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Ascended Master Gautama Buddha through Kim Michaels, May 24, 2021. This dictation was given during the 2021 Webinar for Europe – Ending the Era of Ideology.

I AM the Ascended Master Gautama Buddha. What have I said about people’s reaction to ideology? Let us exemplify it. In many European nations, you saw that during the 60s and 70s, there was a certain group of young people that were pulled into the ideological mindset created by Marxism, socialism, or whatever you want to call it. These people then later came to the realization that Marxism, Marxist ideology, was not what they believed it was and could not fulfill the promises it was making. Some came to this realization when the Soviet Union collapsed. Some came to it before, some after the Soviet Union collapsed. They transferred their allegiance to China, thinking that China would be the communist utopia. But most of them later had to give up on that also, when they started realizing what was actually happening in China and how there was a lack of fundamental human rights.

What was the reaction that people had to this? Some people went into the state of thinking that even though Marxism was not the ultimate ideology, there had to be an ultimate ideology. They started looking for it, and some of them are still looking for the ultimate ideology. Some have found what they think is an ultimate ideology. Some have even found a spiritual teaching that they think is the ultimate ideology. Other people have become discouraged with ideology and have, so to speak, switched into the opposite extreme of what we might call agnosticism or complete disillusionment. They think that either there is no ultimate ideology, or you can never know what the ultimate truth is, or there is no truth whatsoever, there are no higher principles, there is no way to really determine what is a higher truth because human beings are what human beings are. They are trapped in a lower state of consciousness, and they are always fighting, and we will never get beyond it. In other words, there is a certain group of people that have been very enthusiastic about the ideological approach and have become very disillusioned and disappointed with that approach, giving up on the quest to find a higher understanding.

Some of these people can by your calls be able to snap out of this mindset and realize that this is exactly what the fallen beings want to see happen. As I have said before, the fallen beings want to pull those who have the capacity to bring change into either submitting to an ideology or opposing it so that they are fighting the ideology, which means they are trapped in reacting to an ideology defined by the fallen beings. Therefore, their minds are not open to looking for a higher view. There is of course also the possibility that the fallen beings can make some of these people so disillusioned with an ideology that they give up trying to think there is any kind of higher understanding—I am deliberately not saying “higher truth.” I am saying, higher understanding. This of course is a very unfortunate occurrence, and some people will be able to snap out of it and see that they cannot allow themselves to be discouraged this way. The reality of the situation is that, as I have attempted to explain in great detail, there is no ultimate ideology.

There is no ultimate truth on earth

There is in fact no ultimate truth that could ever be brought forth, but there is always the possibility of attaining a higher understanding than what you have right now. This is the basic principle behind science. As I described it, you need to have a foundation for your scientific inquiry. You need to have some foundation for understanding life on earth. You have a starting point, but when you do not see it as an ultimate ideology that has to be infallible and perfect, you see it as just a starting point for increasing your understanding. You experiment, you make observations, and then you use that to refine your understanding.

Many people are ready to see that if you look back at known history, you can say that the process that human beings have been going through is a process of raising the understanding of life. Why do you have so much more knowledge today than people had 2,000 or 5,000 years ago? Why do you have so much more technology? Why do many people (in the developed world at least) have a better standard of living than people had in past millennia and centuries? It is because you have a greater understanding of how life works.

You can see when you look at human history that there has been a certain progression in understanding. Many people will be able to see, and are able to see, that this has not been an entirely smooth process. There have been some dramatic shifts. There have been certain periods of time where the expansion of understanding almost came to a halt for a very long time. As we have said, during the so-called Dark Ages, there was still some expansion of understanding, but much slower than it has been in the last century or so. Many people are able to see this and are able to consider why this happens. Therefore, they can come to see that what actually slowed down the expansion of knowledge was that society had become trapped in a specific ideology. They thought it was infallible, and the effect was that this closed people’s minds. The society was not able to think beyond the ideology; it was not able to ask questions beyond the ideology. This of course slows down the expansion of knowledge.

What is the basis for the expansion of knowledge? It is that you expand your present understanding. How do you do this? By asking questions that go beyond your present understanding. If you could not ask questions that are beyond a certain framework, how could you ever transcend that framework? It cannot be done, my beloved. This is just simple mechanics of how the expansion of knowledge works.

Some principles are independent of human beliefs

This then leads to another perspective, or another way of saying the same thing, where many people today are ready to realize that when you observe life on earth, you can see that there are certain mechanics of how the world works that are not dependent on human beliefs. They are timeless. They are universal principles. Regardless of what people have believed in certain time periods, the mechanics were not changed by that. It is very, very simple. There have been time periods where people had the belief that a particular ideology was infallible, and they should never question it or think beyond it. This always slowed down the expansion of knowledge. It can be no other way. You look at the medieval societies and the Dark Ages and you see it so clearly. You look at the Soviet Union, and you see it so clearly.

Why did the Soviet Union collapse? For a variety of reasons. As we have talked about, one reason was that because of the belief in Marxist ideology and this ideology being infallible, there was a limit to what Soviet scientists could discover. There was a limit to how much knowledge could be expanded in the Soviet Union because of the ideological constraints. In the West, where they did not have those strict ideological constraints, science during the 60s and 70s and 80s started making progress beyond what was being made in the Soviet Union. Therefore, it was simply inevitable that there would come a time where the West would be so far ahead of the Soviet Union scientifically that the Soviet Union could not keep up in the arms race. They could not keep creating weapons that could defend themselves against what the West was creating. You see this exemplified in the entire debate created when Ronald Reagan proposed his Star Wars Defense, space-based weapons that could shoot down ICBMs with nuclear warheads. Therefore, in essence, make nuclear war obsolete or impossible. Whether this was a realistic technology at the time or not, this actually caused many people in the Soviet Union to realize that they were in the process of falling irreversibly behind the West. They simply could not keep up this sort of stalemate in technology that had kept the Cold War from becoming a hot war, that had maintained some kind of peaceful coexistence between the two systems. Therefore, they started realizing that the Soviet Union had an expiration date, and it was coming up quicker than anyone thought.

Many, many people around the world are able to see this or come to see this very quickly as you reinforce these ideas with your calls, even as they have been projected into the collective consciousness during this conference. Many people will see it. They will be able to give up this ideological approach, at least the belief that an ideology is infallible or that there must be some ultimate ideology that has not yet been discovered or developed. Therefore, they can take the more pragmatic scientific approach of saying: “Let us attempt to discover the mechanics of how life actually works. We can base our society on those mechanics instead.”

A society based on observations of how life works

What will such a society based on an observation of the mechanics of the world look like? Well, first of all, it will not be a dictatorship. It will not be a society that is steeped in fanaticism. It will not be a society that is elitist. Therefore, it will be a society that has quite some resemblance with what you see in what we call the modern democracies. Democracy is a society that is based on some observation, some understanding, of the mechanics of how life works, which is that all people are connected, all people are equal. This is what you can actually see when you look at human history where you see that elitist societies, as you have seen so many times in the past, have always led to some form of conflict or disaster. There has always been an internal tension, and there has always been the suppression of the majority of the population who have been limited by the elite.

When you observe how human history has unfolded, you see that you can either have these kinds of unbalanced elitist societies, dictatorships, or you can move towards a more democratic form of government where all of the people have some influence, and where there is more of an equality between people. You can also see that the elitist societies were very deeply divided societies. There was a fundamental difference between the elite and the population, perhaps even different groups in the population, as you have seen divisions based on many different things. Many people today are able to see that in order to move into a better society that gives better living conditions to the people, greater freedom, then humankind needs to make an effort to overcome division; the entire idea that people can be divided into separate groups.

Division is inherent in ideologies

Now, what is it that divides people? When you take my explanation of the worldly definition of ideology, you will see that there is a very deep division inherent in all ideologies. They give a certain explanation of how the world works. It is claimed to be ultimate and infallible usually, which creates a greater division between those who accept this explanation and those who do not. As I have said, because of duality and the mechanics of duality, you can never get all people to accept the same idea. A democracy is actually not based on an attempt (in its purest form at least) of getting all people to accept one idea. It is based on a new form of tolerance of different ideas, different beliefs, different kinds of people, and their right to live accordingly. Instead of trying to get everybody to live the same way, according to a particular worldview, a democracy has the tolerance for different beliefs, different ideas, different ways of living, at least to some degree. The only thing that is required in a democracy is that most people have that same tolerance for those who are different. If that tolerance is not there, then a democracy has various problems, which I am not going to go into right now.

What many people can see is that democracy is really a logical step in the evolution of humankind. When you look back at history, you can see that there have been so many examples of how divisions between people have caused conflict, and conflict always causes suffering. Therefore, the only way to really overcome suffering is to overcome conflict, and the only way to overcome conflict is to overcome division. This is of course in alignment with the Christ mind, who is pulling the world up, pulling humanity up, towards the recognition that all life is one and comes from the same source, and there are no real divisions between human beings.

Even if people are not ready to grasp this, they can at least grasp that democracies prove that the world is moving towards less and less division between people. This means that many people are ready to acknowledge that the function of ideologies has really been defining and reinforcing divisions between people, and they are therefore ready to take a look at ideologies and use ideologies in the broadest possible sense as any kind of thought system that defines or reinforces fundamental, inescapable, unbreachable divisions between people. They literally define that people are fundamentally different, whether they were created that way by God or created that way by nature.

Based on this recognition that we need to overcome division, and that many ideologies reinforce or define divisions, many people will be able to take a look at the thought systems, the beliefs that they have. Of course, it is fairly easy to look at what you normally would consider an ideology and see how many ideologies have defined fundamental divisions. We have talked about the Christian religion defining a division between Christians and non-Christians. The Muslim religion is doing the same. We can see that the Hindu religion defined the concept that there are four castes of human beings that are fundamental divisions created by God, and you can never move between the castes. This is a system that society, after thousands of years, has not completely freed itself from.

Beliefs that people never question

You can also begin to see, and many people will begin to see, that there are many different thought systems that are not normally seen as ideologies, but they still reinforce these divisions. This can open up a new awareness where many, many people begin to question many different things. This of course leads to another realization that there is a need to broaden people’s understanding of what is an ideology or at least what is a thought system that creates division. This leads to a realization that there are actually many of these thought systems that function exactly the same as an ideology, but people would never consider them to be ideologies. They do not even think that they are thought systems that have been particularly defined by anybody. They are just simply beliefs that people have been brought up with and take for granted and never question.

It is almost as if there has been this veil over humankind for a very long time. You look back at every historical period, every generation, they have had certain ideas and beliefs that they took for granted and could not question. They did not see them as ideas that had been defined by some source. They thought this is just the way life is. It is self-evident. It is obvious, and that is the way it is, and there is no reason to question it. In other words, they did not see it as an ideology that could be opposed by an opposing ideology. There was nothing in people’s minds that prompted them to challenge these beliefs. Now, what you who are ascended master students can grasp is that this is not a correct view. There are no beliefs on earth that just happened to appear. They were all engineered by the fallen beings for the specific purpose of controlling people, trapping their minds in blind alleys. They are, in a sense, all ideologies because they are defined specifically to control people.

What is the most effective way to imprison people? Well, you can take a person, you can put them in chains, you can chain him inside a dark cell in a basement where the sun never shines and he is, in a very effective way, imprisoned. The only problem is, he cannot fail to realize that he is imprisoned, and therefore he has a desire to escape. The most effective way to imprison people is to do it in such a way that they do not even realize they are imprisoned. They do not realize they are limited. They do not realize how limited they are. They might even think they are free because they do not recognize that their chains are chains that limit them, that limit their movement.

During the Middle Ages, here in Europe, most people believed that the earth was flat. They believed that they lived on the one and only continent there was, which was like an island surrounded by an ocean. If you sailed out in the same direction across the ocean, you would reach the edge of this disc, this round disc of the earth, and you would fall off and there would be dragons and it would be very unpleasant for you. What was the effect of this? The effect was that nobody dared to sail out on the ocean and continue to go in the same direction. There were some discoverers that started, but they followed land. They followed the contours of the land. You see that medieval people, medieval Europeans, were imprisoned, but they did not realize they were imprisoned because they did not believe that the belief in a flat earth was a belief. They thought it was a fact. That is just the way it is. There is nothing we can do about it.

This is an example of how you can use an idea, which everybody today realizes was unrealistic, was an illusion, to imprison people without them realizing they were imprisoned. Many people are ready to grasp this, and look at history and see how many past civilizations have been imprisoned by ideas that people in today’s world, at least in the modern democracies, can clearly see were illusions. They were simply wrong, they were out of touch with reality.

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