A discussion about death - Part 1

This discussion took place at the Shangra-la Ascension Class, held in Chicago in May, 2006.
 
Kim: We’re going to talk about a topic, and I'm going to write the topic on the white board and I'm going to ask you to close your eyes while I write it down. Then open your eyes when I've finished writing it. And I want you to pay attention to the first impulse that comes into your mind—thought, feeling, whatever it is.
 
[Kim writes the word "DEATH" on the white board]
 
Kim: OK, You can open your eyes now. Your first reaction?
 
Audience: Love.
 
Audience: Black.
 
Audience: Liberation.
 
Audience: Fear.
 
Audience: Heaviness.
 
Audience: End of the road.
 
Audience: Joy.
 
Audience: No reaction.
 
Audience: Anti-truth.
 
Kim: Now, what are your feelings. What do you feel?
 
Audience: Devil.
 
Audience: Pain.
 
Audience: Death of the body.
 
Audience: Death of the ego.
 
Audience: Hatred.
 
Kim: Now, if you think back to how you were brought up to look at this topic, can you identify a main concept or idea about death that you were brought up with?
 
Audience: Fear.
 
Audience: Judgment.
 
Audience: Annihilation.
 
Kim: See, it's interesting that we associate death with something final. Yet most of us were probably brought up with some religious concepts, right? And they all talk about life after death and going to heaven. So why would death be so final—if there is something afterwards?
 
Audience: Because it's something that you don't see. You see the person that's died laid down in the casket and you don't see them again. You only hear that there is an afterlife but you don't see it so is there really, or is there not?
 
Kim: So you were born in Missouri I assume: "Show me!"
 
[Laughter]
 
Kim: "If I can't see it it's not there."  I understand what you're saying.
 
Audience: And also I think what plays into it is because you have no concept of reincarnation so this is your one chance. So after you die even though it's not really final, ultimately it is because you don't get any more chances…
 
Kim: Yes it's like you have this one shot to make it to heaven and if you don't, then you're going to go down to that hot place,
 
Audience: I wasn't brought up religious, so to me death was annihilation.
 
Kim: Nothing afterwards?
 
Audience: No
 
Kim: So were you brought up to believe that there was no consciousness?
 
Audience: I wasn't taught anything, so to me to think about death…
 
Kim: Your parents never talked about it?
 
Audience: I didn't grow up to believe anything, so I thought there was just nothing after.
 
Kim: I remember my father for example talked about it and he had read some scientists that said, "It's just like a sleep that never ends, like you never wake up." Which I always thought was a strange concept.
 
Audience: Or we talked about, "If you don't do this I'm gonna kill you" or "If you do that I'm gonna kill you."
 
[Laughter]
 
Kim: Well that's kind of clear—you know where you stand
 
Audience: For me it was two things—it was annihilation but it was also the end of pain.
 
Audience: I lost several friends and a cousin very young so I experienced the death of a young person when I myself was young. And that was a shock, a profound shock. And I knew that there was life afterwards, I knew intuitively that that wasn't the end but still it was a shock.
 
Kim: When I was six or seven my parents had a dog. I wasn't particularly fond of the dog but one day it got run over by a car. I actually found it, it had tried to run home but it didn't make it all the way. And I was sitting there and it died while I was sitting there. And that was the first time I realized that this dog could not come back. It was final – the end! And that was a shock to me too, like you were saying.
 
Audience: I think all children when we're around that age have a lot of questions about death, we're really intrigued by it and we want to know why?
 
Kim: Well child psychologists have kind of mapped certain phases we go through as we grow up. So there's the infant stage where you basically see yourself as the center of the universe and you're one with it all, so you can make the universe do whatever you want it to. But then as you grow up, you start realizing that's not the case. So you separate yourself a little bit more. And I think in that separation we have the concept that all of a sudden death becomes more real in the sense that we can conceptualize it a little bit more. In the sense that something could end, something could not be there anymore. So I think there's probably a certain age that we're meant to deal with that. I remember it was probably about the same age where I developed this fear of skeletons and ghosts. So that's probably a normal developmental stage when we start to realize that there is such a thing as death.
 
Audience: I grew up understanding about reincarnation, but I remember at one point when I was six or seven, going to bed at night and wondering if I would wake up in the morning. And having a fear of whether or not death would come. So I wondered why I was experiencing that. And it was something I went through and I remember finally when it ended, I thought I still have so much more to do that there's no reason that I could be dying. But up until that point I remember continually thinking about it.
 
Kim: Funny that you say that, because I just watched a movie about this lady who was talking about that as a child she had had that same fear. So as her mother was putting her to bed she asked her, "Mother what if I don't wake up in the morning?" and her mother said "Don't worry about it, just go to sleep!"
 
[Laughter]
 
Child psychology at work there!
 
OK, so when we think about our culture – I don't know if you have ever thought about this – we live in a culture where death is very much present. It's very much something we know about, but in many cases we don’t talk about it. And we have actually taken great pains to in some sense detach ourselves from it. I mean we know it's there in movies, but if a person dies or gets sick they go to the hospital. In Denmark for example you don't view the dead body, you don't have an open casket.
 
And so in a sense we have this kind of schizophrenic relationship with death—we know it's there but we don't look at it and try to understand it. We try to run away from it or hide from it. And the culture is very much that you need to do everything you can to avoid dying or to run away from death or protect yourself from it by buying all these products and insurance and what have you.
 
So my point is that we are actually taught that death is there and we should be afraid of it, but we should never look at it. Can you identify with that?
 
Audience: There's a change coming in the culture through the video games, where the kids are taught that it's OK to kill their enemy in the video games with their guns and weapons and martial arts. So there's a change coming about to impose this impersonal feeling about murdering and killing, that takes it away from the personal, I think to the great detriment of our culture I would say.
 
Kim: Yes that's where they kind of numb you to the idea of killing, where it almost seems like it's not real—you're not really killing them, it's just a game.
 
Audience: I think death brings up probably some of the most painful emotions in people that we can think of. That's another reason why they want to run away, just from the thought of death because it's such intense grief but also fear. People can't deal with that. They hold grief inside from their parents' death or whoever for a really long time, maybe for the rest of their lives. They can't let it go so they just try to erase it.
 
Kim: So where does the pain come from?
 
Audience: From separation.
 
Kim: Yes, going back to our separation from God. I think you're right, I think that's very much a part of it. So we subconsciously know that there can be like a step we take from which there's no coming back or at least it seems like there's no coming back. And that's a good point because that's probably why death is presented that way, to give us the impression that it's something final.
 
Jesus has said on the website, or I think it was Mother Mary, that what the devil is really trying to make us believe is that once we have made a mistake we can never come back. We can never make peace with God once we've separated ourselves from him. So that's the illusion and that's the image we're given of death—that there's no coming back from it. And in a sense it's like there's no escape from it, that's how we are presented with it, there's no way to avoid it. But we should still run away from this thing that we can't avoid. And we should live our whole lives running away from this thing that we can't run away from anyway. So it's a very strange culture if you think about it.
 
Now, the pain you were talking about, we've all experienced the pain of death. Where does that come from, why do we feel the pain?
 
Audience: From the attachment I think.
 
Audience: Separation from loved ones.
 
Kim: Yes, separation… I'm kind of having a certain word in my mind…
 
Audience: Loss
 
Kim: Exactly, there's a sense of loss and that's what gives us the pain and also the sense of separation and that there's no coming back, the finality—it's gone.
 
Audience: There's also a difference between the concept of death and the reality of death. Because the reason why I said there was no reaction was indeed because when I see the term, I have no reaction but that is because I meditated for years from the Buddhist approach. Death is one of the first things you meditate on in analytical meditation, and you have to separate yourself from all of the emotion linked to it, etc. But it still doesn't solve the problem that when somebody close to you dies, you're not indifferent to it. You become totally at peace, you can achieve peace with respect to the concept of death—it doesn't induce any fear. But it doesn't mean that you don't suffer when somebody dies. So there's a difference between the concept and the reality.
 
Kim: Right, but see you also meditated on that. And in my experience we are brought up not to do that. And that's the whole concept that the masters have given us, that fear is a fear of the unknown. We are afraid of something and then we are afraid to look at it. And if we're afraid to look at it, we can't overcome our fear.
 
Because we can't really examine it and see that our fear just doesn't make sense. It's irrational. It's an illusion. It's like fearing the dark. We fear the dark because we fear there's something in there that's going to come out and get us. So once we go out in the dark and realize that nothing's going to jump out and eat us, we overcome the fear. But if we're afraid to go out in the dark we'll have the fear all the time. So that's part of why they wanted us to discuss it.
 
So we're taught to run away from anything we fear and anything that's unpleasant but in the Bible there's a specific expression used about death. Can any of you think of it?
 
Audience: The sting of death?
 
Kim: The sting of death is one of them. There's another one, "Death is the last enemy."  Paul talked about that. And that's an interesting concept because when you think about it as a spiritual person, when we're on the spiritual path we are overcoming illusions and one of the last illusions – or one of the more difficult ones to overcome – is death. The whole idea of the finality of it. That's why, obviously, the masters want to help us get to that point where we don't fear death and we overcome our illusions about it.
 
And one of the ways to do that, when we are spiritual, is to take a closer look at it and see what is it that dies when we normally say death. It's obviously the physical body. So we know we are more than the body and Mother Mary gives the concept in the book [Master Keys to the Abundant Life] about the Conscious You, the Conscious Self which is the core of our identity. And it's created by God, it's out of God's being. It can't die. It's not created from the body so it won't die when the body dies. So there is very much a continuity, which is why I think over the last 10 or 15 years we've had all the near-death experience books come out.
 
Because humankind is really at that point, where we need to change our view of death and overcome our fear of it in order to come up higher.
 
Audience: I think Mother Mary says somewhere that the fear people have is a fear of a loss of their identity.
 
Kim: And that's sort of because we are brought to fear that we lose our identity by dying. Certainly, if you grew up in the scientific culture. But even many religious people will have this. Like you were saying earlier, we don't really have a concept of the afterlife of what it really means. And maybe there is an afterlife but we don't really think about the fact that obviously we will have some continuity of our sense of identity.
 
So when you realize that and you start tuning into it and you know that you are more than the body and your conscious self can't die, you realize that there is continuity. And it takes some of your fear of death away.
 
Now, the other thing is that, as with every concept, there's more than one understanding of death—more than one interpretation of it. And that's one of the things that if you read between the lines in the New Testament you can actually see that Jesus did not always talk about death the way most of us talk about it, which is the death of the physical body.
 
A number of quotes are actually given but here's just one that's very obvious. A person is called to be Jesus' disciple and when he's talked to Jesus and Jesus tells him to follow him, he says "Good master suffer me to go and bury my dead father." And Jesus says to him, "Let the dead bury their dead."
 
Now, no Christian fundamentalist is going to think about this, but if you think about it, since when have the dead buried their dead? [Laughter] Are we talking about a couple of corpses digging a grave for a guy who's just died? So obviously Jesus is talking about people who are physically alive but he calls them dead.
 
Audience: Spiritually dead
 
Kim: Spiritually dead. And that's a very important concept to understand because it shows you that Jesus very well understood that there are people who are unreachable because they are spiritually dead. And it is contrary to what we have been brought up to believe if we grew up Christian. It's an inner condition. It has nothing to do with whether you call yourself a Christian or not, whether you're baptized, whether you go to communion or confession or whatever. It does not matter. Because Jesus is very clear that it's not about being a member of some outer club. It is an inner condition.
 
And he basically says that unless you partake of the body and blood of the Son of Man you have no life in you. And again, he comes and says, "For this reason came I into this world, to bear witness unto the truth. Those who are of the truth hear my words." Meaning that when Jesus gives us a truth, unless we have a morsel of truth in our beings, there's going to be nothing that the truth that he gives can resonate with. So we won't be able to hear his voice. We won't be able to recognize it.
 
And that's why we have the concept that those who are spiritually dead, their Christ flame has gone out temporarily. They have lost the Christ light in them. They have no light in them. And therefore, there's no resonance. You can talk to them and they don't understand what you're saying. Because your words don't find anything that they resonate with in their beings. And that's why he said that you have to jumpstart that threefold flame. You have to jumpstart that Christ flame by receiving it from somebody who has it.
 
And it doesn't necessarily have to be Jesus. Those of us who have a certain amount of Christ light can be the instrument of giving it to somebody else and thereby sparking that. It can spread like rings in the water. But it's an important concept to have in mind and also to teach others, that there's much more to understand about death.
 
There are layers to Jesus' teaching. You can say that's why, as it says in the Bible, he taught the multitudes in parables and expounded all things to his disciples. Because the multitudes were spiritually dead and therefore could not receive his truth in a pure form. But the disciples had overcome that and so they could receive it.
 
Any other thoughts or impressions you have about death or how to overcome fear of death?
 
Audience: It seems like people are increasingly becoming more aware of death also because to understand the spiritual teachings you really have to have a concept of karma and reincarnation. You have to understand these concepts to have an understanding of the spiritual path. And because of that, that automatically confronts the fear of death that many people have been raised with. It seems to be one of the first things that when I'm talking to people that they have to have a new understanding of and confront how to deal with that new understanding to go forward.
 
Kim: That's very true.
 
Audience: I don't find that New Agers believe in karma. They feel like you have the life you create for yourself and then you go and make another choice and everything's fine
 
Kim: Oh that's true, there are some that feel like that.
 
Audience: I mean they believe in reincarnation but not about karma. Like if you do wrong to somebody well that's just the experience you've chosen and they've chosen it somehow and…
 
Kim: So it's like there's no consequences. Reincarnation without karma—it's kind of a strange concept. Why would you have to reincarnate if you didn't have karma?
 
Audience: To have another experience.
 
Kim: Oh right. Oh you know we did a seminar down in New Jersey two weeks ago and there was this lady there who was in some New Age teaching that's similar to that. And they had some lady come down there some months ago who claims she channels Jesus. I don't know exactly what was said but this lady had understood that what this Jesus was saying was that there was no finality in the Father. There was only free will. So people could choose whether they wanted to come back into embodiment or not. It was up to them to choose. And she got very agitated when I said that that wasn't true. So she basically said, "Well, how do you know that the Jesus speaking through you is the real Jesus and not this other lady had the real Jesus?"
 
And I said, "Well, that's fine, let's just take it away from that topic. But what you're saying goes against the entire teachings on reincarnation that have been taught on this planet going back to the Vedas, for thousands of years. You can't separate reincarnation from karma." Well, obviously you have the choice to come back down when you've balanced your karma. But only when you've balanced your karma do you have a choice.
 
Audience: Well, the whole Conversations with God series, he comes out and says you may have been taught that planet Earth is a schoolroom but it's not. You have nothing to learn. You're just here to experience and to remember who you are. And the whole thing is remembering who you are. But if you don't remember who you are, you just have made that choice, so you have that experience and then you die and you have your life review and say "Oh well this is what I'd like to change" so…
 
Kim: Well my question to that would be, if God says that planet Earth is not a schoolroom and you have nothing to learn, why would God then bring out the books that teach us?
 
Audience: Because we have to remember who we are.
 
Kim: But why do we have to remember if we wanted to create the experience of not remembering?
 
Audience: So we can have the joy of remembering.
 
[Laughter]
 
Kim: That might make sense to me when I think about it, but right now it doesn't.
 
Audience: But it never sat with me, it just never sat with me. It just didn't seem right at all.
 
Audience: It's a convoluted argument of the ego…
 
Kim: Right, I mean why would you need to remember if it's not in order to learn something?
 
Audience: It takes away all responsibility to live right. So the ego can do anything it wants because it's just here to experience and do whatever it wants to.
 
Audience: If it feels good do it.
 
Audience: There's one thing we should know about death…. It's not real.
 
Kim: Do you want to expound on that… why isn't it real?
 
Audience: Who we are in God never dies. We know that energy can never be destroyed, that's scientifically proven. So we were created from God and we go on forever. Now I can go through the whole thing that happens but we know that we cannot destroy energy. So if we're just energy we're not going to die. So then the death of the body, the body is just the vehicle that we use. Now when I'm driving my car I'm oblivious to human existence. So the car and what's inside of it is a being. Now when the car sits in the car lot and deteriorates, I get out of the car. Same as just when I get out of the body. If we want to look at death as something not to fear, sleep is not too far from death.
 
Audience: Sleep is the little death
 
Audience: Yes we continue to exist. I had an experience when I was young, my uncle he was older, he used to drink and he had a stroke. And he was not functioning properly for a long time. And when he died I was close to him. When he died instead of me feeling upset over it, I felt happy. And then they took him upstairs and his wife and my parents were supposed to be crying, but they were not crying they were at peace with it. But they had these women they brought in. they call them the criers. [Laughter] So they sit down and start wailing and everybody feels bad and they start wailing too. So I realized then the total unreality of death.
 
Kim: Well, if you think back to what we talked about with Jesus using death in a higher way, in a spiritual way, you can see that physical death is not real because we have gone beyond the body. But there's a higher understanding that even spiritual death is not ultimately real but nevertheless spiritual death is a possibility. In the sense that he obviously talked about the second death where the soul can die. And that's a concept that many New Agers have been very upset about. I've gotten some emails from some people who are very, very upset about this concept of the second death, of the finality of it. And it's almost like we have two extremes we have the normal society's fear of death and we have the New Agers who have gone totally to the other extreme and say "Well, if we ignore death, it's not real."
 
And what we have to do is come to the middle way of realizing that we are only going to overcome the last enemy of death not by ignoring it and not by believing in the black and white version of it but by understanding it more deeply. So what caused death? What caused the spiritual death that Jesus was talking about? I mentioned it a little yesterday when I said did God lie to Adam? Because God said to Adam if you eat of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt surely die. And then the serpent whispers to Eve "Thou shalt not surely die" and she eats the fruit and surely enough she didn't die, but was cast out of paradise.
 
But that was then the spiritual death that Jesus was talking about. Because that was when we separated ourselves from God, and turned our backs on the teacher and therefore kind of made that separation semi-permanent. And that means we died spiritually because now we are unreachable to God who will not violate our free will.
 
Audience: I'll tell you what, another concept they [New Agers] have trouble with is becoming less. Because we're meant to become more by multiplying our talents but by starting that turning away and starting that downward spiral, you actually become less. And they totally won't even go there. How could you become less?
 
Kim: So they've never noticed that sometimes people can get themselves into situations where they become less, like drug addicts or alcoholics who eventually…
 
Audience: They're just having an experience.
 
Kim: And there's no less
 
Audience: No it's just an experience.
 
Audience: Everything is right.
 
Audience: You talk about the turning around experience and they say "You're in fear, you're in judgment…"
 
Kim: Of course, the ego can justify anything.
 
Audience: All experiences are valid.
 
Audience: But that's the thing and that's what they'll do, they'll turn it around and say "You're in fear, you're judging and you're not loving." The whole everything is always perfect and everything is good because everything is God.
 
Audience: So what's the reason for growth?
 
Audience: Because it feels better. What Conversations with God says is that when you do turn toward God and make your decisions based on becoming more it feels good, you feel happier, you're more at peace, you're more loving. So that's the incentive. It doesn't feel good to turn away from God, but there's no consequence because of free will and that's your choice.
 
Kim: But then the consequence of that would be that if a person has become addicted to heroin as wanting a certain experience then if they come to the conclusion that they want to overcome that addiction (or as we were talking about nicotine) you should be able to overcome the addiction right away by just making a choice and saying "I don't want to experience this anymore"
 
Audience: Oh and the other place they'll go is how can we all experience ourselves as compassion or patience or abundance or whatever if there wasn't the opposite. So what these people are doing is experiencing the opposite so that they can they can then appreciate…
 
Kim: Oh yes, and that's why evil is in the world because there has to be a contrast to God.
 
Audience: If there wasn't evil in the world then there couldn't be good because there would be nothing to compare it to.
 
Audience: This is the Conversations with God school?
 
Kim: Yes, and a lot of other New Age teachings that teach the same thing. There's a whole body of channelled teachings out there that say the same thing.
 
Audience: Not to change the subject but I have some good news for you about death folks…. Well you should all be getting much better at it by now [Laughter] The ones who don't think they're good at it – you're very good at it. You've done it many, many, many times.
 
Kim: But not only that, you're talking about physical death right? But we have also died in the sense that is the higher form of death which is the death of the ego, the death of the limitations. That's why we are on the spiritual path.
 
Audience: What's also interesting is that even though in the New Age movement and how I was raised, we don't have this concept of death that the orthodox churches do, you still have the concept of the second death. Which was ambiguous. I mean, I never really clearly understood it when I was growing up. Some people thought it to be the permanent death of the soul after you've had negative embodiments over and over again. Others thought it to be a repolarization of the soul where the soul is erased of all the past issues that they've bought into. And so that's created another fear…
 
Kim: Oh it can very well, that's why a lot of people resist the concept.  
 
Audience: In place of the fear of death that we've already given up. Would you go into that a little bit, the second death?
 
Kim: OK, well the way they traditionally taught it is when you descend into the duality consciousness, when you fall, you've separated yourself from God. And in God's reality there isn't time and space like there is in the material world. It's much more fluid in heaven so there isn't the concept of time and space. So when you've separated yourself from God and descended into the duality consciousness it's like there's a clock that starts ticking.
 
God is basically saying "I've given you free will. You have the right to do anything you want with that free will. So you have a right to separate yourself from me. But remember, you're me and I'm you. I don't want to be separated from myself forever. So I will allow you to separate yourself from me temporarily. But the clock starts ticking the moment you do it. And that means that when the clock has gone around and it comes back, I'll no longer allow you to separate yourself from me, to run away from me."
 
And that's a function of time and space, and in essence it is a function of free will. Because if there's no consequence to your choices, free will has no meaning if you think about it. What is the meaning of making choices if it doesn't make any difference what you do? Really there's no point. You're not going to learn anything, you're not going to grow… but there really is no concept of it. I mean there is a higher concept in heaven, but at least in this world. And in this world everything is time and space, so we have the concept of time—which the masters have taught time is not real either. In Buddhism for example, the Buddha teaches that time is not. But in the concept of time, time must have an end. Otherwise it has no meaning.
 
Audience: What also comes to me is if there were no consequences and it didn't matter, that is not love. There's no love.
 
Kim: And that's part of it. But let’s return to the idea that the clock starts ticking. So you're given an opportunity to separate yourself from God but God is saying "I'm not going to be separated from myself forever." So if you keep going down that path, there will come a point where your opportunity will run out. You have now used your free will to its limits. And there's a limit to it.
 
But here is the important thing. The Conscious You, the Conscious Self that Mother Mary talks about [in Master Keys to the Abundant Life] is not going to die even in the second death. And that's a concept we never had in previous dispensations because we didn't go into the second death that I remember. It was seen as something final. But obviously we know that your I AM Presence is not going to die, they did say that. Your I AM Presence doesn't die and all the energy that was misqualified is just purified.
 
But what does die in the second death is the sense of identity that you have built in this world. It is based on the one thing that gives birth to the ego which is separation from God. So that's why God was actually correct in what he said to Adam, because when we are created by God we have a sense of identity as being sons and daughters of God, as having a divine potential. When we separate ourselves from God, that sense of identity dies. But we can't live without a sense of identity. We can't express ourselves in this world without a sense of identity, so we create another one. That is then a mortal sense of identity that is based on a sense of separation from God where we see God as being up there in Heaven and we are separated from him.
 
And then we can keep going down, like Mother Mary says in the book, there's a spiral staircase that we can keep going down and there's really not much limit as to how far down we can go, other than the cosmic clock is going to stop ticking at some point and now we face the second death.
 
Audience: One concept I'd like to refresh her point about becoming less versus becoming more. We have created opposites only in the illusion of the physical. So in my opinion there is no such thing as becoming less here. You are either in the spiritual or you are in the physical. In the physical you make choices to become who you are or who you want to be. In the I AM Presence state you are always more, so as we are spiralling down, we never become less. We have only chosen to be who we are here and now. And if we continue to keep making choices in whatever we do but the concept of opposites is only in here.
 
Audience: Well, I take the becoming less words right from Mother Mary's book, referring probably to the Light that we're allotted and how we bury our talents in the ground and we're not multiplying them so we're not becoming more. We're burying them so we're becoming less.
 
Kim: The way she uses that concept in the book is saying that we were created at a certain level and we were meant to grow from there. And when we separated ourselves from God and created the ego, then we actually go below the level we were created. And that's what she says is becoming less. And there we can become less and less and less as we spiral down.
 
But just to finish off about the second death, the way I understand it currently is that the time runs out. And then you are taken to what is called the final judgment, which is not as ominous as it seems in the Christian terminology. But it is that you are facing the final choice here: will you change course and start the upward path to who you really are, who you were created to be, letting go of the mortal identity? Or will you refuse to do this? And if the soul refuses to turn around, then that sense of identity that was created in the duality consciousness will be consumed in what they call the lake of sacred fire in Revelation.
 
Audience: So it's still a choice
 
Kim: It's still a choice to the very end. And if the lifestream chooses to turn around, it will receive all the assistance necessary from the masters to walk that upward path and come back to oneness.
 
Audience: I'm just wondering, what happens when the Conscious You remains alive so maybe the second death can become a shortcut to becoming who you were…
 
Kim: No, not if you understand the concept. See what happens is, it's true in a sense what the New Agers were saying, that all experiences can be said, in a way, to be neither good nor bad. Because any experience can be used to build our sense of how the world works so we can learn from it. So we can make a mistake that seems like a mistake, but if we learn from it, we turn it around so it's no longer a mistake.
 
That's why God allows us to fall and to descend. He's given us this option to go against his laws because even that can be a learning experience. So in other words, if you descend very, very far down into the duality consciousness and then choose to turn around and walk the upward path, you have a unique experience. Now you've come back to oneness and you have experienced the contrast. So that is somewhere in your being and you are not as likely to fall again and you are in a better position to help others who have fallen because you have the memory of it. So in other words you can build on the experience and turn it around and make it positive. But what happens in the second death is that the identity and the whole memory of it is obliterated, it's really like it never happened.
 
Audience: Yes but you still have the I AM Presence…
 
Kim: Yes but the I AM Presence does not store your experiences in the duality consciousness.
 
Audience: That means that you haven't learned anything from it.
 
Audience: Yes, but you're still yourself… I understand but I'm just trying to expand my understanding of the second death. So the positive of it could be that it's just the memory of the bad stuff [that is erased]. You still have the I AM Presence, you still have the Conscious You, you can start from zero, no?
 
Kim: Yes, you start from zero without the experiences you have had. And see the whole concept of why we descend into the material universe is to build experience to build our sense of being co-creators.
 
Audience: So in a sense you lose…
 
Kim: You lose all of that.
 
Audience: So you lose the time and the energy and all that and you start from zero again.
 
Kim: Yes, so it's essentially the same as all of a sudden you're a baby again. Instead of having all these experiences. I remember when I was in my senior year of high school, thinking, "Oh if only if I could go back to the first year of high school and have all the experience and the knowledge that I have now." But obviously we can't do that.
 
Audience: In the Summit Lighthouse we had the concept of the causal body that stores the positive experiences, those that were not of the duality consciousness went up to your I AM Presence. So that would be erased?
 
Kim: No, that's transferred. That's your treasure laid up in Heaven. That's transferred as far as I understand, but I don't know what happens in the second death, to be honest with you, to the causal body.
 
Audience: Some of the analogies that use a computer metaphor to reformatting it.
 
Kim: Yes it's like reformatting the hard drive, wiping the slate clean. But it also means that everything you had saved on it is gone.
 
It takes a little bit – and I'm not sure that I have the full understanding of it – it takes a little bit to get your mind around this idea that Mother Mary talks about in the book. You have the Conscious You, but it has the ability to identify itself as anything, absolutely anything. It can identify itself as a rock, if it wants to. Because it's almost like you could say that – and she talks about that too in the book – you build a mental concept, kind of like a little box. And when the Conscious You goes in that box, it really thinks it is that identity that the box defines. That's how it sees itself.
 
And the only reason that we can grow spiritually and come back to God after we've fallen is that the Conscious You can project itself outside that box. It can look at itself from the outside. Because it is out of God's own being, it has the ability to step outside of its current sense of identity and look at itself from the outside. That's why we're all here, we're all on the spiritual path because we have come to that point where we've stepped outside of ourselves and said "I don't want to live my life this way anymore, there has to be something more to life than this." And then we go and find it and look for it.
 
But the fact is that when the Conscious Self makes the decision "Ah, I'm this!" at that point that is its identity, that's its reality, that's how it looks at the world. So any previous identity it had died before it could accept that new identity. And that's why the only way to change and grow is to let that limited sense of identity die.
 
And that's the concept that this discussion has been leading up to. It's that real understanding of death is not the enemy, it is not even something to fear, because the spiritual aspect of death is the death of a limited sense of identity that keeps us trapped inside a little prison. A prison we have created because we have identified ourselves with it. And Mother Mary talks about it in the book, where she says that the Conscious You in order to express itself in this world has to express itself through the four lower bodies. And of course, the highest of them is the identity body. And so that's the very foundation for our expression in this world.
 
And what happens is that we were created to be co-creators. So we were created to always have the awareness that we are more than the lower part of our beings. We are extensions of God, we are co-creators with God as Jesus said, “I and my Father are one.” And we can co-create ideally by letting God work through us, with God's power flowing through us.
 
But if we identify ourselves as mortal human beings who are cut off from God, then that doesn't work. We are cut off from that God power. And that's what happens when we forget that we are sons and daughters of God. The sense of identity that we were created with actually dies, and a new one is born. And that's why Jesus said that the only way for a man to enter Heaven is to be reborn, spiritually reborn. Because we have to let the old identity die and be reborn into a new higher sense of identity.
 
And so the concept here, why Jesus wants us to have this discussion, is that death can be understood as a spiritual thing where it's actually a positive. I think as somebody said, it's liberation because it's a liberation of our higher being from that limited sense of identity. And that gives us the sense of joy that we are now free. And then we don't have the sense of loss because we now realize that we are going to gain from it. But the trick is to overcome this whole concept that if something dies it's a loss. And if the ego dies it's a loss because you will have no sense of identity left. And that's a fear we cannot deal with.
 
And that's why the teaching about the Conscious You to me was revolutionary because I haven't seen that in any of the previous dispensations. And when you realize that the Conscious You is not going to die when the ego dies, it becomes so much easier to let the ego go. You overcome that fear of it.
 
Because if you don't understand the concept of the Conscious You, and you don't have that sense of continuity, there is a gap. The old has to die before the new can be born. And that's what Jesus basically demonstrated on the cross, where he is hanging there on the cross and all of a sudden he cries out "My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?" And all of a sudden he feels alone. And you can sense the struggle in his being; he is holding on to something. He has some kind of a concept of what should happen on the cross and he's not quite ready to let go of that. And then he has an inner revelation and peace comes upon him. And then, as it says in the Bible, he gives up the ghost and then he dies.
 
But what you can sense in him is almost like he feels that God has forsaken him. In other words, all of a sudden he's left alone. Everything he believed before is brought into question and he has to let go of it. He realizes he has to let go of it. But he hasn't seen what's going to come after. He doesn't know what's going to happen, he doesn't know he's going to be resurrected. But he has to still be willing to let go of what he has before he can receive the higher.
 
And so there is the concept that in a sense death is a loss of the old. And from a spiritual perspective you have to be willing to let go of the old before you can see the new. I've talked to so many of you and so many other people who've told me how – and we've all experienced this – we've been in difficult situations where it seemed like nothing could be solved, nothing was going to change it. But then we came to a point where we gave up, we just surrendered, we just let go. And then magically the situation changed. Something happened. But it was in that act of surrender, where we stopped holding on to our expectations and our concepts of how life should be or how the spiritual path should be.
 
I am fairly certain that Jesus had a concept of what should happen at his crucifixion and he might tell us at some point. And then when he is hanging there on the cross, he realizes that it was not the right concept. And so it took him a little while to let go of it, let go of the ghost that he had created because he had an expectation ahead of time. I honestly believe that if he had not been willing to give up the ghost, as it says, he would not have been resurrected. He would not have passed the initiation that his crucifixion was for him too. It's an interesting concept that he could have failed right up to the point where he's hanging on the cross.
 
There was no guarantee. This is again like we were talking about yesterday that we were brought up to believe that Jesus was so above us. We don't have the concept that he was walking a path of initiation and there was no guarantee that he would make it. And that's a humbling concept. But it also brings him closer to us.
 
Audience: Even Mother Mary when he was hanging on the cross, and at that moment when he was about to give up the ghost she was holding the immaculate concept for him as she was standing by. In the Eastern culture where they show Mother Mary in extreme pain, I think at that time it was not true. She probably was hurt inside but she was not broken down she was holding the total vision of the immaculate concept for him.
 
Kim: I think she said in one dictation that her outer mind was somewhat disturbed but beyond that she was holding that immaculate concept to the very last. She knew that was her mission.
 
Audience: And she also said in that same dictation that this was her initiation. That she had held the immaculate concept for Jesus his whole life and then it was time to hold the immaculate concept for everyone.
 
Kim: Yes that was a beautiful dictation; very touching. So the concept we need to get here is that the death of the old has to happen before the new can be reborn. The sense of identity based on the ego has to die. Not all of it at once because as Paul said "I die daily." We put off the old man and put on the new. So we climb a step at a time. Mother Mary in her book gives the concept of the spiral staircase and we have to walk back up by taking one step at a time, one decision at a time. Every decision that brought us one step down has to be undone consciously so we can go back up, or at least the major decisions.
 
So that's the concept that we have to get, so we make it easier for ourselves. We realize that the old has to die and we have to be willing to let it go. But when we connect to the fact that we are the Conscious Self, the Conscious You, we realize that the Conscious You never dies, it just switches effortlessly from one identity to another. It's only when we feel attached to a particular sense of identity that it's hard to let it go. The Conscious You can shift instantly from any sense of identity.
 
Audience: So even at that moment that we take on that identity of the Christ or the identity of the I AM, at some point the Conscious You has to let go of that identity.
 
Kim: In order to grow beyond that, certainly.
 
Audience: So ascended masters, their Conscious You is identifying…
 
Kim: Well it identifies with what they are right now but it's not to say that it is permanent. They have said there's continuity in Heaven, they can grow and rise in rank. One of them talks about, the concept that we are all meant to rise to the level of consciousness of the Creator. First we start as co-creators and then we rise to the same level of consciousness as the Creator.
 
Audience: Would it follow, as I am hearing this I am trying to understand another idea in my mind that when people find out about reincarnation they often wonder what their past lives were. And sometimes people get obsessed with trying to find out what their past lives, their incarnations, were. But then it seems now that as soon as you have an idea of who you were in a past life, you automatically research that and find out about that person and find aspects of their identity and you take them on as your own. So then you've already absorbed a new sense of identity from knowledge of a past life. So it seems like it could be the ego wanting you to learn about past lives in order to engage this physical sense of connection of identity.
 
However, the other reason we talk about it is we understand from the Lords of the Seven Rays book and other books the masters and their causal bodies and their past lives and how they have mastery based on their past lives. So it seems on one hand that we need to surrender that and surrender the past lives. But then when you look at the lives of the ascended masters, you often are very interested in learning about the lives of the ascended masters because of understanding something…
 
Kim: Well, they give us the concept of their past lives so it becomes easier for us to relate to them. So that we see that they have been on Earth just like we have. It's again the concept that most Christians have of Jesus that he was fundamentally different from us. You know when our youngest daughter was three or four years old, we lived up in Montana and she was going to a Montessori school that was run by the church, the Summit Lighthouse. And so she had been taught about Elizabeth Clare Prophet as the Messenger. So she came to me one day like this little child and said, "Dad, does Guru Ma go to the bathroom?" [Laughter] Because she had this concept that she was just so different from us and so above us that she thought maybe she doesn't even need to go to the bathroom like the rest of us.
 
And that's how we've been brought up with Jesus that he was a superhuman being. So when you realize that he was down here and his clothes got dirty and he smelled when it was hot and you know he was in a physical body, so it becomes easier to connect to him and I think that's why they give us their past lives. But I think it's very important the concept you're bringing up, and what you were saying made me understand something I've been wondering for a long time. Because I've seen people who become obsessed with their past lives and it is often like a prideful thing. They want to know who they were, if they were someone special in a past life.
 
But when you think about the concept of the Conscious You, you're always meant to move on. So you're not meant to recreate the identity you had ten lifetimes ago and hang on to that.
 
Audience: Unless it was for a reason or a purpose, like if a master wanted to show you a past life…
 
Kim: Well, I think the concept that I got from the church was that if it happened spontaneously and if the masters give it to you, fine. But ideally that will only happen when you're ready for it. In other words you've reached a certain amount of detachment that you're not going to go back and identify with it.
 
Audience: Right, because I learned that you're not going to learn about a past life if you're not ready to handle the karma from that past life…
 
Kim: Yes but that would include not being attached to the identity of it, because that's in a sense what karma is to some degree – an attachment to a certain sense of identity.
 
I have no idea what my past lives are. I've never asked and I have no interest in finding out. If the masters want to tell me, that's fine. I just figure that it isn't important, it's not the past that's important, it's where we're going from here—that's what’s the essence of it.
 
Audience: I want to ask about the second death about what you were saying that once you make the decision to turn around the masters are going to do everything possible to help you. So what about the Messenger Geraldine Innocente, supposedly she went to the second death. She was doing all that service for the masters and she went to the second death?
 
Kim: Yes she must not have been willing to make the decision to turn around. See it's kind of like it can seem overwhelming to us sometimes to work through our karma and endure it all. So the lifestream may not be willing to do it. Because depending on how far you descended down, you have to go all those steps up. So some decide they don't want to mess with it.
 
Audience: It's about wanting to live. Sometimes people are so… they don't want to live. Too tired or whatever. Sometimes people just don't want to live.
 
Kim: Yes it's just like people who commit suicide. Life is too overwhelming for them and they can't bear it anymore so they think it's an escape, it's a way out.
 
Audience: Can we talk about the death of the spirit, death of the soul? And then can we explore also the word "death" as a word, as a sound? Because it's something that we have discussed before…
 
Kim: You mean the dark night?
 
Audience: Yes dark night of the soul and dark night of the spirit. And spiritual death. And the word "death."
 
Audience: What's the difference between the dark night of the soul and the dark night of the spirit?
 
Audience: That's why I wanted to explore the word death as a sound. When the word is uttered it has a certain energy. If you notice the last "th" it's like you're going from a "d" which is like a heavy sound and then it disappears. So that's why we don't want to talk about it, a lot of people don't want to talk about it because there is that – at the end it just disappears. So there's a lot of things that it brings up.
 
So let's talk about the second death. We know that everything the ego creates is an illusion and you get to a certain point where God wipes all that out, purifies it. So someone has descended into darkness. Now God says "I'm not going to put you to the second death." God does not put a person to the second death. The person has walked into a certain amount of darkness that there is no way that he can get out of it. So that identity annihilates itself. And only the pure energy of God goes back to God and is recycled.
 
Audience: But the soul makes the decision. The soul decides that it doesn't want to go on.
 
Audience: The Conscious You has taken on a certain identity. And through that identity has created a reality.
 
Kim: And it's saying this is the reality.
 
Audience: It's put itself into a box and locked itself in and refuses to get out.
 
Kim: It's thrown away the key.
 
Audience: OK, what I was saying is that there is a decision. It decides that it doesn't want to go on. It doesn't want to change. It's a decision.
 
Kim: Well, to be honest with you, the way I understand it is that when a being is facing the second death, it knows what the choices are. It's actually forced out of its box. I understand what you're saying that it's locked itself in this box, but when it faces the last judgment, it is forced out of the box so it can see the truth. So it sees clearly that this identity is unreal. And then it has a choice, will it start retracing its steps up the spiral staircase and it knows what it entails. So the being has to choose, will it bend the knee to the reality of God's law and work its way back up according to the law. Or will it continue to rebel against the law.
 
Audience: So it's an informed decision.
 
Kim: Yes, I don't think it's right that the Conscious You does not know what the decision entails. I agree with you that it has created that prison that it can't get out of on its own but at the last judgement it is given the clarity. Just like you see many people who are on their physical deathbed and all of a sudden they have a clarity and they see something they never saw throughout their lives.
 
Audience: Like the door to the box is opened, but they're still handcuffed to the doorknob…
 
Kim: Yes, they're still in the box but at least now they can see that there's something outside the box whereas they couldn't before.
 
Audience: Would the decision be to say the Conscious You says "OK, well this is what I have created and this is what it's going to take to go back" but since it identifies that "There's no good in me or no desire in me or no will to go there, I will take the second death"
 
Kim: Yes, it has to decide and it knows what the choices are.
 
Audience: It can be out of pride too because you have to bend the knee to God and say "I was wrong." And they won't admit that they were ever wrong, they would rather die than admit that.
 
Kim: Yes very often it is out of pride.
 
Audience: And what about suicide, that was one aspect too that we were taught in the Summit Lighthouse, that if you commit suicide it's almost a direct entryway into the second death if you're at the end of your opportunities.
 
Kim: I don't remember that, to be honest with you.
 
Audience: I don't mean at the beginning but at the end, like for instance Hitler as an example that went through the second death and that suicide can sometimes be the final straw.
 
Kim: Well, yes suicide is kind of very close to the second death where the soul says, "I don't want to live anymore"
 
Audience: Not that I'm saying that everyone who commits suicide goes to the second death. I'm saying that if it's at the end of your time, I thought there was an understanding that that was one of the last chances that you had.
 
Kim: But see the choice that you face at the second death, Mother Mary explains it in the book, that what started as a downhill path was that we made a decision that we did not want to go back to the teacher and bend the knee to the teacher and say, "Help me come back to the way I was created." We don't want to face the teacher so we run away from the teacher, and at the second death you have one final opportunity to bend the knee and say, "I will undo that decision." But at that point of course, that decision was made at the top of the spiral staircase and now you are down here 250 million steps lower. And you can see that you have to go all the way back up before you can actually undo that decision. You can't just undo it in one moment and be free of it all.
 
But you know what it entails. And there are some souls like they said, I think, that Lucifer to the very end kept cursing God and blaspheming and all kinds of things because he wasn't going to change his decision that God was wrong.
 
Audience: On a lighter subject, I'm sure you all know about this but I'd like to remind you that regardless what you do, you cannot affect your I AM Presence. So go ahead, do anything you want. Your I AM Presence is up there, and he's going to give you a lot of chances to reconnect. Your potential is always there. Regardless of how far down you go, you have that potential. And since now you know that, what are you going to do about it?
 
Kim: That's very true. The primary illusion is that once we have made a certain mistake, we can't come back to God, we're separated forever. And that's why the ego wants to maintain that illusion, because it can only survive as long as we maintain the illusion that we are separated from God.
 
Audience: This is what I was saying about being blessed, to contradict what you were saying, but the potential is equally the same from the first step to step 303 million. You have the same exact potential. You decide to turn around.
 
Audience: Yes it's just harder to come back up once you keep going down.
 
Kim: Yes it becomes harder and harder because you become more ingrained in it.
 
Audience: At the same time you learn from all your negative experiences going down. So you don't have the same consciousness that made you refuse to go back to the teacher…
 
Audience: Once you go back up you don't.
 
Audience: You can't learn anything if you're in pride. So until you start turning around…
 
Kim: Yes until you start turning around. You can turn your experiences into something positive. But you have to turn around first.
 
Audience: But I think you learn from the bottom, because there's a point where you're broken. If you're willing to see that you're broken.
 
Audience: But you only learn when you have made that choice that you would change.
 
Kim: Yes, the way I would say it is that you can come to that turning point where you turn around, you say "I've had enough of this, I can't do this anymore" and that's when you can start learning. Because while you're still going down the staircase and you're in pride, you're refusing to see that what you're doing is harming yourself. And as long as you don't see that you're not really learning, you're not really internalizing the lesson.
 
Audience: About refusing to go back to the teacher, is it just pride or is it something else?
 
Kim: It's different for each individual soul. We make an individual decision. And it probably has something to do with what our God flame is, where we refuse to express our God flame in this world. It's usually the perversion of our God flame that causes us to make that decision. So in my case my God flame is Love, the opposite of that is hate so it could have been hate that I somehow locked into and decided that. It could possibly be that I thought, "Well God is going to hate me because I made this mistake and I don't want to go back to a hateful God so I'm going to run away from him" something like that.
 
Often it's the perversion of the God flame that ensnares us in the dualistic logic. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that we experience that our God flame is not welcome in this world, they don't want it here. So we gradually get to the point where we think, "Oh I shouldn't express it" or "I should only express it under certain conditions, I should hold back, I should hide my light and not express it and not be the Sun" that kind of thing. Whereas Jesus said, "Let your light so shine before men."

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Copyright © 2006 by Kim Michaels