Despite the amazing capabilities of our minds, we humans seem to have an impressive urge to be blind to anything that is overly difficult or incomprehensible. We relegate these things to our subconscious—the attics of our minds. In the past year, our global community has been immensely impacted by disaster to an extent that we had yet to experience, but even the BP Oil Disaster and a nuclear meltdown in Japan can’t seem to hold our attentions. We are continually in a process of forgetting. I often find myself brain-numbed by the current drama of Real Housewives, for instance. Today we have both a collective heightened sense of awareness of the world’s problems and a heightened sense of apathy.
Woody Allen says that we can choose to have either complete misery or the complete destruction of the world, and he hopes we choose wisely. I appreciate his cynical sense of humor, but I also think we can choose joy. One way we could begin is by trudging into the attic of our collective unconscious and dusting off a few buried items. We may find some treasures hidden in the shadows of our cosmic mind that can help us understand why we keep pushing toward our own destruction. What is the subconscious trigger for that? Can we, at least at the individual level, stop pressing that trigger?
