Is not America meant to be the land of the free? How can you be free if you want to own something on earth? How can America be free if it has such a strong desire to own something that it has to build a wall to protect it? Or that it has to erect other barriers and stop interacting with the world, trading freely, exchanging this or that freely? When you start closing yourself off, it is because you think you own something and you have to protect it. When you start building an army that can project force anywhere on the planet, it is almost as if you think that you not only own America, you own the world. Who owns America, who can claim ownership of America? What is America? Is it a country? Is it a certain area on earth that you can draw a line around and say: “Inside of this is America, outside is not America?” Nay, America is an idea. Can you own an idea?
Who owns gravity? America is not only an idea because even ideas have been misconstrued by people to be something final. You can see, for example, how the Catholic church will claim that its doctrines represent something final, something absolute, something that could never be improved upon because it is the highest truth or the only truth. Look at America. Is the idea of America something absolute, something unchangeable, something that could never be improved upon? Nay, America is a process, it is not clearly defined. The destiny of America, the unfoldment of America, the evolution of America depends on the free-will choices of not only the people who live within its borders but many other people who are tied to it in various ways. America is an experiment.
Why America must serve others
Some people think it is their own rugged individualism that has built this country, but it is not individualism as such that has built this country. Certainly, it is not rugged individualism that says: “I only care about myself and I don’t care whatsoever about other people.” You could (even though it would be an artificial concept) look at America and you could sum up how much wealth is owned by people in America. Then, you could start looking at how America spends that wealth and you could say: “Is that wealth being used to do something for people? Is it being used to do something for the American people? Is it being used to do something for people outside America?” You could point to certain things here and there, and America is doing this and America is doing that. This is not said to detract from what is being done.
Yet, if you looked honestly at the amount of wealth that is in this country and how it is being spent, you would see that over the last several decades the tendency is very clear. The wealth is being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people and they are not using it to help others. They are just using it to build more wealth even though they already have more than they could possibly need for the rest of their lifetimes.
One or two people turning to philanthropy and giving away billions of dollars does not change this picture sufficiently. Again, not detracting from what they are doing, obviously it is better to turn to philanthropy than to keep accumulating wealth. Nevertheless, right now there is a small elite of Americans who think they have a right to own the wealth produced by this nation, to concentrate it in their own hands and to put it under their control, to decide essentially that they will take this wealth out of circulation.
The downward trend of money
What is the purpose of money? It is to circulate and to do something for others because that is how the talents are being multiplied so that the wealth of a nation can truly grow. What is happening right now in America is a downward trend where the wealth that is existing is not being used, it is not being multiplied to do something for others. Therefore, there can only come a point where the system crashes, as you saw it do in 2008. This is the only way right now that the wealth is going to be taken away from the elite. Unfortunately, this also has ramifications for the people because they are also affected by this but that is, again, because the people are allowing the elite to steal the wealth.
The wealth is partly an effect of the people’s labor. Those who perform the labor should have a right to control how the money, or at least the majority of it, is spent. In this so-called capitalist system, this free enterprise economy that you think you have (wish it were free but it is not) there is no room for that. There is no room for sharing the wealth among all the people who help create it. Well, then, how can the talents be multiplied? They cannot, and if they are not multiplied, how can the wealth keep growing?
You could say that America has far greater wealth than it had twenty, thirty years ago. But is that really so? Because what is the wealth you have today that you did not have 30 years ago? It is the so-called value of stocks, bonds and other financial instruments. Where is that money? It exists only as numbers on a computer screen, as zeros and ones on a server’s hard drive, nothing else.
Egotism rules America
Is that wealth? Nay, it is simply numbers that serve to gratify the egos of those who have taken the so-called rugged individualism to its ultimate perversion of caring only about themselves and not about others. Egotism rules America and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the higher vision for this nation. Higher awareness did not mean to raise up a nation of spoiled brats who care only about themselves and who take for granted that they have a right to have what they have and do whatever they want with it, without any sense of responsibility for sharing with others.
How do you multiply the talents? When it comes to money, certainly you need to take care of yourself and your family. You need to have a place to live, you need to have a car to drive—if you live in America, the land of cars. Nevertheless, there comes a point where you have taken care of those needs—and it can be individual, this is not setting up a standard for how much money every family should have. There is room for some individualism here but there comes a point where you have enough to take care of yourself and your family. From that point on, multiplying the talents means doing something to help other people. Of course, when you are spending money, you are also helping other people because you are keeping the economy growing.
What is it that the analysts on television always say when there is an economic downturn in America? Why is the economy not growing? Because there is not enough consumer spending, they say. Because consumer spending is two-thirds or more of the economy.
Well, why is there not consumer spending? Because the consumers are not the ones who have the money. It is concentrated in the hands of the elite who do not know how to spend the money because they have already bought all the mansions and all the yachts and all the Rolls Royces and all the Jaguars and all the Maseratis that anybody could possibly have—or the private jets or the this or the that.
There comes a point where you cannot spend more money on yourself. But if you have this obsessive-compulsive need to own the money, then you go into this mode of just accumulating more and more because what if you lost it? When do you ever feel secure? You never feel secure when you are in this state of mind.
A country not dominated by an elite
What needs to happen in America, in order to align it with the Age of Higher Awareness, is that there has to be a sharing of the wealth. Now, this can be done in various ways. It does not have to be done only the way it has been done in Europe where you have the very high taxes that are being distributed by the government. That is not the only way that it can be done but it is certainly one way that has worked for many European countries to the point where they have secured a lower degree of poverty than what you see in America.
America is an idea, America is a dream. What was the idea that higher awareness had in mind when it sponsored America? What was it that the Founding Fathers and many of those who gave their lives to create this country had in their minds? Well, it was to create a society that was distinctly different from the kind of societies you had in Europe at the time. You had the feudal societies with a very small power elite who had control of the majority of the wealth, meaning the land. You had the king who had absolute power to do anything. In other words, you had a completely elitist system.
The vision of higher awareness and the Founding Fathers was to create a country that was not controlled by an elite but where all of the people had an opportunity to multiply their individual talents and be rewarded according to their willingness to make an effort. What has happened since then is that the power elite has, in various ways, eroded that freedom and they have taken the fruits of the people’s labor to a very large degree. It now goes to corporations that are not owned by a single person or even to companies that may be owned by a single person. In any event, it concentrates the wealth in the hands of a small elite. That is not the kind of free, egalitarian, non-elitist society that higher awareness sponsored.
Americans growing a conscience
What is it going to take to truly begin to move beyond this? Well, it is simply going to take that America and Americans need to develop a conscience, a social awareness. You will say: “Well, don’t we have that already?” Well, look around you. Look at some of the other countries where they have said: “We will not allow there to be people who are poor, who are starving to death, who are malnourished, who cannot afford to go to the doctor but must wait until they have a life-threatening illness to go to the emergency room. We do not want to have a society where we are only taking care of ourselves and not taking care of each other. We do not want to have a country that consists of 400 million individuals. We want a country that consists of people who realize we are in the same boat and we will all do better if we take care of each other.”
You may say: “Are there not people who have this awareness in America?” Of course there are, but we have not yet reached a critical mass in America and how can you tell? Well, there is not healthcare available for all people, is there? There is not a social safety net for those who lose their jobs because some corporations care more about profit for the elite than salaries for the people. Unless we come over this critical mass of people who not only develop the social awareness but begin speaking out, then America cannot go beyond its present level.
If it cannot go beyond its present level, it must decline because the talents are not being multiplied. If there is not a willingness to reform the system, then the system must be allowed to collapse. This entire colossus, that the power elite has built in this country, must be allowed to fail.
The government and the media, both of which are essentially owned by the elite, may think that the apparatus is too big to fail, but higher awareness does not think it is too big to fail. If that is the only way to move America forward, then let it all collapse in upon itself. The people will be free from the tyranny of the financial elite. One way or the other, the people will be free from this elite. Will it be the easy way or will it be the hard way? That is a question that higher awareness cannot decide because it is up to the free will of the people.
Raising America beyond rugged individualism
This is not saying that there is a huge gap between where America is now and where it should be. There is, in fact, not such a large gap before that social awareness, that sense of togetherness, can begin to really dominate the American way of thinking. But we are not there yet. There needs to be someone who will go to the forefront.
The more aware people need to look at yourselves, those of you who have grown up in America. See how you might have been, from an early age, indoctrinated with this sense of the American individualism and really start to look at this in yourselves and resolve it. Some of you have already completed this and started feeling this compassion for other people. Many of you, of course, are on this planet because you have compassion for the people. Some of you have still been affected by this American way of thinking where you still have not freed yourself from it. You are actually here partly to take on this American way of thinking and help resolve it in the collective so that you can help raise the collective to the next level up.
America is not the most sophisticated democracy
There are many, many Americans who will vehemently reject what is being said here. It is a grand illusion of the ages when so many Americans think that America is the most sophisticated of the evolved countries, the evolved democracies. A realistic assessment will show that when it comes to developing a true functioning democracy, Canada and many of the nations in Europe have reached a higher level of maturity—in part, in great part, because there is that social awareness.
What is the meaning of a democracy? Some will say that America is not a democracy, it is a republic, but, nevertheless, you are voting for representatives, are you not? And that is one of the keystones of a democracy. So the essence of the current American model is that there is a small elite who manipulates the people into voting for either this party or that party, but both parties are owned and controlled by the elite. Therefore, they cannot enact a policy that overthrows the dominance of the elite. Is that a democracy? No. It is just a camouflaged dictatorial system that is ruled by a small elite.
How do you have a true democracy? Only when you develop a social awareness where the people realize: “We are in this together, and we function better when we all help each other, when we don’t allow a small elite to manipulate us because we don’t allow them to get away with setting themselves up as an elite.” Who created the idea of the rugged American individualism and the “America first” and the “America is the greatest nation in the world?” Well, the elite have because they are the ones who want to be completely egotistical, only think about themselves, not care about the consequences for anybody else and accumulate, accumulate, accumulate. They think they can own something on earth, but that is not individualism.
This is not about having a country where you give up being individuals and you blend into the mass consciousness and you all become automatons. That is not what social awareness is about. Social awareness is that you realize that you are an individual but you are not living in a bubble. You are living in a nation with millions of other people and you are your brother’s keeper. Let those who are in the Cain consciousness stay in that consciousness but do not let them run your nation! You are all your brother’s and sister’s keepers because that is the only way that a free democratic, non-elitist society can be built.