In this era of connecting on line, have you noticed how truly “bad” everyone looks on Zoom, Facetime or any other digital platform? So much for photo-shopping, airbrushing or manipulating lighting. All gone out the window. Why? Because what other choice do we have? If we want to connect, this is how we do it.
But think for a minute what this means and what it’s leading to.
When we connect on line, we are brought literally face-to-face with each other in our most intimate, at home, causal, laid back, genuine selves. Some of us may wear jackets over our pj’s but most don’t even do that anymore. Who cares about what we’re wearing when all our wrinkles, dark spots, double chins, three day beards and worse are exposed by the bad lighting and funny angles that peering into our computers demand of us. Even the background opens up our homes for all to see; our messy bookshelves, haphazard wall coverings, kitchen cabinets, dirty dishes and Zoom-bombing kids and pets.
In these last few weeks, as I have stared into my computer at the faces of family, friends, colleagues, newscasters, celebrities, pundits, and medical people (all at home), I have found myself seeing each of them in a new way. All of a sudden, the outer, visual appearance of these people is no longer important or revealing. Instead I found myself going deeper, picking up on their energy instead of how they look. And this deep dive into the true soul of a person, left me appreciating them each with a new, more profound understanding of who they really are. I was amazed that the strange lighting and distorting angles actually enhanced my connection with them, giving me a heartfelt, intimate bond that had not existed before.
I was also surprised by this revelation, because, as an energy sensitive person, I hadn’t realized how much I still rely on surface appearance!
I was also amazed at how this experience changed my own perception of who I am. I have never liked being photographed or filmed because I am not photogenic, and most photographs or films do not seem to reflect how I see myself. But as I connect to my children or friends on Zoom where I get to see my own face on the screen along with everyone else’s, this reticence began to disappear. It slowly dawned on me that I was seeing myself with the same intimate understanding and appreciation as I was seeing everyone else.
This is not to undermine the psychological importance of putting our best foot forward when we go out into public, with nice clothes, a freshly showered body, clean-shaven jaw/neatly clipped beard, or a freshly made up face (if that’s important to you). Dressing up and making sure we look our best is fun and makes us feel good inside. But at the same time, the other foot need not be judged and found wanting because it is something different. We can appreciate and value both at the same time.
When we connect using Zoom, Facetime, Skype or Google Hangouts, we can no longer pretend to be someone we’re not. No more makeup or manipulated lighting to make us look great, rather, we must get used to the fact that digital connecting captures us in our own homes, in our most intimate surroundings, and in most cases in the worst light and angles imaginable. Even though we are isolated physically, we can no longer hide our true selves, nor should we feel uncomfortable about it. If we want to connect, we have to be authentic.
In looking at the bigger picture, the consequences are potentially even more striking. It seems the veneer is being stripped from mass consciousness. The present crisis is completing the process that the video in our cell phones started. When we became able to record bad behavior and expose it for all to see, we started the process of forcing people to come clean, to take responsibility and be held accountable for antisocial, deceitful and/or dangerous behavior.
The coronavirus isolation is now taking it one step further, going from public behavior to pushing us to be in our own skins, accepting others and ourselves for who we really are, and then learning to like and appreciate what we see.
We are being forced to look beyond the surface and instead search for value in more than the superficial. We are being compelled to focus on energetic reality rather than physical reality.
We are also beginning to realize how easy it is to manipulate images and soundbites to disguise what’s underneath. We are being asked to connect and discern with our hearts, not our judgmental minds and the collective opinions of others. We are learning to appreciate ourselves and humanity in general with compassion and understanding for all our individual quirks and foibles, wrinkles and blemishes, shadows and dark spots, differences and similarities. And of course, this goes way deeper than looks, which are just the surface.
When this crisis is over, we will all have a new take on what is true, valuable, trustworthy, honest, genuine, authentic, and what is not. And most importantly, we will be much better at recognizing the difference.
(For more on energy and the energy dimension, see my book, “It’s All About Energy: Adventures in Expanded Reality”, available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, at local bookstores and on my website, www.transformationalexpansion.com )