Will the future be as frightening as some of our visions?
Sometimes the visions we see when we meditate on the future are dark and scary. But dark and scary is not how the future usually turns out.
If you look back at our more negative visions over the past six years, and then track how they unfolded over time, you may notice that the future is rarely as bad as it seems when you read about it.
In other words, psychic visions of the future usually look much scarier than they will turn out to be when they unfold.
Why is that?
I have noticed from tracking our visions that they often later manifest in the media, sometimes word for word.
So, are we seeing actual future events or are we seeing future public perception of events that is formed by the media? Is there a difference?
The media brings stories into our living rooms and make us feel like they are happening to us directly. The result is that we end up experiencing world events more in our imaginations than in our everyday lives.
So are our visions of the future really just media coverage? Not exactly, but that is definitely part of it. Many of the visions we have do happen in the future, but they often fit the media’s warning and spin on those events rather than most people’s personal experiences. The media focuses on threat, and when it comes to politics, it focuses on warnings. Warnings are helpful for correcting the path we are on rather than what will actually happen. So be careful about overreacting with fear. Readings of the future are not exactly the future. They are more like, “Hey, look out, slow down, there’s a sharp curve in the road up ahead!” Or, “watch out for that guy, he’s up to no good!” These are warnings about what is up ahead, not what will happen to you personally.
On the other hand, most of these frightening events do happen directly to some people, and those people’s suffering bear hearing about. We are all connected to each other, so when some people suffer, we can feel it, and, for the good of all, we send care and compassion to them. When we can, we work to alleviate their suffering. So it is good that we aware of it. But if you are going to become terrified about predictions, including predictions in the news, remember the stories of the future may not affect you individually and directly. And just focus on the positive predictions we have. They are the developments that are growing beneath the surface of the darker stuff. They are real. So take them into your heart.
I sat through Hurricane Sandy and the 10 feet of New England snowfall in 2015, as well as the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing. My personal experience of these events was not what the media described, although I felt bad for the victims.
Regarding the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013, I lived through it as a resident of Boston. I was surprised that it happened, was sorry for the victims, shocked that the authorities would close the greater metropolitan area roads and highways in order to catch the perpetrators. Throughout it all, I never felt fear for myself or my family.
People did suffer and lost loved ones. Some were afraid, and we felt for those people. But the media distorted what life was really like here for 99.9 percent of the population. Throughout all of these events, friends contacted us asking us if we were all right. “Of course, we are all right!” we told them, surprised that they asked. The media has everyone thinking that the pain from these events was ubiquitous.
Regarding the intense storms we experienced here. We felt bad for those who suffered direct losses and tragedy, but all that snow, wind, and rain was actually fun for most people here personally.
My point is that when we are reading the future, we do pick up the media’s interpretation of events and the majority of the population’s media-based distorted perception rather than how most people will actually experience those events. Thus it looks like the world will be much more painful than it actually will be.
Does that mean that reading the future is a waste of time? No. If as a collective people, we see the warning signs of our path, then we can change our path. Warnings are an important part of survival.
Just how close to the media reports are our visions of the future?
Often word for word. However, often we don’t consciously know what the warning is actually about, even when we are able to describe it in fragments. I believe we have an unconscious sense of it when we read it, and thus perhaps we are averting the danger unconsciously. But many of the predictions are hard to interpret. Sometimes, however, they are crystal clear. And everyone is forwarned. However, becasue these events haven’t happened yet, we always live with uncertainty about them.
For example, in April 2012, I had posted these visions for December 2012: “Tears,” and “Children in a line.” That turned out to be the incredibly horrific mass shooting of young children and four adults in Newtown, Connecticut. The event prompted tears all over the world, not just in neighboring states. At the time, I heard from a friend in Spain that her friends who don’t speak English and have never been to the U.S., were all sobbing over the Newtown mass shooting.
The “Children in a line” image that we’d seen had become the universal image for this tragic event – an image of two school teachers leading frightened children all in a line, out of the school. Like so many other visions we’ve had, we were clearly envisioning the media coverage and the public’s response to it.
You can check for more examples by comparing the visions with the media reports here.
Still the future we are seeing isn’t exactly and entirely just media reports. Many of the events we are seeing do end out happening, and people do experience them. So what exactly are we seeing when we have visions of the future?
I believe we are reading the collective nervous system of our culture, similar to what Carl Jung termed the collective conscience. I feel we are picking up images that appear in the public conscience, and feeling the emotions that people share In aggregate.
To pick up these feelings and images, there probably has to be enough people feeling them, so events that don’t spark a large public response don’t send out a loud enough signal for us to detect them.
This phenomenon brings us to the question of what is reality?
Is reality merely consciousness or is there an objective reality?
That question goes to the heart of all our readings and visions. It is one of the ultimate life mysteries. While that topic is too complex to cover here, let’s just say for now, that reality is not what we think it is and that it’s tangled with human perception, which is affected by the media.
Sometimes we see visions of events that don’t make a big splash in the popular media, like the discovery of a queen’s tomb next to King Tut or an astrophysicists’ discovery about the origin of the universe — important public events but not events that dominate the general public’s imagination. So why did those less popular events fall under our radar?
My theory is that we are seeing events that are pertinent to the direction our world is headed, even if the public doesn’t realize it.
So if we start to consider all of our visions as a group, we might be able to get a message about the direction of our world.
Perhaps we envisioned the King Tut discovery of his queen, for example, because our world is becoming more matriarchal, so it’s time for his queen to make an appearance to us!
My hope is that by continuing to post our visions, we will begin to see a pattern of the future that will guide us to a better world in the same way that self awareness enables a person to see their inner selves more clearly and avoid pitfalls, and evolve. Perhaps the result will be a kind of healing for the collective imagination.
Another factor is that we acclimatize to changes in our world over time.
So far, I’ve said that part of the negativity of our visions is the media’s ability to make people feel that events are worse than they are. Once those visions actually unfold, we may have acclimatized to our changed world over time.
Changes don”t come all at once in an Armageddon way. This brings up images of the proverbial frog sitting in hot water who doesn’t get out even though the water gets hotter until poor little froggy is boiling.
If we were to have read back in 1970 that in 2016 13,000 Americans would be murdered from shootings, that there would be 372 mass shootings, 73,000 would be injured from guns, random terrorist attacks would be occurring all over the world, and that civil strife in America would be highest since the American Civil War, I think we’d all expect to be running around terrified like Chicken Little. But hopefully, now that 2016 is here, that is not how you all feel today.
We’ve also seen some equally positive changes in our world since 1970 which the media doesn’t generally acknowledge. Studies show that people as a whole are living longer, and we are experiencing a higher standard of living worldwide. There is, for example, a greater consciousness today about the plight of the poor, a respect for the dignity and rights of animals, and a rising peace movement. I believe that the changes we are seeing up ahead involve the falling away of an old way of life that we’ve outgrown, followed by a new more evolved level of existence.
This from Belinda B.: What I am not always certain of is “why” we are picking up a particular piece of information? Is it weighted more heavily in the collective? Does it apply in some way to our own life at that moment? I too have dreamt (that is my way of seeing the future at the moment) – and have seen the exact happening word for word 1 to many days later in the news. You are correct, by the time the event does occur, we have acclimated somewhat… I also feel as though at times dreams exaggerate in order to get our attention. Many more thoughts – but I will spare you!
REPLY: Thank you for these thoughts. First of all, we pick up the information that we individually are interested in. I tend to see the environment or natural world, spiritual messages about the path of our civilization, the power struggles of political leadership that in turn affect the natural environment, the economy, the nervous system of the collective, and the energies that will heal as well as harm our world. One of my most talented group members, Yakeo, also sees politics as well as terrorism, the security of Israel, the economy, and the plight of everyday people. Some people focus more on celebrity news – I notice this with some of the high profile celebrity psychics. Secondly, we may be picking up the issues that we personally are going to be encountering in the future, so we are possibly seeing our own future. One of my students never sees anything about the greater world, only about her own life in the future. Perhaps she’s not really interested in world affairs so she’s not going to see it. Thirdly, the event has to give off some substantial energy for us to detect it over the hum of thoughts out there. The Global Consciousness Project has shown that thoughts give off energy that can be detected if there are enough of them. So I think we need a significant number of people to be thinking about a subject for it to send a wave big enough for us to pick it up in our visions. The media helps with this, but the downside is that we may be missing important events that the media misses. Lastly, yes, I do think that some visions, including dreams, come through extra loud to get our attention. As if someone out there is trying to guide us. When we are really in need of a message, and when we are in crisis, some of the most powerful messages come through very loudly.