By Kim Michaels

In this article I will describe what I did to raise my consciousness to the point where I could recognize that being a messenger was indeed part of my divine plan—and accept this. As I have said, all spiritual people are part of the raising of this planet, and the important point is to discover what is our personal contribution. The best way to discover this is to raise our consciousness, and I will describe how I personally approached this.

What I didn’t do

Even when I was a child, I had a sense that my life had a purpose, that I had a mission. I obviously didn’t know what it was, but I knew that in order to fulfill it, my mind was my greatest asset. I intuitively sensed that there were certain things I simply could not allow myself to do. I never smoked, never drank alcohol and never took drugs, even being extremely careful to avoid medicinal drugs whenever possible.

When I was 18, I realized I was a reasonably handsome guy with a good sense of humor, and I would have no problem attracting multiple girls. Yet I also knew I couldn’t allow myself to do this, and today I know it is because this scatters our spiritual energies. One does not have to be celibate in order to be a messenger, but one cannot “sleep around” either. A committed relationship with one partner is perfectly acceptable, but anything more than that is a distraction.

I always had the sense that I am not in embodiment in order to live the good material life or seek fame in society. In order to be a messenger for the ascended masters, I have to be mindful of Jesus’ statement that you cannot serve two masters. Being a messenger for the masters is first and foremost an activity that reaches beyond worldly activities. So if I have a desire for worldly activities and experiences, messengership simply isn’t for me.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with wanting to experience what this world has to offer. I am simply saying that in order to be a messenger, I cannot set anything in this world before my relationship with the ascended masters. Jesus made another statement in that respect, namely that if we value anything in this world more than him, we are not worthy of him.

I am not here talking about forcing myself not to do this or that. I simply had such a love for my mission that refraining from certain activities was easy.

Working hard

I learned about the ascended masters from an organization called the Summit Lighthouse. This organization had extensive teachings about the discipline necessary to follow the spiritual path. The main tool given for making progress on the path was decrees. After some hesitation, I realized the value of decrees, and once I got started, I really went for it. For probably 15 years I decreed at least 1.5 hours a day and often more. I would often sit in the evening in my special decree room and after having given a set of regular decrees, I would just flip through the decree book and give what I was inspired to give. This could go on for hours, and I would feel on a spiritual high after I was finally done.

After I moved to the United States, I lived for ten years near the headquarters of the Summit in Montana, and I went to special decree services up to four times a week. During these services, we would decree for four hours straight, and while driving home, I would feel like I was in a different level of vibration. I also participated in a number of conferences, where we would do decrees, often for up to seven hours in order to set a forcefield for a dictation.

I am not saying this to highlight my own accomplishments, but to point out that in my view, I would never have raised my consciousness sufficiently without putting forth all this hard work. I simply had to purify my four lower bodies from energies and karma accumulated in past lives and in this life. If I had not done all this work, I don’t think I would have become a messenger because I simply wouldn’t have been able to tune in to the masters. I obviously, didn’t do these decrees for the purpose of becoming a messenger. I did them partly because I had a great love for raising my consciousness and also because I loved feeling the light flowing through me as I was decreeing.

It was clear to me that if I really wanted to make progress on the path, I had to work for it. The ascended masters said that when Jesus first came to the retreat of Serapis Bey, he had the attainment to have started at the highest level. Yet he insisted on starting at the lowest level and working his way up. That story was always profoundly meaningful to me, and I thought that if Jesus was willing to do this, I had better not assume I could do better than him.

For many years I had no vision that I was going to become a messenger. I simply applied myself to the path by wholeheartedly using the teachings and tools I had found. I know that no effort made with love is ever wasted. I also know that in order to qualify as a messenger, I had to prove to the masters that I am willing to make a one-pointed effort to transcend my old level of consciousness. I always felt moved by Jesus’ statement that you cannot be lukewarm about the path. So I decided I was going to be hot.

Resolving my psychology

As great as it was to do decrees, I came to a point in the early 1990s when I realized that it simply wasn’t enough. I realized the masters had been talking a lot about the need to resolve our psychological issues. I took stock of my efforts, and I realized that decreeing so much in order to “save the world for Saint Germain” had become a convenient excuse for not working on my personal psychology.

I then made a decision to do something to change this, and on the Summit staff I found a professional psychologist who naturally had a spiritual outlook. I did weekly sessions for over six months, and this included talk therapy, gestalt therapy and EMDR therapy. This helped me a lot, especially by clearing up some issues that had lingered since my childhood. I am not saying it cleared all psychological issues because our psyches have many layers, and we cannot clear them all at once. Yet it cleared everything that was coming up at the time, and it really helped take me to a new level of my path.

I have also done inner child work and have experimented with other holistic forms of therapy. And I have read many books on psychology and self-help. I needed to make the issues in my subconscious mind conscious, and then I could work on them in three ways:

- - I use decrees to transform the energies involved.
  - I call to the ascended masters to help me see what I need to see and to help me overcome my issues.
  - I seek to make my issues more visible, until I have an Aha or Breakthrough experience, where I feel that a certain belief or self-image simply falls away. My consciousness shifts.

This process can often take time. I have sometimes worked on an issue for years before the breakthrough happened. It is necessary to have patience with ourselves. I have known people who had an obvious issue for years, and everyone around them could clearly see it, yet the person simply was not ready to deal with it. I don’t think anyone could have forced the person.

Our psyches are very complex and have layers. I can’t decide that now I am going to work on my psychology and I want it all cleared in six months. Until I am ready to deal with the issues at a certain layer, I simply won’t be able to see them. Yet I also believe that I can greatly shorten the time it takes to work through the issues that block my messengership. I believe that by using therapy in concentrated periods and then by studying the teachings of the ascended masters, teachings on psychology and applying the decrees and invocations, I can speed up my progress.

Again, the key word is balance. For each of us, there is a time-table. My divine plan might say that I have the potential to become a messenger, and I should ideally be ready to recognize and fulfill that role at a certain age. Obviously, I don’t want to be behind that time-schedule, so I want to work hard and apply the tools available to me. Yet on the other hand, there is no point in being too far ahead of schedule because the ascended masters won’t start using me until it is time.

There was a time when I was thinking: “I have been on the spiritual path for over ten years, and I have overcome so many illusions and hang-ups in my psychology—when will I ever get through it?” I don’t think that way anymore. My current attitude is that I will be working on psychological issues for as long as I am in embodiment because I am willing to take on issues from the mass consciousness beyond my personal issues.

There was a certain amount of issues that I had to work through before I was ready to begin my messengership. Yet I don’t have to be completely free of issues in order to be a messenger. I have to be willing to continue to work on my issues as they come up, and being a messenger will indeed bring up plenty of issues to work on.

Again, there is balance. I have to be patient with myself, but not so patient that I don’t do my best. After having worked hard for a time, I did come to a point where I no longer felt like I was behind. Having a sense that I am not good enough is not constructive, and when I have worked through enough issues, I overcame this deficit approach to life.

For me, my relationships with other people has always been an important key to coming to see the hidden issues in my psychology. I realized many years ago that the key to Buddhahood is non-attachment, which means that I have control over my reactions so nothing on earth can take away my inner peace. I know that when I react with less than love to any person, there is something in my psychology that I have not resolved. Some of the greatest teachers we will ever have are our children. But for me, being married has been the greatest key to growth. When I am in such a close personal relationship, I have an incredible opportunity to uncover my psychological issues by seeing how I react to my partner.

Humility is also important. In Summit it was generally assumed that the messenger had attained Christ consciousness and that she had no more psychological issues. I observed that she did have certain issues and that they affected the way she ran the organization. I never used that to criticize her, because I realized she was fulfilling her office exactly as she was asked to do. I also realized that the ascended masters didn’t actually want a “perfect” messenger because how can we relate to such an exalted being? In fact, the messenger for Summit might have taken on many issues from the collective consciousness.

I think humility is very healthy. I have seen some examples of people who started claiming that they no more had an ego. Once you allow yourself to think you are ego-free, you can quickly lose all touch with “the real world.” You simply create your own fantasy world, in which you are always right and always on top because you have some way of putting other people down. If you believe that you have no ego, then you always have an excuse for rejecting what other people say. Then, you have lost the teacher who is disguised as an ant. So I do not claim to be ego-free and I am sure I will have psychological issues to work on until I ascend.

Letting go of the past

As part of my therapy, I understood the importance of letting go of the past. When I say that, I mean to completely let go of the past. I had certain issues with my father as I was growing up. Because I moved to the United States and he died shortly afterwards, there was no way to resolve this by interacting with him.

During therapy I did gestalt sessions where I was first saying to my father what I never said to him and then answering back as I thought he would have answered. By going back and forth several times, I came to the point where I had nothing more to say to my father. I also came to a point where I realized that despite his outer manner, he was as vulnerable and wounded inside as I was.

I started seeing that nothing my father had done to me was actually directed at me. It was all a product of his own psychological hangups, and it was simply that certain things I had done and said triggered a reaction in him. He couldn’t respond in any other way, given his psychological limitations at the time. By coming to see this, I could completely let go of all non-forgiveness and grudges.

Up until then, I would sometimes think back to situations from the past, and I would go over them, thinking how I could or should have reacted and how he should not have reacted. I was now able to let this go and not only forgive my father but depersonalize my relationship with him. I realized that my father was just a human being, and not the perfect mythological creature I had made him out to be.

In the Summit it was said that our parents represent the father and mother God to us, so whatever they do to us, we think God is also like that. I realized I had expected my father to be perfect, and thus I had never allowed him to be a human being. Which meant I could never allow myself to be a human being around him. By setting him free, I also set myself free.

This was a mechanism I started to understand during the 1990s, namely that by forgiving others, I am not letting them off the hook—I am letting myself off the hook. As long as I have not forgiven, I am maintaining an energetic and karmic tie to these people. Why would I want to tie myself to people who had hurt me or had no good intentions?

The ego will always try to make us feel that we cannot let go until the other people have either changed or been punished. Yet I can indeed let go at any time. Only, I can’t let go as long as I feel that I have to change other people, solve some problem, change what happened in the past, compensate for what happened or turn back the clock.

I cannot change what happened in the past, but I can indeed change how the past influences me in the now. As long as I maintain strong attachments to my past, how can I become a messenger for the ascended masters? As Jesus said: “Let the dead bury their dead” and “What is that to thee; follow thou me.”

Having no enemies

Starting in the early 1990s but intensifying towards the end of the decade, I became fascinated with the Buddha. I realized that the Buddha is in total peace because he never reacts mentally and emotionally to anything on earth. I was fascinated by the story of how Gautama Buddha was sitting under a Bo tree ready to go into Nirvana. He had to pass one final test, which was to face all of the demons of Mara. Elizabeth Clare Prophet would sometimes tell the story, but one time as I was listening to her, I realized she was not telling the full story.

The real test was that the demons did everything they could think of to force Gautama to react to them in some way. A common interpretation is that there was a right way to react and a wrong way to react. Yet I realized there was no right way to react. Had he reacted in any way, the demons would have won. As long as there is still something I feel I have to do in this world, I cannot enter Nirvana. It was only by not reacting to anything that Gautama passed this final test. He did not react because he had overcome all of his attachments to anything on earth. This was when I consciously started working on exposing and letting go of my personal attachments.

I also realized that the Buddha can have no enemies. This is a tough test in this world because there are people in embodiment who are either fallen beings or are trapped in the fallen mindset. When we start raising our consciousness and expressing our Christhood, the dark forces will be provoked, and then they will seek to use people to attack us. These people will obviously see themselves as my enemies, but I cannot allow myself to see them as such. If I do, I go into the mindset of being a victim.

There may be people who see themselves as enemies of the Buddha and act as such. But the Buddha does not see them that way. He or she simply sees them as people who are not yet enlightened. This has been a challenging test for me, especially after I “went public” as a messenger. From time to time, I have been confronted with people who attacked me with a very aggressive intent. In some cases, they would deliberately misinterpret my teachings or make completely untruthful statements about me.

I had to take a long hard look at this, and one thing I discovered was that I never wanted to hurt anyone. So when I was confronted with people who took offense to something I had said or done, I felt obligated to help them overcome their negative feelings. It took me a while to work through this limitation in my own psychology, to where I could have enough respect for the Law of Free Will to not feel responsible for other people’s state of mind. Truly, if I am concerned about not offending other people, I will find it very difficult to be a messenger—for the messages from the masters will inevitably offend the dark forces and the people who are controlled by them.

Overcoming fear of dark forces

Speaking of dark forces, there are obviously many people in the spiritual field who would rather ignore them. Many claim that you should not put your attention upon them because this gives them power. This is again where balance comes in.

It is perfectly true that if I see myself as the enemy of dark forces and think I have to fight them, I will give them energy. Yet it is equally true that if I ignore dark forces, they will not leave me alone. However, if I refuse to fulfill my divine plan and express my Christhood, then the dark forces will indeed leave me alone, for then I am no threat to them. When I start raising my consciousness, they will come after me. If it is in my divine plan to become a messenger for the ascended masters, then they will do everything they can to derail that goal. I have to find the delicate balance of acknowledging that dark forces exist, without seeing them as my enemy or thinking I have to fight them.

Even when I was a young child, I was very sensitive to energy or vibrations. I could clearly tell the difference between light and dark vibrations, and this ability has become much stronger as I have purified my consciousness. As I raised myself, I started acquiring the ability that Jesus talked about when he said that we must become wise and serpents but harmless as doves.

It was only as I overcame the tendency to see dark forces as my enemies that I became good at exposing them by vibration alone. The dark forces always work through fear, but fear can be disguised in many subtle ways. As long as I am in fear, I will not be able to see through some of the subtle disguises of fear because I will think they are necessary and justified. It is only when I experience true love that I can tell the difference in vibration between unconditional love and conditional fear.

It is only when I can sense the vibration of dark forces that I overcome all fear of them. When I know they cannot fool me, I also know they have no power over me. Dark forces cannot hurt me directly so they have to deceive me. The dark forces can of course use other people who might be able to hurt me physically, yet even that becomes less of a risk when I don’t see them as enemies.

For many years the masters trained me to have better discernment. In the beginning, I would have a fear of false teachings so I would be reluctant to read books if they were not approved by the masters. Yet it got to the point where I can now read a book and sense the difference in vibration between true and false ideas. I have also gotten better at reading the vibration of people, especially their intention.

For example, I once had a woman come to a conference, and when she started talking to me I felt like there was a flashing red warning light behind her. This didn’t mean I refused to interact with her because I sensed I was meant to give her an opportunity to change. Yet I did always keep a certain distance, and this later proved to be wise, as she obviously had an impure intention. And when she finally realized I would not go along, she became very angry and attacked me.

Unless I am wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove, I will not be able to simply turn the other cheek when I am attacked. Once I began to publicly express myself as a messenger for the masters, I was attacked. And the attacks were tailored to my personal vulnerabilities. Dark forces can get to me if I am unbalanced either towards the side of ignoring them or towards the side of fighting them. Jesus said: “the prince of this world cometh and has nothing in me.” When the dark forces have nothing in me, then I don’t need to see myself as being threatened by them. I invoke spiritual protection and stay alert, but I don’t need to lock myself inside a fortress mentality.

When I felt my calling, I didn’t look back

Jesus made a very direct statement, namely that he who has his hand on the plough and looks back is not fit for the kingdom of God. In a sense this ties in with letting go of the past and overcoming attachments, but there is another dimension.

In my personal case, I had to go through some very dramatic changes in my outer life in order to become a messenger. I obviously had no conscious knowledge of what these tests were about (or they wouldn’t be tests), but in each case, I had a clear intuitive knowing of what my next step needed to be. In most cases, I have followed this inner prompting, regardless of the outer consequences of these actions. Moreover, I have rarely looked at my actions and their consequences with regret or anger. I have accepted them as necessary steps on my personal path.

Let me just describe a few of these cases. When I was only 19 I met a girl and intuitively knew I was meant to have a relationship with her. She became my first wife and after having been married for a few years, we both felt a prompting to go to the United States and live by the headquarters of the Summit. So we sold everything in Denmark and left with our two sons. This meant that I could not use my degree as an architect, as it was not valid in the U.S. So I had to take all kinds of menial jobs, from digging holes in the ground to being a door-to door salesman.

After two years in the U.S. I felt my first marriage was over, and my wife agreed. She had met a man whom she believed was her twin flame and whom she later married. And truly, I believe it was part of her divine plan to marry this man, as it was part of mine to move on and marry my second wife. The point is that I have a, some would say radical, view of human relationships. I believe that given the Law of Free Will, I can never allow myself to feel that I own other people. And if I don’t feel I own other people, I cannot allow myself to feel that they own me.

My parents gave me a fully adequate and loving upbringing. Yet I always saw that they had certain interests in life, and I never for a second expected that as their son I would be the most important thing in their lives. My father for example, had an all-consuming passion for duck hunting. As a young child I once wanted him to stop killing the birds, but his response made me see that although I could have an opinion about what he did, I could not allow myself to demand that he should live his life according to my opinion. Yet this also meant that I did not follow their expectations and live in Denmark the rest of my life. When it came time for me to move according to my divine plan, I moved on and never looked back.

My point is that for those of us who are spiritual people, we will most likely start out leading relatively normal lives. Yet there will come turning points in our lives where we will have to do something that is not normal in order to fulfill our divine plans. If we allow the expectations of other people to stop us from taking these steps, then we will miss these opportunities and we might miss our time-table.

I once had a person say to me: “Your personal quest for enlightenment was always more important to you than anything else.” I looked him straight in the eye and said: “You are absolutely right!” My relationship with God and my divine plan has always been more important to me than anything on earth. That is simply the kind of person I am, and in my view I have a divine right to set my priorities that way. On the other hand, I have also been very sensitive to other people and have gone out of my way to allow them to have the experiences they needed to have. But it is necessary to have a limit so I don’t compromise my divine plan in order to keep other people happy.

As I said, I have had many unexpected and challenging situations in my life. I have dealt with them in a very simple way. I took stock of the situation, acknowledged that I did not have the physical power to change the situation, and then I accepted that this was my new situation. Once I had accepted this, I then made the best of the situation according to my state of consciousness at the time.

Gautama Buddha said that he who leaves his home country has accomplished half the Dharma. For me, leaving Denmark and living in the United States was a major challenge—I should say shock. It forced me to do things I would never have had to do in Denmark, which brings me to the next point about ego pummeling.

Whatever is in our individual divine plans, the ascended masters will from time to time call us to take steps that bring us closer to fulfilling our goals. This might mean some very dramatic changes in our outer lives, and there may be a human and material cost involved. Yet if we don’t follow the call, we might very well miss our time-table and miss key elements of our divine plans.

I have personally always had intuitive insights when I faced such turning points. These are not decisions I make with my outer mind. They often come about when I have let go of all outer expectations and attachments. When I get all of the mind noise out of the way, a deeper inner knowing will emerge, and I see what is the next logical step. This happened when I married my first wife, when I moved to the U.S, when I divorced my first wife, when I married my second wife, when I started the ARJ website, when I divorced my second wife, when I moved back to Europe and so on.

In terms of following an inner calling, let me point out something that in my experience trips up a lot of people. Many people expect that the ascended masters should give them complete instructions or a clear vision or roadmap of everything that is meant to happen to them. This simply isn’t the way it happens, and people who have control issues can find it difficult to accept how the masters guide us. In the beginning, we will be tested on everything, meaning that we will not get very clear directions.

At first, we will often be guided to simply start walking, to move out of our current situation without any vision of where we are going. Then, we might get a prompting to go in a certain direction, and when we go there we might get direction to do something else. In other words, we will have to go step-by-step without being able to see very far ahead.

I have been on the spiritual path since 1976 and I have been a messenger since 2002, and this is still the way the masters guide me. I don’t have a clear vision or roadmap of what will happen the rest of my life, and I no longer even desire to have it. I am perfectly content to take one step at a time, knowing that when I follow my inner direction I am going where I need to go. In terms of inner directions, it is also important to be willing to make me own decisions, as described later.

Being willing to have my ego pummeled

When I moved to the United States in 1987 I had some very unrealistic expectations. I felt at the time that I was one of the most eager and determined ascended master students in Denmark, which was proven by the fact that I was willing to make such a sacrifice of leaving my home country in order to help the ascended masters. I expected that since I had made such a commitment, surely the masters would be able to work some kind of alchemy so that all of the practical aspects of my move would work out perfectly.

Instead, I had so many practical difficulties that I sometimes wonder how I survived it emotionally. The first eight years were especially hard because I was denied a work permit and had to take all kinds of odd jobs in order to survive. I remember one time crawling around in the dirt underneath a mobile home in the bare hills, when I suddenly felt that I was very far from home. I wondered whether this was why I had come to the U.S. and whether this really would help me fulfill my divine plan.

In retrospect, I can see that none of what happened had much significance in itself. In other words, there is little point in analyzing what I did to make this or that happen. It all happened for one reason only, namely to pummel my ego. It was all a test to prove whether I was really committed to the path of Christhood or whether I would bow out and allow some excuse to cause me to run back to my comfortable life in Denmark.

In Yogananda’s book it is described that his guru took him through a period where he exposed him to all kinds of humiliations in order to pummel his ego. I have no doubt that this is exactly what the ascended masters did to me. Not in the sense that they did it all, because in many cases I simply faced the consequences of my own stupid choices. Nevertheless, I can see that there is no way I could have gone through so much ego-pummeling in such a short period of time, if I had chosen to stay back in Denmark.

Whatever is in our divine plans, our egos stand in the way of our goals. The only way to get the ego out of the way is to have it pummeled to dust. If we allow it to happen, life and the masters will surely do this to us. I came to a point where I understood this and made the conscious decision to not resist the process and not become angry with myself, God or the ascended masters for what happens during this very uncomfortable but very necessary process.

Taking radical responsibility for myself

Towards the end of the 1990s all of the things described above came together for me, and I accepted that everything in my life was my responsibility. I had a powerful Aha experience where it became clear to me that: “No one ever did anything to me.” I realized that there is a fundamental difference between what other people do – what is outside my mind – and how I perceive and react to that—what is inside my mind.

I realized it was my supreme responsibility to take command over my own mind, and I realized I have the power to do so. I realized that each of us is living in the center of our own personal universe. You may do something to me with the intent to hurt me, but I am still free to react to your actions without feeling hurt. Because my view of what you are doing is not controlled by you; it is something happening inside my mind, and I have the potential to take control over that.

I am not hereby saying I can do this all of the time. Yet I do see that this is my goal, and I am moving closer to it all the time. Once I saw this, I realized that we human beings have only two options in life:

- If we don’t take radical responsibility for ourselves, we give control over our state of mind to something outside ourselves, such as other people, “life,” God or the devil. This means that in order to have some control over our state of mind, we must seek to achieve this by controlling others. Of course, it is very difficult to control other people and impossible to control God. But the ego is very good at creating the impression that it has attained such control.
- If we do take radical responsibility, we realize that we have the power to control our state of mind. Which means we no longer need to control our outer circumstances, other people or the ascended masters.

Of course, as long as I have a desire to control what is outside myself, I cannot be a messenger for the ascended masters. The beauty of the masters is that they are completely beyond the control of the human ego, meaning they cannot be corrupted by the ego. The moment I seek to use the masters to play some kind of ego game, I have lost contact with the real masters. I may then make contact with the false hierarchy impostors, and they may give me the sense that I am in control, but that sense will be very fragile and I will constantly feel threatened by something. When I take full responsibility for myself, I can stop feeling threatened by anything in this world.

Accepting myself

In the mid-1990s I was attending a summer conference in the Summit, and during a dictation by God Harmony, we were asked to envision the highest possible expression of harmony we could picture. I immediately thought: “Well, that’s Alpha and Omega, of course.” I then felt like I was transported to the Central Sun where I stood before the throne of these two beings, who are the highest representatives of God in the world of form.

I then saw beyond them and made contact with the Creator itself. I experienced that I am an extension of the Creator, yet it was also clear to me that what is the extension is not my outer personality and self here on earth. I experienced that my very core is a state of awareness that has none of the characteristics I had so far seen as my personality or individuality here on earth.

This was a momentous experience for me, and ever since it has been my ultimate frame of reference. I simply know that whenever I react to a situation, it is only the outer self that reacts, and I know I am more than this. Although I can still get caught in a reactionary pattern for a while, there comes a point where I realize I no longer want to be trapped in this, and when I see what is behind it, I can let it go.

At the time I had the experience, I did not have the concept of the Conscious You, which Mother Mary gave us in 2005. Yet after I received that teaching, I realized that what I had experienced was my “self” in its purest form. I had experienced the Conscious You as it was before it ever took embodiment; I had experienced myself in the purest possible form before my sense of self could have been affected by anything in this world of form. I had experienced the self that is beyond all form.

The importance of my experience was that it caused me to cross the threshold where I could leave behind all guilt, shame and the sense of inferiority. I accepted myself unconditionally because I had experienced that the Creator accepts unconditionally the pure self that it created out of itself. I could start realizing that all negative feelings about myself could only come from the outer self, which is not me at all. When I can consciously separate myself from the ego and the outer personality, I can make much faster progress on the path.

I have since then encountered people who argue against the concept of the Conscious You, saying it is a false teaching and didn’t come from the ascended masters. They even argue that since it was not given in the Summit, it must be a false teaching. In my view the only thing new about the teaching is the name “Conscious You.” The concept of a self that is pure awareness and is beyond form can be found in every mystical teaching on this planet. The Buddha talked about it, Jesus talked about it (when thine eye be single), Nagarjuna and Padmasambhava talked about it. In Hinduism they have the teaching of Advaita (not two) and you can find it in Kabbalah, Sufism and many modern mystical teachings. I also see it between the lines of previous ascended master teachings.

To me it is not really surprising that some people will argue against it. After I started fully accepting myself, I felt a deep sense of inner peace. This made it easy for me to sense the vibration and see when other people had not accepted themselves. This non-acceptance of self leads us into playing all kinds of games that are designed by the ego and the false hierarchy in order to keep us trapped in an endless quest of compensating for the lack of self-acceptance. We seek to gain validation from outer sources instead of going within and looking at why we don’t accept ourselves for who we were created to be.

Jesus himself said that no man can ascend back to heaven save he that descended from heaven. What originally descended was not the outer personality and self that I now have—this is simply the ego’s impossible dream. The only way to ascend is to shed all of this outer overlay and return to the state of pure awareness with which I first took embodiment.

For people who have never experienced a glimpse of pure awareness, this will be only a concept, and they can argue against it endlessly. Yet once I consciously experienced pure awareness, I began to realize that all of the outer self has to go. I have to be stripped of my garments, and then I have to give up the last ghost, as Jesus did during the crucifixion.

As long as we have not experienced pure awareness, we are trapped in a control game. Which means we will inevitably seek to use the teachings of the ascended masters to give us a sense of being in control. I did this myself in the beginning and I have seen many spiritual students do it.

In this Aquarian age, my vision is that the ascended masters simply will not allow this anymore. If I am trapped in a control game, I will not be a messenger for the ascended masters. I might be a messenger for false hierarchy impostors, who will say exactly what my ego wants to hear in order to feel that I am fundamentally superior to other people. Once I began to experience pure awareness, I saw the utter futility of playing this game, and I developed a deep love for knowing the ascended masters as they really are, instead of seeing them through the perception filter created by the ego and the false hierarchy impostors.

The real masters are far beyond anything the outer self can even imagine. In the previous article, I said that being a messenger is all about being an open door. How can I be an open door unless I can go into a state of pure awareness? Holding on to or seeking to validate the ego-based sense of self can never make me an open door.

Make peace with God and the masters

The most important effect of radically accepting myself was that I could make peace with God and the ascended masters. I first became a member of the Summit in Denmark. When I moved to the United States, I had the attitude that the masters should make it all easy for me. When I then had a very difficult period with many challenges and humiliations, I felt the masters had somewhat let me down. It was not until I fully accepted responsibility for myself and accepted myself that I could let that feeling go.

The effect of experiencing the Creator was that I could make peace with God. I realized God had never hurt me in any way; it was only my ego-based concepts of God that had hurt me. I could let go of the resentment towards God that we have all built, based on the monotheistic image of the angry God in the sky.

Throughout the years I have had various experiences of the Presence of one of the ascended masters. I have elsewhere described how I encountered the very loving Presence of El Morya (Master MORE). This experience was in stark contrast to the image of El Morya given by the Summit where he was seen as a very strict and judgmental master. I have had similar experiences of other masters, and they all helped me realize that the real ascended masters are completely and utterly beyond the graven images created by the ego and the outer mind. In fact, these outer images are heavily influenced by the false hierarchy impostors, who have managed to transfer some of the images of the remote, judgmental sky-god to the ascended masters.

After I realized that I am pure awareness, I could also begin to accept the ascended masters as pure awareness, meaning an awareness that is completely beyond the images we project with the human ego-based or dualistic consciousness. Truly, only when I experience the masters as being beyond form, can I make peace with them. Only when I make peace with them, can I allow them the freedom to express themselves through me. And only then will I be an open door for the real ascended masters.

Total surrender to God

Everything I have described above had the effect of leading me towards the one point that was truly the start of my messengership, namely the point where I surrendered myself completely to God.

One of the most useful teachings I got from the Summit was that Mother May had given the concept of surrender. This taught me that there were many things that I could not solve or correct; I simply had to let them go, to leave them behind, and then move on. This concept was profoundly meaningful for me over the years, and I often contemplated it. I also often applied it, although I really cannot let something go until I have seen the psychological mechanism (the attachment or belief, what we now call the separate self) that causes me to hold on to it.

Towards the end of the 1990s, I started feeling a certain inner frustration. On the one hand I felt that I had studied and lived the teachings of the ascended masters so intensely for so long that I was filled to overflowing. If I didn’t start giving out, I would explode. On the other hand, I couldn’t actually see how to start giving out. This was in large part because I had not freed myself from the culture of the Summit.

The Summit had a fear-based culture. There was an intent of controlling who said anything about the teachings, and you had to take certain courses in order to be authorized to give lectures. The lectures you could give were also controlled, with the general attitude being a fear of saying something wrong. In other words, the risk of saying one thing that was wrong could outweigh the potential for saying a hundred things that were right.

The Summit did say they wanted to spread the teachings of the masters, but it all had to happen from a central point and be controlled by the Summit. This applied to book publishing as well. Of course, in the Summit only the messenger was allowed to take any kind of messages from the masters, and many people got excommunicated for claiming they were taking messages. There was really a very strong taboo around anyone thinking they could be a messenger.

As I said, I always thought Elizabeth Clare Prophet did a fully adequate job, and I never even considered that I could be a messenger or wanted to do so. Yet the messenger retired in 1997, and since no new messenger was appointed, there was a vacuum.

Today, I can see that part of the frustration I was feeling was that it was getting to be time for me to move into the next phase of my divine plan, but because I was still holding on to certain ideas and beliefs (including but not limited to the Summit culture) my mind wasn’t open to seeing what my next step should be. I had moved away from the headquarters of the Summit and felt like I was in a bit of a vacuum. I was wondering what might be next, feeling like I really wanted to be useful to the masters, but not seeing how.

As also described elsewhere, on my birthday in 2001, I had a breakthrough. I had pictures of Jesus and Saint Germain in my office, and I felt like I connected to the masters and said out loud: “I want more.” What I meant was that for so many years I had followed the outer teachings of the masters, but now I wanted a more direct, personal contact with them.

The next day, I got the inspiration to buy voice-recognition software for my computer, and I then started receiving the book The Inner Path of Light. I didn’t see the book as being dictated to me, but that was really what happened. I would sit down at the computer without any conscious thought and would start speaking. The entire book came out without any conscious planning or thinking about it. I simply let it flow.

In August of 2002 the real breakthrough happened. Unfortunately, I can’t remember anything precipitating it. Obviously, I was doing my decrees, using my intuition to look for things I needed to overcome in my psychology, working on surrendering and so forth. Yet it wasn’t like there was any outer event that brought about what happened next.

I was sitting in my office and had just finished decreeing for an hour. Suddenly, I spontaneously fell to my knees, and from the very bottom of my being I felt like I surrendered all of my frustrations, ambitions, desires and expectations about what life should be.

Up until then I had been driven by a strong sense of mission, a strong sense that I had to do something—a sense that had followed me all of my life. After I found ascended master teachings, I naturally thought it meant I had a mission to do something for the masters. That is why I moved to the U.S. and for years I felt my mission was to decree and be part of the Summit. I felt frustrated because I knew I was not doing all that I was meant to do.

In a moment of clarity, I saw all of these ambitions, and I saw they were driven by the ego and the outer self. When I saw that, I realized this is not who I am, and I literally let all of it go. I felt like I surrendered myself completely unto God, and I spontaneously said out loud: “God, you can take me home right now!” I literally felt that if I had died at that moment, I could have left the earth behind without any regrets or any sense that I had something I had to do or wanted to do.

For a few moments I sat there feeling completely at peace, and then I felt the Presence of Jesus more strongly than I had ever felt it before. I felt how Jesus was saying to me: “If you don’t have anything you want to do on this planet, are you willing to do something for me?” And from the very core of my being, I felt the word “Yes” arise.

We all have an outer self and we all have expectations and hopes and dreams. Yet we also all have a pure self, which means we have the potential to surrender the ambitions and desires of the outer self.

It was part of my divine plan to be a messenger, and I had a sense of mission my entire life. Yet in my outer mind I had created all kinds of overlays of how I saw my sense of mission being carried out. In other words, I was right about the “what” part, but I simply was not able to see the “how” part. Until I completely surrendered these outer expectations, my mind wasn’t open to receiving a clear vision of what my true mission was and how it could be carried out.

Only the total surrender made me an open door so I could start my mission. Only a continued surrender has allowed me to continue to transcend outer overlays in order to move my mission to progressively higher levels. Of course, my one moment of surrender did not mean I was ready to be a messenger. I had to go through some training from Jesus, as I will describe elsewhere. I still consider myself to be in training as a messenger, a process that I don’t expect to end as long as I am in embodiment.