Lately, I have spent a lot of time thinking about human nature. I’ve been thinking about collective consciousness, the power that it may have, and how greatly our emotions really affect our lives.
There are two emotions that all other feelings stem from-love and fear. Positive emotions like happiness, excitement, joy, and peace are rooted in love, whereas negative emotions like anger, sadness, greed and jealousy are rooted in fear.
In our society we are bombarded by fear, and therefore we literally breed it. While mainstream media often leaves people feeling insecure, inadequate, and in need of constant material improvement, our personal lives are focused around competition, petty judgments, and dramatic relationships. We fear that we might be unsuccessful without college degrees, so we push ourselves through school – many of us with the main goal of money, not inner improvement. We fear we might not be socially attractive, so we go to great measures improving our appearances. Some people go as far as discriminating against others to feel more secure about themselves; through action and violence, great fears are manifested. The fear to lose what we’ve grown up believing, to lose our conditioned identities: The fear that we may not be married with children by thirty-five, or ever. The fear to walk away from the norm and develop some original opinions in case of exile from a certain group of people. All these fears keep humanity in a box, a great big messy box, filled with war and crime and hate and insecurity.
I recently discovered an uplifting story about changing people’s consciousness from negative to positive. A martial artist and novelist, Arthur Rosenfeld, was in a line at Starbucks one morning when he encountered an unpleasant driver behind him. The driver was honking the horn at him, cursing for him to pull up (which, due to the line, Rosenfeld could not do).Well, instead of ignoring the situation, or even retaliating, Rosenfeld pulled up to the window and proceeded to pay for his tea, and the breakfast of the guy (and his four family members) behind him. When the presumably irritated man pulled up to pay and was told that his order had already been paid for by the driver preceding him, he felt a change of heart. He decided that he would pay for the car behind him. When the next car rolled up to a meal already paid for, they decided to pay for the car behind them. This chain reaction lasted until the afternoon. A news organization caught up with Starbucks, and Rosenfeld was tracked down through his credit card information. When interviewed, Rosenfeld said that it was not an act of kindness, it was a change of consciousness. He wanted to change a negative situation into a positive one, and with that came tangible (albeit small) change.
By acknowledging the universal consciousness that connects every human, one develops far more than just respect for everything around them; one finds a deeply rooted power, an ability to change one’s own life just by changing a negatively-charged outlook. Rosenfeld said that he paid for the guy’s breakfast to benefit himself too, because instead of leaving both of them in a bad mood, he left both of them in a fulfilled mood. With a change towards transcendence, humanity has the potential to evolve. I think we should all remind ourselves daily to focus on this evolution by remembering to love. By extending positive feelings to strangers on the street, the cashier, a peer on the bus-anyone and everyone. Love not only your family and friends, but your enemies too. Once we all start recognizing the power of love in human connection, we will evolve. That’s what the Mayans said anyway, but I think they were really onto something. Even if indirectly, we all affect each other. Perhaps if everyone searches themselves for true meaning, a higher consciousness, we can eventually find ourselves governed by peace and love, realizing we’re all so connected, and living in a better world.