{"id":6331,"date":"2020-11-13T16:47:49","date_gmt":"2020-11-13T16:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordmagicglobal.com\/?p=6331"},"modified":"2020-11-14T18:22:57","modified_gmt":"2020-11-14T18:22:57","slug":"red-states-blue-states-and-states-of-human-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordmagicglobal.com\/red-states-blue-states-and-states-of-human-consciousness\/","title":{"rendered":"Red States \u2013 Blue States And States of Human Consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u201cWe but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.\u201d Mahatma Gandhi<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
When I was a university student in English Literature, I learned of a literary device known as the \u2018Objective Correlative\u2019 in which writers of fiction would create difficult circumstances in the outer world of their story to mirror the conflicts and challenges their main characters were undergoing internally and interpersonally.<\/p>\n
I wondered at the time how one could possibly keep the metaphors trapped between the covers of a book. Weren\u2019t all objective events in some way reflective of our conscious or unconscious beliefs \u2013\u2013 individually and\/or collectively \u2013\u2013 just as our dreams mirror our minds?<\/p>\n
Then, in 2005, I read a remarkable New Yorker <\/em>article entitled, \u2018Hogs Wild\u2019 about a national environmental catastrophe in which, \u201csuddenly, feral swine are everywhere.\u201d And everywhere they were, the swine lay waste to the environment \u2013\u2013 much like what occurs through the unconscionable, insatiable piggishness of predatory capitalism<\/em>, which a Google search reveals, \u201crefers to cultural acceptance of domination and exploitation as normal economic practice.\u201d<\/p>\n
This analogy may seem far-fetched to some. However, at one point in the New Yorker<\/em> piece, author Ian Frazier described meeting an expert on the wild pig problem who had a large map indicating precisely where these feral beasts were ravenously devouring and denuding the landscape.<\/p>\n
Frazier was startled to notice that the wild hog map looked a whole lot like a Red State\/Blue State map. The swine were contentedly eating and breeding away in the Red states. And where a state was politically divided, the feral pigs lived primarily in the Red areas. In fact, the presence of the pigs was a highly reliable indicator for the outcome of an election.<\/p>\n
Here, at last, was a perfect example of a metaphor that had escaped the pages of a book: An \u2018Objective Correlative\u2019 had been unleashed upon the world like a genie from a bottle and was now running rampant, carving a path of destruction across the nation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Does \u2018Reality\u2019 Actually Emerge from the Inside Out?<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n
It\u2019s really quite illuminating when we get to see the degree to which human consciousness affects the environment \u2013\u2013 not only through direct impact but also indirectly in ways that can seem both comical and horrible all at the same time.<\/p>\n
It is essential, however, to remember that there is no particular political party, religious ideology, nationality, ethnicity or any other category of humanity that is singularly and reliably responsible for all of our problems. It is when human nature, itself, goes \u2018hog wild\u2019 that it gets us into so much trouble.<\/p>\n
To put it in the language of poetic metaphor \u2013\u2013 it is when our needs and greeds grow wild like weeds that they overflow our lives and spill into the lives of other beings like invasive species that overgrow a garden causing everything else to go to seed. This is an unchanging Law of Nature. It is not a law drafted in the Halls of Congress and subjected to a multitude of equivocating, self-interested interpretations and spin<\/em>.<\/p>\n
The irony in all of this is that a feral humanity is an absolute necessity for the creation of unbridled prosperity for those at the top of our lopsided economy. And this clearly requires that we, the people, be continually bombarded and seduced by propagandistic \u2018ads\u2019 into believing that we must constantly add to our already too many possessions<\/em> in order to induce that elusive sense of Feel-Full-ment<\/em> at least temporarily.<\/p>\n