What are the problems with entertainment media today? If we look deeper, inside each problem, what useful insight might we find about how to change things for the better? And, where’s the urgency? What’s at stake if nothing changes? These are the questions a group of transformational educators and entertainment professionals asked at a recent summit meeting or “wisdom council.”
The aim of this alliance was to begin a process that could help transform the quality of the content now being served up to us by the varied forms of the entertainment media. Everyone present recognized how powerful these seemingly ordinary but highly invasive sources of content really are—how they shape our consciousness and culture, and how they’re influencing us negatively today.
The First Steps of a Journey Symbolize the Rest of the Journey
These are great questions—good, logical, left-brained questions—yet as I listened to the fleshing out of the responses, I felt slightly uncomfortable, like the cart was in front of the horse and we might trip over it. Sure, films and television are glorifying and perpetuating shallow, intolerant attitudes and violent, reactionary behavior, but to my mind these things are not really the problem, they are physical materializations of one stage in a much larger—and very positive, I might add—transformation process.
From my intuitive observations, this process is already underway in the nonphysical world. It is accelerating and progressing steadily under its own steam, while the physical world tries to adjust the way it’s materializing so the form we know in the external world accurately matches the rapidly changing inner energy blueprint in the nonphysical world.
The transformation process is sweeping everyone along with it—some people embrace it and enter the flow joyfully, while others fear it and try to stop it. What we’re seeing in the entertainment business—to broad-stroke it—is the materialization of the inner blueprint of a group of powerful people who basically fear and resist the part of the transformation process that requires the reinvention of self.
I think my ever-so-mild sense of tension with the way our meeting began came from several things. First, we were focusing on a part of the process as if it were the whole thing. Second, we were framing things negatively, seeing obstacles that needed to be overcome, and even anticipating negative outcomes. By focusing on blocked dynamics, we ourselves could be inadvertently influenced by fear thinking, reducing our ability to access fresh inspiration and visionary ideas. Third, I wondered if we all had a common understanding of the transformation process and its stages that would serve to put the other questions in their proper context.
Author Tracy Kidder writes, “. . .usually what’s missing isn’t a story. What’s missing is a broader way of thinking about what makes a good story.” Perhaps we might have started by thinking about the best way to frame a “problem,” and at what depth to begin. Perhaps the first questions might have been: What is the transformation process, how does it work, and what are we transforming into? Then, how does the state of the entertainment industry parallel the state of our own transformation? And what stage of transformation does the entertainment industry seem to be experiencing now?
Summarizing Transformation
I’d like to summarize what I know about the transformation process; perhaps this will help clarify a few things about the way I’m thinking. Transformation is not just a change of form. It’s not about doing more of something, or doing it better, or differently. It’s not about the sort of change where we begin in the physical world and rearrange things into new patterns that are still in the physical world. Transformation is something else altogether—it’s an alchemical change in the basic nature of something, a shift from one consciousness-and-energy state to another, a startling change that occurs as if by magic.
Transformation is actually a profound shift in how we perceive. It is the process by which consciousness itself can move from knowing reality as a point, then a line, then a plane, then a cube, then a sphere. These are examples of shifts of dimension, of frequency, that entirely transform our identity and reality simultaneously. So that’s where we are now: in the cubic, three-dimensional world of linear time, space, volume, and form.
In fact, most of us are stuck here, covered over and blinded by wet blankets of limiting beliefs and fears, hypnotized into thinking this is all there is. Yet because of the rapid acceleration of energy on the planet—and thus in our bodies, emotions, and minds—we are also in the early stages of a shift to the next kind of identity and reality. Many of us are in the throes of this birth process already, experiencing the uncomfortable symptoms that come with clearing the clutter so we can remember who we really are. What could be beyond what we know so well and assume to be truth?
We are moving from the current Information Age into an Intuition Age, from old, left-brain dominated linear perception to new right-brain influenced spherical-holographic perception. In the Intuition Age, everything we know from the Information-Age point of view will become a new, higher-frequency version of itself. Everything!
So when we talk about transforming the entertainment media, or writing the transformational story arc in screenplays, we must acknowledge that, in addition to changes of plot, character, and theme, the very form of story and narration will shift from an “old” linear structure to a “new” nonlinear, spherical, spiraling, holographic structure.
Plot Lines: A Thing of the Past?
Perhaps we will soon see story and plot “lines” as boring, and move toward something akin to fireworks going off, lighting up many points and experiences in our field of consciousness simultaneously! Perhaps the lighting up of points in the field will trigger different memories and connections for each recipient, and each person will make the story meaningful to themself in their own way. Perhaps we’ll “get” an entire story in two minutes, via direct impression, and when comparing it to someone else’s impressions, will have a second, third, and fourth new story as well, from the same initial imprinting stimuli.