Aggressive mental suggestion
An aggressive mental suggestion is a strong suggestion, projected either from within or without the psyche, that comes into your head and will not leave you alone. It does not originate in the Mind of God nor is it native to the soul, but it can strongly influence the soul to take the left-handed path and to be pressured into making one wrong turn after the other on the highway of life.
An aggressive mental suggestion will pound the brain until the brain is exhausted and it acquiesces to the erroneous suggestion projected by the sinister force. Because it is so powerful, you may think that it must be of God, when it is really of the Devil.
These compelling thoughts which enter the mind and cause impulsive acts are not based on the direction of the I AM Presence or the precepts of ascended master law. These are always projections emanating from the hierarchy of astral forces or their instruments on earth.
Beware of feeling compelled to act or make a decision “right now.” When acting in and through the mind of God and his Christ, there is always ample opportunity to think clearly, to make a sound decision and to act rationally.
Remember the words of the Psalmist, “I have set the LORD always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.”[1]
Discerning the voices
Aggressive mental suggestion is something that we must all be aware of. The more you are one with Christ, the more you are an initiate on the Path, the less susceptible you are. But you need to know this exists as a force, that it preys upon the mind, that it is a misuse of fire, that it stays with you and hounds you sometimes month after month to try to convince you to be moved from your centeredness on the Path.
Aggressive mental suggestion comes from your own carnal mind or dweller-on-the-threshold, which is multiplied and amplified by the sinister force of the planet or the dweller-on-the-threshold of the planet. So it is very important to have a daily foundation of communion with your I AM Presence and Holy Christ Self and the Great White Brotherhood so that you can learn to discern the difference between their voice and those other voices. You know them by their fruits, by the consequences of their recommendations, and you know them by their vibration.
Condemnation
One of the worst forms of aggressive mental suggestion is condemnation. When this hits you as someone’s sharp criticism of you, you can very easily, by the intimidation and because of its intensity, say to yourself, “Well, maybe I am slothful or lazy or incompetent or this, that, and the next thing.” And as soon as you say, “Well, maybe it’s true,” then you enter into cooperation with the other person’s mind and you start condemning yourself.
Most people walk around with a fixed matrix of the things they condemn themselves for. Let’s say we condemn ourselves for always being late, or for eating a little sugar when there is no honey available, and we make a big to-do about this terrible sin we commit every so often. You hold that as a matrix, the force amplifies it, you believe you’re that sinner. The situation comes around again: there’s no honey, so you put a cube of sugar in your coffee, and you say, “Well, you know, that’s the way I am.” You do it because you fulfill the matrix you’ve had upon yourself.
It’s not a terrible sin to do that. People shouldn’t be engaged in such a petty attitude about life. But that is the kind of thing we do condemn ourselves for, which is ridiculous. Jesus Christ himself said, “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, but that which cometh out.”[2] And Jesus was very concerned that we not condemn ourselves concerning the food we eat.
Usually the things that we condemn ourselves for are the products of the carnal mind and the aggressive suggestion of the planetary carnal mind, which is Antichrist in nature.
Factors of limitation
Sometimes we find that as soon as we’re around certain people, we can’t do anything. Some of us can remember at least one teacher in the course of thirteen years of our education in whose presence we could not perform. Maybe we found out then or later that that person or that teacher had it in for us.
It’s important to realize that people who know you or think they know you well often hold a matrix that is so limiting that if you don’t use the most intense calls and guard your own consciousness, it can limit what you do for your entire life. They may even think you’re a wonderful human being and that you’re so wonderful that you could do anything in the world. But concepts of your human abilities and your human goodness by parents are just as devastating as belittlement, because they attribute your ability to act or not act to your humanness. In reality, our ability to act or not act comes not from our humanness but from our divinity, our Godliness.
Aggressive mental suggestion cannot touch you if you are filled with the mind of God. But the moment you say to somebody criticizing you, “Well, I have to admit that sometimes I am lazy,” you become a collaborator of the Antichrist. And you often do it in the name of good and in the name of humility and discipleship. It’s all right to want to be constantly aware of your weaknesses so that you can correct them, but it’s not all right to continually lacerate yourself and whip yourself because you have a negative condition that you haven’t yet overcome. Most lightbearers on the Path do this in some form.
A message from El Morya
Elizabeth Clare Prophet once shared a personal experience with aggressive mental suggestion and self-condemnation:
One of the most memorable pieces of instruction that I ever received from El Morya was when I was walking with Mark Prophet when we lived in La Tourelle. I asked Mark about the thing that was concerning me most at that time, which was why was I tired. It felt like I had to fight low blood pressure and I had to fight fatigue in my body on a daily basis.
The answer that Morya gave me through Mark at that time was that it was entirely the result of self-condemnation. I was with such determination exposing my own faults and my own shortcomings to be sure that I would remember them and to be sure that I would work at overcoming them and to be sure that I did not become puffed up with pride, that I was actually putting a curse of black magic on my own self, on my own four lower bodies, so I didn’t have the strength to perform my service.
This was an amazing moment because it turned my world around. I took this teaching very much to heart and I began affirming the reality that I AM and becoming far less the accuser and the condemner of myself—like the accusers and the condemners of Mary Magdalene. That change in consciousness has been my salvation. Because in the moment of acceptance of what the fundamentalists and the newspaper reporters and all my critics might say about me, it would be like opening a valve and I would get that entire momentum of hatred into my world, and I couldn’t survive.
A perspective from the heart
One thing I refuse to do is to condemn myself. One thing I always do is correct myself. If I feel that I have done something that I could do better, I correct it and I go on. I correct it like I would take an eraser and erase a wrong addition on a blackboard. If it says, “Two and two equals five,” I just erase the five and put in a four, and I go on. I’m too busy doing God’s work to decide that I’m going to whip myself in the process and go through this whole long thing that we put ourselves through.
I don’t think I’m perfect, but I think God is perfect where I am, and he’s the important one. And I think that that God in me and my attunement with that God is always alert to guard against the human consciousness becoming a channel for anything less than Christ-perfection. So not condemning yourself doesn’t make you footloose and fancy-free—thinking that you’ll never sin again and if you do it doesn’t matter. That’s not the point at all. It’s a certain point of perspective from the heart.
By having this perspective, I know what the force is projecting my way. I can read it, and I know what they would like me to tie into. And I refuse to do it, that’s all. Their projection just bumps into my tube of light and goes away.[3]
The shield of the archangels
Archangel Chamuel speaks of the necessity to defend oneself against aggressive mental suggestion:
Aggressive mental suggestion is the germ warfare of the fallen ones. You must hold up the shield of the archangels and wield the sword of the Spirit to deflect the arrows of their outrageous consciousness. And they are raging in the stalls of the astral, like the Devil, that roaring lion, seeking whom they may devour.[4]
The fallen ones are organized. They have taken the consciousness of love, which is the very order of a cosmos, and perverted it to their own use. They have organized a warfare of the Spirit, projecting their vials of astral microbes, astral viruses, deadly toxins which they would inject into the mental and emotional bodies of mankind through that which we have called aggressive mental suggestion.
You can identify this energy. You can know it well. For at any moment of the day or night when you feel waves of irritation and mild dislike and a separation from brothers and sisters on the Path through barbs of criticism and waves of anxiety and nervous tension and you feel your energies seized with a certain dislike for this or that individual or an action of intense condemnation or judgment of a co-servant who works side by side with you in the field of the Lord, know that the Devil has sent his angels, even Satan, who has deceived the whole world.[5]...
You must be alert; for where there is gossip and where there is the maligning of the image of the Mother or her children, where there is the tearing-down of the activities of those who are serving—no matter how imperfectly—the cause of the Brotherhood, know that there are the fallen ones lurking in your midst to destroy the works of God on earth.[6]
Sources
Mark L. Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, The Path to Immortality, p. 24.
Keepers of the Flame Lesson 24.
Lectures by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, June 1, 1982, and August 7, 1987.