Americans take themselves too seriously
One of the changes that could help align America with the Age of Higher Awareness is that people stop taking themselves and this nation so seriously. Truly, when you look at America, there is a certain tendency that Americans take themselves very seriously, whereas you will see that other nations, like Canada, like the Scandinavian countries, have a culture and a tradition where they do not take themselves so seriously. They can make jokes about themselves, about their nation, that Americans sometimes look at and cannot understand why these other people think this is funny.
Of course, humor is an individual thing but, nevertheless, there is a tendency that Americans in general (not all, of course, but many) take themselves seriously, take their country seriously. There is this consciousness that America has a certain destiny, and this, of course, makes people take themselves very seriously. You see so many of the Christians in this nation who take themselves very, very seriously and feel they have a role to play in making America conform to their vision.
Many Christians are anti-democratic
It is a fact that there is a separation of church and state in America, and this is absolutely necessary for a functioning democracy. Yet those Christians who are attempting to interfere and affect the political process are out of alignment with higher awareness, with the Founding Fathers of this nation, with the very principles upon which America is founded.
It is not wrong as such that religious people are engaged in the political aspect of life. This is not saying religious people should withdraw from society and live in a monastery. Of course, they are free to express their opinions as everyone else, but some Christian churches have found a way to manipulate themselves into the political process and exert an influence that is completely based on their Christian worldview. This view is out of alignment with the mind of Christ, the mind of Jesus Christ. Naturally, this is also out of alignment with higher awareness. Truly, there are very few Christians who do not take themselves and their faith too seriously. It would be helpful if Christians could step back and be a little more humorous about their faith, about themselves, about their path.
Some Christian pastors and leaders feel it is their God-given right to interfere with the political process of America. They have been charged by God or Jesus to do this work and it is of epic importance that they impose their vision upon America’s leadership. You have seen certain pastors in the past who have done this, even for several presidents where they have had some advisory position. A president of the United States does not need a religious advisor unless he has a board of religious advisors representing every faith in America. That would be no problem, but taking one particular minister from one particular church and making him the advisor to the president is against the principles of this nation.
Beyond not taking yourselves so seriously, what would it take for Americans to align themselves with higher awareness? Higher awareness does not work only with America or looks to manifest the Age of Higher Awareness only in America or first in America. Higher awareness works to raise all people on earth, it works with people in all nations, as they are able to tune in, and higher awareness has no particular favoritism towards any nation. Higher awareness sponsored America as an example, not because it has any favoritism towards America but because of the potential for America to grow.
Higher awareness is not concerned about America as a nation, it is concerned about America as a process, as an experiment in: “How could we manifest a nation with a higher degree of freedom but at the same time manifesting the Golden Age ideals.” It has been said, and correctly so, that the Age of Higher Awareness is the Age of unity and the Age of Community, so community, come-ye-into-unity in these United States.
Community in America
Americans need to see beyond the individualism, where you are caring about yourself only, not feeling you are your brother’s keeper, thinking it is all about raising yourself up, putting America first, making America great again, making America the greatest nation in the world and all of these things. Can higher awareness work with a nation of individuals? Nay, I look to work with a community.
What is a nation? A nation is not a collection of individuals, it is a community. Yes, it is made up of individuals and, yes, it is important that there is room for individualism because otherwise how could you have raised your consciousness beyond the collective? Community is not, in its ideal form, something that pulls everyone down to the lowest common denominator. This is, of course, the way societies have functioned, first of all, communist nations where everybody was forced down to a certain low level in order to make them controllable by the party elite and the party apparatus. This is the one extreme where community has been misused to suppress the people, to lower the consciousness of the people. In America there has been the tendency to go to the other extreme and let individuality, individualism, run wild so that a few people have managed to set themselves up as these billionaire business people, as this privileged elite that is not even openly seen, openly presenting themselves as the elite. Therefore, they still fool so many people into thinking that America does not have an elite that is as repressive as the noble class of medieval society or other elites that you have seen throughout history.
America is meant to be a community of people who realize: “We are all in this together and we need to take care of each other, help each other grow. We need to therefore look at what is the greatest good for the greatest number of people, not what is the greatest good for those who are willing to take from others without giving anything back.” The only way to become so rich or so powerful is to take from the whole without giving anything back to the whole. A community can function only when a majority of the people, ideally all of the people, take from the whole but also give back to the whole. That way, when everybody freely receives, freely gives, then the whole can be multiplied from higher awareness and that is how a society, a community, grows.
America is an ongoing process
Higher awareness is not a fixed mind. There has been a tendency among people to see higher awareness as having been raised to some state of perfection and in perfection there is no need for growth. There is growth in the higher awareness. This means there is no fixed image of where America must go in order to manifest the Age of Higher Awareness. There is no fixed image of what the Golden Age will be like in America. There will not come a certain point where, now America has manifested the Golden Age matrix. Before that, it will not have manifested it and once it has manifested, it will not change for the rest of the 2,000-year period. This is a dynamic process and that is also why one cannot say that America has fallen behind where it could or should have been and that there is some disastrous state and that America is heading for the abyss and terrible things will happen in three and a half hours.
America is an ongoing process. Certainly, it is true that America could have been further along than where it is right now, no question about that. It is not that America has fallen irreversibly behind or that there is some major disaster or calamity that is impending because America is behind where it ideally could have been. This is not about the outer characteristics of how we manifest the Age of Higher Awareness because what is a golden age? Is it a period where a civilization has manifested some very high level of sophistication and now it just maintains that level for hundreds or thousands of years? That is not the vision for the Age of Higher Awareness. It is a period in which people can experience maximum growth in awareness and therefore make major progress towards higher awareness.
In other words it is a period of growth that makes a golden age, not a static state of perfection or sophistication. Is America behind? Well, it depends on whether you look at certain milestones of where this could have been manifest, that could have been manifest. Look at the process of America as a device. America is a device for giving the people that live there (and those who live abroad as well) an opportunity to raise their consciousness. No matter what happens or does not happen in a nation, it still represents an opportunity for people to grow from that point.
How higher awareness keeps balance
As a more aware person, you need to have a certain attitude in order to maintain your sanity. You can easily become discouraged if you fixate your mind on a certain goal and feel that the planet is not, the people are not, moving towards that goal. What makes this difficult is not really the planet as such but more if you formulate an opinion, an expectation in your mind of how the people on earth should respond to whatever you offer them. That is what can cause you to feel some level of discouragement because the goals are not reached.
Higher awareness does not have this fixed goal, this fixed timetable that this or that should happen at a certain time. It looks at the situation as it is now. It accepts the situation as it is now and then says: “How do we move forward from there?” It looks at anything that happens, including this latest election that has had an effect on so many people, and simply says: “Well, this happened, how do we turn it into a positive? How do we move forward from there?”
The latest presidential election
One potential positive is that some people can wake up and realize they now have to engage themselves in the political process. It may be that others will see an outpicturing of a certain state of consciousness, the black-and-white thinking. It is actually possible that there are certain people who are not in a particularly high state of consciousness but who nevertheless, at least for a time, can be aligned with higher awareness in the sense that they force people to confront something that can bring change. If a society becomes too static, then someone that shakes things up can actually force people to rethink and, therefore, this can be in alignment with higher awareness. Even the president serves, to some degree, in that capacity of forcing people to confront certain issues and therefore get out of the apathy that has crept into so many Americans where they feel powerless to do anything about the political process.
This is not to say that higher awareness is in agreement with many of the statements made and many of the policies that are an expression of black-and-white thinking. You cannot deny the fact that this President certainly has stirred the pot. The point I want to make is that once the people of a democratic nation have chosen, higher awareness accepts this and then says: “How can we move on from here?”
Higher awareness attempts to work with, not only the President but all of his advisors and all of the people who are a part of the government apparatus because it does not have these dualistic, black-and-white value judgments. Higher awareness is not looking to judge anyone, to find fault with anyone or to put anyone down or to punish anyone. It simply says: “Can we work with this President and this administration? How can we work with them? Are there some ideas we can introduce that will actually help bring America forward?” Higher awareness cannot allow itself the luxury of feeling that: “Oh, here is a President that we will not work with” because higher awareness is committed to helping the American nation and the American people progress. Therefore, it cannot simply withdraw itself completely from the White House for four years or eight years. Higher awareness needs to do whatever is possible to work with the current administration (which, of course, is much more than the President) and see how it can find a way to insert some constructive ideas that will bring some part of America forward. Even if the President makes certain decisions that takes America backwards, well, then that can be undone in the future. Nothing is forever so we must take what is there, seek to multiply it and see how we can move forward.
It is the same with Congress and the Senate. Higher awareness tries to work with those that it can work with. Many can once in a while (without realizing where it comes from) receive an idea from higher awareness. It is not a completely hopeless process. Now, of course, this is not to in any way say that things are okay or they are ideal. Higher awareness works with what is there and seeks to improve it. This does not mean it agrees with the status quo. Higher awareness would very much like to see improvements in the political system of America.
Changing the public discourse of America
Higher awareness would truly like to see a change in the public discourse of America, the way people talk about the political situation, the way people talk to each other. This goes to the ordinary American who posts something on Facebook or talks to his neighbor over the hedge. It goes all the way up through the media, through all levels of government and all the way up to how the two parties in Congress discourse with each other.
America has gone through a phase, like most democratic nations, where the advent of the Internet has made it easier and easier for people to express themselves in a public forum, in a public space. Because of the mechanics that you are not talking directly to people when you post on the Internet (and sometimes you are even not posting under your true identity, and you are expressing yourself in words that are written not spoken), because of this mechanic there has been this tendency to a polarization into more and more black-and-white thinking.
This has led to the public forum being taken over by people who are in a black-and-white state of mind, who are in the epic mindset. The most aggressive people are, naturally, the ones who have the epic mindset and believe it is of epic importance that their viewpoint wins the day, that they win the debate, that they convince or destroy the opponent. These are the ones who are the most aggressive in posting in the public space, expressing themselves in the public space. What has this caused? It has caused all of the balanced, moderate Americans to simply give up and withdraw. They do not want to have anything to do with this level of discourse because it is not where they are at in consciousness. We now have a situation in America, and many other democratic nations, where the public discourse has been taken over by these black-and-white thinkers who are always looking for the simple solution, which means forcing some other group of people. It is only degrees away from the willingness to kill those other people, for whom it is so epically important to suppress the viewpoint they have. This has had the effect of turning away all of the people who actually could bring America closer to the Age of Higher Awareness because they are more balanced, which means they are more on the Middle Way. They are the ones who are more aligned with higher awareness and therefore able to receive ideas from this level.
There are congressmen and congresswoman, senators who are also more moderate, more balanced, but they have been hijacked by the leaders of the two parties who have also gone into this black-and-white, epic mindset. They are so focused on fighting the other party, winning over the other party, that the concerns about what is actually right for America have faded into the background. That is why they cannot cooperate. Even though there may be a majority in Congress that are for a certain change, that majority can never vote as one block because some of those moderate, balanced people are republicans and some are democrats. They are forced to vote the party line and this is what has created gridlock. It all springs from the fact that the public discourse has become black-and-white and therefore people cannot talk to each other across these divisive, dividing lines.
Look at how many people, ordinary Americans, who cannot talk to people who belong to the other party. They cannot talk to people who are Trump supporters if they are not Trump supporters. If you cannot talk to each other, then there is only one outcome: tension will continue to grow until there is some kind of explosion. This is essentially how most wars on earth have started. Tension builds between two groups of people (tribes, religions, nations, political affiliations what have you) until there is a spark that ignites the explosion and then you have war. You have a state of civil war in the minds of many Americans because they have become so attached to winning, to defeating the opposite party that they see as being so epically wrong, so epically bad.
A higher awareness view on politics
Concerning the Democratic and the Republican parties, higher awareness is completely non-attached to who has a majority in congress. It is not really going to make any difference because neither party is able or willing to take America in a truly new direction. Either party, no matter who runs it, will be politics as usual until there is some major change and that has not happened yet. It is not of epic importance, it is not so that higher awareness looks at the Democratic Party as being absolutely wrong and the Republican Party as being absolutely right or the other way around. Higher awareness looks at issues, each issue. Often, there is actually a majority of people in congress who are aligned with higher awareness on a particular issue, but they never get to vote as a group because they are split by this black-and-white conflict between the two parties.
There was a time when Republicans and Democrats could cooperate across party lines, could talk to each other. It was not a matter of defeating the other party, it was a matter of coming together in a spirit of cooperation and saying: “What is best for the country? Are we elected by the people to fight the other party or are we elected to do what is best for the country?”
The only way to change this is really to change the public discourse. The more aware people can be the examples of how to have a political discussion that is not based on black-and-white thinking, that is not based on this very simplistic view that one person is the right president and the other is an absolute disaster, that one party will take America in the right direction and the other will destroy it in half an hour. It just is not that way in reality. Naturally, there is a need for many other changes in the political system but none of them can actually come about as long as the public discourse is the way it is right now, as long as it is divisive.
Status quo is created by the power elite
The stark, brutal reality is that politics as usual, the political status quo that you have in America, is created by the hidden power elite who have never been elected, who have never stood out publicly. They have, over decades, gradually manipulated the political process in America to the point where they have created a situation that allows them to gain more and more privileges by taking it from the people. It is not created just by one party but by elements in both parties. Both parties have been hijacked by these hidden power elites.
Who benefits from politics as usual? Only the power elite. Now, who is going to change the situation in America? Not the power elite. So who can change it? Well, the reality is that the two parties that have a monopoly on congress cannot change it. Where can change come from? Only from the people. When the consciousness of the people changes, then the power elite must give way and the manipulators know this. They know that when the people are united, they must give concessions, they must withdraw, they will be forced to give way. They may still think they can maintain some measure of control, but they must give way and, therefore, what is their goal? It is to divide the people into factions so that they cannot come together and speak with one voice and say: “We have had enough of this, we want change.”
What is the entire public discourse geared towards? Dividing Americans and keeping them divided! That is the underlying purpose of this divisive public discourse. It is a subtle plot that very, very few people have realized. There is no way to bring serious changes to America as long as the public discourse is locked in this black-and-white thinking and is taken over and hijacked by these very aggressive, epically-minded people.
There are some of these people, who express themselves in these public forums, who actually believe in what they are doing because they are trapped in the epic mindset. There are those who are paid to do a job by various elite groups who are deliberately polarizing the public discourse in order to divide and conquer. This is an old tactic of the manipulators, as you see in the Roman Empire. It does not work every time but it works a lot of the time because the people so easily get pulled into thinking that there is such a simple solution to their problems—if only we can defeat the group that is defined as the problem.
As long as you define other people as the problem, you are refusing to take responsibility for your situation. There are enough Americans who have started to take responsibility, who have started to move out of the epic mindset, who have started to see the fallacies of black-and-white thinking that they could make a difference. They have not done so precisely because they do not even want to be exposed to the reaction from these very judgmental, critical, aggressive people. They are standing there, feeling hopeless because they do not see how they could have an impact.
You will see a certain shift where the balanced people will begin to speak out, some having already done so but many more need to follow before it will build that critical mass where it cannot be ignored or put down. Then, you will actually see that you can have a demonstration in Washington, D.C. that is not created by extremists but by the more balanced people who are demonstrating for restoring or creating a public discourse that is focused on: “How do we move America forward?” Not on: “How do we win over those other people.”
If more Americans could begin to talk freely, then everything would change. Literally, everything would change if there was free, open, non-judgmental communication. What is it that is really necessary for the public discourse to change? It is that people connect at the heart level. They connect so that instead of seeing those other people as opponents, they see them as people, as human beings like themselves. They realize we are not actually divided by these outer things because there is something deeper, the basic humanity, that we all share, that unites us. Instead of the United States of America, we need to have the United Peoples of America.