Winning the political game in the Age of Higher Awareness 

Higher awareness is not imposing conditions upon whether or not it will share the ideas for manifesting the Age of Higher Awareness in America. There are no conditions. Ideas will be released to anyone who is able to receive them. It is not so that before there will be a release of ideas to America, America has to live up to certain conditions. The ideas are radiated constantly, so the real question is not whether the ideas are released but whether people can receive them.

What will it take for at least some Americans to be able to receive these ideas? What will it take for a critical mass of Americans to be able to accept these ideas so that they can actually be manifest in the nation instead of remaining ideas only? This is not in any way criticizing or condemning America or the American people. It is simply making clear to you what it will take for you to receive the ideas that will set you free from the limitations and suffering you see in this nation right now.

Winning over the obsession with winning

If America is to receive the ideas for the Age of Higher Awareness, Americans need to, overcome the obsession with winning. America as a nation, in the national psyche, has an obsession with winning. How many nations on earth have in their collective consciousness the concept that they are the greatest nation on earth? But America has it. Look at American sports, look at how competitive Americans are, look at how they always want to win. For example, not so long ago when there was a world soccer championship and a very small nation called Croatia beat some of the biggest soccer nations in the world, they made it to the finals. They did not win the final game but they did not think they had lost the world championship. They thought they had won second place in the entire world, but if Americans had been in that position: “Oh, that team, they were so bad, they lost, they didn’t become world champions.”

This is the essence of that obsession with winning: It is win or lose, winners take all. You see it even in the political process, you see it in people’s mindset. You see that America is obsessed with being the best, always being ahead, and this creates a strange dichotomy in the American psyche. On one hand, Americans are always comparing themselves to other nations but they are only doing this to show how America is better than other nations. They are not comparing themselves to other nations and saying: “Do these nations have something we could learn from?” This is talking in general terms, not about everyone, but there is that tendency to look at how Americans can exceed and get ahead of other nations, not being so willing to look at whether there are other nations that are ahead in certain areas. 

The obsession with not losing

For example, in the history of America there is the concept that America won the Second World War, America won the Cold War, the Gulf war, the war in Iraq. Yeah, there was that hiccup with the Vietnam War. We didn’t quite win that war but you know, we won so many other wars, it doesn’t really matter.

If you go back and look at this honestly, you will see what a trauma it was for America after the Vietnam War. America could not deal with this, and why was it? Because America is so obsessed with winning that it cannot face not winning. It cannot deal with not winning in a neutral, objective way. America does not have the ability to say: “We made a mistake. Let’s learn from it and move on.” If you made a mistake, not only did you not win, but you actually lost. It is either you win and you are the good guy and you are right, or you lose and you are absolutely wrong. It is the all-or-nothing, the black-and-white thinking. 

Many Americans are very, very close to breaking through and realizing this entire game of always wanting to be the winner and always wanting to interpret any event as if America came out on top. “We didn’t really make a mistake because, after all, we are the greatest nation on earth and we are the good guys. Even if we did go out to some other country and we did sort of create some situation that wasn’t really good, after all, we are Americans. We have to spread freedom and democracy around the world, that’s what we are here for.” 

What this obsession with winning creates is an opposite polarity, the obsession with not losing. When you have an obsession with not losing, what you cannot do is say: “We made a mistake, let’s learn from it and then we move on.” You cannot acknowledge that you made a mistake.

The game of pretending in American politics

There is no need to think in terms of right and wrong, mistakes or not mistakes. It is simply a matter of going into a neutral state of mind, looking at a situation and saying: “Was the outcome really what we wanted?” If it was not what you wanted, then you ask: “How can we then improve so we get what we want?” This dynamic – the obsession with winning, the obsession with not losing – prevents people from going into that neutral state of mind. 

Instead of thinking: “How could we improve things?” they go into this very contrived, artificial state of mind of pretending they did not actually lose: “Ah, maybe we didn’t win but we certainly didn’t lose because it wasn’t so bad after all.” Instead of just looking at a situation and saying: “We don’t want to repeat that. How do we avoid repeating it so we can do better the next time?” This state of consciousness permeates the collective psyche of America. It has many ramifications. You can see the ridiculousness of it in sports but now look at the political arena. 

There may be some people in America who have not read the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen where an emperor has invited a team of very, supposedly, advanced tailors to make a new dress for him for a major event. These tailors come in and pretend to be sewing this dress but they are not making a real dress. They are so good at pretending that everybody, from the emperor to all of the people in his court, actually see this dress. The emperor appears before the people in his new dress and nobody will come out and say that they do not see it until a little boy cries out: “But the emperor has nothing on!”

This is what needs to happen in the political arena of America. What you have right now is a political situation where the senators, the representatives in the House and all other levels of American politics have used this obsession with winning, the obsession with not losing, to create a situation where the politicians are not doing the job that they were charged to do by the U.S. Constitution. They are not doing the job that the American people elected them to do. But everybody is pretending that they are doing their jobs. They are trying to pretend that they are doing the right thing, that they could not be doing anything else or that there are certain problems that just cannot be solved but it is not their fault. Nobody wants to come out and say: “The emperor has nothing on!” 

Washington, D.C., is just one big game of pretending to look out for the interests of the American people. In reality, as a whole (again, individual differences but as a whole) Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, are not looking out for the interests of the American people. They are looking out for the interests of a small power elite. That is the naked reality of politics in America.

Very few people dare to come out and say it because in order to say it, you have to free yourself from the mentality of wanting to win, not wanting to lose, therefore not wanting to be neutral and simply say: “Are the politicians doing their job? Are they taking care of what is in the best interests of the people of America?” If they are not, it is not a matter of saying: “Oh, they’re wrong, they’re so bad, they’re this, they’re that.” The question is: “How can we move forward? How can we do better? How can we avoid repeating a situation that we realize isn’t what we really want?”

The gap between public and hidden politics

If you read how the media is treating the political situation and if you see how the politicians are talking about it, it is truly amazing that everybody can ignore the elephant in the room. This is not about a particular person, whether in or out of the White House. It is about the very fact that the political system, the political apparatus, in America is not looking out for the interests of the people. They are all pretending that they are. Some of them honestly believe that they are, but they are blinded. They are blinded by a consciousness that has been created in Washington, D.C. over many decades and simply comes down as a cloak over the minds of the elected politicians. 

There are some of the newly elected politicians that do not have it, but it usually does not take that many years before a politician is blinded by this state of consciousness. Suddenly, the ideals that caused that person to run for office have faded into the background. This is partly based on the stark reality that a newly elected congressman or senator has to spend most of his or her time fundraising for the re-election campaign. It also has to do with the fact that the ideals have to fall by the wayside so that the representatives can walk the party line because if they do not, they will not even be able to run for re-election.

There is a certain sense of apathy that has crept into this mindset, namely that there are certain things that they just cannot do anything about. Some problems are too big, some are so complex or they cannot do anything about it because the opposing party will not agree and therefore nothing can get done. In other words, you are talking about voter apathy but there is also a politician apathy that has very much engulfed Washington, D.C. as a black cloud. It is very, very aggressive in attacking the minds of newly elected representatives. 

It needs to be recognized by the people (and by some of the politicians themselves who are open to this) that there is this cloud that takes over the minds of most politicians in Washington. You can especially see it in those who have been there for a long time. You can go to any kind of debate or any kind of hearing, and you can just see that these people all have a certain look on their faces. They all have a certain way of talking. They have a certain way of reasoning. 

If you can read the vibration, you can see that they have all aligned themselves with a certain mindset. Most of them would deny this consciously but what the seasoned politicians in Washington, D.C. have realized is that politics in America is a game of pretending—nothing else. You say what you think you need to say, what the public wants to hear in order to get elected. You vote the way your party wants you to, but the seasoned politicians all know that there is a facade that you show to the public and there is a reality of what you are doing when you think nobody is watching you. There is a huge gap between the public front that you put on and the reality of what goes on in the corridors of power when they think nobody is watching.

Why nobody can go against the status quo

In the movie industry, the insiders have for decades known about the sexual abuse but nobody from the inside will speak out. The insiders in Washington – the politicians, the bureaucrats – they all know about this huge gap between the public front and the political reality. The daily hidden discourse of what goes on and how politics is done and how there is wheeling and dealing and how there are special interests and how there is lobbying and how this person is bought by this special interest group and the other person is bought by that. Therefore, it is not at all about what is best for the people. It is only what is best for the elite and the special interest groups that have bought their way into the political system. 

Everyone who is an insider in D.C. knows this. Why has nobody cried out that the emperor has nothing on? Because the moment you cry out, you are no longer an insider. You will be frozen out instantly and they will attempt to destroy you, as you see how the politicians and the media are attempting to destroy anyone who is a whistle-blower.

Those who go against the status quo will be attacked. In fact, if we step back and take a look at the political process and step up from the public discourse (not only how the public is talking but also how the political system is working ), you can see something very interesting. Ask yourself this simple question: What does it take to be an elected representative in the United States and survive psychologically? Look at what those who are running for office or those who are elected, have to go through: the scrutiny in the media, the blatant criticism, that good old American word “mud-slinging” that takes place all of the time. Look at the hate mail that anyone running for office gets from unbalanced people of every persuasion.

You realize that running for public office in the United States of America is very similar to a method of torture that they had centuries ago, called the gauntlet. You have two rows of people that are standing, forming a tunnel. They have various kinds of weapons and somebody has to run through it and the people on both sides are trying to harm them or kill them or cut their limbs off to the best of their ability. Running for public office in the United States today is like running a gauntlet.

Ask yourself: What kind of a person is willing to endure this in order to win public office? You will see that it takes a rather special psychological profile to be able to run, to be able to win and then to be able to find your bearings in the stark political reality that takes place behind the scenes. A balanced, harmonious, non-aggressive person is very unlikely to be willing to endure this. There are exceptions but there are too few of them to make a real difference in terms of changing this cloud that is hanging over D.C. 

There are too few because the majority of them have that psychological profile, the obsession with winning. They will do anything to win, and they can get themselves into a state of mind where anybody who attacks them can be ignored or pushed aside—or even affirms their view that they are against those other people. Many people have that psychological profile where anybody who opposes them actually affirms how right they are and how wrong those other people are: “Because that’s why they are opposing me, they are automatically wrong if they are opposing me.”

Going along in order to get along

Those who can win and those who can survive psychologically once they have won, have one simple ability: the willingness to compromise and the willingness to go along in order to get along. They are all willing to do whatever it takes to get into office and to stay in office. They are willing to play the game as the game is currently being played. Now, of course, you can say to yourself: “Well, how did we get to the point where the political game has become the way it is? Is that because there’s some evil conspiracy that consciously created this political climate?” Well, on the one hand, there is an evil conspiracy, namely the manipulators, but there is not a conspiracy in the physical realm.

There was no physical person who deliberately attempted to distort the political process. This all happened very gradually over time, without anyone realizing what was happening. It happened so gradually that those who had been there a long time had become used to it. Of course, those who are newly elected and are not compromisers but have idealism, come in and they are shocked at how things are done. There is usually some older politician that comes up to this newly elected person, puts his arm around him or her, and says: “You know, I understand why you are a little disturbed by how things are done but let me just explain a few things to you.” What happens is that either the person is persuaded by the elders to play the game or says: “I will have nothing to do with this” and withdraws. This is why you have a situation where, from a purely realistic viewpoint, you can say the vast majority of the politicians and the bureaucrats in Washington are literally hypnotized by this state of consciousness. They know there is a huge gap between the public appearance and the reality in the hidden corridors, but none of them will speak out about it because most of them have resigned themselves to thinking: “Well, that’s just the way it is. That’s just the way politics is done in America. Nothing we can do about it. We just have to go along and then hopefully it will all work out.” There are even those who enjoy the way politics is being done in America because what does it allow them to do? It allows them to look out for their own interests and enrich themselves by being in office. 

How scapegoating ruins the political climate

Many, many people are already so dissatisfied with the political system that they have the potential to get over this consciousness that there has to be a winner and a loser. What is the obsession with winning? How do you win? Well, it is a relative, dualistic concept because, in order for you to win, someone has to lose—at least if there are two opposing polarities.

Many people are today very dissatisfied with the political process but because they do not understand what is going on and because they are trapped in the win-lose mindset, what do they do? They look for someone to blame. They look for a scapegoat and they say: “That person or that group of people, that’s the bad guy. That’s the problem.” They are looking to blame, rather than looking for a higher understanding so that they can move forward.

Higher awareness is not looking for these people who are close to waking up to start blaming the politicians. It is not a matter of blaming the politicians. It is simply a matter of recognizing that: “For reasons we don’t even need to fully understand and expose, we have a situation where politics in America has slid into a place that doesn’t serve the people. We have had enough of it and we want politics to be the way it should be, namely that everybody in Washington is cooperating in order to do what is in the best interests of the people.”

It is not a matter of finding out who is to blame because neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are to blame. There is, in fact, no single senator or congressman who is to blame. There is no group who is to blame. Of course, those who have been there the longest are the most blinded by the consciousness but it is not a matter of blaming anybody. It is simply a matter of crying out that the emperor has nothing on so there suddenly is that shift in awareness where everybody can see what they cannot see today. Everybody can see how far from the ideal politics has gone, how polarized it has become, how it has become a total game of pretending. If we could have that shift, it would have a major impact on the political arena in America.

Taking money out of politics

There are, of course, many others things that could happen as we move towards the Age of Higher Awareness. You must recognize that when higher awareness sponsored the creation of the United States, it did not have total control over the process. It was not enabled to dictate the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. It was something that had to be created by working with the people who were there at the time. Their consciousness was, of course, an expression of the collective consciousness and the entire state of the world then. The Constitution of the United States was not meant to be a fully ideal, perfect matrix for democratic nations so that it would never have to change. What could be brought forth then was the highest for that distant time, but as the world moves forward and the collective consciousness is raised, naturally we need to revise and create a new platform based on the way the consciousness is today. 

In the Age of Higher Awareness, money will be taken out of politics. This means, for one thing, that a person running for public office in America will not have to do fundraising in order to afford a campaign. You will not need to raise hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in order to run for public office. You will, as is already implemented in some nations in Europe, be able to get equal media coverage with everyone else. You will be able to participate in debates and, of course, with the Internet you will be able to promote your viewpoints. 

There will actually come a point where it will be illegal for politicians and political parties to buy advertising because it favors those who have money over those who do not. Laws will be enacted that will, so to speak, level the playing field so that the success of those running for office will not depend on how much money they can raise but only on their idealism, their enthusiasm, their ability to relate to the people and give the people the impression that they are sincere and honest and will do what they promised. Money will be eliminated from the election process completely.

Those running for office have to spend most of their time raising money for their campaigns. Even those who are elected spend the majority of their time fundraising for their re-election campaigns. Which means what? Which means they do not even have time to read the texts of the laws that they have to vote on. You may say: “Why do they even have to read the text of those laws because it doesn’t matter whether they understand them or agree with them? They have to hold the party line anyway.” Nevertheless, if you spend most of your time raising money, what attention and time do you have left to actually engage yourself in the political process, to make your mark? 

Eliminating lobbying

The other thing that will happen in the Age of Higher Awareness is, of course, that money will be taken out of politics in the sense that lobbying will be completely eliminated. It will be absolutely illegal for lobbying groups to seek to buy influence as they are doing today. What is the entire lobbying phenomenon? It is a form of legalized, visible corruption—nothing else. It is corruption that has become legalized and accepted and it should be seen for what it is and eliminated. 

It obviously favors those who have lots of money and who has the money? The power elite. It is well known and has been exposed for decades that the top 10% control the majority of the wealth and that the top 2% control the vast majority of the wealth in America. This fact, which has been exposed by statistics now for decades, is the most obvious demonstration of the fact that the American political system has gone completely away from the intention behind the Constitution. 

This is not a land that is meant to enrich the few by taking from the many. It is a country that is meant to be a community of equals where each person has equal opportunity to make an effort and reap the rewards of those efforts. This has been aborted, not only by the political process but also by another aspect of American society that will be described  later. 

Eliminating the two-party system

One of the more immediate changes that will be happening before too long is that the electoral college with be eliminated. It had, perhaps, some practical validity when it was created, but certainly with modern communication it is completely obsolete. In the Age of Higher Awareness, the President will be elected by popular vote. Whichever candidate gets the most votes in the entire country goes to the White House because the electoral college will be gone. 

In the short term there needs to be a challenge to the two-party system and the gridlock of having only two parties. One can envision several interim stages that could happen. One is that a third party or even more than one, could begin to gain seats in the House of Representatives so that people would see that they actually have something to vote for besides the Democrats and Republicans. 

Voter apathy comes primarily from the fact that there are so many people who feel that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans represent them or that it does not really matter which party has the majority because it is all politics as usual. As an interim stage, a new party could come in, be part of the debate and perhaps even create a situation where either the Republicans or the Democrats would have to cooperate with this third party in order to get a majority. Some will cry out that this would split the vote, but so what! Do you think the current gridlock is a good situation?

If a third party came in, what would happen? Well, in some situations the Democrats might cooperate with this third party in order to get a majority. But the third party would not agree with the Democrats on everything so there would be other situations where the Republicans would cooperate with the third party in order to get a majority on some issue. That would mean that there is the possibility that the moderates, the more balanced people, could now suddenly begin to get their policy through and take it away from the extremists on both sides.

Another possible scenario would be to revisit why we even created two political parties and whether political parties really have any validity anymore. Have they outlived their usefulness? Should we simply say that all representatives run based on their own merit, not based on party affiliation? Once they are in, they can vote their conscience and there are no party lines that divide the house into two opposing factions. The reality is that most representatives are not really voting based on their conviction but because they have come to realize that they have to play the game, so they play it and vote the party line. If there was a situation where they were free to vote their conviction, and they were directly responsible to their voters instead of being responsible to the party, then the political process would change and things would be done that cannot be done today.

The hidden power elite

In the Age of Higher Awareness there will be a process whereby it will be exposed that there is a small power elite that exercises a completely disproportionate influence on the political process. This is not because these people buy influence, it is because they have what has been called an “old boys’ network” where they know people who know people. They have, over generations, formed this network of people who see themselves as the elite that runs America. They think they are doing it for the good of the country but since they have accumulated more wealth than they could possibly spend, and since this is limiting the growth of the U.S. economy, then, if they were honest, they would be able to see that they are not doing it for the good of the country. You can ask about these people – the old wealth in the Northeast, for example – are they really evil or are they (as was said about the representatives in Washington) blinded by a dark cloud that has taken over their minds? Of course, they are blinded by this. Many of them are not evil people. This is not saying they are all manipulators, although certainly a majority of them are. In the Age of Higher Awareness this will be exposed, people will be aware of this, they will see the power elite for what it is. 

They will realize that you cannot have a functioning democracy if you allow a small power elite to exercise influence by buying it or by persuading or by favoritism where: “You do me a favor, I do you a favor.” It can even happen through pressure where you will be ostracized from the inner circle if you do not follow the line, and thereby your family will be embarrassed and shamed. You can see that as Europe had these noble class
families, you have a “noble class” of families in the United States who all follow the lines so they can remain part of that inner circle that is not even in Washington but exists elsewhere and has formed this network of influential people. 

These are just some of the visions for how the political process will change in the Age of Higher Awareness. There are, of course, others. If you think these ideas are somewhat radical, some of the other ideas are far more radical than most Americans will be able to handle today. Along with health care and the drug companies that will disappear in the Age of Higher Awareness, well, there are companies and political institutions that you today take for granted in America that will simply disappear too. They will be replaced by something else that is based on the awareness of togetherness and wanting to raise up the whole rather than wanting to raise up one individual or one group. 

What is behind this obsession with winning? Well, there can only be a small group of winners, right? Because what happens when you win? Well, at least for a moment you are superior to all those who did not win. This is the game played by the noble class of America. They think they are superior and they have been hidden for so long, been rich for so long, been powerful for so long, that they think this is a permanent state. They think they are completely superior to the people but it can only happen in comparison to those who are inferior, and in the Age of Higher Awareness that consciousness will fade away. 

There will be a widespread acceptance that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and among those is the right to improve your consciousness, to raise your awareness to increasingly higher levels. You especially are endowed by your Creator with the right to raise your consciousness beyond the epic mindset, beyond duality, beyond the consciousness of the power elite. That is your most sacred right.