Ascended Master Jesus, May 10, 2009 through Kim Michaels.

What is the ascension, my beloved? What is the ascension process? Well it is that you must accept that you are no longer a mortal human being, you are now an immortal spiritual being. If you cannot accept that, you cannot ascend.

You might be used to thinking that the ascension is a matter of fulfilling certain requirements. And once you have fulfilled those requirements – ”poof” – one day you will ascend. It is not so! There are requirements to fulfill, my beloved. Certainly, that is true. But the process of ascension is not an automatic process, it is not a mechanical process—it is a creative process. Which means that it involves choices that you must make.

And what are the choices you make? What do I mean when I say “Choose life over death?” Well, “Choose life!” means that you choose to accept a new identity, a new sense of self, that is MORE than the sense of self you had before—even a second ago.

So you see, my beloved, the ego wants to pervert this entire concept of the spiritual path into thinking that you walk a long path towards an ultimate goal. And the ego has two advantages of this. By making you accept that you are walking a long path, it can make you accept that the ultimate goal is far out in the future. As you indeed have had many previous students of the ascended masters who have believed that they would ascend, they would become the Christ, only far into the future. But certainly not now—certainly not right now, right here. And you see, this is the ego trying to make the conscious self believe that it cannot simply shift its sense of identity in an instant and be the Christ in an instant.
And so, the other advantage that the false teachers and the ego gain from this perception is that there is this idea that there is some ultimate stage, some ultimate initiation, you go through—and then you have attained some permanent state.

Give up the dream of an ultimate initiation

You see, my beloved, give up this idea that there is some ultimate initiation, some ultimate goal that is far out there in the future. Instead, accept the reality that the River of Life is a process, an ever-moving stream of constant, on-going, perpetual self-transcendence. It is precisely, as the Buddha explained, the attempt to hold on to a particular sense of self that brings you into the consciousness of death, the consciousness of duality.

In the ascended state, you do not have a permanent, fixed, sense of identity. You are constantly ascending. In fact, it might be constructive, my beloved, instead of talking about ascended masters, to talk about Ascending masters.
For we are constantly ascending, we are constantly being reborn into a higher sense of self. This is, indeed, what I represent to this earth, having taken up a position as the representative of the twelfth ray of rebirth, my beloved. This is what I came to bring forth 2,000 years ago. And now – in the fullness that I AM now – I have taken up that position of representing this rebirth. And it is, indeed, the supreme opportunity for the more advanced spiritual seekers to accelerate their beings beyond a certain point, where they simply shed that snakeskin of the old identity and are reborn into a new sense of self.

But, my beloved, in order to be fully reborn, you have to accept that you now are that new sense of self. It is not a theoretical concept that is still “out there” in the distance and that you might someday take on. No, it is now. It is here. It is you. This is who I am.

You might have made a mistake yesterday, but if you see the mistake, see the consciousness behind it and let it go, then you are reborn into a new self. And the self that you are today was not the self that made the mistake yesterday or ten thousand embodiments ago. And therefore, you do not need to hang on to these feelings that you had in the old sense of self. In fact, you do not even need to hold on to the memory.

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