monkey see, monkey do serves as a personal blog and creative outlet for
systemic self awareness
in talking with my housemate tonight, i’m becoming really interested in a couple views.
1. in thinking of nations and governments, viewing them similar to conscious entities. they have a form of consciousness, containing perhaps more diverse paradoxes of thought and emotion than an individual human mind, but yet the have the ability to ’see’ the world and feel separate from the other nations; and there can be a form of thought, projection, visualization of ’self’ and ‘other’ in how a nation relates to things inside and outside of itself.
2. that the well being of that nation has more to do with its evolution and maturity, just like individual human minds evolve and grow, the nation’s consciousness can grow or recede, can be subject to addictions, obsession, small mindedness, and selfishness.
from this then when i think of America, it appears to me to be a very complex kind of mind. mostly wrought with emotions like fear, greed, and indifference toward many other peoples and situations.
but that American consciousness has the capacity within it to be completely self aware, to know itself so well that it understands how its own consciousness forms and what influences are at work within it. that self awareness can then be cultivated and empowered, and through that self awareness an understanding of how our collective fear arises can be known, how our collective greed occurs and how it can be overcome, and how our indifference arises and how and why that is not a good nor reasonable attitude to have. so aside from the specific content that is in our collective American mind (like terrorism, oil, safety, taxes, or whatever) what would help us the most is cultivating more and more our self awareness of how our collective mind works. why does a culture of fear develop and what are its influences and effects. why does a culture of greed develop, etc. whatever we see our collective consciousness beholden to, why does that occur and what are the systemic causes and conditions, and what are the systemic effects of those attitudes.
i’m sure many people already think this way and many leaders have this in mind already. but it also seems like many people do not think this way. they get caught up in the specific content of the moment, instead of the overall system at work.
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30. September 2006 at 5:54 am :
That would be better than becoming ‘Warriors for God’.
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2456227
30. September 2006 at 6:56 am :
A lot of people don’t even know themselves well enough though. Let alone, realize that they are part of a larger belief system that influences them. I think individual self-knowledge will have to come first. But that will need to be each individuals choice maybe. It’s complicated, but hopefully we start learning.
30. September 2006 at 10:54 am :
Ya, I want to agree. That self knowledge is a precursor to the larger, collective consciousness becoming self aware.
Especially around issues like ‘greed’ and ’selfishness’, how can the nation become aware of its selfishness if the individuals in the nation don’t see their selfishness or greed.
But I’m not sure entirely. Maybe it’s possible for the larger system to have that kind of awareness without all the individuals or even a majority of the individuals having self knowledge?
30. September 2006 at 12:59 pm :
Maybe. Ideally, everyone would have self-knowledge though. But we want to be realistic, right?
Interesting conversation.
30. September 2006 at 9:26 pm :
This reminds me a bit of Richard Dawkins’ meme idea from the selfish gene. I often think of large structures as creatures, with the humans inside being mere neurons. I bet there is a bunch more that could be done to investigate this and see how real it is.