TOPICS: The basic dynamic of life – Why you encounter the same problems again and again – Life does not punish you – Change the way you look at the past – The past becomes prologue to your future – There is an alternative to suffering – The master key to letting go – Non-forgiveness hurts yourself – Take back your power to choose how you respond – Perpetual forgiveness – Helping others see their illusions – Breaking the cycle of revenge – Mother Mary’s tool for overcoming the past –

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Ascended Master Mother Mary, November 26, 2006 through Kim Michaels.

The basic dynamic of life

My Beloved hearts, if your telephone rings, would you not pick it up? And when you pick up the phone, do you not listen long enough to at least find out whether the person on the other end has an important message for you or is simply trying to sell you something. And thus, if you do realize that the person at the other end has a message for you, would you not do your utmost to listen to that message and understand what it says? Surely, you will treat your telephone and the person calling with a certain measure of respect. Thus, my question to you is, “Why would you not treat life itself with the same measure of respect?”

Ah my beloved, you will say that you surely have respect for life. But I would beg to question whether that is really so. For you see, life itself can be compared to a telephone. Every situation you encounter can be seen as a telephone call from life itself. And yet, there are so many situations in life where you do not pick up the phone and listen to see if that situation has an important message for you, a message that can help you transcend yourself – or some limitation – so that you can be free and be more in the River of Life.

Why you encounter the same problems again and again

Most people go through life with blinders on. They are only half awake, only half aware of what is happening. And thus, they do not realize that life is a continuous string of situations—with each situation having a message that can help them rise higher and overcome some erroneous belief, some misconception that limits them and the expression of life itself through them. So many of you have these situations happen over and over again in your life. And you often cry out, “Why does this keep happening to me? Why is God doing this to me? Why are other people doing this to me? Why is destiny or fate or luck doing this to me?” But you do not take time to stand back and say, “Why am I doing this to myself?”

Every situation in life can be viewed as a telephone call, and there is a message in that call. But so often you do not bother to pick up the phone and listen to the message. And even those people who pick up the phone – who do consider that they might need to learn something from certain situations – well, they so often do not truly listen for the message behind the phone call. They do not truly listen with the inner ear, trying to understand the message, trying to understand that which they cannot see with the outer mind.

They listen to the message, they evaluate, with the outer mind. And therefore, they do not see the message, they do not hear the message, for the outer mind cannot fathom that message. If your outer mind had already understood the message that life is trying to give you, then why would life bother to call you on the telephone by having you experience the same situation over and over again?

Life does not punish you

It is a complete misconception of the human consciousness and the human ego that life is trying to punish you. And I can assure you that life itself – and life is created by God, so even God itself – has no desire to punish you whatsoever. Thus, it is an absolute law that once you have learned the lesson you need to learn from a specific situation, then you will not encounter that situation again.

And therefore, when you encounter the same situation over and over again, it is because you have not learned the lesson. And that is why life keeps calling you and presenting you with the same situation over and over again, so that you have another opportunity – and another and another – to learn the lesson.

So my beloved, instead of grumbling, instead of complaining that the same thing keeps happening to you over and over again, I have a very simple suggestion to you. Simply pick up the phone and listen for the message that life is trying to give. Then learn that lesson. Resolve the belief that you need to resolve in order to move up higher. And I can guarantee you that – as if by magic – you will not encounter that same situation again.

Life is not very complicated. Life is really very, very simple. And the underlying message behind every situation you encounter in life is simply this: “The material universe is a mirror!” The Ma-ter light will take on the forms that correspond to the contents of your consciousness. It is your state of consciousness that projects an image onto the Ma-ter light. And the Ma-ter light can do nothing else but to reflect that image back to you—both the image in your conscious mind and the image in the subconscious layers of your mind, your emotional, mental and identity bodies.

Life is very simple. Life itself is the principle of growth—of becoming more, of self-transcendence. So the message that life is always trying to give you is that you can become more. And by seeing your limitation, by seeing the limiting belief that you have – about yourself, about the world and about God – you can transcend that limitation and come up higher and be more in God’s ever-flowing River of Life.

So many people have wondered about the meaning of life, the purpose of life, the secret of life. So many people have searched for the philosopher’s stone, the magic wand, some kind of shortcut that will allow them to suddenly be in a state of bliss, or a state of having what they think they need in order to be happy. Yet my beloved, the secret of life is very simple—it is self-transcendence. This does not mean that you need to attain some remote state of perfection that might seem beyond your reach. It simply means that every time you transcend yourself, you are in the flow of the River of Life. And thus you have the potential to experience the joy, the bliss, that truly is that River of Life.

The message that life is trying to give you in every situation is that when you encounter a limitation, if you are willing to look inside yourself and acknowledge the belief that causes you to experience that situation as a limitation and then let go of that belief, well then you will rise above the sense of limitation and instead be in the bliss of the River of Life.

Change the way you look at the past

I hope that by giving you this discourse, I can change the way you look at your past. For your past is not out to punish you. Your past is not truly out to hold you back, although I know that it often seems like your past is holding you back or pulling you down into repeating the same old patterns over and over again in a seemingly endless cycle. Yet the reality is that your past, and the memory of your past, is simply another expression of life’s desire to see you come up higher.

So whenever you are reminded of your past, consider that this is – once again – life who is calling you on the telephone. And as always, life is calling you for one purpose only, namely to show you that you can overcome yet another limitation, that you can rise above it, that you can simply let it go and join the River of Life—and then become more by transcending your old sense of self.

The situations from your past that keep hounding you are situations in which you responded to outer circumstances in such a way that you accepted a limiting belief about yourself. And that belief is still in your subconscious mind, and that is why – when you are reminded of that situation in your past – you experience an uneasiness, a sense of shame or guilt or other negative feelings that cause you emotional pain. And yet, even this pain can be seen as a reminder. It is a reminder of the fact that you have not learned your lesson, that you have not overcome the limiting belief.

Even the pain can be seen as a grace. For if someone is trying to call you on the phone and give you a message that can save your life, would you not want them to turn up the volume on the phone if they could do so? Imagine that you could not hear the phone. And yet someone could push a button on their own phone and turn up the volume so you could now hear it, get the call and save your life.

That is essentially what your past is doing when it is reminding you – over and over again – of the situations where you have accepted some limitation. And if you will not pick up the phone the first time, then what is life going to do but call you again and increase the volume—thereby increasing the emotional pain in an attempt to finally make you pay attention. And instead of denying and refusing the pain, you say, “Okay, I have had enough of this. I am going to look at this problem and overcome the limitation so that I can once and for all overcome that pain instead of being burdened by it over and over again for the rest of my life or even for many lifetimes.”

Will you not please consider that instead of ignoring your past, or denying your past or seeking to make yourself so busy with the present or the future that you do to pay attention to your past, it would indeed be much wiser for you to simply pick up the phone and listen to the message from your past. If you would but listen to that message, you could quickly come to the realization that the situation from your past that keeps coming back over and over is a situation where you have not seen through a limiting belief and thus you have not let that belief go.

The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Heal Your Life by Forgiving Everything.