Ascended Master Mother Mary, August 27, 2012 through Kim Michaels.

Yet what is the murder of innocence? Well, it is of course the ultimate plan of the fallen beings and their desire to prove God wrong, to prove that God was wrong by giving you free will. Thereby, as Astrea mentioned, they seek to punish God by trapping the extensions of God’s own being in these lesser manifestations. They are of course not trapping God, they are not punishing God, for God knows that everything in the material universe is unreal.

Although God experiences everything that you experience, God does not experience it through the perception filter that you have and thus God is not affected by it as you are. Even though the fallen beings think they can punish God, well of course they cannot punish God for God is not inside their perception filter—they are. And it is not even the Conscious You that experiences what the fallen beings experience, it is the outer self they have created.

I can tell you that even though I have now, since 2005, given teachings on the concept of the Conscious You, it is of course only a concept. I have not given the fullness of what can be given, but still it is only a concept. You will not know the reality of the Conscious You without experiencing it directly.

Any concept we give is not for the purpose of giving you some absolute truth. It is for the purpose of stirring you to reach beyond your present mental box, your present perception, and then you will experience directly the reality that can never be expressed in words. How would you describe the taste of an apple with words, my beloved, to a person who has never tasted an apple or any other fruit and therefore has no frame of reference, no point of comparison? You cannot do this with words. You can hand the person an apple and say: “Take a bite!” And then the person will experience the taste. This is also why it was impossible for Maitreya to sufficiently warn people against partaking of the serpentine consciousness, for how could he describe with words or concepts what it was like to be in the serpentine consciousness?

Defining innocence

You can only know this by experiencing it and that, my beloved, is the key to understanding the fall. How do you grow as a self-aware being? You do not grow through theory. We of the ascended masters are limited to giving you teachings through words, unless you are willing to go beyond the words and have an inner experience that is beyond words.

The words themselves can never give you the experience, nor can they give you a full picture of the spiritual reality. Words can only give you a mental image and then they can give you, perhaps, the impetus to transcend your mental image. Certain words can challenge your current mental image and therefore give you the impetus to question it, to try to step outside of it. Then you will have an experience and that experience gives you growth.

So you see, the reality of free will is that the Conscious You has the ability to project itself into any condition or self, any perception filter, that is possible. This goes for any perception filter whatsoever even those based on the illusion of separation, duality, even the serpentine consciousness. The reality here is this: You can actually be in a self that has a perception filter which is partially affected by the serpentine consciousness. You can be a human being on earth who has certain beliefs about God, or about the spiritual realm, or about life that are affected by the serpentine consciousness. You can even be an atheist, but yet you are still a holy innocent. This may seem contrary to what has been given in the past, yet it is not contrary; it is progressive revelation. Progressive revelation is given for a higher state of consciousness than what was given in the past.

If you will not let go of the perception filter you built based on the prior teaching, then you will see the new as being contradictory. If you are anxious to justify why you will not let go of your former perception filter, then you might seek to discredit or put down the teaching. This is your choice but if you seek to discredit or put down a teaching you are not in a state of innocence.

For what is innocence? It is simply this: You are a self-aware being, you have been given free will, you have used that free will to create your current sense of self. Your current sense of self forms a perception filter and you live life, you live your personal life, through that perception filter. As long as you are identifying yourself with the self you have created, you are perceiving everything – including yourself, including God, including the material world – through that perception filter. This is perfectly valid. Even if your perception filter is limited or distorted, it does not matter which perception filter you have, you can still be in a state of innocence.

The whole purpose of life is a growth in self-awareness, and you grow by creating a perception filter, projecting your light, your consciousness, upon the Mat-ter light through that filter and experiencing how the Mat-ter light outpictures your perception filter. When you see the return, you can evaluate and most of the time you will evaluate through the perception filter. But once in a while the Mat-ter light will give you a return that either surprises you or seems to contradict what you believe at a surface level of consciousness. When you run into these contradictions, or repetitions, or a situation where you want to change but you cannot seemingly change your circumstances, that is when you have the opportunity to say with the words of Einstein: “But if I keep projecting out the same thing and expect a different return, then am I not insane?”

“What is the only way to change what is coming back? It is to change what I am sending out and what is the only way to change what I am sending out? It is to question my perception filter and then step beyond it.” You see, you grow by first immersing yourself in a certain sense of self, a certain perception filter, and then awakening from that immersion, realizing you are more. Then gradually, for each time you have this experience of transcending a certain self, you realize you are more than the self you have created. As you continue this process, you come to the point where you realize you are more than any self that could possibly be created in the material realm. That is when you can give up the ghost that has kept you on the cross created by your perception filter in the four levels of your mind. And when you give up that last ghost, that last belief that you can be confined to a perception filter in the material realm, then you ascend. This is the ascension.

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