Foundational teachings on your divine plan and karmic relationships

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Foundational teachings on your divine plan and karmic relationships
TOPICS: God’s will is not external – higher will and lower will – is your will truly free? – what is forcing you: society or your divine plan? – your limited viewpoint versus your divine plan – your divine plan is not a straight-jacket – you grow by making decisions – the ego resists your divine plan – seeking to force yourself to learn your lessons – the ego’s will is not free – forgiving others – karmic relationships – not necessarily a sexual relationship – concerns about relationships – consider attachments before making decisions – call forth the balancing of karma with other people – giving up attachments leads to a higher level – divine plan has two elements: work and fun – getting stuck in karma so you never get to your sacred labor – how your ego sabotages your divine plan – breaking the treadmill of karmic patterns – be willing to re-evaluate your life and make dramatic changes –

Question: Dear Jesus, I’m trying to understand what a divine plan really is, what kind of details it might contain and how it relates to the free will. I understand that we all have made a personal plan before embodying on the earth. Are we now to follow that plan to the point like robots, or is there room for improvisation, using our free will?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels:

You are raising a question that confuses many spiritual seekers when they first become aware of the concept that they have a divine plan or a higher purpose. This is a question that is very much influenced by the fact that traditional religions – including Christianity – have portrayed God as the angry being in the sky who is imposing his will upon you and judging you harshly if you do not follow it like a robot.

To resolve the enigma, you need to contemplate the fact that the true God is not the angry being in the sky. However, you will also want to take a look in the mirror and realize that most people have an internal conflict about their divine plans. As an example, look at the wording from the question above:

I understand that we all have made a personal plan before embodying on the earth. Are we now to follow that plan to the point like robots, or is there room for improvisation, using our free will?

Do you see that there is a duality implied here, in the sense that there is a subtle belief that following your divine plan takes away your free will and turns you into a robot? However, who made your divine plan? Obviously, you did! How did you make your divine plan? By making choices through your free will!

You did have help from your spiritual teachers, but true spiritual teachers do not force you into making certain choices, they present you with insights that help you make the best possible choices for yourself. So your divine plan is entirely an expression of your free will, and thus how can following your own choices turn you into a robot? Yet what the question correctly illustrates is that for many people there is a conflict between their higher will and their immediate will. So the real question to ponder is whether the will you have right now – your conscious will – is actually free?

What happens to virtually all people is that when they descend into embodiment, they forget about their prior existence, including their divine plan. As they grow up, they are influenced by family and society, which causes them to build certain expectations about life, and these might well be in conflict with their divine plans. For example, most people are exposed to external pressures because other people – including family members – and certain institutions in society want to control them and keep them within strict boundaries. Let me assure you that your divine plan does NOT specify that the supreme purpose for your present lifetime is to be the perfect consumer who is constantly seeking more things, more sex or more superficial recognition from a superficial society. Nor does your divine plan specify that you stay within the confines defined by whatever elite is ruling your society—even the religious elite which says you are a miserable sinner who can never do the things that I did.

On the contrary, most spiritual people have a divine plan which involves challenging status quo by demonstrating that it is possible to live a more spiritual life even in a modern, scientific, materialistic and skeptical society. So what is it – truly – that pushes you to follow an external standard like a robot? Is it your divine plan or is it the norms of society, the standard of this world—which is what I referred to as “mammon.” You will recall that I clearly stated that you cannot serve two masters, you cannot serve God – as a symbol for your divine plan – and mammon – as a symbol for the norms imposed upon you in this world. One might say that your divine plan is not an external but an internal standard, whereas the norms of society clearly represent something external.

Most people have experienced that there are certain situations where they are so emotionally overwhelmed that they cannot think clearly, so they make decisions that they later recognize as being less than ideal. The reason was that your emotional involvement with – your attachment to – the situation formed a veil over your mind that prevented you from thinking clearly. Well, coming into a physical body is like stepping in behind such a veil, and thus you cannot look at life as objectively and clearly while you are in the body as you can while you are outside the body. My point being that when you make your divine plan, you are free of the veil through which you currently look at life.

Obviously, the foundation for exercising your free will is that you have the best possible vision of what your options are and what consequences they have. Thus, you can actually make freer choices while you are making your divine plan than you can make right now while you are partially blinded by the veil built in this lifetime. Reconnecting to your divine plan gives you a guiding rod that can help you see beyond your short-term emotional attachments and expectations, so you can make decisions that are better from an overall perspective. Doing whatever feels good at the moment without considering long-term consequences is not actually exercising free will, for if your vision is limited, how can your will be truly free?

That being said, let me make it clear that your divine plan is NOT a straight-jacket. Following your divine plan does not mean that your entire life is laid out in the most minute detail. On the contrary, everything in your life revolves around your free will, so your divine plan is not actually made in order to tell you what to do. It is only by making decisions that you truly grow, and the entire purpose for your divine plan is to get you into situations that help you make the best possible choices, namely decisions that empower you to overcome your limited beliefs and become free to express – in this finite world – your infinite potential.

The central element in your divine plan is the lessons you need to learn in this lifetime, lessons that are adapted to both your long-term plan for coming into the material universe and your short-term plan of rising above the dualistic limitations you have come to accept for yourself. My point is that the overall goal is to set you free to express your divine individuality and potential. However, to accomplish this, you must overcome your current limitations, and this can be done only when you consciously see the unreality of these limitations and decide to let them go.

Any spiritual seeker who is honest with him/herself will know that there is a force in the psyche that resists growth, resists change—namely what is normally called the ego. This force will seek to make you shy away from anything that is difficult, it will want you to follow the path of least resistance. This is what I called the broad way that leads to destruction, and it is not the path which leads to spiritual growth. So when you make your divine plan, you do take into account this tendency, including how you might have fallen prey to this in prior lifetimes. Therefore, many people do indeed create a divine plan that will force them to experience certain situations – and experience them over and over again – in order to force themselves to face the lessons they need to learn.

Obviously, this can be quite unpleasant once you are in a physical body and have forgotten that you actually wanted to experience a difficult situation. You tend to wonder why you keep attracting the same problems over and over again, and you tend to believe your ego, which states it is not your fault and that you should run away from the situations instead of seeking to learn the lesson. So one can certainly say that there is an element of force in many people’s divine plan, because when you are above the veil of this world, you know how easy it is to run away from your lessons once you are blinded by that veil. Nevertheless, once you begin to understand this, can it truly be said that your divine plan overrides your free will? Or is it actually seeking to prevent you from being controlled by the temporary, dualistic, self-centered will of the ego—that is not truly free?

What kind of details are in your divine plan? Well, that is a highly individual matter. Yet for most people a major part of the divine plan is to balance karma they have with specific other people. Thus, your divine plan specifies that you embody with other people as your family or spouse(s) and that you encounter certain people during your current lifetime. Yet take note that the overall goal here is to balance the karma, which first of all involves completely forgiving the other person and establishing a loving relationship. In other words, the real goal here is that by you setting the other person free, you also set yourself free form any karmic ties to that person.

The consequence is that your purpose for encountering another person is to learn a lesson and balance the karma. Your divine plan does not necessarily specify exactly how that should be done, in terms of what kind of a relationship you need to have with the other person. Nor does it say that it has to be a life-long relationship. For example, it is quite common that when two people meet, their karmic tie will make them feel a strong attraction to each other—which is actually an expression of their desire to work out the karma and be free. Yet if the two people are of the opposite sex – or even the same sex these days – it is quite common that they think their attraction means they have to have a sexual relationship.

Over the cause of history, this has caused immense suffering in the form of creating relationships where both people feel trapped. It has also broken up countless viable relationships because one person feels he or she has to follow the latest karmic attraction. Can you see that what really happens here is that because people are blinded by the veil of being in embodiment, they simply act out their human expectations and start a relationship while they could possibly have balanced the karma in other ways? Can you see that some people go from one relationship to the next without actually learning the lesson they are meant to learn? They are always chasing the dream that the next relationship will be the ideal one, but in reality they will never have an ideal relationship until they learn the lesson they are meant to learn.

My point here is that your divine plan might have specified that you meet and interact with another person in order to balance karma. Yet your divine plan might not have specified that you had to have a physical, sexual relationship with that person. On the contrary, having such a relationship might indeed cause you to make more karma, because as soon as the honeymoon is over, the karma between two people will make it very difficult for them to get along in a traditional relationship. They are likely to both feel trapped and to blame it on the other person, which works directly against forgiving the other person and setting yourself free. Thus, what was meant to be a relationship to set both people free now becomes a tool for binding them even more.

Obviously, there are many forms of relationships between human beings, and sometimes it is indeed necessary for you to marry a person in order to balance the karma—for a committed relationship makes it harder to run away from the lesson instead of facing it. Yet what I am seeking to impart here is two concerns:

• Your divine plan always leaves room for choice. You might have karma with another person, but there is often more than one way for you to balance that karma. Indeed, if you could – immediately upon meeting a person – forgive that person completely, you might not need to have any further relationship with the person.

• By seeking to step outside your worldly expectations – the veil that blinds you – and reconnect to your divine plan, you will gain a clearer vision that can help you avoid making many mistakes in the physical world. You can avoid taking actions with physical consequences and instead learn your lessons and balance your karma before it manifests as physical circumstances that are difficult to reverse. You can avoid experiencing the same problem over and over again.

As a practical way to avoid rushing in where angels fear to tread, create a habit of stepping back from a situation before you make important decisions. Consider your attachments to a given situation—do you somehow feel compelled, feel as if you have to do something, as if you don’t have a choice in the matter? The most common remark after people realize they made a major mistake is, “I had no other choice!” The reality is that you ALWAYS have more than one option, but because you have allowed yourself to become overwhelmed by the situation, you could see only one option.

By consciously stepping back from the situation and seeking to reconnect to your divine plan, you will avoid this form of spiritual blindness. And only when you can clearly see that you have more than one option, can you make a free choice. You can NEVER make a free choice if you think you have only one option.

In fact, it would be wise never to engage in a close relationship without first calling forth the balancing of all karma you might have with the person and making an effort to overcome any attachments/compulsions you feel concerning the relationship. If you feel an unwillingness to give up a relationship, it is a sure sign that there is something unresolved, and if you proceed with it unresolved, it will most likely ruin the relationship. He who seeks to save his life shall lose it, whereas he who is willing to lose his life for the sake of growth will find a higher form of life.

In fact, it is quite common that a karmic relationship blocks your meeting the person with whom you can have a deeper relationship. Many people have experienced that giving up a karmic relationship – completely forgiving the other person – opens up for a deeper, more spiritual relationship. Obviously, what I am saying here applies to more than just relationships, and when you are willing to give up your attachments to a given circumstance, you often open the door for a better circumstance to manifest.

Your divine plan has two main elements. There is the work that needs to be done, namely balancing your karma from past lives, and there is the fun part of your divine plan, namely your sacred labor, which is the gift you want to bring to this world. Many spiritual people choose to encounter their karmic challenges early in life, so as to get them out of the way and set themselves free to do the sacred labor that can only be unlocked after the karma is balanced.

The problem is, of course, that many people get stuck in their karmic relationships – making more karma rather than balancing it – and thus they never get to the sacred labor. You can immensely speed up the process of working through your karma by applying what I have said here, especially by forgiving all people with whom you sense a karmic tie. And this means anyone with whom you have a less than harmonious relationship. Approach every relationship with the attitude that the purpose is to set both yourself and the other person free to move on in life. And never be concerned if the other person does not respond in kind. If you truly forgive another – if you truly turn the other cheek – you will be free of the karmic relationship even if the other person holds on to it.

You can quickly learn to recognize when you find yourself in a situation where you are not free to follow your divine plan, and the best sign is that you sense tension and attachment. And while such attachments always come from the ego, an honest examination will reveal that your attachments have power over you only because the Conscious You has not been willing to take full responsibility for your life. You need to recognize that one of the major purposes of your divine plan is to set you free from the control of your ego and the forces of this world. Thus, your ego obviously does not want you to discover your divine plan, and it seeks to avoid it in many clever ways. Here are the most common ones:

The ego seeks to make you attached to the expectations about life built in this lifetime, so you allow them to override your divine plan. There are myriad disguises for this mechanism, such as the idea that you should live your life according to the norms of your family and society.
The ego seeks to make you accept a set of restrictions for what a human being can do, thus denying that you are a spiritual being. This involves denying that you have the potential to rise above your karma and your psychological issues in order to manifest your Christ potential.
The ego seeks to get you so entangled in karmic relationships that you cannot forgive other people and thus set yourself free to move on to your sacred labor.
The ego seeks to make you believe that your problematic relationships are all the other people’s fault, so that it can prevent you from learning the lesson YOU need to learn.
The ego seeks to divert your attention into following any pursuit in this world, thus never having the time and attention to consider your divine plan.
We now see that there are two main things that block you from discovering and following your divine plan:

Your karma from past lives.
Your unresolved psychological issues that cause you to feel attachments.
This can cause your life – and even many succeeding lifetimes – to become a treadmill, where you never get around to starting your divine plan. To break this cycle, do the following:

Take an honest look at your life and consider problems you encounter over and over again. Be willing to recognize that they are hiding a lesson you have not yet learned. Then make a determined effort to learn the lesson.
Learning a lesson most often means uncovering an issue in your psychology that is holding you back. The issue is unresolved because you have so far been unwilling to take a look at it. So take that look now and do whatever it takes – including appropriate forms of therapy – to move beyond it.
Consider your highest hopes and dreams and then evaluate how the limitations put upon you in this lifetime cause you to reject your dreams almost before you dare think about them. Dare to go beyond such limitations and connect to your highest dreams.
Make a determined effort to use the violet flame and the invocations and rosaries to consume any karma involved with specific situations or your life in general.
Step back and look for the higher perspective beyond any attachments. Be willing to see what your ego does not want you to see and what you might not have been willing to see either. Be willing to see something even if it requires you to make a dramatic change in your lifestyle or outlook on life. You can use my technique for attunement to get a clearer vision.
Your life can be said to have two distinct phases. One is to balance your karma, which requires you to live a certain way—a way that is often heavily influenced by the norms of family and society because you embodied in that circumstance as a result of your karma. Once you have moved beyond the karma, you can start the more fun part of your divine plan, namely your sacred labor. However, in order to accomplish this, you often have to go through a dramatic shift in your outlook on life and in your physical lifestyle. And if you have become attached to any of the conditions in the prior phase of your life, you simply will not be willing to change, and thus your conscious mind will block the vision of your divine plan.

To avoid this trap, you need to reevaluate your life and make an effort to look beyond any attachments. Once you step back, you will experience that your perspective – on life or on a specific situation – can change as if by magic. The clouds suddenly part and you now see clearly. You often see that what you formerly thought was your only choice was actually the worst choice you could have made in a specific situation. The other options you now see will all lead to a better outcome. Or you see that what you thought was the only way to live could never give you the fulfillment you truly desire. Yet you now see other ways to attain that fulfillment, and thus you become willing to change your lifestyle accordingly.

If you want to make the best possible choices in your life, always seek to reconnect to your divine plan. Make sure you do not get stuck in the “work” phase of your divine plan and never get to the fun part. Your divine plan is truly your best friend, your best guiding rod for getting the most out of your present embodiment. And as long as you perceive it as being something forced upon you by an external force, you have not truly connected to it. So step back and take another look—knock without attachments and the door shall be opened unto you.

Note: Mother Mary’s books and the divine plan book contain many teachings on your divine plan. You can also do a novena to the Great Divine Director in order to get a clearer vision of your divine plan.