Breaking the Spell of Humanity – A World Waking Up to Self-Awareness

The world we live in is constantly changing, but we are not always aware of the subtle changes taking place in ourselves, in our perception and behavior, in the way we relate to each other and our goals in life. Even more so, we often fail to see the larger picture and the major agents at play which are responsible for generating the changes and guiding our evolution, for better or worse. Conspiracy theorist will always find a hidden culprit for our current state of consciousness working behind the scenes, and religious leaders may be too willing to find proof for their message and prophecies and point the finger at external ungodly forces working against the will of God to explain our current state of affairs. In the midst of this polarity there is a voice rising up ever more strongly in our times pointing the finger squarely back at ourselves and urging us to wake up and take responsibility for our own evolution and growth, individually, and as a collective human family. More and more people today, from many fields of study, are sharing their vision for our future and calling us to the task of working on ourselves and nurturing the capacity for individuality and conscious awareness.

The tumultuous times of change we live in are proving to be much more subtle than anticipated. The new revolutions of our times are peaceful revolutions without armaments that call upon each individual’s human resources in participating and recognizing we are all connected and need each other to create a better world for everyone. The vision for humanity’s future, coming on the heels of the changes forecasted for 2012, is one that requires of participation in our own evolution and the communities we live in. Most people we have interviewed for SuperConsciousness Magazine, from all fields and walks of life, largely agree on this.

Sociologist and writer, Kingsley Dennis from Britain, author of the new book, Breaking the Spell, An Exploration of Human Perception, in which he addresses the signs of our times, his vision for the future and the current state in our evolution. He points out the task at hand for humanity to reach its next stage and how it hinges on the capacity to become more self-aware of our perceptions, the agents that historically influence it, and offers us simple tools to begin working on each individual’s own growth and evolution. He is convinced that we, as a species, are going to make it and assures us saying, “My message is to say that to wake ourselves up, and to have the ability to perceive more of our participation in an energetic, living, dynamic cosmos is not as hard as we think … As a species we have passed the threshold. By that I don’t mean that we’re going to have a golden age or utopia straightaway, no. There’s a lot of time in the future to start creating the change … We need to shift from a linear, socially conditioned perception to a perception which is more intuitive and one that is based on “gnosis,” which is an inner knowing and inner understanding.” Enjoy!

SuperConsciousness: Tell us about Breaking The Spell, An Exploration of Human Perception, the title of your new book coming out this month.

Kingsley Dennis: “Breaking the Spell” refers to a sense of conditioning, how our sense and ideas of the world around us is very much conditioned. It also refers to our perception, so social conditioning and perception are the two major elements that I discuss in the book. The first half of the book talks about how our conditionings and perspectives are built up within us through society. This has not always been the case but is largely the product of modern society. The second part of the book goes into a deconstruction mode and how we can step back and try to break the spell. I specifically talk about exercises that we can do with ourselves, which I describe in three chapters: Managing One’s Energy; Being Vigilant; and the third one, Stepping Away. These are all mechanisms that we can do very simply in our daily lives to help break the spell. So that is the crux of the book.

SC: Tell us about the “signs of our times” that you mention in the book. What are these signs you perceive?

KD: The signs of our times — I tried to look at the larger, grander picture to say where we are now historically through the processes and how it may not be an accident that we arrived here but rather an evolutionary trajectory. My framework is that there are evolutionary impulses that operate through the historical picture. At certain times the impulses have entered social and cultural frameworks, which we can call “the interventions,” but I prefer to call them impulses or impacts. If looked at historically, it appears that these energetic moments were very deliberate and intentional energetic impulses to assist or be a part of the evolution of consciousness. I don’t specifically look at the sources because these can be quite vague, but if you look at their manifestation then, clearly, there have been moments where specific social times have really helped to push forward humanity’s progress and the understanding of our consciousness.

SC: Where are we at right now, where is humanity in its evolutionary process at the moment?

KD: I see that this is an incredibly important and profound time, because human perceptions and our consciousness are grasping a planetary perspective now. I feel that we are on the cusp of a “planetization” of consciousness, to use that word. But, also, it is not only in the consciousness of our planetary perspective that is emerging but we are very close to having a conscious awareness of our larger cosmic position. We need to shift from a linear, socially conditioned perception to a perception which is more intuitive and one that is based on “gnosis,” which is an inner knowing and inner understanding. I feel that to help push these final stages of a planetization of consciousness we need to trust and develop our inner perceptions and break away from a lot of the external conditioning, especially the conditioning which is very culturally localized. It is important to break away from that to embody a collective consciousness and also a consciousness which appreciates the non-terrestrial perspective.

SC: You mention that what’s important is how we perceive the external world, internally, and devoting more time to developing or becoming aware of our internal perception. Can you tell us more about these ideas?

KD: That is why I made use and included those stories at the end of each chapter, because stories have a capacity to transfer knowing and understanding in ways that are not linear. The difficulty with human vocabulary is that often it offers a linear understanding or it may be merely a channel. It is very difficult to approach understandings of perception and inner knowing through external vocabulary. That’s what I have tried to do by using stories. Stories tap into and reach an area within a person which is beyond linear and social conditioning and can break through those lenses to a gnosis. That’s why I find stories a very useful tool to utilize. The exterior world we can often embody without consciousness and just mimic it. If we polish our inner self we can reflect out to the world what we are in essence. That’s why I talk a lot about polishing the self and our perceptions, polishing the bridge to “the Real” because then we can reflect out our inner reality rather than just absorbing an external reality.

SC: You also mentioned that human beings have the ability to manipulate their sense of reality through their perception. Is this influence on reality merely a subjective experience or could it also produce a real, more objective impact on reality?

KD: There is a very tangible relationship between the human energy state and the state of our manifested reality. I opened the book with that statement you just mentioned, about us impacting and manipulating our reality, but I didn’t talk much more about it until the end of the book. I did this because that statement has been used many, many times through esoteric religions and teachings and it can become very blasé. You have to be careful when you are using that phrase. I wanted to mention it first, then work through the book, and come back to it, because what I tried to emphasize later in the book is that although there’s an energetic relationship between our reality and ourselves, we really have to work on ourselves to have a meaningful relation with our reality. It is not just a given relationship and we have it just like that. That’s something which I also try to emphasize in the appendix when I talk about the perception of spirituality. We often have a very consumerist understanding of what is our spiritual responsibility. So to answer the question, there is a direct energetic relation we can have with what we manifest but is not such an easy, generalized comment. It’s something that the human being has to work at.

SC: It’s clear that we can shift our inner perception of reality but is there any room for our perception to have an objective effect on our reality as well?

KD: We must understand that everything is in energetic relationship; the magnitude of our reality has an energetic source. Thoughts are a vibration; perceptions are also an energetic vibration and so is our state of being. Imagine that we are standing next to someone who is in a negative state. That state will reflect on us. We may not realize it but we will feel that negative energy. For example, I talk in the book about people who can absorb our energy like psychic vampires. They can drink up our energy. They may not be conscious of it but there are people who have this effect because of their energetic state of being. That has an effect on the real world around us. If we are with people who are in a negative state that can affect us and affect our perceptions, likewise we can project a state of perception, a state of being, and we can alter how we experience the impact around us. That’s why the exercises — stepping away, being vigilant, and managing one’s energy — are all exercises that affect how one encounters the physical reality around us. Just by shifting our sense of perception and state of being a little bit, you would be surprised how that can affect how we encounter our physical days.

SC: You mentioned earlier about a “planetization of consciousness,” a shift where the whole planet is becoming more conscious and waking up. Was the galactic alignment of the solar system with the center of our galaxy that happened on December 21, 2012, significant for our evolution?

KD: That’s interesting in terms of what we’ve been discussing in the sense of our perception because that day meant different things according to people’s perception of the date. To some people it was a momentous time and to others it was empty air; nothing happened. In the beginning of the book when I mentioned the Great Year and the precession of the equinoxes, I put them in the context of synchronization in that in the larger picture everything is related in synchronization. Just as we have the twenty-six thousand year precession cycle, we have cycles in our solar system and cycles in the human body, as well. Thus, in that, humanity is not isolated; it’s all connected. That was my context in looking at the astronomical cycles.

In terms of 2012, there was a lot of misinformation over this date, as well. There were a lot of promises that something spectacular would happen at that very moment. But, you see, the larger picture that we are a part of works in a different way and in a larger time-scale. It is not that something is going to happen that moment, specifically, in that one hour or one day, but it does show that there are energy cycles which align with greater cycles. There is an alignment with the galactic center around the planetary alignment, for example. But what I feel and was important for me was to pass the 2012 date to show to people that (A), it’s not the end of the world; and (B), there’s not instant enlightenment in that one moment. These cycles continue and therefore we have work to do on this earth and within ourselves to continue this development. The good thing about the date — one of the good things — is that it helped to synchronize and align human consciousness. There were thousands, perhaps millions of individual minds focusing on this particular moment across the world. This was a convergence of humanity and I feel that was very important to align us together as a species. But in terms of the grand event, it was just one moment within a much larger journey, and we should not stop our work or be put off by what did or didn’t happen on that day. It was a marker on our collectivity. I feel that it’s important to move beyond it and to move into real work.

SC: What is holding us back in our evolution? What are these mechanisms that you speak about in the book that target “the remaining spaces of free choice and free will”? How can we break out of this “spell”?

KD: This time that we live in now is a time like no other in that we already have the tools around us and the changing environment to help us wake up. I talked about this before; one of the mechanisms holding us back is fear. And our tools are education and connectivity. Now we are connecting up like never before across the world and people have talked about that we are part of “a collective nervous system,” for example. We are receiving information like never before and we have to take the responsibility to educate ourselves. It was a lot harder before because we were living in hierarchies and systems of closed information. Now we are accessing and are available to so much information. I also feel that our inner instinct is closer to the surface. Whereas before we may have needed a sledge hammer to get a message through to our inner gnosis, now, I think, that we need the ringing of a smaller alarm clock to really get the message. We don’t need big bombs; we can work with subtlety and smaller triggers. We have to trust ourselves like never before because the step is not that we have to jump off a cliff to wake up, which may have been the case in earlier epochs. We only need to take a step half a foot to one side, figuratively. It’s just a case of trusting ourselves and, therefore, aligning ourselves with the information, the sources, the contacts, the people, and the energies which we feel works for us. All that’s needed is taking that shift and giving ourselves an inch, and we can move a mile.

SC: What are the cognitive systems you mention that are like prisons that hold us back?

KD: Many of these are institutions that are socialized, especially in the western world. We grew up with a lot of peer pressure. We grew up from our schools under pressure to subordinate ourselves to those in authority. This is called “obedience to authority,” which then continues to institutions such as religious institutions, law institutions, the family institutions, and peer pressure. There is the media as well. If we look at our societies, they’re full of these institutions that steer and guide us according to various consensus thinking. It’s very difficult to pull ourselves away from one because we have another one very close by. If we try to pull away from, let’s say, religious or educational consensus, thinking patterns, we have to deal with our friends or family which may be also trying to keep us into a certain bubble of thinking. So the freedom is internal freedom; not to fear peer pressure or fear to think true to ourselves. Once we start to think about our truths we can speak our truths and can then act our truths. Then our whole body and perceptions will represent those truths. It really is about going inward and realizing that we can start from the first step inside.

SC: How do we get out of that sedative, amnesia state and become more involved in active creation? How do we apply the tools for changing our perception? Can you give us some examples of “stepping away”, “being vigilant,” and “managing our own energy”?

KD: The tools are a lot easier and simpler than we may realize. Minding ones’ energy, stepping away and being vigilant all deal with a state of awareness, and that is primary, to have that awareness first. For example, managing one’s energy is being aware when we are in environments that take our energy unnecessarily and leave us weak and being in a state where you hold on to your energy, physically, because energy has a quantitative value. Also, if we feel drained, it is to put ourselves in that environment that we know will help us retain our energy, whether it’s a physical environment or a mental environment. For example, looking at stepping away, we have to believe in life. It’s important that we develop in life and not run off into a cave somewhere and become an ascetic. We have to engage, sometimes, the hectic and crazy world around us, but by stepping away we can put ourselves in a mental state of awareness where we are engaging with the world but internally we are slightly stepped back so we are more objective and we don’t react automatically. We don’t step into people’s games, automatically.

Being in that slightly distant position actually enables a sense of perception which can benefit how we behave and how we engage with our daily lives. Just that small distancing can actually create a lot of energetic development. Being vigilant also is being in a state where we can call up some energy reserves within ourselves by calling up memories or times when we were in high states. By recalling those moments, those states — because the past, present and future can be contacted instantly — they can live within us and we can call upon our resources. In being vigilant is very important not to react automatically within the conditioning, because we’ve fallen into people and society’s games all too easily. It is almost like taking a two or three second relay to put ourselves in a position which benefits us and benefits those we deal with and being more self-aware. So I talk about that within the book. There is nothing esoteric about these exercises. They’re just about being mindful.

SC: Is this something that anyone can put into practice, a natural capacity we all have as human beings?

KD: That is the whole point. What I’ve tried to say in the book is that we all have this capacity. In the final part of the book I talk about what I call “spirituality versus consumerism.” Often we’ve been led to believe that our self-development is a transaction, that we must go to India or go to a guru, and sign on to a certain spiritual course and get a certificate of enlightenment back. No. We’ve been conditioned to believe in this supply/demand type of self-development spirituality, but that gives away our authority to an external source, a source which delivers something upon some form of payment. This is a misconception. What I tried to say is that the payment comes from within ourselves. The deal, the relationship is with ourselves. How we polish our inner selves and manifest that to the world is nothing esoteric. I’ve tried to present this and the ideas in the book in the most approachable way. What I’m trying to say is that the future for humanity is not esoteric. We are not the New Age, we are the new normal.

SC: I think that a lot of it hinges on the definition of consciousness. Consciousness has been misused and abused to mean so many different things that many people feel mistrust when they hear anything relating to consciousness. Is consciousness simply about awareness and perception, being aware, which is nothing esoteric in itself?

KD: Yes, consciousness is awareness, perception and, most importantly, it is our conscious engagement, our participation with our state of being, which is also consciousness. For me it is important to present consciousness as not something esoteric and therefore beyond our reach and something external to us. Our consciousness is part of our wellbeing. Our sense and state of spirituality is really a state of wellbeing. I think there has been a lot of baggage around the vocabulary of consciousness and spirituality.

Let’s talk about our personal engagement with our state of wellbeing and our perception of ourselves; that’s what we’re talking about here, which is available to everybody. I think that this needs to become part of our everyday behavior, thoughts, manifestation, and the way we think. It’s not out there; it’s within ourselves, which then affects how we see out there.

SC: In the introduction of your book you say that the future, most surely, rests within our hands, within our minds. Everything is in flux but we give meaning to our reality, to our life, depending on how we perceive it. The work is done internally. Can you tell us how we are doing as a civilization in terms of this internal work and reaching towards that future?

KD: I think we’re doing very well, thank you very much! I would tell everybody that I speak to that I think we’re doing very well, despite what we may see in the media. Where we are now is more of a blank slate. We can now start writing upon that blank slate what we wish to be and see and do. I think it’s very important just to be relaxed and trusting with one’s self. There’s a lot of news going around that the world is going crazy and there are many signs of disruption. What’s really important is that we have a center of gravity within ourselves and we have that balance within ourselves because it will be everybody’s individual movements that will really create us passing the threshold. I think that as a species we have passed the threshold. By that I don’t mean that we’re going to have a golden age or utopia straightaway, no. There’s a lot of time in the future to start creating the change. I don’t think we are going to destroy ourselves. I don’t think that there’s going to be an ending to our evolutionary project, like some people have talked about.

Some people still say there’s a potential for this to be the end, that we can make it or break it. No. I say we’re going to make it. We’ve passed the stage where we could have broken it, so now we have to mend it. One of the things I talk about in the book is that we have to really trust ourselves because if we sit down and say, “Of all the opinions that I have, how many are mine?” What we know about the world, how much of that information truly comes from ourselves? If we realize that 80 percent of what we talk about and the information we pass on to other people, it’s not truly our own knowing. It is information that we’ve picked up from the news, etcetera. It’s time to just put that aside and really trust ourselves and start to be ourselves. If that means being simple or disengaging from a lot of the craziness of the world, that’s fine, let’s trust ourselves. My understanding is that we have made the tipping point and now we have to get down, trust ourselves, and start working on what is meaningful for each one of us in our lives and our families and loved ones.

SC: Do you see this work that needs to be done, to continue the process of becoming conscious, becoming aware, as a personal journey we do by ourselves or does it require our social involvement as well?

KD: I think it’s both, but everybody can work on that in their own way. What I mean by that is that I feel the social element is very important for the future, for people to connect with like-minded people, to engage in communities or projects that are beneficial to our living standards and our local environments. We are connecting across the world like never before and we can create projects. That doesn’t mean we necessarily have to always do it. I think that some people are worried that if they don’t see something world-changing, then they haven’t done something. I disagree with that. I feel that whatever we do which is genuine, any sincere state of being or action feeds into the whole because we are all energetically connected. We can call it a quantum field or consciousness field; we’re all connected. Any sincere act, thought or behavior will impact the whole. In our physical lives we can choose to manifest that individually, in our behavior with people, or we can choose to join groups and manifest that but we don’t have to feel that we need to do that. Our state of being is the main priority.

SC: You have a quote in your book from Victor Frankl that says, “Man is ready to suffer on the condition that his suffering has meaning.” Could it be that humanity is becoming conditioned to the state, “the spell” we are currently in and mistakingly finding meaning in being asleep and enslaved to it?

KD: I do feel that part of the system’s conditioning is to try to sell an illusion to us and try to create meaningfulness within our perceptual prisons, because if you don’t see the prison bars, you never wish to escape. It’s almost as if our consumer’s lifestyle, materialistic lifestyles, are there to try to placate us. There’s a lot of misinformation in New Age circles, also, that try to pacify us and say, “It’s okay, just think good thoughts, and everything is fine.” The system will die with difficulty because it will try to hold on and on, and will try to always play the last card. I feel that there’s a collective consciousness that is rising through humanity which is breaking the veil, and people are waking up in a sense, intuitively. For example, 50 years ago, I think perhaps everybody or almost everybody would have believed anything through lies and manipulation. For example, people would have easily gone to war for their country. Now we can look around and see that it’s so difficult for our governments to try to persuade people to go to war or sell warfare because we’re waking up to this illusion. The more people that wake up, the harder it will be for the illusion to remain. I think it is a dual role; it’s a mutual participation. On one hand there’s a collective consciousness which is helping us to be more aware of the situation, while at the same time we have to meet that and try to raise our own awareness and do something, try to help others that we speak with to see the lies and the illusion. Meaning can be manipulated or it can be genuine. We have, within us, a taste of truth, and the more we trust ourselves the more we will taste whether the meaning is a lie or it is the truth.

SC: Wonderful. Is there anything else you would like to add to conclude our interview today?

KD: My message is to say that to wake ourselves up, and to have the ability to perceive more of our participation in an energetic, living, dynamic cosmos is not as hard as we think. We don’t have to go a thousand miles; we just have to start changing our thoughts. It’s a knock-on effect. Once we begin to change our perception, our thinking, it’s amazing how other things in our lives start changing also. The domino effect begins with the first step within ourselves. It’s not esoteric; it’s human energy.

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