SEPTEMBER 2021 IN
RICK ASTER’S WORLD
More people are noticing that the world is changing. As a result of this shift, they are finding a systematic view of the world in a level of detail that previously had not been available to them.
The readers of this future-oriented series will surely protest that the world changes every day. The changes are obvious enough to those of us who are empaths, social influencers, historians, meteorologists, marketing analysts, economists, entertainers, and many other roles. It is natural to us to see, feel, and measure the changes as they occur. But we all know people who see the world differently.
Think of someone who cannot name one popular song that was written since they became an adult, or whose clothing style is stuck in a past decade. Or think of someone who has not read a book since they left school. Under the pressures of adulthood, many people tune out the reality of the passage of time and hope that their distant memories of almost everything are enough for them to get by.
This suspended-animation view of the world is a trance that can be stretched only so far. If there is a retail bankruptcy, there are other stores; an earthquake, it will be cleaned up eventually; a pandemic, there were similar events a lifetime ago and the people then figured out what to do. But eventually, these unexpected changes compound so that the next small change that hits is enough to break the trance.
With the trance broken, the person walks around for the next few weeks or months looking at the world with the wonderment that they had when they were a child, seeing everything for what it is and not jumping in with stories that explain most of it away. They may feel angry, confused, perplexed, confronted, or indignant, or more likely, some of all of this, but they also know that they cannot unsee what they have just started to see.
For whatever reason, maybe the simple result of an accelerated pace of change, that is happening now on a larger scale than I have ever seen.
Whole industries are set up to prey on those who believe the world does not change. The illusion of a steady-state world makes people vulnerable to scams around unnecessary necessities, protection against nonexistent risks, thoroughly uncomfortable luxuries, and other anachronistic sales pitches. Thus, anyone who wakes up has the chance to take more control of their lives and become wealthier simply by throwing less money after illusions.
This abrupt shift in perspective also allows the kind of introspection that can lead to a more personal kind of awakening. An example of an introspective question is, “How is it that for so many years I did not notice that these things had changed?” Any serious attempt to answer this kind of surface-level question leads to deeper and deeper questions until the self is understood in a way that it never was before.
A shift in awareness is a shift in power, and some of the powers that currently shape the world will have to give way as these newly awake and empowered people gain more of a say on the direction of the world.
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