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Ascended Master Divine Director through Kim Michaels, June 9, 2019. This dictation was given at a conference in Amsterdam, Holland.

I AM the Ascended Master the Great Divine Director, and I come to give you the identity-level perspective on the topic of fanaticism. The essence of the fanatical mindset is that it divides humanity into at least two groups, those who are the fanatics (who of course do not see themselves as the fanatics) and then those who are the scapegoats. There might be three groups: the fanatics, the scapegoats and all the others. Nevertheless, the foundation for this division, or the foundation for fanaticism, is the division of humanity into separate groups.

Now, we have talked about the fact that you have a biological programming not to kill your own species. If you look at many of the acts that have been committed throughout history by people in the fanatical mindset, you would see that in a certain way they actually think they have not killed members of their own species, or at least their own group. What always happens is that when people go into the fanatical mindset, they dehumanize the group that is their scapegoat. They almost do not see them as human beings, which is why, as we talked about, the commandant of Auschwitz could during his working day orchestrate the killing of children and then go home and play with his own children. He did not see the ones in the camp as real human children.

This is what you see in many of these fanatical groups that you have seen throughout history. They had a scapegoat that they did not consider human, at least not human in the same way as themselves. This has many potential perspectives and ramifications. You can say from a purely biological standpoint that there is no animal species who divides its own members up into separate groups where some are good and some are bad. You cannot explain this from a purely biological, materialistic perspective. There is no precedent, there is no parallel in the animal kingdom.

The psychological basis for division

Again, where could this have come from? It could not have come from your biology. If it does not come from your biology, it must come from somewhere else. Of course, if it does not come from the biology, it must come from the psychology. That is logic. You realize that there must be something in the human psyche that makes it possible for people to divide human beings into at least two separate groups, to dehumanize the other group, those who are seen as the others versus us who are the good group. They dehumanize that scapegoat group to the point where they do not really think they are killing human beings by killing the scapegoats.

How does this happen? Well, you who are ascended master students are familiar with the concepts we have that you have the four lower bodies, the physical, the emotional, the mental and the identity body. You know that in the identity body is of course where your sense of identity is defined. You realize that the division of humankind into separate groups starts at the identity level. You can see, when you trace what you know about history, how this goes back quite far in human history. You can see, for example, when you look at the Old Testament how there came a point a very long time ago where the Jewish people started developing a certain identity that set them apart from all who were not Jews. Then, came the idea that whereas all of the other tribes in the area were worshiping idols, the Jews were worshiping the superior god, the one god of the universe. Then, came the idea that they were the chosen people of that god.

Therefore, when they went into the land that was promised them by their superior god, they did not think that the people who occupied that land were human beings like themselves. They saw themselves as being in a category that was superior to the inhabitants of the promised land. Therefore, they did not think they were killing their own species or at least their own race. You can see that there is an element of the human psyche that enables people to create these divisions that are clearly not based on biology. Therefore again, what are they based on? Well, you could say in a certain way that they are based on some kind of “ism,” some kind of religion, some kind of theory, political theory. Even scientific Materialism has created the concept that some are more fit than others. This has immediately been interpreted to mean that some are fit to rule and should be the elite that rules society and the rest of the population should just be the slaves that support the elite.

You could say that there are these outer theories, these images that people create of how they think the world should work. Throughout history, certain groups of people had developed these theories that set themselves apart from others, but also defined that they had a superior position to others. This is something that many people in the modern democracies are ready to grasp, to understand, to see and to realize. There has always been this tendency and this is something of course that we need to look at.

A superficial understanding of democracy

We need to again recognize that there is a certain cognitive dissonance here. In other words, you could take another view and step back and say: “What do people actually understand about democracy?” You could realize that most people in the democratic nations have a very superficial understanding of what democracy means. They tend to think that democracy is a very easy form of society. Once you have a democracy, you are free and you will remain free for the indefinite future, at least unless you are attacked by some outer enemy. Democracy is an easy form of government because all you have to do as a citizen is that every four years or so you go and vote, then you have fulfilled your obligation. Then, the ruling elite are somehow supposed to take care of everything else and you can focus on enjoying your daily life.

The reality is that the easiest form of government is a dictatorship where the people do not need to make any choices because the system chooses for them. At least that is the easiest for people at a certain level of consciousness. Why then did democracies emerge and dictatorships retreat? Because humankind has been raised to a certain level where there are many, many people in embodiment on earth who cannot be satisfied by living the easy life of a dictatorship where they never have to make decisions, they never have to take responsibility for themselves. When you step back and look at this, you realize that there is a very, very clear connection between the growth in humankind’s consciousness and the emergence of democracies.

What you actually see is that the only reason democracies could emerge was that many, many people had reached that level of spiritual maturity where they were ready to start taking responsibility for themselves and their lives, ready to start making decisions, learning from the consequences of those decisions. That is essentially what it means to take responsibility for your own growth. You are willing to make decisions based on what you know now, and you look at the results of your decisions. If you do not like the results, then you expand your understanding so you can make better decisions in the future. That is the process of growth in its essential form. When you look at this from a broader perspective than scientific Materialism or orthodox Christianity, you can see that the history of humankind has actually been a growth process and it has primarily been a growth in consciousness.

Historians still tend to look at the outer events, the increase in knowledge, the increase in inventions and technology. What actually drives the progress you have seen in history is a raising of the collective consciousness, which is driven by individuals raising their individual consciousness. This is not something that is too difficult to grasp for many people in the democratic nations.

You need to recognize that democracy is the direct result of people starting to take responsibility for themselves. Then, you also need to recognize that people have not, at least not a critical mass of them, continued that process of taking more and more responsibility for themselves. They have sort of come to a plateau, they have stagnated, they have been lulled to sleep by thinking: “Now that we live in a democracy, we are free.” What needs to happen is that people need to start a new cycle, a new awakening, of starting to take responsibility for their lives.

This is again something that is being partly driven by the increase in mental illness because, as we have said, there are advanced souls embodying in the democratic nations. They want to use the opportunity to work on themselves, work on their psychology, but because they have not been given a teaching about how to raise their consciousness, how to deal with their psychology, how to heal their wounds, how to evolve to a higher level of consciousness, they then manifest various forms of depression or mental illness. This forces them to start looking at themselves and many of them have come to a point where they have decided to start to take more responsibility for themselves than what they were brought up to do.

Democracies cannot function with division

You can see here that democracy can really only survive if people are in this process of taking more and more responsibility for themselves, for their lives, for their situation, for their nation, even for the world. They develop a more and more global awareness. What makes a democracy function? A democracy is by definition not a form of government where a small elite rules the majority of the population. It is, at least in theory, a society where all people are involved in the decision making process.

How can a democratic nation function in the best possible way? Well, it can only function in the best possible way if all of the people in that nation have some sense of connection with each other. They must feel that we are in the same boat, we are all being affected by the decisions made. We need to therefore look at each other, seek to raise up the whole instead of raising up just one small portion of the whole. We cannot have an elitist society where there is one rich and privileged elite and the majority of the population living in limited conditions. That is not the idea behind democracy.

Democracies require that the people develop some kind of connection between them. What is that connection? It is what we have in later dictations called your basic or your essential humanity. All men and women are created equal, all of them are endowed from a higher authority with certain rights. All people have those rights. That is an expression in words of the basic humanity. Do unto others what you want others to do to you, is an expression in words of the basic humanity. When people feel compassion for others and want to do something to relieve the suffering of others, that is because they have that sense of the basic humanity. What then works against this basic humanity? Well, precisely the fanatical mindset that divides humanity into separate groups that are not just separated by degree, but are separated in a fundamental way that makes it possible to dehumanize one group.

You can see that when democracies emerged, there was a tremendous shift in the collective awareness. If you could actually look at this from our perspective, you could see that when democracies started to emerge and become more common, there were shock waves radiating through the emotional body of the planet, the collective emotional body, the collective mental body and the collective identity body. There were literally riptides, currents, shock waves going through those bodies because it was such a new and, compared to the old, very radical idea.

People saw tremendous hope and opportunity in not having to live their entire lives in a fixed station determined by their birth, but where they could actually do something to improve their lives, improve their station in life. Consider people who had grown up in the feudal societies of Europe in a peasant family, thinking, the rest of their lives they would be working for next to nothing for the landlord as peasants, working 12-14 hours a day in the field, just getting enough to survive. Now, suddenly they see across the ocean is a new nation called America that has democracy. They will even give you a piece of land to farm where you get everything that you produce, you can keep it yourself. It was a revolutionary idea for the peasants of Europe. It sent shock waves through the collective consciousness. It sent shock waves into the dictatorial nations that were still there both in Europe and elsewhere. The dictators started feeling threatened by this.

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