TOPICS: The responsibility of a democratic society – Democracies must fulfill people’s higher needs – Psychological welfare as the next step – Helping people feel good about themselves – The whole is not a physical thing – From physical to psychological needs – Materialism is an exploitative ideology – The hidden superstructure – Opening for scientific progress – The time of ideology is over – The unrecognized potential of consciousness – The significance of a conference – The decision on the path –
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Ascended Master Astrea, June 3rd, 2017, through Kim Michaels. This dictation was given at a conference in Holland
I AM the Ascended Master Astrea, Elohim of the Fourth Ray, often called the ray of purity but also the ray of acceleration. Naturally, building on Saint Germain’s discourse, we need to accelerate democracies. We need to accelerate the sense of what is the responsibility of a democratic government and the governmental apparatus.
The responsibility of a democratic society
What is actually the responsibility of a democratic society as a whole? Well, my beloved, let us go back and look at history. You can go back to different eras and see that there have been eras of almost complete chaos where there was no rule of law and where the people never knew when they might be attacked by an outside enemy and their lives might be destroyed in an instant. You may ask yourselves today why people so willingly submitted to the Catholic church, to the feudal system, to the kings of the Middle Ages.
You can barely understand in the modern, western world that these people had for a long time lived in societies where the ordinary person had very little protection against either bands of robbers or even bigger invasions from various forces. They gave up their freedom in order to be protected and have the kind of stability that you, after all, did have in many periods. There were, of course, also periods where neither the church nor the feudal lords could guarantee people’s safety. But people still thought that the safety was so important that they saw no other option than submitting themselves to the elite.
This, of course, is something we have transcended with democracy, but my aim is to show you that there have been different stages in the evolution of society. You can go back to a point where the main issue was physical protection, physical survival. Then you can see that, beginning with the industrial revolution and forward, it was not so much physical survival or physical protection; it was more having the material needs fulfilled (those who are beyond the need for protection and survival). What you naturally see is that now many of the more affluent, many of the older, democracies have reached a new stage, but they have not become aware that they have reached that new stage, and that is why the democratic governments are not living up to their responsibility towards their citizens.
You can, if you employed the pyramid of needs defined by Maslow, you can see that the highest of all needs is the need for self-actualization. But we could also say in a more universal way that there are many people in democratic nations who are not quite ready for self-actualization, but they are ready to step up to a level that is beyond this quest for material affluence and security.
Democracies must fulfill people’s higher needs
Many of you can go back to your parents’ or grandparents’ generation who lived in the difficult years during the 1930’s or during the Second World War. You will see that, for them, poverty was such an issue that the main vision and dream they had in life was to have enough food, have a place to live, and even have money left over to do something more enjoyable. This need, in many nations, gradually became fulfilled during the 50’s and 60’s. Then, people went into desiring not only the necessities of life fulfilled, but having more affluence so they could also have a certain luxury of material goods. Again, this can be seen as a natural stage.
Now, in many of the older democracies, people have had such affluence for so long that they begin to take it for granted. When the people begin to take something for granted, it is no longer promoting growth, it is no longer helping them raise the collective consciousness. On the contrary, it can actually cause a lowering of the collective consciousness in the sense that, when people take something for granted, they go into a blind alley in their spiritual growth and they are no longer appreciating what they have. If you do not appreciate what you have, you cannot actually multiply it. That is, in fact, one of the reasons why, in some of these nations, you have seen the economy starting to contract. It is again because people are simply not appreciating it and they are not willing to step up to the next level so there cannot be an acceleration.
When you have the knowledge that you are not going to be killed by some war or an invasion by barbarian tribes, when you have your material needs fulfilled or even when you have enough money to buy various kinds of luxuries, what is the next step up? Well, ultimately it is self-actualization but many people have to go through a phase before that because they are not quite ready and consciously engaging in a spiritual path of systematically and consciously raising their consciousness. The intermediate stage that, in universal terms, people are ready to lock in to is that the next natural step is that people come to feel good about themselves, not about their outer situation or their society but about themselves as an individual, as a conscious being. This is something that many, many people are ready to see. It is very simply that we have now been focused on material welfare for decades and the next natural step in the evolution of democracy is that we focus on psychological welfare.
Psychological welfare as the next step
We have talked about it before, but I wish to go even further with this topic. What will it take then to promote psychological, mental welfare among the people in a free democratic nation who have more material affluence than they actually know what to do with? Well, it will take, as Saint Germain also mentioned, that you begin a discussion of what kind of beings you actually are. More than that, it will actually take that people begin to question the approach that we have had so far to understanding reality, understanding the universe, understanding ourselves.
Now, I know that most people are not familiar with philosophy so I wish to give you a very quick crash course in western philosophy. Most of you know that about twenty-five hundred years ago there were some philosophers in Greece, in Athens. You have probably heard about Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. What most of you don’t know, because very few people actually realize this, even most philosophy professors, is that the two main philosophers of the Greek era, Plato and Aristotle, actually represent two different approaches. I am not trying to say here that one was completely in alignment with the ascended masters and one was completely out of alignment. Nevertheless, the approach and the main philosophy of Plato was that beyond the material universe is a realm where there exists ideal forms. These ideal forms are what have manifested all of the physical forms we see at this level.
You will see, of course, that this is quite similar to what we have taught you, only we have gone into more detail that there are four levels of the material universe and that the conditions you see at the physical level are actually created at the three higher levels: identity, mental, emotional. Plato was open to the existence of a realm beyond, and his main approach to philosophy was that if we wanted to understand the physical world, we had to understand the realm of ideal forms and how they had manifested the forms we see in the physical.
His own student, Aristotle, took philosophy in a different direction by focusing on the material world and actually saying that it should be possible to explain and understand everything in the material world by only looking at the material world. It was not necessary to look beyond to some realm that we could not directly perceive with our senses. Aristotle thought that we can understand the world through what we can see or perceive through the senses. Plato said that the soul comes into embodiment with certain knowledge and ideas into it. Aristotle said that the soul is a blank slate, and as the child grows and receives sensory impressions, then the soul starts gaining content. Again, you can see that Plato obviously was more in alignment with ascended master teachings about reincarnation, and that the soul already comes in with much knowledge and psychological patterns from past lives.
Naturally, for many, many years, even centuries, the Greek philosophers had relatively little influence on the rest of the world. There was even a time where they were forcefully suppressed by the Catholic church because it was seen as incompatible with Christianity. Then, there came a point where a philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, started to study Aristotle and created a new philosophical system where he sought to unify Aristotle and Catholic Christianity. This then, brought the awareness of Aristotle to the western world, and when scientists began to have conflict with religion, then the people who took over science and set the stage for scientific philosophy, they built on Aristotle and the idea that you can understand the material world by looking only at the material world.
The very foundation for science since then has been precisely this: to study only the material world and to actually believe that it is possible to come up with what they call a “theory of everything” where you find some material condition that can explain everything that is happening in the universe. This my beloved, is a philosophical and scientific blind alley, and there are many, many people in embodiment who are actually ready to see this—to awaken from this illusion. Just like you see in the fairy tale where they all believe the emperor was wearing these fanciful clothes until the little boy cried out: “But the emperor has nothing on.”
The emperors of scientific materialism truly have nothing on. This becomes very, very clear when you realize a very simple fact. The focus on material welfare has not automatically brought psychological welfare. No matter how much material affluence people have, it does not automatically make them feel good about themselves. It does not automatically make them happy.
The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Accepting Saint Germain’s Golden Age.
Copyright © 2017 Kim Michaels