September 22 through September 29, 2013
Beloved,
A book I’m reading (E²: Nine Do-It-Yourself Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality by Pam Grout), a current entry on the New York Times Best Seller List, proposes that we see what our brains have been trained to see … what our parents and religions and experiences have taught us to see.
Yes, exactly! Of course! What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you throughout these dialogs? [Michael laughs.] Haven’t you been paying attention?
Well, I had always thought that we see what is right in front of us unless we are visually-impaired and that the evidence of our own eyes could not be compromised.
No! [Michael chuckles.] If that were true, all the witnesses to a car wreck would report the same details and sequence of events. If that were true, you would see me and all of the spiritual reality in which I currently dwell instead of the illusion you’ve been trained to pay attention to … to place your focus on. And we are circling back to FOCUS again, aren’t we? See how important it is? As we’ve said before, perspective is everything and perspective is just another word for the illusion you’ve been trained to focus on for most of your life. A slight shift in perspective … or focus … and you would see a much different world.
That’s what Neverland Valley Ranch was for … to help me … and everyone else who visited it … to navigate that slight shift in perspective that made miracles not only possible, but unavoidable. Within its gates, we created a world of infinite possibility from which one could choose to relive a lost childhood … or be well … or pet a llama. When I returned from a trip abroad and entered those gates, it was MAGIC! Whatever cares or worries held sway in my mind just disappeared, like the rabbit that vanishes from the magician’s hat. It doesn’t matter that the box had a mirror in it and that it was just an illusion … the world we see is also an illusion. Logical explanations and deconstructing the magic are also illusions. Illusions are just the opposite side of the coin to the one we place our attention on. To the person who stands on a beach in bright sunlight, darkness is an illusion … and vice versa.
The human brain is a little like a cable TV satellite. It picks up signals and transmits them to your sensory perception receptors. Now, imagine your brain floating around out there in space being bombarded by billions and billions of bits of information per second … hundreds of billions of bits … not per hour … not per mile … per second. Your human senses cannot handle that amount of information all at once. They would go bonkers.
Two thousand watts, Eight ohms, 200 volts, Real strong
Too much of that
Fuse blown
Be careful what you say
Don’t overload
Base note, treble, stereo control, how low you go
Just enough to make your juices flow
Press play, don’t stop, rotate, too hot
You feel I’m real
I’m everything you need, so tell me what’s the deal?
Its mission (should it choose to accept it) is to choose the relatively few bits of information that your sensory apparatus can wrap its mind around (you should pardon the expression) per second out of those hundreds of billions of bits of information that it receives … and send only its selections … which totals up to maybe one half of one percent of what it receives, if that … the tiniest fraction … to your sensory apparatus. You perceive only those bits of information. An infinite amount of information bypasses your senses every second of every day. A cable TV satellite does the same thing … it just chooses the signals which coincide with the channels you pay for every month on your cable bill. There are millions of signals but it only chooses the right ones to transmit to your receiver so that it can charge you for your usage.
What a great example! One of the examples Ms. Grout uses to illustrate her point is of a “young Philippine immigrant who moved to the United States … and it took her weeks, if not months, after she arrived to notice that some people here had red hair. Red hair was inconsistent with what she had been conditioned to see and expect. So for several months, she was subjectively blind to red hair, seeing it as the brunette of her culture.”
And the operative word in that sentence is ‘expect.’ Our expectations can help or hinder our achievement. Most of us never question our expectations and hold ourselves back by limiting what we think we can accomplish to what our culture has taught us we have a right to expect. We have the right to expect every promise and blessing our Creator has intended for us to enjoy, if we are willing to put in the effort to make it happen. But first, we have to become aware that there is more out there to expect … a rather large obstacle to overcome.
Another example she uses is that of the early immigrants to what has become known as the United States and their arrival on the shores of North America. The indigenous people had no experience of … and, therefore, no reference for … large-scale wooden ships sailing on the ocean. Their culture actually could not see those ships because they were so outside of their experience; they were selectively blind to them until their perception caught up with their reality.
Yes, it’s like the very high-pitched whistle that a dog can hear but humans can’t. Most of us have been trained since infancy to see and hear only what society approves for our consumption like the terrible things in the world that are broadcast on our news channels. We’ve been taught that the world is “unsafe” … that we are “inferior” … that we shouldn’t “expect” more than our neighbors or ancestors … that our “illness” or “appearance” or “race” or “economic status” limits our “life expectancy” or defines who we are and who and what we can become … that talking to invisible playmates is “wrong” … that childhood is only a prequel to adulthood so you better grow up fast … that there is no Santa Claus … that the physical, rational, sane reality fostered by the establishment is the only world that exists and anyone toying with thoughts of a spiritual reality, whatever form of play that ‘toying’ takes , is crazy or blasphemous and should be cast out or burned at the stake … that “play” is for children and “imagination” is only acceptable in dreams.
We’ve all been inundated with ideas like these for so long that we’ve become trained to accept them as our reality, to expect nothing else … to reject anything that doesn’t fit into that severely restricted view of reality and, as a result, we are conditioned to believe them. It’s like the lie that is told over and over again until everyone starts to believe it. Our eyes and ears see and hear only those things the establishment … or government … or church hierarchy … or media has deemed acceptable.
There is so much more out there that the human brain doesn’t send the signals for because it has been trained and conditioned to select only those ideas and thoughts that correlate to the established “norms.”
It’s like living your entire life in a small, rural town in Montana. You are told that there is a whole world out there with different customs and traditions and races and creeds in your classrooms, but you never, ever experience it because you are stuck in the culture of your small, rural community in Montana. If, by some chance, a representative of that ‘whole world’ wanders into your culture, it sends shock waves through your community because it has never experienced anything or anyone like this before and it has nothing with which to compare it.
So, we go through life perceiving it as being limited to a few short years … or a few square miles … and ourselves as being limited to what is expected of us by ourselves, first and foremost, which has been taught to us by our parents and teachers and society. As a result of this conditioning, we limit ourselves to those approved expectations and ambitions when, in fact, the possibilities are infinite and the impossible just takes a little longer, a little more effort and a lot more imagination. Oh, and let’s not forget practice, practice, practice …
I know … I know … until you get it right … and then practice some more until you get it beautiful.
[Michael laughs.] Good! You were listening!
Of course, I was listening, Michael!
Like you (at least, for most of your life), many of us never explore or question or imagine or discover that we are capable of so much more because we’re so busy judging ourselves by the measures we’ve been taught, conforming to expectations to squeeze ourselves into those parameters judged ‘acceptable’ by our culture and making a living instead of living a life. Plus, it would make some of us extremely uncomfortable to realize that the physical laws we depend upon everyday to keep us anchored to the ground and by which we define ourselves … like gravity and time and space … are all illusions.
I mean … just imagine that we could float off of the earth’s surface and play among the stars!
I’m Peter Pan
I can do anything
I soar so high
I am forever
Oh, my Dear One, I remember that interview outside of Hayvenhurst. Your joy was barely containable. I truly believed you could fly in that moment.
So did I! “Better not think too much about it … I might do it!” [Michael laughs.]
For some, that would be an uncomfortable feeling. It’s outside their comfort zone … you know, that box we all build around ourselves to help us cope with the sometimes desperate lives we live. Our culture encourages us to build those boxes … and to build them strong.
So, when we encounter someone who has refused to build a box around him or herself, we don’t know what to make of that … so, we help them out. We build them a box constructed of our own beliefs … our judgments … our expectations … and try to squeeze him or her into it. Too often this person who has failed to conform to our ideas and perceptions of what is ‘acceptable’ just plain doesn’t fit in the box we built to contain him, so he has to be discredited.
While I had read this concept before (i.e. Wayne W. Dyer’s wonderful book You’ll See It When You Believe It), I don’t believe I’ve ever had the point of an entire culture being selectively blind to something that is right before its eyes brought home to me in quite the same way as in the examples mentioned above and it tied in so well with other readings I’ve run across while keeping up on my favorite social networking sites.
For example, I also read a blog entry today from one of my favorite online bloggers that dealt with your beauty in the later years of your physical life. Like me, this blogger now thinks you are beautiful regardless of your age and sees your later years as no exception. However, she pointed to the reams and reams of misinformation that had been printed about your appearance as having brainwashed her into believing that you were cute as a “boy wonder” … and beautiful but non-threatening as a young adult. However, she had been led to believe that you were less attractive in the post-BAD eras by being brainwashed by the constant barrage of negative comment regarding your surgeries and photo-essays comparing your facial structure as a child with more recent pictures. They had her disbelieving the evidence of her own eyes in favor of believing that you were less attractive in later years based on their judgments and definitions, until shortly after The Day the Earth Stood Still when she encountered photographs of you during the early 2000’s that clearly show that the years had been a lot kinder to you than the media would have had us believe.
As I was reading her blog entry, the examples mentioned by Ms. Grout above came to my mind and I was somewhat stunned that my reading list … at least, currently … seems to be leading me in the same direction!
Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? [Michael laughs.]
I had often wondered how anyone could look at you and perceive something so totally different from what I was seeing! Well, this is how it happens! And I marveled anew at the injustice that has been done to the human race through this misinformation and propaganda overload. Through the use of poorly-lit, offensively-angled … and, even, crudely-edited … photographs, much of the world has been selectively blinded to any view other than the one proffered by the establishment (as represented by its media) … even though we are both looking at exactly the same thing.
We’ve been trained to sign on to the media’s view of what is considered acceptable behavior for a grown man; we’ve been told what is considered ‘attractive’ by our culture; we’ve been taught to judge anything … or anyone … that rocks the boat or makes us uncomfortable by failing to conform to the current cultural norms as ‘other’ … and, therefore, ‘different’ and ‘less than.’
The two different readings from broadly-separated areas of study taken in tandem clearly show how insidious and far-reaching such propagandizing is and how it can make us discount the evidence of our own eyes.
Yes, if you hear a lie often enough, you begin to believe it.
Fortunately, your children have found ways of circumventing the established ‘party line’ … and technology currently available has aided that trend. The technological advances in the past approximately twenty years have made it so much easier and more enjoyable for your children to investigate your life independently of the misinformation, discover the truth for themselves and express their love for you without going through the approved channels.
Yes, the use of technology has come a long way. As in most advances, when used with love for the good of humanity and in the pursuit of excellence, it has been a blessing to so many, myself included. We pushed technology in the making of our short films and recordings to new levels with special effects and the perfection of recording techniques. However, when misused to promote hatred or fear or for selfish purposes, it becomes a curse.
Nuclear fusion is the same way. When used to benefit mankind and with proper containment, it can be a major benefit to humanity. Unfortunately, there are always those people who seek to use it as a destructive force, with selfish intent or who cut corners in its production, delivery and containment to serve their own greed which generates harmful effects to individuals, society as a whole and our planet in general. We always have a choice and, as we’ve said so often before, it is those choices which determine our reality.
But what, specifically, were you referring to?
Well, when I contemplate occurrences in my own life, it seems that technology has been developed as I became aware that I needed it. I know that’s a crazy statement, but bear with me for a second here.
Just as an example, in 1992 when I decided I was going to write a book and began the process with a portable typewriter and pen and paper (a laborious and time-consuming proposal, at best) it seems that … magically … a computer was provided to ease the production of the manuscript. Now, I know that personal computers were not developed just for me, but I was able to take advantage of that technology (which, if not in its infancy was at least at the pre-school or kindergarten phase) and, as a side effect of writing the book, I learned to use a computer and make it do what I wanted it to do for me while, at the same time, learning what I needed to know to connect with other like-minded people and contribute my small part to a more sane, reasonable view of Michael Jackson, even if only among the few who frequented our fan club website. I discovered that I was not alone; I discovered that I could write a book; I discovered that other people appreciated reading what I had to say; I discovered a somewhat nebulous but very, very real connection with you which I fostered and cultivated through writing. It was a MAJOR eye-opening experience for me!
[Michael laughs.] Those are all important discoveries that contributed immensely to your growth … allowed you to develop abilities that you were unaware of and to reach out of your comfortable little safety zone and explore the world around you. Why couldn’t the concept of the personal computer have been developed just for you at the moment that you needed it? Stranger things have happened.
[Jan laughs.] Okay, let’s talk about some of those ‘stranger things.’
Uh oh! This sounds serious!
When I decided that I wanted to start collecting anything that had anything to do with Michael Jackson, voila! The advent of Video Cassette Recorders and VHS tapes along with cable television! Whoohooo! I could watch you … and watch you … and watch you until the cows came home … and frequently did. I got very, very good at recording material from various award shows and presentations, interviews, entertainment specials … even deleting commercials. If your face was on my television, I had you on tape! And those tapes are still here. Most of them are even playable. Now, I can record them onto DVD’s! In addition, in at least one instance, I was able to supply a DVD on which I had copied a national broadcast of a television special called “Tabloid Truth: The Michael Jackson Scandal” (Frontline Special, February 1997) to the publishers of a curriculum aimed at educating our youth against Violence and Words (Voices Education Project).
We are talking about a woman who could barely turn the TV on and resented remote control devices because they made us all lazy! [Jan laughs.]
Of course, the never-ending progression from monaural to stereo equipment has been a major theme in my life. I was around during the hi-fi single phase (that you had to put the little thingamajig in) … the vinyl album phase … the 8-track phase … the cassette phase … the cd phase. Gee, I’m old! [Jan laughs.]
Let’s call it well-preserved.
Ouch! I think I resemble that remark. Consider your arm punched.
Ouch! [Michael laughs.] Consider yourself hugged! But what does all this have to do with our topic?
Well, the latest installment in this continuing saga of technological advances is the self-published book. I, for one, had never heard of self-publishing until just a few short years ago, but this innovation has, once again, majorly impacted my life.
We talked in our last conversation about the new book by Donna Massa-Chappee entitled The Untold Stories Behind the Michael Jackson Series. This book just illustrates my point delightfully. Donna self-published her wonderful illustrations, just as I self-published Conversations and Michael: A Short Story and my friends, Brenda Jenkyns and Mimi O’Garren self-published their beautifully-written and illustrated books, Ever After and Forever Loved and my other friend, Siren, self-published her lovely book of poetry and art, Art and Soul: A Spiritual Tribute.
This is a new trend that I have noticed which seems to have had its roots back in the early days of our relationship. Back in the 1990s, when we embarked on this spiritual courtship, your children had no alternative but to read what was available through the newspapers and book sellers; self-publication was a little-known and rarely-used option for budding authors or those wishing to investigate topics of individual interest and, to be totally honest, carried a stigma of being ‘less than ‘material that had received an imprint from one of the large conglomerates. Before this trend took hold in the publishing world, writers had to rely on publishing houses’ acceptance of their expressions and few options existed for readers who wanted to investigate independently, which gave the large corporate publishing houses complete control over what was printed.
While this overarching control contributed to printed materials being grammatically correct (albeit exceptions to this statement have become progressively less so and even leading newspapers and books published by the largest and most respected houses today are rife with spelling errors and incorrect grammar and usage) and uniformly attractive in format, it also gave those imprints control over the content and subject matter of information made available for consumption. In other words, it restricted content released to the general public to information deemed worthy (or profitable) for public consumption by the editors of those conglomerates.
Unfortunately, as is categorically undeniable to anyone reading with an open mind, in the case of Michael Jackson, many of those power brokers and stakeholders in the large conglomerates abused that power, restricting the release of factual, verifiable, reliable information. Rather than adhering to its mission to inform, the publishing industry (including newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses) disseminated only slanted opinion instead of truthful reporting, biased coverage instead of presenting the facts, editorialized comment instead of objective, fact-finding, investigative reporting and contributed, in large part, to the ever-increasing imbalance with which you were viewed, as a public figure as well as a private individual, during your physical life with us.
I never could understand why they had to make up so much garbage. I guess my life just wasn’t interesting enough for them. I often wondered if I had been interested in plotting the overthrow of governments or collecting jet planes or digging up artifacts in Tibet would have been more to their liking.
What’s so strange about loving children? Don’t we all love children? What’s so strange about loving animals? Don’t we all love our pets? What’s so strange about building a place where sick or underprivileged kids can come to have fun in a safe and protected and private Neverland?
Well, if your life wasn’t interesting enough for them, I’d hate to think what my life would be. You lived the most interesting life ever, as far as I’m concerned. The trash that they’re concerned with is juvenile. I mean who’s going out with whom is so high school and why Oprah lost 15 pounds and gained back 30 is so common. I am so totally not interested in wasting my time reading about such inanities.
Journalists such as Charles Thomson have written scathing articles decrying the control exerted over the content of articles he submitted for publication (even to the extent of his submissions being rewritten to include myths that he had specifically warned the publisher against.) Even best-selling authors with a library of true-crime titles under their belts, such as Aphrodite Jones, have made public statements regarding rejection of her proposals because no publishing house wanted material that presented a positive, objective and, arguably, more sane and reasonable view of you. It appears to have been an industry-wide ban on truth and sanity. It appears to be censorship. While I do not consider myself a conspiracy theorist, it would be blind of me to deny the facts that have been stated by such well-known and reputable writers and so obviously observed in my own efforts to uncover the truth.
As a result of this lack of reliable information, during the early years of our cosmic connection, websites sprang up on the internet that prided themselves on presenting only factual, verifiable information regarding Michael Jackson. I was one of the founding board members of one of them. In addition, magazines sprouted up all over the world, but particularly in Europe and Asia, that offered news, concert locations and statistics and stunningly attractive photographs, to some of which I also contributed. In other words, rather than just consuming the trash the publishing industry approved and provided, your children found ways of finding what we wanted to know without all the editorial comment and slanted coverage, independently of the power brokers in the publishing industry. We began to break out of their control. And that trend continues.
Only now is that imbalance being reconciled through the popularity of self-publishing and, while, in some cases, usage, spelling, punctuation and grammatical correctness has suffered and, in some rare instances, format and attractiveness have been sacrificed … in most the quality is improving and the content is exceptionally revealing. A short listing of recommended self-published books that I have read follows:
Dr. William (Barney) Van Valin, Private Conversations in Neverland
Bloemen, Dobler, Lohr, All for Love and A Life of L.O.V.E.: Michael Jackson Stories You Should Have Heard Before – (a wonderful compilation of fan stories and stories about your humanitarian efforts.)
Dr. Karen Moriarty, Defending a King: His Life and Legacy
Elizabeth Michelle Billeaudeaux, An Angel Among Us and Michael in My Life
Ronan Ryan, Michael Jackson: The Seven Secrets of His Success
Craig James Baxter, Behind the Mask: What Michael Jackson’s Body Language Told the World
New titles are being added daily.
This trend continues unabated (and, in fact, is growing by leaps and bounds) not only in the publishing industry but also in the news gathering, music and video industries. Many of your children no longer rely on the 24-hour news cycle to keep themselves informed of what is happening in topics of interest. For example, during the Conrad Murray trial, several of my friends watched the live feed and wrote transcripts for those of us who were unable to do so, helping all of us to stay abreast of the testimony and evidence presented without having to depend upon traditional news sources which had displayed blatant bias in previous reportage, assuring that both sides of the argument were shown to those interested. During the current AEG Live trial, live feed is not available, but some reporters (thank you, Messrs. McCarthy and Wagener) present in the courtroom are ‘tweeting’ reports from the trial via their cell phones or writing up the day’s events on social networking sites and several websites have picked up those reports and put together transcripts. In other words, once again, we have found a way of circumventing the ‘official news gathering agencies’ and keeping abreast independently of the major networks and Court TV.
In the field of music, there are internet-based radio programs entirely devoted to playing Michael Jackson and live streams of radio programs are available 24/7. So, your children are not dependent upon programming decisions or sponsoring advertisements which rule the radio waves. Of course, video no longer depends on release by major networks; hundreds of thousands of videos are available on You Tube and Vimeo. Through these sources, your children are able to watch films which feature interviews, performances, entire concerts, tributes, seminars, scholarly reports and any number of other independently-produced films and radio programs to their little hearts’ content .
And, once again, the timing of these technological advances seems, at least to me, somewhat coincidental … or, at least, serendipitous. All of these technological advances are allowing a broader range of thought and investigation than those proffered by the established media sources.
Oh! That reminds me! How’s your course in Michaelology going?
Shazbat, Michael! This conversation is already over 4,500 words long! Can we save the answer to that question for next time?
Oh, so you’re gonna pull a cliffhanger, now? Okay. I, unlike you, have infinite patience. [Michael laughs.]
Oh! Low blow!
Jan – September 25, 2013
Note: Maira took one of my poems and made a beautiful graphic for me. My thanks, Maira.
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