Each one with their own personality, views, ideals, wants, and a particular way of presenting themselves, creating their own ‘Branding‘ as it were. Family structure, branding, a bigger set of people to manage, each person being audience and participant during their life. And that structure can be said of both an individual person and of corporations. A carefully managed image, and in some cases, facade, to appear to be a certain way to elicit a response, reaction and following from a desired group.

And as the years have gone on, people have been pivotal in the influencing of society and ideals, starting with Early News, where the town crier would walk around shouting the news. To the crazy set up we have these days where it’s become that The News Is The News, with famous faces and names to keep you hooked and interested. Listening to the next thing they want to hear, want you to be aware of, want you to be thinking about. And until recently, these seemed like mostly like suggestions to tempt you into their world and mindset. Not anymore. If you don’t agree or think how they would like, you are accused of being disrespectful, violent or that you are attacking them. A difference of opinion is now viewed as a horrific afront on their very soul.

But today, more than ever, it seems certain people want you to be their audience. Some crave it, covet it, or yearn for it, seemingly in need of that attention to be able to function, perhaps feeling as though they ‘don’t exist’ unless someone is watching them. And that’s what we might call ‘ordinary’ people, and given how that now appears, it also gives a bit more insight into how ‘celebrities’ or people well to the public possibly function. When the ego is massive, yet incredibly fragile and prone to a lack of perspective. It seems to be able to happen across the board, in institutions as well entertainment and the general population.

People are now props too, and have been for some time. As you would expect in a set design, or background items needed for effect. But instead of a object for marketing or a set, or a scene being used, it is people. Crisis actors, presenters, influencers and many others across the whole ‘Entertainment’ industry as mentioned in Are You Not Entertained?. Where they become useful as a tool for purpose, but because they get to ‘live the dream’, they seem quite happy to be there shaking their money maker with tassels and sequins. Props for propaganda.

They say when it comes to our own lives, we have four important roles to ‘play’. Each of us is the main actor, the director and the writer of our own story, often then playing a supporting role as well as an extra to other people’s, just as they are to ours. Interwoven into each other’s existence and experience, making it up as we go along as there is no script to follow, or time to do any reshoots. It happens as it happens. But if you take one or more of those roles out of play, either by choice or by circumstance, it changes it. Someone else wants to be the director now, and if you have ever had an overcontrolling person in your life, then you know how that feels. And someone else now wants to be the writer, telling you how you should act and think, no longer allowing for any natural thought or flair. And in fact, they have decided you are even good enough to be the starring role in your own life, and have minimised your part to be only that of an extra. In the background until needed, when the others that now decide your role, move you up front for purpose and micromanaging you the entire time. A rather intimate overreach into everything you do, or at least that’s what they would like.

But the people who appear to be wanting that, seem to be props as well. A mouthpiece for an ideal, no individualism, no creativity and no inspiration. Just a large media machine in overdrive, trying to grab your attention, for something, for anything. War, plague, food shortages, cyber-attacks, weather, violence and anything else they can think of to capture your thoughts. It’s become extremely tiresome for many, and others are perhaps so caught up in it, they don’t take a moment to step back and really look at the bigger picture. Of how they fit into it, how many people are part of that media machine, feeding the fears and helping to whip people into a frenzy. Any frenzy will do it seems, as long as it stresses people out, emotionally drains them and keeps them waiting for the next storyline, so they can go round in circles of doom. As discussed in Ready for Doom and Prepped For Disaster, Or Clever Programming?. Now though, many have doom fatigue as it’s been relentless if you watch the news or pay attention to what apparently is going by way of their headlines and what gets trotted out via social media. Now with AI generated clips to muddy the waters of what is real and what isn’t, showing we have been vulnerable to having our senses exploited for quite some time. We are no longer in a time where Seeing is Believing when it comes viewing things on a screen, what is fact and what is fiction is not such an easy task to discern anymore, if it ever was. These are indeed some strange times and we do well to remember, all is not as it seems…

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A reading of my article – What Separates Us?

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A Reading of my article – Weather It’s A Good Idea

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When you start to see a number of articles, with similar headlines all pushing towards one overall theme, it sometimes can’t help but be noticed. And it has already been noticed that interracial couples are now the mainstream for advertisers, despite it not being the majority in any part of the UK at this time. The latest, still with use of interracial couples, is for spouse sharing, and apparently the encouragement for it or for people to start thinking it will be a marital boost or something, I didn’t feel the need to read the articles as I don’t subscribe to The Guardian which is where I think they mainly occurred. Because anything that is published and pushed to the forefront by MSM has an agenda, even if it is just simply to sell newspapers or subscriptions, it has an ulterior motive than just passing on or sharing useful information or opinions. People get paid to have them, so you need to always question if that information is really aimed at helping or genuinely advising people, and most of them time you can come to a very quick and short answer of no.

Not that you need MSM articles to see that something has gone very wrong with people, particularly it seems the paring up and partnership aspect. With deviance being promoted at every turn, all sorts of drugs available to suppress your natural instincts, a murky world of internet dating and porn, as well as financial struggles putting an enormous burden on people with stresses and strains not conducive with being stable and emotionally focused. There seems to be much talk online of people in the up to 30 age bracket, who can’t afford kids, can’t afford to move out of home, or have ended up extremely isolated and don’t have any prospects of even meeting someone, let along being to do anything about moving up that ‘family ladder’ we are biologically programmed to seek. I can see why there are lots of frustrations and sadness occurring around that. Either being held back or held down for so long during your life, is a certain type of cruelty, and one that is bad enough as a child, waiting to ‘grow up’ in the eyes of the law, in the eyes of society and by the rules set, whether you fit with them or not. But now, it’s almost as if those rules have been extended well into your adult life. With the general infantilising of the population as discussed in Holding Us Back, and after years of articles aimed at people about feeling guilty for being alive, don’t have too many children, are you killing the planet? Well, not towards everyone, there does appear to be opposing headlines depending on what ethnicity they happen to writing about. And that too has been noticed.

But when it comes to sharing partners, that is not new thing, wife swapping, swingers parties, and threesomes for example. Not that it was deemed ‘socially acceptable’ to everyone and wasn’t usually openly discussed so much when I was growing up. Now it seems everything is to be discussed, and looked at, whether you want to or not or have an interest or not. Where what used to be called private and behind closed doors is no longer so, and you are now seen as weird if you don’t want someone else’s sex life and personal desires ‘shoved down your throat’, for want of a better saying. Where it seems like part of their desire is to have everyone know about it, or for some strange reason, it becomes their entire personality, both men and women, and straight and gay. Although in recent years it has been all about being gay, with a whole month dedicated to it, marches and parades, merchandise and what not. It’s become quite the spectacle, and not very savoury on the eyes in any format. But that in itself doesn’t really bother me personally, if I don’t want to see it, I don’t go, and I am not forced to view pictures online, so don’t have to see it. But to have that kind of inner desire and wants, so publicly displayed, is of interest. Why people want to do that, I presume it’s because part of their desire is to have observers to it, where your participation as the viewer gives them an extra thrill, that clearly cannot be obtained ‘behind closed doors’.

And the overall competition between men and women generally has become a rather strange arena, with a possible alternative to women being pushed in the technological and AI circles, covered in Robotic Affection and A Robotic Future. As well as all sorts of other category changes, new definitions and laws, mostly not in favour of women, a word now quite under discussion with many people suddenly unable to define it, explain it or even recognise it. Yet in the past decades, it has been very well defined for purpose, with the suffragettes, the feminist movement, women and equal pay, women’s rights and so on, all very much centred around women, who seemingly made changes within those areas. However, it’s all gone rather wrong as discussed in A Strange Affair, Competing for Top Spot and Who’s Got the Biggest… where it doesn’t seem to matter whether you play by the rules or try to understand the set-up, because as soon you do, they change the rules, move the goalposts and rearrange the set-up. And I don’t doubt there are many people who partake in what we call ‘alternative’ relationships, and find their way to these things because that’s what they are or what they like, not because an article was written about it. But perhaps they might think that gives the green light to indulge or puts the idea in a mind where it shouldn’t have been, who can know for sure how many people have truly been influenced by merely an article, because someone somewhere said it was true. Fantasy and reality usually seem so very separate most of the time, but around this subject, people really do like to blur the lines…

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A reading of my article – Seeing Yourself

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That subject that is speculated upon, the wonderings of where it all leads, is there something after this mortal existence, is there a life after death? We’ve probably just grossly misnamed the term, because by doing that we separate the experience so completely, it is almost out of our comprehension to understand what it might be. Believing ‘life’ to end at death, and then ‘afterlife’ to begin, rather than it be a transitional phase, but we don’t give much time to ‘beforelife’ it seems. Thinking perhaps that we just spontaneously start at conception, or birth, although ones who lean towards reincarnation being real have given thought to that side of it, as discussed in Simulated, Again and Again, and Deja Vu.

Afterlife – but we do seem to spend time thinking about what comes next, we write about it, talk about it, make films and fictional representations of the ideas of it. Some quite dark and disturbing, others full of charm and brightness. Although not everyone is ok with the subject, or entertaining the thought of it, which could be a response to the idea of mortality and how they say it follows us throughout our life. I guess for some it is a companion accompanying you on your journey and will be with you to the end, and others maybe see it as an evil stalker waiting for its moment to strike and end your time.

Ghosts – Further to the thoughts of where we go after this life, it seems there are others that have already made it, or are trapped in between here and there depending on the context of their ‘haunting’. Discussed in Lost Souls, or Just Trapped?, giving examples of how we have created some rather sinister and morbid visuals to go along with the concept, which just might of led into people forming certain beliefs about their own trajectory.

Rent a ghost (TV series 1976 – 1984)- this was a strange and funny TV series I watched as a child, of bored ghosts and mishaps, with them ‘working’ as ghosts for rent if you needed a haunting. Things like this are what started to get me wondering about it all, and then many things I watched thereafter.

Flatliners (1990) – one of my favourites, not just because it’s a great film, but because it touched upon the idea that everyone’s experience is entirely personal, to who you were, what you did and how you thought. There is the theory that hell is only created in the mind, so if you believe it, you create it. See my article Creating a Nightmare Reality for a bit more on how our thoughts might just have more power that we realise.

Beetlejuice – mentioned a number of times in various articles, this film made quite an impact for its various ideas around the afterlife. With the surprised and newly departed lead couple, and seasoned afterlifers with their different reasons for being there. Like the receptionist said ‘It’s all very personal’ pointing out the shrunken head, the smoker, and then revealing her own fate of tied to civil service because of her own ‘little accident’ of suicide. Giving us an idea of judgement in some way depending on how we met our end, as if we are assigned certain fates based on how we lived. A spiritual credit score that you can’t escape.

Ghostbusters – another great film for many reasons, and has given me much food for thought over the years around this subject. But the recent ones, although not quite up the standard of the originals, still do hold a certain interest, especially because they focused more on what they do with them. Extracting them from objects, then putting them in holding cells, as well as obviously their overall containment facility. And another film comes to mind along that line of thought, and a film I should probably watch again for an updated view on it as it was many years ago I watched it, but it was quite freaky, and although I thoroughly enjoyed the idea and it was technically a good movie, I did not thoroughly enjoy watching it. But that film was Thirteen Ghosts.

If you’ve ever seen the old Victorian photographs of the paranormal spiritualist movement and time, you may have come across ones which appear to show faces and spectral shapes forming within contraptions of wires and frames. Trying to bring spirits through to this realm, and photograph them. You can see how we might have ended up at such films as mentioned above, with much thought clearly being given to what is next, what came before and what it all means. But the overall similarity in many of those themes, is that it isn’t separated from here and now, and isn’t ‘after’ life. That whatever happens to our energy doesn’t always go to or stay on that ‘Other Side’, that it can be here, watching or having its own existence with no care or concern of ours or even any knowledge of us, just as we don’t of them. Thinking all we can see is all there is to see, as discussed in Seeing is Believing, not realising that there is so much more around you. And you never know, even right at this moment something could be sat right next to you…

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A reading of my article – A Prime Choice

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Or at least that’s what we used to say. You can trust your eyes and seeing is believing is what we were told, and that may be true to a point when you are looking directly at something with your own eyes, in the flesh as you might say. Not with a barrier or screen in the way. However, it is said that a witness is the weakest form of evidence, our eyes and mind can play tricks on us, the memory can distort, revise, forget things or just completely make things up, so should we really believe what we see? Even something that seems simple like colour, it not As It Seems, with some people what we call colour blind, who have a different range of what colours they can distinguish. But turns out that even what we considered ‘normal’ for colour isn’t, looked at more closely in my article Seeing Colours.

It really does depend what goes on in mind, when you consider they say our outward view of the world is a projection of all the input we receive from external stimuli, which is then processed internally to form that view.

In my article What You See, it discusses different versions of a veiled reality, viewable by way of sunglasses, mirrors and certain viewing tools, which give us the idea that we are not seeing all that is there to see. That we are hampered with our limited scope of view and require something extra to allow us a window or A Portal of sorts into that ‘other world’ that is happened around us, not just alongside us in some parallel dimension, although it is said that is occurring too.

Another one that turned out to be quite a fallacy is ‘the camera never lies’. Clearly, that was a lie to begin with, so that you believe what you think you are seeing. Which would greatly help to solidify a collective history, not just written, but with ‘evidence’ of the time, of the people, the story. And when some photographs look a bit off, or strange skies, or appear to be washed out, we just assume it is age and time and give it a pass. Allowing perhaps that original saying to do the thinking for us, and view the image as a Snapshot of reality, or what think was reality. Because we have seen it, or because we think we have seen it and cannot verify or check for ourselves. So, we allow ourselves to be deceived perhaps as it is easier than being left with nothing to work from or with.

People are known for Seeing Things Differently, having different viewpoints and opinions, and thinking in different ways. But to think so many are perceiving quite huge differences in thought, based on what they see, or think they see, then it makes it quite a feat that we even have a shared reality we mostly agree on. Or maybe that’s why it isn’t so cohesive anymore, because so much or what we are shown by way of a screen, is so heavily edited and manipulated, our skills or discernment haven’t quite caught up. Having had a rather long time to develop certain senses in person, for person-to-person contact, it seems we are bit naive and ill-equipped to deal with such a high volume of material, as well as the content of what we are told are people. With extra confusion entering the arena as mentioned in Seeing Double, Guess Who and Who’s Who?, of clones, masks, deception and other things to muddy the waters even further. And we knowingly allow ourselves to suspend reality for Music and Entertainment, thinking even then we know what we are seeing, because we have been told and are apparently ‘in’ on the illusion. And by volunteering our attention to it and playing our part as the audience, thinking we are separate and just watching, not quite realising that we too become part of the story…

(c) MKW Publishing