I’m
inspired to write after careful consideration of the ratio of creation to
consumption in my life.
Consumption of
information is something like a default state for me, and for many people I
suspect. I often reach for my phone when I wake up and start the ritual of
brainlessly scrolling that will continue whenever there is free moment of the
day. Or whenever I want to take a “mental break” from what I’m supposed to be
doing. Of course, consumption of information isn’t a mental break. It’s not
some refreshing walk in the forest that allows me to clear my mind and come
back to whatever I was working on with more mental clarity and better focus. If
anything, it muddies my consciousness and puts me in a state of elevated stress
and distraction.
Lately I’m
finding myself impulsively consuming news content like a junkie. I’ve been
following the Kavanaugh hearing with a ravenous hunger for more and more
information. The next update, the next partisan spin from some talking head,
the next witty quip from some late night news comedian. I check to see what CNN
says, I check to see what Fox News says, I watch all my triggered female
friends announce their pain and indignation on Facebook. I even dreamt about it
last night.
Why am I doing
this? There’s nothing I can do to change the outcome. I don’t even think I’m
necessarily attached to a certain outcome. If he gets confirmed I’ll probably
grunt out a resigned, disgusted “Uggghh”. But I certainly won’t be filled with
the same agonizing rage and feelings of complete betrayal by my country that I
felt when Donald Trump was elected. At this point it would just feel like par
for the course: America’s ugly shadow has taken control of its body. The shadow
needs to be seen and recognized. It’s a necessary step in our evolution toward
transcendence. I can’t continue being angry. I can’t continue getting off on my
own rage. It’s too exhausting and it’s aging me.
In order to
combat this obsessive addiction to consumption, I’ve decided to create more.
Creation is, after all, the opposite of consumption, according to me. A couple
days ago, after passively consuming content for…30 minutes? An hour? More? I
hastily resolved, “I want to create as much as I consume!”. On closer
inspection, that ambition isn’t reasonable. It would mean for every book I read
I’d have to write a book. Surely no one has ever created as much content as
they’ve consumed, especially not in the digital age when rapid information is
so readily available. Don’t even get me started on all the fluffy garbage
articles I read on my phone while I’m waiting for something else to happen: a
bus to arrive, a file to download…whatever. With my current lifestyle, in order
to increase my ratio of creation to consumption even slightly I’d have to stay
up into the wee hours writing. I value sleep way too much for that so instead
I’ll have to curtail my scrolling habit significantly. Instead of reaching for
my phone at the first hint of boredom, I’ll have to allow myself to Be. Here.
Now.
What
outrageous current event could be more important than my presence in the
current moment? After all, these moments aren’t chunks of time I have to kill
while I wait for my life to get moving again, these moments ARE my life. And I
only get one, apparently. Therefore, I want to go on a mental diet and control
the inputs better.
Don’t
misunderstand me, I’m not saying paying attention to or participating in social
media is a bad thing. I think social media is an extraordinary tool and a sign
of something truly remarkable happening to humanity. Technology has always been
used to amplify and extend the natural abilities of humans. I believe with
social media we’ve developed a technology to materialize our collective
consciousness. Social media gives collective consciousness a user interface.
You know what I mean by collective consciousness, right? I mean this theory of
Jung’s that once knowledge exists in the universe, it becomes accessible to all
conscious beings. For supporting evidence I’ll site the classic case that all
the woo-woo hippies love: The 100th Monkey Effect. In the
1950’s Japanese scientists did an experiment which involved leaving sweet
potatoes on island beaches for monkeys to eat. For years, the monkeys were
content to eat sandy potatoes, until one day a young monkey on one island had
the idea to wash the potato in the stream before eating it. This made it more
enjoyable to eat. She taught this behavior to other monkeys and after a few
years, this knowledge spread throughout the entire island and every monkey was
washing their potatoes before eating. At the same moment, monkeys on distant
islands started washing their potatoes also. Somehow they all knew what to do
simultaneously without directly learning from the monkeys on the first island.
Another
example of collective consciousness could be the Flynn effect, which shows that
IQ scores have been getting higher every year since the IQ test was invented in
1942. This isn’t because people are getting more intelligent, but because
people have been solving the types of problems on IQ tests for many years. The
answers are out there floating around in the ether, becoming more accessible to
us the more times people solve these problems. And perhaps that’s what it means
to become more intelligent as a species, to have more information accessible to
us via the collective consciousness. As a final example of collective
consciousness in action, I’d like to point to the many cases throughout history
of simultaneous scientific and philosophical discoveries by different groups of
people in different parts of the world. Newton and Leibniz inventing calculus
at the same time is a great example.
I feel like I
can directly observe the collective consciousness bubbling to the surface on my
news feed. I travel a lot and I’ve lived in many places. As a result I have
Facebook friends from all over the world. It’s so striking to me sometimes when
I see my friends in Peru posting the same sentiments as my friends in Holland
as my friends in Texas and Oregon and Canada and Australia. None of these people
know each other, it’s just that we are all subject to the same psychic
ripple-effect and we now have a tool to express and notice it.
I recently
finished The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts and
very shortly after, my boyfriend mentioned he has been listening to Alan Watts
lectures (he did not know what I was reading) and a Facebook friend
posted this lecture from
Alan Watts. This could be one of those creepy things where Facebook knows
everything we are reading/doing/thinking and feeds this data into an algorithm
that will show us things we are likely to click on, but I also think this is
just the way the universe works. You learn a new word and then you start
hearing it everywhere. Once some underpinning truth is revealed to you, you
suddenly start noticing it everywhere.
Anyway, I’ve
been thinking about Alan Watts’ idea in the lecture above of our presence in
these bodies as being analogous to music. I hear these analogies from the kinds
of spiritual people I like listening to all the time. We are one giant
symphony. I believe that this is the true nature of consciousness: it’s some
giant vibrational energy that exists outside of our bodies. Our material bodies
are like antennas for consciousness. Consciousness is the spirit, the ghost,
the energy, the life force that animates each one of us. It’s the vast cosmic
one-ness that we are all part of. It existed before us and it will continue to
exist after us. At our best, we are vibrating along and finding subtle melodies
to harmonize with. At our worst, we are out of key, out of time, out of synch
with the one-ness.
For me, the
best way I’ve found to ride the vibration is to learn and engage with complex
ideas. This is when I feel like I’m harmonizing with the universe and playing
to my true potential. This is what I want from this blog, an engagement with
the world of ideas. I want to create, and publish, develop my communication
skills and be open and vulnerable with my intellectual labor. I write in my
journal all the time, but what good is creation if you don’t share it? I’ve had
a blog before with a similar spirit, but I feel limited by my previous blog and
I want to start again.
Why Cave
Paintings? I love that ancient humanity found a channel to communicate with us,
their distant ancestors, through markings left behind. We can’t know what they
meant or what their intentions were when they made these markings. Like all
communication, we can only take from it the pieces that resonate with us. The
best creators are able to strike a deep chord that resonates with many people.
But no matter the medium, be it music or blogs or cave paintings, we never know
exactly what someone means, we only know how we interpret their creation. I
like to think of my unintelligible scribblings on the internet or elsewhere as
cave paintings for whoever takes the time to stop by and interpret them. I’ll
end this one here. Thanks for reading this far.
