Consider the basic dynamic that guides life on earth. The Creator has given you self-awareness and free will. You grow in self-awareness by exercising your free will. You have two basic options for making choices, one is choices based on the awareness that all life is one, which is the Christ consciousness or higher awareness. The other is to make choices based on the illusion that you are a separate being, which is the consciousness of anti-christ, the consciousness of death.
Contrary to what many religious and spiritual people believe, the deeper reality is that God has given you free will so there is nothing inherently wrong in choosing to go into separation. God does not judge you or condemn you to hell for going into separation. The reason is that God’s purpose for giving you free will is that this is the only way you can grow in self-awareness, and experiencing life as a separate being can expand your self-awareness in the long run.
However, going into separation means limiting your self-awareness so this expansion takes place only after you awaken from the illusion that you are a separate being. Going into separation means that you think: “I am this identity.” After some time, you will realize: “Oh, I am not this identity; I am more than this identity.” This realization is what leads to a growth in self-awareness. You ascend when you realize that you are more than any identity that could possibly be created on earth.
From this perspective, there is nothing inherently wrong with the selves and the games of the selves. The selves are simply what makes it seem believable to you that you are a separate being and that there is still something you want to do and experience on earth.
The games of the selves are what give you the experience that you are a particular kind of separate being who has something to do or experience on earth. We can compare this to an actor who puts on a costume and make-up and then psychologically gets into character before going on stage.
Take note that an actor does not forget that he or she is more than the character portrayed on the stage. When the play is over, the actor simply takes off the costume and make-up and returns to his or her normal sense of self. The difference between acting and taking embodiment is that you do not retain the memory that you are a spiritual being who has simply taken on a role.
You go into separation by the conscious self literally entering into a separate self, and once it is in there, everything it sees affirms that you are a separate being. You will forget that you are a spiritual being and think you are a mortal being. You can awaken from this forgetting at any time, but you have to awaken and this is not as simple as taking off a costume.
What now needs to be added is that there exist the manipulators who have chosen to not only go into separation but to rebel against God’s purpose and plan for having all beings grow in self-awareness. They have built a separate self which believes it knows better than the Creator and that its mission is to prove that the Creator made a mistake by giving all self-aware beings free will. These beings have used their free will to decide that they want to take away the free will of all other beings.
As a sincere spiritual student there comes a point where you can go no higher on the path until you acknowledge the existence of the manipulators and how they are using the selves and their games for the purpose of preventing you from awakening from the illusion of separation.
If you take the manipulators out of the equation, you would still have selves and the selves would still be playing certain games. You would be identified with these selves, but after having had a certain amount of experiences, your built-in drive to become more would make you wonder if there is not more to life than what you experience through a particular game of the selves. Without the manipulators, it would simply take a certain amount of time before you would start awakening from the selves-based sense of identity.
What the manipulators are trying to do is to delay this awakening indefinitely. For the vast majority of lifestreams, they cannot prevent it from happening, but on a planet like earth, they have been quite successful in delaying the awakening for the lifestreams embodying here. How have they done this?
By either taking advantage of the natural games of the selves and taking them further towards the extreme, or by creating entirely new games. This always follows the basic pattern of inducing a certain fear or problem through one self and then inducing the illusion that you can alleviate the fear or solve the problem through another self. With this in mind, let us look at one example of how this works.
You are not good enough
In a distant past, there was a phase where the inhabitants of earth had started going into separation in increasing numbers. They had not yet taken the collective consciousness to the low point that allowed manipulators to start embodying on this planet. Back then you had the game of people who saw themselves as separate beings competing against each other in order to win.
What you saw back then was more like the kind of competition you see today in the highest form of sportsmanship. It was what is embodied in the Olympic spirit, which in its pure form is meant to bring people together in friendly competition in order to build a common bond even a sense of team spirit. Each person was competing to be as good as possible at a certain task but never sought to destroy the abilities of other people.
When the manipulators started embodying on earth, they immediately started using the competition game in order to accomplish the goal of delaying people’s awakening from separation. They did this by inducing the illusion that God is an angry and judgmental God and that some people are not good enough in the eyes of God, meaning they will be punished and sent to hell.
Those who believed in this image of God now created two selves in their beings, one that truly believed in the angry God and one that offered relief or escape from the wrath of this non-existent God. When it came to people who were already into the competition games, this had the following effect. One self told them that they were not good enough in the eyes of God, and another told them that if they were better than others, then God would have to accept them, for he could not send everyone to hell.
What had instantly been accomplished by the manipulators was to turn the game of friendly competition into a very unfriendly game of seeking to compensate for your own deficit by being better than others. Which then very easily was taken into the game of seeking to raise yourself up by aggressively putting other people down.
The core of comparison
In the ideal scenario, a new lifestream starts out with a point-like sense of self but also with an inner sense of connection to something greater than itself. That something is the higher self, but for a long time the new lifestream will have no conscious vision of the higher self. It acquires this vision by expanding its sense of self, by raising its consciousness.
How does a new lifestream expand its sense of self? It does so by interacting with the material world and by referring all of its interactions to its inner connection. This means the new lifestream has a sense that there is a reality beyond the material world, meaning nothing in this world is ultimately real. It knows it is not a product of the material world but came from somewhere else. It cannot come to identify itself with and as its own creation but sees its creation in this world as a springboard to expanding its sense of self.
A new lifestream grows by expressing its creative abilities and comparing the result to what it feels within. As it has created something, it looks at its creation and evaluates how it feels compared to its inner sense of connectedness. It basically considers (although for some time this is not done consciously) the question: “How well does my material creation express who I really am?” A lifestream that is not lost in separation has en internal frame of reference for evaluating all of its creative efforts. It is not creating in order to achieve or own something in this world but in order to expand its sense of self.
Once a being steps into separation, it forgets its inner connection. It can no longer have an internal frame of reference. It might have a valuable frame of reference in the form of an outer spiritual teaching, but this is still something outside itself.
If you are the one defining a person’s frame of reference, you can exert an incredible degree of control over that person. The manipulators knew this before they even came to earth so from the moment they came here, they started to completely redefine every thought system on earth in order to pervert it to their own ends.
The ascended masters can counteract that by giving new spiritual teachings, even direct revelation. The moment a teaching enters the material realm, the manipulators will seek to destroy, counteract or pervert it. They know full well that their control over the population depends on their ability to control what people use as a frame of reference. The bottom line being that they must maintain a situation where people use an external frame of reference.
The very core of competition is comparison, but the core of comparison is that you compare yourself to other people and you do so based on a standard defined in this world. Take note that a new lifestream, who has not lost its connection to the higher self, does not compare itself to other people because it always looks within to evaluate its creative efforts. It does not need an external standard in this world because it has an internal standard that is beyond this world. Even a being with a limited self-awareness is difficult to control.
The core of comparison is the external standard, a standard that is defined in this world. Very few people have strong enough selves to create their own standard, and for most their personal standard is highly affected by an external standard created over time. This standard was not created by one manipulator, for even a manipulator does not have selves big enough to single-handedly create such a standard. The standards that reside in the collective consciousness have been created by many manipulators (both in and out of embodiment) and they have been created over time.
This explains why it is difficult for any individual to see through and expose such standards, and this explain why you need the Christ mind and outer teachings given from higher awareness by the ascended masters. You can use these teachings as an outer frame of reference until you regain and strengthen your inner connection to your higher self and no longer need an outer teaching.
The black whole of competition
Take note of why competition games can delay your awakening from duality for a very long time. You have come to see yourself as a separate being and you have lost your internal frame of reference. You have forgotten that you ever had this inner connection, but you have a vague sense that you have lost something, that something is missing. The manipulators can use this by creating the belief system that you have fallen into sin, that you were created in sin or that you are in other ways deficient in the eyes of the angry god in the sky.
They then offer you a relief from this fear of annihilation by giving you an external frame of reference. If you live up to the requirements of this frame of reference, and if you do so better than other people, you will become acceptable to their god.
You are now trapped in a game of seeking to become better than other people based on some external standard defined by the manipulators. You may think that by living up to the demands of this standard, you can reach some ultimate achievement here on earth, such as running 100 meters faster than any other human being has ever done.
No matter how fast you run on earth, you cannot run your way into heaven. The standards found here on earth are all based on the duality consciousness, the consciousness of separation. These standards will never give you access to heaven—no matter what any authority on earth says. God is not mocked and God is no respecter of man-made standards.
You now see the illusion. The selves’ competition and comparison games all give you the impression that if you are better than other people based on your standard, God will accept you. No matter how much energy you pour into living up to such a standard and no matter how good you become, it does not bring you one step closer to heaven.
You are simply feeding your energy into a black hole, and as you know, no matter how much you pour into a black hole, you can never fill it. What the manipulators have done on earth is to get millions of people to play these competition games, and you can continue to do so indefinitely, or at least until you run out of opportunity.
The reality is that you will enter heaven – the ascended state – only by expanding your self-awareness until it can no longer be contained in the material universe. Here then comes a subtle distinction. We saw earlier that you can indeed expand your sense of self by going into separation. It might seem as if winning the competition game would expand your sense of self. After all, it might require considerable skill and self-control to be really good at some task. Being better than all other people can certainly expand the selves.
In reality, you do not expand your sense of self by being good at a particular competition game. You expand your sense of self only when you awaken from that game by realizing: “I am more than this separate self that thinks it is better than other separate selves. I am an infinite self and as such it has no value to me to be better than others according to a finite standard.” The question is simple: Do you believe it has some special importance to achieve a measurable result here on earth, or do you see any activity as having value only insofar as it expands your consciousness?
Again, you grow in self-awareness only when you awaken from separation. You awaken by realizing: “I am not that I am,” meaning the separate self you have built. Now, there are two ways to grow in self-awareness. You can build a separate self designed to have certain experiences, and when you awaken from it, you expand your sense of self. You then build another self to have different experiences and this keeps going until you have had enough.
This is what we might call the gradual path. The alternative is to build a separate self that you keep adding on to until you have built it to such a level of sophistication that it seems to be superior to any other separate self on earth. Truly, if (note the if) you do awaken from that self, then you will have made progress in self-awareness.
The gradual approach was the only approach taken on earth before the manipulators entered the stage. They are the ones who “invented” the all-or-nothing approach and they did not do this consciously. The fact is that a manipulator will continue building its separate self and if it does awaken from it, it will indeed have had so many experiences that it can very quickly rise to the same level of consciousness as a lifestream that has taken the gradual approach but never entered separation. The big difference being, of course, that it is much more difficult to awaken from a separate self, a fallen self.
It has indeed happened that manipulators have awakened. That is why Jesus told the parable about the prodigal son’s return. Even a manipulator will be welcomed into the kingdom—once it has fully awakened from separation. The trouble is, however, that many manipulators simply are not able to awaken, and they end up in a blind alley without becoming ascended masters.
How do you awaken from the fallen consciousness? Lifestreams who have entered separation but not the fallen consciousness can be awakened by encountering a spiritual teacher with the Christ consciousness. This teacher gives them a new frame of reference that helps them realize there is something beyond their present state of consciousness, which awakens their desire to have that something.
Once you are lost in the fallen consciousness (which is the ultimate degree of separation), you are blinded by the serpentine logic that you can define your own reality. You cannot be awakened by someone teaching you but only by you seeing that your self-created standard simply does not work and does not get you where you want to go.
A new lifestream that experiments with its co-creative abilities without going into separation will always awaken and expand its sense of self. Once you go into the fallen consciousness, there is no guarantee that you will make it back out. You can indeed create such a “sophisticated” separate self that you become a black hole.
You create such a momentum of denial that you can deny anything, and you are the one at the center of the maelstrom of energy. Rather than being in control or being able to use your superior self to get you back out, you are overpowered by your own creation – by your Frankenstein’s monster – and you go down with your ship.
Those who are not lost in the fallen consciousness need to recognize the fact that competition games will never get you to the goal promised by the game. Even athletes who have achieved world championships often end up feeling a sense of emptiness, a sense that “Where do I go now?”
The reason is that when you have had enough of playing the competition games on earth, you will want more. Not more of the competition but more than the competition, more than the separate self can ever offer you. That is when you become the prodigal son who is worthy of a feast with the fatted calf.
Take note that there are two kinds of what scientists call black holes. One is what really is a black hole in the sense that it is created by the manipulators who suck everything into their downward spiral without ever being filled. The other is a white hole created by an ascended being who is seeking to lift all life up to a higher sense of self.
A black hole does become denser and denser and hotter and hotter until the beings trapped in it literally are burning as if in a fiery hell. They are burning because their sense of self has become so narrow that they seem to have no way to escape the internal division that creates the friction that produces the heat. A white hole – in some cases what you call a sun – becomes brighter and brighter in ever-higher vibrations that give you greater and greater freedom and an ever-expanding sense of self.
Spiritual people and competition games
You may think that as a spiritual person you have risen above the competition games. You may have risen above the more obvious competition games, such as being good at sports or having more money or possessions than the Joneses. The manipulators have created many more subtle competition games, and one of them is the game of thinking that your religion, spiritual teaching or guru is clearly the most sophisticated one on the planet. This is a game played by many religious and spiritual people, even by many ascended master students.
What will bring in the Age of Higher Awareness? It is only that a critical mass of people awaken to their spiritual nature and dare to express it. What will bring this about? Not – as many spiritual people think – that millions of people are converted into believing in the right religion, the highest spiritual teaching or the superior guru. What will make a difference is that millions of people are awakened to their inner connection to their higher selves, and this can happen through many spiritual teachings even for people who do not follow a spiritual teaching.
The ascended masters are seeking to awaken all people who have the potential to be awakened, and for this reason they have given many spiritual teachings. It has never been their goal to convert every human being to be a follower of one teaching. It has been their goal to help every human being transcend its present sense of self until it becomes an open door for the higher self.
What might facilitate the awakening is a universal form of spirituality, but this cannot be defined by one teaching or system. It is something that is floating around in the collective consciousness, and as such it has, of course, been present for decades, gradually growing stronger and being recognized by more people.
You can indeed help bring about the spiritual awakening of humankind, but you can do so only when you rise above the competition games defined by the manipulators in order to fool spiritual people. By being willing to look at your approach to spirituality, you can quickly come to see how you have been influenced by a desire to belong to the ultimate spiritual movement and be recognized by other people, your guru or even the ascended masters as being more sophisticated than other people. When you give up this desire, you will feel an immense freedom.
What is this form of competition a quest for? It is a quest for recognition from an external source. In many cases you see this as other people, God or the ascended masters and you seek to gain control over them in order to get the recognition that your selves think will guarantee your immortality. As long as you seek to control the minds of others, you will never get full control over your own mind.
Furthermore, the only thing that will truly satisfy your inner longing is oneness with your higher self. As long as you are seeking recognition from an external source, how can you attain oneness with the higher self that resides in the kingdom that is within you? It simply cannot happen, and you will never feel fulfilled until you awaken and realize it cannot happen, stopping the game of seeking from without what you can only obtain from within.
The most subtle competition game is the one where you think you have to engage in some kind of game in order to get God to give you his kingdom. As long as you believe in the illusion that God is withholding his kingdom from you and that you can – and must – take it through some kind of activity in this world, you will never get it. You will receive God’s kingdom only when you stop struggling to get it and recognize the truth in Jesus’ statement: “It is the father’s good pleasure to give you his kingdom.”
The manipulators love it when you think that you have to follow one of their schemes in order to force God to give you what God offers you freely. They love it when you think you have to struggle to get what can only be had through not struggling but simply accepting.
When you struggle to control God or win the ultimate competition, the manipulators are laughing all the way to the bank, the bank where they deposit the energy you are feeding them through your struggle. Instead, follow the Living Christ as it offers you the peace that passeth understanding, the “understanding” created by the fallen consciousness in an attempt to keep you from oneness.