The aim of this teaching is to develop your ability to understand and accept yourself and others, and to help you find the path of agape, or unconditional love, which is the final goal. The state of agape is that acceptance of self and others which includes knowing we are all following our appropriate paths and are learning the lessons which we have set up for ourselves, regardless of what that may look like. This state varies in degree from mild tolerance to complete acceptance and love. The path of love, or agape, is the path that you ultimately follow as you advance in soul perception.

 

Before you can accept others, you must learn to accept yourself. It is a universal law that you can only love others to the degree that you are able to love yourself. So, in this teaching, you begin by studying yourself. Through this process, you develop a greater understanding of yourself and what challenges and agreements you have set up to fulfill in this lifetime. Through this process, you can also develop a greater tolerance toward yourself and attain the balance that allows you to act as appropriately as possible and to actualize your fullest potential.

 

While learning to appreciate yourself, you learn to appreciate others. The information that Michael gives allows you to understand people are correct for being the way they are and to have insight into the challenges they have provided for themselves.

 

Michael teaches that souls evolve through different levels of soul perceptivity and that, at any time, you will be working on lessons related to a particular perceptivity. Knowing this makes it possible to accept that people are working at the levels they need to complete.

 

For yourself, studying soul perceptivity can allow you to achieve the highest soul level that you reached in a previous life, and possibly move on. It is also important to recognize that in two out of three lives, most souls do not choose a life of spiritual advancement. Even when people are not working directly towards spiritual advancement, however, they are growing through the pursuit of other physical-plane phenomena.

 

This teaching recognizes all paths as valid and does not make any claims toward being the only path. Michael acknowledges that certain people make agreements before they are born to absorb a certain amount of this teaching. There is no compulsion to believe anything. There is no penalty for disbelief or for not following any of Michael’s teachings. Michael has found through the ages that people do whatever they are going to do, regardless. For that reason, Michael does not give advice but simply tries to state things as "they" (all the fragments of that entity) see them.

 

The Michael System works as a model of the universe and operates according to the same laws. The system provides a means of studying yourself and the universe because the same laws that operate within man (the micro-cosmos can be observed in the universe at large (the macro-cosmos). Two of the laws we shall encounter continuously are the Law of Three and the Law of Seven, also known as triads and septants. Briefly, the Law of Three says that for any phenomenon there are three forces present: affirming, denying, and neutral. The Law of Seven states that for all phenomena there are seven levels of vibration or manifestation.