A post from Tina:
I’m fascinated by your description of the Internet as “cold chaos.” Although (perhaps because) I’ve worked in technology for the last 20 years, I see its limitations; I’m disturbed that few others seem to. Here in the Bay Area, people seem to see technology as the silver bullet that will fix all our problems, including public education. Just replace the teachers (being human, they must be the problem, right?) with laptops loaded with corporate content. People also seem to feel that online interaction is an adequate substitute for face time. I fear that the Internet is starving our spiritual need for community.
My reply:
Hi Tina
It’s such a weird feeling I got when I first went onto the internet. I’m actually very left brained as well as right and was working in computer animation during the early 1990s. So the internet was sort of an exciting idea. I had a friend who was a big champion of it but when I logged on, as I said I felt this very creepy, cold void as if there was an alien intelligence that seemed very connected to the shadow side of us, rather than the conscious side. Of course that seemed to be what took off first, pornography, voyeurism and it unleashed this strange (now cultural) narcissism that I think was contained in people through direct interaction with others.
IT felt like we were going to meet our shadow on the other end of that line and it really scared me. The other thing that struck me was attached it seemed to be the energy of chaos, I mean in the universal way, often seen in ancient cultures as a force for evil. And of course it was the final wall that ripped down public and private life, which I’m not sure was such a great thing.
Perhaps one day we will be able to fit all these things back together and elevate it all to a better place but for now we seem to be having trouble with the darker side of this phenomena. It seems to have way too much power on the way people think and feel and I believe it contributes to the delusions we have about the economy, jobs and the stock market.
I know it sounds strange, but there is so much information out there, yet very little of it is really checked like it used to be in the old days, by multiple sources. Blogs are opinion based, and often based on half-baked information, and traditional media outlets are going more toward copying the editorial style of blogs. We’ve nearly lost the 4th estate. We have no one to really put the government’s feet to the fire and those that are trying to do it are doing it with mid-evil methods and coo-coo statistics.
We are more divided, less tolerant and the dark sides of who were seems to be overshadowing the light. It’s interesting to note all the Celestial bodies that have been discovered since the turn of this century and how kind of creepy most of their legends are. Almost all appear to be dealing with the shadow side of our nature. (I am actually working on making a list of these planetoids and their dark rulerships to be released in the future.)
To get back to what Tina said. It’s a HORRIBLE mistake to let computers become teachers. And I’m also against testing teachers and children like they are robots. If we can’t come up with an organic, holistic way to determine what kids are getting out of school and what teachers are doing, than something is wrong! The people who are in charge are not checking in on the classrooms, aren’t listening to parents, and aren’t taking into consideration other types of development. Sometimes, I think we’ve forgotten how to be human and it’s just as important to teach theater, expressing one’s feelings, art, music, political science, critical thinking, as it is to teach math and reading.
I have a sibling who is severely dyslexic. We were opposites. I was in gifted classes, they were in special ed. We were both freaks on the opposite end of the spectrum. My sibling has a very high IQ but their condition wasn’t fully understood. It’s now coming to light that people with dyslexia have a different kind of brain – one that sees literally in 3-D, and so words – which on a page are 2-D, are an impossible jumble. My sibling never really learned how to read and write past the 1st grade level (until they went away to a special school in their 20s that approached things in a radical new way). Yet my sibling is actually very brilliant and can take build anything, figure anything out, has the mind of an engineer. I wonder what the schools we went to would do with a kid like that now when they have to take those “every child left behind” (pun intended) tests. It would make it look like those teacher sucked.
My point is different kids learn differently and forcing children to reguritate information onto a test to satisfy some quota isn’t good education, it’s good martial training. And it’s really stupid.
By the way I read an interesting article in “The Mountain Astrologer,” for those of you who don’t know about this magazine and are interested in astrology, it is by far the best of the best – there was an interview with Carolyn Myss who is a sort of New Age guru. I kind of stay away from New Age stuff, but I started listening to her Sacred Contracts lecture on tape and agreed with a lot of it, some of it struck me as a bit nutty. And I found her a bit full of herself and someone with a kind of a angry, arrogant energy that turned me off. I really don’t like it when people make up systems and seem like they’re winging half of it, and while I thought she had tapped into some truths, I felt a lot of it was sort of recycled from other metaphysical sources or could be found via other places, not to say she didn’t believe she invented it. I just have read a lot of occult books and have studied spiritual ideas outside the mainstream for a long time and had heard what she put forward said many ways, many times, with many different twists before. But it’s always good, however to make it new and get people thinking so I was happy to see her books do well as they undoubtedly made people open to new ideas which is always an excellent accomplishment.
It’s also my opinion that anyone who is that sure of themselves is invariably wrong about a lot because while one must invest in their ideas, one also has to remain open. And one never has all the answers, as soon as one thinks this, one is crushed by reality by the Universe.
Also being a double Aquarius I have a natural distrust of authority and I really don’t like being put in the position of guru which was why I originally left the practice of reading for people. I’m not always right. If one changes their path the outcome will change, which in my opinion is the reason readings are valuable, so one can correct their path. I’m not omnipotent and I can’t control fate. It’s an unfortunate side-effect of the work that people want to turn you into a guru or a god. For example when reading some people they will argue and try to convince me why what I’m telling them shouldn’t be (as if I can change the outcome of their path!) I’m psychic not God!
Unfortunately, psychics themselves can get caught up in this power trip (which I’ve seen) and it’s really not cool to say the least. That was what ran me out of the work. While I wanted people to listen to what I was saying and take it seriously so they could change their future for the better, I didn’t want them to be under the illusion that I was anything more than a messenger. These lines do however get blurred for some people and that made me uncomfortable. I really didn’t want to turn into a “Spiritual Leader” at 22 years old. I was wise enough to know I didn’t really know anything. However now I understand things more clearly and feel more comfortable relaying the messages I get, mostly because I understand them now! But still I’m just the messenger! This was my problem with Myss in a nutshell, she kind of had to much ego about the whole thing which in my opinion dulls the ability – kind of like what I suspect happened to Sylvia Brown, maybe she was psychic at one point, now she’s just an egomaniac.
However, in this article Myss mentioned that before every expansion of her psychic ability she would have a run on grand mal seizures and then they would go away when her new abilities opened up. Unlike, Myss I was born psychic however like Myss I have experienced this same phenomena. (We are also both from Chicago. Supposedly, a place where more psychics are born than an place else – although I didn’t read the book about the subject.)
I had a grand mal seizure when I was 17 which was just after a major surgery and I was put into a drug induced coma, which was really awful, within a year of that experience my psychic abilities, which I had tried to suppress (due to being an adolescent just trying to fit in, instead of being called, witch and freak) broke open like a damn and I really thought I would die as a result of the enormous, wild, intense energy that felt as though it would engulf me. I worried (with good reason) that I would turn into a human fire-ball (not to mention many other extraordinarily bizarre events). My psychic ability was in control of me rather than the other way around. I had to find a teacher and when I was 18 that’s what I did.
Again, when I had my daughter and my abilities became more integrated and changed form, I too suffered from (this time a series of) both grand-mal and petite-mal seizures. So I think Myss’ is onto something here. I think there is some sort of wiring or neurological component to being psychic. Like that reader who could put his hand on the electric fence, some of us, perhaps are truly wired differently.
As another note, I’m currently watching Nightline Primetime special about the brain. I’ve read research on the topic they are covering as well – there is a lot of evidence to suggest people who are violent offenders have disturbance, damage or are born with problems in the frontal lobe many become killers/serial murders and mass murderers.
Interestingly, they not on the program that this lack of energy in the frontal lobe, which indicates murderers is also seen in people obsessed with religion in a zealot like way – perhaps this is why religious wars and suicide bombers exist. This research seconds my feeling that those who voraciously cling to religious zealotry do so because they don’t feel an internal moral compass. People with frontal lobe issues may need to have rules and regulations and a prescription for how to live a normal life and fit in. And perhaps having a strong traditional religion where they are fortified in their belief and kept in line by a large group they can belong to, also helps them keep it together.
Another interesting article I read recently in Discover was about the shrinkage of the human brain in the past 10,000, which as it turns out has been quite substantial. Some have put forth a dumbing down theory. My belief (which is also another scientific theory with some modification on my part) is we have become domesticated and no longer need to have this over-developed aggressiveness (domesticated animals’ brains shrink over a period of 12 generations) also we are more specialized in what we do, therefore streamlining our brains and probably creating a different sort of wiring that is more complex, sensitive and different. As it turns out there are many animals who have “small” brains, but research has shown they are actually as, or more intelligent than animals with much larger brains he size. It’s not how big, it’s how the thing is built. My laptop is more powerful than the a thousand NASA computers from the 1960s and it is certainly much smaller!
Interestingly, the theory that prevailed in the 1990s that we would become one light-coffee colored homogenized group (think of the Benetton Ads which were based on this theory of the future – now not talked about much due to scientists’ fears of dealing with all the racial politics, although again this is silly as we can all be equal and not the same but anyway…) as people intermarried. In actuality we have become less like each other. There are more differences between races, in terms of physical structure and performance on various tests than before, all of these things are indicitive of finding one’s niche and passing it along to one’s prodgeney. And perhaps the areas we grow up in due to our race, or the opportunities we are given due to our ethnicity. And of course we are much bigger than all of that and break out of every rule put on us and people are so much more than any of these things.
I’ve often thought that our DNA is actually an internal tape recorder – that what we do in our lives gets encoded and those talents get passed along. Why else would some have a talent for music, art, math? None of these things are necessary for immediate survival, one can’t draw oneself out of starvation or sing themself out of being eaten by wolves. Yet one can not deny that seemingly learned traits get passed on, often skipping generations which means it can’t be entirely attributed to one’s environment.
We are clearly a mix of so many complex elements, our environment, our genes, our soul, our past lives (in my opinion), our point on the wheel of individuation – that there will never be simple answers to anything. Some people will rise above mental illness or indications that they should be sociopaths – compassion will develop in a different part of the brain and compensate. Some people will have everything they need to become schizophrenic except it will never be triggered due to the luck of growing up in a happy home and having a very stable environment until the point of the trigger is rendered moot. We are complex beings, spiritual, emotional, physical, metaphysical and multi-dimensional.
I will continue answering the rest of the questions throughout the week. When I’m done I’ll open it back up to people who need help. But make sure to check because I’m just going to do it for a day next time and then answer what I can, and close it down. I’ll keep doing this for until I don’t have time.
Many blessings and best wishes to all,
Denise
