Control games can be seen as one aspect of power games. However, raw power games can easily form a self-reinforcing spiral that leads to more and more extreme expressions of force. For example, many leaders who abuse power gradually become so extreme that the outcome is a war in which they either destroy others or are themselves destroyed. We can say that a raw power game is one that causes you to lose control, eventually leading to your own destruction.

A control game is where you express power in a way that is more restrained—controlled. This means people can express power for a longer period of time, but the price they pay is that they must continually seek to control others, even their own people. When you set out to control others, the first person to be controlled is yourself.

Why is this so? What does it mean to control others? There is, of course, raw control through physical force. As history bears out, control through direct physical force is very difficult to attain and even more difficult to maintain over a long period of time.

Say a dictator of one country occupies another country. How can he control the citizens of the occupied country? He could throw them all in jail, but then what would be the point of occupying the country? He could assign three soldiers to physically guard each person 24 hours a day, but does he have that kind of resources?

The only practical way to control others is to get into their minds and get them to accept a certain world view, a certain mental box. Joseph Stalin had great physical power to arrest and execute people, and it is estimated he killed 21 million people in the Soviet Union. He realized, however, that he could not physically control every person so he instituted “Red Terror,” a campaign where he used special forces to randomly kill people or make them disappear.

The result was that no one felt safe and eventually everyone decided to not resist and accept the mental box, which said that communism could not be overthrown and that Stalin was the supreme, undisputed leader. Stalin had broken people’s resistance, but this happened in the psyches of the people.

What did Stalin have to do in order to accomplish this goal? He first had to create a mental box defining the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime where there was no law except what one man – Stalin himself – defined. In order to do this, he first had to believe in that mental box, meaning he was the first prisoner of it.

Most of the time Stalin did not feel like a prisoner because he could divert his attention with the feeling of having ultimate power. Especially towards the end of his reign, Stalin started feeling trapped and confined but now saw no way out. He knew that if he relaxed his iron grip, a spiral would start that would eventually cause the entire Soviet system to unravel. He had to keep himself and the people in the mental box in order to maintain the system, which had now come to own him and use him as a tool.

Why control cannot last forever

The Soviet leaders who came after Stalin realized he had gone too far in his abuse of power. They gradually sought to lift the threat of execution and imprisonment, and several leaders thought they could do this and still keep the Soviet Union intact. The last Soviet leader, Gorbachev, even thought he could give western-style freedoms and that this would improve the economy and people’s standard of living while maintaining the basic Soviet system.

What Gorbachev and others did not understand was that the people had not chosen communism, and they stayed in it only as long as the mental box that controlled them was intact. That mental box was created through the uncompromising threat of death, and it was only the fear of death that controlled the people.

As soon as Soviet leaders began relaxing the threat and the people began realizing the threat was no longer as severe, they wanted more freedom, then more freedom—and this continued until the Soviet system simply could not be maintained. The mental box created by Lenin and Stalin had been dismantled.

Why did this happen? It happened partly because, as explained in the discourse on power games, anything that is based on force will generate a counterforce from the cosmic mirror. You need to use more and more force to simply maintain the system and this will eventually exceed the resources available.

The promise made by Lenin was that communism would be a worker’s paradise where all people would have a comfortable standard of living. Because the system was based on force, it inevitably defined itself an external enemy and that – combined with the extreme paranoia of Stalin – meant the Soviet Union was locked in an arms race from the very beginning.

Had there not been the need to divert greater and greater resources to the military, the Soviet Union might have provided a comfortable standard of living—for a time. Because the system was based on force from the beginning, it simply could not exist without an external enemy. Communism, from Marx’s day, defined itself in opposition to Capitalism and locked itself into a dualistic struggle that would eat up its resources and invalidate its central promise of affluence for all workers.

The other aspect is that any force-based system goes against the very driving force of life itself, namely the drive to become more. People have an inherent drive for freedom and you either suppress this brutally, as Stalin did, or you will see that it will eventually overthrow every force-based system.

What is it that controls people?

This gives a foundation for understanding how the selves controls you. Stalin could not have physically killed all people in the Soviet Union, but he did not have to because all people believed in the threat that anyone who resisted would be killed.

What controlled the people was not the actual physical apparatus that could kill some people. If all people had revolted at once, that apparatus would have been neutralized. What truly controlled people was a mechanism in their minds. The conclusion is that the basis for any kind of control is to get into people’s minds and block their connection to higher awareness.

You are not a human being limited to this physical body and the material world. You are a spiritual being who can easily exist without your current physical body and the life you have built in this lifetime. Once you realize and accept who you are, nothing on earth will be able to control you because you will know that whatever they might do to your body – such as nail you to a cross – they will never be able to do anything to your mind—for you have taken control of your mind.

Why don’t you have full control of your mind right now? Because there is a division in your mind, you are a house divided against itself. This division was created because you entered the duality consciousness and created two aspects of selves. These selves were created here in the material world and they believe their survival depends on specific conditions in the material world. The selves want you to stay within certain boundaries in this world, they want you to hang on to certain conditions in the material world as if your life depended on it.

How is it possible for other people to control you? They can do so only because they have something inside your psyche that they can use to make you feel attached to certain conditions here on earth. If you were willing to give up and leave behind anything and everything you have on earth, how could any power on earth control you? That is why Jesus said that only those willing to give up everything could follow him into Christhood.

You can be controlled when you feel that here is something on earth that you simply cannot exist without. Someone makes the threat to take away what you think you cannot live without, yet he also makes the promise that if you submit to certain restrictions, you can keep your treasure. If you truly think you cannot live without it, you will indeed submit.

What is it in you that feels it cannot live without something on earth? If you are a spiritual being, how could you ever come to feel this way? The magic of the teachings about the conscious self is that once you realize and experience that you are pure awareness, you directly experience that your existence does not depend on anything on earth.

This can then open you up to seeing that what feels it cannot live without something on earth is not you but a self that exists inside your energy field. This self was created based on certain conditions on earth and it truly cannot live without them.

The self is a perception filter, like colored glasses. As long as you do not realize that you are simply looking at life through the perception filter of a self, you will think that the self’s fear is your fear. When you realize that you are a conscious self that is pure spirit, you will know that you will not die when you lose your earthly “life.” That is when you will be willing to follow Jesus’ call that those who seek to save their lives shall lose them whereas those who are willing to lose their lives in order to follow Jesus into oneness will find eternal life.

You already have eternal life. The selves in your being can never see this, for they can never attain eternal life. They are mortal and they can never become immortal. The conscious self is already immortal and simply needs to realize this.

You realize this only by coming to see the selves for what they are, seeing that you are not these selves and then consciously letting them die. This is what the selves and all dark forces will do anything in their power to prevent. They will do anything to prevent you from being able to say with Jesus: “The prince of this world cometh and has nothing in me.”

Spiritual people and control games

The most subtle effect of the selves is that they make you see life through the perception filter of a mortal self without you realizing that the way you see life is a distorted vision. You believe that your existence depends on certain conditions in the material realm.

It now follows that in order to preserve your existence – the basic survival instinct – you must seek to maintain those conditions in the material world. How can you do this? By seeking to control something in this world. You are now condemned to the prison of seeking to control something in this world. What is it you must control? Here are the main things:

Some people think they have to control God, and most mainstream religions are basically designed to give people the sense that through their religion they have some control over God.
Some people believe they have to control nature, and modern science and technology is very much affected by this drive to discover the laws of nature in order to control nature.
Some people believe they have to control other people and there is almost no limit to the philosophies and schemes that people will come up with in order to control others. Spiritual teachings can be used by the selves in their attempt to control others.

Let us now look at the realism of thinking that a human being could control God, the laws of nature and other people. What seeks to attain this control is a self that lives inside your energy field. This self was created in the material world, and it will never be able to fathom that its attempts at control are doomed from the beginning. Only the conscious self can fathom this and it can do so only through a direct, inner experience where you intuitively see the futility of seeking to control anything. Let us look at the three factors:

God. The selves think they can define God and they also think they can control what they have defined. The conscious self can experience the Presence of God and this will give you a frame of reference for seeing that God is completely beyond form. That which is beyond form simply cannot be controlled by anything in the world of form. God is no respecter of persons. When you have this experience, you can see the futility of the selves who use religion, even spiritual teachings, in an attempt to control God. It will be an enormous relief for you to let go of this subtle attempt to control God and it will open you up to experiencing the unconditional love that God and all ascended masters have for you. When you experience that love from within your self, why would you need to control anything outside your self?
Nature. The very purpose of the laws of nature is to provide human beings with a frame of reference that allows them to physically see that there is something they cannot control through duality. In medieval times people believed the earth was the center of the universe and that it functioned only to serve them. As science discovers how vast and complex the universe is, does it not become increasingly obvious that this expansive universe is not created to serve human beings on earth and that its basic functions will never be controllable from this little planet? Again, only the conscious self can have this Aha experience.
Other people. What could potentially make it possible for you to control another person? It is that you have free will and you can make the choice to try to control another. If you have free will, would the other person not also have free will? If so, then you will not actually be able to control another person. You may be able to get another person to choose to submit to your control but the other person could at any time choose to change that choice. Again, the selves will never see this, but the conscious self can indeed see it. Giving up the desire to control others will lift an immense burden from you, setting you free to live a life where you seek to control nothing and where nothing controls you. As long as you seek to control another human being, you will never attain control over your own mind. Only self-control can give you the inner peace that the selves seek through controlling the external world.

Why control is possible but cannot be maintained

Let us now take this to a more subtle level. The material universe is meant to give you certain experiences until you feel you have had enough of them and move on. These experiences take place inside your own mind and it is here you will decide when you have had enough and want to move on.

This means that the material universe has two functions. One is to give you any experience you desire to have, even the experience that you can control God, nature and other people. In reality, you cannot control these circumstances, but through a self created for this purpose, you can indeed have the experience – an illusion, but an illusion that seems very real from inside your perception filter – that you can control God, nature and other people.

This means that once you step inside the perception filter of such a self, you become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You are not actually controlling God, but it seems like you are. How is this feeling attained? Because the self blocks out all evidence that would question the illusion that you are in control.

You literally see only what confirms your illusion and you are able to ignore or dismiss any evidence to the contrary. This is why any perception filter – any perception filter – becomes a closed mental box that imprisons the conscious self until you look at the filter (the self) and see that it is not real and it is not you.

Now, while the universe is designed to give you any experience you want, it is not designed to give you this experience indefinitely. You are an extension of God’s Being and God will allow itself to be imprisoned in a mortal form, but it does not want to be imprisoned forever. The material universe does have certain factors that will eventually begin to intrude upon your illusion that you are in perfect control.

We have already described these as the counterforce generated by any force-based impulse you send out, but in relation to control games, let us look at all three factors:

In a sense God is the easiest factor to control because God has given you free will and God will not force itself upon you. Once human beings have created the image of the remote God who is not here on earth, there is not much God can do to shatter this image. The ascended masters can indeed send representatives to earth who demonstrate that there is a higher form of consciousness, but people can easily ignore or discredit this through their perception filters.
Nature. While people have indeed used modern technology to build defensive walls between themselves and nature, there is not presently, nor will there ever be, a technological way to completely control nature. Natural disasters are simply the return of the force-based impulses that people have collectively sent out. It is technologically possible to control a force like a hurricane, but doing so would use up so many resources that it would be impractical. Wouldn’t it just be so much easier to purify the collective consciousness of misqualified energy, meaning the planetary energy field does not become so overburdened that it has to release the energy this way? While it is still easy to build the perception that you can control nature, nature will only comply for a time and it has some pretty obvious ways to make its non-compliance known.
People. Obviously, the easiest way to build a sense of control is to build the illusion that you can control other people. This is also the illusion that can last the longest and be the most difficult to shatter. Presently, the vast majority of people on this planet are playing along with the illusion that a small elite can control the population.

What did Jesus come to demonstrate 2,000 years ago? He came to demonstrate that nothing in this world can prevent an individual from attaining the Christ consciousness and that nothing can control a Christed being. Today, millions of people can awaken to their potential to do what Jesus did by refusing to submit to the mechanisms of control found in this world.

The spiritual people of today are the only ones who can rise above these mechanisms of control and demonstrate to the general population that you do not have to live within the mental boxes defined by a small elite of manipulators. For you to fulfill this potential, you first have to rise above any desire you have to control God, nature and other people.

Control games cancel out spirituality

What is the basis for control? Stalin could not physically kill every person in the Soviet Union—and if he had done so, what would have given him a sense of power? He did not have to kill them all, for it was enough that they feared that they could be killed. What controls you is fear—the fear of loss.

If you look at the world, you will see that some people are not open to the spiritual path while a few are. What is the difference? The fear of loss is unbearable, you simply cannot live with it. We might say that the forces who want to control you face an inescapable dilemma.

In order to control you, they must induce the fear of loss in your being. In order to continue to control you, they must enable you to reduce this fear to a level you can live with. They must both create a problem and offer you relief from it.

How is this accomplished? In reality, the forces that seek to control people are not facing a dilemma. They operate in the field of duality, and in duality there are always two polarities. All these forces have to do, is to get you to accept one of the subtle, serpentine illusions that spring from the duality consciousness.

Once you accept such an illusion, you will – without being aware of this – create two selves. One self is created from the fear of loss, the fear of death and annihilation. The other is created from the illusion that by living up to certain conditions on earth, you can escape death. Look at the three factors mentioned above:

God. One self fears God as an angry and judgmental being in the sky who will send you to hell. Another self believes that if you follow the prescripts of a particular religion on earth, the angry God will reward you with eternal life in heaven. These two selves do not cancel out each other so you are still trapped in the middle. You will never actually escape the fear of God’s punishment, but by focusing on the second self, you can live with the fear of loss.
Nature. One self fears that you can die at any moment from natural disasters. Another self convinces you that it will happen to someone else, and thus you can live with the fear although you will never be able to live without the fear.
People. One self makes you fear what other people will do, that they will betray you, leave you or let you down. Another self convinces you that through some scheme or other you will be able to control them and prevent this. Again, you can live with the fear.

What is the difference between those who have awakened to the spiritual path and those who have not? Those who have not awakened are still trapped in the fragile balance between the two selves, the one that induces fear and the one that promises to relieve it.

Those who are open to the spiritual path have started to doubt that this scenario is right, they have started to doubt the self that offers relief and they now acknowledge their fear. It is a simple fact that most of the people who awaken to the spiritual path do so out of fear. They begin to acknowledge the existential fear of death – their angst – and they begin to grapple for a better solution than the “normality” offered by the second self. They begin to look for a real way out.

This will almost inevitably launch people into a somewhat tumultuous, even schizophrenic phase, in which they seek to overcome the fear of death without fully understanding the dynamic of the two selves. That is why their selves are often able to take them into a blind alley where they simply use the spiritual teachings they have found – even the teachings of the ascended masters – as a way to seek the control that the selves think is the only way to alleviate fear. Let us look at how this works:

God. People will think that because they have found this sophisticated spiritual teaching or guru, they now have the ultimate way to control God and get him to give them a break, so they can be saved without having to do the hard work of unraveling their own psychology and dismissing the selves and their illusions.
Nature. People will think that they now have such a powerful spiritual practice that they can avert natural disasters, at least for them personally. Or they will think that because they are so spiritual, God will grant them a favor and spare them from what befalls others.
People. Most spiritual people will go through a phase where they seek to control other people by using their spiritual teaching. This is usually done by using the teaching to induce fear or play upon people’s existing fears.

This is not said to blame anyone. All who have ascended have gone through these phases and eventually came to see the futility of trying to control anything. Even when you do attain a certain degree of control, you will actually realize that this does not remove your fear. Why not? Where is your fear located? It is located inside your mind. How will you overcome your inner fear by controlling outer circumstances?

Think about this simple logic and allow the conscious self to be free to experience the reality of it. What is actually the core of fear? It is that you are not in control of your destiny, your life experience. What can take away this control? To the selves, only something external to yourself.

To the selves, it is perfectly logical that if something external to yourself can take away your control, then the way to overcome your fear of losing control is to seek to control that external something. The conscious self is capable of experiencing the fallacy of this. It is capable of realizing that your destiny is not dependent upon anything external to you.

Your destiny is dependent upon how you react to what is external to you, it is dependent upon what happens inside your mind. You do have the potential to take control of what happens inside your mind by seeing that you are a conscious self, that you are pure awareness and as such you cannot be divided. Something external can control you only when there is a division in your being, namely two selves. But you are not those selves and can at any time rise above them and simply leave them behind.

The selves will scream at you that you cannot simply leave them behind, and they will give you all kinds of subtle reasons for this. How do you become free of this control? Only when the conscious self realizes – consciously – that all of the reasons are invalid because since you are pure spirit your existence depends on nothing on earth. Letting go of something on earth can never be a loss to the conscious self, it can only be a gain because it brings you one step closer to freedom.

Take note of a subtle distinction. Free will gives you the right to have any experience you want for as long as you want. Some lifestreams have a desire to experience life as separate beings, and in order to have this experience, they need to experience life through the perception filters of dualistic selves.

It is possible that a person who still has not had enough of that experience could find this website and read to this point. If so, the selves of that person will come up with very sophisticated arguments for why the person should reject what is said.

Truly, if you have not had enough of experiencing life as a separate being, those arguments would be valid. If you want to continue having the experience as a separate being, you should indeed ignore these teachings, and you might even want to go on a crusade to prove them wrong in all kinds of ways.

The basic law for how the ascended masters work is this: When the student is ready, the teacher appears. It is also an inevitable consequence of the material universe that when the masters put a teaching into a website, it is possible that people can find it before they are ready for it—at least at the level of the outer mind. If that applies to you, please do ignore the teaching until at some later point you might want to come back for a second look.

Those who are indeed ready, and who are ready to acknowledge that they are ready, will see that the only way to overcome the desire to control others is to overcome fear. The only way to overcome the fear of loss is to overcome the illusion that you are a mortal being whose existence depends on anything on earth.

Such people will see that fear of loss is built into the separate self, the dualistic selves. A self is created based on conditions in the material world and nothing in the material world is permanent. The self has a fear of loss that can never be alleviated. Even if you were able to control everything on earth, your fear of loss would remain.

Some people overcome the fear of losing something by actually losing it and then experiencing that they still exist and that they can still find some meaning in life. The point of any spiritual teaching is that the conscious self does not need to have a physical experience of losing something. It can overcome the fear of loss by separating itself from the self that generates it. You can actually attain spiritual growth without having traumatic physical experiences.

You do not have to lose everything you have on earth in order to follow Christ. You do have to be willing to lose everything on earth in order to follow Christ. If there is anything on earth that you think you cannot leave behind in order to follow higher awareness, then you are not ready to follow Christ. You are not ready to give up the self that gives you the life experience that you are dependent upon something on earth. It is only by completely giving up the desire to control anything on earth that you gain the ability to control what really matters: yourself.

The living Christ does not want to force you into the total freedom of oneness. It simply stands ever-ready to offer you that freedom when you decide that you want it more than you want anything on earth.