Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

Control games can be seen as one aspect of power games. However, raw power games can easily form a self-reinforcing spiral that leads to more and more extreme expressions of force. For example, many leaders who abuse power gradually become so extreme that the outcome is a war in which they either destroy others or are themselves destroyed. We can say that a raw power game is one that causes you to lose control, eventually leading to your own destruction.

A control game is where you express power in a way that is more restrained—controlled. This means people can express power for a longer period of time, but the price they pay is that they must continually seek to control others, even their own people. When you set out to control others, the first person to be controlled is yourself.

Why is this so? What does it mean to control others? There is, of course, raw control through physical force. As history bears out, control through direct physical force is very difficult to attain and even more difficult to maintain over a long period of time. Say a dictator of one country occupies another country. How can he control the citizens of the occupied country? He could throw them all in jail, but then what would be the point of occupying the country? He could assign three soldiers to physically guard each person 24 hours a day, but does he have that kind of resources?

The only practical way to control others is to get into their minds and get them to accept a certain world view, a certain mental box. Joseph Stalin had great physical power to arrest and execute people, and it is estimated he killed 21 million people in the Soviet Union. He realized, however, that he could not physically control every person so he instituted “Red Terror,” a campaign where he used special forces to randomly kill people or make them disappear. The result was that no one felt safe and eventually everyone decided to not resist and accept the mental box which said that communism could not be overthrown and that Stalin was the supreme, undisputed leader. Stalin had broken people’s resistance, but this happened in the psyches of the people.

What did Stalin have to do in order to accomplish this goal? He first had to create a mental box defining the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime where there was no law except what one man – Stalin himself – defined. In order to do this, he first had to believe in that mental box, meaning he was the first prisoner of it. Most of the time Stalin did not feel like a prisoner because he could divert his attention with the feeling of having ultimate power. I can assure you that, especially towards the end of his reign, Stalin started feeling trapped and confined but now saw no way out. He knew that if he relaxed his iron grip, a spiral would start that would eventually cause the entire Soviet system to unravel. He had to keep himself and the people in the mental box in order to maintain the system, which had now come to own him and use him as a tool.

Why control cannot last forever

You will see that the Soviet leaders who came after Stalin realized he had gone too far in his abuse of power. They gradually sought to lift the threat of execution and imprisonment, and several leaders thought they could do this and still keep the Soviet Union intact. The last Soviet leader, Gorbachev, even thought he could give western-style freedoms and that this would improve the economy and people’s standard of living while maintaining the basic Soviet system.

What Gorbachev and others did not understand was that the people had not chosen communism, and they stayed in it only as long as the mental box that controlled them was intact. That mental box was created through the uncompromising threat of death, and it was only the fear of death that controlled the people. As soon as Soviet leaders began relaxing the threat and the people began realizing the threat was no longer as severe, they wanted more freedom, then more freedom—and this continued until the Soviet system simply could not be maintained. The mental box created by Lenin and Stalin had been dismantled.

Why did this happen? It happened partly because, as explained in the discourse on power games, anything that is based on force will generate a counterforce from the cosmic mirror. You need to use more and more force to simply maintain the system and this will eventually exceed the resources available.

The promise made by Lenin was that communism would be a worker’s paradise where all people would have a comfortable standard of living. Because the system was based on force, it inevitably defined itself an external enemy and that – combined with the extreme paranoia of Stalin – meant the Soviet Union was locked in an arms race from the very beginning. Had there not been the need to divert greater and greater resources to the military, the Soviet Union might have provided a comfortable standard of living—for a time. Because the system was based on force from the beginning, it simply could not exist without an external enemy. Communism, from Marx’s day, defined itself in opposition to Capitalism and locked itself into a dualistic struggle that would eat up its resources and invalidate its central promise of affluence for all workers.

The other aspect is that any force-based system goes against the very driving force of life itself, namely the drive to become more. People have an inherent drive for freedom and you either suppress this brutally, as Stalin did, or you will see that it will eventually overthrow every force-based system.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book Freedom from Ego Games.