Most Americans realize that something is amiss in our community. But what? And why? We dig deep in this essay in search of the Truth.
First, understand that each member of our species choose the experience they have on this planet. In short, they create their own Reality. Now, we realize you may want to argue how that cannot be true for certain people in certain circumstances today but read on as we continue to excavate.
There are only two choices each human can make–to live in a conscious “state” or an unconscious “state.” Henry David Thoreau observed that his neighbors in Concord, Massachusetts chose the latter and hence he characterized them as “sleepwalkers.”
The vast majority of people in the Global Village since the beginning of time have made the same choice of living in an unconscious “state” and there are many examples, familiar to most of us.
We start with an older and very profound example of the two choices being offered. At the Last Supper the disciples were distressed to learn that Jesus was to leave them. Jesus let them know that they could choose:
Consciousness – a worldview of Oneness or, in other words, that of a unified and perfect Creation defined by Truth and beauty. Choosing consciousness results in an identity where peace of mind, happiness, joy and compassion characterizes the human experience.
Or they could choose:
Unconsciousness – a worldview in which the Creator is capable of judgement, cruelty, and imperfection, a scary narrative indeed. Choosing unconsciousness results in an identity driven by fear, competition, disintegration and violence.
To comfort his disciples Jesus assured them that they would not suffer in his absence since they all had the same Christ consciousness he had (in the Bible this is called Paraclete or Holy Spirit). Simple Reality calls it the True self. This insight was Jesus’ gift to his followers. “But Jesus proclaimed a loving father who was already arriving among his people, bringing peace, freedom and joy. One simply had to let him in, for the kingdom of God had begun.”[i] All the disciples had to do was to choose consciousness and accept the “kingdom of heaven on earth.” They had the same choice we all have today but unfortunately, they chose unconsciousness—the common fear-driven choice of an identity trying to escape from a cruel delusion.
Now on to a second example of an unconscious choice, this time in early American history, and the consequence of that choice.
In 1795 Thomas Twining, an English visitor to Philadelphia, had his first encounter with slavery when a Negro woman, the property of his host, was asked to show him to his bedroom. “It caused me both pain and surprise to meet with it in the country which so boasted of the freedom of its institutions.”[ii] This institution that shocked Twining was approaching its 200th birthday because captured African people had been hauled in shackles aboard ships and imprisoned on concentration camp plantations as early as 1619. If this description “grates” it is because most Americans are in denial of one of our most egregious “bad” choices as a nation.
Making a “bad” (unconscious) choice doesn’t mean it’s forever. Of course you can always make a conscious choice instead. Changes can be made; amends can be made. Listening to our most insightful and sensitive citizens can help by providing warnings about self-destructive behaviors. Some two centuries ago Herman Melville sent up a flare to reveal the moral catastrophe occurring in the darkness of the American soul. If we don’t heed these warnings, cause and effect will deliver its merciless consequences. “They and all beings, as the naturalist Henry Beston wrote, are ‘caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.’”[iii]
Melville provides a third example of unconscious choice for our deeper exploration. In Melville’s Moby Dick, Ahab could not hear the warning of his True self and was blinded by his fear and the resultant hatred.
Moby Dick embodies the Other for Ahab. “Ahab’s bias is personal and color-based. A white whale becomes a blank pincushion for Ahab’s thrusting mania as Melville shades pages with his madness. Yet—and this was absolutely astonishing for its time—Moby Dick becomes the ultimate asserter of reason. In self-defense the whale delivers justice. And never dies.”[iv] In the context of Simple Reality, justice is always perfect.
Moby Dick’s warning was profoundly prophetic. “By the 1840s, having ventured half the world away from America, Melville cast a frigate-bird-like perspective on the American character’s deepest congenital malignancy, then called Negrophobia. In the early 19th century, sperm whale hunting was never far from slave trading.”[v] Americans chose an identity which was driving their self-destructive behavior and the gap between Reality and illusion was becoming a chasm.
Ishmael, the protagonist in Moby Dick, befriends Queequeg a dark-skinned shipmate with whom he must share sleeping quarters and expresses once again one of the insights that could help his fellow Americans redirect their unfolding worldview. “For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean comely looking cannibal, a human being just as I am. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”[vi]
The growing distance between our unconscious false self and our conscious True self poisons our community, sickens our souls. If it turns out that we cannot find the courage to open both our minds and our hearts to the Truth then we will continue to destroy our human community, our planet and our psyche.
Truth is not easy to hear, particularly when it points to the unconscious behavior of our most sacred institutions. What devastation must occur before we finally acknowledge that we already know the Truth? Refer to the supplemental reading to dig deeper.
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Supplemental Reading: Religion, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
#18 Unconscious Choice
[i] Sheehan, Thomas. The First Coming. New York: Random House, 1986, p. 58.
[ii] Alberts, Robert C. “Protégé of Cornwallis, Guest of Washington.” American Heritage. August 1973, p. 60.
[iii] Safina, Carl. “Essay: Melville’s Warning.” New York Times Book Review. June 14, 2020, p. 12.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
