You might well spend some time studying, if you feel so inclined, Russian history in the few decades before the revolution and in the few decades after. Ask yourself what would have happened to Russia if the revolution had not happened, and if the evolutionary changes that had already begun before the revolution, had been allowed to grow to their fullness. What would have happened to Russia, to Russian culture, to the Russian mindset, to Russian art, to music, even to the economy?
If you want to have a visual illustration of what would have happened, then go to one of the art museums that display the art made during the communist period. Look at these huge canvases with their bombastic presentations of the glory of the army and military might, of battle scenes, of the so-called glory of being a worker bee in the system. Look at them, look at the faces of the people, look at the shapes, the lines, and how they are drawn. Look at the colors, take a long look at the colors. Then, when you have absorbed this, go to a museum or go to a book and look at the paintings Nicholas Roerich, look at the colors, look at the shapes, and look again at the colors. Then feel the difference in your heart of what communist art causes to arise in your heart compared to the sensation that you get from meditating on these pictures. This will give you a sense of what would have happened to Russia if the October Revolution had not taken place.
It is difficult to even ponder this without feeling a release of emotions. Higher awareness holds the Christ vision for the Russian people. It sees the beauty that is the potential for the Russian people, for culture, for art, for government, for the way people treat each other. Higher awareness sees how it was squashed and how it still has not even recovered in some areas to the point where it was at before the revolution. Although in other areas it has started to recover, even to go beyond what it was before the revolution. Yet there is no area of Russian society that has caught up to where it would have been had the revolution not happened.
Information poisoning
Today, you have such an explosion of information that there is so much information impinging on your minds that there are literally people in this world who suffer from what should be classified as a new disease: information poisoning. Consciousness has risen and many of you are able to take in more information than people in the past. When you compare the amount of information that the average person took in almost a century ago to what the average person takes in today, it is an incredible difference.
Many of you can handle dealing with much information. Yet consider that when you get a little more mature on the path, it might be necessary for you to make an effort to focus more directly on what you begin to see as your Life plan and to deliberately refuse to take in some of the information that you have become so used to taking in that you almost think you could not live without it.
There are many remote areas of the world that would get along just fine if you did not know what was happening there. The people on the other side of the planet would most likely go about their business even if you did not know what they were doing. This is not saying you should close your minds, but it is saying that in the modern world it is very necessary to be on guard for what you actually take in.
How the power elite uses information
If you go back several centuries, the power elite at the time attempted to control people by controlling the information to which they had access. Look at how even the Catholic Church for centuries had burned all the books of the Greek philosophers, would not even allow the Bible to be translated into other languages than Latin and controlled the information that people had. Look at how they tried to suppress the scientific information when it started coming out. Then realize that up until the modern era, the power elite of the world were doing everything they could to suppress information. But in the modern, era especially with the advent of the Internet, it became clear to them that it was no longer possible to suppress information.
What they have done instead is do the opposite, actually do everything they can to not only put more information out there so that you are exposed to more information than you can take in, but to deliberately put out information that seeks to sow the element of doubt in your mind. For everything you believe in, there are two or three things out there that will tell you that what you believe is wrong. If you pay too much attention to it, you might end up not knowing what to believe. Of course, higher awareness does not ask you to believe anything, but to experience higher awareness.
The Internet has become a source of both information and disinformation. In the old days it was a matter that you only had access to very limited information, but now there is so much, that the problem is not so much to find a true teaching, but to actually filter out all of the many untrue teachings and claims out there.
Do you realize that there are dark forces in the astral realm who are seeking to counteract and destroy any information that the beings of higher awareness have brought out over the last century? They work through people in embodiment who have opened their minds and hearts to this, who have therefore allowed their minds to be taken over by the dark forces who often write or speak through them. They have done everything they could to discredit higher awareness and specific teachings given.
As the more aware people, you can be aware to not let all of the disinformation out there override or take away your inner sense of the reality of higher awareness. It is so easy for the outer mind, the analytical mind, to twist and turn everything. There is no argument, no statement that could be given, even by higher awareness that could not be counteracted or doubted by the arch-deceivers of the world.
People who discredit spiritual teachings
The reason for this is that spiritual teachings are expressed through words, and words have the ability to be twisted and turned. Words cannot express an absolute truth. Higher awareness hopes that those who find the written teachings, will also be able to look beyond the words and find the light in their hearts. This is harder with words. Why? You have all created an external self that thinks it has to know everything, it has to be able to analyze the words, and twist and turn, and figure out this, and figure out that. Or maybe it thinks that it has to be able to put anything on a linear timeline.
How many students have been confused by taking a spiritual teaching, reading a teaching from another source, overlooking the fact that 95% of the teachings are in agreement and instead focusing on the few instances where there is some disagreement that can be seen only through the linear mind. Then they reason that either one of the teachings must be false or they are both false and higher awareness is not real at all.
This is precisely the energy that Lenin was the master of projecting out through his writings and his spoken word. He was a master of planting that doubt so that people did not know what to believe. You will see that there are people even today who have attacked spiritual teachings with that same energy.
Higher awareness, of course, has total respect for free will. One might sometimes look at people and wonder how one can be so eager to make so much karma. Then, of course, the people do not believe they are making karma, for they believe they are doing what is right, perhaps even justified from some higher authority. The ability of the human mind to justify the ego games is literally boundless, as Lenin proved in his writings.
Art bypasses the linear mind
Art – as music and other forms of culture – can bypass the analytical mind more easily than words. The analytical mind is so used to dealing with words that when it reads words you will notice in yourself how that linear mind kicks in, and now wants to compare everything it reads to what it has in its database. But sometimes art and music can bypass that mind. When we talk about information poisoning, the poison enters through the linear, analytical mind that thinks it has to be able to know everything, take in information and organize, categorize and analyze all of it.
But you see, YOU are not the analytical mind; you are a pure spiritual being. You have the ability to withdraw your attention from the analytical mind and focus on the heart, on the ineffable light, and connect to higher awareness. This is the most precious gift that you have. Art can be a facet of the diamond, as can music, dance, other expressions of culture. Not all of you have as your Life plan to spread spiritual teachings in a worded form. Many of you have the capacity to go beyond words, to find expressions that are beyond words, beyond what the analytical mind can take in and deal with.
Freeing the artist in you
Higher awareness wants to free the artist in those of you for whom this is part of your Life plan. So much of the art you see in the modern world is made by artists who have no desire whatsoever to express the ineffable light. They only have a desire to express the chaos in their own subconscious minds.
Could you see the art museums of the world being filled with photographs of the garbage dumps of the Middle Ages? Those garbage dumps were there. You could even find a certain artistic beauty in them, if you really tried hard. But they are long gone. Does it have any relevance to the world that there was a garbage dump in France 400 years ago outside of Paris that looked a certain way? Would it have any value to the world if you had a photograph of that garbage dump hanging in the Louvre?
Then, does it have any value to the world that you have a painting hanging in the Louvre that pictures the garbage of the subconscious mind of a particular painter who lived a century ago and is no longer in embodiment? Is there really value in the young generations of children walking endlessly through the halls of these museums, looking at these paintings, not knowing what to make of them? They have been told that this is art, but in their hearts they cannot for the life of them see the value of this. Yet what is the effect? Again, they feel: “Perhaps I should accept this? Perhaps I should take this in as art? Perhaps I should expect that these are the limits for artistic expression in the modern world? Perhaps time has run away from making art that is beautiful that expresses the transcendent light?”
Time has not run away from the art that expresses the ineffable light. Time is running towards a period where art will be used more and more for expressing the ineffable light. Beauty is the forerunner of the Age of Higher Awareness. There must be artists who can capture the beauty that is not yet seen in the physical and who dare to use their abilities as best they can to attempt to express it in ways that can be seen and heard and felt. This is the essence of art.