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.
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