36.
How to rise above your past
NOTE: This
is an excerpt from the book The
Least You Should Know About Life.
Rising above your past is not nearly as difficult as it might seem.
The simple fact is that the circumstances from your past that are limiting
you in this lifetime were all created by you. Thus, the empowering realization
is that anything which you have created, you can also uncreate. You
created the limiting circumstances through an unconscious use of your
creative faculties. The fact that you could create these limitations
demonstrates that your creative faculties are working. Thus, you can
use those very same creative faculties to uncreate the limitations from
the past. You simply need to start making conscious use of your creative
faculties. This section describes how to do so.
Self-awareness
The foundation for your creative efforts is the fact that you have self-awareness.
You know you exist and that you have the ability to create. Unfortunately,
most people have diminished their self-awareness, often to avoid pain.
The simple mechanism is that if you don’t think you can do anything
to change your life, you would rather not think about life. This has
happened over several lifetimes of living in a culture that is not particularly
spiritual, even though it might claim to be religious. Thus, many people
do not have a habit of observing themselves for the purpose of seeing
how they can overcome self-defeating beliefs.
The improvement that is needed is not that you begin to compare yourself
to some man-made standard for how the perfect human being should be.
Various societies have created such standards. What you need to do is
to uncover your spiritual identity by reconnecting to your I AM Presence.
Everyone is a unique individual, and the only evaluation that is relevant
for you is to what degree you are expressing your Divine individuality
as opposed to a lower identity that you have built over many lifetimes.
It is essential to realize that in reclaiming your Divine individuality,
your conscious self will meet stiff opposition from your ego. Your ego
will not voluntarily give up its control over your lower being, so you
have to take it back with determination. This will require you to take
responsibility for your life and your spiritual growth. You must overcome
the tendency to rely on gurus, institutions or philosophies outside
yourself. You must accept that you have everything you need inside yourself
in the form of your Christ self and your I AM Presence. Outer teachings
or other people can be very helpful, but they must never become a substitute
for the direct connection to your spiritual self. You must not let anything
in this world come between you and your I AM Presence.
It is also extremely helpful to realize, as explained earlier, that
the ego has created a mental prison but that the conscious self can
step outside that prison any time. The reason is that the conscious
self is more than the ego and the ego’s beliefs. And when you
no longer identify yourself with the ego, it becomes much easier to
admit the mistaken beliefs of the ego. However, this can only happen
when the Conscious You decides that it will once again fill its role
of making decisions in your life. This opens up for a subtle shift in
the way you look at life, and it can help you avoid the pitfalls of
fear, guilt or shame. Instead of feeling guilty for your mistakes and
seeking to hide them, you now see them as simply scientific experiments
that did not produce the desired results. Thus, in order to overcome
the unpleasant results, you want to bring your mistaken beliefs out
in the open – to the level of conscious awareness – so you
can leave them behind as quickly as possible.
Part of being self-observant and taking responsibility for your life
is to recognize that you have made mistakes. The ego will never admit
that it made mistakes, so it will try to pull you into an endless cycle
of seeking to justify your actions or beliefs. The main message of the
ego is that you either cannot change or that you do not need to change—meaning
that you leave the ego in control. As part of this act, the ego will
try to discourage you from acknowledging your mistakes by either making
you afraid that you could have done something unforgivable, by making
you feel so guilty or ashamed that you do not want to look at the past
or by making you feel so prideful that you think you never made mistakes
or don’t need to admit them.
The key to avoiding these ego games is to recognize that the Conscious
You did not make the vast majority of the mistakes you have made. In
a sense the Conscious You only made one mistake, namely refusing to
make decisions, thereby allowing the ego to make most of the decisions
in your life. The point is that most of the specific mistakes you have
made were the results of decisions made by the ego. Yet the Conscious
You is not the ego, and therefore – in a sense – you did
not make those mistakes. The lie promoted by the ego is that if you
did something bad, that makes you a bad person. The truth is that making
a mistake does not make the Conscious You a bad person. And by separating
yourself from the ego, you will rise above the mistake.
However, this must not be misinterpreted into thinking you are not responsible
for the mistakes made. The Conscious You is responsible for making decisions
in your life. So if the conscious self decides that it will no longer
make decisions, it is giving away its power to make decisions, but it
cannot escape the responsibility for making decisions. Thus, you must
recognize that it was a mistake to give power to the ego, but you must
also recognize that once you take back responsibility for your life,
that mistake is undone. You are still responsible for resolving the
imperfect beliefs and misqualified energies created by the ego, but
you do not need to identify yourself with the ego or feel bad about
yourself.
The result of this realization is subtle, but very important. When you
no longer identify yourself with the ego and the ego’s decisions,
it becomes much easier to separate yourself from the ego. It becomes
much easier to admit the mistaken beliefs of the ego and then simply
leave them behind. The process of overcoming a mistake has the following
elements:
-
You must resolve the
self-destructive belief that caused you to make the mistake, or
rather allowed your ego to make and justify the decision behind
the mistake. You must replace this belief with a decision that is
in alignment with your Divine individuality and the spiritual laws.
-
You must transform any
external karma (karma directed toward other people) resulting from
the decision.
-
You must transform any
internal karma (karma directed toward yourself, such as belittling
yourself for having made the mistake).
- You must make the conscious
decision to let the entire situation go and leave it behind. You must
decide to remember your sin no more.
The final element is the
most essential aspect of spiritual growth. In the end you can never
change what happened in the past. However, when you have risen above
the state of consciousness that caused you – or rather the ego
– to make a mistake, and when you have neutralized the external
and internal karma, the mistake no longer has any objective existence.
In fact, it now exists only in one place, namely in your memory. Thus,
the final act of overcoming a mistake is that you must forgive all people
involved in the situation and then forgive yourself.
You must decide to simply let the situation go and forget about it,
thereby fulfilling the process of erasing any record – written
with the energy of your thoughts and feelings – so that the universe
is literally restored to the same state of purity as before the mistake
was made. Therefore, it is as if the mistake had never happened. What
was written with the low-vibration energies of the material universe
has now been unwritten. It was simply written in sand and you have now
erased it. Most people misunderstand forgiveness and think that if they
forgive someone, they let him or her off the hook. In reality, when
you forgive everyone, you let yourself off the hook because you are
no longer tied to the situation or person and can now move on without
being burdened by the past. Until forgiveness is complete, you are not
completely free of your past.
The importance of these concepts is that as you grow on the spiritual
path, you need to rise above the sense that you are an imperfect human
being or perhaps a miserable sinner. You need to let this sense of identity
go and accept that you are a spiritual being, a co-creator with God.
It is only when you let go of any human elements of identity that you
attain the full spiritual freedom that comes from rising above your
ego and its false sense of identity.
Imagination
As has been explained, any form begins as a mental image in the mind
of a self-conscious being. This mental image is then superimposed upon
the Ma-ter Light which eventually takes on a physical form that outpictures
the image. The mental image must be formulated by using imagination,
the ability to envision a form that you cannot see, even a form that
has never been imagined by anyone else.
The logical conclusion is that your ability to create is completely
dependent upon your imagination. You cannot create what you cannot imagine,
so if your imagination is limited, you have no way to rise above those
limitations. If you cannot imagine that you could escape the mental
prison created by the ego, you literally have no way to escape.
The most important fact about imagination is that the Conscious You
has unlimited imagination, and this gift can never be lost. Thus, no
matter how you see yourself right now, you still have the ability to
begin to imagine that you could rise above your current circumstances.
However, the key to doing this is that the Conscious You must take back
the role of imagining your future instead of allowing the ego to do
this.
The Conscious You was created in the spiritual realm, and therefore
it has the ability to imagine the spiritual realm and your spiritual
identity even before it actually experiences it. This imagination of
a higher reality is what opens the door for your inner experience of
that higher reality.
In contrast, your ego was created in the material world, and it simply
cannot imagine anything beyond this world. Thus, the ego’s imagination
is limited to the conditions that it sees in this world, meaning that
it thinks you really are a human being with very limited powers. The
ego firmly believes that there is nothing you can do to change your
physical conditions by using the power of your mind. It thinks you need
to use the ways of the world to get your way, and the ego has no morals
or ethics. The basic philosophy of the ego is that, “If it works,
do it.”
The ego is completely self-centered and essentially believes that it
is the center of the universe. Nature and other people are simply here
to serve its needs, but unfortunately other people stubbornly refuse
to accept this fact. Thus, it is necessary for the ego to try to control
them, and it is acceptable that the ego uses any means to attain this
goal. After all, nothing is more important than the ego’s survival.
It now becomes obvious that the key to improving your situation is that
the Conscious You must separate itself from the self-centered world
view of the ego and begin to use its imagination to envision a better
future. You must dare to dream, dare to imagine that you are more than
the ego, more than the world programs you to be. You are a spiritual
being who was created by a loving God and fully worthy of the perfect
love that casts out all fear. Whenever you become aware of a limitation
in your own psyche, such as a self-destructive belief, you must imagine
a better belief and imagine yourself free from the limited view.
You must dare to imagine better outer circumstances for yourself and
create a mental image of the situation you want to experience. You must
then use your imagination to see yourself in that situation, experiencing
how you would identify yourself, how you would think, how you would
feel and how you would act in that situation. You must then use the
full power of your imagination to hold on to this image with the firm
inner knowing that it WILL manifest in due time. As the Bible says,
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things
not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). The meaning is that true faith begins
with the imagination of what is not seen, not yet manifest. Yet when
imagination becomes a firm inner knowing – based on the realization
of how everything is created through mind – the imagined image
is superimposed upon the Ma-ter Light and the light takes on the envisioned
form.
When exercised correctly, the process cannot fail. Imagination is your
ability to reach beyond the material universe and even the contents
of your four lower bodies. You can then grasp a higher vision for your
life and by holding on to it, you can gradually lower it through the
four levels of the universe until it is manifest as a physical reality.
Higher reasoning
The material universe is created as a scientific laboratory or cosmic
schoolroom in which new co-creators are meant to learn how to use their
creative powers by experimenting. You do this by using your imagination
to envision a form you can manifest or an action you can take. You then
put your envisioned image into motion, and the material universe mirrors
it back to you. Thus, the universe can be compared to a giant bio-feedback
machine that is designed to help you learn by seeing your mental images
outpictured in material circumstances.
It is essential to realize that you were created as a new co-creator
who had limited self-awareness, limited awareness of God’s laws
and limited experience with the material universe. Thus, you were not
expected to be perfect, just as a baby is not expected to walk on its
first try. You were expected to take certain actions that could be considered
as mistakes because they produced undesirable consequences. Yet by learning
from your actions, you would grow and thus any action can become a learning
experience. Once you learn from a mistake, it is no longer a mistake
but has become a stepping stone for growth. And your growth is the very
purpose of your existence, as will be explained later.
The conclusion is that you will grow only as long as you are willing
to learn from all of your actions, even the ones that produce undesirable
consequences. Yet how can you learn? You must use your self-awareness
to observe yourself, your imagination to envision the highest possible
outcome and then use your reasoning ability to compare the actual result
to the highest potential. When you see a discrepancy, you realize you
could have done better, and you can then use your reasoning ability
to analyze how you could have done better.
Unfortunately, when the conscious self refuses to make decisions, your
higher reasoning ability is neutralized. Instead, it is the ego’s
limited and self-centered reasoning ability that takes over. The difference
is considerable:
-
Your conscious self can
access the mind of Christ, first through your Christ self and eventually
directly. The mind of Christ contains full knowledge of the spiritual
laws that are designed to ensure harmony and balance in the universe.
When you know these laws, you have an absolute standard for measuring
an action and its consequences. If a mental image or an action is
in harmony with the spiritual laws, it will enhance both your own
life, the life of other people and the conditions on planet Earth.
It will generate energies that vibrate above a critical level, meaning
that they can flow back up to your spiritual self and thus reinforce
the figure-eight flow between Spirit and matter. If an action generates
energies of a lower vibration, it simply misses the mark and thus
you need to learn how to raise your vision and bring it into harmony
with the higher reality of the Christ mind.
- Your ego cannot access
the Christ, mind but only the mind of anti-christ. As will be explained
in more detail later, this mind has no absolute standard for what
is constructive and destructive. To the ego everything is relative,
meaning that it can always justify an action or explain away the consequences.
The ego cannot conceive of a higher standard, and thus it evaluates
everything based on a self-centered standard. What the ego thinks
is good for itself, it will justify as being right, regardless of
the consequences for other people or even the long-term consequences
for yourself.
The conclusion is that the
only way for you to truly learn from your actions and use them as a
stepping stone for growth is that your conscious self must separate
itself from the relative reasoning of the ego and reconnect to the absolute
reasoning of the Christ mind. You must refuse to engage in the endless
ego-game of seeking to justify your actions and beliefs and simply leave
behind what is not working for you.
Your conscious self is fully capable of doing this, although it may
take some time to see through and dismiss the many dualistic illusions
created by the ego. In the beginning, spiritual teachings or an outer
teacher can be a great help in this process, but the real key is that
you connect to the inner teacher of your Christ self. You need to enhance
your intuitive faculties so you can know the truth of the Christ mind
through an inner knowing.
Will power
The very center of your personal growth process is the fact that you
have free will. It is by making choices and experiencing the consequences
of those choices that you grow. Your free will is located in your conscious
self. However, your conscious self can refuse to make decisions, whereby
your ego takes over and makes decisions for you. This is what has happened
to most people, and their egos have then created a downward spiral that
leads to increasing suffering. The reason being that the ego cannot
recognize the spiritual laws (it cannot access the Christ mind) and
thus it cannot make life-supporting decisions. All decisions made by
the ego result in limiting consequences and misqualified energy.
It now becomes clear that the key to turning your life around and creating
an upward spiral instead of the ego’s downward spiral is that
you must come to a turning point. The Conscious You must make the decision
that it will take back the power to make decisions. What will it take
to bring a co-creator to this turning point? There are two basic options:
-
The person eventually
“hits rock bottom.” The ego finally precipitates such
a major crisis that the conscious self wakes up and says, “I
can’t keep doing this [not making decisions], I have to change.”
Such a turnaround is often driven by fear, the fear that something
even worse could happen.
- The person has a positive
turnaround, a spiritual awakening, whereby it realizes the mechanics
of how life works. This is the result of an expanded self-awareness
combined with imagining a better future, analyzing your life to see
that it doesn’t work and making the decision that you are willing
to change yourself. The basic realization is that if you keep doing
the same thing, nothing will change, and thus you must change your
inner situation before you can expect that your outer situation will
change.
In many cases,
people keep doing the same thing until they do experience a crisis.
This finally awakens them to the fact that their actions have negative
consequences – which the ego denies – and out of fear of
a worse consequence (dying, going to hell or whatever) they turn their
lives around. This can clearly lead to growth, but it is essential to
recognize that a growth based on fear will only take you so far. In
fact, it is possible that you can get stuck at a certain level of the
path, and you will not get beyond it until you raise your motivation
from fear to love.
The simple fact is that the spiritual path is a path that leads to oneness
between the conscious self and the spiritual self. You will always run
away from what you fear and run toward what you love. Thus, as long
as your conscious self is motivated by fear, it will run away from oneness
with your spiritual self—encouraged by the ego. Only when you
are motivated by love will you run toward oneness with your spiritual
self.
As has been explained, the path is a process of giving up imperfect
beliefs. You can do this out of fear because you are afraid that if
you continue to act a certain way, something really bad will happen.
Yet the higher motivation is to do it because you realize you love something
more than the self-centered beliefs of the ego. You love something more
than your ego and the “things” of the material world. Many
spiritually interested people have already started the process of moving
from a fear-based to a love-based motivation.
For example, many people have a sense that they came into this lifetime
for a specific purpose, that they have a mission to fulfill. Planet
Earth is currently in a transitional phase during which humankind is
meant to rise to a higher level of awareness. Many co-creators volunteered
to take embodiment at this time to help facilitate this growth in awareness
that can lead to a more peaceful and prosperous world. The key is to
realize that your ego is preventing you from fulfilling your mission,
and when you recognize how much you love your mission, it becomes much
easier to let go of the self-centered beliefs of the ego.
What does love have to do with will power? Many people have attempted
to change their lives by willfully imposing restrictions and discipline
upon themselves. This can be a useful temporary measure, for example
it will take some will power to escape an addiction. Nevertheless, in
the long run, using will power as an external force will actually increase
tension and division in your psyche.
As explained earlier, the ego’s beliefs can be compared to computer
programs in the subconscious mind. For example, an addiction is the
result of a subconscious computer program that seeks to pull you into
a specific pattern of behavior. When you use will power, you are creating
a new computer program that seeks to override the old program by pulling
you into a less destructive pattern of behavior. Yet this does not remove
the old program, and thus you will continue to struggle with a conflict,
often for the rest of your life.
The higher way is to rise to a love-based motivation, whereby you do
not have to counteract the destructive program. You can instead remove
it because you realize you love something so much that you are willing
to give up the old program and the entire consciousness from which it
originated. Thus, will power that is based on love is always superior
to will power based on fear. The fear-based will can be useful for taking
you out of a very destructive situation. But only the love-based will
can take you all the way home.
One final thing you need to realize about will power. It is the Conscious
You that must make the decisions that take you beyond the ego, and the
Conscious You lives in the now. The ego lives in the past and is always
dreaming about a future that never comes. Thus, the ego is seeking to
imprison your awareness in the past (feeling bad about it or seeking
to justify your actions) or the future (dreaming about what could be).
Yet the only time to make a decision is now. Obviously, you cannot make
decisions in the past for yesterday is already gone. Yet the ego will
try to get you to postpone the decision to take control of your life
by saying you don’t have to make the decision right now—you
can wait until tomorrow or next lifetime.
Yet it is a subtle reality that tomorrow never comes. When you wake
up tomorrow, what seems like tomorrow right now will have become today.
Thus, the final decision to take control of your life must be made in
a now. So the question is whether you will make the decision right now
or whether you will postpone it until some future now, thereby prolonging
your suffering until the future now becomes the present now, the eternal
now.
37.
The two legs of progress
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Copyright
© 2008 by Kim Michaels |
