Some students have a tendency to want to argue or reason with the selves or their own mind. On one hand it is necessary to use the reasoning faculty of the mind to see inconsistencies in your world view or perception filter. On the other hand you can never actually out-reason or outsmart the selves. They will just keep reasoning indefinitely and it becomes a closed loop that gets you nowhere.

Everyone who has taken embodiment on Earth and have ascended has gone through that same process. The masters have ascended because they learned a better way of dealing with the enigma, the riddle, presented by the duality consciousness. The basic challenge presented by duality is that it always has two opposites so it seems like you are “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

There are people on Earth who are so immersed in having the experience of acting as separate beings that they almost have no self-awareness. Self-awareness means the ability to mentally step outside your current frame of mind, look at yourself and ask some questions, such as: “Why is my life this way?” “Why does this keep happening to me?” “Why do I keep acting/feeling/thinking like this?” These people are not reasoning about themselves and their lives at all.

Then there are other people who eventually have had so many experiences as separate beings – and who have experienced the struggle and suffering that inevitably follows from seeing yourself as a separate being – that they reach a saturation point. They then start asking questions, such as the ones above. They basically ask the question: “Does life have to be this way or could it be more than what I am experiencing right now?”

What is it that can ask such questions? It is not the selves because the selves are more like a computer that follows predefined programming. The selves can indeed ask questions, but they are always within the framework defined by their programming. If a self is programmed to seek power, it might ask how to get more power, but it will not be able to ask whether there is more to life than seeking power on Earth. 

Only the conscious self can ask such questions because it can never quite forget that before it went into separation it had something that is now lost. That “something” was, of course, its conscious connection to its higher self and spiritual teacher.

Consider why this part of your being is called the “conscious self” or “conscious you.”  The “you” part indicates that this is actually the core of your sense of identity in this world. The “Conscious” part indicates that in this world you are who you think you are, you are who you are conscious of being. One can say that when the conscious self is sent into this world, it has no predefined identity. It is the ongoing task of the conscious self to define who it wants to be, who it wants to see itself as being, how it wants to be conscious of itself. 

The conscious self starts out by defining who it wants to be in the material world. It has experiences based on how it defines itself, and then it gradually raises its sense of identity until it can no longer be contained in the material world. 

The conscious self is first conscious of itself as a being living in the material world, and it eventually becomes conscious of itself as being so much more that it can no longer see itself in the material world. That is when you ascend. We might say that the conscious self starts out by saying: “I am this” and then it eventually realizes: “I am not this, I am more than this.”

The Earth is currently a low planet that is dominated by beings trapped in duality. This means that for anyone taking embodiment here, the basic challenge is how to deal with those who are stuck in duality and who will either attack you or in other ways seek to draw you into their dualistic games.

In any such situation you have two options. The basic reality of the situation is that the duality consciousness, symbolized by the serpent that tempted Eve, will present you with a challenge that you cannot handle with your present level of self-awareness. Your options are:

• Expand your sense of self-awareness by reaching for the higher awareness perspective on the situation. This is what the conscious self is meant to do, namely expand your circle of awareness.
• Decide that you do not want to expand your sense of self and you do not want to deal with the situation based on your current sense of self. You basically don’t want to be conscious of the situation.

If you take the first option, you demonstrate that you are ready for a teacher and by cosmic law a teacher must then appear to you. You will be able to expand your sense of self and deal with the situation without having any division in your being. 

In an ideal scenario, a new lifestream will descend with a limited but whole self-awareness. We can compare your self-awareness to a circle. When you first take embodiment, your circle is very small and as you experience the material world, you will ideally expand your circle. You become more and more conscious and you gain a stronger and stronger sense of who you are. As long as your circle of self is unbroken, you have a sense of personal wholeness and this allows you to meet the world with a sense of peace and integrity. 

Now look at the second option described above. When the conscious self decides that it does not want to be conscious of a particular situation, it is basically refusing to do what it is designed to do. What is it designed to do? It is designed to descend to Earth and define itself based on the Christ mind, based on its connection to its higher self and regardless of what it experiences in this world. 

You are meant to expand your circle of self while being able to keep it undivided in the face of the onslaughts of duality. This is higher awareness or Christhood. What the forces of this world are seeking to do is to get the conscious self to define itself in relation to the conditions in this world. They are seeking to force you to react to them by launching such a severe attack on you that you simply do not want to deal with it.

The conscious self cannot stop being conscious. What it does instead is that it creates a division in the “self” aspect. It creates a new self to deal with duality, it creates a self defined in relation to whatever it has encountered in this world—where everything is influenced by duality. This is the original selves. The conscious self has now created a pair of separate selves inside its circle of self. The inevitable consequence is that you are now a “house divided against itself,” meaning you have lost your previous sense of wholeness.

At first, this will feel like a loss, symbolized by the story of how Adam and Eve felt naked and felt bereft when they had been “cast out” of paradise. Over time the conscious self can become less conscious of this loss, and here is how this happens. 

The selves are created from duality, which means they have a fundamental division from the very beginning. You cannot create just one self; you have to create two. Every time you meet a new situation and deals with it through the selves, you create two new aspects of the selves. Over time, you create numerous such selves and whenever you encounter a certain type of situation, one of these selves takes over your reaction to the situation.

The net effect is that the more divisions or selves you create, the more confused your sense of self becomes. This means you gradually lose the initial sense that there was a contrast between being whole and being divided into two. You now have so many divisions that this seems like the normal state and wholeness has almost been forgotten. You still have a longing for wholeness, but you don’t actually realize it is wholeness for which you are longing. 

We can also say that although the conscious self cannot stop being conscious, it can choose how it wants to be conscious. It can choose to enter into a separate self and experience life or a given situation through the perception filter of that self. 

One obvious example is black-and-white thinking where people have created a self that defines a clear division between right and wrong. If they do what is right, they can feel almost whole in being, for example “good Christians.” They can then ignore the need to reach for a higher perspective and expand their self-awareness through the mind of Christ. Instead, you experience yourself through the perception filter that you are a good Christian who will be saved by Jesus so you don’t have to look at the beam in your own eye and expand your sense of self.

The reality is, of course, that the more divisions you create, the more struggle you will experience. The more selves you have, the more inroads will the “prince of this world” have in order to force you to react. This means your life becomes more of a struggle, and eventually it will become so intense that the conscious self reaches a moment where the intensity of its life experience causes it to step outside its normal perception filter and ask itself: “Is there more to life than this?”

At that moment a teacher will appear and give you a frame of reference for taking the first step on the path back to wholeness. The selves and the forces of duality will do everything possible to derail your progress on this path. One avenue is to make you believe you can be saved or ascend by following an outer path. You do certain outer things and this will give you entry into a higher realm without you having to expand your sense of self and take back your willingness to be conscious of everything. 

The very purpose of the conscious self is to expand its circle of consciousness by consciously interacting with the material world. The only way to actually exit the material world is to expand your circle of consciousness until it goes beyond the boundaries of the material world. 

When your circle of self is too large to fit into the material universe – or rather into any of the illusions created by the duality consciousness – you will ascend by making a conscious choice to let go of any attachment to this world. In order to expand your circle of self, you must be willing to look at more and more until you have looked at everything in the material world and decided: “I am more than this.”

How the conscious self decides to be unconscious

What exactly is it that causes the conscious self to want to stop being conscious or wanting not to be conscious of a certain situation? When a lifestream takes embodiment on a planet where there is still room for the duality consciousness, it will inevitably encounter beings trapped in duality. This is what is symbolized by Eve encountering the serpent. 

These beings will feel threatened by an innocent lifestream, and they will do anything they can to take away your innocence and cause you to go into duality. This might involve attacking you, ridiculing you, accusing you, tempting you or any number of subtle schemes. The very fact that you have not ascended shows that you did respond to this and entered duality, creating your selves.

As just one example, many spiritual people volunteered to descend to Earth in order to bring light here. They were then viscously attacked as you saw Jesus being attacked. One possible reaction is that this was painful to the conscious self and you decided that you simply did not want to be conscious of this. You then created the selves to deal with these attacks, and one possible design of your selves can be that they are programmed to fight the attackers and prove them wrong. 

What keeps you tied to Earth is that you still have a desire to prove certain people wrong and prove yourself right. Now, why is that a problem? 

The conscious self was designed to descend with a small circle of self and gradually expand it. How do you expand your circle? By becoming more conscious, and how do you do that? By looking at something you have not yet looked at. How do you look at something new? By having experiences on Earth. When the conscious self decides that there is something it does not want to look at – assigning the selves to deal with it – then the conscious self suspends its potential to grow.

Contrary to what the selves want you to believe, you can grow from absolutely any situation you might encounter on Earth. There is nothing so low or humiliating that it cannot be turned into a growth experience. There are examples of people who have gone very far down into what can be seen as low experiences, for example substance abuse, but have finally come to see what they have done and then see that this experience cannot define them because they are more than this. These people have indeed made spiritual progress from the experience, even though most people would say the experience was not spiritual.

The conscious self is meant to come into embodiment and identify itself as a limited self, experiencing the world through that self. It is meant to have a certain amount of experiences through this self, until it looks at its situation and decides: “I am not this, I am more than this.” At that moment, you have expanded your circle of self. You may take on a new self that is still limited, but as you transcend that, you once again expand your circle of self. You keep doing this until your circle of self goes beyond the boundaries of the material world.

What is the core of this process? It is that you become conscious of the fact that you are more than the self through which you are experiencing the world. You become conscious of this only by looking at your situation – through neutral self-observation – and seeing that there is more to life than what you are experiencing right now. 

The selves will seek to derail this process by setting up a value judgment that some experiences are wrong. There are certain experiences you should never have had or that are not fit for a spiritual student so you should deny having had them instead of honestly looking at them. The selves give you the impression that you can be saved by fulfilling the outer requirements rather than looking into your own subconscious mind. 

As long as you believe in this value-laden judgment after appearances, it will be painful for you to look at your subconscious mind. Many people seek to avoid it until outer circumstances force them to look. If you truly integrate the teachings on the selves, the conscious self can rise above this feeling of pain, remorse, regret, shame, embarrassment and what have you.

You can consciously decide that looking at anything in the material world is your opportunity to grow by coming to realize: “I am not this, I am more than this.” You can consciously decide that you are willing to look at anything and everything, and when you do so, the selves and the prince of this world will have lost most of their power over you. 

The selves can only hide when there is something – some division – in your circle of self that you are not willing to look at. The ascended masters will not put you down but will help you see that you are more than anything on Earth. That is why the truth will set you free—the truth that you are pure awareness and cannot be defined by anything on Earth.

The role of reason

Let us consider the role of reason. The question is how the conscious self can ever escape duality once it has stepped into a separate self that colors the way it sees everything. This has two aspects. One is that the conscious self must have a frame of reference showing that there is more to life, there is something outside its perception filter. 

It is the role of the Living Christ, meaning any true spiritual teacher, to provide people with such a frame of reference. This was one of the main reasons for Jesus’ embodiment 2,000 years ago, namely to demonstrate that it is possible for a human being to do more than most human beings think is possible. 

The other aspect is, however, that the conscious self must use its inherent ability to reason. First of all, you can only recognize a teacher when you are open, and you can only become open by using your reasoning ability to consciously ask the question of whether there is more to life than the mess created by the duality consciousness. 

Recognizing a teacher is an experience that is beyond reason. But what you do with that experience is very much a matter of using reasoning faculties. Here you will be helped by the fact that the deeper you go into duality, the more you will have observed the divisions of duality and the inevitable contradictions and inconsistencies. For example, many spiritual seekers have seen the inconsistencies in black-and-white thinking and can quickly step up to also seeing them in gray thinking. 

Once you have had a direct experience of contact with the teacher, you can use that as a frame of reference for sharpening your reasoning ability. This does not mean you are reasoning through the duality consciousness.

You can use your reasoning ability to expose the divisions of your lower being, you can expose the different selves. You can come to see that a self always has an opposite polarity and instead of deciding that one is right and the other is wrong, you can reason that both are unreal and must simply be transcended.

Let us look at an example. A fundamentalist Christian is stuck in black-and-white thinking. He believes that only members of his church will go to heaven and all others will go to hell. This is obviously black-and-white or either-or reasoning. There are only two options with nothing in between.

This mindset is openly dualistic because it has a clear division into two extremes. Why was this mindset created? Out of the selves’ need for some kind of absolute security. How is this mindset created? By creating two spirits. 

If the conscious self steps into the perception filter of seeing itself as a fundamentalist Christian, it will now look at everything through the perception filter of these two selves. One self defines a set of conditions that you must fulfill in order to be one of the good people who are guaranteed to be saved. The other self defines a set of mistakes you can make that will take you out of being a good Christian and instead condemn you to an eternity of torment in hell. 

The conscious self is now trapped between a rock and a hard spot, between these two selves. It is true that as long as you believe you are living up to the conditions for going to heaven, you can feel somewhat secure. At the same time you can never escape the threat of making a mistake that will condemn you to hell. Your entire attention is eaten up by the threat of going to hell and the constant need to affirm that you belong to the good people. This is a constant state of tension that truly is hell on Earth. 

Most fundamentalists would deny that they are in torment, but that is because they have other selves that have caused them to come to see their state of division and tension as “normal.” When you are divided enough, you think the division is the norm and wholeness is either non-existent or impossible.

Many spiritual teachings have the same kind of division between what it means to be good and bad. Even students of ascended master teachings have often used the teachings to define this division between what it means to be a good student and not to be a good student. The result is that you are now constantly trapped by the selves’ need to judge everything based on the appearances defined by your standard. Again, this creates a constant tension.

You can come to a point of recognizing the contrast between the tension you normally have in your own mind and the infinite peace you have in higher awareness, in the Christ mind. You can then long for this peace, and you can use your reasoning faculties to see that the tension is caused by the divisions of the selves. You can begin to become conscious of these divisions, and when you do expose two opposing selves and see that one will never eradicate the other, you can see the futility of this never-ending struggle. You can see it as the “vanities of vanities, all is vanity.” 

You can then decide that you do not want your life to be eaten up by this nonsense, and once the conscious self truly sees that both selves are unreal, it will instantly separate itself from them. The “magic” of the conscious self is that it is who it thinks it is, it is who it sees itself as being. You may see yourself through the filter of a pair of selves, but once you step back and see the selves for what they are, you see that you are not the selves: “I am not this, I am more than this.” 

We might say that the duality consciousness, the prince of this world or the demons of Mara are constantly trying to tempt you to enter into a sense of identity defined in relation to them, to the illusions of the duality consciousness. They are trying to get you to step into a self and say: “I am this.” 

This self always has an opposite so you are always saying: “I am this but I am not that.” Your challenge is to experience the world through a given self until you have had enough of that experience and say: “I am not this and I am not that; I am more than both.” 

You might then go into another pair of selves and experience the world through that for a time. Eventually you begin to realize that all of the selves in this world are unreal and you begin to long for something more, namely your higher self. 

You can come to a point where you realize: “I am not any of the selves in this world” and you experience what can be called pure awareness. That is when you experience that the conscious self has no predefined identity. You realize: “I AM, and I don’t have to be any ‘I am’ defined in this world.” You can then look within, discover your higher self and say “I AM that I AM,” or as Jesus said: “I and my father are one.” You can then take the next step of saying: “My father worketh hitherto and I work,” meaning the conscious self is now an open door for the higher self without having any identity defined based on duality. You are expressing your non-dual identity.

What the forces of duality want you to believe is that you either cannot express your true identity in this world, that you are not allowed to do so or that doing so will mean the loss of your individuality. The selves desperately want the conscious self to believe that if it gave up the selves, it would have no individuality left. 

In a sense this is true because the conscious self has no inherent individuality. The very task of the conscious self is to define who it wants to be in this world. The two options are to define your individuality based on the duality of the consciousness of separation or the oneness of the consciousness of Christ. One leading to a contraction of your circle of self and one leading to an expansion of the sense of self.

Most people who are open to these teachings can quickly come to see some of the divisions of the selves. For example, you might be able to see how you have used a spiritual teaching to define a standard for how you have to behave. You can then see that you have one self who is constantly judging other people according to this standard. When you look more closely, you will see that you have another spirit who is constantly judging you based on this standard. 

You might even see that the standard is impossible to live up to, meaning you are effectively condemning yourself to living the rest of your life with a sense that you are not good enough. Or you might feel you are good enough because you are better than those other people who have this or that fault. Even then your entire attention is eaten up by this judgment, and is that really the way you want to spend the rest of this lifetime, having to come back and do it all over again until you see the unreality of the struggle and consciously decide to simply walk away from it?

Again, you can get very far by reasoning, but you also need to realize through a direct experience that you cannot out-reason the selves. The selves can reason only by using the duality consciousness, and there is no final argument possible in duality. The selves can always refute any argument you come up with and convince themselves that they are right. Other people can always refute any argument you come up with and convince themselves that they are right. It is simply a matter of how long the conscious self will find this struggle to be real or important.

Reasoning can help you expose the contradictions between the two selves, and it can help you realize that you are constantly trapped in a very limited state of consciousness. Only when the conscious self becomes fully conscious that it is more than this aspect of the selves, will you actually have separated yourself from them. 

That is why it is important to realize that there is no final argument in the duality consciousness. You cannot reason with your selves. It is not a matter of convincing a self that it is wrong. It is a matter of helping the conscious self see that both selves are unreal, and you can simply walk away from them without having to solve the problem that they seem to define.

You don’t have to solve the problem defined by the selves

There is one self that defines a certain problem and then there is another self who defines how you must solve it. They both project that you have to do something to solve the problem. You can spend many lifetimes thinking you are actually a good or advanced person who is selflessly working to solve some of the world’s problems, but in reality you are simply working to “solve” problems that have no existence outside the duality consciousness. You are like Don Quixote fighting the windmills.

You can eventually spend so many lifetimes in this frame of mind that you see the futility of it. You see that it will never end and you use your reasoning to say that there must be a better way. This then opens you up to having the direct experience where the conscious self steps outside the entire perception filter of problems and problem solving. You realize you are more than this and that you simply don’t want to do this anymore. You walk away from the problems, leaving them seemingly unsolved.

For many people it will take a long time to get to that point. Once you have stepped into an selves-based identity, you can almost fall in love with that selves-based mind. You can come to see it as being very clever for being able to define these problems and the solution to them. 

All who have ascended have spent lifetimes being so in love with their own minds that they used all of their energy and attention on trying to solve the problems that their minds had defined. They didn’t make progress by doing this, but they did made progress when they saw the futility of it and decided they were more than this problem-creating/problem-solving mind that truly does become a closed system.

The enigma is that in order to express itself in or experience this world, the conscious self has to create a self, but no matter how sophisticated this self becomes, it still has to be given up in order for you to ascend. You will not ascend until you give up trying to do what the self was designed to do and simply leave it behind.

Part of the purpose for the conscious self descending into embodiment is to have experiences. It is not the conscious self who actually has a particular experience. The conscious self is pure awareness so it simply witnesses what happens on Earth—it does not experience it. Ponder the difference between experiencing something and witnessing it. It is the outer self that experiences a situation by superimposing a certain mental image upon it, giving rise to certain feelings.

Beyond the outer self, your higher self also experiences what you encounter on Earth. It obviously does not experience a situation through the filter of the outer self, but it does experience a situation through its (your) spiritual individuality. This is what becomes part of your causal body. The entire purpose for creating an outer self is to have a certain type of experience, which the higher self then turns into something of enduring value. 

Take note of the subtlety. In order for you to have a certain experience, for example that you are a powerful warrior, it has to seem real. The outer self incorporates the feeling that it has to do something that is real and important. While you have not had enough of the experience, the conscious self will think that it is necessary to fulfill the task that the outer self was designed to accomplish. The task has no significance, indeed it has no reality. The conscious self will be free only when it sees this and gives up the desire to fulfill the outer task, thereby giving up the ghost of the outer self.

Once the higher self has gotten everything it wants from a specific outer self, it only wants the conscious self to give it up and move on. The challenge of coming into embodiment is that the conscious self can become stuck in, attached to, a certain outer self. It might even become attached to trying to take it into heaven with it. You will indeed have to give up all these ghosts in order to ascend.

Feeling you are doing something important

For many spiritual seekers it is very important to feel they are doing something to improve the world. Many lifestreams did indeed choose to descend to Earth in order to help improve conditions here. Yet you need to find this point where you are fulfilling your reason for being here without being trapped in duality.

One could say that you are not here to “do” something as much as you are here to be the open door for the light. Consider the old analogy of how you can remove darkness from a room. Can you stuff it into boxes and then throw the boxes out the window? No, because darkness has no substance so how can you stuff it into boxes? Darkness is not a substance in itself but the absence of light. You cannot remove the darkness by thinking you have to do something to the darkness. You simply have to bring the light and then people can see the darkness and see its unreality.

Where the analogy breaks down is that in this world, beings trapped in duality have managed to create the impression, the appearance, that the darkness has substance and very complex structures. Many lifestreams did not fall here and did not choose to take embodiment in order to experience duality. They chose to come to Earth in order to help raise the collective consciousness. 

The reality is that such lifestreams were all viciously rejected and put down by beings trapped in duality. They have often been trapped into thinking that in order to set people free from the conditions that trap them in this world, they have to somehow solve the problems they see in this world. The beings trapped in duality will attack you and accuse you of doing something. This attack is based on their definition that it is wrong to be doing this. 

As an example, when Jesus walked the Earth 2,000 years ago, he declared myself to be a son of God and was then accused of blasphemy. He could have entered a struggle to disprove the claim that people are not sons and daughters of God. He could have attempted to solve the problem that says you are not a son of God and that you are not allowed to declare yourself as such. 

This could never have been done. People who are seeing the world through that particular perception filter will never actually acknowledge any argument one could possibly make. In reality, you can never prove them wrong in a way they would accept. You could never free them from the illusion, you could never solve the problem.

What you can do is to challenge certain viewpoints in a general way so that those who are open can use their reasoning faculties. Then you can be an open door for higher awareness that will gradually cause the darkness to fade away so people can more easily see the unreality of the dualistic illusions. 

You need to avoid becoming attached to changing the minds of specific people by disproving specific illusions. Instead, you remain non-attached to specific results of your efforts and simply work to increase the light and awareness. Those who have become open on their own accord can then take advantage of the increase in light and make quicker progress.

Why you can’t disprove a particular illusion 

Many of the more aware people are baffled by the fact that there are certain people that you simply cannot reason with. They are thinking that if they cannot convince another person of what they know to be right, it must be because they are not good enough at presenting an argument and thus they have to change themselves. 

This reaction is very understandable and very common. Those who have ascended have all spent lifetimes trying to change other people, yet they eventually saw the futility of it and simply gave up that ghost.

What makes this very difficult to understand for spiritual people is that you did not choose that you wanted to go into duality in order to have some of the experiences you can only have when you see yourself as a separate being. You look at people who are trapped in duality and you see how their lives are a struggle. 

Since you know that you would never want to be in this state of struggle, you assume that they also want to be free of it. You then see that what makes their lives a struggle is that they believe in a certain illusion. You think that if you could disprove their illusion, they would welcome your exposé, would admit their error and then become free. 

This is a very understandable line of reasoning, but unfortunately it is also completely out of touch with what is going on in the minds of these people. They entered duality because they wanted to have a certain type of experience, and they have not had enough of that experience. 

You think they are suffering, but they actually want to experience the struggle and they have not had enough of that experience. When you try to expose the illusion that justifies their struggle, they become very hostile and might even accuse you of all kinds of things, including that you are violating their free will. 

If you are deliberately trying to change their minds – because you think they should no longer have the experience they want to have – you are in a sense violating their free will. If you simply demonstrate that it is possible to live without their illusion, you are not violating them because they can ignore you. 

If you deliberately seek to change them, then you are in a sense interfering with the experience they want to have and that they have a right to have for as long as they want it. That is why it is important to realize that you can give people an example, but you cannot seek to force them. The teacher is only allowed to appear when the student is ready. You can lead a man to water, but you cannot make him drink.

What exactly is it that people do in order to reject an argument? For example, Jesus did challenge the scribes, Pharisees, moneychangers and temple priests so what was going on in their minds that caused them to reject him? What was the mechanism that made it possible for them to reject the Living Christ?

There is a subtle mechanism. There is a power elite of people on this Earth who for millennia have been trying to enslave the population and keep them trapped in illusions. They will do anything to keep the people from having a frame of reference. Many among the people are actually ready for a spiritual teacher but the power elite will try to prevent the teacher from appearing in a physical form. Once you have attained a certain degree of Christhood, it is lawful to challenge the elite because you have the right to help those among the people who are ready.

This requires a delicate balance because you must be able to challenge the elite without becoming involved in a dualistic battle with them. You must never become attached to changing their minds. You basically need to be aware that you are not challenging the elite in order to change them but in order to help the people who are ready to rise above the illusions used by the elite to enslave them. 

Unfortunately, many sincere and well-meaning spiritual seekers think it is their job to challenge the elite before they have attained sufficient Christhood. The result is that they will either be psychologically hurt or they will become involved in a dualistic struggle that does not increase the light on this planet but only solidifies the dualistic illusion.

What makes it possible for people in duality to reject any argument, even one coming from the Christ mind? The underlying reality is that all life is one. When you have some measure of Christ consciousness, you know that you are an extension of higher awareness. You know all other people are also extensions of higher awareness, meaning all are part of the Body of God on Earth. 

You therefore know that if you kill another human being, you are killing part of the whole, meaning you are killing part of yourself. This is the reality behind my statement to “do unto others.” The reason is that due to oneness, what you do to others you are doing to yourself.

As long as you have this awareness, there are certain things you simply cannot do and certain experiences you cannot have. How can you have the experience of being a pirate who indiscriminately fights and kills others to get loot? How can you have the experience that you are better than others or have power over them so they do what you say instead of getting directions from their higher selves?

It is not necessary to have such experiences in order to expand your sense of self, but it is possible to have such experiences within the Law of Free Will. There are many planets in the universe where the collective consciousness has been raised to the point where no one desires to experience separation. There are still lifestreams who have not had enough of this experience, and Earth is one of the planets where this is still allowed. Of course, the power elite do not want people to know this fact. Earth is one planet where it is allowed for lifestreams to have the experience of being separate beings. 

The hope is that they will eventually have had enough of the experience and want something more, which does happen for most lifestreams. Now consider what makes it possible to have the experience that you are a separate being and that you can “do unto others” without doing unto yourself. 

The reality is that all life is one so you can never be a separate being. You can only have the experience that you are a separate being, but that experience can happen only inside your own mind. The question is what makes this illusion possible and believable, and the answer is the consciousness of separation (the opposite of oneness). It is also called the duality consciousness because in order to go out of oneness, you must create a division into two opposite polarities.

The selves make it seem believable that you are a separate being and that all people are not individualizations of higher awareness.  The reality is that all people are one and came from the same source. If you have the all-encompassing awareness of the Christ mind, you see this. 

What does the consciousness of separation do? It obscures the all-encompassing reality of the Christ mind by blocking out certain aspects of reality, defining them as unreal, non-existent or non-important. The Christ mind makes you see everything, but the selves blocks out many things from your view. 

We can say that the Christ mind makes you see all 360 degrees of the circle of life, but the selves blocks out many of the degrees so you have a narrower perspective. The fewer degrees you can see, the more you think you are a separate being and thus can hurt others without hurting yourself. 

Imagine that you have an encyclopedia that contains all knowledge. The selves then blocks your awareness of some of the volumes of that encyclopedia so you have a limited view of the world. Then they try to make you believe that your view is either the full view or the only right view and thus you can feel completely justified in acting based on this view, ignoring all contrary evidence.

Again, all people are extensions of higher awareness and thus all have equal value in the Christ mind. None of the characteristics you see on Earth (religion, sex, nationality, ethnicity and so forth) have any reality in the Christ mind. The mind of separation divides humanity up into separate compartments that are different in a fundamental way. 

The Jews believed (and some still believe) that Jews were created differently from other people and that this was done by God. They were chosen by God to go to heaven whereas all others were chosen to go to hell. In Jesus’ mission in ancient Israel, he attempted to challenge this view but it was rejected by many, especially the leaders who had not had enough of the sense of superiority this gave them.

The selves justify that you see yourself as a separate being and that you have the right to act in a certain way that actually harms others. They justify this by blocking out certain knowledge, a certain field of view, and this is what makes your experience seem real, even justified according to God’s plan. 

The selves do this by creating the illusion that your selective view is not limited but is reality. It is the view held by God or it is the laws of nature. Whatever the reasoning used by the selves, the claim is that what is simply a very limited illusion has some kind of unquestionable authority. 

Questioning this view is dangerous or it is insanity and it carries some kind of ultimate penalty. The effect is that once the conscious self steps into the perception filter of such a limited view, such a self, it simply will not be able to see any validity whatsoever to any arguments questioning what it sees as beyond questioning.

When the Living Christ appears and challenges your selective view, the very arguments that are used to make your world view seem beyond questioning are also the very arguments that people will use to reject the Living Christ. Once the Christ enters this world, he or she can only speak in words, and those trapped in duality can easily argue against any statement made in words. That is why you can never come up with an argument that will convince such people. They have rejected it before you have spoken it.

The only people you can help are those who have – by having had enough of the experience and using their own reasoning to begin questioning it – started to consciously long for something more. They can recognize that the Living Christ is more than the words being said and also carries a spiritual light that is beyond duality. By acknowledging this inner experience of the light, they can then take the teachings of the Living Christ and use their reasoning to begin questioning their illusions. 

When you realize this, you can avoid the trap of becoming involved with a dualistic struggle against other people. However, to fully do this, you need to recognize what can be a hard truth. Many spiritual people want to believe that those who are open to a spiritual teaching, have reached a certain level of consciousness and are beyond the dualistic struggle. Once you put a teaching into the physical realm in books or on websites, anyone can find it, regardless of their level of consciousness.

It is entirely possible that people will find a valid spiritual teaching, but their selves will cause them to use the teaching to solidify the basic world view of the selves rather than transcending that view. That is why it is possible for people to take even an ascended master teaching and project a meaning upon it that simply justifies their desire to continue struggling against other people, making themselves feel superior by putting down other people.

Selves and the the 144 levels of consciousness

There are 144 different levels of consciousness that it is possible to have while being in embodiment on Earth. Theoretically, the spiritual path is a process of rising from lower to higher states, until you reach the 144^th level where you can ascend. 

There are, however, three important divisions of the 144 levels. A new lifestream that descends to Earth for the first time will not descend at the lowest level but at the 48^th level. It will then be offered the path towards attaining Christhood by a spiritual teacher whereby it can go through the initiations and rise to the 96^th level. From there is can enter the path of expressing its Christhood, which it must largely do on its own, even though it still has access to a spiritual teacher.

Today, the Earth has, of course, gone below the ideal scenario. The spiritual path can be seen as a process for rising above the illusions of duality, defined at all 144 levels. A new lifestream descends with a limited self-awareness but a clear connection to something higher than itself. If a lifestream decides to follow its teacher, it will rise to the 96^th level. If it decides to leave the teacher, it descends below the 48^th level. 

Based on this, we can talk about three levels of selves. Between level 1 and 48 you have selves that are what many people clearly see as ego. They make people selfish, makes them believe they have the right to force others, even that doing so is justified by some ultimate cause. 

The lower you go, the more selfish people are, but they often manage to camouflage this by appearing to work for an ultimate cause. That is why certain world leaders have had the ability to mesmerize people and get them to follow them blindly while thinking they are working for God’s cause. Of course, those who blindly follow a leader demonstrate that they have not taken responsibility for themselves.

This lowest level of the selves is what clearly limits you and binds you to an ongoing struggle against others. Even if you claim to be working for a good cause, you are still struggling to get others to accept your cause. 

Now comes another subtle distinction. When you rise to the 48^th level, you will become open to being instructed by the ascended masters. At this level you still have selves, but it is not the openly selfish selves of the lower level. Given current conditions on Earth, the selves you have between the 48^th and the 96^th level are somewhat beneficial to your growth. 

Today, the collective consciousness on this planet is very heavily dominated by the lowest level of the selves. In order to follow the path, you must free yourself from the downward gravitational pull of the mass consciousness. Otherwise you would be living your entire life as the majority of the people do and ignore the spiritual path.

At this stage of the path, you have risen above the tendency to use overt force to get other people to comply with your vision, but you have not risen above the tendency to use psychic force. This is much more subtle, and many well-meaning spiritual seekers are exercising such force without seeing it as coming from the selves. As you rise towards the 96^th level, you begin to overcome this and paradoxically you actually do this by spiritualizing your selves.

Take note of how subtle this is. You are indeed rising above the lower aspects of the selves. For example, in order to rise from the 74^th level to the 75^th level, the selves that corresponds to the 74^th level will die. Because you are striving to rise above the mass consciousness, you will also be building a sense that it is important for you to be different from other people. This will almost inevitably cause you to build selves based on the sense that because you are so diligently following this advanced teaching and passing these initiations, you are rising above the mass consciousness and this makes you somehow more advanced than most people.

We can say that in the process of overcoming the lowest level of the selves, you actually build more sophisticated and subtle selves. Indeed, you are becoming more advanced than most people because you have risen to a higher level of consciousness. The selves will impose a value judgment upon this and make most people believe that they are now superior to other people, meaning those other people should follow them as spiritual leaders.

Indeed, it would be beneficial for most people to follow a spiritual teacher who has risen to the 96^th level, for it is far above the 48^th level and below. Having risen to the 96^th level does not make you free of selves, and if you begin to think that you are free of all selves – because you are free of the lower aspects – then you can become entrapped by another form of selves and even fall below the 48^th level.

The challenge above the 96^th level is to solve the enigma that even though you have risen above the consciousness of most people, you are not better than them and they have no obligation to follow you nor do you have a right to demand this. This is embodied in Jesus’ statement: “He who would be greatest amongst you, let him be the servant of all.” 

We might say that in order to rise from below the 48^th level to the 96^th level, you have to build a new sense of self as a spiritual being. In order to rise from the 96^th to the 144^th level, you must now gradually give up this sense of self and let it die. That is why Jesus said that those who seek to save their selves-based lives will lose them whereas those who are willing to lose their lives for Christ’s sake shall find eternal life.

As you approach the 144^th level you do in a sense become more different from most people, yet you actually come to see the oneness of all life, and thus you do not set yourself apart from them. Instead, you seek to serve them based on the considerations about free will and assisting people in their growth without forcing them in any way. 

By reaching back to the concept of the Alpha and Omega, the what and the how of your mission, we can say that you become non-attached to specific outer results and thus let go of the need to force or change other people. You are focused on being who you are and letting your light shine. 

You teach only those who demonstrate that they are ready for your level of teaching and who have asked to be taught. You are the light of the world and you are not hiding it. But neither are you seeking to force anyone to look at it. You freely share it with all who are open to receiving, and you are non-attached to those who are not open. Free will is the ultimate law for this universe, and as a more aware being you both see and accept that only the selves and the false teachers seek to force what God gives you freely.