This short essay explores how conscious attention to our inner image — the visions we hold of how life should be — can empower us to resist manipulation, reclaim agency, and shape reality. It examines the ways media, technology, and culture distort perception, and how cultivating a spiritual callus and deliberate inner vision can guide authentic action.
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If you pay attention to mainstream media — of any kind — the messaging is consistently over-dramatized, traumatic, and demoralizing. That’s by design. The world isn’t really that way, but the storytellers in charge keep beating us over the head with doom and gloom rather than boom and bloom. It’s all part of the inverted nature of the modern-day world-stage script — the same process parasitic and predatory influencers have used throughout history to manage, control, and manipulate those who unwittingly fall for it.
This only works because most people don’t realize how reality is actually shaped.
At the core of it all is image — the inner vision a person, or a people, holds of how life is, should be, or could be. This is what Anastasia speaks of repeatedly in the Ringing Cedars of Russia books. When thought, feeling, and intention align around an image, it quietly shapes reality. It goes deeper than that, but for the purpose of this essay, it’s more than adequate. Most of life unfolds not from deliberate creation, but from images held unconsciously or inherited from others. And it is precisely in this way that the predators of our world use our own creative power against us.
For the far smaller crowd who recognize these machinations — the mind control, the soul-sucking, the human farming — life becomes a paradox. There is the pull toward truth, and at times the weight of seeing it too clearly. Whatever the world presents should be for us, sharpening discernment and helping us develop something like a spiritual callus against persistent distortion, deception, and demoralization.
Truth seekers are routinely lumped in with conspiracy theorists. Yet when the “theories” pan out with uncanny consistency, it becomes obvious that the conspiracies were always visible to the few, while being carefully obscured from the many. Subtle manipulations blend seamlessly with the grandiose and explicit. Minor shifts in paradigms — the frameworks of reality we collectively agree to inhabit — are interwoven with heavily orchestrated, staged, planned, and sometimes outright faked events that steer consensus narratives. This distorted reality, coupled with persistent inversions as to the natural order of things, makes for a mutable collective image we have little to no awareness of, let alone our passive acceptance of it.
These narratives drive culture. Downstream from culture come law and policy. In that sense, it can appear as though we asked for this — when that has never, ever been the case. No modern government operates for the benefit of its citizens, its lifeblood, its so-called constituents. Unless you’re truly oblivious, you’ve seen the cracks spreading through the foundations of “democracy,” and you’ve likely wondered what happens when the illusion of centralized authority finally collapses. What replaces a corrupt, dysfunctional, absurd pantomime that insists, with manufactured confidence and hubris, that it alone can solve the problems it continues to create? The building of parallel infrastructure and economies, and fostering like-minded growth from the ground up. Small communities, purpose-built homestead settlements, and consciously considered villages operating under local governance and natural law. You already know of such societies that have quietly persisted in largely rural settings, generally ascribing their central values and priorities to religious considerations. While religion certainly isn’t a requirement, a spiritual and philosophical foundation of common values is, one could fairly argue, rather critical.
This is where a new image must be initiated, contemplated, and carried into the collective field. And we’re not talking new-age, airy-fairy wishful thinking here.
The existing image of our era is reinforced relentlessly through every media channel available. Today, that influence is concentrated almost entirely through screens — flat, 2D abstractions of life that we’ve mistaken for reality itself. And yet, something interesting is happening. There is a quiet movement away from constant, always-on connectivity, from endless entertainment, from doom scrolling, from the glowing, sleep-disrupting, blue-light rectangles that mediate nearly every human experience.
That movement isn’t ideological. It’s instinctual.
People feel, in their bones, that something is wrong — misguided, malformed, maligned. These technologies radiate false narratives at a scale never before seen, and the body knows it. The soul knows it. The question becomes: then what?
Many are returning to what is most natural. They’re leaving urban noise and nonsense for open land and rural spaces. They’re building homesteads, intentional settlements, and lives labeled “alternative” by those blinded by the false security of urban living, while being utterly dependent on the offerings of an ever-greedy technocracy. They’re reading real books again. Writing by hand. Learning trades and practical life-supporting skills. Meeting face to face. Homeschooling. Relearning how to connect without mediation, surveillance, or convenience masquerading as progress.
To someone old enough to remember life before the internet and smartphones, modern technology often seems laughable, if not infuriating. The same issues of reliability, connectivity, and utility that existed in 1995 still persist in 2025. That is simply pathetic. Meanwhile, each so-called upgrade adds little more than distraction, advertising, bandwidth-consuming nonsense, and digital noise. Everything that is repairable, salvageable, and functions well is replaced or systematically erased. Everything tech-infused, shiny, and new is designed to serve profit margins and ensure repeated purchases, made to quickly become obsolete or break down. It feels increasingly clear that we have reached a tipping point in collective awareness regarding the false promises of technological “solutions.”
This brings us back to image — and to choice.
Depending on what you feed your mind, you’re either feeling empowered, grounded, and increasingly detached from the madness, or you’re anxious, depressed, and waiting for the next manufactured crisis — the next scam-demic, orchestrated conflict, artificially amplified weather event, or inflation-induced grocery bill shock. One path leads toward agency and authenticity. The other leads toward paralysis and dependence. Catching yourself in that divergence is critical now, perhaps more than ever.
Carry the right energy forward, without judgment or resistance to the pervasive negative noise. Shape the image deliberately — for yourself, for your family, and rest assured that it will continue outward into the wider field. The old structures of Empire are collapsing. There may well be uncertainty ahead. But collapse is not new. Civilizations rise and fall. What is new and improved is the scale of psychological manipulation and predictive conditioning aimed at keeping humanity divided, distrustful, and turned against itself. Consider for a moment how often you berate, denigrate, judge, and hate on yourself. That’s not natural.
Much of that suffering could be averted, if not entirely avoided if we paused long enough to break the pattern — to step outside consensus reality and question what we’ve been told is real, possible, and inevitable.
I have written about reclaiming agency and authorship a hundred different ways, but the core truth is simple: this world, your life, your body, constantly reveals how powerful we actually are. Image is part of that power. Used unconsciously, it enslaves us. Used deliberately, it alters our trajectory.
A spiritual callus is not cynicism or numbness. It’s ethereal armor. It’s elevated perception. It’s recognizing distortion for what it is and choosing otherwise. And the image — the true one — is entirely within our conscious control.
True change begins within. You have always known this. By tending our inner image with care and clarity, we not only cultivate a spiritual callus to remain steady amid distortions new and old, but we also inspire ourselves to move differently, to act, and to dare greatly. From that grounded place, a different future begins to emerge — quietly, naturally, and entirely through our own conscious choice.
Solvitur ambulando