Why is America not in the golden age? Because not enough Americans are in the golden age consciousness. Why are they not in the golden age consciousness? Because they have been divided by all of these factors.
What is the Age of Higher Awareness? How will you manifest the Age of Higher Awareness? The next 2,000 years have the potential to become a golden age because it is the age of higher awareness and the age of community. Community means “come ye into unity.” But how do you come into unity? You come into unity through higher awareness, you are divided through the mind of lower awareness, the mind of antichrist. Why are Americans divided right now? Because they have become open to the manipulation of the mind of antichrist. What is one of the factors that have made them open to this?
Americans have an obsession with winning. But underlying this desire to win is, of course, a certain mindset that is very competitive. Americans often do not realize this because Americans tend to live in a bit of a bubble because America is such a big nation that Americans do not travel as much as other nations outside their nation, because you can do so much traveling in the United States and still see new things.
People in smaller countries around the world tend to travel more. They are exposed to different cultures and they realize there are many different mindsets, many different ways of looking at things. So Americans are not so used to hearing what other people think about America. Otherwise, they would know that many people consider Americans to be very competitive.
You can look at the Olympics, you can look at sports in general, and see how often Americans want to win, how they have a certain very competitive attitude of wanting to win, wanting to be better than others. And it is even reflected in this national sense that America is the greatest nation on earth, that America needs to be better than other nations and that America is more advanced than other nations.
This competitive mindset is precisely one of the things that has divided Americans because the very essence of competition is that you are in some kind of struggle against other people. Competition and cooperation are not compatible. They start both with a term “co,” but that is where the similarities end. You cannot cooperate with people if you are competing with them at the same time. Now, there is another word that starts with “co” and it is community. So? You cannot come into community, you cannot form a community through competition, but only through cooperation.
There is a popular saying in the United States that you want to “keep up with the Joneses.” Well, there are many Americans that are in this state of mind where they want to keep up with the Joneses. If somebody down the street gets a new car, then they have to get a new car that is a little bit fancier, a little bit bigger. Or at least it used to be that way when the middle class Americans had money to spend on these kinds of luxury items, which many of them do not have anymore, despite the fact that both husband and wife are working.
There are many Americans that want to keep up with the Joneses but there are also many Americans who want to be the Joneses. They want to be the people that other people are trying to keep up with, but they want to stay ahead of them. They do not want other people to catch up.
You see here, this is what on a national scale works in the favor of the power elite who have stolen the money from the people. They have set themselves up as an elite, they do not want to share with others, they want to have a privileged position that nobody can threaten, and nobody can take away from them. In other words, there is a consciousness that you want to have a privileged position, and then when you have it, you want to keep other people from getting close to your position.
What does this mean if you look at it historically in America? The people who have the money today, the people in the top one percent, how did they get the money? You have this American dream that everybody through hard work can become a millionaire. This is part of this dream. But if you look at how the people who are billionaires today, how they or their ancestors, how they accumulated that much money, it was done through certain business measures where they were free to destroy the competition and to do whatever necessary to accumulate the money. But when they had accumulated the money, they did everything they could—both using their money and illegal methods, but also using the government—to shut down freedom of competition. In other words, they used the freedom of the economy to gain a privileged position for themselves and when they had gotten that position, they attempted to destroy the freedom of the economy so nobody could threaten their position, or at least very few people could do so.
If you look at things from a purely logical perspective, would it not be to everybody’s advantage if everybody in society had lots of money? Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of the economy, so the more money consumers have, the more they spend, the more businesses can be started, the more the existing businesses make money. Everybody prospers. Everybody makes more money when people have more money to spend.
So the richer everyone in a society gets, the bigger the economy will be, and the more people can make money. Even the richest people can make more money if everybody has more money to spend. So why wouldn’t these rich people want everybody to get rich? Well, for the simple reason that they want to be ahead of the population. They want to be the elite that stands out that has what nobody else has.
Look back to the feudal societies of Europe. Here are these few noble men sitting in their castles, having several hundred peasants do all the work so they can live a privileged lifestyle. If you take one of these noblemen, and look at what money he actually had, he didn’t have very much money compared to what the rich people today have. There are people today who, even if you account for inflation and all of these factors, have much greater wealth than the noblemen of medieval Europe. But that was not what meant anything to these noblemen. What meant something to them was that they had more money than the majority of the population, that they were so far ahead of the majority of the population. They also, of course, competed amongst themselves, but nevertheless, they could feel that they were part of an elite, and that elite was so far beyond the regular people that there was no comparison.
This is what means something to these manipulators in embodiment, and that is why they do not want all people to have lots of money. They do not want the population to prosper too much, because they do not really care about making more money than they have. They care about having more money than most people do and having it be such a large gap between what they have and what the have-nots have that it is an insurmountable gap so that nobody can ever cross it, or maybe just a few people can cross it and also become millionaires or billionaires. But this is something they have to allow in order to maintain that American dream.
Now you can look at certain people, like the owner of Amazon, who started out with nothing, but started out in a new field that none of the established businesses could really see the value of, and has still made a huge fortune for himself. This is something that the power elite, the old established power elite, do not really like. They tend to look down upon these people because they are not part of the old establishment. But they allow it because it maintains the American dream that really everybody could do the same if they applied themselves the way he did.
But the fact of the matter is that everybody could not do the same. Everybody cannot become prosperous because the money is not there, the economy is not there, the freedom is not there, the competition is not there. You may have one or two people that break through the glass ceiling and accumulate a vast fortune, starting with nothing. But if all Americans tried to do the same, even if they applied themselves and worked as hard as they could, they could not all do it, because the economy simply is not at that level. And it is not at that level, because the power elite has kept it at an artificially lower level.
This is the competitive mindset. And unfortunately, and this is what keeps the status quo the way it is, you do not only find this among the top one percent of the power elite. You find it among a rather substantial percentage of the American people. They also want to be ahead of others, not as far ahead as the power elite, they just need to be a little bit ahead. But they want to be ahead. They want to be the Joneses that everybody else is trying to keep up with.
This has created a mindset in America, and you will find it everywhere. This has created a mindset where some people, in their youth, made an effort, started their own business, did whatever they needed to do and they gained more money than the average. But now that they have gained that more money, they have become a little bit complacent, a little bit lazy. What they want to do is they want to maintain the lead they have over others. They want to still be ahead but they are not really willing to make an extra effort anymore to work harder. So what do they do? They want to keep other people down.
There is a shift that happens in many people. First, they are all focused on striving to make money for themselves. Then when they feel they have enough, they now shift, and now they are focused on keeping other people down. This is what in many, many places in the United States has created what you call the ‘old boys’ network.
You see almost everywhere this tendency that there are businesses that have a certain dominant position in a town or in an area of a larger city and now they want to keep other businesses down. They do not want other businesses to come up. They have become a little bit lazy. They do not want to work as hard anymore. They do not want some young upstart who is willing to work hard to take their customers away. So they do whatever they can within the law, or beyond the law, often as a form of corruption that is not necessarily as negative a corruption as it can be, but still a form of corruption where they keep the old boys in their privileged positions by cooperating about this.
This is a mindset that does two things. First of all, it keeps the real power elite in power, and therefore it keeps the entire economy top heavy. But second of all, it slows down the economic growth. Because again, there comes a point where you have enough money to buy the house you always dreamt of but you cannot buy two dream houses, or three and you cannot dream of a better house. You cannot buy a bigger car than the car you dreamt of when you were young, and so on, so many people come to a point where they may accumulate money, but they are not spending it, so they are not keeping it flowing through the economy. They are not willing to share it either, and sharing the wealth makes other people do well.
What is the effect of this mindset, this consciousness? It is anti-community. This is not how you build a community. If you look at the first American settlers that came over, they had a very strong sense of community, a very strong sense of helping each other because they knew that this was the only way that they themselves could do better. They did not even consider that they could do better as an individual. Their entire mindset was that: “The way that I can do better is to help my brothers and sisters in a community do better because when a community prospers, all members of the community will prosper.” This was their mindset. This was the real mindset that built America. It is still there, you can still find it. But it is not the dominant mindset in America right now, and has not been for some time.
Go back, first to the 1800s. Large businessmen came up, realized that: “In order to really accumulate wealth, we cannot do it through a free market economy where there is free competition. We cannot do it by just providing a product or service and making a reasonable, we might say a natural, profit, off of doing that.”
When you look at a certain economy, you can see there is a level, the entire economy of a nation has a certain level. People have a certain amount of money. They can pay a certain amount of money for necessities and therefore you can make a certain profit on providing those necessities. This is the natural profit.
Now the natural way to increase your profit is to raise the level of the economy so everybody has more money. They can afford to pay more, they can afford to buy more, and therefore you can actually make a higher profit. If you double the level of the entire economy, the natural profit can also double. But these people were not content with doubling their profit. They wanted to multiply it a hundred or a thousand times and this is what you cannot do in a natural economy, a free economy with free competition.
You can only do this in a monopolized, top-heavy economy that takes the value of the people’s labor and concentrates it in the hands of the elite. In other words, the reality of the so-called free market economy that people are always screaming about in America is that you can only make a natural profit. There is a natural profit to be made. And this means that in a natural economy, you will not see the emergence of an elite that is so far ahead of the broad population.
You cannot see this in a natural economy because you only make a natural profit. What these power-elite people wanted was to create an unnatural economy where it is possible to concentrate wealth in the hands of 1% of the population. This is essentially the kind of economy you had during the feudal societies of Europe, where the wealth of the people’s labor was funneled upwards to the noblemen who owned the land and owned the people. This is what they wanted to repeat in America. This is what they have been working on since the 1800s. First of all, they created the Federal Reserve, they created financial instruments, they created stocks and bonds, they created the banking system and created many other things.
What did it lead to? Well, if you look forward to the 1920s, you see what they call the “roaring twenties” where the economy was supposedly booming. But it wasn’t really the natural economy that was booming, even though it was also growing during that time. But the growth was top-heavy. It was concentrated in the hands of those who had enough money to buy stocks, and who had so much money that they could create a bubble of stocks. This led to a phenomenon that has been known in economic circles as speculation.
In other words, you are buying something, for example, it can be real estate, it can be stocks, it can be other kinds of financial papers, but you are buying this not because of the value it has for use, but because you are speculating that even though you pay a certain amount for it now, the prices will go up and, therefore, you can sell it for a profit in a short time. In other words, you are speculating that prices will continue to go up.
If you had a natural economy where the wealth was being distributed evenly across the people, not necessarily that everybody had the same amount of money, but that all shared in the growth, if you had such an economy then you could see that prices could continue to grow because everybody would have more and more money, and they could afford to pay more and more. This is where you could potentially see a continued rise in prices. But it would not be as fast as when you created a bubble economy where, again, people are not buying something because it has value, they are buying it because they speculate that it will keep increasing in price so they can sell it at a profit.
If you look at the United States of America, you will see a phenomenon that you do not see that obvious in any other nation around the world, even though you do see it in other nations, but you see it especially in America, you see it time and time again. An obvious example is the stock market crash of 1929. Stocks have as such no value, or rather stocks have value in the sense that if you buy stock in a company that makes a profit, you are paid dividends. But what drove the growth in stock prices in the1920s was not that people were hoping to get dividends out of their stock. It was that the stock market was growing artificially because people kept buying on speculation that the prices would continue to go up, so they could make a short-term profit without doing anything.
You have seen so many times in different parts of the United States where there is a real estate bubble. All of a sudden real estate prices are going up. People are buying an apartment. They know they do not actually have the income so that they can afford to live in that apartment long term, because the price is too high for the apartment. But they realize that they can live in it for at least a year or two and then they can sell it for a profit, they hope. But, of course, such a bubble cannot continue indefinitely. It is a pyramid scheme. There will come a point where those who started the cycle are smart enough to realize that it cannot continue much longer and then they start pulling their money out. There is a group of these top 1% or less, who know that they can drive these bubbles and they have done it over and over and over again.
They drive the bubble by putting their money into the stock market or into a real estate market and they make prices go up. Then they count on some of the people who are lower down on the food chain, who don’t have as much money and who are not as ruthless, they will start buying hoping to make a short-term profit. They know this can only keep going for a certain amount of time. But in the meantime, they are having a lot of value added to their investments because their stocks or their properties go up.
Then there comes a point where they think: “Now is the time to pull out.” Then they start pulling out and all of a sudden when they start selling, the prices cannot be maintained, and the prices start going down and this can lead in many cases to a panic where there is a crash. This means that the top 1% not only got their money out in time, they made a huge profit. But most people are the ones that are lower down on the food chain. They lost money, in many cases, all of their money because they had over-invested.
This is what the power elite will do time and time again. This is what they have done time and time again and they will continue to do it until the people smarten up and demand that the politicians stop this kind of exploitation, for it is exploitation.
This is not a free market economy. A free market does not mean that the top 1% have complete freedom to exploit 90% of the population. This is not a free-market economy. You cannot maintain a free-market economy if you allow the ruthless people to seek to create monopolies and these bubbles, boom-and-bust cycles.
What is it that really happens in such a boom-and-bust cycle? Well, what happens is that you are destroying the sense of community. You are creating a situation where individuals are only concerned about themselves. They are driven by greed. They want to make more and more money. They do not care that other people lose money. They do not care if society loses money. They do not care that all of those ordinary people, who are working jobs, do not make more money and do not increase their standard of living. They do not care about anything but themselves.
So you have the top elite who are completely blinded by their greed but then you have those who want to be part of the elite, those who want to be the Joneses and they try to get in and make a short-term profit. And they are usually the ones that are left holding the bag, as the saying goes.
What happens here is that you have the most selfish, the most self-centered, the most egotistical, the most insensitive, the most narcissistic people in society who create these boom-and-bust cycles, partly by ruthless manipulation and partly by blind greed. But they have been allowed to do this over and over and over again.
Now what happens when you start doing this? Well, for a time, it may seem as if the natural economy is growing alongside the bubble economy. You create an unnatural economy that is like an octopus sitting on top of the natural economy having its tentacles out everywhere seeking to siphon off profit and value upwards.
For a time, the natural economy can be growing. But then there comes a point where the unnatural economy keeps growing so much faster than the natural economy and there is a shift that happens where there is no longer sufficient focus on multiplying the talents. Multiplying the talents means doing something that benefits everybody, which raises the entire level of the economy. When you artificially drive up real estate prices, you are not creating more value, you are not building more houses, you are not building bigger or nicer houses. You are just artificially inflating the prices of existing houses. Stocks are even worse! What is a stock certificate worth? It isn’t worth the paper it is printed on, as they say.
When you create this artificial economy, what do you do? Well, you suspend the very principle that drives economic growth, which is what Jesus described in his parable about the talents where the three servants receive different numbers of talents. When you multiply something by doing something that benefits the whole, there is a multiplication from higher awareness. This is how an economy can actually grow and continue to grow.
There can be sustained growth in the economy without any boom and bust, without any inflation, when it is a natural economy but this requires there to be a multiplication factor. When that multiplication factor is suspended by greed, then there will come that point where the economy goes into a bust. There is a crash. It can be no other way.
Even if you did not have the multiplication factor, these boom cycles must come to an end because they are artificial. It is a pyramid scheme. It is dependent on more and more people putting more and more money into it and that cannot be done when just a small minority gets money out of the cycle. How can there be more and more money coming in when there is nothing going out? It cannot happen. Even from a practical level, these will have a limited lifespan. But especially when you consider this multiplication factor, it is clear that they will go down. So what happened in the 1930s?
Well, the economy went into such a deep downward trend that it became as self-reinforcing as the upward trend had been in the 1920s. Those who still had money did not dare to invest it, didn’t dare to start a new business because they didn’t think they could make it. They did not think they could make money when so many people had lost their jobs and were unemployed and in many cases, they could not.
What was it that really happened? The unnatural economy destroyed the natural economy. The boom-and-bust cycle destroyed the natural economy so that the recession became much worse than it otherwise would have been. Did this matter to the top elite? No, because they had all the money they needed to continue living their lavish lifestyle. They had the money to wait it out until they could have the next cycle of boom where the economy was again growing.
But what really happened here? What happened was that the sense of community was destroyed and now you had the recession where it was each man for himself and there wasn’t that willingness to help each other at the same level as there had been before. Again, this took down the multiplication factor continuing through the 1930s.
What turned it around? Unfortunately, what turned it around was World War II, where Americans had an external enemy that caused them to be united in fighting that enemy. This restored some of that community spirit, the willingness to sacrifice for the greater good, and that restarted or accelerated the acceleration factor so that the economy again started growing. This, unfortunately, was at an enormous human cost that had to be paid by those who were killed in the war, those who were hurt by the war and so on.
What is it that then happened after the war? Well, there was a sense of community spirit that carried over into the decades after the war. There was this sense of a growing middle class who believed in the country, who believed in the system and who believed in the economy. They dared to invest and they dared to spend money, and the economy became a self-reinforcing upward cycle, mostly again because of this multiplication factor that people had.
But then from 1975 and forward, it was not just one thing, it was many things that the top elite managed to get through at the political level that again started to restrict that multiplication factor. That is why the economy has stagnated, economic growth has stagnated, and again, this is partly driven by the people who are acting as individuals who have the competitive mindset, who want to be ahead of others, who want to have a privileged position and then prevent other people from challenging it.
How can you, when you have attained a privileged position, prevent other people from challenging your position? Only when you restrict free competition. Well, if you restrict free competition, you will also restrict the multiplication factor because when you restrict innovation, you restrict the willingness to serve people better, then the established businesses, and so on. You cannot maintain that cycle.
Once those people who want to attain a privileged position by using freedom (and then want to maintain the privileged position by restricting freedom once they get into power), then the multiplication factor goes down. And what you have seen now is simply this taken to an extreme that really is absurd. It is absurd to look at how much money has been concentrated in the wealth of the top 0.1% of–you can’t say the American people, because they certainly don’t see themselves as part of the American people and they don’t act like it.
This can change in two ways: It can change by another bust that leads to an enormous downturn in the economy that will have enormous negative effects on the general population. It also will have negative effects on the top (1%) because they have created such a system now that if it tumbles they will not be able to maintain the wealth like they did to a large degree in the 1930s. They simply will also lose, most of them.
It will have enormous negative ramifications. This can lead to such a crisis situation that there is a violent revolution or uprising by the people. There could be a war scenario where America could get involved with foreign wars to such a degree that it becomes also very, very devastating and expensive. And this is one scenario. It is not an unrealistic scenario.
The other option is that the American people will have a shift where they will be willing to say: “We want to change.” And, therefore, there will be such an upwelling of determination on the part of the people, a majority of the people, that a critical mass of people become united by this one goal: to change the top-heavy, elitist economy. This can happen.
But even this has more than one scenario. The ideal scenario is, of course that the people will become united by a higher vision of how the economy could really function, as a natural economy that benefits everyone. But unfortunately, there is another scenario that also has a high probability and it is that the people will not be united by a higher vision. They will only be united by anger against what they come to see as a common enemy.
The top 0.1%, most of them are manipulators. They have created their positions and maintain them by dividing the people. There is always an inherent risk in doing this because there can come that shift, especially in today’s media age with the internet, where the majority of the people come to see that the enemy is not another group of people, but the enemy is the power elite.
The enemy is the elite that has divided the people into all of these warring groups. If the people are united by this vision and united by enough anger, then that can also lead to a not peaceful transition, but at least not as negative as if there is a crash in the economy first, where they demand change. This is, of course, not the highest. It is clearly a dualistic change. But sometimes there can be a situation where the higher vision simply is not possible because not enough people can grasp it. So they must be allowed to outlive their consciousness.
Right now there are too many Americans who are into this divisive state of mind, where they do not want to look at themselves. They want to point to another group of people as the enemy. If they become united and point to the power elite as the enemy, this could also lead to change, not the highest form of change but certainly it can lead to change.
It will, of course, not in the long run solve the problems because only a higher vision will solve the problems, because this will not really overcome division. The people can be united against a common enemy, as they were in their fight against the Nazis and the Japanese, but this did not mean that all division in American society had now been overcome, as you can clearly see today. Even if the people are united against the elite, this will not, of course, overcome all forms of division, but there will be the stage set for another conflict further down the road. Nevertheless the scenario must be allowed to outplay itself.
You have already seen the beginning of what can happen with these demonstrations against police brutality. You see from this there is an anger in the people. Many, many people have accumulated anger, and a large part of this anger comes from the fact that they know, even if they do not consciously acknowledge this, that they cannot maintain their middle class standard of living. Something has happened so they are losing income, they are losing wealth, their standard of living is being steadily eroded. They don’t know what to do about it. They don’t know what the cause is. So they have the anger, and when they see a way to take this anger out, well, then you see these riots and demonstrations.
Yhere is no question that police brutality has gone too far, and it is both valid and within the democratic rights that people protest against this peacefully. But because of the anger you can see that it is often difficult to keep those protests peaceful. You can also see that the police are enveloped in what we have called a collective entity of anger against the people. That is why you see this police brutality that keeps going. Even after the first demonstrations there were still shootings, completely unnecessary shootings. How can it be necessary to shoot a person in the back seven times? You can only say that police officer’s mind was overtaken by a collective entity, but there was no rational thought in this person’s mind. And despite all of the protests that have been taking place, it still happened.
There is no rational explanation for this other than the accumulated anger, and it is just a matter of time when this reaches this level where the government will not be able to stop it. They can put in the National Guard, they can put in Special Forces, they still will not be able to stop it. If they attempt to stop it by force, well, what is the difference between the United States of America and some dictatorship that America claims to be far above? You see the dilemma that America is in, which is why one might say: “Right now America is ungovernable.”
How do you maintain law and order if too many people are rioting? How can you do it and still maintain some kind of democratic principles? It cannot be done. It is an impossible situation. Is there a way out?
Well, certainly there is a way out. There is more than one way out. But it is a shift in the minds of the American people, where they begin to look at what divides them and they begin to connect to this basic humanity. What is it you have in a true community? You have that sense of humanity. It can be a community like the first settlers in America, who were very poor, who were in a very difficult situation in a hostile environment that they did not know, and they were united by their need to even survive. But still there was that recognition of the basic humanity: “We are in this together. We can only survive by helping each other. We cannot survive by fighting each other or competing with each other.”
So this can be something that can emerge, where there are people who look at the riots, look at the government’s response and say: “Now wait a minute. This has gone too far. Can’t you see that this has gone too far? We need to stop this. This is not what America is all about. This is not what a democracy is all about and this is definitely not the way to move America towards a better future.”
If enough people will form a counterweight for this, then there can be a shift. There can be a shift away from division, where people begin to unite and say: “We simply cannot allow this downward spiral to run amok. We need to stop it, and we need to stop it now.”
There is a real potential that this can happen. Many, many people in America are aware of these things. They have these ideas already in their minds. Of course, they got them from higher awareness because they were tuned in to it. It can happen. The potential is there.
Now the question for the more aware people is: “Will you be the forerunners for this happening? Will you be those people who can tip the balance in that direction?” If so, you must yourselves overcome this division. You must overcome the divisive mindset where some of you, in fact too many of you, have been pulled into the entire mindset, the epic mindset: “This party is right. The other party is completely wrong. This president is the only one who can save America. That President will take it to hell.” All of this mindset.
If you want to be forerunners for a positive shift towards the Age of Higher Awareness, you need to take a look at yourselves, and you need to look at why you have been pulled into this mindset. You need to recognize that it is a fear-based mindset. It is the epic mindset. You can only be the forerunners if you overcome this mindset.