The root and the branches.

Our common root.

Every once in awhile seemingly random, unrelated thoughts come thundering into my conscious awareness like a hurricane that forces attention. This morning was one of those explosions that had so many branches it took some time to arrange them, find coherence, organize the many, and identify the meaning.

Imagine in your mind’s eye a metaphorical tree with all of the ordinary parts: A root, a trunk, and a proliferation of many branches. In that way, it is like any other tree, except for one thing: The branches are aware of the other branches, all of which look different, but are utterly unaware of themselves, and most importantly ignorant that all of them arise from the same, common root. Keep that image in mind as you read what follows.

The clutter populating our mind today is, unfortunately, all too common and reminds me of what Marshall McLuhan said in 1964 in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. His take away message: “The medium is the message,” and it became the guiding force of the advertising business back in the days when that was my vocation, and it applies to our world today. What he meant was the nature of a medium (the channel through which a message is transmitted) is more important than the meaning or content of the message.

Much has changed in the 50+ years since then. Now we have a vast proliferation of media forms never conceived in 1964. I can’t count the number of social media forms that are now common coin, particularly among those who grew up in an era of the Internet. Taken as a whole, the Internet, in all of its configurations is the medium, it defines, limits expands the message, and creates so much clutter it is nearly impossible to find a quiet space within to untangle the branches, much less find the root. We are all too busy being distracted by the forces of wind coming from the other branches to notice our commonality and thus remain ignorant of the scourges that threaten us all. 

From that restricted vantage point what happens on our branch is all that matters and it seems clear that what is important to us individually is paramount to all else. And that preeminent, exclusive ideology stands in opposition to ideological problems of the other branches. For participants of various social media spaces, the bubble of choice determines their tribal allegiance and becomes their source of restrictive, reliable truth against which they bulwark themselves against opposing views. 

The cacophony of distractions is so loud it blinds us to common curses. Right versus wrong then becomes the mantra. Praise and blame occupy our every thought, we scramble to ferret out the culprit who is at fault and we forget the wisdom of Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”  Not “I,” not “You” but “us.” We, collectively speaking—the branches, are the enemy when we forget our common root. There is no fault except what we create together.

What we fail to consider in the grand scheme, is our differences, our fault-finding, our praises and our blames don’t matter. What ultimately matters is our root, which we rarely consider. Our rational-branch-mind of consciousness sees and differentiates but it is our subconscious-root-mind that determines our ultimate fate. The subconscious mind is akin to the hidden bottom of an iceberg and controls 95% of our lives; only 5% is run by the conscious mind. 

Most people live on the autopilot of differentiation, once habits have been ingrained into the mind which are then repeated day in and day out, unconsciously, as the branches upon that metaphorical tree. Ignorance of what the subconscious mind does is the reason we have such a hard time with troublesome thoughts and feelings. Consciously we are different and opposed to one another but we all grow from the very same root. Consciously I am me, you are you and the twain shall never meet. In truth of the root, this division disappears and we are united.

“Egotism is but the perversion of spiritual being. Ambition is the inversion of spiritual power. Passion is the distortion of love. The mortal is the limitation of the immortal. When these false images give place to true, then the spiritual man stands forth luminous, as the sun, when the clouds disperse.”—Patanjali