Someone asked me what I thought about expansion in terms of current affairs, of Michael and in going forward. There is a change; I can feel it. The letters I am now getting from fans are much more thoughtful, thought provoking and serious. They are now exploring the spiritual value in their association, their awakened state and whatever their discovery via or with Michael Jackson.
Most are reports of personal growth or exploration as I have invited fans to stay in touch and update me about their progress. When I began Inner Michael, I was a touch point for fans, a confidante, a place to go for support and help and to ask questions. Lots of the questions had an undertone of fear, especially in the beginning. Many wondered what was happening to them. They were puzzled about their own feelings and were groping for understanding why they were so affected by Michael’s death.
I am still getting notes about how Michael Messages are helping. I suspended them after the chakra series and when I got busy but someday I hope to return to them or maybe even reincarnate them in another form.
I have mentioned before that this reaching out to me prompted a few visits to my own spiritual advisor—our associate pastor who identified this as a calling and asked if I would serve. How could I not show up, I asked her? I’ve been in that hurting place myself and my guts too have screamed “why, why, why?” when the world made no sense to me or something or someone I relied on was suddenly gone.
It’s the empty space that is so wrenching. It’s the senselessness of some deaths and the senselessness of human-inflicted tragedy. It’s the mental struggle to wrap your mind around something that is just, well… impossible. I recognized Michael’s death as a spiritual emergency for many, many people and I had just attended seminary for that training the summer before so I was in a unique position to guide people through their grief and to their own understanding.
Spiritual emergencies are nothing to sniff at or laugh at or dismiss as simple “fan idol worship” gone manic and out of control. Many people were in the midst of true spiritual emergency and that portends a shakeup of reality and major life changes. That kind of rattling invites the existential questions: who am I? Why am I here? What’s it all about? What is the meaning of life?
Why do humans have to suffer? Why does tragedy occur? Is there a God? It’s not an easy place to be yet there were some “journalists” or “talking heads” or “pseudo psychologists or arm chair analysts (and even real ones) who chalked it up to hysteria or irrational adolescent-type adoration. That is typical of ignorance—to eschew something you don’t fully know from thoughtful investigation or understand for lack of context. On top of a real crisis, fans were being marginalized or their real grief trivialized by their own culture. Their support system not only dissolved, but ridiculed them or dismissed them as mentally questionable and that grief seemed to be its own betrayal of Michael Jackson’s memory and legacy. The “crazy fans” meme was inadvertently perpetuated and that layered on even more grief.
It was the same kind re-victimization and layered on anguish that I’d often seen with pet owners who were admonished by well meaning friends to “just get over it” or “go get another cat” as if a new ball of fur could replace the old one who was a family member. Or the really troublesome comment many have heard: “good grief, it’s only a dog; get another one for goodness sake.” These are hurtful comments that serve to re-traumatize someone who is already bereft at their loss.
There was a fair amount of infighting among fans who initiated a kind of contest about who could cry over Michael the most or the longest which diminished and distracted from the real grief being felt. It was as if tears were trophies instead of a means to process a loss and invite healing. The healing became more and more difficult as pundits and critics and commentators ‘added insult to injury’ by dismissing Michael or worse, defaming further, his character.
Arguments erupted between “true fans” and “new fans” as if longevity was a measurement for loyalty or the magnitude of the grief. An important truth was overlooked that long term Jackson fans were hit hard by his loss because it was the last straw in a constant series of post event traumas. Long term fans had been through years of defamation and his death brought back not only all of that and the associated memories, but was a poignant reminder of their own helplessness to do anything to change it. They had endured years of this kind of assault on Michael and it was gut wrenching to them each time it happened and it had been going on for decades.
Michael’s loss also represented the end of an era, the loss of something beautiful and innocent, the loss of an opportunity to ever redeem him in the media, the loss of any opportunity for him to actually navigate a comeback and become beloved once again, the loss of any opportunity for vindication during his lifetime. For some, it was the closing chapter of their childhood and growing up years, the milestones marked by the Jackson Five or by Michael as a solo artist.
For some women it was the death of their first crush; for others it was the death of their hero. For many it was the death of the last man on earth who embodied hope now and hope for the future. For some it was the final blow in a world that had become all too cynical where Michael represented the antithesis of that. For long term fans it was the end to the attempt to make it like it once was, or better. Now there was no chance for that.
New fans wrote to ask why the death of this man whom they had never met had affected them so much; some hadn’t ever grieved so deeply for loved ones in the families so they wondered out loud how could a stranger mean so much? How could the death of someone they didn’t know personally and had never met be so hard to navigate, to grieve?
And the talking heads just kept droning on about how senseless and stupid it all was. Many resurrected the tabloid stories and legends that impacted so much of Michael’s life and diminished its, and his, value. They were blissfully unaware of how ignorant and incredibly insensitive they were because they didn’t understand the collective loss. So because they didn’t understand it, they did what human nature does when it doesn’t understand—they ridiculed. Themselves victims of the infected and sick media, they were disconnected from reality yet accused the fans of that very disconnection. They thought themselves the “official voices” about all things Jackson not realizing that they were perpetuating a myth and a carefully, over time, deliberately constructed caricature that resulted in an incredibly inaccurate meme about a man and real human being. It was as if somehow his celebrity negated his humanity and he was once again, fair game. And it was the protracted “fair game” game itself that was the last unbearable straw for many of them.
Heaped on their grief was the planned Discovery Autopsy program, the ITV Kelvin MacKenzie sophomoric and mean spirited attack on Jackson and by proxy, his children who were claimed ‘better off without him.’ The glaring disconnect between a rampant and insidious epidemic of bullying in the culture and involving media, contemporarily affecting millions of children resulting in suicides, and the bullying of Michael Jackson already decades into it and continuing daily incredulously continued unabated. And the incidents of using Michael Jackson’s name to get attention, sell stories and make accusations indefensible because he was dead added to the deep anguish.
On top of that was the mystery of exactly how he died, the implications of addiction, the unsolved nature of his homicide, the at times flaunted freedom of his killer, and the constant accusations of “crazy” and “delusional” fans, and you have a recipe for taking the breath and the sanity of any reasonable person. Yet is it the general public and many members of the media who are delusional. They are the ones who never investigated, fact checked or looked into the veracity of the caricature or meme; they are the ones who perpetuated the hysterical myth. Yet they were calling the fans “hysterical” and “delusional.” And they are the same ones who see “darkness” as synonymous with “Michael Jackson.”
The irony was glaring and knee deep. It was all reminiscent of the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials or the later lynch mob mentality that killed real people based on a cultural infection and group think hysteria. It was the same kind of marginalization that infected Nazi Germany only the scale is different. But they were seemingly certain it didn’t rise to the level of destroying a race or the humanity of a culture and species, it was only smearing a pop star for sport and profit—something that Michael endured throughout his life. It’s the “only” part that is so very, very wrong and a way to make baseless excuses for bad behavior.
The parallels between Diana, Princess of Wales and Michael Jackson and even Dame Elizabeth Taylor were lost on a media and culture too busy bullying its celebrities and entertaining themselves with a voyeuristic and paternal snooping into private lives so popularized by Rupert Murdoch and the tabloid industry.
Even when Murdoch was taken to task by the British Parliament and Scotland Yard for phone hacking, there was no epiphany about how Murdochian media might have had something to do with Michael Jackson’s notoriety and reputation in his vilification and trial by media. Maybe even his death. There was a disconnect between understanding that the man had a sleep disorder likely induced by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that got progressively worse throughout his life. Nobody seemed to put it together that quite possibly the man couldn’t sleep because he was an innocent man relentlessly vilified and bullied by a hysterical press that behaved like aberrant cheerleaders leading the public in a cheer consisting of a frenzied deluge of projection. They, without realizing it, became tour guides to the practice of heaping humanity’s collective dark shadow onto a man objectified and made into its’ temporary target.
Once an enchanting little boy with the big voice, he went from beloved child star to the most hated and bullied man on earth. He was innocent and the court found him innocent because there was no case. Santa Barbara, an elitist, white and wealthy nearly oceanside town didn’t want a black in the neighborhood. Law enforcement drunk and corrupt with power targeted an innocent man just as they had many non-white and ethnic citizens who tried to settle and do business there. It’s an ugly truth that nobody wants to admit or look into.
And still today, fans deal with a faction of people who are called “haters.” Michael Jackson is a hated target for latent homosexuals who believed him gay and engage in hatefulness toward his fans to distract from their secret attraction and unconscious sexual agenda. They hurl hate speech and accusations about him toward fans. And he is still the target of haters who can’t bear to reveal their own ego’s shadow to themselves so they continue to project it—onto a dead man. Viewed from the outside, it’s pretty sick behavior and a form of sadistic bullying. Projection onto a live person is self treason and harmful enough, but projecting it onto a dead man is probably an working definition for the epitome of “insanity.”
The fans have been through a two year run up to a trial filled with breathless “breaking news” about their hero, with leaks and statements, with resurrected tabloid garbage and unanswered questions about death and who’s involved, about money and conspiracy theories, yet living with unanswered questions and perpetual injustice, the last installment of injustice causing his death.
Michael people are tired but that doesn’t mean they’re not resolute; that doesn’t mean they have lost their passion. The funeral is over. The run up is over. A long awaited trial is over. But the story is not over.
It’s the fans and Jackson admirers who are precisely those who are, because of their experience—strong in the way that Michael was strong—with a strength of character. They have been through the crucible and baptism by fire. They are among the few on this planet who are NOT deluded and not infected by the cultural meme. They know the media and the truth of the media. They are awake in ways that many are still asleep. They are among a minority on this planet who know how it could be, how it should be. The fans know the seductive power of the dark side and how easily people are conscripted to evil by corruption involving money and power. They understand human weakness in the face of dangling the bait of money, power and the exclusivity of that 15 minutes of fame. They understand how values are corrupted by deliberate seduction with evil or malicious intent.
Michael people understand deeply the cynicism that accompanies “grownup” life. They know the heart of a child intimately and they grieve unconsciously or not for the loss of their own innocence, and collectively for humanity’s. They feel the world’s almost imperceptible turn toward increased indifference and cynicism. They feel an unrest and sense of obligation. They are tired and weary of the battle with an enemy so ephemeral and amorphous as to be practically invisible that is like shadow boxing with a ghost. Shadow is very much a part of their fight, of this fight. And so is a ghost. Not just the ghost of Michael and his legacy but of innocence and dignity lost in the stampede for commerce and feeding the machine, of childlike joy, freedom, creativity and magic… lost on a culture hungry for it and yet starving from their empty plate.
If the world ever desperately needed a Michael Jackson—it needs one now. It needs another one. But there will never be another. If the world ever needed its innocence and dignity and humanity back, it needs it now. Michael gave a whole generation, actually multiple generations—hope. He gave them Joy in his dance, hope in his lyrics, and magic in his work and his presence.
Michael is no longer here. But he has a stand in. An expansion is due and perhaps overdue, an expansion of “fan.” Let’s examine that next, shall we?
12 Comments
I don’t know if this is the place to ask this, but I’ll preface things by saying whenever I feel on the verge of an awakening, and I come here, your current discourse is already addressing the matter of concern in one form or another! I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but anyway, while reading the Historical Jesus section at wikipedia today, I came across the fact that historians agree Jesus really did say Love Your Enemies. The phrase stopped me, the inside of my head seemed brighter and I got a strong sense that if I could do that, or at least grasp the concept, I’d leap-frog into being much more the way I wish I was. Then I thought Love Your ENEMIES?? Seriously, WHAT?? How do you do that?? What on earth did He mean?? Through the entire duration of a now-abandoned Roman Catholic upbringing, I never heard an answer to this that was more than vague at best! I can’t think of anyone, other than Jesus himself, whose ideas on this I would rather hear than yours, Reverend B. Is it even fair of me to ask, however?
OK so far in further readings it seems that Jesus was advocating a stance of non-violent resistance, not acutally advocating that we allow ourselves to be abused so much. This kind of resistance, back in His time, seems to have been a non-violent means of shaming the aggressor for their injustice. And apparently he was also clarifying that the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth should not be used as an excuse for taking personal vengeance. Is it the principle of killing them with kindness, shaming them for their unkindness by responding AS IF they are not the unjust, or cruel that they are? Still not totally getting it. I feel there must be quite a bit more to this.
I am not sure I have your answers, G. “Love” in the sense it is used in scripture is not the romantic or sappy kind of love we think is real love. That kind of love is unemotional and holds space for possibility and for karma (I think that is more eye for eye and tooth for tooth than the kind with human intervention.) It seems to me the Universe is always seeking equallibrium (more homoestasis) so whatever you/I set in motion will have consequences. What someone says about you or thinks about you is more indicative of who they are than who you are. We project onto others what we can’t bear to live with in ourselves. So in that sense the condemnation of another already lives in you. Your hatred, anger or whatever you feel toward them is not swimming in their bloodstream– it is swimming in yours. Divine love doesn’t rescue, it allows. Sometimes loving someone fiercely means that as they are about to fall on their face, stepping out of the way and allowing it. To love in a romantic sense or to rescue or interfere (which is what it really is) is to affirm to someone that they are not powerful. Allowing someone to experience the consequence of what they set in motion is love’s inaction that is actually love in action.
I think perhaps Jesus was referring to unconditional love. We live in a world of duality. All is polar and the holding of opposites in the same space is that homestasis. So it stands to reason that if a space is filled with hatred, sending more hatred into that space does not balance or neutralize it. Sending love into that space brings balance and homoestasis. It’s the alchemy that takes the negative charge and adds a positive charge ending in no charge. The holding of opposites together can be difficult in a world of duality. The problem is that we try to figure it out with out minds instead of just feeling into what Jesus meant. When a situaltion is grave it is heavy (gravity.) When it is met with love (lightness) it can balance. We feel that in our bodies. Love is always lighter (in weight and in the light spectrum.) Hatred is always heavy and dark. Which would you rather harbor in your body? I think that is what Jesus was saying. It is so simple. Not always easy or easy to do, but simple.
My human mind struggles with this too. My heart knows it. My soul knows it. But my emotions and mind argues. What we resist persits and becomes stronger. We amplify something we hate when we dwell on it. Someone once told me that when someone has cancer to hate it is to add power to its ability to destroy. That individual said that if we could learn to truly love the cancer, we could cure it. I suspect that is somehow true. But it makes no logical sense on one level while on another it makes perfect sense. The mind gets in the way. To “figure it out” is not always the best way. To feel or allow or have appreciation for or respect something is to love it.
When people fight oppression it is because they love themselves. Self preservation is a form of love. If we are all one truly then attacking another is to attack self. There is no need to attack. Being a mirror is the greatest form of love. A mirror does nothing but stand there and allow someone to see their own reflection. There are many ways to do that. Your enemy does it well. ~B
Oh my goodness, your last sentence – your enemy does it well – has hit me like a ton of bricks.
It is really so very true!!! There really is very little as effective in showing you what you’re made of than someone who is nasty to you. Oh my word, I might be finally twigging to this! When someone is nasty or wrongs you somehow, HOW YOU REACT really tells you the story – about YOU. It tells you YOUR story, it tells you what is inside of YOU – more hatred? the same hatred you think they have in THEM? or more wisdom, more decency, more love or foresight? Your reaction has literally NOTHING to do with them. And we can CHOOSE what to have inside our own selves. So THERE is our freedom of choice?
I am so thankful you have taken time to feed me back. It may seem odd but what is going on inside me right now, because of what you’ve given me to chew on, is HUGE. The thoughts on homeostatsis – brilliant, so USEFUL to explore, and yes I think Jesus WOULD be quite genius enough to know that adding more hatred makes everything worse and adding love is the only way to neutralize the acidity.
These realizations do make the response needed to the (ongoing) abuse of Michael far clearer. I’m getting it. Lies and hatred must be met only with dignified truth and at the very least a non-engagement in the same kind of hatred, if not yet met with lovingness. Otherwise we give the hatred power by increasing it! Getting to that point of evolvement will require much contemplation I imagine.
Yes I see that it is so simple, but the experience of PAIN seems to make it difficult. We can tend to hate that which causes us pain – and thereby unwittingly become that which we hate, or become ourselves that which causes us pain? Is this what the sages mean when they say no one can cause you pain but yourself?
I have a long way to go on this but oh the excitement in me right now! This is the first time I have ever really started to grasp this, if I’m not mistaken. And I honestly feel that I have stepped onto a new path. I have tears of thanks that I have you and the Inner Michael family, Rev. B., to point out a better path and/or navigate it with me. Honestly, this is a big moment for me. I feel that I am truly going to change. Good God, it’s taken me my whole life to get here.
Me too, G; me too. Now to only practice it! Practice. It. ~B
Practice! practice practice practice – like Michael on a Sabbath! Its a great Eve of Sabbath, Rev. B! gonna be Sabbath every day now! much love –
G
Thanks, Rev. Barbara–so eloquent and so wise in what you think and how you say it. I recently read Peter Pan–I guess I always knew the story, but I decided to read it again b/c Michael loved it and he even said “I am Peter Pan.” What I got out of rereading is that Peter Pan stood for magic–he was a magical being–he was also a leader, not only of the ‘lost boys’ but of his island–the Never island. He defeated Captain Hook–who was so scared of Peter Pan that he jumped off his ship into the jaws of the crocodile. At one point when they are fighting, Hook asks–who are you? And Peter Pan says, “I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.” I think Michael was also magical, a symbol of joy–and just like a bird he broke out of the egg that was confining him–the egg of control, tradition, and what ‘should’ be the ‘right’ behavior.
I had trouble with completing my post–so I want to add–I mean that he broke the egg of tradition in that adults are not supposed to play with children, or not other people’s children anyway, and not talk to children or find them interesting. In fact, the whole focus on children’s issues that MJ espoused, including sick, injured, deprived children–this is not a ‘normal’ focus for adults, especially males. MJ defied traditional male behavior and he didn’t care if he wore women’s perfume or loved flowers. He was free. He paid a heavy price for breaking cultural norms but he did what he thought was right in his heart and he was not a conformist–this is what I meant by he did not follow what the ‘shoulds’ the culture put on us. The media leapt on him for that–and thanks for your Murdock discussion–it was Murdock’s The Sun that started the Wacko stuff.
I have never seen a more perfect storm. Michael defied convention because he could and because his life from the beginning was unconventional, he had unlimited resources and because he was incapable of standing outside himself to view himself with convention because he never knew what that was. A deeply religious man, and transcendental, Michael understood the laws of the Universe and he harnassed them. And he was an empath. An empath with financial power, charisma and magical thinking. Empaths feel the pain of the world and of course a sensitive empath with resources would use them to improve the human condition in whatever way they could.
Remember he has been called a “force” and I believe he was. If Michael wanted something to happen, he made it happen. That is both the beauty and the danger of being a savant. If he had been obscure and unknown, he would not have been such a target. It was his visibility that drew all manner of people– some not so well intentioned. Some jealous.
We only see in others that which lives in us even when it’s hidden from us. We also do not see in others that which has no home in ourselves. So some of the things that happened to Michael he never saw coming. He patterened his life after his heros and that included Jesus. Jesus loved the children, blessed and healed them. So it was natural for Michael to want to replicate that. And as someone who had empathy for chldren, took the Bible seriously and literally and was deep in his faith, who was isolated from the cynical world and lived that faith, and who had a fatherly love for all children while ascribing to the “it takes a village to raise a child” philosophy, all his behavior has meaning in a religious and metaphysical context.
Everything has a set and setting– the set being the conditions and the setting being the context which includes the time/s in which something happens. Part of the reason for the misinterpretation of Michael’s behavior is in the setting. His accusations came on the heels of a shocking awakening in America to the incidence of child sexual abuse. It cames after the McMartin Preschool Case which very much parallels the Salem Witch Trials in its’ hype and hysteria in the public and the media. A preschool and its faculty were accused of running a sexual abuse ring with the children (other people’s children) from their preschool. The case was all over the media and the coverage was obsessive. When that happens in media, the subject is on everyone’s mind and that gets explored thoroughly. The case was sensational but there was nothing to it. It didn’t matter. Everyone’s life was destroyed and it took a decade to finally prove innocence. But you can’t undo what was once done nor the damage it causes.
What happened was a frenzy of investigation into childhood abuse and a raising of the consciousness of the public. It was discoverd that incest was rampant in rural America and there was little structure in place for reporting it or supporting the victims. That changed quickly in the wake of the focus of the public on sexual abuse of children. It heightened the sensitivity to it and everyone was looked at with suspicion– especially males. Around the same time therapists began to “uncover” repressed memories of childhood abuse. Whle some cases were legitimate, most were not but many parents were falsely accused and unjustly incarcerated or their children snatched from them. There was also a hysteria around MPD or Mulitple Personality Disorder and Satanic Ritual Abuse in a country with puritanical (and pseudo-puritanical) social mores. “Repressed memory syndrome was all the rage in theraeutic circles until flase memory syndrome was uncovered. I know this all so well because I lived it as director of a halfway house for the mentally ill. Many of my clients were abused as children. The hysteria was real and the public was sensitized to it.
Then along comes Michael Jackson… a black man in a racist culture. A superstar expected to be hypersexual at a time when rock stars exploted their popularity with young female fans. (Yet here is a man who didn’t so there must be something wrong with him– he must be gay!) A man who surrounds himself with children and is seen frequently with little boys… And a media that has some experience now with hysteria and a burgeoning tabloid industry cynically guided by a man with no restraint or moral compass who is interested only in making money… and new “tell all” tabloid media with “reporters” hungry for fame…
As I said, the perfect storm.
Thank you for this Rev. B. In relation to Michael, I have always believed that the term “fan” was so inadequate. We do understand because we have watched the cynicism and darkness leveled at this messenger for decades, helpless to stop it, but more and more determined to continue to be his standard bearers, and continue to work for that brightness for all of us. You are correct, there are times of great despair, but I believe change is coming, there is a shift and we are here to push it along every chance we find. Thank you for helping us focus. Love and peace.
Thank you Rev. Barbara and everyone else for these very interesting conversations. I am learning every day about neutralizing negative energy. I find that concept so interesting, but it is so true. I just recently read in a book by Gary Zukav about the need to balance energies. I recently encountered a personal situation where I projected out some very negative energy out of frustration. I even openly stated my frustrations. I immediately realized what I had done and acknowledged it. The important thing I remembered was not dwell on it of course, so every time those frustrating thoughts came into my mind, I immediately turned around my thinking to be more positive. I didn’t want that negative energy hanging around. I immediately felt a difference in the energy around me when I changed my thinking. Living in duality is very hard at times. The Earthly dimension can be a very difficult one to navigate at times. It takes focus and work no doubt.
I have hope that the people who project hatred towards Michael will see what they have done. There is still time for this to happen. I have hope that it will. Michael did break many barriers and he paid a significant price; however, at the same time, many people were awakened. I say prayers of gratitude every single day and even multiple times a day for my awakening. As each day goes by, I see things more clearly. The treatment of Michael taught us many lessons. Many people learned, but there are still many who still have to learn. We can be the example to help them learn, yes? I will be there to do my part. Thank you.
That was really so good. I like that a lot.