Information and Consciousness
Where I live, the Mayan prophecy of 2012 is taken as scripture. I say scripture, because essentially it is religious in basis, and like religion, few people duck the blind belief to check the true facts. To some extent, I count myself as one of them. However, my education being based in science, I cannot help but question its real significance in the greater picture.
The belief, or rather the hope, by most of my peers is that the general state of consciousness is ascending. This, as dramatized by popular literature such as The Celestine Prophecy, is supposedly marked by a rising sense of dissatisfaction, a subtle search within the populace for something more… a deeper meaning to the increasingly technological world around us.
All this talk of ascending consciousness and revolution and the only argument people can come up for the 2012 "shift" is to remind us how many people in the past have predicted the end of the world, only for the world to stubbornly continue turning. Likewise for ascending consciousness. People always believe they are the chosen ones, the new revolution, whose forward thinking is so dramatically different to times gone by that it is sure to force a change in societal structure. They forget that modernity, by its very definition, means new-ness, implies improvement. What about that feeling of satisfaction, every January of every year, when writing the date sends a new-year chill down the perceptive writer's back, compared to every December, when the date, just months old, seems stale and old-fashioned.
What happened to the Summer of Love? A huge movement, world-wide, all-encompassing, enough to make history in both fact and legend, enough to change politics, enough to change the world. But was it? What happened to those freedom loving protesters? The movement was radical, its proponents passionate, but where are they now? They went on to produce the world we see today, it all its matte technological sheen, its crumbling, untrustworthy democracies, its dirty wars. They wound up in sad marriages, with large houses and spoiled children. Not all of them, of course. Some of them turn up, from time to time, long hair and large glasses and a conspiratorial manner. But what really changed, other than our view of fornication?
What are the indicators of today's consciousness movement?
A large part of the world relies on television- or internet-based new channels for their view of the world. As a conscious human, one must understand the limits of this input. For every journalist there are a hundred, very talented PR agents, all able to insert their 'news' with ease into daily circulation. Those who don't know, don't care, and those who don't care, don't know. Every news story is simply someone's opinion. I learnt this in primary school. However, how many of us extend this awareness into our daily lives? How many of us talk about the limits of the news, the joke that is Fox, the embarrassment that is the London free papers. And how many of us have the time to scan every newspaper and channel to compare sources, drawing as unbiased an opinion as possible? For in theory, this is what we should do. In practise. Well, in practise, personally, I am in Guatemala, twenty minute's walk from the nearest shop, a hundred mental miles away from anything that 'matters.' I haven't a clue about the world right now. They told me Osama Bin Laden was killed and I laughed. Who the hell is Osama Bin Laden? Why are we killing him? You might yell, in outrage, he terrorized the United States! Or perhaps, he started the war! Or maybe, he is in control of a multinational campaign to kill everyone who is not Muslim! What exactly was it again? And who told me that? Where did that information come from? For many, if Fox News tells them Osama needs to die, they will agree, to the point where onscreen hypnotization is a definite possibility. When someone tells me he is dead, I feel nothing. I have no idea who he is. To me, he is just another bearded man. He could be the same bearded man as in another picture of him, or he could be different. I have absolutely no evidence to believe that he is dead or even that he deserved to die in the first place. Why? Because I don’t trust the media. I don't have the time to read everything and make a measured judgement, as free from bias as possible, and as such I do not feel entitled to an opinion.
So when people talk about an ascending consciousness I look to cases such as this for evidence. And I'm afraid more often than not I see blind faith in what we are spoon fed through our popular media channels. Someone tells me Young Turks, an independent news discussion board, gets 3,000,000 hits per months. On the one hand this is encouraging, on the other, disparaging, for when you think about how many people watch the television, how many people watch youtube, in fact, you see that in fact this is a cripplingly small number.
Consciousness is crippled from the very start. Our education system is built on principles of non-questioning acceptance. Memorize this, pass exam, succeed. Critical thinking is given a small place in a child's life, and as such the emerging adult has to struggle against years of conditioning to open his mind. Even on the yoga farm I struggle sometimes, as here, in the most free of places, one grows accustomed to meeting people who say things like 'This has been around since the times of Atlantis, etc.’
JIYA JULIA
Jiya works in the field of self-empowerment, particularly through creative expression, helping people to identify their challenges and fulfill their full potential. A founder of international organization Kula Collective, Jiya offers her retreats around the world.
