Every change on Earth begins in the identity realm, at the highest level of the human mind, where people’s sense of identity resides. A change happens there, then it moves from there down into the mental realm, then into the emotional and after it has moved there, it can move through to the physical. Higher awareness has for a long time been working to bring certain ideas and realizations through the three higher octaves so they are ready to move into the physical octave, where a greater number of women can recognize them. Many of the more aware people have already recognized them. Many women who have some spiritual inclination or a greater level of awareness have recognized them. But we are at a point where in this coming decade these ideas can move into being recognized by a large number of people. Perhaps not a majority, but certainly such a critical mass that changes will happen.
Let us look at the situation of a woman on Earth who is becoming a mother, whether for the first time or whether it has happened before. You are becoming a mother. You are giving birth to a child, and you are of course hoping and envisioning that this child will grow into an adult and will live a hopefully long life. What do you as a mother want to see for your child? Well, obviously if you look around the planet, you can see that mothers are in many different outer situations. They live in many different cultures. They have various outlooks and beliefs about life. If you go into the specifics, you will see that women want various things for their children depending on the situation in which they have grown up and in which they expect their children to live. Let us not be specific. Let us go beyond the specifics and look at the more general.
What does a mother want for her child? Well, the basic thing is that she wants her child to have a good life. Again, if we look at specifics, women in different situations may have different ways to define what they mean by a good life. But nevertheless, they all want their children to have a good life. And that means there are certain things they do not want to happen to their children. They do not want them to die early. They do not want them to become drug addicts. They do not want them to become criminals. They do not want them to be called into military service and die in a war or come back crippled. They do not want them to contract some kind of debilitating or deadly disease. They do not want them to be psychologically crippled or damaged so they cannot live a constructive life, cannot get an education, cannot hold a job and have a family of their own. There are certainly things we can say that women do not want for their children.
Now, we take the situation of a woman who is about to become a mother. When she projects into the future what might happen or what might not happen for her child, how can she deal with this? Well, you can look back into history and see what has happened. There are some situations that women are in around the world where they themselves have lived a very uncertain life, perhaps a poor life, perhaps a life in a region of conflict. And so they can see historically that there is a certain risk that their child might be exposed to these violent or uncertain circumstances. There are also women in a more modern part of the world that live in fairly peaceful and affluent countries where they can see that their children are likely to have a fairly good life. But still, even these mothers cannot know that the child might not become ill, might not have some psychological condition that prevents it from living a normal constructive life, or that other things could not happen to the child. When you look at this as a mother, you can ask yourself the question: “What will for my child determine whether the child has a constructive life or whether the child has a life that is plagued by various problems and mishaps and traumatic or dramatic or violent events? What will determine this for my particular child? I want my child to have a good life, but what will determine what kind of a life the child has?”
This is where many mothers, if they were to do this, would be able to acknowledge consciously something that they know but often have not acknowledged. When they contemplate the future of their children, they feel relatively powerless to do anything about it. They feel they have very little power to determine whether their child will have a constructive or not so constructive life. Many women of course, do not think about the future of their children precisely because they feel powerless to do anything about it. So they avoid thinking about it. But if you think about it, what are the beliefs that women in different situations around the world have about what will determine the future of their children? Is it fate? Is it destiny? Is it luck? Is it coincidence? Is it God’s will, as some women believe, whether it be this God or that God? Is it a child’s karma as some women, many women in the East, believe? What will determine the fate, the life, of your child? Well, if it is any of the conditions just mentioned, whether it be God’s will or karma or coincidence or luck, you as a mother can do nothing about that. You may, if you believe that God’s will has an influence on your child, be able to pray to God and you may be able to believe that your prayers will influence what God allows to happen to your child, but otherwise, women feel various degrees of disempowerment.
Now, the realization that is close to breaking through on a larger scale in the physical, in people’s conscious minds is that this sense of being disempowered as a mother is an illusion. It is based on various erroneous beliefs that are floating around out there in the collective consciousness. It is based on some even malicious beliefs that have been deliberately put upon women in various cultural contexts. So the realization that many women can come to in this next decade is that as a mother, there is indeed something you can do to determine what kind of a life your child will have. Now, many women will of course, look at: “What can I do physically?” And there will be many women in the poor part of the world or in certain conflict-ridden regions who feel there is not much they can do physically, because the future is so uncertain. There will be some women in the more affluent part of the world who will feel that they have done everything that can be done. They have a good, secure material lifestyle. They are going to put their children in the best schools that are available. They are going to help them with their education, see that their child will get an education and therefore can get a better job than the average. And they feel that this is enough. Their child will have a relatively secure, affluent life.
Yet still, if you think about it, how do you know that the child is not one day walking down the street and is, to use the popular expression, hit by a bus? You can never quite know, can you? But the realization that many women can come to is that, whether you feel uncertainty or whether you have a certain confidence in the certainty of the future, there is still something you can do to make sure that your child will get a better life than if you did not do this. There are actions you can take that will improve the life of your child regardless of conditions in your country, regardless of fate or luck or bad luck or whatever you call it. This is guaranteed to improve the life of your child. And what is that factor that can give you the power to improve the life of your child?
Well, it is simply the recognition that human beings are psychological beings. Certainly, your child will grow up in a specific outer circumstance. There will be outer conditions that will influence the life of your child. And those you may not be able to do anything about. But when you look realistically at life—maybe your own lives, maybe the lives of others—you see that two children can grow up in very similar circumstances, yet one has a constructive life and one does not. You see many children who grow up in affluent nations and basically have everything they could need. They are, as the saying goes, born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Yet you see some of these children who cannot live a constructive life. And why is that? Well, it is in their psychology. What is the difference between a child that grows up to live a constructive life and a child that does not? It is all in the psychology. It is in the child’s approach to life, attitude to life, the way it looks at life, the way it looks at itself. It is a matter of what psychological conditions does the child have when it comes into embodiment?
Now, here is where many women are ready to recognize that in most areas of the world, women have been brought up, have been programmed, to believe that there is not much you can do about your psychology or the psychology of your child. A child is born with a certain psychology, and there is not much you can do about it. And this is the lie, this is the illusion that many women are ready to see through. It can, on a large scale begin in the more affluent countries, but even in many of the poor countries, many women have taken embodiment there who are ready to make the shift and realize that psychology influences every aspect of your life. The shift that women can come to is to recognize: “My child’s psychology is not set in stone. My child was born with a certain psychology, but there is something I can do to help my child develop its psychology so it can take a more constructive approach to life.”
It is not so difficult for mothers, when they contemplate this, to see that people who have a more positive, constructive attitude and approach to life generally lead a better life in terms of even physical conditions. But they especially lead a better life in terms of psychological conditions, their psychological well-being. And what mother would not want their child to have psychological well-being? What mother would not want their child to be happy, at peace and fulfilled with their lives? Well, some mothers do not want this because they themselves have grown up with such deep psychological wounds that they are not even able to wish this for their children. But the vast majority of mothers will want their children to have a happy, constructive life. And so it is not that far-fetched, it is very close, that many, many women, a critical mass of women in the affluent part of the world can break through and make this shift and realize that: “There is one thing I can do for my child that will affect every aspect of my child’s life. And that is to help my child to heal and develop its psychology.”
This then means that women can become open to looking for ways where their child can be helped psychologically. There will be some women, especially those in the affluent part of the world, especially women who have busy careers, who have busy jobs, and who are used to being able to pay their way out of everything, and these women will say: “Oh that means I will have to take my child to a psychologist and my psychologist will deal with my child.” But there are many more women who can take a more personal approach and say: “If my child is to improve its psychology, who is going to do it? Is the father going to do it? Not likely. Is it realistic or even affordable for me to send my child to a psychologist, and for that matter, can a psychologist even really help my child?” Probably not so likely either. To whom does the finger point? Where does the finger point and say: “You can do something about your child?” Well, obviously, it points at me. This then gives rise to another logical question: “If I am to help my child with his or her psychology, how can I do this? Well, it means I must first work on my own psychology, because if I have certain psychological wounds, then first of all, I am unable to help my child. But second of all, it is very likely that I will pass on my own psychological deficiencies to my child.”
If you look at history, perhaps even if you look at your own family, your own mother, your own father, can you not see in how many cases a wounded psychology of the parents is either passed on to, or at least deeply affects, the children? Is it not then logical that not only in order to help your child, but even in order to avoid harming your child, it is best for your child that you work on resolving your own psychology. But wait a minute now. Is it only your child that it is good for that you resolve your own psychology? No, obviously it is also good for you, because as you resolve psychology, you can have a more fulfilled life. Higher awareness wants that for all mothers, and for that matter, for all people.
The recognition that can break through is that even though there may be several external factors that have an influence on your life, the primary factor that influences your life is your psychology. The next realization is that human psychology is not set in stone. The next realization is that every human being, except a very few with a very, very wounded psychology, have the option to take conscious command over their psychology and do something to heal their wounds to resolve various hang-ups that prevent them from living a psychologically healthy life.
This can then lead to another realization that is part of both the basic and the essential humanity. The basic humanity enables you to recognize that many people live very difficult lives because of their psychology. The essential humanity enables you to recognize that you can change the psychology and you can do something yourself consciously to change it. This is the potential that many people are ready to acknowledge as part of your self-actualization needs. It is also what the most modern democracies need to acknowledge is the next step, namely to move beyond material welfare to psychological well-being.
However, here comes the next realization. What you can look at is based on an evaluation of humanity. Which countries, which societies, have the greatest degree of physical health? Many of you are already aware of this. Certain indexes have already been created. In which countries are people the most healthy? In which countries do they have a healthcare system and even an approach to health that is the most developed and therefore takes best care of their people? You can then transfer this to say: “Is it enough to look at physical health?” Obviously it is not. It is necessary to also look at psychological health. What are countries doing about psychological health? Have they recognized how big of a problem this is? Have they gone in and recognized, truly recognized, the importance of psychological health? All countries have recognized that in order to live a constructive good life, physical health is important. But hardly any country has fully acknowledged that the psychological health is even more important than physical health. And this is a shift that can happen that can be driven by women out of concern for their children, where they say: “We need to make this shift. And it is not enough to look at the material conditions we give to our children. It is even more important to look at the psychological conditions.” To some degree this has started to happen in some nations, but it has not broken through as it could be where this becomes a major priority for these societies.
What can drive this? Well, what can drive it is that women, on an individual basis, make the shift and say: “What psychological tools are available to me that I can first apply to myself and then apply to my child?” When you look at the conditions in even the most developed, modern democracies, most women will quickly come to the realization that there is not very much available. There are certainly things that you can find in books and courses and this and that, but there is not that much available, certainly not as much as there could be. This can then lead to a process where there will be first a raising of awareness but even the raising of this demand that: “We want better psychological tools. We want a better understanding of psychology than what we get from traditional psychology and traditional psychotherapy.”
When you look at this realistically, even in the most affluent nations, how can women afford to first spend years going to a psychologist every week, paying a very high fee for an hour session that really does not do very much? What women can afford to send their children to such therapy? Is it therefore realistic for most women that they can fulfill their desire to give their children a good psychological life by going the traditional route? Well, it is not. So what is the only realistic alternative? It is that you find different approaches to psychology that people can apply on an individual basis. You do not need a therapist who has gone to a university for five years and studied psychology, without in many cases resolving their own psychology, to help you.
What you need is somebody who has some practical experience, some street sense, as it is often called, and can say: “I have worked on myself. I have worked on self-realization, psychological healing, even personal development, personal growth for many years. I have found these tools, these teachings. This has worked for me. I think it can work for you also.” Then you see an entirely new movement can spring up, where more and more women are looking for this, a practical approach to psychological healing and development that they can apply first to themselves then to their children, practical, affordable, doable in everyday life. When the demand is there, well, supply must follow, and so you can see that an entirely new, what they often call industry, can spring up. An entirely new movement can develop. You already have it to some degree with self-improvement, mindfulness, various courses on self-awareness, but it can also be extended to psychology, psychological healing, personal development. Of course, some women will be open to a spiritual approach to this, but many women will be open to a more universal approach that is not openly or directly spiritual.
This is a very important development that the more aware people can work for, can envision. You can work on it yourself, creating the demand, filling the demand. Some of you have experience in working with helping people with coaching, self-improvement, whatever you have. Some of you have experience with traditional psychology. So many have the potential to be part of this. There are, of course, many women but also some men who are tuned in to this and who are ready to step into that role as therapists and fill the need: coaches, authors, what have you. But the focus can be, first of all, to: “Develop myself as a woman so that I can help my child, my children, develop themselves into productive individuals.” In a little longer run, it is clear the demand needs to grow to a point where society makes this a priority, makes this as available as physical health care, but that is a little more down the road. Quite frankly, there are many women who are open to the realization: “I can’t wait for society to do this. My children will be grown before that happens. I need to start now. I need to do something now. So I need to take the initiative.”
Women can come together, form groups, support groups for each other, where they are helping each other develop their psychology and help develop their children. There are many ways to do this. There is much experimentation that needs to be done so that people in different countries and different cultures find what works for them. This is not in any way saying there is only one way to do this, or that a particular teaching is the way to do this. Universal ideas need to be brought forth. Many are already there, but they need to be put together into a practical, applicable process and method, many methods, many therapies, many approaches. This is a very, very important development. Certainly it will start in the more affluent nations, no question about it, because people have the free time and the free attention to do it. They also have the money to do it, but it can spread like rings in the water.
Now, on a little more long-term basis, what can this then develop into? Well, when you begin to recognize your self-actualization needs, you can become open to various forms of spiritual ideas. You come to the point where, in order to fully embrace self-actualization, you have to realize you are not a physical, material being. Otherwise you would not have the potential to actualize yourself. A cow cannot actualize itself, nor can a monkey, but a human being can. So this can open many women to a spiritual approach. Many women are already open, but many, many more can become open in this next decade to various kinds of spiritual approaches. Again, there is not one that will take over, that will be dominant, but there are some general ideas that many women are ready to contemplate.
First of all, there is the idea of reincarnation. It is very important for resolving some of these questions that mothers have. For example, you are contemplating the future of your child, and you know that there is always the risk that the child could experience some kind of accident, some kind of mishap that could set its life on a negative track or even end its life. When you recognize that the child can have lived before, and in past lifetimes the child might have made karma, this could precipitate such negative events. You can ask yourself: “Well, what can I do about my child’s karma from past lifetimes?” Obviously, you can do various things, according to various spiritual traditions, to transform this karma before it becomes physical. Obviously some of the more aware people have been doing this for many years, using spiritual tools to transmute the karma of their children, but many more women can become open to this idea that: “I can use certain spiritual tools to transform the karma of my child before it becomes physical and precipitates an unfortunate event.”
There is another question that many women have, even though they are not necessarily consciously aware of it or able to put words on it, and it is simply this: “Why is my child the way it is?” We are not just talking about physical characteristics. Most mothers recognize that their relationship to their child is very much dependent on the child’s personality, in other words, the child’s psychology. Many women have experienced that there are some limitations to what kind of a relationship, how close and open a relationship they can have to one of their children, or even all of their children. Why is this? Well, an important aspect of this is, of course, the psychology that the child has created in past lifetimes and carried with it into this lifetime. But, of course, your relationship to your child is not only dependent on the child’s psychology. It is also dependent on your psychology. So when you are open to reincarnation, you can see that you could have had certain experiences in past lives that you have carried with you into this lifetime, as certain psychological conditions, hang-ups, wounds, tendencies. You have a certain reactionary pattern that always causes you to react a certain way, and your child knows exactly how to push the button that triggers this reaction in you.
So then women can begin to empower themselves by saying: “Okay, I see that there’s a certain pattern in my relationship to my child. The cause of this must be certain patterns in my child’s psychology, certain wounds, certain hang-ups and certain patterns in my own psychology. Do I then have to live the rest of my life with these patterns? Will this set a limit to my relationship to my child that will continue indefinitely? Or is there something I can do about this?” Of course, the realization is that there is something you can do about it. You can fundamentally change your relationship to your child, but only if you change both your psychology and your child’s psychology. In some cases, it might be difficult to change the child’s psychology, but as society moves forward, it will become easier and easier because there will be more of an awareness. Children will learn already from the kindergarten stage that their psychology is something they can deal with. You will see that, beginning in this coming decade but also beyond, there will be an openness to the realization that all human relationships depend on the psychology of all people involved. And there is something you can do about it. Even if you as a mother cannot change the psychology of your child, by changing your own psychology, you can still change your relationship to your child.
I grant that there are some children whom it will be very difficult to help overcome certain psychological conditions in childhood because the children need to become adults. They need to go out in life and have certain experiences before they are ready and willing to look at their own psychology. There are some children that will feel that their mothers are trying to force this upon them, and, of course, it is important that you do not seek to force your child. Nevertheless, the majority of children can be helped when their mothers resolve their own hang-ups first and then seek to help the child. When you as a mother have resolved your own psychological patterns, it is not as likely that you will seek to force anything on the child because now you are not seeking to resolve your child’s psychology to avoid dealing with your own, as is the case with many mothers today who have not realized what we are talking about here. You can look at the pattern, perhaps even the pattern with your own mothers, where you, when you were a child, did certain things that made your mother angry, and your mother did not like to be angry. So she attempted to force you to change your behavior so that she would not become angry.
This, of course, is not the pattern you want to repeat yourself with your own children. You want to take a different approach and say: “Let me work on my own psychology first before I seek to change the psychology of my child, so I am sure that I am not seeking to force anything on my child in order to avoid dealing with myself. In other words, I will remove the beam in my own eye before I deal with the splinter in the eye of my child.” In some cases, you just need to remove the splinter in your own eye before you can deal with the beam in your child’s eye because it is, of course, not universally so that children have fewer psychological hang-ups than their parents.
On the contrary, in this day and age, many children have greater psychological problems than their parents. The reason for this is partly that when you look at the history of the last hundred years, with the many wars and conflicts there have been, you can see that there is a great number of souls who have been severely wounded in past lifetimes. They come into this lifetime with a desire to heal their psychological wounds, and they say to themselves: “Where would I like to be born?”
Well, many of them will want to be born in an affluent nation where they have a greater chance of being able to work on their psychology, but they will also look at the parents and say: “I would like to be born to parents who don’t have as many psychological hang-ups as I have, so they have some surplus, some freedom, to help me.” This is not to say that it is always that way because there are, of course, also many children, and many of you who are spiritual people are among them, who have fewer psychological hang-ups than your parents. Therefore you could potentially help your parents, or you could at least free yourself from your parents, so that their psychological hang-ups did not determine your life. But there is a clear tendency in the affluent nations that many children are born with some severe psychological hang-ups from past lives in the hope that their parents can give them an opportunity to heal them and overcome them.
So this is also something that is an expression of the essential humanity, namely that women begin to look for a deeper understanding of: “Why is my child the way it is?” This can make women become open to reincarnation because it does have a big explanatory potential for explaining why the child is a certain way, why it has certain psychological wounds that you cannot account for. In today’s world with the current understanding of psychology, there is a tendency that society or even family members will blame parents for their children having psychological issues. So if your child is not able to take care of itself or get an education, you must have done something wrong as a parent. Either your genes are not good enough or the way you brought up the child is not good enough. But that is not always the case. In many cases, it is not that way. You can look at a particular child and you can see that it has a deep psychological wound. A truly deep psychological wound can only come from a severe physical trauma that led to psychological trauma. You can look at this child who grew up in this affluent country, with parents that had plenty of money that had a stable life, and you can see that there is no point in this person’s childhood where he or she was exposed to this kind of trauma. Yet the wound is still there, and it is potentially preventing this child from having a constructive life. What can explain it? Well, only reincarnation. So there is a potential here that motherhood and a greater awareness by mothers can open women to many of these universal spiritual ideas.
The basic humanity is the recognition of rights, what should not happen, or what should happen to a child physically. The essential humanity is about opportunities, the opportunities of people, the opportunities of the child. So when you raise your awareness as a mother, you would also look at: “What are the opportunities for my children? And how could I improve those opportunities?” Surely you can improve the opportunities of your children by helping them heal their psychology. But is there not more you could do to improve the opportunities of your children, perhaps even influence what kind of children you are going to have?
If you step back from all the specifics, you can say one thing: Whenever you think about Jesus, whatever you think about Christianity, if you free yourself from the usual doctrines, Jesus was a child that had an extraordinary potential. He had an extraordinary opportunity to do something in life that would have a big impact on the world, a positive impact on the world. So, if you are a mother who is a little more aware than the average, would you not want to become the mother of one or several children who could also have an opportunity to have a positive impact on the world? You would therefore have to say: “What could bring this about? How could I become the mother of a particularly gifted child with a great potential?”
You would have to be willing to work on yourself, not only your psychology, because it is not a matter of just healing psychological wounds and reactionary patterns. It is a matter of developing your psychology towards the higher potentials of human psychology. This means that you will have to walk the path to higher awareness and deliberately and consciously seek to raise yourself to a higher state of consciousness than what most people call normal.
To bring forth a child with a higher potential, you have to have your psychology so resolved that you do not have any hang-ups that would have a negative effect on the child. You have to be so resolved in your psychology that you are free to focus on tuning in to your child’s potential and what it would take for you to support that potential so that you could do what is in your power to do to help the child realize its potential.
There are many women who in this lifetime have worked on their psychology and in past lifetimes have reached a certain level of resolution, where in this lifetime, it is part of their Life plan to give birth to a child with a particular potential, a higher potential. Many of these women are in affluent nations but not all of them and so there is a large group of women who are not yet consciously aware of this who could break through and who could start saying: “What can I then do to prepare myself to give birth to such a child?”
The obvious answer is that beyond resolution of psychology, you can raise your consciousness, walk a spiritual path, get to the point where you understand what it takes for a human being to raise its consciousness and thereby unfold its higher potential. There are women who can do this within the next decade and there are others that can do it beyond. There are so to speak rungs of women who can gradually step up to this. You who have already stepped up to this realization of the spiritual potential, the potential for spiritual growth, can do spiritual work for this and some of you can seek to help other women, either through counselling, coaching, therapies, workshops, whatever experience you have. So there are certainly many things that can be done. Many, many things that can be done here within these next 10 years to create this kind of a breakthrough where mothers become more open to looking beyond traditional viewpoints, traditional beliefs, traditional thought systems and looking at: “What can I do to improve the life of my children and of course, improve my own life in the process? What can I do to improve my relationship to my children, or the relationship of my children to each other?”
How many mothers have given birth to their first child and they have enjoyed a certain time being alone with that child, being able to put their full attention on that child. Then they have looked forward to having a second child thinking, oh these two children will now be a lot of enjoyment to each other, they will be able to play together, they will help each other. And so you have that second child and barely is it “dry behind the ears” as the saying goes before it starts fighting with its sibling and then you have sibling rivalry. You have these very deep conflicts between children.
How can you understand this unless you know about reincarnation and realize that these two souls might have had severe conflicts in a past life that they have carried with them, and even though they are siblings and you think coming from the same mother, being in the same family, they should like each other. Well, they hate each other from past lives and so you have again the situation: Will you live with this until the children finally move away from home, or will you attempt to do something about it? What can you do about it? Well, you can use psychological tools to heal the children’s psychology, you can use spiritual tools to consume the karma between them and seek to get them on a positive track. You can help them grow beyond these patterns that they have carried with them from past lives so that essentially they can either free themselves from each other and move on in separate directions, or they can resolve their differences and have a constructive relationship. In any event, they are free from the conflict that might have consumed their life for several lifetimes.
Again, you can say: “What can you do as a woman to make sure you don’t have those kinds of children?” Well again, raise your consciousness. Or you can at least raise your consciousness so that if you have those kinds of children, you can help them and you can avoid reacting to them in a negative way.
The basic message here is that there is more to motherhood than meets the eye. It is time to step up to a higher awareness of motherhood. Some might think there is more to motherhood than meets the physical eye, but you can also say: “There is more to motherhood than meets the I, meaning the sense of self of the mother, the “I” of the mother.”
Motherhood is not about “I”. Motherhood is about more than I, more than myself. Many women have traditionally engaged in motherhood from a self-centered perspective. There are two main ways this has happened. They did not have a planned pregnancy, they were thrown into it, they may have felt forced into it and so they become self-centered in dealing with the situation that they feel forced into. Or they planned to have the pregnancy because they had some self-centered desire for how their children should be. You will see, and many of you will have grown up in such an environment, that your mother had a very fixed idea of how you should live your life, what you should do and what you should not do. This is because for your mother, motherhood was not more than met her I, herself, her separate self, her outer personality.
You can see if you look at this historically that if you go back in time even in the modern democracies you would see that mothers often had a stronger expectation about their children. You can see this especially about daughters. Mothers traditionally have a higher expectation for their daughters than they have for their sons and therefore they give less freedom to their daughters in many cases. When you go back in time, you had this situation where as a daughter your life was locked on a track and you had to follow the expectations of your mother, even your greater family and your culture. But you can see that in the affluent nations, the more modern nations, what women have gained is not just physical or economic freedom, but also more of a psychological freedom to not live their lives as their mothers did or as their mothers expected them to do. Many women have managed to free themselves from these expectations. Many mothers have also lessened their traditional expectations so that there is greater freedom in these affluent nations.
But you can go to other nations, such as again, the Muslim countries of the Middle East, but also India, China, many other nations, even South Korea. Even though it is one of the modern democracies, you have this very strong expectation from the side of parents, especially mothers, of how their children, especially their daughters should live their lives and it can be very difficult for women in these countries to break free from this. It is something that women in the West could reach out to women in these other nations and help them overcome this. Help them grow to the point where they can recognize their essential humanity and say: “I have a right to go beyond the expectations of my mother, my father, my society, my family, and live my own life. I have a right to do something with my life that my parents and their generation could not even imagine and envision. I have a right to take my society beyond what my society can envision and imagine. This is my higher humanity, my essential humanity, my higher potential.”
You will see here that there are so many things that can be done here. Books could be written. Many, many women in all parts of the world could write books about their situation, their growth process, what they have gone through, what they have overcome. There is a book written by a woman in Saudi Arabia who described how she broke through some of these taboos. She drove a car, she was imprisoned, she eventually had to move from her country but still she describes the steps she went through, and many other women can relate to this. But many women in the affluent part of the world could write their stories of what they have gone through in their lives, how they have overcome limitations, overcome all of these things. It does not even have to be books. It could be blogs. It could be postings on the internet. It could be movies, TV series. All kinds of things that could come out of this.
What has happened over these last several decades is that there has been more and more women who have been speaking out, not necessarily about great political, philosophical topics, although they can also do this, but they have spoken out about their own situation, how they have overcome various limitations. This is a great inspiration to women. This is very much needed!
There needs to be more of an alternative to the traditional women’s magazines that are little more than propaganda apparatuses for promoting these traditional views of women, women’s role, how women should look, what it means to be beautiful and sexually attractive to men and all of these things. There needs to be some expression where real women tell their real stories of their real struggles and their real overcoming of their limitations. This could be tremendously inspiring to many other women, not only in the affluent part of the world but especially in other parts of the world where women might read this. There is even a certain value to the fact that it is now possible to watch television in large parts of the world and that even in some of the poorer nations there are still women who can watch television. If you look at some of these TV series about women that have been created by the Hollywood establishment, you may say that these TV series are completely out of touch with how women live and what their situation is in these poor nations and this is of course, correct.
But there is still a certain value in women in these poor nations seeing a program on TV and they see that there are women in other parts of the world who have a very different life than we have. They have much better material conditions. In fact, they have so affluent material conditions that they do not even spend any time worrying about it. They are only worrying about their boyfriends and whether they get enough sex. But women in the poorer part of the world can see that it is actually possible to have this kind of life, and if it is possible for these women who quite frankly we often can see are not particularly sophisticated or intelligent but very self-absorbed, why should it not be possible for themselves in their part of the world?
This is one of the values of spreading this even though it may be popular culture or not particularly high, it still gives a different perspective.
It is even more important that women share their real story, which is not Hollywood glamorized, but sharing your real story, your real struggles. You may say: “Well, I have grown up in a very privileged society where I have certainly not experienced severe poverty. And these conditions that women may have in Saudi Arabia or in India and Bangladesh, what value could it have for them?” But they still might be inspired by the fact that you were facing certain limitations, you overcame them and that can inspire them to say: “Well, can I then also overcome the limitations I face even though they are different?”
Because how did you overcome your limitations? By working with yourself, with your own psychology, and you may say that a woman who lives in fairly poor conditions, how can she work on her psychology? But the reality is that if you have a basic awareness of psychology, what does it cost you to work on yourself? You just need a little bit of time here and there in your daily life. Then you can make some progress. So you cannot take this negative view that is out there that there is nothing you can do, or whatever I do will not have an impact. You need to keep in mind what the Buddha said when he came out of Nirvana and was challenged by the demons of Mara that nobody would be able to understand his teaching. He said: “Some will understand, some will benefit.” Some will be inspired by you and is it not worth it then to put yourself out there?
Besides, you will learn for putting yourself out there, putting your stories out there and seeing how you react to the feedback you get. This gives you an opportunity to grow. When you look at history, going back to the women’s suffrage movement, the women’s liberation movement, you can see that women could not have achieved these breakthroughs as individuals. They achieved them by coming together, by supporting each other, by working together, not as the men are working together but as women can work together. This has had a tremendous impact on the world and the potential is virtually unlimited for the kind of impact you could have on the world when women come together and work together.
Men tend to be much more focused on the outer, much more focused on conditions, religion, political affiliation, ethnic affiliation, skin color, all of these things. Women have the potential to look beyond all of these outer things to connect with each other at the heart level, at the intuitive level and therefore form a sisterhood that goes beyond all outer boundaries. Men cannot do this, at least not in the foreseeable future. Women can. Some of you have already done it, many women have done it but there is a potential in the next 10 years that this will break through on a much larger scale that will cross many more boundaries than have so far been crossed. This is one of the greatest potentials for manifesting the Age of Higher Awareness.
Certainly men will play a role in manifesting the Age of Higher Awareness but in the practical, everyday down to Earth matters women will be driving the change or there will be no change. So will you, not to just drive a car in Saudi Arabia, but will you drive the change in Saudi Arabia, in Iran, in India, in Bangladesh, in China, in Denmark, in Sweden, in America, in South America, in Africa, wherever you have it? Will you as women drive the change? There is no need to feel negative about it, but you can look at it as an opportunity to say: “What can I do? What can I do to improve the life of my own children?” If you do not have children or if they are grown: “What can I do to improve the lives of other children and their mothers? What can I do to improve the life of women around the world?”
There is something you can do. This is another lie of the manipulators that they always project at you. You will notice many times if you look at yourselves honestly that you can read a teaching, you can feel uplifted, you can feel elated and then after some time there comes this reaction: “Oh, there’s nothing you can do. Who are you? Who do you think you are? What can you do?” But you can say with higher awareness: “There is something I can do.” And whatever you do is better than nothing, for nothing has never changed the world, but something, many small somethings, have indeed changed the world and will change the world in the future. Many more aware people are looking for this big breakthrough and now we have the Age of Higher Awareness. But the golden age will be brought by many small steps, many small changes here and there is what will bring the Age of Higher Awareness. There will be people who 500 years from now, still will not think the world is in a golden age because they have not realized it. There are people today who have not acknowledged the immense progress that has been made over the last 500 years, at least in some parts of the world because they have not realized it. They have not changed in their minds. But 500 years from now, you will barely recognize this planet, because then the Age of Higher Awareness will be well and truly on the way to manifesting its higher potential.