Exactly HOW are we dumbing ourselves down?

That's the question I posed this morning to my IF (Imaginary Friend) and he immediately returned with counter question. It was a good one. He asked On what level does this dumbing down take place?

So, we narrowed it down to comprehension (although perhaps you could also say understanding or awareness) and expression. In other words, the one happens internally, in the privacy of your own mind, while the other is about communicating that awareness to others. An interesting and helpful distinction.

That means we can create questions for further clarity:

1. Am I still having the same level of awakenings as I did a couple of years? And if not, why not?

I had one this morning (which is what I'm writing about), but I have over the past year or so felt a type of 'thinning'. I would be asking myself, if something is interfering, what is it. I've been looking at a number of possible suspects. Last year September (2016), I got my first real smartphone (I still have only the one) and yes it is a distracting and absorbing device. So many of its features are designed to trigger some form of neural addiction and there were definitely times when getting prompted into compulsive consumption of digital content and services served to disable some of the super features inherent in my consciousness. In connecting to infinity and my inner awareness. In many ways, paying more attention to social media compels you more and more to take linear timelines for granted, and that has the unfortunate side effect of lessening your awareness of less linear ways of perceiving.

On that subject, I should add that I think I have been reading more this past year. Now my relationship with reading is a very interesting one. For nearly all my life, reading has acted as my passport to wonder. Growing up in a locale where I felt very little connection to the society around me, I have always looked to books to discover new worlds and imagine new versions of myself. You could say, the librarian is my dealer. One of the side effects of my awakening, though, was reading less and also reading in different ways. I would absorb a book randomly, rather than going page by page. Around this time, I also discovered the most ironic of books - The Goddess vs The Alphabet by Leonard Shlain - which argues that learning to read has profoundly influenced our ways of perceiving our world and the infinity that surrounds us. It suggests that reading has rewired our brain and since it functions by a linear process of revelation, has forced our minds to act in more linear ways. Reading typically follows a marked path. Wandering off in your thoughts still happens but is it really possible to imagine how revelation might take place to the non-reading mind?

Remember, clickbait articles also function on the very linear process of hook/reward, often delaying that reward over several installments. It guides your perception and your thinking and the question should be asked: Is it a good guide? Or does it have its own agendas? But I digress.

Another change this year, has been doing new kind of work. From 2012-2016, I worked ghostwriting on travel destinations. This year, I began doing transcription work and faced different kinds of deadlines. That change could well have contributed to more distracted and less aware me. I also began to work on an ongoing new writing project (more about this at a much later stage) which has also turned out to be quite absorbing.

2. How has the process of communicating awareness to others changed in the past year or so?

Wow. Lots of ways. What I've noticed is that nearly everybody seems to be so much angrier of late, no doubt a sign of how polarizing the news media has become. One sign of this is that the truth depends very much on who's telling it. But we all know that already and while I may philosophically approve of variable realities, I must admit to being somewhat disappointed by some of the dominant ones that are surfacing. There is NO respect at all for opposing viewpoints. There is an ongoing chase to join the coolest SJW lynch mob. The majority of contemporary output is reactionary to something.

But because of this, I suspect everybody secretly fears themselves to be under attack in their most holiest place. Notice, even my phrasing in the last sentence could serve as a trigger to the militantly atheistic, even though I meant it as a figure of speech. Language has become both weaponized and monetized and sometimes it's difficult to find words and phrases that aren't inherently offensive in some way. In an ideal world, communication is a bridge between souls. But in reality, we are becoming so fearful of honestly expressing our thoughts that we introduced the checkpoints, with our internalized memes as border controls to keep undesirable thoughts from settling.

Now, first a word or two about the benefits of exposing yourself to so-called undesirable thought. If I look back on journals and past stories and story ideas, some of the best have resulted from some very abrasive undesirable thoughts. Remember the oyster and the pearl. It creates some awesomeness, but it's not a happy relationship. So I have always appreciated and welcomed thoughts that anger me and hurt me, because many times, they have acted as my muses. But that's me and I'm still trying to figure out why other people don't work that way.

But with the increased saturation of weaponized and monetized content, some of those internalized memes are sneaking across the borders of my consciousness. Because everything we take in, changes us in subtle ways. It's very difficult to de-activate those memes that interfere with our thinking. Outrage is also addictive, and on top of that, it often disables compassion and imagination.

"I cannot eat your fire, I can only eat your flesh"

This is an encounter that takes place in the realm of the subjective. My imaginary friend (IF) and I were visited by a large brown bear. It was very amiable, but when the bear licked my face, I flinched, thinking This is a wild creature, it could eat my flesh. The bear was surprised by my reaction and IF pointed out that this should not be a problem in a supernatural realm. We experimented. I let the bear eat my hand and grew a new one. But I discovered that it was harder to let it eat my face. I seem to indentify stronger with the brain and the face as "me" than with the hand. We tested this, by giving the bear my brain as a meal. IF said that, if the astral body left the physical body, I would still be intact and the bear would have a meal. The real me, it seems, is the energy of the astral body. At this point, the bear said. "I cannot eat your fire, I can only eat your flesh." Those were his exact words.

The above incident "took place" about a month and a half ago and I am writing it pretty much as I experienced it, but I've been paging through old journal entries of lake and discovered something equally dark. This was something IF said early in the year, "If the mouse connects to the snake, it's never a happy ending." He was reminding me that there is a darker side to the universe.

One such story can be found at this link.

Interestingly, though, the universe did kick up one exception to the rule.



The video clip is about seven years old and the best I could track about what happened afterwards it seems that the snake and the hamster were later separated and the facility where they were housed later went out of business.

5th Dimensional People

People influence who we are by 'observing' us. Most people 'fix' us by drawing rigid lines around how they perceive us, as if afraid that a rogue bit of self might escape, but occasionally, someone will, by observing us, transform us. Those rare souls have the ability not only to see what is, but also, 'what could be'. They touch our lives with the vision of change they bring. They are different from the rest of the population, but you can't tell what they are just by looking at them. They must be experienced. They are like artists, except their medium is the matter of souls. They are different, almost like fairy-folk or angels. They are among us. They are the people of the 5th dimension.

The Dance

Picture an enormous hall or valley, where a massive consciousness festival is taking place. Many dances are happening at once in a thousand different styles. You are dancing, dear reader, and so am I. Some are caught up in the thick of the movement. Some are watching our dance, while others remain engrossed in other performances. Some stay only briefly, before moving on, and even we are watching other dancers from the corners of our eyes. As we perform, as we become our different and very individual perfomances, but are we really separate from other styles, other movements. Someone watching from above would see the various styles interacting with each other, creating a pattern together that is not visible to individual performers. It's all related.. it happens on large scale and small scale, what you see is what happens where-ever you choose to look.

This is life, my friend, the beautiful, terrifyingly magical game of life...

The enigma of togetherness:

Together we have something that is not at first apparent. How do you explain connection to a loner? Someone who has never witnessed the process of a jigsaw puzzle being completed, would never know or understand the function or purpose of one single puzzle piece, if he saw it on its own, out of context. He might look at the fragment of the picture and wonder about the oddly irregular shape of its edges and never guess the mystery of what it truly is. (t.y.m.)