The ego has attempted to create an impenetrable wall between your Conscious You and your acceptance of your true identity as a co-creator with God.
The process of separation took most co-creators into a self-reinforcing downward spiral of alienation from God. This led them to build a sense of identity based on the things of the material world, including their bodies and their egos.
The further you descend into identification with the material world, the more you will limit your sense of identity. You are, so to speak, building a prison for yourself, and it gradually becomes smaller until you can hardly move.
Most co-creators will eventually reach a bottom line, from which they decide to start going back up towards a more unlimited sense of identity.
The ego would prefer that this turning point did not take place, but once it has taken place, the ego will resist every upward step you take, and its primary weapon is to divert your attention from the inner path itself.
The ego wants to create the false path, which makes you believe that you can “be saved” without confronting the ego and letting it die.
The desire for something more can take you out of a downward spiral but it can also be used by the ego. The ego sees only the things of this world, and thus the ultimate triumph of your personal ego would be that you had absolute power in this world.
Although one part of your ego is afraid of you turning around and walking the path towards a greater sense of existence, another part of the ego actually welcomes this—as long as it can maintain its control over you and misdirect your longing for something more in a certain direction.
People start their return to oneness by going through the following stages:
- Survival. All attention and energy is fed into the survival of the physical body.
- Accumulation. Seeking material possessions becomes the goal of life. The ego can now pursue the sense that if you have more possessions than other people, you are better than them.
- Seeking a higher goal by realizing material possessions is not enough.
- Seeking control. A perversion of seeking growth in consciousness is the desire to control your circumstances. This can lead to a desire to control the world by fighting for a good cause.
The above are self-centered stages where people are focused on raising themselves as separate individuals by using what is available in this world. After some time, many people realize that the material world cannot be all there is to life.
People become open to a continued existence in the spiritual world after the body dies. Your conduct in this world might have an impact on what happens to you in the afterlife. This is when a person is awakened or converted to a religious lifestyle.
One part of your ego would rather that this conversion did not happen and that you remained focused on the material world. Yet another part of the ego will seek to use your religious conversion to keep you under its control.
People now go through the religious stages:
- The lowest stage is represented by the black-and-white thinking, which makes people believe there is only one true religion. This can lock people in a religious version of the struggle between relative good and relative evil, and this is a dangerous trap because the ego makes people think they are doing God’s work, and thus they can deny the need for self-transcendence. Some lifestreams have to be reborn into a great number of different religions before they finally accept that there is no automatic salvation.
- The lifestream now realizes that it is not enough to simply be a member of an outer organization but that you have to meet a set of individual requirements. The ego often manages to make a lifestream believe that if only it meets certain outer requirements, it will qualify for salvation. People play these ego games with a keen sense of comparison, thinking that if they do more good works than others, their salvation will be guaranteed.
- The highest potential for the next stage is that the lifestream takes full responsibility for its own salvation and recognizes that the Christ consciousness requires one to discern between the relative “truth” of the ego and the absolute truth of the Christ mind. Yet most lifestreams are not quite ready to take full responsibility, so they let their egos talk them into going into the gray thinking described in a previous discourse. The ego has now defined what it means to be a spiritual person, and this definition can never lead you to the Christ consciousness. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult for sincere spiritual seekers to admit this fact and admit that their spiritual quest has been misguided.
The religious stages share some characteristics with the material stages. People are still very much focused on the ego-self, and they are seeking to use their religion to “save” their egos.
Yet people now have a sense that there is something outside the ego, namely God. Yet they still see that God as being outside themselves, and thus they are outside his kingdom. They are vulnerable to the ego’s claim that they have to meet certain outer requirements in order to enter the external kingdom.
Many spiritual people are still focused on comparing themselves to others, thinking they are better than others if they appear to be more spiritual according to the definition of their church and ego. If you seek spiritual qualities for the sake of making the ego appear acceptable to God or better than other people, you are still engaged in an impossible quest.
When people are stuck in the material stages, they are often primarily motivated by fear. When they move into the religious stages, they begin to be more motivated by pride.
Having overcome fear is an accomplishment but it does not mean that you are home free.
As you rise above fear, the chameleon of the ego will simply change color and will now stop trying to control you through fear-based means. Instead, it will become much more subtle and seek to divert you through pride-based means.
Pride will remain a temptation as long as you are in embodiment on earth. There is only one way to avoid the subtle traps of pride, namely to increase your alertness and your ability to see through the games played by the ego.
Only you can counteract the subtle games that your personal ego plays in the deepest recesses of your mind.
All pride is based on a comparison that leads to a value judgment. Neither the comparison nor the value judgment can take place in the mind of Christ.
A comparison is always a relative measure, meaning that it takes place in the realm of duality which sets up a scale between two relative extremes.
In the Christ mind, there are no relative comparisons. There is only one evaluation. Do you live up to your highest potential as a co-creator with God, or do you fall short of the mark?
The Christ mind is not blind, but it never seeks to make an imperfect condition permanent.
The mind of anti-christ seeks to create imperfect conditions by setting up its own relative standard. Once it has defined itself as being better than others, it wants to maintain their imperfections in order to maintain its own sense of superiority.
The ego seeks to raise itself up by putting other people down. It is quite possible for the ego to use a religious or spiritual teaching to play this game.
The wide gate and the broad way spoken of by Jesus is the way of the ego. The strait gate and the narrow way is the true way of self-transcendence, whereby you are spiritually reborn.
Being born again means that you are reborn into a new sense of identity. Instead of identifying yourself based on the duality consciousness, you now accept your true identity in Christ.
Being born of water means that you attain mastery over your emotions and master fear. Being born of the spirit means that you attain mastery over your thoughts and thus master pride.
When you attain the mind of Christ, you no longer follow the “logic” and “rationality” of the mind of anti-christ. Thus, neither your ego nor the forces of this world can predict what you will do. You will be following the higher logic and rationality of the Christ mind, which is utterly unfathomable to the dualistic mind.
The process of spiritual rebirth will become so much easier when you realize that the core of your being is the Conscious You, which has the ability to identify itself as anything it chooses.
If you walk the spiritual path while still identifying with the ego, you will find it very difficult to let go of the ego’s illusions. You will be fighting a constant battle because you will be thinking that if part of your ego dies, you will die.
When you consciously step outside of the ego’s mental prison, you realize you are much more than the ego, and thus you can let part of the ego die without feeling that you are dying or even losing anything.
For you to step on to this higher level of the path you will have to deeply contemplate the meaning of Jesus’ statement that the kingdom of God is within you.
You must come to see the fallacy of the ego’s claim that any conditions in this world can guarantee – or prevent – your salvation.
You must take full and final responsibility for your own salvation by realizing that the only factor that determines your salvation is whether you have the Christ consciousness or whether you still have elements of the duality consciousness in your container of self.
Salvation is not an outer condition bestowed upon you by an external God or an external savior. No one can save you for you. Salvation is an inner condition, whereby you attain a sense of oneness with God.
How can you be in the kingdom of God while maintaining the ego’s sense of separation from God? Only when you attain the Christ mind’s sense of oneness with God can you be in the kingdom.
Copyright © 2013 Kim Michaels