Question: The average Westerner spends about eight hours a day on their phone, or on a screen of some kind. It reminds me of Plato’s allegory of the cave and the movie “The Matrix,” and I cannot help but wonder what the ascended masters might say about this.
There is a growing counter-culture around screen consumption, and I am curious about the psychological projections that may be playing out, perhaps reflecting aspects of our internal self. What I often notice is that shame and judgment tends to arise around screen addiction and usage; we end up demonizing what is in essence a neutral tool.
Still, it seems that most of us on some level have a dependency. Is this just a natural marker of technological progress, something becoming more integrated into our lives for ease and efficiency, or is it pointing to a deeper issue that we are not yet fully conscious of, one the masters could offer insight on? Either way, I wonder if the real invitation here is to cultivate more grace and healthy boundaries around these tools, guided by our own intuitive discernment process.
Answer from the Ascended Master Saint Germain through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2025 USA Conference.
Yes, of course, most people spend too much time on some kind of screen, unless, of course, they are reading ascended master dictations; then it does not count. No, but seriously, this is just what we have seen over and over again. You are not aware of this, but there was a time when most people could not read. Then you had illiteracy, and most people could read, and many people did with books what people today are doing with their phones. It is just that over time, people have found more of a balance.
Then came radio. All of a sudden, you could turn on this device, and a voice was coming out of it or music, and there were people who overindulged in radio until they found a balance. Then came television, a little box, and there were little people moving around in there, and they were again hypnotized by that screen.
Then came the internet, and many people, yourselves included, many of you remember how in the early days of the internet, it was so fascinating and so new, and it was going to change the world or perhaps destroy it. Gradually, you found a balance, and it is the same thing today with the phone, with social media, where when you say people are using their phones, most people are using social media, and they are sitting there being hypnotized by this.
There is an element of dependency in the sense that the mind has a natural desire for stimulation, a natural need for stimulation, so the mind is always restless; it is always looking for something. In a sense, it is a safety mechanism to prevent the mind from becoming a closed system because it is always looking. There is nothing that really, no closed system can really satisfy the mind; it always has to look beyond. But still, that, of course, can also become unbalanced so it becomes so superficial.
What most people do on social media is that they are looking at these superficial messages from others or these statements about some line of wisdom, and it becomes very, very superficial, and that is, of course, not healthy. But this is not really something that you need to worry too much about for spiritual people, because most of the people who overindulge in this are not spiritual; they are not really consciously on the spiritual path. For many of these people, it is just a matter of them saturating themselves in this until they have had enough of it.
So, naturally, you see that as a counter-reaction to this, there is this awareness that starts growing that people have become unbalanced. The same thing happened with television, and so you could go back some decades, depending on the country, and see that there was also this guilt trip about watching too much television. There are always dark forces that will take advantage of any new technology: first, to get people to overindulge, and then to get people to feel guilty about it and get people on this merry-go-round of trying to discipline themselves and trying to pull back.
But really, for spiritual people, it is just a matter of realizing what your priorities in life are. What do you really need to know? Do you need to know everything about what the celebrities did this week, or what is going on in fashion, or what your friends on Facebook said? You have to, as we have said before, select out: “There are certain things I do not really need to know.”
You could also look at this in the sense that you go back 500 years, what was the primary tool for the power elite controlling the people? It was an absence of information; keep the people ignorant, keep information away from them. Then, with the advent of the printing press, it became more difficult. With the advent of radio and television, even more difficult. With the advent of the internet, really difficult to keep information away from the people. So, as we have said before, what did the power elite do? Plan B: flood the people with so much information that they are overwhelmed and do not know what to do with it; flood the people with so much obviously false information that they begin to distrust all information, and they go for entertainment and superficiality instead of really making use of this tool to educate yourself about the deeper realities.
So again, a balance is gradually found, at least among some people. But you can look at this phenomenon from a different perspective, and you can say, what is it that has happened over a long period of time, say a thousand years? You go back a thousand years, and people were very focused on the physical aspect of life. They had religion that talked about something beyond the physical; they had a certain superstition and mythology, like certain supernatural creatures. But they were by and large very focused on the physical.
When you look from the perspective of spiritual development, well, when you are so focused on the physical, you are not really open to any spiritual growth. So what happened is that as information has become more available, people have started shifting their focus away from the physical, the physical body, the senses, towards the mind, thinking, not just mental but also emotional. But primarily thinking. Books allowed people to think, to go into a mental space as they were reading a book. Even if they are reading a novel, they knew that: “I am not on a ship traveling towards the New World and hoping for a better existence than what could happen in a farm in Europe, but I am reading about”, and therefore, in a way, you were going through this in your mind; you were living through it, and you could resolve certain things in your psychology by reading a book. Or if you were reading a book about philosophy, you could expand your ability to grasp concepts that were purely in the mind and did not actually really help you to do your physical work, but still gave you some broader perspective on life, and the same, of course, with books about spirituality.
So you could say, in a sense, that even though it seems like people are glued to the screen, it is still a part of this process of shifting away from the purely physical to the mind. Now, I am not saying this is only a good thing, but the potential in the longer run is that people will shift more and more into a focus on the mind, so they become open to the potential or the realization that, as we have said, the mind is primary and the physical is secondary. A thousand years ago, all people, the vast majority of people, believed that the physical is primary, the mind is secondary. But more and more people are becoming gradually open to this idea that the mind is the fundamental reality and is not a product of the physical world.
You see, in a sense, you could say that this has the potential to help people shift because what have we explained? We have explained that everything in the physical is a reflection of what goes on in the higher levels of the mind, a projection of what happens at the higher levels of the mind. But once things have been brought into the physical, people can become so focused on the physical that they forget that it was created through the mind, and therefore they can even shift into the materialistic paradigm that their minds are just a product of the physical processes in the brain. In other words, the physical, which was created by the mind, has actually created the mind, and this is what humankind is gradually shifting away from as you even see a number of scientists who have begun to realize that mind is primary.
There is a positive potential of this. There is, of course, also the potential that people can, through their screen use, tie themselves to the astral plane through pornography, for example, or they can become completely superficial, focused on celebrities. Seriously, what does it matter what that celebrity wore to some kind of event? But people are so fascinated by this that it keeps them at this very superficial level. “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.” But everything has a high potential and a low potential.
Over time, though, people will become more and more balanced, and they will realize that they are spending way too much time on this, way too much time on these superficial things, and they will begin to use their phones to seek knowledge that really helps them improve their lives, because people will realize that all this superficial knowledge does not help them improve their daily lives. Many people are already beginning to look at how they can find something that actually helps them improve their daily life, and many of them search for that with their phones or other screens. I look at it from an optimistic perspective. You could take a more negative perspective, but I look at it from the positive.
Answer from the Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2025 Conference for America.
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