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.