By Kim Michaels

What is the very core of being a messenger? It is to develop the attitude that it is not about me; it is all about the masters. As a messenger, I am not the doer; it is the ascended masters who doeth the work. My job is to be available as the open door, and to be as open as possible. Which means that I cannot allow any personal agenda to color what I receive from the masters and how I portray yourself.

It’s not about me

I was once doing a conference in Columbia, which had been going on for several days. I had travelled for hours in a minibus to get to a remote town. I had taken a shower, but as I put shampoo in my hair, the hot water ran out and I had to finish the shower with ice-cold water. I had gotten too little sleep for a week, but here I was, standing in front of over 50 people who expected to hear a dictation from an ascended master. How do I take a dictation in a situation like that? By completely stepping back from the situation and truly feeling: “It is not about me. I can of my own self do nothing.”

I was once driving towards a conference after several days of hectic preparations. I was tired, dirty and felt I wasn’t in shape to be a good messenger. The thought came to me: “I hope there won’t be a dictation tonight.” And then I instantly felt the Presence of Jesus, who mentally said: “But if you are not the doer, what does it matter that you are tired?” My mindset shifted instantly, and I did receive three dictations that night.

Beyond stepping aside in specific situations, I also find it necessary to step aside in my general approach to being a messenger. I find it invaluable to always keep in mind that the ascended masters are completely and utterly beyond my personal perception of life. The only way I can continue to earn my position as a messenger for them is to always strive to transcend my personal perception and any subtle agendas of my ego. I acknowledge that I still have an ego and that it still has its agendas.

I have met many people who have not understood this point. Some didn’t understand it as students, but the fact is that you cannot internalize the teachings until you realize they seek to take you beyond your personal agendas and perception. Some thought they were messengers but still didn’t understand the need to continually depersonalize. They thought that by being anointed as a messenger, they had suddenly become perfect human beings.

In order to fully qualify as a messenger, I had to transcend the tendency to think the masters will validate me and my personal perception of life. I had to transcend the tendency to think that I am so important that the ascended masters are concerned about even small personal details.

If people do not see this, then there is no limit to how far they can go into thinking that the ascended masters have validated the way they look at life and the way they behave towards other people. I have seen people accuse others of being angry or critical, while thinking it was the masters doing this in order to put others in their place. I have seen people accuse others of being aggressive towards them while overlooking that they were seeking to use the ascended masters to control those others. They were projecting psychic energy at others while being convinced this came from the ascended masters.

Once you think you are a messenger and you think the masters have validated what is simply a personal agenda, what is to stop you from feeling the masters will validate anything you do or say? Wouldn’t the ego just love having the unquestionable authority of the ascended masters behind itself? It is literally scary to see that once you cross a certain line, you can do things that common sense clearly sees as aggressive or self-centered, yet you are completely convinced that this is validated by the ascended masters. What can then bring such a person back to balance?

In the Summit there were a few cases where the masters mentioned specific people in a dictation. It was considered the highest honor, but I always saw it as the ultimate test. From time to time, the masters have said something about specific people through me. I have come to see that this is always done as a test, and the main part of the test is the humility and realism I am talking about here.

Will you actually believe that because the ascended masters have talked about you, you and your personal situation is now so important? Will you think that now you must be beyond ego? Or will you realize that the real test is that you need to transcend your sense of self-importance and the focus on your personal situation? I have seen the masters tell people things that were clearly designed to push people’s buttons, and it was a last resort for getting people to overcome the focus on themselves.

A dilemma

This is a dilemma. As a messenger, I have been criticized and attacked by some people. Putting myself in that position, means I have to be willing to make a sacrifice. One way to motivate me is that I sense what I am doing is important. So having a sense of self-importance may be a necessary step to get me started as a messenger, yet I don’t think it can carry me beyond a certain point. There came a time, when I had to depersonalize my messengership. I had to realize that while my messengership is important, my personal agenda or perception is something I need to leave behind.

I have several times had people who aggressively wanted to drag me into submitting to them, and when I refused they tried to provoke me into arguing with them. Yet I have decided that my role is to focus on being available to the ascended masters so I use my time to bring forth teachings that might help people rather than arguing with others—which I really don’t think helps anyone.

This does not mean I claim or think I am the perfect human being or have no ego. I still once in a while find myself reacting to what other people do or say with lower feelings. Yet I generally try to be alert to that and then look at myself to discover why I reacted that way. I know I have said that I once experienced a total surrender to God, but surrender is an ongoing thing. As we grow, we will uncover deeper layers of the psyche, and I think we will continue to do this as long as we are in embodiment. Ultimately, the ascension is the last act of surrender oon earth.

The bottom line here is the following question: Are we seeking to use the ascended masters to justify staying at a certain level of consciousness, or are we seeking to use them to rise to a higher level?

Being willing to make decisions

The ascended masters have explained that the purpose of the material universe is to give us an opportunity to raise our consciousness. We do so by making choices and experiencing the material consequences of those decisions. The masters have also explained that the fallen beings only had to do one thing in order to derail our growth and keep us trapped in the duality consciousness.

They created the idea that the results of our creative efforts should be evaluated based on a dualistic standard, meaning a standard with two opposite polarities, such as right and wrong. Of course, the standard automatically implies the value judgment that one polarity is good and the other bad. After creating the standard, the fallen beings then projected this into the collective consciousness as a very aggressive psychic projection.

This is a subtle mechanism. In the original scenario, we were innocent. This means we made a choice, experienced the consequence and then evaluated: “Do I want more of this, or do I want more than this?” If we wanted more of the same, we continued making the same kind of choices. If we wanted more than what we had, we changed what we were sending out; we changed ourselves.

Once the fallen standard had been introduced, there was now a risk associated with making choices. If you made the “wrong” choice, you would be bad, and the angry God in the sky would then reject you. We now started evaluating our choices based on the fallen standard before we made them. Because of the risk involved, wouldn’t it be nice if we had some infallible way to know what was the “right” choice before we even made it?

The psychological effect of this has been that most of us have developed a fear or making choices. We are afraid of experimenting, yet experimentation is the very core of expanding our consciousness. The essence of experimentation is that we make a choice without knowing what the outcome will be, and then we learn from experiencing the result.

Instead, we seek for some way to find out what we should do in life without actually making a personal choice. We seek some outer authority who can tell us what to do, and if the authority is high enough, then our choices should always be right. We abort the entire creative process because even if an infallible authority told us what to do, we would not thereby raise our consciousness. Making ourselves robots does not qualify us for the ascension.

It is very common for spiritual people to use some kind of means to avoid making decisions. In the TM movement, I saw adult human beings who simply could not make a decision about life without running to a psychic lady. I have seen people use Ouija boards, Tarot cards, pendulums, crystal boards, astrology, numerology, kinesiology and just about any other kind of -ology, and it was all done to give them the feeling that some infallible external authority had told them what was the right thing to do.

When we become aware of the ascended masters, wouldn’t it be just great if the masters or their anointed messenger could tell us what to do? In the Summit it was very common for people, especially staff members, to seek the messenger’s approval before marrying. I have seen people who were told they were twin flames, and now they expected that their relationship would be “happily ever after.” When the inevitable problems arose, they sought to cover it all over, and eventually the marriage broke up (as any marriage is likely to do without honest communication).

The problem with seeking the approval of an external authority is that it fosters codependence. This can work as long as both sides are fulfilling their role in the bargain, but in the material world, everything will come to an end. When the messenger for the Summit retired because of illness, many of the codependent followers became very angry with her. Overnight, she went from being their greatest hero to being the worst villain ever.

There was no end to the bad things they could suddenly say about her or the rumors they could circulate. If we allow ourselves to become codependent upon a spiritual teacher, it is because we have abandoned our personal responsibility to make decisions. The depth of the anger only demonstrates the unwillingness to take responsibility for oneself.

I have seen people who thought that the ascended masters would take great interest in their personal affairs and that the masters would tell them where to live, whom to marry, what house to buy what used car to buy, what clothes to buy, what horse to buy, whether to garden or not garden and all kinds of things.

In a couple of cases, I believe that for a time, people were actually receiving directions from a higher source. Yet the purpose was to take these people towards the point where they would start making their own decisions. For example, I have seen people who were given so many rules for what to do that they eventually could not move. In the Summit, the masters had given so many rules that you could not follow all of them. Yet to me this is simply the last resort for people who will not make their own decisions. The masters then box them in with rules and directions, hoping they will eventually take responsibility for their own choices.

I have met people who think it must be easy for me to make decisions, for surely an ascended master always appears and tells me what to do whenever I have to make a personal choice. I don’t see it that way. For the vast majority of situations, it is my responsibility to make my own decisions. Surely, I can use the master’s teachings to increase my awareness. Surely, I can use my intuition and attunement as a frame of reference.

In the end, I need to make choices based on my present level of consciousness—because that is the only way I will expand my level of consciousness. Having a master direct me as a puppet on a string will not take me to Christhood. Psychic forces don’t care about that, so they will gladly tell us what to do. Yet ascended masters will never compromise our path to Christhood, even if we beg them to do so.

The Middle Way for making decisions

Once again, there is a delicate balance to be found. On the one hand, I obviously don’t want to make decisions based on my outer mind and its self-centered needs and desires. As the Buddha said: “If with polluted perception you speak or act, suffering follows.” If I can’t use an external authority, how do I avoid making ego-based decisions?

The biggest decisions I have made in my life was when I moved to the United States and when I got divorced. The decision about moving was based on a naive perception—and suffering did indeed follow, although I have no doubt the overall decision was part of my divine plan. However, if I had been more balanced, I could have implemented the decision in a more mature way. In terms of my divorces, in each case I took a long time where I waited for inner clarity. I did not make the decision because I wanted to get away from the relationship, I worked on my own psychology until I got to the point where I could live with the relationship even if my partner did not change.

In each case, there came a point of clarity where I realized I could continue the relationship but what I really wanted was to rise to a higher level of service—in or out of the relationship. Once I had reached this state of surrender, it didn’t take very long before outer circumstances changed, and it became obvious what was the next step in my divine plan.

There is a Middle Way between making decisions with the outer mind and wanting an infallible authority to tell us what to do. It is to work on ourselves until we reach clarity, resolution and surrender. When I do get clarity, I make a decision to go in that direction, taking full responsibility for the fact that I am choosing to move in that direction. As they say in India: “Don’t move until an elephant steps on your foot.” Yet when the elephant does step on me, I admit that I am making a decision to move.

The measure of whether I have made a decision from surrender is very simple. I don’t regret it, I don’t analyze it and I don’t blame other people, the masters or God. I don’t need to justify my decision by making it seem like other people were wrong. In each of my divorces, I admitted that I am a human being with free will. I made a decision that it is my divine right to make, and I stand by that decision. I chose to leave because I wanted to move into the next phase of my divine plan as best I could see it at the time. I don’t need to demonize my ex-partner in order to make it seem like I had to leave. I don’t need to say that the ascended masters told me to do this or that they validate my decision. It was entirely my choice and I take full responsibility for making it. To this day I feel completely at peace with both the marriages and the divorces.

If I want ascended masters to validate my personal decisions or make those decisions for me, I will likely be working with the psychic masters. They will “validate” my decisions for the rest of my life, and I can then feel really superior compared to those other people who are wrong in an epic way.

Perfectionism and making mistakes

Closely related to this topic is the issue of perfectionism, which is another outcome of the fallen consciousness. It is easy to assume that the ascended masters are perfect, yet I came to see that no one has ever been able to define what it means to be perfect. How could we define a static state of perfection when the nature of God, life and the ascended masters is ongoing self-transcendence? The fallen beings have manipulated us into thinking we have to strive towards the goal of being perfect, but it is a goal that can never be attained—meaning we will forever be chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The ascended masters are indeed above us in the sense that they have transcended the personal level of consciousness. When we hear ascended master dictations, it is easy to believe that the messenger receiving them must be a perfect human being. In the Summit, the messenger was seen that way by many people, which is why they became so angry when she fell ill and thus shattered the bubble of infallibility.

It may give us a nice status that people think we are infallible, but it is actually an unpleasant prison. If people see us as infallible, we can never be allowed to make a single mistake, nor express our personality. Perfection is an all-or-nothing game, and a supposedly perfect person is often seen as having no personality or individuality. I remember coming to the headquarters of the Summit back in 1987, and by simply observing how things were organized, I realized the messenger could not be infallible. I then had to deal with my own idolatry, and after some struggles I realized that I could indeed allow the messenger to make mistakes and still see her as a valid messenger.

Elizabeth Clare Prophet admitted herself that no messenger is more than 95% accurate in the messages he or she receives. In her case, she brought forth so much material that 5% would be a rather thick book. The problem being of course that the inaccuracies are not collected in a separate book but scattered among the many accurate teachings.

The dream of perfectionism says that once a person has been anointed as a messenger for the ascended masters, that person is so protected by a mantle that he or she could never make a mistake. Thus, neither the messenger nor the students need to exercise personal discernment but can accept everything that comes forth as accurate.

I see this as a mistake, and I realized it many years ago. It is my personal responsibility to always exercise Christ discernment and never turn it off—whether I study teachings or bring forth teachings. As El Morya said in the Summit: “Eternal vigilance is the price of discipleship.” It is also the price of messengership.

I simply can’t function or survive as a messenger if I have a need to portray myself as perfect. I will make mistakes, because making mistakes is part of the testing I have to go through. The test will be somewhat individual based on our psychology, but a big part of it is that we need to overcome our fear of saying something wrong. I know people who are reluctant to express their Christhood because they are afraid of saying something wrong. Yet how about the potential for saying something right? Should the risk of saying one thing that is wrong stop us from saying a hundred things that are right?

Another test I had to pass is to realize that even if I say something wrong, this does not instantly disqualify me as a messenger. I have received things that I later realized were wrong, and I have received some things that I later saw were given that way because my consciousness could not receive a higher teaching at the time. I removed or corrected such things when I went through the websites. I also removed things that had become outdated—which will happen as long as revelation is progressive.

The ascended masters do not require me to be perfect, and they will never support the belief that I am. The psychic impostors will do this, so it is important for me to heal my psychology and overcome this need. Being willing to continually learn and transcend myself is the only way to avoid becoming stuck at a certain level.

Being willing to move on

One of the tests of being a messenger is that after I had been a messenger for a while, it was easy to become comfortable in my position. This can especially happen if people gather followers and build an organization that gives them a nice position. The Summit was a typical example of this, but I have seen several others.

The ascended masters do not stand still. When I first heard about ascended masters I was not interested because the way I was told about them made it seem like the masters were no longer growing—they were standing still. It was only when I realized that the masters do indeed transcend themselves that I was interested in ascending. To me, growth is synonymous with life.

The masters’ state of consciousness is almost infinitely higher than what is common on earth. Their job is to give us teachings that can lead all people to the ascension—one step at a time beginning where we are at in consciousness. Given the current state of consciousness on earth, there is an almost infinite amount of teachings yet waiting to be brought forth. The problem is that for a higher level of teaching to be brought forth, the masters must have a messenger who has a high enough state of consciousness to receive the teaching. And they must have a critical mass of people who are ready to embrace the teaching and begin embodying it.

From the masters’ perspective, progressive revelation will not stop for a very long time. Yet the ego and the fallen beings always want to say that now we have the final or ultimate revelation. If a messenger or a student body begin to believe this, then they can no longer serve in bringing forth a higher level of revelation. In that case, what are the masters to do? Well, for a time they may attempt to shake up the messenger and the students, hoping they can come up higher. If that does not work, then the masters will simply leave behind both a messenger and an organization, no longer sponsoring it. It is then up to individual students whether they will hang on or move on.

At the time, I was not aware of what was happening, but in retrospect I can see that in the early 1990’s the masters had reached the upper limit for what could be brought forth through the Summit. This didn’t mean they stopped giving dictations, but I can see that the dictations did not go higher for the last several years. Instead, the masters attempted to get people to work on their psychology and Christhood. When that did not have the desired effect, the masters could not continue sponsoring the Summit, and the messenger retired without appointing a successor.

After I started the askrealjesus website, a small organization sprang up around my second wife and I. I had no clear sense of not allowing it to happen, so I let things unfold. When Mother Mary released her Course in Abundance, I knew this would be a dividing line. This became even more obvious when the masters released further teachings on non-duality in the coming years. In retrospect, I feel I should have been more aware of this, but I wasn’t. Yet I did feel that some students did not grasp the teachings on non-duality, partly because they were still very attached to the entire approach given in the Summit (many of the students were former members of the Summit).

I remember several times at conferences taking a dictation and feeling how much more the masters had to say. I felt that the masters simply could not release it because the people attending the conference could not receive the higher teaching. I realized this was not a sustainable situation. I am not saying this to justify my decision to leave. As a messenger I will move on when the masters move on, even if that means leaving behind a comfortable situation or other people.

The question I was facing was simple: Would I continue to take dictations for a certain level of consciousness, or would I be willing to move on – leaving the outer situation behind – so I could step up to a higher level of service? I was – as I have so far always been – willing to move on. I have several times felt that the masters have stepped up to a higher level of teaching. In almost every case, this meant that some people were not willing to step up, and they left, sometimes accusing me of no longer being a messenger. Yet every time, some of the students were ready for the teaching and they attracted a new group of students who were also ready.

I don’t yet have the full vision for where this will take me, but I do feel that today I am free to receive a higher level of teaching than ever before. This is really all I want in life: To give the best possible service to the ascended masters while I still have a focus in the material realm.

Again, progressive revelation is progressive. Yesterday’s level of attainment is never sufficient for today. The ascended masters have nothing holding them back from flowing with the River of Life. If I want to keep up with them – as a student or a messenger – I have to cut my own attachments and flow with the masters.