Consider the topic of families and how they will transition as we move into the Age of Higher Awareness. The state of Utah in the United States is the headquarters of the Mormon church and the majority of the population in that state are Mormons. The way to tell whether you have entered a Mormon home is that in the living room, will be a small framed embroidery with a text, “families are forever”. This shows you in a nutshell, how the Mormons have taken the concept of family to one extreme. They believe that after this lifetime, they will live in a higher realm along with their present families and they will live with those families for eternity.
Most of the more aware people will probably look at your present families and think; “no way do I want to live with these people forever.” Why is this? Why is it that there are some people in the world, not just the Mormons but many other people, who believe that their family members are the most important people in their lives and that they want, or at least feel obligated, to spend time with them, even beyond planet earth, even beyond the present lifetime? Why is it that you have that extreme of people who want to spend time with their families and you have the other extreme of many people, especially more aware people, who do not want to spend more time than necessary with their families, because they do not feel they have anything in common with their families, especially when it comes to growth in awareness?
This is because when you look at planet earth, you see that there are many different levels of consciousness. If you take Maslow’s pyramid of needs, you will see that at the lower levels of the pyramid, where people have the physiological and the safety needs, these have, when you look at it traditionally, very much been tied to the family. Families have tried to support each other in their physical survival, they have tried to protect each other. And then when you go to the next level of needs, the love and belonging needs of course, most people have at least attempted to find fulfillment of these needs in the family.
For many societies the fundamental unit of society has been the family. This is true in many different societies around the world, certainly in the monotheistic religions that have been patriarchal. For them, the family has been centered around the father. And even though it was in practical terms, always the women who held together the family, they have not really been recognized as being important because the father was more important.
But you do have examples around the world of matriarchal cultures, for example, some of the Native American tribes where the mother was the most important or the central figure in the families. You can certainly have families that are centered on the father; families that are centered on the mother and either way the family can then be the basic unit of society.
If we again, look at Maslow’s pyramid of needs, when we go to these higher needs we have the need for recognition. And although some people can find this fulfilled in their families, most people have a need to go beyond the family unit and seek some kind of recognition from the wider society.
Of course, when it comes to the highest of the needs described by Maslow, the need for self-actualization, well that is when most people who have this need, who are conscious of this need and who are pursuing this need find it difficult to find the support in the family that they need in order to actualize themselves. Most of the people who have risen to the level of the self-actualization needs have found little support in your families for your personal or spiritual growth. There are of course a variety of reasons for this.
Why have families have been so important in many cultures? There are some practical reasons for this. First of all, the fact that human bodies take a long time to mature into adulthood. It takes a long time for children to become self-sufficient especially in these hunter-gatherer cultures, or even in agricultural societies. There is no way that a five year old child can go out and plow the field and start planting a crop. It is dependent on its parents for its physical survival and will usually remain so until the late teenage years, perhaps even beyond.
There are some very practical reasons for this. There are also other reasons in the sense that some of the more organized centralized societies have seen the family as a very convenient unit for taking responsibility away from the state. You will see in communist societies for example, where even though the state was supposedly the most important, still they relied on the family to raise their children and help them survive so they could go to school and be indoctrinated with communist ideology. Many states have wanted the families to fulfill certain roles so that the state did not have to be burdened by, for example, looking after the children or bringing up children in a basic way.
However, if you go beyond these outer practical things recognized by the world at large, you can look at the fact that the manipulators have attempted to influence every aspect of life on the planet. And what is it that the manipulators want about families? How have they affected, how have they attempted to affect the way people look at families and the way families function?
The manipulators a long time ago decided to make men the dominant sex on the planet. They did this because men are more vulnerable to the epic mindset. And therefore, they can more easily be enticed into going to war. They also did it because from a biological viewpoint, women give birth to children, women nurse the children, and so it is more practical that the women stay with the children, so the men are free to go to war, and the women and the children can still survive.
Based on this, the manipulators projected this image of a family where the father was not only the head of the household, but he was sort of the master and the woman and the children were the slaves. They had to not only obey the father, but if he decided he had to go to war, or go on a crusade, they had to simply accept this, endure it, and make the best of it so that they could survive in his absence. And he was therefore free to do the bidding of the leaders of society, which in most cases were the manipulators.
The manipulators wanted a family structure where men had a privileged existence that allowed them to take off and go to war, or pursue some other service to the power elite. If a man was called to serve in government, for example, or in the army, where even if there was no war, then men could single-handedly decide to do this, even if their wives objected. The wife just had to accept it. And the man could then follow the manipulators and whatever they required of him.
You also have some more subtle motivation that the manipulators have for wanting to create these very tight-knit family units. What is it that you see in many families, at least in certain cultures? You do not see it as much anymore in the more developed nations in the world, but look at many of the less developed such as, for example, the Middle East. And what do you see? Well, you see that the family is actually enveloped in an aura, a spirit of obligation. People feel obligated towards each other. They feel they have to be loyal to their family members or even to their family as some kind of abstract unit.
It is not just a matter of not questioning the father, as the head of the household, but that you have to feel loyal to your parents, to your siblings, to your children and this must last for your entire lifetime.
Again, there is, as in many cases, a practical reason for this, which is that in less developed societies, you see that the state does not want to take on the burden of keeping older people alive. Therefore, there has to be created this spirit of obligation, this attitude of obligation, so that the children feel obligated to take care of their parents as long as their parents are alive. When parents get too old to take care of themselves, then the children must take on this burden so that society, the state does not have to take it on. This is the practical aspect of it. But the other side of the coin is, the deeper aspect, is that the manipulators themselves have wanted to create this unit of the family as a basis for loyalty, for obligation.
There are two main reasons for this: one is that the manipulators in embodiment are not always leaders of society, the high and the mighty. They do have embodiments in ordinary families. And what the manipulators always want is to get energy from the people around them. By creating this spirit of obligation in a family, a manipulator in embodiment can then exploit his or her family members and gain energy from them through their sense of loyalty. Whatever the manipulator does, their family members are obligated to support him or her, so he can continue to get their energy even perhaps continue to survive, perhaps survive without working, and so on. This is one reason why the manipulators want this, we might call it a more personal reason.
There is also an impersonal reason because the manipulators, of course, are often leaders of society. What do the manipulators want from the population of the society they are leading? They want loyalty. They want that all people feel obligated towards the leaders, whether it is a king or an emperor, or towards the state that is led by the manipulators. You look at many of these cultures that have had a very centralized power structure, a dictatorial power structure, the Roman Empire, the Soviet Union, ancient China, and you will see that the people had been programmed, had been brought up, had been brainwashed to feel obligation towards the state, towards society. But this programming started in the family from birth. The family became the ground unit for the sense of obligation, which started out with feeling obligated towards the family members, but then gradually expanded until the sense of obligation extended to society, to the state.
This is what the manipulators want from families. Now, of course, you can already see that in some of the more developed nations in the world, this has started to shift. There are many people who look at some of these modern societies and deplore the breakup of the family unit. There are predictions that this will cause these societies to collapse. But this is of course, because you are not taking into consideration the growth that will happen.
You will see societies where people do not feel as obligated towards their family members. You will see societies where there is a welfare system or a social security network, so that old people have a pension from the state, meaning they can live independently of their children, and the children are not obligated to take care of them. But neither are the older people feeling that they are a burden for their children. In a sense, both parties are freed up to live a more self-sufficient, self-determined lifestyle.
You see also, of course, the more developed nations who have public health care so that the health of elderly people is not a problem for them or for the children. With this, you see that there is less of that sense of obligation towards the family. You also see that there is less of a sense of obligation towards the state compared to more dictatorial nations.
This does not mean that people do not have a sense that they are part of a community. What you will generally see in many of the more developed nations is that people are not feeling loyal to the state in the same way as people feel in a dictatorial society. The people in a free democracy feel more free to determine their own lifestyle. They do not feel obligated towards the state in terms of going to war, or going into some kind of government service or following the dictates of a government because the government is not dictatorial.
But nevertheless, you still see that many of these people are willing to work most of their adult lives and pay a fairly high percentage of their income as taxes. And part of that income, of course, goes to support their own parents and older family members who have the health care and the pensions that they could not otherwise have, because where would the state get the money from if the working population did not pay the taxes?.
Now, you see many of these modern nations where there is no animosity or rebellion against this. Why is this? Why is it that many of these people are willing to take upon themselves this high burden of taxation in order to gain the freedom that they do not have to take care of their parents or grandparents, they do not have to feel obligated? Well, this is of course because in the modern democracies, at least most of them, what you see is a growing sense of basic humanity. The basic humanity is something that comes from within. It can only come from within. It is not something that can be forced.
You may look at certain societies such as communism, where the entire idea of communist ideology was to create this sense of an ideal community where everybody was doing what they could and at the same time consume what they needed. And there was this dream of this great society, this great community where everything would work out in the best possible way. In practical terms, it could not be manifest. But still, even though there was a certain solidarity among the people, that was in reaction to the oppression of the state. The state when it realized that this great community would not happen spontaneously attempted to force it. They attempted to force the loyalty as so many other dictatorial states throughout history have done.
You can force outer behavior, you can even indoctrinate some people. But there is a certain sense of community, a sense of basic humanity, that you cannot force. It can only come from within. Now, I know that you can make an objection to this. And you can say that many Christian nations, many Christian communities, many Christian churches have this sense of community where they are helping each other in what they call the Spirit of Christ.
However, if you go back to Jesus’s teachings and the community that Jesus attempted to create before his crucifixion, and the community that sprang up among his followers after the crucifixion.
What Jesus attempted to create was this spontaneous growth of the basic humanity from within, because as people raised their awareness, they came into contact with their own core humanity and they started to see this in each other. And this is how you can manifest that sense of humanity that is not forced.
Now, there are certainly Christian groups, where the people have locked in, even through the distorted teachings of Christ they have been given in the Scriptures, they are still locked in to that basic humanity, at least to some degree and they have some sense of community. But there are also many Christian groups where they have the outer behavior, but it is forced, because Christianity has become another religion, as you clearly see in both the Catholic church and in many fundamentalist churches, that are programming people to feel obligated towards the church, the faith.
Certainly, the Mormons is one example of this where they have a great sense of obligation towards the church, towards the family. But they also, many of them, have a genuine internalization of the basic humanity and many other Christian groups have the same. So there is a mixture of this outer sense of obligation but also many people have that inner sense of the basic humanity and so they have some community.
Many of the more developed nations, they have risen above this sense of obligation, they do not feel obligated towards the state. And many of these nations, they do not have a sense of obligation to the church either. What has instead happened is that because these nations are based on democratic ideals that guarantee individual freedom, there has been this spontaneous growth in the sense of basic humanity.
Many people have this sense of, not an obligation towards community, but a sense of being part of something and realizing that it can only work if everyone makes a contribution. People may not have any sophisticated understanding of it but they have, over many lifetimes, internalized it so that without necessarily having a communist or a christian ideal, they are just living it. Not from some ideological mindset but simply because over lifetimes, they have internalized this basic humanity. They recognize it in other people because they recognize it in themselves.
What you see in some of these nations is that there is a beginning trend where the traditional view of families has been broken up and replaced by a different view. Now, you can look at the fact that the divorce rate is much higher in some of these modern nations than it is in some of the nations for example in the Middle East where they have a more strict religious lifestyle. Some people deplore this and think it is a negative trend.
But the deeper reality from a higher awareness perspective is that although there are certainly negative aspects or negative causes for this, the higher reason for this is that people’s individual growth has been accelerated. In many of the modern democracies, a large part of the population has risen to the self-actualization needs. For them, growth is the most important.
On the lower levels, especially the lowest levels of the physiological, security and love and belonging needs, growth is not important to these people, stability is important. That is why they want an enduring family unit. That is why they want the safety, the security and that is why they are willing to endure this or even see it as a positive this sense of obligation towards the family. When you rise to the self- actualization needs, your most important need in life is not security and stability. It is growth.
Without people necessarily realizing this, they are looking for growth in their relationships. And when the relationship does not provide growth, they break up the relationship. And they look for that growth, however they conceive of it, in a new relationship. And some people have to go through several relationships but many, many people have actually come to a point where they have realized that even though they may change their partner, there is a certain dynamic that has not changed.
Some people have come to realize that this is because they themselves have not changed. There is something in their psychology that has not changed. And when they come to that realization and begin to look at their psychology, look at their patterns, then they can transcend a certain pattern. And now they can find a more lasting relationship because they have a new approach to their relationships.
What is actually happening here is that many of these people who are going through one or several divorces are helping to break up the old, restrictive, obligatory family pattern and open the way for a new view of families, a new approach to families. You will for example, see that a generation or two ago it was very uncommon that people got divorced. These people only felt a sense of obligation towards their own biological children. Most people did not have anything to do with or certainly had no responsibility for children that were not their own in a biological sense. Today, you see many people who not only have biological children but may even have biological children with more than one partner. But they also have close contact with children from their current partners previous relationship. Many people today come in contact with a greater number of children than their own biological children. And since some of these children are not their biological children, but they may indeed be living with them, this necessitates that these people find a new way to relate to children.
They also often find a new way to relate to their partners. And you will, of course, see that many of the modern democracies, the traditional roles of men and women have been broken up so that man is no longer the head of the household but the man and a woman are equal partners in making decisions. Women often have an education, they often have a career and therefore their husband must share in raising the children, household chores and so forth.
You see that what this leads towards is a much broader view of families. A wider family in a way. Families have been expanded. They are no longer this strict unit centered around one man and one woman and their biological children. There is more of a sense of community and what this will lead to as we move further into the Age of Higher Awareness, is that many nations will begin to experiment as some people have already done with a more of a communal form of living.
This is not necessarily talking about people living in collectives where they share a house and live in a house and live together. But there is certainly a trend that will be growing where more and more people realize that it simply is not practically possible, humanly possible, for two people, a husband and wife to keep a family together, when both of them are working. It is not possible to give children the attention they need and deserve when both husband and wife are working 40 hours or more per week. You see that there are already many children who have grown up in previous decades, and whose parents were working so much that the children were pretty much left to themselves. And there is a growing recognition that this is not a sustainable trend. But what then is sustainable?
Well, it could very well be that people get together and say: “We are a group of people somewhat around the same age. We are willing to move together not necessarily in one house but in close enough proximity that we can help each other with the children.” They may of course pull in some older people, whether it be their own parents or other people who are interested in playing this part and form this kind of a unit that is not a traditional family unit, but it is a wider unit involving many adults, even of different ages. So that these people help each other and they share many of the burdens they have. They may even decide to build, not necessarily communal living houses, but build housing units or assemblies of houses that are designed for this purpose, a more communal form of living where there is more interaction with the people. There may be several houses that share some kind of garden that is a playground, a safe playground for the children where they can be under supervision from older people, and so forth.
You can also have them create activities for the older children where they, for example, might share the cost of events so they can drive children to sports games or cultural activities and they can take turns doing this instead of the concept of the soccer mom where one woman drives her own children to these sports games and spends most of her time doing this.
There is no reason to go into too much detail about the practical aspects because they will be individual for different nations and different societies. But there are vast opportunities for creating a new type of family. It may not be called family, but it is where people come together, not because they just happen to be born in the same family or household but because they have a shared interest. They realize that perhaps that they have a particular interest in bringing up children in a certain way that is more creative, more avant-garde. They go together to do this, perhaps even creating schools for this purpose.
This is what will happen more and more in the Age of Higher Awareness where you will see these wider communities that will start to form. People of like mind come together and support each other in creating a different lifestyle, a more aware, a more conscious, a more socially responsible lifestyle. These are some of the outer changes that will happen to the family in the Age of Higher Awareness.
What is my family? Humanity as a whole is your family. You cannot have humanity as your family and have the traditional patriarchal view of family. You must have a much wider view, which is precisely what people, the most advanced creative people will move towards as we move further into the Age of Higher Awareness.