We need to make a distinction between what many people call anger, but which is more like a temporary turmoil in the emotional body. For example, there was the situation where Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers. There was a situation where Jesus cursed a fig tree. And there was a situation where he said: “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but God.”
From a normal human perspective, you might say Jesus was angry in those situations, and how could a highly developed person who had a high level of awareness ever be angry? This is at least what many more aware people think. But the emotional body is like water. Easily stirred up, but once the stirring movement stops, it falls back down to a calm state. This is not really what we can call anger and hatred in terms of a poison in the emotional body. There are many people throughout the ages who have reached a high level of awareness and who still in certain situations can react strongly. They become upset, they become irritated, they become angry, they speak with a loud voice, and so forth.
If your emotions are stirred by certain situations but they fall back down, and when they fall back down, it is like water, there is no sign of the previous wave, then this is not lower awareness. You live on a very dense planet with an enormous amount of chaos and inharmony. You might say: “Should it be a goal for a more aware person to always be calm and never get upset?” Well, really, should it? If you get upset, but your emotions calm down and there is no trace left of you being upset, will it detract from your growth? It will not. How can you go around on a planet like this and avoid being upset no matter what happens?
Well, you can if you are at the highest levels of awareness, but up until those stages of the path, you need to look at yourself and other people with a certain forgiveness and say: “Ah, did it really matter? Let’s move on.” There is a recognition that you can be upset, you can even display what would normally be called anger, but it is not a permanent stage where the anger accumulates
Anger and hatred as a psychological poison
If you are temporarily angry, but then you calm down and there is no trace left of the anger, that is not a poison. But if you become angry, and then even after you calm down your emotions, there are still traces of the anger, there is still the memory of what happened, there is still a lack of forgiveness towards the person that made you angry, then that is a psychological poison. In other words, a poison is something you carry with you over time. It stays in your emotional body. It attracts more of its kind from its surroundings and it stirs up your emotional body, so you more easily become angry the next time.
Anger and hatred is not confined to the emotional body, even though most people would say that anger and hatred are emotions. The psychological poison also goes into the mental body, and now you have various thought processes. It can be, for example, justifying that you got angry, justifying that you stay angry, justifying why you do not forgive those other people. Going on and on about how bad these people are, how what they did was wrong, and how they should not be doing it, and how they should be stopped. And why it might be justifiable to take drastic measures against these people, even doing something that you know is not in accordance with the Golden Rule. Furthermore, when you take enough of this poison inside your energy field, it also goes into your lower identity body. And you can very easily come to identify yourself as a person who is in opposition to another group of people.
You see in the Middle East, for example, how many Arabs have the poison of hatred in their identity bodies, so that they identify themselves as people who are against the Jews, who are angry with the Jews, who hate the Jews, and why this is justified. You see innumerable examples of this around the world. You also see Jews who hate the Arabs or the Palestinians, and so forth. What you have here is now a distinction, where the psychological poison of hatred is something that lingers over time and affects not only your emotional body, but also your mental body and your identity body.
Cognitive dissonance: torturing people in the name of good
Now what is one of the effects of this psychological poison of hatred? It counteracts the Golden Rule. You may actually think you are a Christian, you may actually think that when it comes to other Christians, then you are following the Golden Rule. But there are those bad people that are perhaps even working against the cause of Christ as defined by your church. And towards those you do not need to apply the Golden Rule because it is okay to kill them in a crusade. And Jesus would even approve of this.
You go back to the Middle Ages. You will see some of these Inquisitors that spent their whole day torturing people. And after the day, they would go into the church and kneel in front of the crucified Christ, and they would feel certain that Jesus approved of what they did in his name. This is because their minds were colored, were overpowered, by the psychological poison of hatred. In their mental minds they felt it was justified. And in their identity minds they identified themselves as people who were doing the cause of Christ, even by doing something that was against what Christ said: “Turn the other cheek,” and so on.
There is this distortion, and the effect of all these psychological poisons is that it leads to this cognitive dissonance. You have a selective view that allows you to hold two incompatible views at the same time, such as: You are a good Christian, but it is justified to kill Muslims or infidels or heretics or Catholics or Protestants or whatever you have.
Hatred in a population and freedom of speech
Naturally the psychological poison of hatred is also against your growth towards higher awareness. You may believe you are a good Christian, but if you have that poison of hatred in your three higher bodies, you do not have higher awareness, and you cannot grow. You are actually going in the opposite direction, regardless of what you think.
When we take this to how it applies to democracies, then you see, of course, that, given that a democracy is based on some recognition of the Golden Rule and therefore basic humanity, hatred works against the democratic principles, the democratic process. If there is too much hatred in a population, they cannot have a functioning democracy. They may have a democratic form of government, but the hatred, often reinforced by other psychological poisons, will actually undermine the democratic process. You can see this very clearly in the United States with the two blocs, the left wing, the right wing, the extreme Democrats, the extreme Republicans, and how there is hatred there from both sides.
This stops the democratic process. Why? Because what is one of the foundations for a functioning democracy? It is based on democratic rights, and one of these rights is freedom of speech. Many people think that freedom of speech means that you can say anything you want, and nobody should stop you from saying it, and nobody should object to you saying it. But if you have this view, that you should be free to say anything you want and nobody should object to it, that is the psychological poison of hatred, causing cognitive dissonance.
First of all, freedom of speech does not simply mean that you can say anything you want. Freedom of speech also means the freedom not to say something, the freedom to remain silent. Because you see that what you were about to say was not in accordance with the call to “do unto others.” One might paraphrase Jesus’ saying to: “Say unto others what you want others to say unto you.” Because many people have not understood that “do unto others” also applies to what you say unto others.
What does this mean? It means that you do not speak with this anger and hatred. Again, it is a difficult planet, people will get upset. But if you are temporarily upset and you say something to another person with a certain emotional charge, that is one thing, as long as you then get out of it, once your emotions calm down, and perhaps now you are willing to apologize or at least talk to the person in a normal tone of voice. But if you have that lingering, ongoing anger and hatred, and you speak and qualify your words, you will harm yourself. Jesus even described this when he said that if you talk to your brother and say Raka, then you are still not following the rule, the Golden Rule.
The concept of hate speech in the public debate
In some democratic nations you have a recognition of the concept of hate speech. There are some nations, the more evolved nations, where they are very aware of this, where it is part of the public debate and where even the government has taken certain measures to limit hate speech. The media has also taken certain measures to limit hate speech, and there is this awareness of it. This is especially the case in many European nations where there are still many people who remember the Nazi propaganda and the Nazi hate speech against the Jews that led to the Holocaust. Many European nations are much more aware of this and therefore have taken certain measures to limit hate speech. There is even more awareness in the population that you do not speak out with anger towards other people and certainly not with hatred. You do not express this kind of hatred based on race or religion or nationality, or whatever it may be.
Now obviously the United States is not as far along in this regard. There is more hate speech in the United States, there has been, going all the way back to the Civil War and the aftermath with the issue of slavery and the treatment of African Americans by the white supremacist majority. There is still a white supremacist minority in the United States that has in their emotional, mental and identity bodies hatred towards African Americans, towards Mexican Americans, towards Asian Americans, whom they, of course, do not consider Americans, any of these groups.
You see how this has come to the surface after many years where America made considerable progress towards overcoming this racial animosity. It has started to come to the surface again and, of course, been accelerated by the Trump presidency and the aftermath of the 2020 election. Even though race was not a direct factor in this, many of the people who have gone into Trump’s election lies and believed in them, you will see that they are white supremacists. They have, perhaps, a Christian worldview that Christianity is the superior religion. And they have a very strong pool of anger and hatred – the psychological poison of anger and hatred – in their emotional bodies, in their mental bodies, and in their lower identity bodies. It is just there. If you can sense energies, it is undeniable. If you cannot, then of course, you can explain it away. You will see some on the left that are the more radical Democrats or liberal people, who also have anger and hatred towards those that they see as their opponents, who are the conservatives, the ones who are always working against change, as they see it, and so forth.
What has happened in the last decade or so in the United States is that this energy of anger and hatred has been allowed to go towards a more extreme expression in order to make it visible to the American people and in order to give people the lessons in the school of hard knocks, where this anger and hatred continues to build until they face this situation of how far will we allow this to go? Will we allow it to cause violence, perhaps even a civil war-like scenario? How far will this be allowed to go?
Violence as a form of communication
You see that there is, of course, some awareness of this. Many people are concerned, many people are attempting to do something about it. But there has been limited success. Surely, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram have attempted to limit hate speech, have attempted to limit conspiracy theories and unfounded claims. But there has been limited success. The anger is still increasing, which you can also see by the number of shootings that are taking place. This is people who get overwhelmed by the anger and hatred in the collective so that they feel they have to take a gun.
Now, what is it that happens when a person goes into a school and starts shooting? Well, as brutal as it might seem, this is actually a very crude attempt at communicating. This person in his mind – you will see that they are mostly men – this person feels that his frustration has reached a point where he cannot control himself. But why has it reached that point? Because he has not been able to communicate with anybody. Nobody has heard him. And you might recall that Putin also said that he had not been heard so that is why he had to go into Ukraine and start shooting. You see that when this frustration builds to a certain level, then people feel they cannot be heard through words, so they must be heard through a gun, through violence.
This is what you also see in demonstrations and riots, where a group of people form a mob mind and suddenly they start attacking shops, attacking the police, or so forth. It does not matter whether they are on this side or that side of the political spectrum. Anytime there is violence in a demonstration, it is because people have lost control, but behind it all is that they feel that they are not being listened to. They cannot communicate. Nobody will hear them through words, so they must express their frustration through violence.
Now this is, of course, because their minds are overpowered by this anger and hatred, the psychological poison. But what is it that is the effect of this poison? It is that it shuts down communication. When people have allowed the poison to build in their energy fields, they cannot communicate. They cannot express themselves, and they cannot handle other people disagreeing with them. In other words, they are not free to express themselves in a neutral manner that is constructive communication. But neither can they react in a constructive way to other people who disagree with them. In many cases, these people stopped communicating, and they might feel that nobody has heard them.
In many cases, they have not actually really expressed their concerns, their feelings. This is what you will see very often on Facebook, where somebody posts something, another person disagrees and comes up with some kind of short remark that is very dismissive of the other person’s opinion, and maybe the two go back and forth for a while. But eventually they just give up and say: “That person is not going to be my friend anymore. I am not even going to communicate with him.”
What you see in America – and, of course, in other nations as well, but especially in America – you see this very strong tendency that people separate themselves into different camps, and they stop talking about certain issues. You see it in families, where there are people who cannot talk to each other, whether it is about the election, whether it is about politics, whether it is about vaccinations or wearing masks, or whatever it is. You simply see that people stop communicating, they stop even trying to communicate. And they, of course, feel: “It is because these other people will not listen to me. They do not agree with me. They are against everything I say.”
Now, first of all, as I said, this is the effect of a psychological poison. When you have this poison, you are blinded. Your emotions are stirred up, your mental mind cannot think clearly, objectively, and your identity body cannot connect to the fact that: “But these are my family members, these are my countrymen. Aren’t we all human beings? Aren’t we all Christians, sons and daughters of God?” You cannot see what connects you to other people. You only see the differences. This means that you are projecting out because that is one effect of the poison. You are projecting out. The problem is out there, because the poison prevents you from looking in the mirror. It prevents you from even considering that there could be a beam in your own eye, even a splinter, a tiny little splinter, in your own eye. You cannot conceive of this, when you are blinded by the psychological poison.
The need for free and neutral communication
What is democracy? In a dictatorship what kind of communication do you have? You have one-way, top-down communication. The dictator declares: “This is the way it is going to be,” and all the people have to obey it or face various repercussions, from death to imprisonment to torture to whatever. This is a one-way communication. There is no feedback coming up towards the dictator, certainly not from the people. What is democracy? Is it not an attempt to establish a society where there is two-way communication? The leaders communicate to the people, but the people communicate back, not just through voting, but in many other ways as well. But is it just a matter of communicating between the leaders and the people? No, of course, it is also a matter of communicating between the people, the people communicate amongst themselves, otherwise a democracy cannot function.
You may say that one of the democratic rights defined in many constitutions is freedom of speech. But behind that outer expression, there is a deeper reality, which is free communication, open communication, neutral communication, non-toxic communication. In a dictatorship problems are resolved through force and violence. A democracy is an attempt to establish a form of government where problems can be solved without violence. But this can only happen in one way, through communication.
Tolerance for differences is a foundation for a democracy
What needs to happen is that there is free communication in the population until gradually there is some kind of understanding that emerges. It may not be that all people agree, but they see the humanity in those people who disagree with them, and they see that they also have a viewpoint and that they should not necessarily be forced or suppressed or killed or sent to Siberia. Therefore they respect these people’s right to be different. This is what happens when there is neutral communication. You have an increased understanding and tolerance for differences. You cannot expect in a democracy that everybody will agree or that everybody will be alike or will live the same way. Therefore one of the foundations for a democracy is tolerance for differences.
This, of course, is also one of the main aspects of higher awareness. At the lower levels of awareness it is theoretically possible that one person can be a Trump follower and claim that he is following Trump because he has discernment, and another person can be against Trump, or at least not be a Trump follower, and also claim that this is based on his level of discernment. They can then have opposing viewpoints and both think they have discernment, but it is a lower form of discernment. When they get to a higher level, they connect. They see the humanity in each other, and they see that the issue is not really that important.
What is it you see, as you go towards higher levels of discernment? Well, ultimately, higher awareness is the mind that is meant to help people escape separation, duality and division, by coming to see greater and greater levels of oneness. As you grow in discernment, you see beyond the outer differences, and therefore you see: “Is the outer viewpoint really that important? Is it that important whether this or that person is President? Is it that important, whether I wear a piece of cloth in front of my mouth when I go to the store, like the government requires? Can I not render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s? First of all, can I not treat other people by accepting their right to be different from me, to have a different viewpoint?”
What ideally should happen is that people who are growing towards higher awareness should be able to communicate openly and neutrally, even when they disagree on certain issues. In other words, there should not be that emotional charge that you see so many times when people attempt to communicate. Where does that charge come from? Well, it is actually a psychological poison that blocks communication. To return to the situation in the United States, you have the emergence of these blocs of people who have taken in this poison of hatred and who therefore have no tolerance for those who have different viewpoints than they have. They either think these people are stupid, or they hate them outright. And this, of course, is a major danger for any democracy.
You can see other examples throughout history, including Northern Ireland, where the Protestants and the Catholics hated each other and started talking with bombs, instead of having a conversation with words. This was, again, because the psychological poison had taken over these people’s minds to where they could not have open and neutral communication. Again, when you have open and neutral communication, it does not necessarily mean that you will end up being in agreement about issues. But you will be able to still keep your entire approach to other people based on the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you want them to do to you. If you are a Catholic in Northern Ireland, do you want the Protestants to throw bombs at you? Most likely not. Why would you even consider doing it to them?
You cannot take democracy for granted
It is absolutely vital for any democracy that there has to be open communication. If there is not, then a democracy will easily start a downward spiral, where the animosity builds until people are no longer able to say it with words so they start saying it with assault rifles or whatever violent means they have at their disposal. There are, of course, many people who are aware of this, who can see this. The more aware people can work so that more and more people will see the need to address this hatred, this breakdown of communication. They do not need to start talking about psychological poisons. It is enough to simply observe and say: “When there is this kind of hatred, then communication breaks down. And when communication breaks down, democracy breaks down. So what can we do?”
There needs to be an awareness that you cannot take democracy for granted. There are forces that are seeking to destroy democracy. There are external forces, but there are, more importantly, internal forces. The external forces cannot destroy democracy unless democracies have already been divided by the internal forces. There needs to be a growing awareness that democracy has value. It is the government of the future. It is progress compared to the dictatorships we have seen in the past, which created one disaster after another. We need to defend democracy and that may mean that you have to take certain steps. The government, the media, but also people themselves, will have to take certain steps to counteract this.
Democracy gives freedom, but those who have ill intentions can abuse that freedom, can take advantage of that freedom, to undermine democracy, as the troll factories in Russia and China have done for years, as many other people with ill intentions have done for years. There are people who have deliberately created conspiracy theories, simply because their minds are taken over by manipulators who only want to create chaos and disharmony.
There needs to be this recognition that a democratic government needs to step up to the awareness where you still remain harmless as a dove, but you become wise as a serpent, and you recognize that you cannot take for granted that once you have a democracy, it will be sustained indefinitely. You need to be willing to look at the forces that are opposing democracy and defend your country against them. This means even defending yourself against the people in your own nation who have been seduced into going into a mindset that is, quite frankly, anti-democratic.
If you have hatred towards another group of people, that is an anti-democratic mindset. If you believe there is some grand conspiracy that stole the election from your President, then that too is an anti-democratic mindset because you are not acknowledging the democratic institutions. You are not actually fulfilling the oath, if you had taken it, to defend the Constitution against all enemies. You are being a domestic enemy of the Constitution if you are claiming and spreading the lie that the election system is taken over by some grand conspiracy and is not functioning and that the people are not honest and so forth. All of this is anti-democratic. There can be really no question about this unless your mind is colored by these poisons and by the lies spread by the manipulators, which have no compunctions about lying because their goal is to undermine democracy.
Fundamental weakness of democracy
What we are really talking about here is the essence of stepping up to a level of awareness and discernment where you go beyond the simplistic interpretations and the simplistic views. When Jesus gave the Golden Rule, do unto others, then this set the foundation for democracy, but on the other hand that Golden Rule actually puts democracies in jeopardy. If a society is based on the Golden Rule, it has a fundamental weakness towards societies that are willing to take advantage of that Golden Rule. It goes back to the same old story: If you treat another person well, and that person takes advantage of you to steal your property or even kill you, what good did it do you to follow the Golden Rule? Why should you then have followed the Golden Rule?
There are many people who have been turned away from even Christianity, but also the Golden Rule, many people from other religions, because all religions have some version of the Golden Rule, who have been turned away from this, because other people have not reciprocated their actions. They treated other people well, but other people did not return the favor. Now they doubt the principle of the Golden Rule. There are many Christians who have gone into the state of mind where they say: “Well, I just always have to be kind to other people. Then I cannot do anything wrong. I have to just, whatever they do, I still have to be kind back. I have to turn the other cheek, and I have to keep turning the other cheek.”
Being wise as a serpent
There are levels of awareness and discernment. At the lower levels what is it that happens? Well, you might still have a momentum of not turning the other cheek or responding in kind, responding based on an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. In order to break that momentum, you may have to go through a period where you decide: “I will always turn the other cheek, no matter what other people do.” Because this breaks that momentum, and once you are free of it, you can then step up to a higher level of discernment, where you realize that the Golden Rule does not stand alone.
When you step up to a higher level of awareness, you become wise as a serpent. You realize that there are serpents, and they are not following the Golden Rule, and it is not likely that they will, for the foreseeable future. If you have a democratic nation that is based on the Golden Rule, and where most people are following the Golden Rule, and where the government is following the Golden Rule towards its own citizens, there is a tendency that this nation wants to believe that it can also follow the Golden Rule towards other nations. This can be done with other democratic nations, but it cannot be done with a dictatorship that has an ill intention of either destroying democracy or conquering your territory.
This is a delicate balance. You could say, going back to Hitler: “Could the rest of Europe just have said: ‘We’ll turn the other cheek. We’ll let Hitler’s tanks roll in. They can take over, and we’ll see how it goes. Maybe we can transform Hitler into being a nice person when we show him that we are turning the other cheek.’” First of all, that is not likely to happen with the manipulators, but it could have happened with the German people. This could have eventually removed Nazism. It would have taken a lot longer than five years. It would have had some very severe ramifications. But it could have happened.
Then you go back to the time of the Soviet Union, which had an ideology of spreading communism to the entire world, which basically was the Russians’ delusion of grandeur of wanting to control the whole world. What would have happened if the West had not resisted the spread of communism? Well, again, Stalin would not have been transformed, but he would not have lived forever. What would have happened? Would the entire world have been communist today? No, of course not. Partly because the communist system, as demonstrated by the Soviet Union, is not self-sustainable, but also because there would have been a transformation of consciousness and so forth.
Nevertheless it would have had widespread negative consequences. This is not saying that the West should have done this. Nor is it saying that Ukraine should have turned the other cheek and allowed Putin’s tanks to roll in. Because again, people need to respond with their level of consciousness. You have a certain level of consciousness where you can say: “Here we have to be wise as serpents. We have to look at the facts. We have to acknowledge that there are countries, there are leaders in countries, that have a negative intent towards democracy.”
The Golden Rule of democracy
There was a period where it was an understandable reaction that the Western countries gave Putin the benefit of the doubt. It was again an expression of the collective consciousness. But now that he has exposed himself so clearly that nobody can fail to see it, then it is time to step up to this higher level of discernment, where you simply say: “We need to defend ourselves. We cannot allow other countries with ill intent, or even people in our own countries with ill intent, to take advantage of the democratic freedoms.” You could say the Golden Rule of democracy is: A democratic government is meant to guarantee the rights and freedoms of its population, which means it cannot allow any force to take away the rights and freedoms of its own population. Whether this be an external force like Putin, or an internal force like Donald Trump, or the conspiracy theorists, or the media which has turned itself into a propaganda machine, you cannot allow this because it is a detriment, it is a danger, to the survival of democracy.
Higher levels of discernment in the development of democracy
Now, this does not mean that this is the ultimate level of discernment. There can come higher levels where there will be some of the democratic nations which will say: “We will abandon all military. We will stop having a military.” There may be some that say: “We do not want to have this nation state that we have had so far. We want to cooperate with other states and form some kind of region.” Even what you see in the EU, striving towards some form of unity, even though it is a difficult task.
There can come a point where a nation has reached such a level of consciousness that it can trust that if it turns the other cheek, even to an aggressor, then the return current of the universe towards that aggressor will actually make sure that they cannot destroy the nation or destroy the people. There are various levels here.
Obviously there is no democracy which is quite at that level where it can say: “We are going to trust in the universe and lay down our arms.” But that does not mean it will not happen in the future and in the Age of Higher Awareness, certainly there will come a point where many nations will give up their national defenses. There will have to be an interim period where you create some kind of collective army that can work against dictators that suddenly attack other nations.
Democratic responsibility of the people
It is necessary to recognize that a democracy needs to defend its own citizens against those who will take away the freedom and the rights of those citizens. Otherwise, a democratic government is not fulfilling its responsibility. But, of course, the people also need to fulfill their responsibility and become aware. This does not mean that the democratic governments now need to go in and forbid this type of speech and that type of speech. “You cannot say this, and you cannot say that, and you cannot post this on Facebook, and you cannot post that.” Because that would, in order to combat this aggressive force, amount to censorship. It is necessary that the population, the people, educate themselves, become aware of what is happening, become aware of trolls and troll factories and those with ill intent, and therefore say: “I am not going to be pulled into this. I am not going to allow myself to be pulled into this.”
You have many, many people who have been pulled into the conspiracy theories who have come, after some time, to the conclusion that it did not do anything positive for them. It only pulled them into a negative spiral where they were not even really alive because they were so disturbed, their mind was so focused on this, their emotions were so agitated, that it was not the way to live. This awareness can spread. People can communicate this and say: “Listen, I have been there. I understand your frustration, but this just is not the way. It is a dead end, and it will only take you down.”
There needs to be this growing willingness to speak out. And there needs to be this willingness to speak out in a neutral way so that we can establish a way to talk about problems without being taken over by the hatred that causes us to shut down communication. There needs to be this awareness that communication is vital in a democracy. But it needs to be open and neutral communication, not this emotionally charged, where people are so attached to a certain viewpoint that anyone who disagrees with them is no longer seen as a human being. And therefore we do not need to do unto others and turn the other cheek towards those people. Because we are so blinded by this hatred, this poison, that we cannot even see them as people. So there needs to be this awareness.
The ideological state of mind vs. tolerance
What is democracy really about? Is it about viewpoints and physical results? No, it is about people. It is about the growth in consciousness of the people. You, as an individual, if you are in this biased state of mind, this agitated state of mind, the ideological state of mind, well, you are not growing. Other people, of course, are not growing. They are also not fulfilling their democratic responsibility. They are hurting themselves. They are hurting others. It is just a downward spiral that people can come to see and say: “Enough of this. We have to find a way to communicate. We have to find some basis for communication, things we agree on: even that democracy is important, we are all human beings, we should all be allowed to be here.”
You see here that what it all boils down to is tolerance. As you grow in awareness, you increase your tolerance for those who are different. You even increase your tolerance for the manipulators, the power elite, where you do not find it necessary to engage in a physical battle with them to destroy them physically. You do not find it necessary to engage in a battle to prove them wrong. You step back and say: “I cannot help these people so I am not going to engage with them.”
This is, of course, one of these tricky aspects of discernment, when you go beyond this black and white of wanting a simple solution to everything. You need to be able to communicate with people. Well, should that not mean that you can communicate with anybody, just like you should turn the other cheek towards anybody? Well, it does not at the higher levels of discernment.
There may be a phase where you need to go through this and try to communicate with everybody. But as you increase your discernment, you will see there are some people that it is not constructive to communicate with right now because they are so trapped in a psychological poison that you cannot help them. Therefore you instead use your time and your attention and energy on communicating with other people and building a consensus with them, raising their consciousness, thereby raising the collective. The people who are still trapped in a poison, trapped in hatred, they become more and more isolated, they become more and more unbalanced, and therefore it becomes easier for the middle part of the population to see how extreme they are.
The balanced middle – beyond the extreme points of view
If you look at a society, a democratic nation, even the United States, what is the best hope for a change in the situation? Well, it is that the broad middle of the population will come to see the imbalances on both sides of these extremist groups. You have some people on the left that are extremist, some people on the right that are extremist, but in between you have a large group of people who are much more balanced. Even though they do not necessarily have the higher discernment, they still have this sense that you cannot go too far. You cannot take it too far. You cannot become violent, for example. When they see these extreme outplayings of this, they will say: “This is too much.”
There were many, many people, even many Republicans, many Trump supporters, who looked at the January 6 riot and said: “No, this is too far. This we cannot agree with. This should not have happened.” And the same thing with the guns, the shootings: “This is too much. This is taking it too far.” And the same with many other issues. There can always be that broad middle, not middle class, but balanced group in the middle, who do not have the extreme viewpoints. And who therefore can say: “Ah, let’s just try and find a more balanced approach here. Let’s not go so far.” That is then what can bring a democracy higher, that group in the middle. They are sometimes very slow to react, but nevertheless they are sort of the bulwark against the extremists on either side.