Living In Stranger Times

What happens when reality is weirder than a movie.

I open my computer these days the same way that I open my Tarot deck, with a certain amount of worry over what I will see. This morning I found this post by Robert Reich on Facebook asking how it is that that Trump is able to do all the outrageous and ridiculous things that he is doing, like this Qatari jet and the illegal offers of business in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia without people simply saying, “NO”. This is my question as I read the news daily and marvel from my own place of improbability from which the US for many years seemed a bastion of reliability. I suspect that the answer to this question lies in our understanding of reality oddly enough.

For years people in the far right have spoken of thoughts and prayers whenever something really horrific, such as the school massacres that have become a staple of the US news, happens. The first time I heard the phrase I was simply astonished at the basic lack of empathy…that was at the time of Columbine when my now thoroughly adult children were still in high school. But that was just the first time, and we heard it again and again and again. Not long after that, there was a flood of books and talks and so on about “manifestation”, how to bring the things that one might desire into one’s life, books about The Secret for example. People scoffed in some groups (I was a scoffer) and gobbled them up in others. Those who believed in thoughts and prayers were especially keen, and the rest of us keep talking about science and ignoring them. But what if the thoughts and prayers group was right all along, and the rest of us who thought of ourselves as sane were missing the boat. No one specified WHAT the thoughts and prayers were about, what the people praying were praying for. But they had started a LONG time earlier than the rest of us. One of my clearest memories is one of taking a road trip as a child and listening to the radio fade in and out a we traveled through the southwest. There were radio preachers who would exort their listeners to “put your hands on the radio to feel God’s love” and to send money to the speaker. If that isn’t manifestation, I don’t know what is.

Many years later, the US is being mismanaged and dismantled by people who are never questioned or stopped by the larger group of individuals who don’t seem to really grasp what they are losing in this highway robbery. It’s so hard to watch. Lately I decided to give myself an unreality break in the form of entertainment, so I found Stranger Things on Netflix, a bit of a horror movie for horrible times, but it seemed light enough. I started over and watched all four seasons, finishing last night, only to feel that I was still watching something far too real.

What am I to think? Am I too imaginative these days? About a year ago I joined a group of older women on Facebook because a friend was there and I liked the name. When I made contact with the woman who had started the group, but who didn’t actually apparently intend that I chat with her, to ask her if it was an experiment of sorts to see what could happen with a critical mass of imaginative older women, she became very agitated and a month or so later she contacted me to “give” me the group. Being curious about what could grow a group of women from zero to 18 thousand in less than a year, I agreed to take it on. Worldwide Circle of Crones is now about 30 thousand women. I’m still not sure what would constitute a critical mass of crones, or what they would be capable of accomplishing, but it has been interesting to watch the group grow. (Anyone interested in joining it should just go to the page and answer the necessary questions… and, yes, it is just for women). Having tossed myself into the deep end of the pool of women with special senses and capabilities, I have been exploring those for the past year. I’ve noted that I was always able to communicate with people at a distance without the benefit of a telephone, but that isn’t a skill that I’ve felt I could necessarily rely on for day to day life.

Recently I ran across the Telepathy Tapes, a podcast on YouTube that has gone viral. I was fascinated as it was about profoundly, and not so profoundly at times, nonverbal autistic children who appeared to be able to know what other people both near them and far away were thinking. The podcast was made by documentary filmaker working with neuroscientists and educators who had been working with and studying the children. The conclusion, quite reluctantly stated by the filmaker, was that the world is not composed of matter as we have all believed, but of energy, and that this energy is something that we all can and do affect. There is no assumption that the energy that makes up our universe is either good or bad, and some of the children clearly state that some of it is NOT good. I think that many of us know what they are talking about, or at least that we can imagine what they are talking about. I have believed for years that human beings or other animals/material beings are not the point evolution, but that consciousness is. Looking back on the evolutionary scale, the possibility of consciousness is the one thing that has reliably increases over the eons. And recent work in quantum physics pushes me to believe in the interconnectedness of energy.

I wish all these thoughts of mine would end up with some sort of certainty in a conclusion, but that isn’t happening so far. However, perhaps we can find out what a critical mass of our consciousness can do to stop a large, out of control mass of very destructive consciousness. Meanwhile, spend time in your space with your consciousness and be aware of others, and be kind

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