The only way out of suffering is to start to make your own choices and ask for guidance from higher awareness. It should be no surprise that the manipulators have attempted to block this way out. A very dangerous effect of the epic mindset is that it makes people think they know better than God or the ascended masters.
They use a specific teaching or idea that is in the physical realm as a justification for refusing either the outer teachings or the words and ideas the masters give them directly within their own minds. Many people actually know about ascended masters but have rejected valid directions they get from within themselves, either from their higher selves or from their personal ascended teachers. This is clearly the greatest single obstacle for the masters’ efforts to free individuals and raise the collective consciousness.
Did God lie to Adam and Eve?
The manipulators will do anything they can think of to deceive human beings into following them. In every time period they have attempted to set themselves up as leaders of society, even religious leaders. They have often been there at crucial moments in world history, and they have managed to exert their influence and take humanity in a less than ideal direction, a direction that perpetuated the dualistic struggle. This includes being able to pervert many religious scriptures.
The account in Genesis of the fall of Adam of Eve is in subtle ways perverted by the manipulators. It is stated that God had told Adam and Eve that they were allowed to eat of all of the fruits in the garden except the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. If they did eat of this forbidden fruit, they would surely die. This is not correct.
The students in the garden had been told that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was a specific state of consciousness, namely the consciousness of duality. They had been told that it was an initiation that they would have to take but only when the teacher assessed that they were ready for it. They had been told that if they took the initiation too early, they would most likely become trapped in duality, meaning they would lose contact with the teacher and be trapped in separation.
They had been told that in that case, they could not remain in the Mystery School and the teacher could not help them as they would not be able to hear his instructions. They had even been told that by going into separation, their old sense of self, as a being connected to the teacher, would die and they would be reborn into a new, separate self.
In a sense, one could say that it was correct that they would die if they ate the forbidden fruit. One can also say that the serpent was correct in that they would not die. What can resolve the paradox?
Self-awareness has two components: “self” and “awareness.” Self is temporary but awareness is ongoing. At any given time, you see yourself as and through a specific self, meaning your awareness is experiencing itself through the filter of that self.
The self can be replaced by another self, and when this happens the former self dies. Because of the ongoing nature of awareness, you may not be conscious of this shift. You simply experience life through the new self without realizing that the old self has died and you have taken on another one.
A new co-creator starts with a point-like sense of self. For quite some time, the circle of self will be so small that a co-creator will not be consciously aware that it shifts into a new self and that the old one dies. It is not even conscious of the difference between how the old and the new self looks at life.
Only when you reach a certain level of maturity will you be able to be conscious of the shift and retain an awareness of the difference between old and new. Only then will you be able to go into duality without losing the awareness that you are not a separate self but that there is more to your existence.
Experienced students can experiment with duality like an actor who takes on a costume and plays Hamlet. The actor may be fully living himself into the role, temporarily forgetting everything else. Yet there comes a point where he again remembers that he has not become Hamlet, he is only playing a role, meaning he can take off the costume and leave the theater.
If you do not have sufficient self-awareness, then you cannot experiment with duality without losing yourself in the role. You will surely die as the old self and be reborn as a new separate self. This is what has happened to all human beings in embodiment on earth. It has happened because of the deception of the manipulators.
Serpentine logic
How did the manipulators deceive human beings? They used some form of serpentine logic to get them to step into a specific state of consciousness. This state of consciousness is very difficult to see once you are inside of it so you need to use your intuitive abilities and not the analytical mind to follow this.
Before a being falls into duality, it sees itself as a self that is connected to something greater than itself. It knows that it is not complete in and of itself but that it is an extension of something greater. This is the higher self, although a new co-creator has no conscious awareness of the self, only a sense of being connected to something.
The being knows that it is not capable of knowing reality on its own, it needs a frame of reference from outside itself. That is why the student is connected to the teacher and listens to the teacher. The obvious advantage is that you are never alone and you never have to face an initiation or problem on your own. You always have access to your spiritual teacher, and although he or she will not tell you what to do, the teacher will give you a frame of reference that is invaluable.
There comes a point when the student has to start becoming self-sufficient. The teacher must withdraw and allow the student to make decisions on its own. The student will still be connected to the teacher and will make a decision, then go back to the teacher to get feedback about the lesson that can be learned.
The teacher therefore serves as the student’s frame of reference and it is the teacher’s directions that form the basis for how the student evaluates its decisions and their outcome. This prevents the mind of the student from becoming a closed system.
The consciousness of duality represents the opposite of this frame of mind. The dualistic mind is indeed a closed system, meaning it has no frame of reference from outside the material universe. As an individual you may have a frame of reference from outside your mind, but that frame will not be a spiritual teacher. It will be something coming from the material world, meaning it will be a thought system devised by the manipulators.
The manipulators have become your frame of reference, meaning that all decisions you make and all evaluations you perform will keep you trapped in the dualistic struggle. When you are in duality, you make decisions based on your current frame of mind (as you do before entering duality), but you also evaluate the outcome of your decisions based on your current frame of mind.
You are literally defining your own standard for evaluating your decisions, which means it is possible to define a standard so it seems like your decisions are always right or necessary. As the serpent said, you have become as a god defining good and evil. The net effect is that you do not need to learn from your decisions, meaning that a decision does not expand your self-awareness. Instead, it solidifies your current self and makes you think you need to hold on to it instead of rising to a higher one.
If you know something about science, you will know that it has been proven mathematically that in reality there are no self-referential systems [Gödel’s Theorem]. A closed system will contain internal contradictions that cannot be resolved from within the system itself. There is always a need to look beyond any system that can be created in this world.
This is also described in the second law of thermodynamics, which says that any closed system will self-destruct. This is the absolute reality about the consciousness of duality and any system or effort based upon it here on earth. This is also the reality that the manipulators will deny as long as they remain trapped in the fallen consciousness. They will do anything to make you deny this reality as well, and their greatest ally is your personal selves. Their survival depends on you denying this reality.
The selves are always right
We have talked about the selves’s need for security and that the selves can always come up with an argument that makes them seem right. This is easy to understand when you compare it to the illustration about the conscious self standing in the center of a circle with 360 degrees, each forming a triangular, pie-shaped area. Each slice of the pie represents one way to experience life on earth.
You are meant to go into one slice and experience life through it until you reach the circumference of the circle and have had enough of experiencing life this way. As long as you are a connected being, you will then return to center, pick another slice and experience life that way.
As you go around the circle and experience life from many different angles, you gradually expand your self-awareness until you realize that you are more than any self that could be built on earth. You then begin to long for a higher experience than what is possible on earth and you enter the ascension process.
What also happens as you do this is that you realize something very profound. You are a formless being and you can never be defined by or trapped in any self on earth. As you experience life through many different selves, you come to realize that there is no final or ultimate self.
There are many ways to experience life on earth and none of them are better or “right” in some epic sense. They are simply different experiences and none of them have any enduring reality or value. They are temporary tools for expanding your self-awareness and the last thing you want is to get stuck in any one of them.
As a practical example, you realize that the real purpose of a religious teaching is (or should be if the manipulators had not perverted it) to help you raise your consciousness. There can be many valid religious teachings that can all help people raise their consciousness. It is meaningless to try to establish one as the superior or only true one, and it is especially meaningless to enter the epic mindset of seeking to forcefully eradicate all other religions.
You clearly see religion as a tool, as something you need to transcend. You also begin to realize that it is meaningless to say that any religious teaching could represent a superior or infallible truth. Words and images from the material world simply cannot capture the ineffable reality of the spiritual realm, a reality that the conscious self is beginning to experience directly.
Nothing from this world could ever be an infallible truth, and in order to know reality, you need to experience the Spirit of Truth, which the conscious self is capable of doing. The only condition being that you become so non-attached to your current self that you will allow the conscious self to step outside that self.
What the manipulators have managed to do is to get people to step into one slice of the pie and then think this is the only right way to experience life. They are then automatically threatened by all of the other people who experience life on earth through a different slice. When you add the epic mindset, it seems as if God has defined your slice as the only one and God wants you to eradicate all the other slices—or the world will come to an end.
How is this attained? It is attained by saying that life can only be seen as it appears when seen through your particular slice. Any other perspective is wrong and of the devil and you need to automatically reject it. When you reject enough contrary evidence, you can always prove your point and it always seems as if the selves are right.
Diversity is the way to help the conscious self expand its sense of self and avoid becoming stuck in a particular self. The manipulators have managed to make people think diversity is dangerous and will lead to the death of your self. This is, of course, correct. As you have gone to the outer limits of your current self and return to center, your current self will die.
The conscious self will not die but will seamlessly move into another self. In the beginning you will not be conscious of this, but as you experience sufficient diversity, you will become conscious of the fact that your earth-based self can die without you dying.
The manipulators have managed to pervert the very process that is meant to take you toward greater self-awareness and the ascension. Instead, they have trapped you in an ongoing quest to take one unreal and temporary self and use it to destroy other selves.
They have projected the subtle idea that when you are successful, the self that has conquered all others will become permanent and God will let it into his kingdom. A completely futile quest that will never come to fruition, as Jesus’ parable about the wedding feast illustrates.
You will never enter the kingdom by raising one self to some ultimate status on earth. You will enter only by coming to realize that you are more than any self on earth whereby you put on the wedding garment of the Christ consciousness.
The choice is simple. Will you continue the process of seeking to prove yourself right according to a standard defined by the manipulators? Or will you reach for the mind of Christ than can help you rise above all standards defined on earth? Will you continue to seek to prove yourself right among men, or will you choose to be right with God? You cannot do both, you cannot serve God and mammon.