Let us look at the essence of a drama. A personal drama makes it seem like your salvation is dependent upon you achieving something in your sphere, something that cannot be completed without the co-operation of other people. The epic drama makes it seem like the salvation of the world cannot be completed without achieving something in this world, such as making Christianity the only religion on earth.
The central illusion is that the drama is not a drama but reality. You will believe that either yourself or the world will not be saved until the goal defined by the drama has been achieved physically. Because this goal is defined based on an illusion, it can never be achieved, meaning that you are pursuing an impossible goal. You can seek this goal indefinitely, and the only way out of this impossible quest is to come to see the unreality of the drama.
Why is it easier to escape a personal drama than an epic drama? A personal drama is a struggle between you and some authority figure and other people within your own sphere. You are trying to prove yourself right and the others wrong, but you are not trying to prove that God is wrong or that the entire universe is based on a flawed design. A personal drama is clearly centered around you, and there is at least some possibility that you will eventually come to realize that the only way to change your outer situation is to change yourself.
When it comes to the epic drama, you have not only refused to take responsibility for yourself, you have projected that responsibility upon a force that is on a much bigger scale, such as God, the universe or humankind at large. It now becomes possible to believe that the cause for which your drama makes it seem like you are fighting is so big that it could not possibly be resolved by you or could not be resolved in one lifetime. This gives you an even more watertight excuse for not looking at yourself but continuing to project responsibility outside yourself, projecting it on forces or circumstances that a human being on earth could not possible influence alone.
We might say that the personal drama revolves around “me, myself and I,” which keeps it on a scale that at least has the focus on you. When you begin to see through the drama, you can relatively easily see that you do indeed have the power to overcome the drama by changing yourself.
The epic drama projects responsibility so far away that it makes it more difficult for lifestreams to accept that they still have the power to overcome the drama. It is easier to see that a personal drama is created in the mind whereas it is far more difficult to see that this is also the case for the epic dramas. The epic drama seem like they weren’t created in your mind, but of course it is simply the personal dramas taken to their extreme.
What makes a lifestream susceptible to the epic dramas? It is the lifestream’s personal dramas because the epic dramas tie in to the personal dramas and offer an even more watertight excuse for not looking at the beam in your own eye. If you believe there really is a Battle of Armageddon between God and the devil, and if you believe other people are on the side of the devil, then you can easily believe that you have no reason to look at the beam in your own eye—for you are obviously on the good side. You simply have to keep fighting the bad side until the battle is won—which might happen any day or in a thousand years, but in either case postponing the decision to look in the mirror.
The essence of a drama is that you think the fulfillment of your goals in life (even your salvation) depends on the choices made by other people. The drama makes it seem like you are not responsible for your own destiny. The people around you are, and you have to try to force their will.
Epic dramas add that in order to ensure the fulfillment of God’s plan, in order for people to be saved, in order for the battle of Armageddon to be won, you must deal with the free will of all human beings. Instead of just saving yourself, you now have to save the entire universe.
The net effect of this illusion is that it focuses attention on the splinters in the eyes of other people. This causes people who have taken on the drama to use the drama’s “perfect” excuse for not looking at the beam in their own eyes. Why is this a problem? As long as you are not looking at the beam in your own eye, you are not growing! It really is that simple and there is no way around it.
This is precisely what the dramas make it difficult for people to see. Once you enter a drama, you can no longer see it as a drama. You think that the view of life – the mental box – presented by the drama is real, that it represents the way life really works. You now have the “perfect” excuse for not even considering that the drama is unreal, that it has no more reality than what you – and other people – give to it. You refuse to see that you can indeed walk away from the drama any time.
Consider what you would say about an actor who had become convinced that he really was Hamlet and who refused to take off the costume, insisting on playing the role even outside the theater and claiming he really was the prince of Denmark. You would probably think the person had lost touch with reality. Yet your own personal drama has the exact same effect—it causes you to lose touch with reality. What is the exact effect of this?
Why dramas make you unteachable
Let us first restate an absolute and inescapable fact. The Law of Free Will is the fundamental law of the world of form. You can become a permanent being – an ascended being – only by freely choosing to enter into oneness—oneness with your source and oneness with all life, with the whole.
In order to make this choice, you must free your mind from all influence from the consciousness of separation, the consciousness of duality, the consciousness of anti-christ. All dramas are created out of this consciousness so it follows that you cannot make your ascension until you give up any and all dramas.
A drama forms a mental box and the box is closed. Any drama is based on an illusion, a view of reality that is out of touch with reality. This does not mean that the view is completely false. It may indeed contain many ideas that are true in themselves, but the way they are presented in context means that the entire world view cannot lead you to the ascension.
The problem is that once you step inside the mental box defined by the drama, you can no longer see that the world view is an illusion. Instead, from your vantage point inside the box, you think the world view is real, that the world really is the way it appears from inside the mental box of the drama. It is like the often-used example that if you put on yellow glasses, you think the sky really is green.
What is the logical conclusion? When you are inside the mental box of a particular drama, you believe in an illusion. You also believe that this illusion is reality, and this is what makes it a catch-22 that is very difficult to escape.
Consider how the situation looks from the vantage point of spiritual teachers. The teachers know your world view is based on an illusion. They know that the only way you can ascend is to help you see through the illusion. What is the most natural way to seek to help you? It would be a two-fold approach of seeking to present you with a correct world view while pointing out the flaws in your existing world view.
Now consider how you will experience a teacher’s attempts to help you when you see them from inside the box. You think your view is reality, and thus what this self-appointed spiritual teacher is presenting to you can only be unreality. It must be a false teacher and anything it says must be meant to deceive you and make you believe a lie instead of the reality you already have.
The subtle mechanism that comes into play here is that if the conscious self identifies itself fully with the drama, your mind will be closed to anything that a spiritual teacher could possibly say to you. Nothing could penetrate the defenses erected by your mental box.
Anything that goes beyond or contradicts your existing world view will be rejected. In order to help you escape your limited world view, the teacher must of necessity give you knowledge that contradicts or goes beyond your existing world view.
How come some people actually manage to listen to spiritual teachers? Because after having outplayed their dramas for a sufficient amount of time, their conscious selves have begun to doubt the world view presented by its drama. The conscious self has begun to separate itself from the drama so that it can start opening itself to an outside perspective on the drama—what is presented by the spiritual teacher.
Projections versus understanding
The entire world of form is designed to facilitate the growth in self-awareness. The Creator is not unintelligent and foresaw what could happen as a result of free will. There are a number of built-in safeguards that are designed to ensure that while self-aware beings can indeed enter into a mental box, these mental boxes will inevitably be challenged.
Once you step into a drama, the world view presented by the drama will be seen as being under constant attack. Consequently, those affected by the drama are constantly having to defend their view as the only real view of life, as the highest and absolute truth, as the only true religion or belief system.
When you feel that your world view is indeed the way life is – and you experience that it is under threat from unreality – your only way to defend your “truth” is to go into a state of mind that is based on projecting. You are constantly projecting your mental image upon yourself, God, the world and other people. You are seeking to force the universe to fit into your mental box by projecting the box and a very aggressive intent upon others.
Obviously, this is a violation of the free will of others, but you don’t see it that way. You think that others are opposing the only truth, the one defined by your mental box. They are violating your free will and you have a right – indeed a sacred duty – to defend truth. The problem is that when you go into this mindset, your mind becomes closed to a spiritual teacher.
The reason is that your mind is fully focused on – filled with – the need to project your existing mental image upon everything. There is no awareness of the need to expand your world view. Your mind is a one-way street with plenty of output but no room for input. You think you already have the highest truth so what is the need for you to open your mind to a higher understanding?
How will you ever escape your current drama? Only by becoming open to a broader world view than what you see from inside the mental box defined by the drama. How could you possibly see such a broader world view? Only when your mind stops projecting and becomes at least somewhat open to input from a higher source. You must stop projecting and seek to understand.
We can also say that the conscious self must stop projecting itself through the drama and project itself outside the drama in order to experience pure awareness or the input from a spiritual teacher or its higher self. As said before, you can never lose this ability but you can indeed forget it and that is the most limiting effect of dramas.
A drama – and especially the state of mind in which you are projecting – makes you unteachable. You are simply unreachable for a spiritual teacher, who must respect your free will and withdraw until the built-in safety mechanisms have – through the School of Hard Knocks – worn down your assuredness in your drama’s reality to the point where you are again open to understanding.
Observe your own reaction
The effect of the drama is that you resist the River of Life and you resist the teacher’s instructions. If you are honest with yourself, you can use your reactions to these discourses to gain some perspective on your personal drama:
- Do you find a certain resistance in yourself to these words? If so, follow the feelings and thoughts to their source and you might indeed discover why you are resisting.
- Do you find that you are projecting an existing view onto the teachings and using it to judge, analyze or evaluate everything?
- Do you find that there is a process – almost subconscious – aimed at invalidating the teachings so that you have a justification for not truly seeking to understand your own drama?
- Are you truly open to understanding what is said or are you seeking to reject it so that you do not have to look at the beam in your own eye?
There are many people who have used their existing mental box to judge a spiritual teaching as being false or impure as an excuse for not heeding the teaching. These people overlook a very simple fact. There is no spiritual teaching that will automatically awaken everybody.
If it was possible to formulate a teaching that was guaranteed to awaken any person who studied it, humankind would already have ascended. The effect of a teaching is not dependent upon the teaching. It is dependent exclusively on what the person studying it is willing to do with the teaching. Does the person have an open mind, is he or she seeking to understand rather than to project?
Your progress does not depend on anything outside yourself. It depends exclusively on your willingness to take responsibility for yourself. It depends only on the choices you make. The basic choice for any spiritual student is this: Do you want to project and reject, or do you want to understand and expand?
It is your drama that causes you to reject a higher understanding. If you reject the understanding hidden between the lines of these discourses, it is your drama that causes your rejection. There can be no other explanation, even if your drama offers you one.
Your drama is designed to project responsibility away from you, and thus it will seek to place responsibility anywhere else. As long as you are projecting responsibility outside yourself, you cannot do the one thing that can help you escape your drama, namely to take full responsibility for yourself. You cannot overcome your drama until you accept that you have created or accepted it and that you are the only one who can change that choice.
The choice is whether you will look at yourself and seek to unmask the drama or whether you will continue to project that the drama is right and that the teaching is wrong. If you reject the understanding, you must continue to affirm the drama—indefinitely.
The ascended masters are in full acceptance of your right to choose, and in full acceptance of you regardless of what you choose. They also accept the fact that those who continue to project and reject have set themselves outside of the Circle of Oneness and they are unteachable. The masters are here to help those who are willing to transcend their dramas. They are not here to validate anyone’s drama, and Jesus proved that by letting himself be killed as the ultimate way to expose people’s dramas. How far does the Living Christ have to go with you before your drama becomes so extreme that you are willing to look at it?
A foundational truth
When you are playing a role instead of a drama, there is no conflict between you and life and you have no need to resist the flow of the River of Life. You even have no need to resist the dramas outplayed by other people, for you do not allow yourself to take in the consciousness of the dramas.
This leaves us with only one plausible conclusion. Any time you resist anything – whether you resist life or whether you resist the dramas of other people, even resist the devil himself – your resistance is exclusively a product of your personal drama combined with any epic drama you have accepted. There simply is no other explanation, for only a drama makes it seem necessary to resist anything—including the dramas of other people.
Once some beings have developed dramas, it becomes a subtle temptation for other beings to develop their own dramas in order to resist the dramas that the first people are seeking to force upon them. That is precisely how dramas spread like a cancer until a downward spiral forms that only very few individuals have the non-attachment to transcend.
If you have no drama, you are non-attached to any circumstance you encounter, and you do not use it as an excuse for not letting your light shine. When you are focused on letting your light shine, you have no attention left over for resisting—you are untouched by the dramas of others. You are simply being the Sun of God who is radiating your light independently of other people or material circumstances. This is the only way to secure your own ascension and make your personal contribution to the ascension of the world, meaning the ascension of your sphere.
May the prince of this world come and find no drama in you whereby he can tempt you to react to and resist anything in this world.