Thursday, November 30, 2006

Dryclean my Mind

I went to pick up my dry cleaning the other day and as I was standing at the counter, I became lost in thought staring at my bag of clothes. When the lady rang me up I handed her my card,
signed the receipt, and headed on my way out the door. But she stopped me . . .

“Sir, don’t forget your clothes”. They were still hanging on the rack.

Enter: waves of self-chastisement & loathing for not being “in the moment”. Exactly how out of the moment do you have to be to forget your drycleaning at the drycleaners?? It’s not like I went in there for anything else. So as the little Yoda on my shoulder is yammering away ---“never your mind on where you are on what you are doing . . . reckless, you are”---I go grab my clothes and start to walk out the door again when something hits me mid stride. “That happened the last time I came here” I say out loud. Enter: equal parts frustration & amusement. I felt like a mouse in a maze, always bumping up against the same wall. And I wondered "does this silly game go on forever?"

And then the drycleaning lady said “everybody does it---all the time. I’ve chased after people and they've completely dissapeared around the corner. Then they come back a few hours later saying ‘uuummmmm, excuse me, could I please have my coat?' I guess people just like to pay me for nothing.”

At that we both smiled and all the frustration just drained out of me. Because it’s somehow comforting to know that so many of us are in this boat together. Running here and there, doing 12 different things, thinking 25 others, all while trying to get through our day.

And so there's a certain comfort in numbers---even in our shared absent-mindedness. Not to mention that it's funny as hell to imagine a steady trickle of people walking into a drycleaners, paying for nothing and walking out.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

An Introduction

Popular. Consciousness. It's sort of funny considering that consciousness doesn't always seem to be the most popular thing out there these days. But if you look around, I believe we'll see something that's growing. So what is popular consciousness anyway? There are tons of definitions out there for both the words “popular” and “consciousness”, so I've improvised this little breakdown on my own:

pop‧u‧lar con‧scious‧ness [pop-yuh-ler kon-shuh-s-nis] noun
1. the collective thoughts, feelings, values and beliefs shared by a group of people
2. the predominating belief and value systems of a culture and its sub-cultures

It's all about what's on our minds---literally. On top of our basic human experience, we have layers of worldviews, paradigms and thought systems that guide how we live our lives. It's the software we've accumulated over a lifetime. Some of it is absolutely necessary to survive, but there's a lot that's outdated and inefficient. And then there's all the bugs and viruses. Consciousness is the process of waking up to these systems within us and between us, strengthening what's healthy and getting rid of what's not.

And like anything that's worthwhile, that process can be exhausting. If you become so acutely aware of everything going on in your mind and the world, you may want to knock yourself . . . unconscious. Because we're bound to see so much madness in ourselves and so much injustice in the world once we start to really look at things.

But there is so much beauty here at the same time, so much passion and ingenuity and creativity and compassion and spirit bubbling over all around us. Both are happening at the same time: the dark and the light. And that's the reality we're trying to wrap our heads around, to truly see the Whole Picture. And it doesn't happen overnight. Just as the evolution of our consciousness as a species is a process, so are our own individual journeys. We take it step by step.