Inner Michael

I wanted to talk about consciousness, tribal thinking and unexamined assumptions and we will; but before we can do that well, we should take a look at something that happened last week. It needs addressing. It has come up before and this week lots of people wrote to ask what can be done about the media and in particular, some media people who persist in perpetuating the meme of Michael Jackson as a monster who harmed children.

To examine this subject adequately and to understand what drives it, is going to require a series. The metaphysical picture will clear up the puzzlement about why people continue to believe and spread lies, but before we can go there, lots of questions this week indicate that we need to do some preliminary work.

The media did an excellent job of driving home a false meme. Histrionics, hysteria and crowd psychology caused otherwise reasonable people to assimilate false information and create unexamined assumptions. When the allegations first hit, Michael Jackson was the biggest thing on the planet. His meteoric rise to fame was not just because he was a musical prodigy and the Jackson Five were so popular although that is part of the story. Everything is energy and energy is behind everything. Metaphysics informs reality at the same time actual physical events take place and while some things cannot be seen, they are often felt. The energetic “signature” of the reality brings an energy field that is mostly unconsciously, but sometimes consciously, read.

We have spoken previously and in the “Michael Messages” how people, events and places have a feel to them. When you feel that you are processing the energetic signature of the thing, place, or event whether past, current or future, you are reading the energy or accessing the energetics of it. Energies imprint in physical reality. Our bodies unconsciously (and consciously with practice) read that energetic signature and react accordingly. Some places make us feel good and some make us feel negativity– we feel sad, empty, suffocated, afraid, depressed. That is because the energy (“energetic,” a noun) is perceived and processed unconsciously and occasionally by some very sensitive people with conscious awareness.

In our last conversation, we spoke about judgment. Judgment seems to be part of human nature that is hard to avoid. We all make judgments, have opinions, form ideas, create beliefs and we always do that without adequate information. We simply cannot ever know everything about a person, situation or event. So we must always proceed having inadequate information. Additionally, the energetic of something cannot be consciously read by most people so there is no way to look at the energy of something and check its’ accuracy.

So there are a lot of unexamined assumptions circling the planet. People like ease; they like things to be easy. And a large portion of the population has not activated their “observer consciousness” but goes forward assimilating information without examining it. Humans are born with a “tabla rasa” or blank slate with no experience and no preconceived notions, and without judgment. Each life event writes its energetice imprint onto the human body and psyche and the human, who was once a pure and untainted spiritual being, becomes contaminated by the energy of experiences and their reactive perceptions written into the codes of the energetic capsule (bubble/aura) that we each live in.

Conditioning begins early in life. The child hears a scolding tone instead of the loving sing-songy normal voice of mom. Alarms go off and the energetic is fear! The church, the school, the culture, the society begin to imprint energetically upon the capsule and soon the child is walking around in a bubble of indoctrinated beliefs that aren’t his but are imposed on him by his external environment.

Like sponges, we absorb the energetics around us. Like a suit of invisible clothing, we “put on” this information or these beliefs without discernment or critical thinking and then we forget that suit is there. Many of the indoctrinations we wear don’t even belong to us! They are layers (invisible suits) of belief that we put on, wear and forget about. I refer to these layers of psychic attire as your “field.” It is an invisible scope or aura that surrounds you, imprints and informs your physical body and determines how you resonate or relate to the world. We are all walking around with our personal field and are interacting with the personal field of others while living in the increasingly larger fields of our family, culture, society, country and the planetary field.

Most people are so busy with their lives– work, home life, school, community, family, and so on, that there is very little extra time to critically examine all the information and indoctrinating beliefs that come into their field. And many have never developed the ability to sort it all out with discernment, critical thinking skills, intuition, correctly reading body language, resonance and energetics, and as a consequence, much extraneous information is assimilated without first being examined. Couple that with our innate intent to trust the sources of this information, and you have unconsciously assumed unexamined material floating around in your field.

Only people who have developed their perception muscles through practice exercising them, are able to sort out what belongs to them and what belongs to someone else who told them something. There are many institutions that are willing to tell us what to believe– families, school, churches, political parties, religion… and much of that information goes unscrutinized, unresearched and unexamined.

Children are especially vlunerable because they come into the world innocent and trusting and like sponges, they absorb all that is told to them and all that happens to them. They trust the world because they haven’t learned not to. Indoctrination and conditioning begins very early in life. Children do not examine; they simply believe. This inclination to trust and believe are very strong impulses because as adults we want to continue to believe.

We want to think that we are not being lied to, manipulated, swayed in our opinions, influenced or coerced into our beliefs. We’d like to think the world is a friendly place. We want to go about our lives believing that we can trust that we are being told the truth or the real story. We want to think that we are smart enough to determine our own truths. The reality is that people are telling us what they think we want to hear, what they want us to hear, and what they want us to believe because it will curry favor and profit them in some way as they compete for our attention, loyalty and/or our cash.

People, advertizers, institutions, businesses, corporations, politicians, clergy, are all trying to convince us, indoctrinate us and recruit us to their way of thinking while gaining our loyalty and some kind of capital whether that is power, favor, loyalty or cash. We are their “targets’ and their “consumers.”

Very few of us have developed the ability to separate out the indoctrination from the truth. Some of the beliefs we have are so ingrained as to be transparent to us. We believe through them. We added them to our field in an unconscious and vulnerable moment and now they are so much a part of us that we believe through them without ever scrutinizing them or revisiting them to see if they still fit. We don’t even know they’re there; we just assume they are truths that are part of reality. A belief that is transparently in our field becomes a lens through which we view the world and colors our world, but we have forgotten its origin and even the unconscious moment it landed. These are beliefs that we picked up somewhere and don’t even know we have. They’re everywhere. There are a lot of unexamined assumptions swirling around people and their fields– the personal field, home field, work field, church field, social field, cultural field, planetary field.

Encapsulated information (beliefs or thoughts that have entered and have either been accepted without question or have been repeated enough to become concretized in our consciousness) is called a “meme. A meme (pronounced MEEM) is a unit of information that gets passed on, repeated, shared and accepted as factual and becomes a part of the culture or collective conscousness.

Memes are sometimes formed from unexamined assumptions. Unexamined assumptions can be deadly and they have harmed many… people, animals, cultures, societies, planets…

The media creates memes and it often does so irresponsibly in the rush to get capital– eyeballs, attention, market share, power, cash… The media needs to be more responsible and more conscious of the memes they create and the damage false memes do. We can help make that happen if we use prudence when we act. When we are not prudent or don’t use our smarts, we can do further damage and make the meme even more concrete rather than removing it.

Understand that when you rock someone’s reality (based on their assumptions,) you are going to meet with resistance. It’s natural. Resistance to new information is not favorable but it is natural in human nature. “The world is flat” was around a long time before Columbus set sail. “The moon is a mystery” or is “made of cheese” was around a long time before Buzz Aldrin’s famous footprints showed up. Galileo was condemned by the Pope for his “heresey” that the earth orbited the sun. Even the field of science is reluctant to change an accepted meme when it’s proven. It often resists the challenges to its established facts.

Those who work toward releasing the truth and deconstructing the false meme to vindicate Michael Jackson don’t always behave so wisely. That creates more problems for Michael’s memory and further damages the Michael Jackson legacy. There are wise ways to go about this work. I have been encouraged by groups to have that conversation, so let’s begin.

This conversation is likely to be in parts so come back for part II and III or however many it takes to cover this topic. It is an important one. No, it is critical. I will welcome questions. If I don’t have information or an answer for you, I will call upon Sue Wilson whom I have worked with off and on since her tour of Wisconsin last September.

Let’s begin with a short examination of the brain and habitual thinking and how it can be damaging to our selves, culture, world.
 

There exists a point where something balanced on a fulcrum is caused to lose its balance and something crashes. A “fulcrum” is the place where the balance rests—the bar, for example, over which the teeter-totter rests. When the balance shifts, the reality shifts and change occurs. Sometimes that is intentional; sometimes not.

If you want something to shift, you have to disturb what sits in balance. People don’t like having their status quo or predominant beliefs threatened because it throws them off balance. They don’t navigate change very well. Their sense of normalcy can be tied to the feeling of being secure and feeling safe with their assumptions about the world around them. Life used to be simpler but now information comes at us at the speed of light. It is overwhelming. It is information overload and that in itself, can be distressing to our balance.

People don’t want to seem stupid yet there isn’t enough time and energy to process all the incoming information. Too much information or information that is too challenging upsets the balance. To keep things balanced, we rely on others to sort out what is important and what we should know. Some sources try to convince us what we should know.

We also don’t like our homeostasis disturbed. “Homeostasis” is a Greek word meaning “stable” or “same.” Human nature doesn’t like surprises, likes homeostasis, likes to be “in the know,” and likes things to be neat and tidy and to nicely fit into “boxes” of categories and beliefs. Humans like to think they are smart and informed and stable. They don’t like deviations from “normal.” They don’t tolerate it well when someone is deemed “different.” When something shakes them up or rocks their world out of balance, they don’t react favorably. They get agitated and resist whatever challenges their current belief system.

Because the amount of information is overwhelming and we can’t possibly investigate all of it to be sure it’s the truth, we rely on sources to be credible, to be trustworthy and accurate. We want to trust those who inform our beliefs and we want to believe that our beliefs are true. We even want to believe that our beliefs are carefully constructed. They aren’t. But the illusion of stablility gives us homeostasis and a relaxed state of being from which to operate. When beliefs that were perceived as carefully informed or constructed are challenged, humans react negatively. They lash back or lash out.

The last thing humans want to believe is that they are wrong. Or that they have been wrongly informed. Or god forbid– duped. That is where the phrase “don’t kill the messenger” comes from. When we have packaged our lives and beliefs into true and neat little boxes, we don’t like our wrapped-up packages to be disturbed. And when the information came or comes from a source in which we have placed our trust, we don’t like to find out we have been blindsided or misled.

The consumer of information expects that they will be informed and told the truth and from someone without an agenda. They expect that sources will give just the facts and tell it like it is. That used to be true decades ago when Walter Cronkite was “the most trusted man in America.” Since he was dispassionate and ethical and didn’t abuse his platform, he told the truth plain and simple and with flair, but without embellishment. If Walker Chronkite said it, it was believed. There is no one like that now with impeccable journalistic integrity because now it is all about ratings.

Families used to gather around the radio in the early days and around the television later at an appointed time to get all the news and information. At the six o’clock news hour, and again at ten pm (in the U.S.) one became informed of the day’s events with the lead story being the most crucial one or the one with the most impact for the world. In a world with a 24 hour news cycle (cable news) the cable stations must now compete for ratings and that dictates what news will be given and what stories will lead. In journalism, and particularly in broadcast journalism, there is a saying: “If it bleeds, it leads.” That is because people pay more attention to something that stimulates and grabs attention.

But what if there is no blood? Well, news outlets use the inclination (toward the sensational) to manufacture excitement and sell the news in order to gain viewers. Some broadcasters have learned to use emotion to stimulate while others use sensation, and still others appeal to the lower emotions and sensory input. Sometimes fear is employed; sometimes the information appeals to those with a proclivity for being angry which ignites the human fight or flight response. These broadcasters will appeal to the baser human emotions and the animalistic part of the human (the reptilian brain and lower chakras) and some will appeal to the frontal lobe of the brain.

It depends on what the listener or viewer resonates with. (Remember where you heard that- it’s not well known yet.)

No longer is the news delivered dispassionately and with complete integrity while broadcasters garner loyalty based on integrity. Cable news dictates a ratings game and the “best” broadcaster does not necessarily win. The news channel that gets the most ratings wins. That means that the broadcaster that can get the most eyeballs makes the most money. And cable news exists to make money by getting viewers and increasing market share in order to increase profits. They get sponsors to sign on and pay for commercial time (exposure) when they can prove to sponsors that they have a demographic that will buy their products. It all hinges on getting viewers. Broadcasting is all about ratings, which is all about getting the attention of viewers.

When money is involved, you can be assured that tricks and techniques are used to get attention which translates to market share and sponsors purchasing airtime. Humans are fascinated by the stimulating, the sensational, the shocking or startling, the intriguing, the forbidden or the mysterious. It’s human nature to respond with fascination when contronted with intrigue. If the program can make use of these things which titillate and attract human interest, the market share (and profit) increases.

It is the competition and the competing market for viewers and ratings that drives the decisions and the programming. Public interest and public service has taken a back seat to corporate profits. Add to that the fact that in a court case in Florida, the state’s Supreme Court decided that the media can legally lie to you, and you have not only hijacked democracy but hijacked TRUTH.

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/11-the-media-can-legally-lie/

“Today, six giant multinational corporations now control all 14,000 radio stations in our country, almost all 6,000 TV stations, 80 percent of our newspapers, all of our billboards, and now most of the Internet information services. So you have six guys who dictate what Americans have as information and what we see as news. The news departments have become corporate profit centers. They no longer have any obligation to benefit the public interest; their only obligation is to their shareholders, and they fulfill that obligation by increasing viewership.” ~ Robert F. Kennedy, in a speech to the Sierra Club, September 10, 2005.

During the life of Michael Jackson, the media both used him and abused him solely for profits. The world was fascinated by the superstar who was also a sex symbol at that time and early in his career. Gossip magazines and newspapers discovered that stories about Michael Jackson would increase sales extraordinarily. If the stories “revealed secrets” or were salacious they sold even more. Our culture is enamored with the famous, the beautiful and with the cult of celebrity. It cultivates the conflicted human love/hate impulse. It takes deliberate and low aim. The tabloids learned that “insider” information about the most famous, yet mysterious man in the world sold volumes of copy and made obscene amounts of money. The allure of that kind of money caused tabloid journalism to hack into peoples phones, email accounts and voice mail for information. Federal (FCC) regulations were relaxed and the integrity of journalism and broadcasting suffered. History will one day mark the life of a man named Michael Jackson as a dark period in human communications.

The media traded on the public’s fascination with him and individual “reporters” made their careers off Michael Jackson. Yes, it is vampirism. Sucking someone’s life blood, life energy, or life’s work is vampirism. One “reporter” in particular learned early on that Michael Jackson stories got attention—the more salacious, the more attention to Michael and by association, to the reporter herself. So she proclaimed herself an expert on him and his life. Michael was enigmatic and fascinating to the public; he was just different—- a prodigy and musical genius. Couple that with a puritanical and conservative agenda and a lust for sex crimes, legitimized and camoflaged by one’s job (only “reporting” the stories,) and you have the makings of a recipe for exploitive and explosive tragedy that becomes a killing field. One who lives and breathes it, who panders to shadow is another kind of “dealer.” Are they somehow better or more lofty than a drug dealer or worse than one? Consider this: a drug dealer panders to human cravings to feel better. A shadow dealer spreads darkness for money. 

 A reader recently reminded us that prolific writer and social critic James Baldwin (another bold and voice for black America who dared to speak out) once said something profound and prophetic of Michael Jackson:

“The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael.

All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black life and wealth; the blacks, especially males, in America; and the burning, buried American guilt; and sex and sexual roles and sexual panic; money, success and despair–to all of which may now be added the bitter need to find a head on which to place the crown of Miss America.

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated–in the main, abominably–because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.”

And the rest is history… as they say.

One reporter in particular is terrified. What happened to Michael Jackson comes from, and out of, a dark place within the human psyche. It comes from the deep tribal, cultural, and archetypal recesses of taboos and memories in ancestral bones. It is a place of primal fear and terror and deep and disowned humanity that denies taboo desires—unspeakable and disturbing. Michael embodied most of them and openly challenged them and so became the target for the collective wrath of a culture denying and hiding its treachery and shadow from itself.

Humans have always known slavery to be morally wrong. Humanity has always known that skin color is not a reason. America with its pseudo-puritanical cultural structure was threatened by maleness and particularly black maleness. So along comes a child born in the sixties during a time that lynching was still legal, who grows up to be not only a superstar but sex symbol! He dares to attract white women and gay men which terrifyingly upsets the cultural norms and raises standard hidden taboos! (The first terrorist!) And then his blackness begins to lighten and he begins turning white! The unconscious reaction to this encroachment was too much to bear! Here was another seventh son whose very existence reminded a society of its darkest sins. The contrast was far too difficult, excruciatingly uncomfortable so the crowd, made frenzied by media fanning the flames, wanted him crucified.

Crowd psychology then takes over and not the Roman legions, but the legions of media gleefully serve him up to betrayal for the sake of their silver to his state trial at the hands of a system of corrupt politico and moral watchdogs with internal racist and superiority conflictedness. So this outspoken and daring uppity black man becomes the lynchpin, the fulcrum, the sacrificial lamb who must bear the sins of his admirers and torturers and must be metaphorically lynched, crucified and dismembered publicly but first humiliated and rendered non-human as punishment for his animalistic and unforgivable blackness.

For Michael Jackson, the storm was perfect.