How idolatry and elitism subverts freedom


TOPICS: The problem of idolatry – Where idolatry came from – Idolatry, dictatorships and elitism – The thoughtform for 2019 – The greatest force of anti-freedom – Looking at 2018 – Overcoming idolatry – The fear of seeing your name in print – A civilized Internet – Looking at 2019 –


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Ascended Master Gautama Buddha, January 01, 2019, through Kim Michaels

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha, and I am Free. I am free because I have walked the path that you are all walking, of overcoming what I called “the attachments,” but which we might as well call the internal spirits, the separate selves.

The problem of idolatry

Naturally, when you look at the religion of Buddhism, the structure that has sprung up based on my teachings, you can see the same pattern to a large degree as you see in Christianity. Most Buddhists fail to see me as an example and instead have built this sandcastle of idolatry, of how special I was, starting with the conditions around my birth and going all the way up to my teachings and my entering nirvana.

What is the purpose of idolatry? The purpose of idolatry is always to project that one person is special compared to the majority. What then, is the purpose of doing this? It is to give the majority an excuse for not coming up higher in consciousness. There is absolutely no other, no genuine, purpose for idolatry, and this goes as well for the major world religions as it goes for ascended master teachings. We have seen in previous dispensations, how in every organization there was built a certain idolatry of the messenger or the messengers. They were somehow special. They had been trained for so long. They were born in certain circumstances. They had some ability that made them special compared to the students that were following them or their teachings.

My beloved, we have said in this last year that there were certain things we had to do to help certain people overcome the initiations of Pisces that they had not passed. We have said that this was one of the major initiations of Pisces: to overcome idolatry. Well, this no longer holds true. We have done what we could do for those who have not passed these initiations, and what we are doing now is for those who are willing to move into the initiations of Aquarius.

Of course, Aquarius has been said to be the Age of Community, the Age of the Holy Spirit, so does it not stand to reason that you cannot, then, have idolatry of one person in the Age of Community? You cannot have this centralized structure where one person is at the top of the pyramid and all decisions made in an organization have to go through that person, be approved by that person. Then, you create a bottleneck and then you bog down the workings of an organization. This we have, of course, seen in previous ascended master organizations and we do not desire to see it repeated in the coming age. This is one reason that we have not, from our perspective, created an organization around this messenger. This is one reason that he has not done so because he realizes this and the problem with idolatry.

It is time for those of you who are studying our teachings to begin to wrestle with this, and it is not so that I am hereby saying that you have a tendency to be idolatrous, although some of you, of course, have but many of you do not. You need to recognize here that you are not here just for yourselves. You are here to help raise the collective consciousness and that means that you need to wrestle with this spirit of idolatry that is now quite strong in the collective consciousness. You need to, first of all, overcome it in yourself so that you are willing to look at yourself, see if you have idolatry of this messenger and then work on overcoming it, letting it go.

We have in no way put him up as being special compared to you, other than, of course, he has the mantle of messenger and the ability to do this, but you have other abilities, as we have said many times, that are equally as important. It is meaningless to talk about one person or one person’s task being more important than another. You are all equally important. You are all part of Saint Germain’s mandala for the Aquarian Age—if you choose to be part of that mandala by overcoming your separate selves, including the one on idolatry. You need to be honest with yourselves because it is one of the initiations of this coming year, the Year of Freedom, to overcome this idolatry, which has surely imprisoned many, many people throughout the ages.

You need to look at yourselves, see if you have this idolatry and then use the many, many teachings we have given you on the primal self, on the separate selves, on overcoming these internal spirits, on the path of Christhood. We have given so many teachings on the path of Christhood, my beloved, that if you take them, you will come to realize, as we have said many, many times, that the Christ is in You, that the Holy Spirit can work through you, that you can find your way to be an open door for your I AM Presence, for the Holy Spirit and bring forth something.

This is how, if there is to be a community of ascended master students in the Aquarian Age, this is how it can come forth—not from a centralized vantage point. It comes forth when people individually overcome the idolatry, overcome the primal self, overcome this consciousness of separation and then they come together – spontaneously we might say – but certainly by an inner impulse, not by a decision by the outer mind or not by having a set matrix that forces them into following that matrix.

Where idolatry came from

Then, why is it important to consider idolatry in 2019, which is the Year of Freedom, the year where the planet will be going through the initiations of freedom? Well, it is important because this coming year will be a year where humankind will have to deal with the issue of elitism. We have hinted at it before, but truly the primary initiation of 2019 for the planet will be to recognize that the greatest hindrance to the freedom of the people is the elite, the power elite. Beyond the power elite, is the consciousness of elitism, and, of course, idolatry is very much part of this consciousness.

Now, you will see, of course, that the power elite on earth consists of many fallen beings in embodiment. We have told you that there are fallen beings in the emotional realm, the mental realm and the identity realm and they form a, sort of, coherent force (more or less coherent) with the ones in embodiment. You have this group of fallen beings and they, of course, are the ones who have brought with them to earth this consciousness of elitism. Not that there was not some consciousness of elitism before but the fallen beings, when they started embodying here, have certainly reinforced it and given it their entirely own slant, as you might say. They have created their version of elitism, centered around themselves and their beliefs.

What you see is that, they are the ones who have initiated this (what we might call) era of elitism on earth. However the people are not without responsibility here. We might say that the alpha aspect of elitism is that there is an elite who are absolutely convinced that they have a right to form an elite. They have a right to control the people, they have a right to set themselves up with special privileges not enjoyed by the people, and they have a right to demand and expect that the people actually support those privileges by doing the work, whatever society demands. This is the alpha aspect but the omega aspect is, of course, that the people have accepted this. They have accepted that they cannot govern themselves, that they need someone who has special abilities in order to govern them.

Look back throughout the ages and see how, in various cultures, various civilizations, there has been this clear idolatry where the leaders were seen to have some special characteristics. They were appointed by the gods—there was even in medieval Europe, the divine right of Kings. There was the whole belief that a certain family is the leader and the eldest son born into that family will be the next leader because there is a lineage, a “special” lineage. Where in the Old Testament philosophy would that special lineage ever have come about if all people descended from Adam and Eve?

Look at how many other cultures have had this belief that their leaders came from a special lineage but there is no real logical explanation for where this would come from. In some cases it comes from God because they were descended from the gods, but does that really make any sense when you consider, then, where did all the other people come from.

Now, there are, of course, some civilizations, for example the Ancient Greeks and others, where they had a certain philosophy about certain gods that were ruling mankind and often doing so in an unkind way. What you need to recognize here is that in all of these cases (where you had these supposed gods who have some very clear human traits, such as vindictiveness or jealousy or whatever it may be), you are not talking about gods and you are not talking about ascended masters. You are talking about fallen beings who have managed to set themselves up as gods in the minds of the people.

You can see it in the Roman Empire how people actually, at a certain point, came to believe that the Emperor was a god on earth. How anyone could believe that about a person like Nero is beyond me, but nevertheless you see this and how the Emperors themselves bought into this and believed (because their minds were taken over by fallen beings in the identity realm) that they were a kind of god on earth. Until, of course, karma caught up with them and their bodies deteriorated or there was some rebellion against them or whatever you have. But at some point or other, it was proven that when death knocked on the door, these gods were only humans.

Idolatry, dictatorships and elitism

You see that there has been a very long history of idolatry on earth and it is absolutely necessary in the Year of Freedom that at least some people begin to free themselves from this. We, of course, look at you who are our students to begin this process. We also look at you, of course, to be the forerunners for this in the collective consciousness, to really call forth the judgment of this beast of idolatry, this beast of elitism.

That is, of course, why we have the conference in Korea coming up where we call for the ending of the era of dictatorships. Because what is a dictator but a person who has created an extreme idolatry around himself, as you see, not only in North Korea but in virtually every dictatorship ever seen in history. There has been some cult of idolatry created around the dictator.

We also have, of course, our conference in the United States, which we will dedicate to ending the era of elitism on earth. So these two can form an alpha and omega polarity and, of course, be reinforced by our other conferences where we will have similar themes of overcoming this elitism.

The thoughtform for 2019

My beloved, this is the primary initiation for 2019 that I wish to bring to your attention. With this, I would like to give you the thoughtform for 2019, which, of course, as all of my thoughtforms, can be used beyond the year for which they are given. As this thoughtform for 2019, I would like you again to step back and imagine, envision that you are looking at the earth from space, from a distance. Not so far that you cannot see the individual nations and borders, but imagine that you are looking at a globe where the borders between nations are drawn. You see that even at the physical level there are borders.

Now, you know very well that you can go to certain areas, such as the European Union, and you can see that those borders do not necessarily have a physical demarcation. They are not clearly marked. If you go to the borderline, there are many places you can walk right across the border without there being any fence or barrier. You may even be able to drive across these borders many times without even having to stop and show your identification papers and so on. You also know that there are other areas of the world where there are much more physical borders.

What I wish to do here is to have you step back and look beyond the physical. If you can see what is happening in the collective consciousness of the people, you will see that there are also borders erected in the collective consciousness. Many types of borders are created in the collective consciousness of humankind. There are, of course, some of these collective borders that follow national borders because the people on one side of the physical borderline have a certain attitude towards those on the other and vice versa.

You also see other borders that are erected purely in the consciousness based on the attitudes, the mindsets. For example, you see clear, very definite borders between people who belong to different religions and these do not follow national borders. You will see, for example, if you go to some smaller villages in the United States that you can have a Central Square there. On each corner of the square there is a local church, a church with its own congregation. They are all Christians but there are different varieties of Christians. If you could look at the consciousness of even such a small village, you can see borderlines between those who belong to the different churches. Even though these people live in the same village and are in many cases related to each other and their families have known each other for a very long time, there are still borderlines in the collective consciousness.

When you take that up to humankind, you see how there are so many borderlines created based on religion. There are, of course, other borderlines based on religious affiliation and there are some very, very clear borderlines that are built between those who consider themselves to be part of the elite and who see themselves as separated from the people, “the people” as they often call them. They even think that it is “their people” but they have nothing but contempt for those people. You can see that there are all these borderlines created around the planet based on very, very artificial criteria.

Naturally, you can look at national borders between countries and see that even those are artificial criteria that often are due to a political situation that may happened hundreds of years ago, or some war that happened hundreds of years ago and established a border there, but there is really no logical, rational reason for it. You will see that all of these lines in the collective consciousness are all artificial based on some, in most cases, dualistic criteria. They clearly spring from the consciousness of separation where people love to set themselves apart from other people.

The thoughtform I wish to give you is that when you look at the surface of the earth, at the level of the collective consciousness, you see all of these borders created between people and groups of people. Yet, I now wish you to envision that in the center of the earth is a Buddha figure but it is not the golden Buddha. It is a Buddha that is radiating an intense ruby-red light, an intense ruby fire. It is, of course, what we have called the Buddha of the Ruby Ray, and now I wish you to envision that this Buddha of the Ruby Ray is radiating this light of the ruby color to consume these borders in the collective consciousness. Now, if you are personally aware of a particular borderline (it can be at the level of your family, it can be in your nation, your religion, a particular group that you have been affiliated with) then I ask you to envision that you are sitting in a meditative posture, literally inside this Buddha of the Ruby Ray. You are directing the attention of the Buddha of the Ruby Ray to this particular division, this border, this wall in the collective consciousness. You are envisioning that a very concentrated laser beam of this ruby-ray fire consumes that border, thereby setting the people free from this division that is currently imprisoning them. If you will pay a little attention to this over this year, you can give a very significant service to helping as many people as possible pass the initiations of 2019 and attain a greater level of freedom.

The greatest force of anti-freedom

What is the greatest force of anti-freedom on earth? It is precisely this consciousness of elitism, with the alpha of the elite thinking they have a right to rule and the omega being the idolatry of the people who think they need the elite in order to have a functioning society. My beloved, do you need – does any nation or group of people need – an elite in order to have a functioning society? The vast majority of people on earth, if you asked them this question, would say yes. Even people in democratic nations will say: “Well, surely we need some elite who has the experience, the know-how, of how to run the country.”

Is not the entire idea of a democracy that you do not have an elite who was born to that position and who can never be questioned and gainsaid? You have, of course, people who are in government and who have a certain experience but they can be exchanged for other people who can then take over and still make the government function. So why do you need an elite? Why do you still, in many democracies (in fact, in all democracies) allow the existence of an elite that is influencing the country behind the scenes even though they were never elected by the people?

This is one of the challenges for the democratic nations because many people in democratic nations will say: “Well, we do not have a dictatorship. We have a free democratic government, therefore we are not run by an elite, by a hidden power elite.” But you are, my beloved. In all democratic nations there is a power elite and they do pull the strings of the puppets in parliament. This is not always done in a malicious way. It is not done necessarily in an illegal or unconstitutional or deceptive way. It is done by simply having connections and being able to influence people’s thinking through those connections, but it is still a form of elitism.

There are so many nations on this earth where they think they are free but they are still controlled by a small elite. Last year I talked about the United States and the President of the United States. Here, you have a people who are facing a choice between two candidates for President, one they have come to see as being part of the established political elite and they want something different. So they elect the other candidate, who presents himself as a more populist candidate who is not part of the political elite—and that is true. But was he not a billionaire businessman before he was elected? And is there not an elite in the United States of billionaire businessmen, who do not even respect the political elite, the political apparatus or the political process but think they are entitled to run things the way they want to, as they do in their companies, where the CEO is a kind of god who has almost godlike powers? So how do the American people think that this person can free them from elitism?

That is a question to ask and to project into the collective consciousness so that more and more people will begin to ask this in the coming year: “Can a person who was part of the business elite set us free from the elitism that we are beginning to realize is the major problem in our country?” Of course, you can make the calls also that people will come to realize in greater and greater measure that their major problem, as was said at the United States conference, is elitism. It is the fact that there is a small elite running the country and this is not democracy as it was intended to be in the United States or anywhere else.

Looking at 2018

My beloved, truly 2018 was from our perspective, another acceleration. I said last year that there was a danger of many conflicts springing up, but most of them have not flared up in the physical, certainly not to the extent that they could have. This is in very large part due to the work of yourselves as our direct students in this dispensation, but also the work of other ascended master students and other spiritual, New Age people around the world who have done what they could do – based on their knowledge, their teachings – to promote peace.

Many, many people, many spiritual people, even many who are not overtly spiritual have tuned in to the initiations of peace in this past year and they have done whatever they could, based on where they were, both in consciousness and in the physical, to promote peace.

Overcoming idolatry

Naturally my beloved, when I start out talking about idolatry, I cannot allow you, who are ascended master students, to have idolatry of yourselves. That is why you cannot allow yourselves to fall into the trap that students of previous dispensations fell into of thinking that they were the most advanced students on the planet, they were saving the world for Saint Germain by doing all of these decrees, and they would one day be seen as the ones who had saved the world and brought the world into the Aquarian Age.

This was, again, something that was needed for people to have that initiation and overcome the initiations of Pisces and pass those initiations but it is not necessary for you. That is why we wish you to have a more realistic assessment. We recognize, of course, that what you are doing is important and does have a major positive impact on the planet, both when you give your invocations and decrees but also when you raise your consciousness. On the other hand, you do not fall into this idolatry where you are motivated to do what you do because you are seeking some special status or some reward, whether here on earth or in the hereafter.

We are asking you to step up and come to the point where you are giving your service lovingly, not because you have an obsessive-compulsive drive to be seen as special. How can you step up to that point? Well, you need to overcome the primal self because that is what is driving you to somehow compensate for the fact that you were put down when you came to earth as avatars. You have been seeking ever since then to get some kind of special status, often for the benign purpose, seemingly, of wanting people to listen to you. Nevertheless, even this is not an Aquarian Age concept because in the Aquarian Age people should not listen to you because you have a special art or status, as had been the case in the Piscean Age and in previous ages. They should listen to you because of what you say and it resonates with them.

The fear of seeing your name in print

This, of course, is, again, where the Internet is a major opportunity for you – all of you – to begin speaking out, spreading your insights, sharing them with other people, as Jesus admonished you to do last year. You see, my beloved, there is an important topic here that I wish to touch upon, even though I have already given you a fairly long discourse. You realize, of course, that for the Buddha, time is not.

When we talk about elitism and idolatry, when we talk about freedom, has the Internet helped combat elitism, combat idolatry and increase freedom? Has the Internet been a plus or a minus? Well, of course, you could say that from a certain perspective, clearly it has been a plus. It has allowed so much knowledge to be available to so many different people in a way that it has never been available before.

Nevertheless, you need to recognize here that the Internet has also played a part in actually reinforcing these walls, these barriers that are in the collective consciousness between groups of people. To some degree the Internet has served to break down these walls but in another way the Internet has helped to reinforce them. This has something to do with the fact that people have used the Internet to make these statements that are clearly not thought through, that are very biased and that are often what you call hate mail or hateful statements. You have the Internet trolls, and I can tell you that there is an entire group of people who are either paid by fallen beings or whose minds are taken over by fallen beings to act as these Internet trolls, really only for the purpose of creating chaos, conflict and for discrediting the Internet and anything on it.

Besides this, you need to recognize here that there is a certain mechanism and it is a mechanism created by the fallen beings a long time ago. You see  my beloved, going back in the recent history of the planet, one of the major setbacks of the fallen beings was when a man named Gutenberg invented the printing press that made it possible to disseminate the printed word in an inexpensive way so that more and more people could actually afford to buy books. You will see that before then, many people could not even read because there were no books for them to read. The distribution of knowledge was controlled, often by these monks who sat there and hand copied manuscripts. Therefore, it was all under centralized control, even the control of the Catholic Church.

When Gutenberg invented the printing press, all of a sudden knowledge became much more widely available. You see, of course, throughout the centuries after Gutenberg’s invention how books became more and more widespread and the fallen beings could not stop this even though they clearly wanted to. What they instead attempted to do was to gain control over the publishing industry and this control did, of course, limit what could be brought out in books. Even this control was eventually broken by new printing methods but most of all by the Internet. You see here, that what the fallen beings did in order to counteract the spreading of knowledge through the printed word, was that they managed to, over time, create a certain consciousness in the collective, a fear of seeing your name in print.

If you go back to the time when the primary news media was newspapers, there were many, many people who feared to have their name in print. There were many people who, if their name did make it into print in the newspapers, they would feel a major trauma of suddenly being exposed in a way that millions of people could read about them. This was not even that people had done something illegal or wrong, but many people actually took on this fear of being exposed in the media. You will see how, there has always, of course, been a certain elite who wants to be exposed but the majority of the people would rather live an anonymous life.

What has happened via the Internet is that now so many people have a Facebook account or some other account, at least an email account, and suddenly their names are out there. What many people are having to deal with, including yourselves as ascended master students, is this fear of seeing your word in print (so to speak, even though it is not printed, it is nevertheless still on the Internet where everybody can read it). Of course, it can be spread much more quickly on the Internet than it ever could through the printed word.

There is a certain fear in the collective consciousness and this, of course, is a wall created in the collective consciousness that is created by the fallen beings so that the people do not dare to step through that barrier and speak out against the elite. What you see on the Internet is that you now have people who have a Facebook account where anybody, or at least anybody who is their friend, can post a comment. So, here is a person who posts some kind of thing on their Facebook account and then somebody comes in with a very negative, hateful comment to this. Many, many people have been shocked, disturbed even traumatized by having this. You have in many democratic countries, there are even Members of Parliament or other public figures who are reluctant to have a Facebook account because they are tired of every morning looking at their account and having to read these hateful comments.

You see here that there is an entire consciousness—not only is there a concentrated group of people who are directly seeking to destroy the Internet by trolling but there is a larger group of people who have taken on this consciousness of posting these very sarcastic, ironic, negative, down-putting comments on other people. Even for things that are supposedly benign, they still receive these hateful comments.

This is another topic where you can use my thoughtform. If you have been exposed to this, as most of you have, envision you are sitting there in the center of the ruby ray figure, directing that ruby ray into consuming these barriers. Therefore, as we said in the United States, people can find a more constructive way to have a public dialogue, find a more constructive way to interact on the Internet.

A civilized Internet

Envision that in 2019 people will begin to speak out that there is a need to raise the Internet to a level where civilized people can have a civilized conversation. Not in the sense that it is controlled but in the sense that you create some way for people to have a constructive dialogue that is not brought down by these people who only want to bring things down. You may say, my beloved, am I not encouraging you to create another barrier where you shut out the people who are negative? No, I am actually not, because barriers are created from the consciousness of separation, but I am encouraging you to rise above that consciousness.

Therefore, you can actually find a way to have freedom that is not based on creating a barrier that shuts out those that you think are working against your freedom. You actually raise yourself to the point where you transcend the consciousness of those who are opposing your freedom and therefore they become irrelevant to you. This is what is needed: that more and more people realize that we simply need to have a public dialogue that is not run by this very negative, ironic, sarcastic, downputting consciousness.

Looking at 2019

My beloved, will there be other challenges in 2019? Well, naturally. There is always the spectre of conflict, which could break out here, there and everywhere. Nevertheless, we still look at you who are the spiritual students to envision that whatever may or may not happen, there will be a raising of the collective consciousness so people become more and more aware of freedom as a topic that begins in the mind.

It is not so that you will ever be truly free by creating certain conditions in the physical. You will not be truly free until you look at the mind. This is what is lacking in most of the developed countries where they have people who have grown up in a free society – at least more free than you have ever seen on earth – yet they are not free because they are so trapped in their own psychological mechanisms. Hold the vision, make the calls that people will be aware in 2019 that the major challenge for the so-called free world is to focus on the concept of mental freedom that Saint Germain has talked about before.

My beloved, this concludes my address. It is always a joy for me to address you. It is a joy for me to address you at conferences, and I certainly look forward to the conferences that you will have this year and the many teachings that will be brought forth. With this, I express, again, the gratitude of all ascended masters for your dedication, your service, your attention and your willingness to change yourselves, first of all.

 

Copyright © 2019 Kim Michaels