Creation vs. Consumption

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 100^th 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.