A few years ago, a creative agency based in Kolkota made an awareness campaign video by way of a social experiment. The organizers invited a group of adults into a room and asked them to draw a simple picture on a given subject. The participants were instructed to use only three colors out of six and were told that the colors they did not choose would go to a second group. After they were done with their artworks, the organizers brought in the second group, the participants’ children, and asked them to draw a picture on the same subject. Once the kids were done, the organizers sat those two groups opposite each other and asked them to show off their work.
The parents proudly held up their drawings of trees against sunny backdrops and rivers along flower beds filled with vibrant greens and blues. But when the children held up their pictures, the parents’ faces fell. The children had colored their pictures using mostly black and grey because those were the only colors they were left with. The downhearted faces holding the monochromatic drawings were put in that situation and made to feel that way because of the choices the previous users made. This brilliant, slap-in-the-face campaign called #doorwaytogreen conceptualized by J. Walter Thompson company in Kolkata for Environment Day was created to emphasize our overuse of natural resources and the importance of conserving and protecting our environment.
When Mother Nature nudged the evolutionary scale in favor of mankind millions of years ago, I bet she did not take into account man’s gluttonous tendencies to consume and hoard material objects. Had she known that the 20th-century humans’ industrialization and urbanization were going to strip her resources faster than it took for her to restore, she might’ve had second thoughts about allowing his evolution. If she had known that man would morph from a species that saved for his bare necessities into a breed that hoards for his probable wants, she would’ve pulled some dirty disaster tricks to snuff him out early on.
In any case, this post is not going to be a rant on man’s destructive effects on earth because,
- Mother Nature needs no saving since she knows quite well how to survive the game, thanks to past extinction events, while the burden is really on the humans to scramble for an exit strategy.
- Separate from man’s appetite to hoard her riches, there is a different kind of hoarding that I am more interested in that is even more destructive than amassing natural resources.
Almost a decade ago on a quiet weekday morning, I was shopping for groceries at an uncrowded supermarket when a young girl approached me and asked if I had a dollar to spare. She must’ve been of high school age with long, disheveled blond hair, well-worn jeans, a t-shirt, and a jersey jacket. I responded with a matter-of-fact, stupidly honest answer, “I’m sorry. I don’t carry cash but only a credit card”, and she looked around unsurely, nodded apologetically, and moved away. It was only after she left did it occur to me the several other useful things I could’ve said to her instead like, “Is there any other way I could help you? Can I buy you anything? Do you need to call someone? Can I give you a ride to someplace? Can I call the cops in case you are in any trouble? In a world of runaway children, broken homes, abusers, and pedophiles, the stupidity of my mistake hit me a moment too late and by the time I looked around for the girl to make amends, she had already left the store.
To this day, this incident has been one of the top five regretful moments of my life that I experienced once but suffered in memory many times over. Looking back, there were a million things I had unconsciously picked off her appearance and body language like the hesitancy in her voice or the lost look in her eyes, but none of that registered with me at that moment because truth be told, I was afraid. I felt blindsided and scared that a stranger, even if only a young girl, who was a full head taller than me wanted to interact with me when I least expected it. Was it the horrible stories of teenagers setting a homeless man on fire or ambushing people for drug money that had primed me for doubts and fears? Or was is all of mankind’s anxiety and distrust condensed through time and passed down generations as collective consciousness that my own consciousness dips into every time I have a fear-based thought?
“Part of our consciousness is the inheritance of great suffering of mankind, not only personal suffering but the immense suffering of man who has been through thousands of wars, thousands of actual physical pain, all recorded, all shaping our brain.”
J. Krishnamurti
All through history, mankind has hoarded thoughts for the next generation passing them on as life stories, social norms, tribal pride, religious obedience, customs, and expectations, thus preformatting his children’s thinking to conform with the collective humanity. We are taught to think of things in a certain way, we are expected to react to situations in a certain way. We take ownership of abstract concepts and prickle on touchy subjects without thinking twice about the origin of those source thoughts or how it has been made to affect us personally.
But experiential truth is that we don’t think a thought; we become aware of a thought. As soon as a thought comes to our attention, we use language to put it in words and re-interpret it to ourselves. We can never claim intellectual rights to the thoughts we think because they were never ours to begin with. But every time we become aware of a thought, along with it arises an assortment of our past patterns, dormant memories, regrets, and mistakes that influences our reaction to that thought. Add to that a stockpile of humanity’s thoughts that has been handed down to us as our moral inheritance. When we have been conditioned by all that has come before us, what does it say about our ability to have an authentic emotional response to any thought? How can we claim credibility to our feelings when they are being experienced on borrowed premises?
“We are the result of innumerable impressions, pressures, other people’s thoughts, other people’s opinions, judgments, values; we are second-hand people very deeply and there is nothing original.”
J. Krishnamurti
There is a functional aspect of thoughts, like man saving for his bare necessities, that serves the practical purpose of aligning us with reality without any egoic overtones. But more dominant than that is the dramatic aspect of thoughts, where a simple thought is exaggerated by everything we have hoarded in our psyche that affects the way we see reality. Under the influence of all the baggage that we have inherited over time, who are we honestly when we get angry or sad? Whose honor are we defending when we feel offended by an insult. Who will we be when we peel away the layers of conditioning.
And who are we really, when we refuse our past, ignore our future and react to moments authentically?
“You are not sad, sadness arises.
You are not humble, humility arises.
You are not depressed, depression arises.
You are not hungry, hunger happens.
You are not thinking, thoughts happen.
You are a sentient, transparent screen
which cognizes the phenomena that appear on it.“
Wu Hsin
