“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
 — Bertrand Russell

In the past few years, various events from US elections to a pandemic to a war have triggered a whole lot of fear and panic that are spreading rapidly around the globe. There is speculation about whether or not we’re going to be annihilated for one reason or another, including the extreme decisions that have been taken — and the global response to them.

Many people have become immersed in that fear, and have taken to living on their social media feeds, checking for the latest, wondering if the red button is about to be pushed and reading the countless angry, fearful messages that others are posting. The news is full of disturbing stories, many of which include issues of discrimination in one way or another, stories about the worst that humanity has to offer.

And when that discrimination comes from the so-called leader of the most powerful country in the world as it did when a certain person was in power — and horrifyingly might have another shot at it — it reeks of 1930s Germany and the fear and hatred that resulted in a World War and the mass murder of millions in the form of the Holocaust.

And as if all of this isn’t enough, there are terrible acts against crowds of people, whether it’s mowing them down with a bus or shooting at them in a nightclub where they’re trapped like fish in a bowl.

Even here in Calgary, a city that used to feel pretty darned safe as far as big cities go, there’s a shocking number of murders and deaths of children at the hands of their parents. There is just so much negativity in our environment — and we can get sucked into it like a drain swirling into a sewer.

One of the many problems with this is that we don’t always see that it’s happening. When it comes to the Dark side of life, we can be like moths to a flame. And we don’t understand the negative impact that it’s having on our lives.

Suddenly, all of this fearful, angry negativity is the main topic of discussions around dinner tables and the proverbial water cooler. The more we talk about it, the more we stir up the fear. It’s a bit like throwing some bloody fish parts into a shark tank and starting a feeding frenzy.

We know that every human choice comes from a place of either love or fear, and although love is far more powerful, it doesn’t feel that way when you’re up to your eyeballs in fear.

Sure, it’s an instinctive emotion that is designed to keep us safe. So it’s easy to pay attention to it and respond either defensively — or offensively — or both. But when we do that, it just breeds more fear and there you go, you’re circling the sewer drain again.

Added to this is the overwhelming sense of helplessness that many people in the world are feeling. They stand about, wringing their hands and yelling that the sky is falling, and there’s nothing they can do. They feel disempowered, which only breeds more fear.

But what’s going on in the world is really just an expression of what’s going on in our own hearts and minds, and in our homes and families. What’s going on globally is just the manifestation of our own experience on an individual level.

Now I’m not suggesting that we are all discriminating against immigrants or setting off missiles or starting wars. But how we respond to events, whether they’re on a global scale or in our personal lives, is going to have a ripple effect. Drop a boulder in the centre of a lake; eventually, those ripples will hit the shore.

When we see video of people shooting into crowds, or world leaders having childish tantrums and not playing at all nicely with the other kids in the sandbox, what is it that makes some of us need to see every single disturbing moment over and over again?

How many times and for how many years have we been watching those planes smash into the towers? What makes anyone watch videos of beheadings? Why on earth would people choose to immerse themselves in the Darkness and negativity of fear and trauma, when it feels so terrible??

And we wonder why stress is responsible for more than 50% of the deaths in our culture. It’s one thing to be informed; it’s another to spend a huge chunk of your time overdosing on the miseries of the world.

Is it because people are addicted to fear? Or rather, to the adrenalin rush that comes from hearing every single, horrifying detail of the awfulness that we are inflicting on one another these days? That fear that something might happen to us or to the people we love — it is so powerful. As you sit and listen to the evil that is perpetrated on human beings and by human beings, it is really frightening.

On an equally toxic level are many of the reality TV shows that are being touted as entertainment. I watch the adverts for The Real Housewives of some city or other and just laugh. First of all, I’m sure I can think of numerous better ways to spend my valuable minutes. But Real Housewives? Are you kidding me? I can assure you that when I was married and raising five children, I was definitely not like any of those housewives, and nor were the other housewives I knew in all those years.

And then there’s Big Brother — and shows about Little People and families with lots of babies or people who weigh 600 pounds, or who are hoarders to a destructive extreme, and on and on and on. Have we really become so disconnected with ourselves that we have to be mired in the miseries and challenges of other people’s lives? Is this to make us feel better about our own?

Or is it with some misguided notion that these shows add anything to our lives or can help us in some way?

Or maybe that’s just the excuse we use to justify watching them.

Much of what goes on in those shows involves inane chatter or a lot of arguing, swearing, and people demonstrating a significant lack of respect for themselves and others. Especially shows like Maury or Jerry Springer. I fail to see how watching them can possibly add anything positive or meaningful to our lives. In fact, it does exactly the opposite.

Why are we so attracted to it? Why is television dominated by a plethora of options to view society at its worst?

It seems that a huge segment of the population has slid into a place of choosing to demonstrate — and appreciate — the very worst that we, as a civilisation, can be. And the more people there are who encourage it by watching it, talking about it or participating in it in any way, the more we are focusing on the dark side of humanity. And the more energy we give it, the more of it we get.

When it comes to what we see, our bodies can’t tell the difference between real and fake. So that even when we watch fictional television shows that depict the worst that we bring to the planet, we are just as profoundly negatively affected as if we are watching the real thing.

When we watch CSI or a film about a murder and we hear screams and witness violence, our bodies respond very powerfully and negatively to it as if those situations were happening in our own living rooms.

No amount of telling ourselves, “It’s just pretend” will make a difference. We are flooded with stress hormones and become overloaded with cortisol, which causes no end of damage to every single cell in our bodies. It’s a major cause of degenerative diseases that are killing millions of people around the world.

Then we watch the news and hear stories of violence, aggression and pain. And we watch not just once but over and over again. And our bodies respond accordingly to that too, even if we’re not fully aware. Those images, those messages, and the negative emotions that go with them will trigger the same stress response. Adrenalin courses through our veins. Cortisol is deposited into our bloodstreams. Blood pressure and heart rate increase. Damage is being done.

It’s one thing if you feel a need to stay informed about world events and local happenings. But what I don’t understand is the need to watch them over and over again, or to watch all of the news, read all of the papers, check social media repeatedly for updates, and then discuss all that misery at length with others.

And if we’re not addicted to the fear or the adrenalin rush, then perhaps we’re paying attention to all of this negativity because it gives us a false sense that we have some measure of control. Somehow, we think that if we know about all of this awfulness, we’re prepared in some way and have a shot at preventing it. Better the devil that you know, perhaps?

But control is an illusion. Of course, there are certain elements of our lives that we can usually control such as choice of clothing or what we’re going to eat and some of the bigger choices, too, like the jobs we’ll have or the homes we’ll live in.

But those choices can be taken from us when the universe decides otherwise. You decide what to wear to work and then spill egg down the front of it at breakfast. You get out of bed intending to go to work but slip halfway down the stairs and break your leg, sending you to hospital for surgery and a cast.

There is really very little about our lives that we can truly control. You make a plan and do your best, but you never know when there will be that moment in which you go from “Everything’s fabulous in my world” to getting a phone call and hearing that your life has just been blown to smithereens.

Still, many of us have a relentless need to try to control the uncontrollable, and in part, overdosing ourselves in knowing every miserable detail about the world makes us think we are prepared for the enemy and — well, we’re informed so we’re going to be fine. 🤦🏻‍♀️

So diving into the dark can make us think we’re keeping ourselves informed and being enlightened — but there’s a big difference between that and sliding into a vat of misery. One has everything to do with the Light. The other, quite simply, does not.

Unfortunately, much of the drivel that we call entertainment has become nothing more than watching other people live their lives and we’re not living our own. We are so busy watching the telly or sticking our noses into facebook and other social media, staring at phones when we’re with friends or family, locking ourselves away in separate corners of the house watching one screen or another, that we’re not connecting with each other any more in a meaningful way.

Whole relationships are built and destroyed via text or email, rarely even hearing the other person’s voice. And then there’s technology that lets us pretend we’re playing tennis or we’re bowling or dancing or whatever else you can do on those things purportedly “with” someone else.

But what you really get are two people standing side by side, staring at a screen and trying to mimic what they see, rather than facing each other and interacting with another person and feeling it and experiencing it by actually playing a sport or going to a dance club and just letting loose to some great music.

I look at all of this — from immersing ourselves in the negativity and problems in the world and our lives, to the mindless voyeuristic toxicity-driven, anger-laden drivel that we call entertainment, to our electronic and digital interactions with others — even when we are in the same house — and it is no surprise that it’s easy to slide away from the Light and into the Dark. If we’re doing it within ourselves, that’s going to manifest “out there” in the world at large.

When it comes right down to it, although it feels like much of this is beyond our control and we’re being pulled away from the Light, in reality it’s just indicative of our choice to leave it behind.

Why do we do that? There are as many answers to that as there are people on the planet but I suspect one big reason is it’s just easier than staying connected.

Or at least, it seems easier, but there’s a consequence down the road when eventually, you’ve drifted so far away from living in the Light that it can feel like a long way back. You can just float through your life doing what you do and not bother with changing negative thoughts into positive ones, and not bother with meditation or with any form of spiritual practice. It’s easy to become complacent and just think, “Yeah, I’m okay, I’m a spiritual person and I’ve got it covered.”

But have you really?

“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.”
 — Rudyard Kipling

In my 25-ish years as a homeopath, I’ve seen countless patients who have come to me to get rid of their suicidal depression, anxiety disorders, or anger management issues that are adversely affecting their lives on a daily basis. Many of them are dwelling more on their problems than on the solutions. And some of them tell me “I’m a spiritually connected person and I can’t figure out why I feel this way!”

That’s easy. It’s because there’s a difference between being spiritually awake or aware, and being spiritually connected.

You are only connected as long as you are making a conscious effort to stay that way. It’s when we let that connection slide by not meditating, or by not being in ongoing conscious communication with our Highest Selves and with Spirit, that’s when we run into trouble. Fear kicks in and manifests in all kinds of unpleasant ways.

But that’s your Ego’s job. It knows you live in a physical world and so it wants to protect you from the dangers that lurk nearby. And that’s why all of these external, environmental and global uncertainties and events trigger fear. These situations feel so big and so scary, they leave us feeling like we have no control over what happens.

So what can we do to stop circling that sewer drain and stay in the Light?

Plenty.

In his book, the Divine Matrix, Gregg Braden talks about a man from Barbados simply known as Neville. He was a 20th century visionary and one of his books, called the Power of Awareness, was published in 1961. In it, he suggests that everything that is done to us or by us is the product of our consciousness.

Experimental evidence shows that we are creating the universe as we go, and adding to whatever exists. We are the very energy that is creating the cosmos, as well as experiencing what we are creating. This is because we are consciousness, which — according to experiments — is the “stuff” from which the universe is made.

Einstein struggled when confronted with evidence that matter changes when we simply observe it. He said, “I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.”

However, experiments in the quantum realm clearly show that consciousness has a direct effect on the most elementary particles of creation. And we are the source of that consciousness.

John Wheeler, who was one of Einstein’s colleagues and a professor emeritus at Princeton, did studies that suggest the world is created by consciousness itself, a process Wheeler called a participatory universe.

He said, “…the very building materials of the universe are these acts of observer-participancy.” He goes on to say that if the building materials are made from our observation and our participation, then there must be something there with which we can create, a sort of universal play dough.

Further experiments have proven the existence of that “something.” It exists everywhere, between all things, and connecting all things.

In the interests of brevity, I’ll have to sum up the results of the research that supports this theory, but here’s one example. In a paper that appeared in the U.S. in 1995, there was a report about the work of a quantum biologist and his colleagues at the Russian Academy of Sciences. They proved that DNA directly affects the physical world through what they believed was a previously unrecognised field of energy connecting the two.

So we know that there is a lot more than air between us; there is a field of some kind, a field that is not separate from us, but of which we are a part, as is everything else in existence. And we are not just a part of it, we have an effect on it.

Those of us who are spiritually oriented believe that everyone and everything in the universe is connected and now science is proving it. No one can call it “woo woo” anymore!

In other research, there was proof beyond any reasonable doubt that human emotion has a direct effect on the way our cells function in our bodies.

Based on the results of these experiments, the US Army did their own investigations, wondering if living DNA would still be impacted by emotion, either positively or negatively, when tissue samples were taken from donors.

In a 1993 study reported in a journal called “Advances,” they used tissue swabs from the mouth of a donor, and put the samples in another room, hundreds of feet away from where the donor was. The donor was then subjected to images that would evoke various emotions, and the DNA was measured electrically at the same time. It showed peaks and dips that exactly matched the donor’s changes in emotion.

Later, they did the same test but when the DNA samples were 350 miles away from their donors. And not only did they get the same results, they happened instantaneously.

These experiments suggest four things:

• A previously unrecognised form of energy exists between living tissues

• Cells and DNA communicate through this energy.

• Human emotion has a direct influence on living DNA

• Distance appears to be of no consequence with regard to that effect

Then, of course, we have the studies done by the organisation called the Institute of HeartMath. Their research has proven that the human heart has an electromagnetic field of energy that is between five and eight feet in diameter.

Again, in the interests of brevity, I must sum up the results of their experiments on the heart and emotions, but they proved that human emotion changed the shape of DNA without anyone or anything touching it. Further, different intentions produced different effects in the winding and unwinding of the DNA.

So what has all of this got to do with the topic of this article?

Everything.

We are absolutely, undeniably connected to everyone and everything in the universe — and our thoughts, our emotions and our intentions have a profound and immediate impact on not just our own lives but on the world as a whole.

And it proves that when we are focusing on the Dark side of life, whether in the events of the macrocosm of the globe or the microcosm of our own lives, our physical health and wellbeing are directly and immediately impacted negatively.

Therefore, because we are all connected to one another in a much more physical way than we might have imagined, what affects one of us truly does affect all of us, whether for good or otherwise.

We are magnificently, frighteningly powerful creators and I put it that way because we have the power to create in the most amazingly wonderfully positive ways, just as we have an equal power to create in the most terrible, negative and destructive ways.

Every single thought makes a difference, whether in yourself, in your home or the world. Every single thought presents an opportunity to create change, and to influence and affect outcomes, whether in your own life, the life of someone who needs an ear, or somewhere on the planet.

So every time you hear a bit of news that makes you think the sky is surely about to fall, or Armageddon is happening a week from Thursday after dinner, or your neighbour wants to sit and moan about the same old miseries that she refuses to change, you have choices to make.

You can reduce the amount of time you spend watching or listening to the news. I refuse to watch it or read the papers. I hear enough of the highlights from friends.

“Laughter is poison to fear.”
 — George R.R. Martin

You can avoid your social media news feeds, where you get not only the global misery but there are those people with a victim mentality who constantly whine and complain about all the awfulness in their lives, even the most miserable little details of things going wrong for them as if their lives would end.

Instead, make a point of going to the posts of people you can count on to be uplifting and positive. Better yet, have less screen time and more actual people time or go hug a tree or something.

You can make a point of spending time with like-minded people who have a positive outlook.

And as the saying goes, you can be the change you wish to see. Send only positive thoughts and imagery into any situation that disturbs you, whether it’s in your home, your circle of friends, your community or the world at large. Talk about this with like-minded people. Perhaps start a regular group in which everyone agrees to spend five minutes a day at an appointed time, sending positive energy and Light into a worrying situation.

We knew it anyway, didn’t we, but science is proving how very powerfully connected all of us are to one another, not just when we’re together in a room but to everyone else on the planet, and to everything in it and beyond.

So whether there’s something going on globally that concerns you, or whether there’s a significant challenge in your own life, the change must begin inside each one of us. The world is in its current state — both the good and the bad — because of the people who have lived in it and the choices they have made. The frightening parts feel beyond our control at times — but clearly, they are not — not if we pull together as a society, as a planet, and keep working to create ever larger pockets of positivity until we reach the tipping point and the pendulum swings back toward the Light.

What’s going on “out there” has begun “in here” with individuals, with people just like you.

Humanity is just one spiritual community, whether or not all of its members are aware of that. When we choose to see it, our world is a source of nourishment and fulfilment and strength. It is a source of Light and Love, both of which are given freely. It is up to us to allow ourselves to share and receive them, and to continue to share that Light and that Love in the lives we live outside of the walls of our homes and our own circles of friends, and in the world in any way that we can.

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Feeling stuck? Need guidance or a Tarot reading to help you with clarity?

Spiritual Arts Mentor and Master Teacher, Liberty Forrest, guides you in discovering who you are, why you’re here, and how to follow that path.

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