Why
the ego will always be a house divided against itself
The least you should know about the ego, Part 9.
A discourse by Jesus
NOTE: This
teaching was given on July 24, 2006, after the NEW
DIRECTION was implemented.
In previous discourses I
have hinted at the fact that the ego has certain built-in contradictions,
and we will now take a closer look at them. The fact is that the ego
is based on an inescapable contradiction and therefore the ego will
always be a house divided. If you allow the ego to make you
divided against yourself, then you simply cannot stand in the light
of Christ truth. And you are not going to enter the kingdom of God while
you are lying down. You are going to enter only when you stand on the
one truth – the rock – of Christ.
In order to understand the ego’s systemic division, we need to
take a closer look at your own being and your purpose for being here.
As Mother Mary explains in her discourses,
everything is made from an interplay between two polarities, namely
the expanding force of the Father and the contracting force of the Mother.
Thus, in every aspect of life, there are two forces at work. This is
a truth that all spiritual seekers should fix in their minds so they
never forget it.
The consequence of this truth is that in every situation, there is a
high and a low potential. A sustainable creation can occur only when
the expanding and contracting forces are held in balance—so they
enhance each other. This is the high potential. The low potential is
that one force becomes dominant, which inevitably leads to an imbalance
that will cause the situation to deteriorate. If the expanding force
is too strong, everything will be exaggerated and if the contracting
force is too strong, everything will collapse upon itself.
What is it that keeps the two forces balanced? Well, it is the Christ
mind, the principle of the Son, which is designed to ensure oneness
between the two aspects of creation. From the viewpoint of a human being,
the two forces represent Spirit and matter, the spiritual realm and
the material world. Thus, the Christ mind is designed to ensure oneness
between Spirit and matter, which can happen only when matter outpictures
the blueprint designed by Spirit—the blueprint that is stored
in the universal Christ mind.
On a personal level, you have a spiritual aspect of your total being,
which we normally call your I
AM Presence. You also have a material aspect of your being, namely
your four lower bodies.
In order for you to fulfill your highest potential, you must have oneness
between your spiritual self and your lower self. We might say this has
always been the essential challenge for spiritual people. The Bible
describes it clearly:
For the good that
I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.
(Romans 7:19)
Watch and pray,
that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but
the flesh is weak. (Matthew 26:41)
So what can ensure this oneness
in your being? Only the Christ mind, but the Christ mind will not do
this as an external force that imposes oneness upon you. It will do
it only when it becomes an internal force, and that will happen only
when you – meaning the conscious self – makes the decision
to unite with the Christ mind, to become the Living Christ. To do this,
the conscious self must take full responsibility for your life and being,
even for your salvation. It must be willing to make the critical decisions
and seek balance in every situation.
Once you have the Christ mind, finding balance is not difficult, but
in order to have that mind, the conscious self must accept full responsibility,
and that is often a major stumbling block for spiritual seekers. That
is why the ego is so often successful in getting people to follow the
outer path, the automatic path that does not require you to take full
responsibility for making decisions. That is why the false
teachers so often trick you into believing they can make the decisions
for you.
The birth of the ego
In a previous discourse, I described how
you became enveloped in the consciousness of duality, the consciousness
of anti-christ. This caused you to make wrong decisions, until you came
to the point where the Conscious You decided that it would no longer
make decisions. Yet you were alive and you were in a particular outer
situation, and these facts were not changed by your decision not to
make decisions. So your outer situation demanded that decisions be made,
and since the conscious self would not make them, someone else had to
make decisions for you. That someone was what became the ego.
Let me make sure you understand the basic dynamic here. You decided
that you did not want to make decisions because it seemed like all your
decisions led to undesirable consequences. You felt, “I’m
damned if I do and damned if I don’t.” Yet the ONLY reason
your decisions produced undesirable consequences was that they were
based on the murky waters of the duality consciousness. This caused
you to take everything too far into one of the two extremes, and the
result was that every situation led to suffering. If your decisions
are based on the clarity of the Christ mind, they will always lead to
growth, and then there is no burden associated with making decisions.
In other words, you decided to stop deciding ONLY because you had lost
contact with the Christ mind—or a spiritual teacher who served
as your link to the Christ mind.
My point is that when you decided to stop making decisions, you had
already created a certain momentum of making decisions based on the
dualistic mind. We might say you had created a computer program in your
subconscious mind. When the conscious self stopped making decisions,
that computer program took over and quickly developed into the ego.
The ego is more than a computer program in that it has a survival instinct
and is thus an aggressive force in your being. Once you have given the
ego control, it will rather die than give it up—because giving
it up means that the ego WILL die.
The important point is that the ego was born out of your separation
from the Christ mind, and thus the ego can perceive only the consciousness
of anti-christ, the consciousness of duality. The two basic forces of
creation do not stop operating because you make a decision, so you are
still faced with situations in which the two forces exist. Here is the
vital difference:
-
When you look at life
through the clarity of the Christ mind, you see the expanding and
contracting forces as complementary. You see how to balance them
so that every decision you make is balanced and produces growth.
-
When you look at life
through the filter of the duality consciousness, you see the two
basic forces as opposites. Instead of complimenting each other,
you now see them as canceling out each other. The reason is that
when you do not balance these forces in your own being, they WILL
cancel out each other. The inevitable result is that your decisions
will produce an imbalance that leads to suffering.
My point here is that to
your ego, the two basic forces are seen as enemies that are out to oppose
its control over your circumstances. And since the ego can never grasp
the Christ mind, this is a fundamental problem that can NEVER be solved
at the level of the ego. The ego will always look at life through the
duality consciousness, and therefore it can NEVER balance the expanding
and contracting forces. Thus, the ego’s decisions will ALWAYS
produce suffering.
In fact, the ego is on a constant see-saw between one of two extremes.
It will first go into one extreme, for example by letting the expanding
force dominate. This leads you to be caught in the black-and-white
thinking described earlier. When you have finally had enough of
this form of thinking – and its unbalanced results – the
ego will not admit its mistake, for it can NEVER see its mistake. Instead,
the ego will take you toward the other extreme, namely gray
thinking. When you have had enough of that, the ego will take you
right back toward the other extreme, and this can go on for numerous
lifetimes.
In fact, it can go on indefinitely, unless the Conscious You finally
has had enough and decides that it will take back the responsibility
for making decisions. The problem here is that taking back responsibility
is not enough. You must also understand that in order to make right
decisions, you must reach for and put on the mind of Christ. Yet because
most religions teach the outer path to salvation, most people simply
do not know that they need to do this or how to do it. Which is why
they continue to cling to the dream of an outer, automatic path to salvation—which
leaves them at the mercy of the ego and false teachers.
There is only one thing that will bring about a solution to your problems
and an end to your suffering. You must restore balance to your own being
by restoring balance between the expanding and contracting forces, your
spiritual self and your lower self. The ONLY factor that can restore
this balance is the Christ mind, the one, undivided truth of the Christ
mind. Yet the Christ mind will not enter your being unless it is invited.
Your ego will never invite the Christ mind to enter, for it cannot even
see the Christ mind as a solution to your problems. If it could, it
would know that the entry of the Christ mind would mean the death of
the ego. So the Christ mind can enter ONLY when invited by the Conscious
You.
The trick is that the Conscious You cannot invite the Christ mind to
enter until it has taken full responsibility for your life and salvation
by deciding that it is willing to make decisions and to take the decision-making
power away from the ego. The other trick is that the Christ mind will
not enter as an external force that will fix your problems for you.
The Christ mind can work in your life ONLY when it becomes an internal
force because the Conscious You has decided that it is willing to put
on the mind of Christ and become one with your own higher Being. You
are willing to base your sense of identity in the material world on
your spiritual identity. You are willing to be here below all that you
are Above. This idea deserves further scrutiny.
Why are you here?
The ego sees only the material world and it sees everything through
the duality consciousness. So to the ego there is no spiritual purpose
for life; the purpose for life must be defined in, defined by, the material
world. Thus, the human ego has defined any number of “life purposes”
that people spend lifetimes pursuing—always without finding happiness,
fulfillment, peace of mind or a sense of purpose and meaning.
As Mother Mary describes in detail in her book,
the real purpose of life is your growth in self-awareness. This growth
comes from fulfilling your role as a co-creator with God. Your Being
is designed in the image and after the likeness of God, meaning that
you have the creative powers to use the Ma-ter light to create form.
You descended into the material universe in order to multiply your creative
powers and take dominion over the Earth, meaning the mastery of mind
over matter. You will be fulfilled ONLY when you fill this role—a
role you chose before coming into embodiment.
What does it mean to take dominion over the Earth? As everything else,
it has a Father and a Mother – an Alpha and an Omega – aspect.
The Alpha aspect is that you must start by taking dominion over your
own being by establishing oneness between your spiritual self and your
lower self. The key to this is that the conscious self decides to fulfill
its proper role of being the Christ in your being and balancing the
father and mother aspects, Spirit and matter.
The Omega aspect is that you take dominion over the Earth and do your
part to raise it into the kingdom of God. You do this by both exercising
your creative powers and by using the Christ mind to help other people
rise above the duality consciousness. The key to this phase is that
the conscious self decides to take up its role of being the Christ on
Earth by challenging the consciousness of anti-christ wherever it is
encountered.
We might say that when you are in embodiment, your own consciousness
is the Alpha aspect of your life and your environment is the Omega aspect.
Once again, your role is to establish oneness between the two so that
your environment reflects your inner being which reflects your spiritual
self.
As always, the key is to have the Christ balance between the two basic
forces. If you let the ego run your life, it will still seek to fulfill
your goals in an unbalanced way:
-
Dominion over
self: If the expanding force is dominant, your ego will
seek to control every aspect of your life. You will attempt to force
yourself by strictly following an outer system, be it a religion
or a diet. This is the dream that by living up to outer requirements,
you will be saved without looking at the beam – the ego –
in your own eye.
If the contracting force is dominant, your ego will take the if-it-feels-good-do-it
attitude. You will be completely unable to discipline yourself or
free yourself from the control of the ego or other people. You will
feel like a total victim of outer circumstances and find a million
excuses for not changing your life.
- Dominion over
the Earth. If the expanding force is dominant, you will attempt
to force other people to become a member of your belief system, thinking
that the end of saving them can justify the means. This is what you
see in fundamentalist people from any religion, even the fundamentalist
people in a political ideology or the ideology of science. This leads
to black-and-white thinking.
If the contracting force is dominant, you will think you have no right
to influence other people and that you should be tolerant of everything.
Any idea is as valid as any other, so live and let live for love is
all you need. This leads to gray thinking.
The key to fulfilling your
divine plan – the plan you made before coming into embodiment
– is to bring the Christ mind into your life so that it can balance
the two basic forces. Thus, instead of the perpetual tension between
the two forces – leading to conflict, loss and suffering –
your life can become an upward spiral of greater freedom and fulfillment.
The Christ is not somewhere between the two extremes but transcends
both extremes because it is above and beyond the duality consciousness.
The Christ mind clearly sees that the Earth is out of alignment with
the Creator's vision and laws, which will eventually cause the material
universe to self-destruct. It therefore sees that the only solution
is to bring the Earth back into harmony with the purpose of creation.
In other words, the Christ mind realizes that the mother aspect cannot
be allowed to evolve on its own, creating its own laws instead of following
the Creator's laws. Thus, the material realm must always be an expression
of the spiritual realm, yet this can happen ONLY when the co-creators
that embody on this planet decide to become the Living Christs. They
must take dominion over the Earth rather than letting the Earth have
dominion over them.
The key to creating an upward spiral
When your conscious self stops making decisions and allows the ego to
run your life, you create a downward spiral. You will create a mental
prison for yourself, and it will result in outer suffering. This suffering
will become increasingly intense until you finally “hit bottom”
and decide that you cannot continue to live this way.
It is an unfortunate fact that many people have to experience this suffering
for many lifetimes before they have had enough. Some do not make the
decision to turn around until they experience an extreme form of crisis.
Yet an outer crisis is not what turns your life around. The ONLY thing
that can turn your life around is an inner decision, namely that your
conscious self decides to start making decisions again. Thus, the outer
crisis is simply a tool – which you create subconsciously –
to get the conscious self to the point of being willing to make that
decision.
My point is that the conscious self can – at any moment –
make the decision to turn around through an inner revelation instead
of forcing itself to do so by precipitating an outer crisis. The conscious
self has the ability to change its sense of identity instantly, so there
are no outer circumstances that can prevent you from turning around,
nor do you need particular circumstances before you do so. The only
thing that really prevents you from making the decision is the ego,
which always seeks to make you believe that you cannot transcend your
present sense of identity, your present level of consciousness.
One thing that can help people overcome the manipulation of the ego
is to realize that the dream that you can escape making decisions is
an illusion. The conscious self can refuse to make decisions about what
to do, but it cannot refuse to be conscious. Thus, even when you let
the ego make decisions for you, you cannot escape experiencing the consequences
of those decisions. And when you do experience the consequences, you
are forced to react to them, meaning that the conscious self must decide
how it reacts to the decisions made by the ego.
My point being that although the conscious self can refuse to make decisions
about what you do in life, it can NEVER escape making decisions about
how you react to life. No intelligent person will want to be forced
to respond to the consequences of decisions that you did not make. Thus,
it is infinitely better for you to take back control over both your
actions and your reactions.
We might say that the first stage of the spiritual path is the process
of taking dominion over your self, over your lower being. The ego will
seek to derail this process by making you follow the outer path, as
described in previous discourses. Yet there are millions of people on
this planet who have followed the true path to the point of having taken
some measure of responsibility for themselves and having gained some
control over their lower beings.
However, this does not mean that they are home free, as the ego and
the false teachers will seek to make you believe. This brings us to
the point where we can understand what is the most critical point on
the path.
The most critical point on the spiritual path
As I said, there are two aspects of your mission on Earth. The Alpha
aspect is to take dominion over yourself, and the Omega aspect is to
take dominion over the Earth, over the matter universe. This requires
the Conscious You to make two critical decisions. The first is that
you are willing to take dominion over your lower self. The second is
to expand your sense of self and take dominion over the All, meaning
your environment on Earth.
Most of the people who are spiritual seekers – no matter what
outer belief system or organization to which they belong – have
made the first decision and have started to take dominion over self.
However, many of them have not yet realized the full consequences of
that decision, so they have not understood that it must lead to the
death of the ego. Thus, they are still allowing their egos to run part
of their lives, which is why they cannot make the second decision.
Don’t get me wrong here. There are many, many spiritual seekers
who have developed a global awareness and a global sense of responsibility.
They feel a great love for the Earth and seek to preserve it through
various activities, ranging from the spiritual over political to environmental
causes. Yet the reality of the matter is that the only way to save the
environment is to bring the Earth back into alignment with the Divine
blueprint for this planet. It is precisely because the Earth has been
affected by the duality consciousness that you see so many imbalances
in nature and in human society.
The only factor that can bring the Earth back into alignment is the
Christ mind, but that Christ mind MUST be expressed through people in
embodiment. Demonstrating that this is possible was the primary goal
for my mission 2,000 years ago. In other words, if you really want to
save the Earth, you MUST become the Living Christ on Earth. THERE IS
NO OTHER WAY, even though the ego and the false teachers have invented
numerous clever schemes to lead the spiritual people into blind alleys
where they think they are saving the Earth but are only treading water.
In order to fulfill your highest potential of becoming the Living Christ
on Earth, you must bring balance – meaning oneness in purpose
– between the higher and the lower parts of your own being. The
Alpha aspect is that you decide to take dominion over self and that
this decision is a total decision, meaning that you are willing to let
the ego die. You are willing to lose your life for my sake, meaning
losing your mortal sense of identity in order to be spiritually reborn
as the Living Christ.
What I want you to understand is that it is possible to make this decision
and attain a high degree of self-control without actually becoming the
Living Christ. Taking dominion over self is only one side of the coin,
and your Christhood will not be complete until you make the second decision,
namely that you are willing to take dominion over the Earth.
Do you see my point? There are many sincere spiritual seekers who have
spent a long time seeking dominion over self. They have attained a degree
of self-control and can have all kinds of spiritual experiences. I am
in no way trying to belittle such experiences that can be genuine. But
I am saying that as long as you are focused on your own growth, you
are not the Living Christ. Christhood must be expressed – in a
selfless pursuit to raise all life – before it becomes manifest.
Christhood is what establishes oneness between Spirit and matter, a
oneness that can occur only when there is a figure-eight flow from Spirit
to matter and back again. It is possible to establish a flow from Spirit
to matter in your own being, but until you selflessly seek to raise
others, the return current will not be there. And until you close the
figure-eight flow, you will not be the Living Christ on Earth.
We can now see what is the most critical stage on the spiritual path.
Most of the sincere spiritual seekers started the downward path when
their conscious selves decided that they would no longer seek dominion
over the Earth. Why is that so? Because seeking dominion over the Earth
is a far more difficult task than seeking dominion over self. This is
caused by the fact that the Earth has become a planet dominated by the
duality consciousness. Thus, taking dominion means that you must battle
that duality consciousness.
There are forces and people on Earth who do not want to be raised up
to the perfection of the kingdom of God. They want the Earth to remain
a twilight zone, where they can hide behind appearances and continue
to do whatever they want. And when you come with the best of intentions,
they will resist your efforts, as they clearly resisted me 2,000 years
ago. This resistance might range from indifference to outright hostility,
culminating in their attempts to kill you physically and destroy you
spiritually.
Because of this resistance, many of the spiritual people on this planet
decided that they simply did not want to take dominion over the Earth.
This led them into many different types of blind alleys, and many are
still stuck in these. One of the more dangerous blind alleys is that
you feel you are actually doing something to save the Earth, but your
efforts are based on gray thinking. This causes you to think that you
need to be tolerant toward almost anything happening on the Earth and
just spread love and positive vibrations. You should never challenge
the consciousness of anti-christ. This has, in fact, caused many spiritual
people to form a subconscious pact with the devil, saying, “If
you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone. If you leave me alone
in my pursuit of spiritual growth, I will leave the Earth to you”
One example of this is the well-meaning drive to preserve any animal
species. In reality, many of the animal species currently found on this
planet were not created by God but are manifestations of humankind’s
lower consciousness. Thus, raising the Earth into the Golden Age will
necessitate that such species are allowed to die out. Spending your
life preserving a creation of the consciousness of anti-christ obviously
will prevent you from becoming the Living Christ. It will also prevent
the Earth from rising above the state of imbalance that leads to deterioration
from within.
In other words, if the mother aspect of creation, the material universe,
starts evolving in a way that is out of harmony with the father's vision
and laws, then the material realm will self-destruct. The ONLY way to
preserve the Earth is to bring her back into alignment with the vision
and laws stored in the Christ mind.
Do you see the central point here? The Earth is out of balance because
it is dominated by the duality consciousness. The ONLY thing that can
save this planet is to bring it back into balance and this can be done
ONLY by challenging the duality consciousness until a critical mass
of people have seen through its illusions and have decided to rise above
them. This challenge can come ONLY through the Christ mind, and it can
happen ONLY when the most spiritually advanced people embody that Christ
mind and stand up to challenge the representatives of anti-christ.
That is why it is a tragedy when these people are misled into refusing
to make the decision to take dominion over the Earth. And that is why
the most critical stage on the spiritual path is the point where you
make or don’t make that decision. This is the real meaning of
“To be, or not to be!”
How to really take dominion
What I want you to see here is that many seekers have been on the spiritual
path for lifetimes and have created an upward spiral. Yet that upward
path leads them toward the point where they started to create the downward
spiral, and that point was when their conscious selves decided that
they did not want to take dominion over the Earth. In other words, you
have experienced great and undeniable progress compared to the low point
from where the upward path started, the point where you hit bottom.
Yet all you have really done is to turn the clock back to the point
where your downward path started. As the song goes, "California,
here I come, right back where I started from." You have been moving
back toward the central challenge of the spiritual path, namely that
you must undo the decision that created your ego. That decision is the
decision NOT to fulfill your reason for being, namely to BE a co-creator
and take dominion over the Earth. You will – once again –
have to face that decision. And this time you MUST – if you are
to be free of the ego and make genuine progress – decide to accept
your responsibility to take dominion.
If you do not make that decision, all of your spiritual progress will
come to a halt and you will INEVITABLY start to create another downward
spiral. Don’t get me wrong. When you first started the downward
spiral, you were not aware of what was happening. You thought you were
doing just fine and did not notice how you gradually slipped down toward
the abyss. The same thing can happen again, and I must tell you that
there are many people who think they are very spiritual, yet they are
imperceptibly sliding downward into a spiral of focus on self that inevitably
gives more and more control to the ego.
What is the key to really turning the corner and starting to go above
the point from were you started to descend? The key is to realize a
subtle difference that the ego can never fathom but which the conscious
self of most mature spiritual seekers will be able to grasp. The key
is to realize that although the Conscious You is designed to take dominion
over the Earth, it is not designed to do so by its own power or through
its own wisdom. While the conscious self must make decisions, it can
base those decisions on the vision of the Christ mind.
The Conscious You actually has no power of its own; it is designed to
direct power and it does so over its attention. When you place your
attention on something, power flows through your four lower bodies over
the bridge of your attention. Yet that power will be colored by your
sense of identity, which is why you need to contemplate these statements
of mine:
And Jesus looking
upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for
with God all things are possible. (Mark 10:27)
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)
The key message here is that
the Conscious You has the ability to identify itself as anything it
chooses. If it identifies itself as a human being – as a being
separated from its source, its own spiritual self – then it must
seek to take dominion over the Earth by using the power in its four
lower bodies—the power of men. This makes it impossible to take
dominion and it only envelopes you in the dualistic power struggles
that go on all over this planet, fueled by the ego and the forces of
anti-christ. It is precisely because they tired of this dualistic struggle
that many spiritual people decided they would no longer attempt to take
dominion.
Yet the real issue here is that if you seek to take dominion with human
power, it will be impossible, whereas if you seek it with God’s
power, all things are possible. So what will it take to have God’s
power flowing through you? It will take oneness between your own higher
being, your spiritual self, and your lower being. The key to establishing
this oneness is that the Conscious You accepts and fully integrates
its true identity as a co-creator with God who has the right to take
dominion over the Earth and subdue it according to the vision of the
Christ mind.
Do you see that the ego and the forces of anti-christ will do anything
in their power to prevent you from reaching this sense of identity?
They will do this by seeking to take you into one of the unbalanced
extremes created by the ego. They will play on the basic conflict built
into the ego and seek to make it the dominant force in your being. They
will attempt to make you take the black-and-white approach of seeking
to dominate the Earth through force or the gray approach of refusing
to take dominion. Either way – and a thousand other ways –
they will prevent you from fulfilling your ultimate destiny and potential,
namely to be the Living Christ on Earth. This, of course, is the real
goal of the ego and the forces of anti-christ.
The last thing they want is for you to BE the Christ. So the only remaining
question is, “Will you decide to BE, or will you allow your ego
and the forces of anti-christ to continue to manipulate you into deciding
not to be?” THAT is the question, and only the Conscious You can
answer it!
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© 2006 by Kim Michaels |
