I hope you are all enjoying the intricate drama that is being so lovingly and skillfully enacted before your eyes. You will recall that at Wintergreen (the site of another drama) Saint Germain said he enjoys dramas. Yet why would the Bard be content to write dramas that everyone knows are dramas? After all, where is the initiation in that?
The initiation lies in a real-life performance that does not seem like a drama. And thus, people are presented with the eternal initiation: Will you identify yourself fully with the role you have taken on, or will you come to see it as just a role, see yourself as MORE and therefore transcend the role and become that MORE?
In order to play my part fully, I have come to see that I must offer you some information and perspective that only I can give you.
The essential tipping point at this stage of our drama is, of course, Lorraine’s message from Padma Sambhava, stating that I am no longer a sponsored messenger. The central point is: Do you accept that as a true statement?
Some of you have obviously done so, and thus the next question becomes the question that is the theme of the Askrealjesus website:
If this statement is incorrect, would you want to know?
Let me first give you my perspective. My messengership was never initiated, approved or validated through Lorraine or any other external source. If your relationship with the ascended masters – who have transcended any earthly authority – needs validation from any source on earth, then you have a serious problem. And you should resolve that before you present yourself as a messenger.
It is my responsibility to know whether my sponsorship has been withdrawn. If you think I have now become unable to know this or unwilling to admit it, then I will tell you that the change has taken place entirely in your own perception. In my mind I know who I am, and I know I am still a sponsored messenger, who has actually attained more freedom to exercise my messengership, taking it to a new level.
I also know that the surest and fastest way to compromise one’s messengership is to use it as a justification for one’s personal behavior, feelings or thoughts, clothing them with the authority of the masters. That is why you will see that I have not claimed any validation from above, allowing you to evaluate my latest behavior as expressions of myself. This should then give you a clue as to the initiation you face and how Lorraine and I have presented you with two fundamentally different approaches to the spiritual path.
I am overjoyed by the fact that some of you have been critical of my behavior and my statements, for it shows me that you have started the process of becoming free of the image of me that you held in your mind—the image that blocks you from truly connecting to your inner teacher. Yet you might ask yourself why you have not applied the same critical analysis to Lorraine, her behavior and statements.
I realize that I am playing the part of the fallen hero, who has compromised his status by leaving the queen for a mystery woman. Yet the reality here is that while you have started to separate yourself from me, many of you have not started to separate yourself from Lorraine. And if you turn her into what she is presently asking to become – the infallible external guru – you will be missing the essential initiation that our drama is presenting to you.
One could certainly raise the argument that I should simply let this unfold, because it is your test. Yet I am being moved from within to write this, so I have decided to write, even though I do not know at the present whether it will ever be published.
Thus, let me present to you some perspective on Lorraine, her muscle testing and her Divine Direction that only I can give you.
In the first years of our relationship, we had what I would call a normal husband and wife relationship. We got along very well and made most decisions jointly, after we had discussed the issues and come to a consensus. Lorraine is five years older than I and more experienced about many things in America, so her perspective often carried more weight. Nevertheless, this did not give rise to conflict, as I felt included in the decisions and our discussions gave me time to process.
A fundamental shift in our relationship occurred when Lorraine learned muscle testing. I am struggling to remember when that was. I am thinking 94 or 95, but I could be off with a year or two. Lorraine learned muscle testing through a system called Health Kinesiology, which was developed exclusively to help people resolve psychological blockages.
It was specifically taught that muscle testing should not be used beyond the framework of the system and should not be used to ask personal questions or as a substitute for personal decisions. This was done because the founders of the system had realized that muscle testing will give you answers to any question that can be formulated as a Yes or No question. Yet if taken too far, people can become highly confused as the answers may be inconsistent or influenced by the person’s consciousness.
Lorraine started a private practice in Montana, offering kinesiology to clients. She very quickly took her practice beyond the original system and started getting personal messages and directions from the masters during her sessions. Let me make it clear that I do not believe this was wrong. A student who masters a system has a right to take it to a higher level, and we all have a right to experiment.
The problem was that in the culture of the Summit, what Lorraine did was an absolute “NO, NO.” Elizabeth Clare Prophet (ECP) was the ONLY messenger and the only one who was allowed to take and deliver messages from the masters. Thus, Lorraine was reported to the Inquisition and got some flack from the community. And I believe this caused a shift in her psychology, where the outer challenge to what she was doing stirred up a need to feel that what she was doing was right, no matter what anyone else said.
Again, this is not necessarily wrong. At a certain point on the path, we must dare to be who we are regardless of any external opposition. Yet the problem I see is that Lorraine and I approached this initiation from a fundamentally different perspective. My approach was and is that it is MY responsibility to develop my personal Christ discernment. This means that I rely only on my inner knowing to determine what is real and unreal. It also means that I am willing to make personal decisions and take full responsibility for them, admitting when I am wrong, not condemning myself for it and then learning from the experience.
Lorraine, on the other hand did not see this as necessary. Instead, she began to rely more and more on her directions from the masters and her muscle testing, both of which are clearly external sources. She would even use her muscle testing to confirm her inner direction, and she very rarely questioned her muscle testing. I personally believed this to be dangerous, as I believe our consciousness can affect our bodies, thus also affect the responses of the body through muscle testing. If we feel strongly about an issue, we might get the answers we want, and if we don’t question them, we can dig ourselves into a hole.
What also happened was that Lorraine now started to take on the same consciousness that was so dominant in the Summit. ECP always presented herself as a package deal. You were either for her or against her. You either accepted that everything she said came from the ascended masters and thus had ultimate authority, or you were questioning not only her but also the masters and ultimately God (you might recognize this as the central initiation of the Piscean age). ECP also saw everything in terms of an epic struggle, where anyone who opposed her or the church were working for the forces of darkness—and thus she herself was always right.
Lorraine began to also feel a need to always be right or to be beyond questioning, and this did lead to a fundamental schism in our relationship, a schism that has never been healed and that some of you will surely have recognized when you think about it. The effect on our personal relationship was that I no longer felt included. When in a discussion or faced with a decision, Lorraine would never talk about what she wanted to do. She would always defer to the directions she had gotten from the masters or she would pull out her word lists and start muscle testing until she felt she had gotten the right answer.
I can tell you that after she developed this mindset, I have rarely had a real conversation with her, and I have generally felt not included in our relationship because my only option was to submit or be accused of questioning Lorraine and her Divine Direction. I never submitted, because I always used my own discernment, but I did not question her openly either. In reality, this would not have been as much of a problem, except for the fact that she always took every direction she got and every answer she got from her muscle testing literally. My approach was that while it is valid to get direction, ultimately the masters do not want us to become robots, so sometimes a direction might actually be a test. You pass it only by not following the direction or by not taking it at face value, using your intuition to gain a deeper understanding that the master is withholding until you seek it.
Lorraine actually knows this, but she very rarely applies it, except in special circumstances. Over the years, she has received a lot of inner directions and a lot of muscle testing answers that later turned out to be flat out wrong or inconsistent with other messages. In those cases, she would often brush it aside by saying it was a test. You will recall her telling the story of how El Morya boxed her in, until she couldn't do anything and finally decided to make her own decisions. And while it is a good story, she did not actually apply the lesson but went right back into relying on muscle testing and her directions.
In the first years after this developed, she had not taken her desire for infallibility to the same extreme as ECP, but I can see that this was because she did not have the power ECP had. Yet that changed again when Lorraine was called to be a messenger and Shangra-la developed. For the people in Shangra-la who uncritically accepted what came through Lorraine, she did assume the same absolute power as ECP had in the Summit. Thus, she gradually developed this sense that she was truly above anyone else and that she was always right and could never be proven wrong. And truly, she could never be proven wrong because she had built such a shell around her that you could not reach the real person inside who could admit that she needed to change.
The problem was that this is simply a shell. It is not true discernment that makes her spiritually self-sufficient. Lorraine needs external validation from this world in order to maintain her sense of equilibrium, her sense of being in control. For me, this meant that I had to play the part of not questioning her too directly. Yet as some of you have noticed, I did not uncritically accept everything she got from the masters or from muscle testing. Some of you have expressed that this is wrong, critical of Lorraine or not supportive. Hhhm.
Well, I never uncritically accepted what came from ECP, always referring to my own inner discernment, constantly seeking a deeper understanding and never accepting that I had the final or absolute truth. To me this is simply my responsibility to develop personal Christhood. Lorraine did sense this and although she never liked it, she accepted that she could not ultimately control me. I on my side felt I had to allow her to outplay her need, and I now see that this was in fact an integral part of the initiation the Shangra-la was meant to present to people.
Lorraine and her need for outer validation has a side effect that I have never accepted as right. As a result of her need for validation of her position, she attracted to her people who would question her ultimate authority. I could have done that, but then our marriage would have ended years ago—as is proven by recent events. I had to maintain a certain level of harmony, and thus other people came in to challenge Lorraine. Her reaction every time was to create an epic struggle between herself and that person, which could end in only two ways. The person either submitted to Lorraine as the ultimate authority or the person was ostracized from the community. Those of you who were in the Summit will see ECP doing the exact same thing.
The underlying problem here is that Lorraine has what Jesus calls black-and-white thinking, which causes her “all-or-nothing” approach but also gives rise to an epic mindset. One outcome of this is that everything Lorraine does has some cosmic importance, so if you question her, you question God. Another is that for Lorraine to feel vindicated in a conflict, the other person must be ultimately damned.
In her mindset, this means that the person is labeled as a fallen angel or serpent, which for her is the ultimate judgment. Over the years, I have heard her label a substantial number of people this way. Basically, anyone who ever questioned her came close to being or were labeled as a fallen angel, including her daughter, Melissa. Thus, the problem is projected outside oneself, and if one cannot even consider that there might be a beam in one’s own eye, how can one be free of it?
I have known Lorraine for 20 years and I have been closer to her than anyone else. Melissa has known her for 19 years. We both see clearly what she does not see: Lorraine is trapped! I have seen how unfree she has been ever since she accepted herself as a messenger.
I can tell you it is a very challenging position to be in—for the messenger is initiated more than the students. Being in this position can often give the ego the sense that there is something valuable to lose, and so we form an attachment to our position. One can then use one’s position of authority to create the ultimate closed mental box, from which it is difficult to escape. For the only way to escape is to admit that one is not infallible, and doing that seems to invalidate everything one has done, causing one to lose one’s position.
I believe that as a messenger, one must continually wrestle with the possibility that the messages can be limited or colored by one’s state of consciousness, seeking to keep oneself empty, unbiased, neutral or whatever one might call it. If you believe your messages are infallible, it is almost a guaranteed that they won’t be. This doesn’t mean they cannot contain some truth, but it does mean that YOU cannot tell the difference because of your bias. Because of my awareness of this trap, I have been careful not to have an attachment to my messengership or the infallibility of it. And thus, when the time came for me to let go of everything, I simply surrendered it.
I would love to see Lorraine be who she really is, for I have seen it in glimpses and know there is so much more to her than what I have seen since she accepted her position. I see it as quite possible that she could transcend this and that the Shangra-la community could be resurrected and rise to a much higher level as a result. Yet I also see that for this to happen, there must be a seismic shift, whereby the community fully transcends the consciousness – the mass entity of the Shangra-la community and the final initiation of the Piscean age – that has been so obviously illustrated in this latest drama.
What I saw in the Summit was that the Piscean initiations were given in a very concentrated form to push people’s buttons. The central one being whether people would seek the kingdom within or rely on an external authority for their salvation. Would they move from fear to love? In the Summit there was only fear, as ECP played her role extremely well, and I think also identifying herself with it.
I feel the drama of Shangra-la has now been outplayed sufficiently for all to have the opportunity to see the central theme and decide whether they will continue to identify with their roles or see them as roles, rising together into a new form of community. Therefore, I feel I have outplayed my personal role as I was asked to do.
As of this movement, I will withdraw from the community and the situation. I will stop reading or responding to e-mails about the situation and I will take some time to reflect and gain perspective. I will then continue my service as I feel directed from within.
I am non-attached to any outcome.
For I AM FREE.
The only outcome is to BE who I will BE—at any moment, in any circumstance.
Kim Michaels