It’s official: we are all living through the Age of the Nonsensical. It’s also the Age of Official Fakery, the Age of Deception, and the Age of Artificiality. This Age can also have many other descriptors attributed to it. Fill in the blank yourself with your own description of these times we now suffer through, and which, for us who identify as spiritually intelligent, is a source of constant insult to our sensibilities.

So, what balm for the spiritual adepts, the artists, the pure of essence and intent in a world of the fake parading as the real? What comfort — at least in the world of art — can there be, when the overall quality of what passes for art has slipped so far below what would be, to even the pedestrian onlooker of old, a minimum standard of art criteria.

We live in a world of the nonsensical. The fake. And, our whole subjective world experience now revolves around discerning the true, the natural, and the real from the false, the fake, and the unnatural, which we are constantly bombarded with. Really, the keyword of this Age is discernment. But, how well can one discern reality when so-called “news stories” consist of a few short clips of the disaster, the incident, the controversy, and roughly one to one-and-a-half minutes of teleprompted sound bytes consisting of negative keyword mass-consciousness programming triggers?

The answer is, of course, we cannot discern true and natural reality with these corporate TV news agencies (and most Hollywood studio production companies) constantly programming us for a psycho-emotional reality that resonates at lower frequencies, i.e., fear, ignorance, displeasure, grief, shame, guilt, etc. so that we cannot realize a higher reality and personal power modality. The frantic output of these corporate, pyramidal media companies shows their fear, however. They are presenting their true colors, like garish, ugly peacock feathers that display and communicate fear of loss of power rather than the desire to share in an equal, communal energy where all benefit from seeing, discerning, knowing, and, ultimately, transcending the material in favor of the immaterial and eternal, and thus tapping into infinite selfhood.

Widening the Field for True Spiritual Discernment

So, our principle of spiritual intelligence / spiritual cinema encapsulates the idea of the higher concepts being able to be seen and discerned — properly. There is much obfuscation, manipulation, and their attendant power-control objectives going on, the evidence of which is seen in 90% of the media output that’s consumed. And, what “they” also seek to do in this process is a narrowing of the field of collective perception. Is this why I almost invariably feel the inevitable anxiety of perceptual claustrophobia whenever I (rarely) view any of these mainstream CGI comic book-hero / hitman-as-antihero / drug dealer-gangster / robbery-heist glorification or other big-budget Hollywood blow-it-all-up, over the top, $200M schlock pic? Probably.

You feel it, too, surely. Even in some of these $10M (and under) “indie” pictures, the sense of foreboding, menace, depression, anxiety, and dysphoria in many of them is overwhelming, though far more subtle. Then, there are films like Paterson with Adam Driver, which are like breaths of fresh air amidst the cinematic smog of the usual or mainstream. As a professional writer who has written much poetry for thirty years and more, it’s funny (or uncanny) to me how many of these rare alternative, indie, breaths-of-fresh-air films are stories of artists — many of which are poets, like Adam Driver’s bus driving poet character. As a culture that largely eschews and denies the poet and poetry, these rare cinematic bright spots like Paterson are far more indispensable than most of us know (but don’t tell the huge crowd queuing up for the next showing of Barbie).

How to Win the War on Truth and the Natural

Find your True and Real Place and stay there. Don’t be coaxed out of your “Place” by these slick media-masters whose billion-dollar livelihoods depend on your buying-into their “media created reality” diversions, which, as time goes on, are becoming more and more virulent, influential and toxic. Find your true and happy center, sharpen your tools of discernment, keep your focus, and view everything you see through an objective lens. Then, your spiritual IQ and sense of the real, true, and natural will increase, and the world of the ersatz, fake, and artificial will evaporate.