Ascended Master Gautama Buddha, January 1, 2013 through Kim Michaels.

If you will go through a reality check, you will realize that you were not wrong for believing in the spiritual side of life. You were, indeed, led astray by your own ego and by the false teachers. It was your decision because you did not approach spirituality in a balanced manner.

This does not mean that you have to now criticize yourself or feel guilty. You do need to realize that your approach was not the highest possible and therefore you need to step up to a higher approach where you seek balance first of all. You seek balance over peak experiences or outer results. You stop measuring and you find a viable spiritual path and you apply it, even if it seems like you are making no progress for years. If you are applying a viable path, you ARE making progress at inner levels even though it sometimes may not seem so to the outer mind.

You have all been given a completely false image of what happened to Jesus and myself and other spiritual teachers. You think we were so special that we did not have to walk the same kind of path that you are walking. This is an illusion. We all had to walk a gradual path. We all had to deal with our own stuff – our own unresolved psychology – the illusions we had accepted over many lifetimes. We all had to deal with every, dirty detail of it. We all took a long time to complete the journey, and there were times when for years it seemed like we were getting nowhere.

Just look at even the rather illusory, glorified view of the world and see that I spent years sitting in the forest meditating. I can assure you that there were times when it seemed like nothing was happening except my hair and nails were growing longer and longer.

Finding your personal Middle Way

We all have gone through this, and we made it because we kept going. We kept putting one foot in front of the other. Yet, we did not simply blindly follow some kind of scheme where we decided: “Ah, now I have the right path and now I have to just blindly apply it for the rest of my life and now I will be saved.”

Did I not sit there for years, thinking I had to follow a certain path, and then at one point I was willing to step back and say: “Nay, this path of the ascetic, this extreme path, cannot be it. There must be a higher way.” And that is when I discovered the Middle Way.

You see, there is not just one Middle Way. There is a general Middle Way, but there is a Middle Way for each person. You must also come to the point where you say: “I have had enough of going from this extreme to that extreme, now it is time for me to discover the balance by stepping back and looking at what I have not looked at so far, namely myself, my own psychology. Instead of thinking that I have to apply this or that outer system, outer technique, outer teaching, outer guru.”

You are the ultimate guru in the sense that there must come a point where you are willing to look at yourself and then tune in to your own higher self and to the ascended gurus who will give you directions from within. Earthly teachers, earthly teachings, can only take you so far. There will come a point when you must use the teaching to gain your own inner attunement with your higher self. If you will go to and look at the AskRealJesus website and the AscendedMasterLight website and the AscendedMasterAnswers website, you will see that we have been saying this since 2002.

Indeed, this is one of the messages you can apply to discern between a false and a true teaching. Will it tell you to go within and seek your own inner attunement, or will they tell you to follow an outer guru and keep following that guru without ever applying your ability to look at yourself from outside your current sense of self?

This is an excerpt from a longer teaching. You can read the full dictation HERE.