Op-Ed by Dylan Charles

By now, every possible angle of the Las Vegas shooting has been expounded upon by anyone with a website or a YouTube channel. Without a doubt, something doesn’t add up, but, we’ve gone through this before, many times now, and it never adds up.

And it won’t ever add up, because the self-proclaimed authorities will never acknowledge contrary points of view. They’ll never publicly admit that the official story doesn’t jibe with the totality of facts and thoughtful observations openly available to anyone with an Internet connection and a halfway open mind.

And so we never come to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth. These cases remain open forever. They fester on and on like incurable tumors in the psyche of the body politic, forever generating debate, discussion, discordance, disharmony, infighting, argument and anger. Forever pushing people into psychological traps where reality is whatever best fits with one’s chosen perspective, whatever that may be.

The power structures in place have a firm grip on the controls of the reality generation machine. It’s a top-down system. When an event like Las Vegas happens, the machine goes into action, spinning out variants and possibilities then tossing them into the ether of the collective consciousness. There, facts and fantasies are furiously pecked at and picked over until we’ve had our fill. Then we wait for the next feeding. The next blood-letting.

You see, the real powers in our world don’t care if we know the truth. They don’t care if in all of our theories we do happen to stumble upon the actual story. Their interests aren’t threatened by speculative chatter on the Internet. They’re not challenged by keyboard experts or social media warriors. They’re not afraid of homegrown video analysis and list articles pointing out the obvious. They’re not troubled by snarky know-it-all bloggers. To them we’re just a billion monkeys with a billion typewriters feverishly hoping to accidentally hammer out Homer’s Odyssey.

In fact, they love it when they know that we know. It’s a psychopath thing. You wouldn’t understand.

To the contrary, though. The insane flurry of pseudo-investigative journalism and professional-grade speculation serves them well. It deepens the divide. It stokes more anger, rage, impotency and confusion. It speeds up the fractionation of the public psyche into ever-finer opinion groups and ever-tighter echo chambers. It serves them well to niche us down into evermore subtle corrals of theoretics.

In our uber-connected, news-cycle-driven world, an event like Las Vegas is much more than just murder. It’s a wide detour for public awareness. And it’s a mega pay-day for everyone in the game.

Those pulling the trigger profit by selling us back our peace of mind in the form of security technologies and increased federal budgets for the alphabet agencies of the police state and the Orwellian permanent war tribe.

The 24-7 news teams cash in, too. They gain in audience share and up the price on their advertising space. The pundits get booked overtime presenting, framing, re-framing and re-packaging tidbits of info for public consumption. They sell dark fantasies about what could be and what might come to be, triggering the imagination, stirring up waves of cortisol then selling more pills and products to cope with it all.

The ever-growing body of independent websites and alt-news ventures get to take all this to the bank as well. Speculation is insatiably click-worthy. No one really knows what the hell is going on, but the clicks just keep on coming, so long as we can think of new ways of saying the same things. After all, clicks equal money, and who doesn’t want money? If the theory is just as discreditable as the official story, who cares?

The ritual of terrorism and mass murder events wouldn’t be what it is without the feeding frenzy of content creation, widespread speculation, conjecture, opinion generation, confidence games and outright bullshit. It’s part of the emotional roller coaster we so darkly love. It temporarily fills the void. It’s a little thing we do to feign purpose and meaning amidst our frustrating inability to substantively improve the human condition.

In this environment we are free to choose our own reality, to jump from ship to ship, subscribing and unsubscribing to whatever theory compliments our frame of mind and upholds up our tightly held worldview.

Meanwhile our attention is stolen and misdirected, trained onto the most terrifying of external fascinations. Higher consciousness is pissed into the wind. Love is plowed under by fear, and a spiritual illness metastasizes. The inner being continues to rot and disintegrate.

Suddenly there’s no time for holding space for the victims or for those directly affected. There’s no desire to consciously generate empathy. The task of ferreting out our own darkness and of rooting out our own anger and hate is put on hold for a wild goose chase in search of certainty and consensus. The bigger picture is totally lost in the sensational details of the horror.

The mind convinces itself that it can control the world by wrangling with external circumstances, and that its righteous duty is to submerge itself in the dark minutiae of shock and awe. The psyche is further conditioned to indulge in madness, and the spirit is further tricked into believing that fear has a rightful home in the heart.

It’s a trap within a trick. A tragedy built into a tragedy. A thousand rabbit holes within a rabbit hole. It’s a veil concealing the reality that the matrix is an attention funnel designed to direct our awareness and energy onto a pre-fab spread of pre-packaged, shitty realities. Where attention goes, energy flows. This is spiritual warfare. The enemy’s goal is for us to forget that we are creators of this world and that we have more power than we know what to do with.

This is the age of choose-your-own-reality. It is my suspicion that the world will begin to improve when we consciously enter into the age of create-your-own reality.

Read more articles by Dylan Charles.

Dylan Charles is a student and teacher of Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi and Qi Gong, a practitioner of Yoga and Taoist esoteric arts, and an activist and idealist passionately engaged in the struggle for a more sustainable and just world for future generations. He is the editor of WakingTimes.com, the proprietor of OffgridOutpost.com, a grateful father and a man who seeks to enlighten others with the power of inspiring information and action. His remarkable journey of self-transformation is a testament to the power of the will and the persistence of the human spirit. He may be contacted at [email protected].

This article (The Choose-Your-Own-Reality Theory of Terror, Mass Shootings and Spiritual Warfare) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.