The Technological Transformation of Consciousness

We now have information about many things that we were previously unaware of.

I recently had dinner with a longtime friend. She reminded me that in 2005, I predicted that Donald Trump would someday become president. I'd forgotten saying this, but she'd written it down. How did I come up with such an outlandish idea back then? Maybe I made a wild guess that turned out to be correct. But realistically, I probably dreamed about it. This is something I've been doing my whole life.

When I was very young, 5 or 6, I predicted my grandfather's impending unexpected death. I wouldn't leave my parents alone until they drove an hour to his house so I could tell him he was going to die, which he did not long after. There have been other episodes like this over the years. Most have been inconsequential and confusing, but some turned out to be important.

When I was 25, I went to Brooklyn and found a street corner that I'd dreamed about. There I encountered Rebecca Hart, a psychic healer who stopped what she was doing as I walked by to tell me a bunch of accurate information about the complicated medical problems I was dealing with at the time. In the year that followed, her skills as a healer proved instrumental in helping me to figure out and address these problems.

While the vast majority of my dreams never come to pass, instances like these leave me wondering. How did information about the future find its way into my awareness while I slept? Was there a reason for it or was it some kind of accident? These are questions I may never be able to answer. But my dream premonitions have convinced me that there's more to consciousness than the materialists would have us believe. There's more to consciousness, and maybe more to time itself.

This may all sound lofty and irrelevant, but the technological transformation of society necessarily involves the transformation of consciousness, and we don't yet know how that might play out. I've even heard people in the New Age community say that communication technologies like cell phones are devices to gradually get humanity used to the idea of non-local consciousness, like stepping stones towards eventual widespread psychic communication. I'm not so sure about that. But I do think we'd be fools to imagine that emerging technologies don't have a psychic dimension.

In popular media, experts talk about the dangers of killer robots and the possibility that human consciousness can someday be uploaded to the cloud. Dig a little deeper and you'll find conversations about various forms of high-tech mind control and the corrosive effect of social media on mental health. But the biggest impact of this transformation on our minds isn't really being talked about. Simply put, we now have access to information about many things that we were previously unaware of.

Every aspect of our total system has long been profoundly broken, but now it's becoming much easier for average people to see the problems caused by this broken system. Although our media machine relentlessly spins all of these problems into shallow partisan arguments, awareness of them inevitably forces our collective psyche to evolve. At a certain point, everyone has to contend with the fact that the world they find themselves in is different from the world they thought they were inhabiting. Each person individually may cross this threshold many times, but our culture as a whole now appears to be entering such a moment of reckoning.

Shocking Revelation

During the pandemic, a broad coalition of public and private interests colluded in a vast conspiracy to lie to us all so we would support their policy measures and price increases. Using propaganda and censorship, they cast the mass psychology equivalent of a magic spell that the American people are only now beginning to awaken from. This awakening process may not be pretty, and it could be accelerated by the economic upheaval related to the big squeeze. As I wrote last year: We've been getting squeezed hard since 2020, with big business extracting an extra $1 trillion from us since 2021. According to The Guardian, "two-thirds of the new wealth amassed since the start of the pandemic has gone to the richest 1%."

In the year since I wrote that, things have not improved. The post-covid economy isn't sustainable and the negative implications of this are being felt by more and more of us. Right now, I feel like we're coming to the end of the part where people still think things will eventually go back to normal and the beginning of the part where people begin to understand that the world has changed and they're worse off for it.

This realization may be shocking to many, especially against a backdrop of political lunacy and social media's crisis amplification. It may also feel isolating, because the control regime has engineered reality to keep us convinced that our problems are totally individualized, especially when their causes are social or environmental. And when people respond to the realization that the new normal is terrible, many will begin with the naive assumption that we live in a free country where we can band together and actually fix the system. They'll begin with this assumption and will quickly discover that our society doesn't work at all like that.

Instead, we're operating under a brutal control regime that reflexively destroys anything or anyone that would challenge its dominance in a meaningful way. Not everyone has an easy time accepting this. There are a million other things we'd rather believe. That our problems are the result of individual failings or karmic punishment for misdeeds in past lives. That our government and corporations are basically good and could be reformed if only we could install the right personalities in positions of leadership.

These may be comforting thoughts, but they don't accurately reflect the situation we're in. And in some ways, we appear to be on the threshold of a mass awakening regarding our systemic problems. This raises all kinds of practical concerns, but what I'm most concerned by are the psychological difficulties that large numbers of people will face when confronted with the fact that we live in a dystopia. This is a hard pill to swallow and society is filled with mechanisms for keeping us in denial about it.

Those who can no longer deny the dystopian quality of our society are going to need help. Mental health support from the medical establishment isn't designed to provide this kind of help. So people will turn to their social networks, in both healthy and unhealthy ways. In my book The 321 Incident, characters find support for this kind of stuff in General Support Groups. I don't know if these could work in the real world, with real people, but maybe it's worth a try.

One thing I know for sure is that however our consciousness might be transforming, the key to making sense of it probably involves attention. Because everything always seems to come back to attention.

For more of my writing, check out my science fiction books and my Hive blog.