The Inconsistent American Consciousness

It bothers me that the consciousness of Americans is so shattered that almost no one recognizes the schizophrenic nature of their thinking. Exactly what do I mean by “schizophrenic nature of their thinking?” I mean the way people embrace a variety of issues without realizing that these issues represent contradictory principles. I mean the way we say one thing and do another. I mean the inability to be consistent. We cry about racism in places like Ferguson and yet fail to examine the underlying attitude that infects everyone in America – the attitude that we are better, smarter, richer, more educated, and more deserving than any other country in the world. We mount internet campaign after internet campaign designed to protest everything from control of the internet to capital punishment to fracking to animal poaching in Africa, yet never get off the couch to really do anything different. Why? We’re too busy slaving away to make a living...yet never examine this. We fuss and worry about money and our credit scores, yet walk into stores and pay the price marked on the price tag without saying a single word simply because we have been conditioned away from bargaining – which means we have been robbed of a voice in the transactions of life. We protest abortion and yet celebrate with parades when soldiers who have killed dozens come home from wars in faraway places. Once the parade is done, we abandon the soldiers, never thinking of what it might have cost them to be in that awful experience. We are just secretly glad it wasn’t us. We refuse to fund birth control or abortion, and even more stupidly try to tell our young people that their sexual urges are ‘sinful,’ which absolutely runs counter to life and its natural beauty. At the same time, we won’t touch the issue of the right to have as many children as we feel like or address the responsibility to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves and our children in a clear and caring manner. We seem to have no realization that we are creating future humans. We communicate endlessly on cell phone and iPads, yet can barely manage a face-to-face conversation without anxiety, judgment, and misunderstanding getting in the way. We have learned how to operate a gadget but we have forgotten how to listen. We complain about suffering with a thousand and one health problems, yet continue to stuff ourselves with fake food that cannot rebuild the body because there are no nutritional factors in it. We could grow our food directly, but we are mostly too busy protesting racism and abortion, mounting internet campaigns, trying to make enough money to replace our voice, and playing on our iPads. We run around fighting the war on drugs while ignoring the fact that this is a significant source of income for our government and a significant loss of spirituality for us. Consciousness-altering plants are Mother Nature’s offer to awaken consciousness and realize that there are many dimensions of reality out there. There is only one way to shift your life and that is to recognize all the places where you are being inconsistent and contradictory in your thinking. Next, learn to be consistent and decide what is important to you. Structure your life, your time, your energy, your money, and your relationships to accomplish those things that have meaning to you. If the structure you set up is not quite right, change it…and continue changing as you change so that it is always right for you. The best way to maintain an old world that isn’t working is to pour protest and attention into it. The best way to create a new world that could work much better is to pour attention and effort into it. The key is attention…remember that!