If you look at the history of humankind, you can interpret it, of course, in various ways but you can look at it as a continuing process of seeking greater and greater freedom for the people. Freedom has two aspects: freedom from and freedom to.
When you are oppressed, when you are limited by some external force, you naturally seek freedom from that force. There can come a higher recognition of freedom as a freedom to flow with higher awareness. If you look at the history of humankind so far, you can see that people have mainly been concerned about attaining freedom from. The population has been seeking freedom from the power elite.
This is a perfectly valid way to interpret history. It is clear that in the Age of Higher Awareness the influence of the power elite will diminish. There will be an aspect of bringing the Age of Higher Awareness that is a freedom from the manipulators, but this in itself will not bring the golden age into manifestation.
In fact, you cannot attain freedom from the power elite through physical, material means. There is no way to bring the Age of Higher Awareness through physical means. You cannot, even if people were awakened to the existence of the power elite tomorrow, create some kind of institution that is meant to identify the power elite and dethrone them from power. It could not be done. It could not work at the present level of the collective consciousness.
What is it that is needed? What is needed is an alchemical shift in consciousness. Even though alchemy has been somewhat the laughingstock of the scientific community and, of course, was persecuted by the religious community of the Catholics, there is a validity here. The validity is that there is a recognition that the substances that are in existence on earth right now can be transformed into a higher state. This is the essence of alchemy.
It is possible to take what is manifest on earth right now and transform it into a higher state. There is also implicit in the alchemical mindset that you need to find some ingredient that is not physical in order to accomplish this. This is implicit in true alchemy. There is, of course, a false alchemy, which thinks that there is some magical formula, some philosopher’s stone, some chemical element that can bring about this transformation in a mechanical way. The true reality of alchemy is that the philosopher’s stone that can transform one element into another is consciousness, higher awareness.
Mental freedom is the norm
Through higher awareness people will realize that there is no condition in human psychology, in the human psyche, that cannot be transformed into a higher condition. One might want people to be free from the power elite and from any external oppression and limitation, but the only way to accomplish this is to first free them from the limitations in their own psyches that are burdening them and weighing them down. Why is the power elite still in power? Because people have so many psychological burdens that they cannot raise themselves to the awareness of the power elite and the awareness that will simply flush out the power elite without much physical action having to be taken.
A very important step is a groundswell of an awareness that we have reached a point where the intensity and the frequency of mental illnesses and other psychological maladies has reached a level where we need to do something different, something we have not done before. We cannot use the Christian paradigm to cure mental illness but neither can we use the materialistic paradigm to cure mental illness. Therefore, we need to find a new paradigm. We need to find not just one new paradigm but many different paradigms and modalities, many different approaches to mental illness, mental freedom. There is a need for a new concept, namely the concept of “mental freedom.”
We have so much talk about mental illness and people think that mental illness is something you can ignore until it becomes a crisis that you can label as a depression or schizophrenia or this or that. Then you need to do something about it, but ideally all human beings should enjoy and manifest mental freedom. Mental freedom is the normal state for a human being.
Right now, you have in every country a certain sense of normality based on how most people function, or rather how most people dysfunction. In all countries you still have a situation where virtually all people have unresolved psychology to the extent that they are not functioning at their optimum capacity. They do not have mental freedom, and therefore mental freedom should be the norm for a human being. It should be seen that until you have that mental freedom, you are not manifesting your highest potential. It is desirable – it is, in fact, normal – that all human beings, first of all, are striving for mental freedom and are engaging in a lifelong process to attain this mental freedom. Therefore, society should help in this process right from the kindergarten stage and even before. When the child is in the womb, there are things the parents can do to help facilitate the process of children engaging in this lifelong process of achieving and expanding mental freedom.
The next step is psychological welfare
Society also needs to help those who are already born, those who are already adults, those who are already elderly, attain mental freedom. This does not have to be a particularly religious or even spiritual concept. Who can, in a free democratic society, object to the concept of mental freedom? Only the power elite. The question is: Do they dare to object to this if enough people grab on to the idea and demand that society does something to facilitate the process of people developing mental freedom? Who can really object to this if enough people grab on to the idea and begin expressing their desire to see this happen?
This, of course, has many different levels, and there are many different ways this will be done. It will be implemented in different ways in different countries. It will start with the more aware people pursuing it individually. We have reached a point where a next logical step for the more affluent societies is that we stop focusing on material welfare but begin focusing on psychological welfare and the goal is to help people develop mental freedom.
Why is the power elite in power? Because they are using people’s psychological hang-ups and wounds to keep them under their control. What happens if a critical mass of people work on their psychology to the point where they achieve a higher degree of mental freedom? Well, they simply will not respond to the control games of the power elite.
You can look at certain societies, such as the Soviet Union, and you can see that there was a physical apparatus designed to control people. It was brutal, it was willing to kill anybody who did not submit to control and even randomly kill people to keep them in a constant state of fear. It is clear that such an apparatus has a certain power over the people, but could this apparatus prevent the Soviet Union from collapsing? You know the historical fact that it did not.
Science can develop a universal approach to psychology
What has been one of the major contributions of science? If you go back to the society you had before the advent of science, you will see something that you often do not think about in today’s day and age. You have grown up with the concept promoted by science that it is possible to explain certain things in a universal, objective manner that is not affected by human beliefs or superstitions or by a particular religious interpretation. Yes, it is ironic that this same science has been hijacked by materialism, which has the exact same approach as the religions have of defining how the universe should work, wanting to force people to accept this, wanting to force the universe to fit into their thought system. Nevertheless, science has still introduced the concept that it is possible to look at: “How does the universe actually work” instead of having a theory and seeking to impose that theory upon the universe, therefore forcing the results of science to conform to the theory.
Again, you can say: “Isn’t that what science is doing today where many scientists are wanting their results to conform to materialism?” Yes it is, but still you have the concept that it is possible to make observations and experiments and look at the results and look at what that says about how things actually work, and therefore we can discard the theories that we cannot support through these observations. Well, it is possible to take this exact approach to the human psyche, to the concept of consciousness, and it is possible to investigate consciousness. You can look at how does the psyche actually work, what works, what does not work. You can conduct observations, conduct experiments and then you can come up with something that is completely based on experience and experiment. Therefore, you can come up with an entirely new view of the psyche that when it is developed, will not be seen as religious or even spiritual.
It will be seen as simply a natural, objective, neutral realization, a higher awareness and a natural element in the evolution of humanity, a higher awareness of how the human psyche works, what a human being is, what our potential really is. When you come to this point, you are so to speak de-mystifying the topic and therefore it is not a religious approach because you are not actually asked to believe this, you are asked to test it out yourself.
Can you raise your consciousness? Can you feel a difference? Well, then it obviously works for you, does it not? Does following this path make you feel better about yourself? Well, then it must work. As more and more people begin to actually demonstrate that it works, there will be that shift where now it is not a matter of calling it religious, it is not a matter of belief or not belief. It has simply become the new norm, the newly accepted truth.
If you go back just a hundred or two hundred years and look at the average person, they had virtually no concept of the psyche; what the psyche is, how it functions. Modern science (and in part credited to Sigmund Freud who although he took this in a slightly unfortunate direction, still broke new ground and made psychology a more accepted science) has produced an increase in the awareness of the psyche. Most people in the more developed part of the world have an awareness that there is something called the human psyche and it has a great impact on their lives.
There can be psychological problems, psychological illness, and if you go back just a few decades, you would see how there was an incredible social trauma associated with seeking help with psychological problems. Psychological illness was a taboo that most people did not even dare to acknowledge for themselves. They certainly did not dare to seek help because it was considered as socially unacceptable in many circles.
Of course, it still is today in some, but in many nations that trauma has gone away. The stigma has gone away and more and more people are seeking help with depression or other mental illnesses. They are going to psychologists, other forms of therapy and this is a development that you could scarcely have foreseen just a few decades ago.
What has shifted here is that the awareness of the psyche (that it has a great impact on your life and that it is necessary for human beings sometimes to do something about their psyche) has now become accepted. It has now become normal and it is not a big leap to go to the point that instead of waiting for a mental illness to occur, it is better to have an ounce of prevention. You then teach the children from an early age how to avoid mental illness by actually looking at how society can help children function better and help their citizens function better and come to feel good about themselves. This is not religious, it is not spiritual, it is not mystical. It is only a matter of time before it comes to be seen that this is absolutely natural and absolutely self-evident. People will look back and can scarcely understand that there was a time where individuals and societies resisted this, which now seems so self-evident.
As a result of this, these religions that give you answers from without and demand that you will believe in these answers even if they do not make sense, will clearly fade away. This does not mean that people will not have questions about the spiritual aspects of life and naturally these questions will not be answered by some state-defined religion. They will not be answered as people go to school and get an education because this will be focused on the universal aspects of the psyche. People will naturally pursue this on an individual basis. This does not mean the emergence of one dominant religious, spiritual or mystical teaching or philosophy because more and more people will study mystical teachings on an individual basis.
There always will be room for various spiritual teachings, various directions. There will be room for many different kind of spiritual communities. Maybe they will not even be called spiritual communities because they will be seen as a form of community where people can come together and support each other in the raising of consciousness, in the answering of their questions about life and fulfilling that basic human need that most people have and that more people will become aware of, namely that you need to have some understanding of who you are, how the world works and how you fit into the world.
Of course, there are many different levels. This does not mean that when you have gone through the educational system, everybody is at the same level of consciousness. Naturally, people will come into embodiment at many different levels and so there will still be many different levels of consciousness in society. Therefore, these people will need different things, different explanations, different practices because there will be a greater awareness of the need to practice some form of technique in order to raise your awareness. Again, there will not be one that will be sponsored or acknowledged officially by society. It will be up to people to choose this individually. There will be much diversity in the Age of Higher Awareness. In fact, there will be more diversity in the Age of Higher Awareness than you have right now in the field of spirituality—and, of course, in many other fields as well.