There is a blurred line between games of the selves and dualistic dramas. When the manipulators started to embody on this planet, they took the games already created by the people on earth and they gave them a twist so that they became dualistic dramas. Of course, they also added some dramas that no people on earth had thought about or could have thought about.

As an example, let us refer to what was said about competition games, namely that people who go into separation can begin to see themselves as being in competition with other people. They desire to be superior to others by doing better than them in sport, business or as a warrior. 

The game of competition is in a sense straightforward and honest. It is a matter of improving yourself so you can do better than others in your chosen field. In its pure form, this is all focused on you and improving your own abilities. Quite frankly, this can serve the cause of expanding your self-awareness, as proven by some martial arts practitioners who have added a spiritual dimension to being a warrior. Once you transcend the need to compete against or fight others, you will have expanded your sense of self and your awareness of how the material universe works, even how your mind can use the body and direct energy.

Take note that in its pure form, competition is based on a strict honor code. There are certain things you don’t do because that would take away your honor, your self-esteem. For example, you don’t do anything to ruin your competitors’ ability to compete, you don’t cheat and you don’t use deceptive or violent means to take your competitors out of the competition. There is an invisible line that you simply do not cross because you can see no justification for doing so. 

We can say that in a competition game, there are heroes but no villains. Sometimes you are the hero and sometimes it is someone else, but everyone follows the honor code. What can turn a friendly competition game into an unfriendly competition drama is the manipulators who add the twist that the game has a “greater purpose” and a villain who opposes that purpose. 

For example, there might be a power play between nations, such as seen during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. It isn’t enough to win based on ability alone because winning demonstrates the superiority of your political system, which is the ultimate higher purpose. 

It now becomes acceptable, even desirable, to use any means in order to give your nation more gold medals. In that context, using experimental steroids to boost the abilities of your young athletes becomes a justifiable necessity, and the long-term effects on the health of the athletes is simply not a concern for those directing the drama.

Take note that this overall concern that the state or the system is more important than the individual is very much a mentality that the manipulators brought to this planet. It is not something that the original inhabitants of the earth came up with on their own. The original people had competition games, but it was the manipulators who taught them how to create the ultimate competition game, namely war.

What is the underlying mentality here? Why didn’t human beings have war games? Because they had a certain kinship with each other and it was difficult for them to justify killing each other. The manipulators had – and have – no reverence for life in general, but they especially have no sense of kinship with the beings on earth. On the contrary, they look down upon them as being far below them and much less sophisticated. Indeed, when it comes to controlling or destroying others, human beings are far less “sophisticated” than the manipulators.

Seeing your own mental box

Let us add a word of caution. It is very tempting to say that this earth wasn’t too bad until the manipulators came here and they were the ones that really perverted everything. Saying this is actually not far from reality. Yet there is an essential distinction between seeing the reality of what the manipulators have done and then appointing them as scapegoats so you don’t need to look at yourself.

The essential characteristic that allows you to step onto the path of personal Christhood is your willingness to question your mental boxes. The real question is whether knowledge of a certain topic takes you closer to Christhood or further away from it. 

You simply cannot make it on the path of higher awareness unless you recognize the existence of the manipulators and begin to see through their deceptions. Will knowing about the manipulators take you closer to taking full responsibility for yourself, or will it serve only to give you an excuse for not looking at the beam in your own eye? 

The answer, of course, depends on what you do with your knowledge about the manipulators. Or rather, it depends on whether you are willing to see that the manipulators could control human beings only because they took advantage of the psychology that human beings had already developed. Until you begin to see what it is in your psychology that makes you vulnerable to the deception of the manipulators, you have not really started the path to higher awareness.

The path toward Christhood is an ongoing process with many levels. Until you ascend, you will have a mental box. Your progress from any level will be determined by your willingness to question your mental box. The selves and the manipulators will always seek to make you cling to your current mental box.

As you rise on the spiritual path, the mental boxes become more subtle and more difficult to see. Many sincere spiritual seekers have allowed their selves, their friends or the false teachers to make them believe that they have reached a level at which they no longer have or need to question any mental boxes. 

There is not now and there never has been any being in embodiment on earth – no matter how advanced such a one might appear or claim to be – who has had no mental box left. If you truly have no mental box, it is not possible to remain in embodiment in the current density of this planet. 

You will inevitably be pulled up and lose your ability to hold on to the physical body. When Jesus was hanging on the cross and one hairsbreadth away from winning his ascension, he still had to “give up the ghost” of the last remnants of his mental box. As soon as he did indeed give it up, he drew his last breath and left the physical body behind.

Had Jesus not been willing to entertain the possibility that he could have a mental box, what would have happened? He would not have qualified for his ascension! His body would still have died on the cross, but he would have re-embodied to outplay whatever drama he had not been willing to see and surrender. 

Even if you are one decision away from qualifying for your ascension, you still have that last step to take and what might it be? It is precisely that you give up the last mental box, the last illusion based on the consciousness of separation. This is the illusion you took on in order to descend to the 144th level of consciousness.

Another important perspective is that the path of Christhood has several levels. As you rise to a given level, you will be able to see something that was invisible to you before. What you see at the higher level might give you an entirely different perspective on certain elements of life or the spiritual reality.

The selves and the manipulators have set up the dualistic dramas precisely to prevent you from letting go of the old. How can the ascended masters help you escape this? By giving you information that challenges your current mental box. If you insist that your existing view is an absolute truth, then you will obviously have to reject what the masters are saying. 

At the higher levels of Christhood, you begin to see that no knowledge expressed in this world is the absolute or highest truth. There is always a step higher, namely a direct experience of the Spirit of Truth. In order to have the fullness of that experience in the ascension spiral, you must be wiling to give up everything you think you know right now. This does mean everything.

The origin of roles

How does life progress on a dense planet like Earth? As an example, let us look at Europe and let us go back to the stone age. What has been happening in Europe is that there exists a blueprint in higher awareness for how Europe can evolve from the stone age level toward the Age of Higher Awareness.

Over time, many of the people embodying in Europe have tuned in to this blueprint and have brought society forward in a variety of ways. Some have done this with greater self-awareness and have had a clearer vision of the end goal although no one has had the full vision. Others have had less self-awareness but have still made a positive contribution. Even a peasant or factory worker can be making a positive contribution to the overall progress of society.

As society has progressed, it has gone through many phases. Gradually, it has moved toward a greater and greater collective awareness and a greater awareness of the potential to reach an end goal. What we now need to add is that the people who embody in Europe today have done so for many lifetimes. This means that over time they have had the opportunity to embody in many different circumstances and have many different experiences by having different positions in society. 

We might compare this to a theater production in which the actors rotate so that each actor over time plays every role in the play. Naturally, this will increase the actors’ awareness of and appreciation for the overall vision of the play.

As individual co-creators rise in self-awareness, they grasp more and more of the overall vision. This means that at the conscious level, a common vision and goal begins to emerge. People no longer see themselves as disconnected individuals. They see themselves as part of something larger, and this gives them a deeper sense of meaning, purpose and fulfillment. 

We might say that the lifestreams involved with the process move from a separate or localized awareness towards a global awareness. In the beginning, they only work for individual goals, but over time they have enough of playing such roles. They gradually begin to play the roles that more directly work toward the common goal, and they find greater satisfaction in working with others on an overall vision. They move from being apart from the whole toward voluntarily and with full awareness becoming a part of the whole.

The entire purpose of the world of form is the growth in self-awareness of individual lifestreams. A lifestream must start somewhere so it starts out with a very localized sense of self-awareness, for example as a human being on earth who is only concerned about itself and its own desires, needs and wants. For a new lifestream, this is not selfish or egotistical; it is simply a natural way to start the process. As long as the lifestream gradually grows toward an expanded self-awareness – goes from a localized to global awareness – there is nothing wrong with this and it contributes to the growth of the whole.  

When a new lifestream starts its journey in the world of form, it has a very localized, point-like self-awareness. This is comparable in some way to a newborn baby who does not have enough awareness to choose what it wants to be when it grows up. A new co-creator does not have enough self-awareness to define how it wants to express itself. It needs some experience before it can decide this consciously. In order to give it such experience, it is placed in an environment where there is a number of predefined roles.

Compare this to an unexperienced actor who could not walk right into the theater and play Hamlet. He starts out playing a simpler part and gradually takes on more complex roles as his experience with the theater and his self-awareness grows. He might even increase both until he is able to write his own plays and define his own roles. 

The Creator is One—it has an indivisible self-awareness. Out of its own Being, the Creator creates self-aware extensions who do not have the global or universal self-awareness. They start out with a point-like self-awareness but have the potential to expand it until it becomes as global or universal as that of their source. How can this happen? The co-creator must continually expand its self-awareness by seeing itself as part of something greater than its sense of self. 

As its vision of that “something greater” expands, it begins to grasp that it is part of the Creator’s Being, eventually coming into oneness with its higher self. This process can be completed only by moving from a localized self-awareness toward a global self-awareness. There is no other way. 

Only by becoming one with your higher self, can you reach the ultimate level of self-awareness. You cannot reach this with a separate self-awareness, with a self-awareness as being apart from the whole—no matter how complex or seemingly sophisticated that separate self becomes. 

The choice of co-creators

A being with localized awareness can use its co-creative abilities without considering the impact it has on the whole. Its abilities are limited so that its potential to destroy is limited. As it becomes more aware of the whole, its co-creative abilities are expanded because now it is less likely to use them in destructive ways.

The entire material universe is a unit and as co-creators multiply their talents, they will increase the light intensity, which will create an upward momentum. This can be compared to a force of gravity that pulls on everything in the unit. Compare this to the earth where everything on earth is pulled toward the gravitational center and held in place so that it can move with the whole as the earth hurtles through space at incredible speed.

This upward momentum can be called the River of Life or, in Christian terminology, the Holy Spirit. It is created as co-creators transcend their original, localized self-awareness and begin to see themselves as part of a greater whole. We might say that the Holy Spirit is the awareness or vision of an underlying whole that ties all life together into a unit. As the collective vision of that greater whole expands, the gravitational force of the Holy Spirit increases.

The effect is that it now becomes easier for co-creators to expand their self-awareness and see themselves as part of a greater whole. Those who voluntarily and consciously choose to participate in this common process, experience an increased sense of purpose, meaning and fulfillment. This sense of fulfillment is far greater than what can be achieved as a localized individual who sees itself as being apart from the whole.

Taking full responsibility for yourself

We now need to recognize a very important aspect of the growth process. A co-creator starts out by playing a predefined role in a larger unit, such as a civilization on earth. This is much like small children who play “house” in order to practice the roles they take on as adults. As a co-creator plays a variety of roles, two things happen. It gains greater experience with how its sphere works and it increases its self-awareness.

This leads toward a point where the co-creator no longer fully identifies itself with or as the role it is currently playing. A new co-creator is fully identified with its role, as you see some people on earth who are completely identified with their physical bodies. 

As it matures, the co-creator begins to realize it is more than its current role. Eventually, it begins to realize that it is more than any predefined role in its current environment. The co-creator is now ready to take a crucial step on the path toward higher awareness, namely to begin to define its own role instead of simply taking on a role defined by its spiritual teachers.

What is the crucial thing that needs to happen in the mind of the co-creator before it can take this step? It is that the co-creator must make the decision to accept full responsibility for itself, for its own growth, for what on earth might be called its own “salvation.” 

So far, the co-creator has not had to accept this responsibility because it was playing a predefined role. Compare this to an actor who goes on stage with a certain costume and has a predefined script that tells him what to say. Now imagine that an actor is told he has to go on stage and select his own costume and with no predefined script decide what to say. You will see that this can give rise to a new level of performance anxiety.

When you define a role for yourself as part of the whole, playing that role will raise your self-awareness and it will raise the whole. In order to define a role as being apart from the whole, you have to make the decision to stop your growth in self-awareness—and this decision must be justified. How can a self-aware being justify the decision to stop its growth in self-awareness (which is its reason for being)? Only by accepting the belief that it is a victim of something, namely that the whole is seeking to force it rather than seeking to help it grow.

This belief cannot come from the co-creator itself, meaning from the conscious self. It can come only from a “self” based on the illusion of separation and this new self is what becomes the core self or ego. The self was born out of the conscious self’s refusal to take responsibility for defining its own role. The conscious self is still defining its own role, but because it is denying this, it now believes that it has not defined its role but that this role has been forced upon it from without. We might say that the conscious self has still created its own role, but it has not taken responsibility for doing so.

The conscious self could have defined a role and it would have been aware that this was only a role. By learning from playing the role, it could at any time change or expand the role until it eventually transcended the role. When the conscious self defines a role without taking responsibility, it thinks the role was forced upon it. It comes to identify itself with and as the role, thinking it cannot expand it or rewrite the script. It feels stuck in the role instead of seeing it as merely a learning experience. It resists learning from the role, and this means it cannot come to the point where it can transcend the role.

A spiritual teacher has uncompromising respect for free will. When the student decides to define a role based on separation, the teacher cannot pursue or force the student to accept help. The teacher must withdraw and this is what makes the student feel it has been cast out of the Garden of Eden and that there are angels with flaming swords preventing it from coming back. In reality, it is only the student’s unwillingness to take full responsibility for itself that prevents it from coming back to the circle of the teacher’s guidance.

Free will and others

Here, we have a subtle point. Refusing to take full responsibility for defining its own roles is completely within the Law of Free Will. An individual co-creator has the right to do this. What an individual cannot do is to set itself apart from the whole in which it lives. 

A person on earth may rebel against the force of gravity but will still be moving through space along with the earth. An individual co-creator can decide that it wants to stop its own growth, but it cannot ask others to do the same. An individual can stand still but cannot expect or demand that the billions of other co-creators should stand still.

Because the individual is still part of the whole, as the other co-creators expand their self-awareness, they create a stronger momentum of higher awareness that will pull on the individual who stands still. The gravitational pull of the collective momentum of higher awareness creates a pull on the individual, which means it becomes a struggle to uphold and justify the individual’s role as being apart from the whole and the process of growth. This tension between the individual and the whole is what creates a drama in the mind of the individual.

The drama is created because as higher awareness increases, it becomes increasingly difficult for the individual to justify setting itself apart. The selves of the individual must take stronger and stronger measures in order to justify staying apart from the whole. These measures give rise to a series of dramas that are aimed at justifying the individual’s separateness by actually causing other individuals to slow down their growth in awareness.

There a role – predefined or self-defined – in which you see yourself as part of the whole. There is a drama in which you see yourself as apart from the whole. The role has no tension between you and others because no matter how you play it, it contributes to your own growth and to the growth of the whole—it adds to the momentum of higher awareness. The drama has a built-in, inescapable tension between you and others. 

In order to justify your position, you must seek to get others to validate your position. That means causing them to limit their own growth in self-awareness by getting them to likewise take on a drama instead of a role. When you are in a drama, there is constant conflict between yourself and other people. You are, in a sense, seeking to draw the rest of the universe into your drama and make it fit into the mental box defined by the drama.

Dramas and free will

A role is like the normal process of cell-division that leads one cell to grow into a complete human body. A drama is like a cancer that causes cells to self-destruct and then spreads to other cells until the whole body dies. This is the essential difference between roles and dramas. 

When you are playing a role, you do not feel threatened by anything and you can live and let live. When you are playing a drama, you constantly feel threatened. This inevitably leads you into seeking to control other people and your environment. This is also what makes you vulnerable to being pulled into the epic dramas, as we shall see in the next discourse.

In order to understand personal dramas, you need to fully understand free will, and this, of course, is the problem. Those who develop a drama do so precisely because they will not understand and accept how free will works. That is why – once they have stepped into a drama – they will think it was forced upon them and thus they must deny their ability to get out of it by their own power and choosing.

What is the essence of free will? Many people think that if they truly have free will, it means that they can do anything they want, with no restrictions. This view is perfectly correct. You do have free will and God has put no restrictions whatsoever on what you can do inside the energy environment in which you live. In the sandbox of the material universe, you can do anything you want, for nothing you do will hurt the sand.

However, while this view of free will is correct, it is not the complete understanding of free will. The world of form is a learning environment. How do you learn? By using your free will to express your co-creative abilities and then experiencing the result of your choice.

If your choice has no consequence – if there is no feed-back mechanism to signal the difference between choosing one option over a million other options – how can you learn and grow? If you make a choice and there is no feed-back, you have not actually made a choice.

What is the feed-back mechanism built into the world of form? It is that while you have free will, you will experience the consequences of your choices. One way of describing this is to say that the universe is a mirror. The base energy will outpicture physical circumstances that are a reflection of the beliefs, images and feelings you hold in your mind. You will project the images from your mental box upon the energy that will take on the corresponding form.

While you do have free will, you also have full and complete responsibility for the choices you make! Why is this so important? Because when you accept full responsibility for yourself, you know that if a choice gives you unwanted feed-back, you can simply learn from it and make a better choice that will inevitably improve the feed-back! You are thus empowered and will never feel like a victim. You realize that with higher awareness within you, you have the power to change or transcend any circumstance.

The denial of free will

Once you accept a drama, you refuse to take responsibility. This means you no longer believe you have the power to change any circumstance. You believe you are a victim of forces beyond your control, but what is causing this? Only your refusal to take full responsibility for yourself!

This now leads to a further necessity, namely that those who will not take full responsibility for themselves, must rebel against or deny free will. If you do not take full responsibility for yourself, you do not believe you have truly free will, including the power to change any circumstance by changing your state of mind. 

This also means you do not fully respect the free will of others. You will fall prey to the serpentine lie that the ends can justify the means, which means you will seek to control others instead of taking dominion over your sphere of self. You will seek to control others in order to validate the selves’ claim that you do not have to change by taking responsibility for yourself.

Furthermore, you do not respect your own free will, meaning you become open to following an external authority who will tell you what to believe and how to live. You become prone to being a blind follower of the blind leaders. You follow a false teacher rather than the true teacher that you turned your back upon when you refused to take responsibility for yourself. The blind leaders are, of course, those with epic dramas, as we will discuss in the coming discourse.

Why dramas seem real

The essence of a drama is that it is created in order to justify why a being does not take full responsibility for itself. It cannot be seen as merely a drama that is based on unreality and that you can walk away from—like a play in a theater. It must be defended, justified and validated as being based on absolute reality – as being the way life really is – and having a power over you that you cannot overcome by your own strength. You either need an external savior or you need to bring the drama to its ultimate conclusion by forcing others to enter your drama.

Any drama is created from duality, meaning it has two opposites that can only be in conflict. Conflict is built into the drama, which for the personal drama means conflict with other people or your physical environment. This means that people who live in a drama are constantly resisting the River of Life or the Holy Spirit. 

They are resisting the upward momentum of their entire sphere, which no individual and no group (at least not any minority group) has the power to do. This built-in resistance inevitably leads to suffering, which causes people to take themselves too seriously. Once you take yourself and your drama too seriously, it becomes a vicious circle that prevents you from returning to the River of Life through the playfulness of a little child. 

You simply cannot fathom or accept that you can just walk away from the drama. You think the drama must be brought to its self-defined conclusion and that the only way is to apply enough force to overcome the opposition to the drama’s conclusion. 

Because the opposition is created by the drama itself – your resistance to life – no amount of force available to you in the consciousness of the drama can overcome the opposition also created by the drama. Take the scientifically proven law of action and reaction. For every action there is an equal reaction, meaning it has the same force but the opposite direction. This law states that there is no decisive force, for no action can possibly be bigger than its self-generated reaction. 

That is why Jesus said that with men this is impossible, meaning that with the consciousness of a drama, it is not possible to generate a force that propels you out of the drama. Only by reaching for the power of higher awareness from within yourself, can you generate a force that helps you transcend the drama. You can do this only when you let go of the drama, when you are willing to lose your “life” for my sake. Only then will there be a decisive force.

A personal drama will make you vulnerable to being pulled into an epic drama, and the epic drama is far greater than any individual. It is far more difficult for an individual to escape the maelstrom of the epic dramas. Obviously, it can be done, but only when you begin to see the fallacy, the vanity and the unreality of the epic dramas. 

In the next discourse, we will consider the origin of the epic dramas so that you can become wise as the serpents and have the option to choose to be harmless as a dove. An option you do not have while trapped inside the mental box of an epic and a personal drama.

Mental boxes revisited

Let us return to the concept of a mental box. When a new co-creator is created, it has a very localized perspective on the world and on itself. This perspective inevitably forms a mental box. When a new co-creator takes on a predefined role, the being’s mental box will be affected by the role. 

As it transcends the role, it transcends the mental box of the role but may carry certain elements with it that it has incorporated into its personal mental box. This is not necessarily wrong, as the role is defined to facilitate the growth of the co-creator and thus contains timeless elements.

As long as a co-creator sees itself as part of a larger whole and is striving to expand its self-awareness, the mental box is not really a problem as it is constantly being expanded. As long as you constantly expand your mental box, any mental box can eventually be transcended so you reach the ascended state. A mental box simply gives the co-creator a foundation for functioning in the world while expanding its sense of self.

The problem comes in when a co-creator decides not to take full responsibility and creates a role as being apart from the whole. This role obviously necessitates the creation of another mental box, but this box is created by the selves and the selves are fully identified with it. To the selves, the defense of the mental box is a matter of life and death.

As long as a being has no drama, the being is not fully identified with its mental box. It has no need to hold on to an old mental box because it is constantly experiencing that expanding the box leads to a greater sense of self and a richer life. 

In this state, the conscious self is not fully identified with the box and eventually comes to realize it is more than any mental box on earth. The box is a means to an end, not an end in itself. This is what Jesus meant when he said that unless you become as a little child – eager to expand its mental box – you cannot enter the kingdom.

When a being creates a personal drama, the conscious self retreats into a cave and now lets the selves take over its interactions with the world. You are no longer relating to the world as pure awareness but only through the filter of the drama, namely the selves that spring from the drama. The selves are indeed fully identified with the mental box as they would have no life without it. The selves will defend your mental box to the death, even to the death of your physical body as proven by many people on earth. 

The conscious self – you – must take back full responsibility for your life and stop identifying with the mental box created by the selves and the manipulators. The catch-22 is that a mental box based on duality makes it difficult for you to even hear, let alone accept, this truth. The mental box of the selves has layers of built-in defenses designed to prevent you from taking back full responsibility for your life. 

After spending many lifetimes in the selves’ mental box, it can truly be very difficult for students to come to see the beam in their own eyes. It is so easy to accept the arguments presented by the selves and the false teachers. Just look at how many used their mental boxes to reject Jesus 2,000 years ago. Nevertheless, the true teachers of humankind are not deterred. They continue to release their core message in many different versions, knowing that for each time, some will understand.