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Ascended Master Saint Germain through Kim Michaels, June 8, 2019. This dictation was given at a conference in Amsterdam, Holland.

I AM the Ascended Master Saint Germain. I come to continue what Mother Mary and Master MORE have talked about, but I want to give it this perspective of freedom. You have in all of the modern democracies a certain consciousness that has grown over time where people believe they are free. Of course, from a certain perspective you can say that people in democratic nations are free. Certainly, compared to those in dictatorial nations—but are they truly free? Has their freedom gone as high as it can go? Are people as free as they could be? This is a question rarely asked. Why is it that people rarely ask that question? Well, it can again be explained by the pyramid of needs created by Maslow. He said that, once a lower need has been fulfilled to a critical degree, people no longer think about it. It simply falls out of their awareness and they do not consider it a problem.

If you go back to before the democratic era and look at these nations that are now democracies, you can see that people lived under what was essentially a dictatorship. When you are living in a dictatorship, most people will feel restricted. They will feel that they are not free. Certainly, in the feudal societies of Europe, most of the population did not feel free because they could not improve their station in life. They lived in constant poverty, their daily lives were a struggle, just to survive physically. They clearly felt that as a limitation. There came a point where they started recognizing that they were being oppressed by the kings, by the noble class, by the power elite. There came that point where they took back their power and demanded freedom.

What happened back then was that throughout several centuries, there had been building this collective consciousness that: “We are oppressed, we want to be free.” Then, you had democracies created and now that level of consciousness felt that it had gained freedom. It had gained the freedom it was longing for in the pre-democratic era. People had physical, political freedom. In a certain sense, you can say this is somewhat correct, at least because they have greater freedom than they had before.

Mental freedom is a higher level of freedom

As we have many times talked about, there is still a power elite in democratic nations that are trying to set themselves up in a position where they have power and privilege beyond the general population. They can only do this by taking freedom, privileges and abundance from the population. That is why you see this concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. This is a return towards even a physical form of slavery where people are not enslaved by the threat of physical violence, of being killed, but they are enslaved economically. They are enslaved to work their whole lives to pay back their mortgage and therefore pay the interest to the power elite. Nevertheless, we can still say that people in democratic nations enjoy a high level of physical, political freedom. Even to some degree economic freedom in the sense that they can live a relatively comfortable material life.

What can happen, and what has been building for some time, is a shift where people become aware that this is not enough. This level of freedom is not the highest potential for democratic nations. It can happen when you look back to what Mother Mary and Master MORE have talked about. The trigger can be the rise in mental illness. What happens when a person suffers from a mental illness or depression and therefore is incapable of functioning in a normal way? Well, is that not a state of non-freedom, of anti-freedom? It is very, very close, (in the collective consciousness the tension has been built) where a shift can happen where people start realizing that physical freedom is just one side of the equation of freedom. It is one aspect of it. We need to step higher in the democratic nations and realize that the only way to truly be free is to have freedom in the psyche. What I have before called mental freedom. That is true freedom.

You can have political freedom, you can have economic freedom, but if you are still trapped in some limited psychology, you are not truly free. You can see this by looking at many of these people who have used their political and physical freedom to gather more and more wealth to the point where they have more wealth than anyone could spend for the rest of this lifetime. They cannot stop there, buy themselves a vacation house somewhere and just enjoy life. They have to keep accumulating wealth. You see that the only explanation for this is that these people, even though they have financial independence, they do not have psychological independence. They are not free in their minds.

You can then see again that it is not just the elite, it is also the population. People are not free in their minds. Physical, political freedom is just the first step in the process of becoming a free human being. You really need to build on this and then say, once we have the political and economic freedom that gives us free time and free attention, then we can build on this, we can use this as a foundation. Instead of thinking it is an end in itself, we use it as a foundation for now pursuing psychological freedom, mental freedom.

It is easy to live in a dictatorship

You can see this very, very clearly in the affluent nations by the fact of the increase in mental illness, psychological problems, substance abuse. What you can realize here is that when people are oppressed, life is in a sense easy for them. If you go to the dictatorships that are still in the world, you can see that in a certain sense life for these people is easy. They have very clearly defined outer parameters that they feel powerless to change. In some cases, people come to a point where they accept conditions as they are. You can go back to communist times and see how many people had accepted that: “Oh this is how life is, there is nothing that can be done, we couldn’t improve our lives beyond a certain limit. I can get this job, I can hold this job for the rest of my life, I make this income, this gives me a certain standard of living, there is nothing I can do about it.” There were people who accepted this, therefore life was, in a sense, easy for them. They did not have the options to choose from. What you can do in the affluent nations is you can look at this generation that is now coming into retirement or has already retired, of the people that we have talked about that lived a materialistic lifestyle for all of their lives. They were pursuing material affluence as the main goal for their lives. You can see how many of these people have been used to working, and often working hard in order to gain more economic abundance. What happens when they retire? In many cases, they do not know what to do with themselves. They do not know what to do with the physical freedom they now have because they are not spending 40 hours or more a week on their jobs. What do they do? You see many people who have worked very hard for many years, they retire and within a year they die. It is simply because they do not know what to do with their freedom.

What you can realize based on this is that freedom actually demands something. When you have physical freedom, political freedom, economic freedom this is not an easy state to be in. There is again, if we reach back to the pre-democratic era in Europe and elsewhere, you see that there was a certain assumption in the collective consciousness. People assumed that: “If we just get free of the kings and the noble class, if we just have physical, political, economic freedom, then we will have utopia, then we will have paradise, then we will have the ideal society.” What you see is that when people are feeling oppressed, they look at what is oppressing them and they think that if we got rid of that, we would be free. This is a very limited understanding of what freedom means. You can see here that after these democratic nations, after people gained that political, economic freedom this has not been as easy as people thought.

The escapism industry

You see that many people have not been able to figure out what to do with their freedom. That is why you can see that there are many things that are happening in the modern democracies that are an effect of the fact that people have not gained the psychological freedom to correspond with their physical freedom. Therefore, they do not know what to do with their physical freedom. You can see mental illness as one aspect, but you can see the entire escapism industry, as we might call it, where people instead of making a choice of what they want to do with the freedom they have, they go into seeking some kind of escape, some kind of entertainment. It can be anything from drugs and alcohol to cheap entertainment that just diverts your attention in the moment. It can be movies, it can be television, it can be computer games, it can be all kinds of things, reading books that just help you pass time.

You see that there is an entire phenomenon that has happened in the democratic nations where people now have free time. But if they are not free in their minds, they do not know what to do with their free time. There is an entire industry that has sprung up that only has one purpose, that is to help people pass their free time.

The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Ending the Era of Fanaticism