Being social. I doubt natural humans had a concept for “social.” I believe it just was.

Not today. Now ties of family and tribe are stressed or broken, and we are “civilized,” made part of artificial groups, brought together through economic class, school, and workplace. There are advantages that have come with these changes, for certain individuals as well as to all, but I want to look at on particular cost, to see if it might be mitigated.

My first experience of life, like most everyone I know, was changing pairs of rubber gloved-hands which soon placed me in an “isolette” – isolated from germs, I suppose, but also from my mother.

If that harmed me, I know it also harmed her, and it hurt me again when they kept my children from me for days after their births except every two hours and then just long enough for nursing.

All this, I’m sure, prepared us for the world to come, in which we’d be more easily convinced to sacrifice things of the heart for the needs of industry.

I got extra treatment, but that story is not necessary to make my point today: we’ve all been mind controlled to some degree. Baby boys, uniformly for decades, were sexually mutilated at birth for a totally bogus reason, which might explain the violence, including sexual violence, in our culture, as well as our nation’s ability to raise troops to go so readily to war: we have generations of men who have to prove something, because once they were totally powerless to stop a profound psychic pain, something to do with their manhood, but they can’t quite figure it out, so they need to act it out.

This massive change in human consciousness, called “civilization,” has been resisted throughout time, from the heathens and pagans (literally, heath dwellers and forest dwellers) who were murdered as part of Europe’s economic machinations to move people into the cities to worship in cathedrals, to the Sixties’ recognition of the mind-numbing state of the nuclear family – or was it just the family in front of the TV?

And now the human connection, citified into what we call a “social life” is becoming even less so, and we don’t even mind the descriptor “virtual,” which means, “almost, but not quite.”

Am I satisfied with virtual? Not at all.

And yet, as a writer, it’s my medium.

And I’ve complained about this plenty. I know I’ve lived other lives far more satisfying – connected – than this one. And I don’t blame myself or anyone; it’s just what we have become as a people (directed by whom is the salient question), and some of us have harder experiences than others.

As one of those getting harsher treatment, I believe it’s my role to holler. And I can’t really see that it’s my role to do anything else, even if no one wants to hear. Tough. It’s what pain cells do, and the human body does well to listen to those signals.

Even though I was not raised to be social, I give it the old college try. Each year, more of my parts pull together, and I do better and better at socializing, so much that some people, catching me on a good day, would never believe how hard socializing can be for me at other times.

A successful night out to dinner, for instance, requires the focused attention of I-don’t-know-how-many parts of me, after which I feel an energy lag while all the experiences of the other evening are brought back to the rest of me and revisited, like a girl going home to her sick sister to tell her what she’d missed at the dance.  Of course, the sister has thoughts and feelings about it and and needs to do a little reliving, imagining, or opining – and that takes time. If I’m too busy, I may suffer with a sense of disintegration and must stay home, sometimes, for weeks at a time.

I love my solitude (thankfully), though I use it – ironically – for the even-more removed version of social-ness – the virtual world – so I can rail against our loss of human connection, destroyed in favor of human resource extraction.

I don’t see clearly the way to change things, but I believe if more people would acknowledge that we are mind controlled, and it pervades our culture from birth on, together we have a chance.

Personally, I work in the system when I see a chance to inoculate it with better ideas that might spur change, I invest energy in new ideas like Permaculture, and I invest myself in understanding the other dimensions and gaining facility in communicating with helpful energies.

Since I’m a recovering mind-control subject, everything I do needs to be judged. It’s everyone’s responsibility.  But not only with me – with everyone. We are all mind-controlled to some degree, some of us more insidiously than others.  Mind control is the biggest threat to human consciousness – the foundation of our ability to perceive clearly and act rationally, individually and collectively.

The damage to us has not been an accident, but is an intentional, ubiquitous, historical practice, now refined to great power, and not to be ignored.  It underlies everything.

So I keep yappin’, telling of my experiences, asking others to let me know if they think I should consider other explanations for my perception of reality.

I believe we live in a multi-dimensional cosmos, far more amazing than most of us acknowledge, with a complex history of which human evolution and manipulation are only a chapter, maybe just a footnote, though it’s everything to us.

Sometimes I think we’re like the patient on the table with everyone praying and weeping for us to wake up.  The hospital is in a war zone, but they’ll save those details till we’re more awake.

Other times it seems our cocoon is cracking and about to break open, and it’ll be a beautiful and amazing day.

Often events are a tangle or dance of things greatly opposed.  And it works.

Crashing waves against the cliff.

The bramble and the vine.

Compost and new shoots.