Our Unconscious Behaviors are Adding Up to Catastrophic Consequences.

“No problem can be solved with the same level of consciousness that created it.” Albert Einstein

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” Carl Gustav Jung

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, facilities, and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.” Patanjali

I have been on what I began calling 13 years ago; my “spiritual” journey. I put spiritual in quotation marks because what unfolded was less of my then current understanding of spiritual as otherworldly, mystical, etc., to more of a journey to “consciousness.” I now equate spirituality as simply coming to consciousness. This consciousness involves the subtle, nuances of values, norms, and inherited attitudes which make up the reality of our world. These attitudes are the given assumptions which are the foundation of our everyday experiences which we do not question or scrutinize. At a basic level we are often “unconscious.”

The time is come for all of us to become conscious if we are to heal ourselves and our planet. Perhaps Chris Jordon summarizes the importance of such a feat most succinctly in the talk he gave at TED in 2008. He offers us a very important perspective: "Our (individual) unconscious behaviors are adding up to catastrophic consequences....I fear we're not feeling enough. We've lost our sense of anger, outrage and grief... and there are very real social consequences...if we feel these issues more deeply and they affect us… finally, we will find within each of us how we change..."

I came to learn through my own struggles with repressed sadness and rage that the most important personal guidance system we have to becoming conscious resides in our emotions. We’ve all learned to ignore, repress, and invalidate our feelings. Once we begin to understand them as valuable guides and messages from our core; only then can we begin to make the necessary changes which will allow us to unleash the dormant forces which Pananjali quote refers to and truly transform our world.