Making Ripples

By now, you should be aware that fake news, otherwise known as non-credible news sources, is a poison in your environment. It is bad for your mental health, and it causes you to attack wrong targets and lose friends. Even when their falsehoods get corrected, you are left with lingering doubts and broken relationships that persist for years.

In the earlier posts, I covered how to recognize fake news and how to prepare yourself to deal with fake news, so in this post, I will address how you can protect yourself from the effects of fake news on an ongoing basis.

There will always be fake news or opinion disguised as news because people with a hidden agenda find it to be an effective way of exerting hidden control over people and groups. The fake news can be blatantly false or covertly hostile, but the intent is the same. Their desire is to create dissension between members of a group so that someone else can take control. Fake news uses falsehoods to create dissension, where whistleblowers use the truth to reveal corruption. Every group has a certain amount of disagreement as to goals and purposes and the best way to achieve them. As long as the arguments are presented truthfully, there is a possibility of an eventual resolution. When opinion is substituted for truth and is not recognized for what it is, there is little chance of achieving a peaceful resolution of any issues.

The presence of major news channels tolerating and distributing fake news creates a toxic environment for all citizens. Even if their fake news is intermingled with actual news, the overall product is compromised. Like rodent poop in coffee, the end product is a health hazard.

You owe it to yourself to learn how you can protect yourself against non-credible news sources forever. It may surprise you to learn that fake news cannot be detected by the fact you do not agree with it. There are ample examples of fake news from both ends and the middle of the political spectrum. Fake news is that news that cannot be verified by several independent sources. Sources like “highly placed officials in the FBI” are not credible sources, neither are unnamed “Presidential Advisers” or any unnamed sources at any level. Claims that some harm has been done by some person with no supporting data is an opinion being presented as fact. Many of the major media outlets are notorious for doing that, and you will have to decide for yourself if that is true for you.

Here is how you can sort these issues out for yourself. Start identifying news sources as reliable or non-credible and continue to follow those which are credible. You can do this every time you look at a news feed. Let’s say a journalist or talking head says that someone is guilty of treason and points out that this scoundrel wants to let people carry arms on their person or wants to burn the American flag.

If you do not know the exact definitions of treason, you might be persuaded that the statement was true. Treason is defined as: The betrayal of allegiance toward one’s own country, especially by committing hostile acts against it or aiding its enemies in committing such acts. 

Any news article which presents only one side of an argument can be suspected of containing opinion even if there are no demeaning adjectives used. Any arguments presented in anger are likely to be loaded with opinion rather than sticking to facts.

You might want to apply this four-way test to every news article you read and see how many pass muster:

1. Is it the truth? 
2. Is it fair to all concerned?
3. Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
4. Will it be beneficial to all concerned?

If this test does not fit your way of thinking, try these questions:

1. Where are the recordings of the event?
2. Have they been altered?
3. What are the names of those involved?
4. Are there contrary facts describing the event?
5. Are some comments being suppressed?
6. Are some contributions being blocked?

If you are getting “no” answers to the first four questions and “yes” answers to the next 6 questions, you are dealing with a non-credible news source and should exclude them from your daily reading. If you do this religiously for the next few weeks, you will find that your disposition improves, and your ability to concentrate also improves.

You may want to expand your reading to include blogs because they provide a known mix of facts and opinions, and reading them may also make you laugh. Before Facebook started dominating the news, there were many fine bloggers who kept us informed of what was happening in different areas of life. They are still there and are experiencing a resurgence of popularity now that mainstream media is so polarized.

This book was a natural outgrowth of the Spiritual Rescue Technology I developed for use in spiritual counseling during the past decade. There is material here you will not see elsewhere.

I wanted to create a work that would undercut all of the technical discussions about spirit behavior and the mechanics of spiritual influence and possession and would give a new person an entry point into the spiritual universe through caring conversations with spirits of all types.

In its current form, it is a handbook on how to make friends with spirits and get them to assist you in making life easier. I have included excerpts from actual sessions so you can see that spiritual communication can create major changes in a person’s awareness and personality.

It is my hope that this will serve as a guide to developing an effective relationship with your spiritual companions which allows you to accomplish goals that are otherwise inaccessible.

Preparing yourself to find the truth is the very first step in dealing with any kind of news source. If the topic or the words used to describe the topic disturb you, it will be very difficult for you to find or understand what the truth is.

Angry people do not see clearly, and one’s ability to see what is occurring gets worse as the emotional tone level of the observer drops down the scale from enthusiasm to apathy. This is because the environment becomes less real as the person goes down tone. One’s ability to perceive get less and less as one goes down the tone scale and has less and less life force to bring to bear on solving problems. The person becomes less and less alive as he goes down the tone scale. The bottom of the human tone scale is death. The bottom of the spiritual tone scale is total failure.

Therefore, to find truth, you must first center yourself so that all of your attention is directed to events occurring in the present moment. You will know when you have achieved this state because you will be calm and alert and will be ready to observe what is actually happening and be ready to observe what has happened to create the current situation.

When you have centered yourself, you can look calmly at the outrage presenting itself to you, and your next steps will be productive rather than retaliative and self-destructive. In other words, if you are to fight back against treachery and outright betrayal, it’s best if you can plan your actions calmly and execute them enthusiastically.

Whether the betrayal involves a faithless loved one, a group of elected officials who have shown their true colors as evil madmen, or fake news that accuses someone falsely, your best response is to avoid the instinctive response of striking out and destroying them and erasing them from history. You need to get your wits together by whatever rituals you can muster until you can focus your attention on the present moment and can see what you failed to notice or do, which brought you into the situation in the first place. Once that is located, and you can take responsibility for it, you are ready to move forward and take effective action to reduce the results of the betrayal or treachery.

So, what does a non-credible news source have to do with betrayal and treachery? A non-credible news source is treachery personified. They transmit altered information that arouses your anger and directs it at targets that are innocent of the charges presented. You are incensed that some person has done some evil activity, and you target this person with insults and continue to tell everyone you know how bad that person is. If you stay angry, you don’t even bother to see if the charges are real, and you contribute to the mob that is calling for punishment. Fake news is designed to create anger, and when you fall for it, you become part of the problem rather than a part of the solution.

Fake news is not limited to the media. You can be the effect of fake news if someone insinuates that your loved one is unfaithful or your company is doing evil things by not hiring deserving people. There are people who seem to delight in manufacturing and spreading bad news. In the old days, these people were called gossips. Today they are called journalists.

So, these people are not credible news sources. How do you deal with them? First, you get yourself into a state of calm alertness so you can assimilate data and see what is actually going on. Then you dig for the real data underlying the disturbing and alarming news. You need to see more than one source for the best results. If you cannot find sources of corroborative data, the initial report is probably false. If an initial report sounds too good to be true, it may be a false report, and you need to follow the same procedure to see what the truth is.

If while you are running down the truth, you find yourself getting angry or misemotional, calm yourself down again and proceed only when you can investigate calmly. Truth is not arrived at when the seeker is angry. This applies to scientific as well as political matters. Angry people do not tell or recognize the truth, even if you agree with them.

The problem is not new. What we call fake news now was once called yellow journalism, a term for journalism that presents little or no legitimate, well-researched news while instead using eye-catching headlines for increased sales. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.

Frank Luther Mott identifies yellow journalism based on five characteristics:

1. scare headlines in huge print, often of minor news

2. lavish use of pictures, or imaginary drawings

3. use of faked interviews, misleading headlines, pseudoscience, and a parade of false learning from so-called experts

4. emphasis on full-color Sunday supplements, usually with comic strips

5. dramatic sympathy with the “underdog” against the system.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

When I was a child, our family got our news from the newspapers and the radio and the people we knew. The reporting was probably no better than now, but the saturation level was much lower. We only got the drivel that passed for news once a day.

Today, with the advent of the omnipresent internet, we get misinformation on a continuing basis, like elevator music, or supermarket music that permeates the environment and leaves a residue in the corners of your mind. We see, in scary headlines, that a politician is accused of attempted murder by a female colleague with no supporting evidence or detail and this drivel is repeated to an excessive degree for days on end. If you care to dig into this story, you will find that he said something she disagreed with.

The typical structure of a fake news article is an astonishing tale of wrongdoing that should tear at your heart until you read in the next to last paragraph of the article that someone said something that offended the journalist and those he represents.

If you have been ensnared by this kind of story, your best approach is to dig until you find the original video or message which triggered the fake news. Quite often, you will find that someone said something to explain a situation and others took the statement entirely out of context.

There has been a rash of accusations about racist behavior which when followed up turns out to be someone describing an undesirable situation and quoting what was done or said at the time. This includes mentioning words used in Huckleberry Finn as an example of language not used in polite society at this time, while these words are in common use by certain segments of society.

Much of the fake news today seems to be based on hurt feelings of some sort, where a hurt feeling is treated as a serious injury to one’s life. The validity of this can be exposed by digging into what was actually said and done by both sides and finding the root cause of the upset.

We will go into this situation in depth in the next installment: Dealing With A Lack Of Credible News Sources – Part Two.