Most spiritual people have a longing for something more, the desire to understand, the sense that there must be answers to life’s questions. This is a safety mechanism that prevents you from becoming totally lost in the duality consciousness.
Many people have an awakening experience as a result of finding an outer teaching.
Your ego’s main goal is to prevent you from awakening to a higher sense of identity as a spiritual being.
The ego will take the teaching that served as the outer tool for your awakening, and it will seek to use it to neutralize your quest for truth.
The essence of your quest for truth is a longing for a direct experience of the Spirit of Truth.
The ego is seeking to misdirect your search for truth and make you believe you can find a truth in this world that can guarantee your salvation.
A common result of an awakening experience is that people begin to believe that by joining an outer organization they have “made it.”
The ego wants you to believe that as long as you stay in the organization and keep following its outer requirements, your salvation is guaranteed. The ego has then neutralized your quest for truth.
The driving force behind your quest for truth is that you ask questions. Yet when the ego makes you believe in a guaranteed salvation, there are certain questions you do not ask.
This will prevent or abort the direct inner contact with the Spirit of Truth, which is the only factor that can take you beyond the dualistic beliefs of the ego.
The ego has now created the perfect mental prison in which you feel relatively content. You think you should never look outside the prison.
Should you begin to see through the illusion of an automatic salvation through, the ego can still win. Many people give up on the spiritual path.
When you take the black-and-white approach, you become stuck in one belief system and can never move beyond it. This approach is based on fear, the fear that opening your mind makes you vulnerable to false ideas.
When you take the gray approach, you think there are no false ideas. Yet if you do not have the willingness to discern, people often go from teacher to teacher until they find one that confirms their belief that they can be saved without discerning and confronting their egos. Or they continue to go from guru to guru, constantly thinking that the next one will do it all for them.
Both approaches are based on the same basic psychology, namely an unwillingness to reach beyond the duality of the ego and attain the discernment that can come only from the Christ mind.
Only God’s forever self-transcending truth that will make you free from the dualistic “truth” defined by the ego and the prince of this world.
The ego is constantly seeking to stop your quest for truth. If it cannot stop you from asking questions, it will seek to divert your attention.
The ego is trying to make you believe that ultimate, absolute truth can be found in this world.
Your ego will never see that the Spirit of Truth cannot be confined. Yet the Conscious You can see this truth and then decide to reach for the direct experience.
As long as you are searching for truth outside yourself, you will never find the Living Truth.
In order to make ultimate spiritual progress, you must become aware of the mechanism whereby your ego turns the outer belief system into a closed box.
The ego can use even a valid spiritual teaching to create a closed box. Once a teaching is expressed in words, it enters the realm of duality, and it can now be used by the ego.
In order to expose a dualistic truth created by the ego, you must have a frame of reference. This can be attained only through a direct, inner experience of the Spirit of truth. There is no substitute for this direct experience.
The ego is subtle, and it is precisely the people who think they are above the ego who are trapped in the most subtle weapon of the ego, namely intellectual and spiritual pride.
There are a number of teachings that can potentially lead you beyond the duality consciousness of the ego. Do not allow your ego to make you attached to the particular form of one teaching.
No true teaching is designed to give you absolute truth. It is designed to take you to a direct experience of the Spirit of Truth. It is this direct experience that will raise your consciousness, not an intellectual understanding of the outer teaching.
The message of a true spiritual teaching is that there is something beyond the teaching. The outer teaching is only meant to show the way to the kingdom of God that is within you.
If you allow your ego to make you believe you can reach the kingdom by staying in a closed box you will never enter the kingdom.
There are two ways whereby your personal ego can use an outer teaching to trap you in a closed box:
- The ego looks for a ready-made belief system that claims to have some form of infallible or absolute authority. The purpose is to make you believe that your salvation is guaranteed, so you no longer need to think.
- Your ego will come up with a set of personalized versions of the outer doctrines. These are designed according to your personality and beliefs, so they vary greatly from person to person. These personalized versions allow their egos to hide and allow people to live their lives the way they want to—while still believing they will be saved.
The ego is not seeking for absolute truth. It is seeking to take a relative expression of “truth” and elevate it to the status of being absolute. It is not seeking to find absolute truth but to define it based on its own dualistic reasoning.
The ego is that it will look for statements in a spiritual teaching that can be interpreted as giving absolute authority. It will then seek to establish a culture in the organization that makes people believe they never have to question these absolute statements.
The ego creates a closed box if you believe the following:
- The teaching comes from and is one hundred percent backed by the highest possible authority.
- There can only be one truth, meaning all other teachings are false.
- If you follow a false teaching, you go to hell, but if you follow the only true teaching, your salvation is guaranteed.
- The teaching is higher or better than any other teaching.
- Because the teaching is absolute, it could never be changed.
- There could never be a higher or more advanced teaching.
- Because you have this perfect teaching, there is no need to seek for a direct experience of the Spirit of Truth.
- Who are you to think you can ask questions or seek for a deeper understanding of the teaching?
- If you ask a question that the leaders cannot answer, there is something wrong with that question. If you are not satisfied with the official answers, there is something wrong with you.
The Spirit of Truth cannot be confined to words. Once a spiritual teaching has been put into words, it is no longer the Living Truth.
Some people will turn any teaching into a closed box. They will seek to pull you into their box, because the ego literally believes that if everyone on earth agrees with it, then it must be right.
The perversion of a teaching can be avoided only if it remains open to progressive revelation, meaning that there is a direct connection to the ascended masters.
Jesus did not create a closed box but attempted to establish a tradition for the delivery of the Living Word.
As humankind’s consciousness has grown, the ascended masters have attempted to establish a more direct connection by training messengers through whom they could speak in a more direct manner. Yet people can still become too focused on the outer teaching and the outer organization.
Many people will not accept any messenger unless he or she has some kind of otherworldly authority. Yet if the ascended masters establish such authority, the ego will take this too far and build an organizational culture that says this messenger is the only true messenger.
An organization can also become too focused on the particular form of the message given through its messenger. The way the Living Word is delivered through this messenger is the only way it could possibly be delivered.
An organization can fall prey to the dualistic game of defining itself as being superior in comparison to other teachings.
A spiritual organization must fulfill two requirements:
- The organization must maintain a connection to the ascended masters so that the delivery of the Living Word can continue.
- The members and the leaders must have a keen awareness of the ego and how it affects spiritual organizations.
Will people use the outer teachings to always reach beyond the teaching for the direct experience of the Spirit of Truth?
To be the open door or not to be the open door, that is the timeless question.
There is no way to create a spiritual organization that is automatically guaranteed to be free from the ego and its games. The only way to combat the ego is through constant alertness and a constant reaching for the Spirit of Truth.
This can happen only as a personal, inner experience, and although the experience can be shared it can never be institutionalized.
Never become attached to a particular expression of truth. Use it as a stepping stone for reaching for a direct, inner experience of the Spirit of Truth.
The Sprit of Truth is the River of Life, and the all-important characteristic is that it is constantly flowing.
Copyright © 2013 Kim Michaels