🔻Hyper media mania🔺

I found a way through and past all of this dark stuff many years ago. It is not a system of belief based on blinkered wilful selfishness.

For millenia, smallish communities lived together in agricultural subsistence. What happened among them stayed between them. The only form of new transmission was by the voice. Shouts, words, gossip, storytelling. All during these thousands of generations, we might guess at, but we were only very seldom if ever directly aware of fatal wounds, diseases, poisonings, plagues, floods, fires, famine, intrigue, rape, pillage, war, gratuitous violence.

We had plenty of work to be getting on with merely in order to feed and house and clothe ourselves.

We found ways of assimilating terrible life events, and – for most of us – we had a lifestyle of mutual support, and this helped us to remain healthy in body and mind.

Comes the advent of industry, technology, printing, mass literacy, radio, and god help us live broadcasts by television and streaming handheld smartphones.

The exact same Tsunamis and Earthquake types of destructive and dread events continue to affect human communities.

The major difference today is the gigantic burden of excessive awareness of human tragedy in every part of the world it occurs as it happens.

The media brings every one of us into virtual face-to-face with the plight of those caught up in tragic circumstances.

The circumstances offered up to us are mostly explicit and graphic, and almost invariably embellished, embroidered and hyped for commercial advantage by the complete range of high tech media, assisted closely by scientific applications of various disciplines of psychology.

What’s more, the Media are in competition to outperform against each other because of their need for financial gain.

Return for a minute to an ancient agricultural or craft village, where the worst noise pollution is birdsong, farm animals, strong winds. And where the rather strict rules of communal life tend to be set up for self-policing. Here hard work is among the top requirements expected of the average inhabitant.

This activity leaves not a lot of time for rioting, revolt, manslaughter or mayhem.

It will have been obvious to everyone that the miseries that do befall them are common to every person in every village throughout time.

What they did to keep going involved close reference to accepted tried and trusted ways of getting through the seasons, with room for empathy, compassion and altruism.

What we need in this period of the Anthropocene is exactly and precisely the same focus of time, effort and attention to the same preoccupations for ourselves and the people we live together with.

If we, or “I”, take on board an excess of attention to the woes and wherefores of people geographically very far distant from us, we are eventually bound to suffer seriously destructive imbalances to our naturally frail spiritual framework.

As my Mother would frequently point out, too much of anything is not good.

So I take no longer any notice any more. I don’t say, I do not care. I say I am bound to care more about those whose lives affect mine, about the paths of the lives of those who cross mine.

“May all beings everywhere be happy and free.
May my thoughts, words, and actions contribute in some way to happiness and freedom for all.
May I keep faith with this heart’s truth
~ Love is present EveryNow”

As long as I abide by my integrity, I share, I love, I help, I stay connected and at peace!

What point am I making, you ask as you stir impatient on your virtual bar stool.

I say we are being called upon by newly formed mass media influencers to  needlessly take notice of the entire panoply of all the ills and evils in the whole worldwide human community.

This suits those whose profits flow from the uninterrupted viral forcefeed of bad news. But that’s where any measurable advantage terminates for us as individuals who go about our daily lives.

I cannot hope to take notice or accept responsibility for every single horrid happening reported constantly. If I take a step away, I see that the best interests of my well-being are served by my being well informed about my own circles of family and friends.

Other distractions, should I choose to let myself fall prey to their melodramatic Media blandishments, provide me with only a noxious and dangerous mix of highly-charged negative emotional stimuli. I can and I should do little or nothing that allows them to erode my sense of my Original Self.

My Original Self is that inner child, that new born angelic heart, whose sacred centre is an integral part of the peace and love from which it came, and to which, collectively, we are all returning home.

Nothing has to be changed for me as a good community member. It’s the same as it would have been for me in that little village in the countryside so many Moons ago!

If I am leading a good life as a productive and caring member of my peer groups, I must consciously take leave of the flow of dystopian Media hype which concerns other people, whose responsibilities and influence concern their own local communities.