News programmes start with dramatic music and an air of seriousness. The message is that the world is a bad, dangerous place, so you need a government, a big army, and strong-armed police force to stop the terrorists, rapists, child molesters, murderers etc away from your door. The nature of reality is struggle, pain, war, fighting, drama. This is interspersed with gossip and opinion to keep people diverted from thinking too deeply, or feeling too much. We seem to be addicted to drama and suffering, that’s what sells the newspapers and keeps people glued to TV screens. It is accepted as normal.
And we are invited to respond with ‘concern’, which I see as an involvement with external affairs. Concern is an entanglement in the confused mesh of information. It is different to empathy or compassion – where one is absolutely with oneself, but feeling deeply the connection to everything else. Concern can turn to worry, which can turn to fear…..
Imagine a news programme without spin, without drama. The struggles are balanced with positive news of people helping each other, challenges being overcome. Perspectives are offered calmly without a ‘needing to be right’, and without a hidden agenda. A programme that motivates people to take positive action, and to stand for what they feel is true and good. A programme that encourages openness and heart-feltness, even in the face of big challenges.
To many this seems unimaginable. We have become so used to believing that the drama being presented is just how things are.
Delve deeper into the information out there, and you can see that endless possible versions of reality exist. What is ‘true’ is only what you or I believe is so. In this internet age one can find evidence to back up almost any theory and any perspective, even with so-called ‘scientific knowledge’.
Checking the alternative news sites, I find that often they too have an agenda, that they are backing up with the information they select. This is not necessarily a ‘negative’ agenda, it’s not about good or bad. The corporations and governments may also believe that their agenda is ‘good’ and what people need or want, (and they may well be right, most people on some level do want to be ‘led’ and seduced).
I take another step back and see it all as a big game being played out. Everyone has their role, there is no good or bad. It just is what it is. There is an underlying harmony that goes unnoticed. And this game is showing me things, offering me lessons, opportunities to love more. Information is neutral. How I respond to it creates my world.
And as the apparent insanity in the world continues to rise, or become more evident, rather than feeling more fear and worry, I seem to be feeling a sort of freedom and release, in the recognition that its a crazy world, full of all kinds of everything, whirling about.
I can open up my awareness to sense the vast amount of information just beyond my perception, all the zillions of parallel realities that are right there so close, created from the slightest variation in what I perceive, where my attention goes. My attention is here, and what is just beyond that? Infinite possibilities, alternate realities.
Perhaps even the news that “today is another day, here we are on planet earth” is enough cause for celebration on this fragile and delicate planet. Poised between destruction and regeneration, death and life, at every level. Finding this balance point is where life flows with the most juice. Sitting in the centre where all things are balanced, everything in its rightness. Me in the midst of it, and it in the midst of me. Open-minded and open-hearted.