Context Clarifiers
versus Content Creators
Do we even realize how terms come into our individual worlds and what they mean about the world at large? Like “Influencers”. We have Influencers now?
What do they do? Create Content.
What’s that? Stuff we look at.
Are they actually creating it, or repurposing it from elsewhere? Bit of both.
Why do we think we need so much Content? Because we’re not content.
I found myself watching a woman on the train at the end of what I imagine was a hard day of work or school - of being out in the world - as she scrolled through her Feed.
Feed? She’s being fed by this Content? Fed, meaning Nourished? Fed as well as Influenced?
Curiouser and curioser.
At any rate, she flicks through, sliding her finger swiftly up the screen to bypass all the non-nourishing Feed. How is she determining when to stop? This is what I’m wondering as I watch her. What makes her stop, even for a second, and tarry? Or continue to toggle on through?
How does she know Value when she sees it?
Here on Substack many of us are still writing in long form, or at least what passes for long form these days. It’s not Flash Fiction, another phenomena that I’ve come across in the past year or so. 1,000 words or less. Are we really that pressed? I don’t think it’s solely an issue of time, but rather of craving variety and even more stimulation still, and thus not being content.
But coming back to Content, words are minor here. Most of the posts are set to music. We’re showing more than telling. Or maybe it’s relatively equal.
Which leads me into the thought that these days everyone’s an author but no one has authority. Everyone’s an actor but nobody’s taking action.
All the world’s a stage, or a virtual reality, but what’s for real?
Since about 2018 I’ve been sensing a 5th chakra explosion that prompted me to edge back a bit from persevering with the online marketing of MYOGA Freedom I’d been doing since 2015. It seemed to me, as the pioneer and scout I tend to be, that I had done my job of sharing yoga earlier on - both in person and in digitized forms. What greater success could I ask for than to know that the students I had taught to teach themselves were now doing just that, as well as teaching others?! Yet now our spiritual evolution has combined with online marketing, the likes of which we haven’t had before.
Much of Social Media is people telling other people how to live. Something I loathe. Yet I also recognize we generally learn a thing by teaching it to others. I know I’ve done so, and still do. I’m not complaining about people teaching others, but rather about people telling me things - unbidden (not to be confused with un-Biden) - that I either already know and do, or don’t have any desire to know or do.
So I’ve pulled back from “Meta” (Instagram and Facebook) because I’ve always struggled with the arrogance of advertizing (and yes I know that’s not how it’s spelled anymore but say it out loud—is it an S or a Z in your mouth?!). If I want something, or want to know something, I’ll ask. I’ll investigate on my own, thank you very much.
I don’t need your algorithms to think for me.
We’ve become lazy, jaded, or exhausted. Or all three. And this is how advertizing infiltrates our Feed. In fact it’s often the cost of “free” Feed. It’s good in some ways, sure. How else would I know about key ecological campaigns and countless creative expressions across our glorious globe?
In other ways advertizing is offensive and out of hand. How else would I think (all on my own with just my wee human brain) to search for super secret remedies unless the data gleaned from all those Cookies (a conspicuously cute term if ever I ate one) and my Feed was being analyzed so that answers I didn’t know I needed could be loudly shoved in my face?
But let me get back to this 5th chakra explosion I’ve been witnessing - the explosion of exploring self-expression that has been tremendously facilitated by technology. Voice, acting, music, authorship, creativity, teaching has all been aided by phones that are also cameras. And by applications like Substack that make the dissemination (shares a root source with sperm…) of our ideas and ponderings so much easier than the physical cutting and pasting that I did for my high school newspaper. By my senior year we had computer-based editing. Imagine that! In my lifetime alone the accelerated ability to spread ideas has catapulted us into the maelstrom of cross-firing we have today.
War of the Words, a session I attended last weekend at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival, was a conversation about how we have conversations. This is crucial. This is the real meta - the overarching awareness of how we are and how we wish to be. And this is why I love our weekly Talking Circle and invite you to join us.
Don’t let Meta - the purveyors of Content - co-opt our right to co-create our own meta - our perceptions of, and purpose in, our Context. Let’s aim for these tech systems to stay rooted in connection over commercialization.
And on that note, a short aside here: In May 2021, on Waiheke Island, 4 of us keen to combine ceremony, sound, and movement birthed meta collective. Little did we know that, only a few months later, our clever branding would be usurped by the megalithic Meta-verse!
On the positive side I reckon all this Vishuddha expression is helping us to be less judgemental and more compassionate, though it can seem like the opposite is happening. We might chalk that up to the shadow being more visible as we ‘en-lighten-up’. The process of Purification (a translation of Vishuddha) inevitably requires that a mess be made in the process of creating more order and clarity. Just like Spring cleaning.
I see this in Virgo aspects, as the sign personified by the virgin pulling the chaff from the nutritive wheat. When we lose sight of the larger context and fail to keep our eyes on the prize (the metaphorical wheat), it’s very easy to get fixated on the chaff (AKA the literal shit) that we’re having to examine in the process of threshing them apart.
The chaff that chafes is comprised of our unfettered fears, our lack of compassion, and our tendency to judge, all of which leads to the separatist ‘isms’ that create schisms - racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, classism, et al.
Instead, stay focused on the wheat, on the nutritive grain that will feed us all.
After all, as my grandfather would sing while he did a soft-shoe shuffle, “Here we all are with our sunshine-y faces”. Even if some of us are a bit Goth at the moment - and understandably so, for there is, no doubt, much woe.
With the onslaught of Streaming (another term worth investigating), so many more people are trying their hand at acting. Because we can audition from home and productions are being made locally, actors no longer need to move to a big city. As a performer for decades, I’ve experienced the eventual, and now very exponential, decolonization and decentralization of the entertainment industry. These days anyone can become the next big Netflix, or other Platform, star and be launched into fame’s space!
Isn’t that what platforms do after all? Elevate things.
But still, all the terms and potential tangles aside, actors cannot be any good at acting unless they can BE another being. In order to convincingly be anOther we have to be present. Paradoxically, being present requires us to more thoroughly accept ourselves, to be ourselves, so that we can release attachment from our own identity long enough to be the Other. So, potentially, more actors in the world indicates that, as a species, we are evolving. Either that or we’re even more ego-obsessed than before…
Back to the title. We have Content Creators (AKA Influencers) which Feed us; which feeds (quite literally) into a whole other conversation, since all our content become AI. Where do you think Chat GPT gets its data? Being used as a source can be spooky or it can be an opportunity and an invitation. We can choose to be more conscious about how we communicate, in whatever chosen form we do it - written, sung, danced, filmed, even regurgitated - so that by sharing our self-expressions with those we love (or just those who Follow us), we set the stage for what’s next.
Coded Bias - a great documentary I came across a couple years ago - opened my eyes to just that - how we must re-cognize the power we have to code bias into our futures by how we are engaging with technologies in our todays. For, without awareness, we blindly perpetuate the worst of our yesterdays. This film got me into futurism.
As a yogini I know full-well the powers of focus and intention. Now that so many more of us are doing yoga, the next step is to BE yogic - to be unified and to cultivate and apply our siddhis (super powers) to clarify the context within which we are co-creating content. For all you hungry spiritual achievers who are avidly scaling the rainbow ladder, it’s time for Ajna chakra evolution. Ajna means Perception, which is another way of saying we have to see it before we can be it.
Are we working from what-is, namely recognition and acceptance of biodiversity? Or are we resisting what-is and therefore creating strife and destroying Life? We are a diverse species. And the health of our planet, Gaia, depends upon diversity - not only our own interspecies diversity but, even more so, the diversity of all living beings. Certainly, Earth will live on without us. Yet I reckon a few of us would like to live on with her as well.
Well, here we all are with our sunshiney faces.
The context is key.
We can only Be what we can See.
So before you Share your next Post, I invite you to consider how aligned it is with “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” How will your Feed feed into a saner Context? How will you Love (Like or Share) the Content that shapes our Shared future?