled into a whole.
The black-and-white approach would say that a true teaching contains
no false ideas whereas a teaching that contains one false idea is
a false teaching. If you apply this criteria, you will not find a
single true teaching on this planet. For example, many Christians
believe the Bible is a true teaching, but that is because they intentionally
blind themselves to the errors and contradictions in the Bible.
Bringing forth spiritual teachings on Earth and translating them into
human language is a difficult process. Words are inherently ambiguous,
so even if you word a statement as precisely as you can, people can
still come up with different interpretations. Thus, what seems true
to one person can seem false to another. In reality, what seems true
or false is not the actual statement but the individual interpretation
of it. Against this, no spiritual teacher can protect his statements.
You also need to realize that even the best teachings will contain
some errors in them because things are “lost in translation.”
Furthermore, you must consider the context in which the teaching was
given. As I explain in the ego lectures, the ego wants to elevate
a teaching to the status of being infallible, meaning that it is absolutely
true in all circumstances and for all time. This is an impossible
dream, for no teaching can be understood without being seen in context.
For example, a teaching that is given in the East will be adapted
to the mindset, culture and even the use of words in the area. If
you evaluate the teaching with a Western mindset, culture and use
of words, you might impose errors upon the teaching that are not there
in the original form.
On the other hand, it must be made clear that even a false teaching
will contain many true ideas. If it had no truth in it, it would attract
very few people. In fact, the more sophisticated false teachings contain
mostly ideas that – seen in isolation – are true. Yet
when they are seen in context, they are given a slight turn that can
take the unaware seeker into a blind alley. This has caused many sincere
seekers to follow false teachers because they focus their attention
on the many true statements made by such a teacher. The teacher is
saying so many things that they want to hear that they unconsciously
– or sometimes even willingly – overlook the few warning
signs that exposes the false intent behind the teaching.
Again, a better measure for the value of a teaching is the intent
behind it. A true teaching is designed to help you rise above the
duality consciousness, whereas a false teaching is designed to keep
you trapped while thinking you are a very spiritual person who is
doing everything right. This can be detected when you use your intuitive
faculties to read the vibration of a teaching.
Defining a false teacher
One of the most common mistakes made by religious and spiritual people
is that they expect a spiritual teacher to be the perfect human being.
They judge this based on the standard of their religion, society or
even a personal standard. The trouble is that such standards are often
heavily influenced by the ego, and the result is that no one could
possibly live up to them.
Another important point is that a spiritual teacher is not meant to
live up to a human standard of perfection. On the contrary, the role
of a true spiritual teacher is to shake people out of their rigid
mindset. Thus, a true teacher often appears in disguise or plays a
role that challenges people’s pre-conceived opinions. For example,
many people rejected me 2,000 years ago because I did not live up
to their expectations about how the Messiah – a perfect human
being in their minds – should appear and behave.
My point is that if you look at appearance and behavior, you cannot
correctly distinguish between true and false teachers. In fact, many
true teachers deliberately take on an appearance designed to filter
out those who are not serious students, those who are not willing
to look behind appearances. And many false teachers attempt to take
on the appearance of being perfect according to the expectations of
their target audience. A true teacher will tell you what you need
to hear, whereas a false teacher will tell you what you want to hear.
Again, you must go beyond the outer mind and use your intuition to
read the intent and vibration of a teacher. Fortunately, this is much
easier to do for a living person than for a teaching expressed in
words. When you see a person, even a photograph, you can read the
totality of the person’s energy field—even if you don’t
see it. In a teaching expressed in words, it is easy to camouflage
or hide errors. Yet no person can completely control his or her energy
field, and thus a perceptive student can read the energy field of
a prospective teacher. Many students have had an instant recognition
upon meeting a teacher, whereas others have been instantly repelled.
However, this process is not always infallible, as we will discuss
later.
The distinction between growing teachers and false teachers
Let us take this into a little more detail. As I seek to explain on
this website, Christhood that is not expressed is not Christhood.
The Alpha aspect of Christhood is that you establish an inner connection
to your higher being, a connection that does not depend on and cannot
be disturbed by anything on the Earth. The Omega aspect is that you
use that connection to selflessly raise other parts of life. Only
when you have this complete circle, this figure-eight flow, have you
attained a degree of Christhood. My point being that for the most
mature seekers on this planet, teaching others (or helping them in
other ways) is a natural and inescapable part of the spiritual path.
If you take a brief look at the internet, you will see that there
are many, many people who claim to be spiritual teachers, channelers
or messengers in some capacity. Can we reasonably say that most of
these are false teachers? That depends on what criteria you use. My
point here is that teaching is a natural part of Christhood, yet you
do not have to be perfect before you start this teaching mission.
People trapped in the black-and-white approach will say that only
a perfect person can be a true teacher. People trapped in a grey approach
will say anyone can be a true teacher. The truth is, of course, beyond
both extremes.
The fact of the matter is that there are many people in today’s
world who are seeking to teach others, yet they themselves are not
perfect and have not attained the fullness of Christhood. Let me make
it clear that there is not necessarily anything wrong with this. It
is in teaching that you truly learn, so if you do not start teaching,
your learning cannot progress beyond a certain level. In other words,
you need to start teaching before you are perfect. The big question
becomes whether you will recognize and admit that you are not perfect
or whether you will seek to hide your inexperience behind a veil of
infallibility?
There is nothing wrong with a mature spiritual seeker trying to teach
others. However, it is extremely important to remain humble and NOT
let the ego talk one into beginning to play the game of superiority
or infallibility. As long as you keep firmly in mind that you don’t
know everything and that you are constantly learning and growing,
then you can still help others and experience personal growth.
Do you see the distinction here? Many of the people who teach do not
have the highest possible understanding of reality or of the teachings
of the Ascended Host. They may even still have some personality flaws
or unresolved psychological issues. In other words, they still have
certain erroneous or incomplete beliefs, meaning that they might be
teaching some ideas that are false. Yet if their intent is pure, if
they don’t claim infallibility and if they are constantly trying
to grow, then they are NOT false teachers. They may be immature, inexperienced
or flawed teachers, but they are not false teachers because they are
not deliberately and maliciously trying to mislead and manipulate
others. If such a person is honest and sincere with his or her followers,
it is possible that a group of people can make tremendous progress
by growing together.
This then leads us to identify a group of teachers that we can safely
label as false. These are the ones who are deliberately – and
in most cases they know this consciously – trying to deceive
others. They do this for various reasons, ranging from money over
the need to feel superior to the need to vampirize spiritual energy
from those who still have it. These teachers can often be difficult
for inexperienced seekers to expose because they are very good at
hiding their true intent behind a facade of sincerity, credibility,
selflessness and humility. They are good at playing the game and giving
people what they are looking for in a spiritual teacher.
How do you recognize such false teachers? Here are some outer points
that can give you a foundation, but do not forget that the most important
points are intent and vibration:
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False teachers are
often very concerned about establishing authority for themselves.
The purpose is to set themselves up so they cannot be questioned
or gainsaid. For example, some Christian churches and even New
Age organizations claim to be the only true representatives of
Christ based on a lineage of people going all the way back to
me 2,000 years ago. In reality, such an earthly lineage is worthless
because it could so easily be polluted. The only thing that really
matters is that you have the spiritual anointing of the ascended
Jesus Christ.
-
A false teacher often
seeks to set himself up as being above his followers, often as
being in an entirely separate category. The reason might be that
the teacher claims to be God or a spiritual being incarnate, has
some anointing from above, has been or done something in past
lives or has done something in this life. A true teacher says,
“The works that I do shall ye do also, and greater works
shall ye do.” He places attention on the students, not himself
-
A false teacher often
gives himself the VIP treatment, in terms of luxury accommodations
and being treated as a superior being, whereas the followers and
staff are living in poor conditions.
-
A false teacher often
creates a culture of fear in his organization so that people are
afraid of questioning the leader, the teaching or are afraid of
leaving.
-
A false teacher often
creates an organization with a double standard, leading to dishonesty.
The leader and his closest associates can hide behind a smokescreen
and can get away with things that are not ethical or legal.
-
A false teacher often
has a distinct vibration of pride and superiority that is not
hard to detect—once you have been willing to look in the
mirror and detect your own pride.
-
A false teacher often
has some character flaw or misconduct that is either hidden or
explained away with some cleaver reasoning. However, nothing can
justify abusing other people sexually, physically, emotionally
or by taking their money.
-
A false teacher often
seeks to make his followers co-dependent upon him so they do not
dare to make their own decisions. They do not think for themselves
but ask for the guru’s advice or base their decisions on
the outer teaching rather than their inner Christ discernment.
-
A false teacher is
actually stealing the spiritual energy of his followers. He can
do this by people placing their attention upon him, but for many
false teachers this is not enough to give them the energy they
need to survive or crave in order to build their egos. Thus, they
use various forms of spiritual and emotional manipulation in order
to force people to release their energy. If you feel empty or
exhausted after being near a teacher, that is a danger signal.
- In short, we might
say that a true teacher is seeking to give to the followers and
raise them up. A false teacher is seeking to take from the followers
and use it to raise himself up above all other people.
Let me make it clear that
there is a danger in giving any kind of list to expose false teachers.
The danger is that the false teachers will know what criteria I list
and can thus counteract it. This has been going on for thousands of
years on this planet, thus there are some false teachers who are extremely
good at disguising themselves. There are also some true teachers who
may display one or more of these characteristics. So, again, only
the use of intuition can give you true discernment. Which makes it
essential for us to discuss how certain forces in your own psychology
can interfere with your discernment.
How the ego interferes with your discernment
What I have done in the above sections is to question the way many
people seek to discern between true and false teachings. An immature
person will use a very black-and-white form of judgment based on outer
criteria defined by the duality consciousness. It is my hope that
the more mature seekers will realize that in order to develop true
discernment, you need to become aware of how the ego will seek to
influence the process. The purpose of spiritual growth is to transcend
the ego, and you cannot do this as long as you let the ego influence
your path. The ego will never take you to the promised land, but will
take you into a blind alley to ensure its own survival.
As I explain in the discourses on the ego, the ego wants you to follow
a false path, a path which promises that you can be saved without
leaving behind the ego. Essentially, all false teachers promise you
that they can take you on this false path, what I call the outer or
mechanical path, to salvation. The result is that your ego is constantly
trying to make you follow any false teacher and reject any true teacher
you come across.
The ego will seek to make you believe that any idea which threatens
to expose itself or its manipulation of you is a false idea. The ego
will do this primarily by defining a particular false idea as beyond
questioning, then saying anything which contradicts or goes beyond
it is a false idea.
To understand how the ego manipulates you, you need to study all of
my teachings on the ego. However, let me give you the main thrust
used by the ego. Most false teachers will promise you that they can
save you, meaning that they can do the work for you that qualifies
you for salvation. By the mere act of following them – according
to the rules they define – you will be saved, attain a higher
state of consciousness, be whisked up by a UFO or whatever the promise
might be. What they are really saying is that you can be saved without
doing the hard work of looking for the beam in your own eye –
the ego – and overcoming it. You can be saved without transcending
the duality consciousness and putting on your personal Christhood.
The ego, therefore, will do everything it can to try to make you accept
this claim and reject the reality that there is no substitute for
self-transcendence. One example is the Christian claim that I have
taken upon myself all the sins of the world. Another is the New Age
claim that being kind and loving is all you need.
In seeking to cloud your discernment, your ego will skillfully use
whatever unresolved issues you have in your psychology. These are
the issues that make you vulnerable to a false teacher in the first
place. There are many of these, but let me mention one of the most
common ones. Many sincere spiritual seekers are not powerful people
but are very loving people. As a result, their egos have often managed
to lower their self-esteem. This makes them vulnerable to a false
teacher who makes the claim that he is a very special person who can
do all the work for them.
These people often feel that they can’t save themselves, so
they need a strong leader. Once they have accepted the leader, their
self-esteem gets a boost by being a follower of this “perfect”
leader. However, their sense of self-esteem also depends on them following
the leader rather than thinking for themselves. As long as the leader
can maintain his aura of infallibility, he can get such people to
do almost anything. Because they are seeking to avoid taking personal
responsibility – which they feel they are not capable of doing
– they will follow even the most outrageous directions from
the leader.
Other people are very strong intellectually, and their egos will seek
to make them feel pride over being able to understand a very complex
teaching. In reality, explaining the basic dynamics of spiritual growth
is not that complicated and does not require a sophisticated intellectual
explanation. Yet some people have fallen into the trap that if a teaching
is hard to understand, it must be very sophisticated.
Still other people are very emotional and the ego will use their emotions
to manipulate them. This can be through fear or it can be by playing
on people’s anger. For example, some people live in constant
fear of the end of the world or some major cataclysm, and as a result
they dare not express their Christhood. They reason that only when
the danger to the world is over, can they work on their Christhood.
Others live in anger against another group of people or even dark
forces. Their goal is to defeat the adversary rather than attaining
the Christhood that enables them to transcend the adversary.
My point for giving you these examples is to show you that both the
ego and a false teacher will exploit whatever unresolved issues you
have in your psychology. They will seek to magnify these issues –
such as fear – and then use them to manipulate you in a certain
direction. In many cases a false teacher doesn’t know when to
quit, meaning that he takes the manipulation too far and exposes himself.
That is why many people eventually come to see through a false teacher.
However, it is essential for you to understand that the ego often
wins either way. As long as you are following a false teacher, the
ego has you going in the wrong direction. Yet should you come to see
through the false teacher, the ego can often get people to jump into
the opposite extreme of rejecting all teachers or the spiritual path
as a whole. Either way, the ego has won and has managed to stay hidden
from view, blaming everything on the outer teacher.
My larger point here is that for you personally there really is only
one false teacher, namely your ego. Any outer teacher is just an instrument
that your ego uses to manipulate you and at the same time provide
a scapegoat that diverts attention from the real problem—the
ego itself. The main goal for the ego is to influence you while staying
hidden, and it will ruthlessly exploit an outer teacher to attain
this goal. It can even use a true teacher to do this by making you
believe you don’t have to think for yourself now that you have
this perfect teacher.
How you can use a false teacher as a springboard for growth
When spiritual seekers come to the conclusion that they have followed
a false teacher, one of the most common reactions is that they become
angry at the teacher and feel they were deceived and manipulated.
Such feelings are very understandable, but there comes a point where
it is necessary to look beyond the feelings and ask a very important
question: “Do you want to grow from the experience or do you
want to allow your ego to turn it into an excuse for not taking the
next step on the path?”
You see, God has created the law of karma, so any false teacher will
surely reap the karma for having misled you. That simply is not your
concern, for God’s law will take care of this and does not need
your assistance. What should be your concern is how you can turn the
experience with a false teacher into a step forward on your personal
path. This can be done ONLY if you are willing to take responsibility
for your path, look in the mirror and ask yourself what it is in your
psychology that made you vulnerable to this false teacher? Why did
you believe in the promises made by the teacher, promises you now
realize were empty?
If you are willing to go through this self-evaluation process –
even if it is painful – you can turn the entire situation
around and make great progress. If you are not willing to look for
the beam in your own eye, you can spend a lifetime complaining about
the splinter in the eye of another, and you will end up wasting an
embodiment without making the progress called for in your divine plan.
Instead, ask yourself why you were so anxious to follow a teacher
who told you what your ego wanted to hear?
I know it can be painful to admit that it was your own psychological
issues that made you vulnerable to the false teacher. It is far easier
to accept the belief – promoted by certain sides, such as the
so-called anti-cult movement – that the teacher was so skillful
that he could take over your mind. Yet the reality is that no one
can take over your mind unless you allow them to do so. And it is
the unresolved issues in your own psychology that makes you give others
control over your mind. You believe in the false promise that if you
give them control, they will remove issues for you so you don’t
have to confront them yourself.
Let me make a clear statement that can seem heartless, but is actually
very liberating when you accept it: IF YOU HAVE FOLLOWED A FALSE TEACHER,
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE REASON, NAMELY THAT YOU HAVE NOT TAKEN FULL
RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN PATH! It is the attempt to avoid taking
this responsibility that caused you to give a false teacher influence
over your life.
The liberating aspect of this truth is that you can use the experience
with a false teacher to take the essential step that will put you
beyond the reach of ANY false teacher. That step is that you accept
FULL responsibility for your own path and begin to sharpen your Christ
discernment and your ability to make right decisions. This is when
you step away from the false path to salvation – the outer path
– and step onto the true path to salvation, namely the inner
path of self-transcendence, the path to personal Christhood.
You can now use your experience with a false teacher to expose your
ego, instead of allowing the ego to use the experience to take you
away from the spiritual path and continue hiding in the shadows of
your unresolved psychology. For example, if you can honestly admit
that you have a problem with low self-esteem, you can begin to reach
for a true sense of self – namely that you were created as a
co-creator with God – and then gradually build a true sense
of self esteem that cannot be manipulated by the ego or other people.
Once you know who you are, you will not feel inferior to any person,
and thus you no longer need a teacher who claims superiority.
Let us now take this to an even deeper level.
When the student is ready, the teacher appears
Is it possible that your exposure to a false teacher is part of your
divine plan? The divine plan is a blueprint for this embodiment that
you made before being born. You made this plan in cooperation with
your Christ self and spiritual teachers, and you made it while having
a broader perspective than you have now—where you see everything
from inside the mental box of your current embodiment. Thus, people
often plan for things to happen that they would not have chosen while
inside their current situation.
Why would you choose to be exposed to a false teacher? Here are the
most common reasons:
-
In past lives, you
have developed or have not overcome a particular weakness. You
choose a false teacher who can play on this weakness as a way
to force yourself to deal with it in this lifetime
-
In past lives you
have shown an unwillingness to take (full) responsibility for
your path. You choose a false teacher to force you to deal with
this issue and take full responsibility.
-
In past lives you
have not developed sufficient Christ discernment. You choose a
false teacher to help force yourself to finally develop this discernment.
- You might have mastered
the above lessons in past lives, but you now choose to demonstrate
the path for others. Thus, your intent is to allow yourself to be
exposed to false teachers so you can demonstrate that they will
not stop your progress. You want to demonstrate how to overcome
adverse conditions and still move forward on the spiritual path.
Regardless of the motivation,
the essence here is that you forget all about this as you come into
embodiment. Thus, you face the situation on a blank slate. It is therefore
important for you to become aware of how the ego will seek to use
such a situation to stop your progress on the path. You must be determined
not to let the ego manipulate you into a blind alley but to keep moving
forward.
You can make things easier for yourself by pondering the saying, “When
the student is ready, the teacher appears.” The real question
is what kind of teacher you are ready for at any given moment? The
teacher you attract to you will be adapted to your state of consciousness
and will thus reflect the kind of lessons you need to learn. In other
words, when you met a false teacher, it was because that was the kind
of teacher you were ready for.
This is not necessarily a negative—once you overcome the naive
dream that the spiritual path should be easy and problem-free. Remember
that when you formulate your divine plan, you have a broader perspective.
Thus, you clearly see what lessons you need to learn, and one of the
main lessons is always Christ discernment. It is a fact that even
a false teacher can teach you Christ discernment—or perhaps
we should say that you can learn Christ discernment by being exposed
to a false teacher. In fact, for some students, being exposed to a
false teacher can be the fastest way to learn certain lessons.
My point is that a true spiritual seeker will not blame him- or herself
and will not look at anything with regret. You should approach everything
that has happened to you as a potential for learning the important
lessons on the path. By taking a positive approach and looking for
the beam in your own eye, you can use a false teacher as a springboard
for taking essential steps forward. This is, of course, the last thing
your ego wants, which is another reason for taking this positive approach.
In that respect, let me call your attention to the fact that forgiveness
is an essential act for all spiritual seekers. I understand that many
people have been abused and hurt by false teachers, and I am in no
way trying to justify the actions of such manipulators. Yet it remains
a fact that the law will return to such people what they do to others.
Thus, your concern should be how you can move forward, and you can
do that only by forgiving everyone involved, including the false teacher,
God and yourself. Forgiving everyone is setting yourself free to move
on from the situation. Not forgiving is keeping yourself karmically
and psychologically linked to the false teacher.
In that respect, let me address the issue that many seekers had an
intuitive experience when they first met a false teacher. They felt
an inner prompting to follow this teacher, and now that they have
come to realize it was a false teacher, they feel betrayed by their
intuition/inner guidance, being reluctant to trust it again. However,
the intuitive prompting you got was to follow the teacher. The assumption
that it was a genuine teacher was something your ego managed to project
unto the situation—based on your own unresolved psychology and
the dreams that followed from it. This was done for the purpose of
setting you up for a fall when the illusion was punctured. Your ego
wanted to make you distrust your inner guidance, which is the ONLY
way for you to reach beyond the duality consciousness.
My point is that your inner prompting was true. It was part of your
divine plan for you to follow this false teacher in order to learn
certain lessons. Thus, do not allow your ego to use the situation
to get you to distrust your inner guidance and your divine plan. Learn
the lesson and move on! Use the situation to expand the clarity of
your inner guidance and your awareness of how the ego can distort
a true direction in order to take you into a blind alley. Things are
not always as they seem, and there is often a greater purpose for
why you have to go through situations that might be unpleasant or
seem like a mistake.
It is especially important to realize that many of the initiations
on the spiritual path are subtle—especially at the higher level.
Thus, there is often a hidden lesson behind every surface appearance.
For example, there can be a positive purpose behind meeting a false
teacher, once you look behind the surface assumption that you should
meet only true teachers. Always seek to step back from any situation
and ask yourself what might be the hidden lesson.
How to move on
Let me now address the specific points that were brought up in the
original question. The first one is:
Some people are
afraid that if they could be fooled by a false teacher once, what
is to prevent them from being fooled again. Some even take this
to the extreme of not wanting to ever trust any teacher.
The reaction of not wanting
to ever trust a teacher again comes ONLY from the ego. It is not a
soul response, so you need to see it for what it is and dismiss it.
It is a valid concern that if you have been fooled once, you could
be fooled again, However, this is only the case if you did not learn
the lessons you needed to learn from the situation. And if you did
not take full responsibility for the situation, you will not have
learned all of your lessons. Thus, you are likely to attract another
false teacher as an opportunity to learn the unlearned lesson.
There are many people who are exposed to a false teacher and realize
this, but they blame the teacher. Such people will not learn their
lessons but will simply attract another false teacher. Perhaps this
next false teacher takes on a completely different disguise. For example,
some people have followed a false teacher in the New Age field only
to submit to another false teacher in the anti-cult movement or a
fundamentalist Christian church. Some people can attract several false
teachers over one or more lifetimes, all the while failing to learn
the lesson and accept full responsibility for their path. Yet once
you understand the workings of the ego and are willing to look for
the unresolved issues in your psychology – the issues that make
you vulnerable to false teachers – you can quickly put this
behind you.
Some people have a deep sense of regret, feeling they should
have known better. Some even feel that their Christ self or the
masters should have warned them.
The sense of regret is
often reinforced by the ego in its attempt to make you distrust the
spiritual path itself. However, sometimes the regret does come from
a deeper part of your being because you knew that you knew better—but
you allowed your ego to manipulate you into discounting your intuitive
warnings. It is a fact that you will always receive a warning, but
in many cases people ignore them or rationalize that they are not
important. This always happens because the ego exploits your unresolved
psychology, making skillful use of your expectations of what this
wonderful new teacher will do for you.
Thus, you rationalize that once you have been turned into a perfect
human being by the teacher, you are no longer vulnerable to the very
things that the false teacher and your ego will use to manipulate
you. Your regret comes from the fact that you fell for the temptation
to think that the teacher would resolve your issues for you—whereas
the reality is that the teacher would make them more visible so as
to force you to deal with them.
Simply let go of this regret and realize that it is never too late
to learn your lessons. Take responsibility for your path and move
on. It is far better to admit that you made a mistake and move on
than to let your ego talk you into not admitting your mistake. The
latter will only keep you stuck in the state of consciousness that
caused you to make the mistake in the first place. It is time to move
on and self-transcend.
Some people are concerned that they might somehow have been permanently
affected in a way they cannot escape.
This is a valid concern
because some of the most ruthless false teachers can indeed insert
a “psychic hook” into the subconscious minds of those
who have submitted themselves to them. Even after you have seen through
and left such a teacher, the person can still influence you and drain
energy from your energy field.
And while this is a often carried out with great aggressiveness on
the part of the false teacher, it must be stated that no one can influence
your mind against your free will. Thus, you gave the false teacher
access to your mind, and you did so precisely because there were certain
unresolved problems in your psychology that you were not willing to
face. You therefore fell for the promise that the teacher would do
the work for you without you having to face the music.
The only way out is that you accept full responsibility for your path
and resolve – perhaps with the help of a professional –
the psychological issues. Once they are resolved, the false teacher
will have no inroad into your consciousness—the prince of this
world will come and have nothing in you. However, as an intermediate
step, it can be very helpful to call forth spiritual protection and
ask Shiva or Archangel Michael to cut you free from all ties to false
teachers. Archangel
Michael’s rosary and the New
Age East West rosary are valuable tools although no tool can be
a substitute for you taking responsibility.
People who are vulnerable to such psychic manipulation are likely
to have soul division or fragmentation.
Thus, it is important to use the situation as a prompting to seek
appropriate healing of such problems that have often followed you
for lifetimes. Determine that this is the lifetime where you will
make an all-out effort to seek wholeness and leave such divisions
behind for good. In other words, the ultimate revenge against a false
teacher who has hurt you is to use the experience to seek wholeness.
Accepting the nature of the path
As a final note, let me say that the spiritual path is an inner process
between the Conscious You and your own higher being. Any teacher you
encounter on Earth – true or false – is simply an
external influence. No teacher can do the work for you, because the
true goal of the spiritual path is that you attain oneness with your
own higher Being, and that sense of oneness can only come from within.
A teacher can either help or hinder the process, but you are ALWAYS
the one who must take each step. An immature spiritual seeker often
assumes that a false teacher can only hinder your progress whereas
a true teacher can only help you. In reality, that is not the case
because everything depends on how you make use of the experience with
the teacher. If you learn the lesson, sharpen your discernment and
take responsibility for yourself, then an encounter with a false teacher
can be a major step forward. If you think the teacher will do all
the work for you, then even an encounter with a true teacher can hold
you back.
Accept that the spiritual path is an inner path and that it is always
up to you how you use each situation to learn your lessons. When you
take this responsibility, you can turn every experience into a step
forward. If you do not accept this responsibility, there is nothing
I can do for you. You can continue to follow the false teachers who
will promise you forever that they can do the work for you. But when
you tire of this age-old game, remember me. I will always be here
for those who are willing to look for the beam in their own eyes.
And with my help, pulling that beam is not nearly as difficult as
your ego wants you to believe. Try me!
Copyright
© 2006 by Kim Michaels
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