Conscious Revival: Unity Through Design

You're sitting in your house. You have everything you want and need. Decorations and adornments; couches, cars, clothing, creature comforts. You feel safe with your things. They become the definition of your personality, your achievements, how you've made your parents proud. Why do so few people know who you are, you know, that place inside you, the unique snowflake, the hero, the rock star, the one receiving all the love and adoration for achievement in being? The Self they talk about in psychology class. The Soul.
When people travel they tend to drop all the so called amenities that define our outside, acceptable, comically uniting personalities. The longer one stays on the road the more one feels themselves disconnected, fragmenting, as if you were just starting to realize that you did something very very wrong and felt ashamed, but could do nothing about it. But really it's just a shedding of the skin, the one you thought you needed to belong without question, the dried out wilted outermost layer. What you are left with is an understanding that the less things you travel with and depend on, the easier it is to see your surroundings for the beauty it has to offer, the simpler communication is in spite of language differences, and every material thing you carry with you just adds weight. When we are in one place we have to bring the beauty to us, and have it sit near us as we sit and delight us everyday to remind us of the happiness we feel when we are in comfort of home. To remind us of who we are when we aren't at work. However, these decorations and adornments, as much as we long for them, are taking over our world and block our view.

More and more our interpersonal relationships are being replaced by products; cell phones, ipods, treadmills, and affordable tv's for every room. Even though each American is encouraged to amount to something, to grow and learn and dream, at the end of a very long career you're left with a handful of muddled memories mile marked by things. Possessions. Stuff that you can't take with you. Sometimes, I step through the mirror and see our world with a whole new story, and I want to tell people about the possibilities, but the idea becomes too big and it gets away from me, or my bills get too big and I'm back in "reality". Of course, I don't mean to suggest anarchy. Though it might be interesting to throw all the rules away, all the laws, borders, couches, cars, candy, and pills, it would never last. We are made up of cells, the same cells that make up everything, the awesome miracle of God, and it is our nature to cluster to a group and serve a function that seems to call to us. Everyone, every single human, is a cell in the body of our species, functioning together, trying to roll over, discovering our tongues. If we look telescopically at our human race baby we can see there is major problems in the middle east, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, the very center. The space between our hearts and our stomachs. The solar plexus. This bright yellow sun and sand chakra point represents the ego of the mysterious psychological Self. This yellow glow is self esteem, the energy center, personal power, vitality, and yet everything around it is diseased. Look at the Holy Land, prophet-ville, the beginning, Palestine. There is suffering, and fear, and trauma, and irreparable psychological damage each and everyday in the land where Jesus and Buddha and Ibrahim travelled, shed their skin, and spoke. And though we sit quietly amongst our things and do nothing to remedy the problem, as it is not apart of our function, it is apart of our body, and information is programmed there, and one day, it will be the shame you feel when you are finally naked in your new skin.

You can sit amongst your things and ignore it, believing that having possessions is worth all this suffering. Injustice and slavery, of course, is nothing new. Perhaps a few generations ago we were indentured servants, loathsome emigrants,poor and pathetic and spit on and ignored. It all seems apart of the cycle of things, hurt or be hurt. We're trapped in a psychological prison of fear and need, and the powers that be would have us eat each other alive if it brought more finance and luxury for they, too, suffer the same illusions that the whims of greed bring the things that make us complete, like joy and love. Those of us who know what it means to seek love and joy and beauty know that it is not the material satisfaction that provides, but the process of the mind, and the drive of the spirit that awaken these emotions within us.

However, this psychological prison, this fear, creates a barrier for developing our Emotional Intelligence, a study that psychology is only just starting to explore. Salovey and Mayer (1990) are the leading psychologists studying this idea, and defined EI as “the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.” Basically, they are saying that the more we understand how we react to things emotionally, the better the decisions we can make. Forty hours a week we greet customers, push paper, crunch numbers, or develop software to serve our society, and the less emotion we use to make decisions each day the smoother things run. Corporations have rules set up to be followed so we do not have to suffer the burden of using our emotions to make business decisions, which are, by nature, as inconsistent as we are unique. At the end of the day, it's only natural that we still have this nagging, incessant, need to feel, just as our eyes need to see and the ear never stops hearing, and we need the delights that entertainment, decorations, candy, and pills provide, simply to quiet our emotions enough to do it again the next day. Creature comfort society is not enough emotional understanding to the know the Self, but rather makes us anonymous, as we hide deeper under our pile of accomplishment souvenirs. If we cannot understand the emotions of our Self, our spouse, or even our child, how could we possibly have empathy for the woman in China working for a dollar a day, participating in the function of the body decreed by her state, to create the decoration or adornment that satisfies the otherwise unsettling compromise you made to act as a function decreed by your state. Both you and she are no one, and nothing changes.

Creating, celebrating, and exploring art is the key to opening the doorway to the Self. The experience of art is something that exists outside of function, rationality, and protocol. It is something more. Viewing art registers inside our Self and makes connections that cannot be controlled, predicted, or ignored. As much as consuming goods is a social practice, art is anti-social, and therefore sharpens our perceptions and make us aware. Its purpose remains outside of the traditional method of achievement, ie production for the masses, so the artist has no choice but to be the other side of the mirror, to see the world outside of conformity, and report the results. As much as the artist longs to release the ceaseless creative voice inside them, so it is apart of everyone to experience it. Research of psychobiologist Roger W Sperry has told us that the visual, artistic side, and emotional side are both located on the right side of the brain. Art and emotion understand each other, and work together, processing the whole picture and sending it over to the left side to be broken down for processing. What good is the process without the big picture, and what good is the big picture, if it doesn't feel right? Our preferences for art, the way different art makes us feel, are as unique as that snowflake we were raised to believe we are, and the result is a connection with emotion that we are not ashamed of. Even the act of changing from comfy pajamas to a ball gown electrifies emotional stimulus and creates, essentially, a whole other side of your personality. You can get to know yourself a little better simply by changing your clothes. This is far from a miraculous psychological breakthrough, in fact, one can get quite addicted to the Self a particular outfit provokes, till it is no longer a window to the soul, but a mask, and again we are caught in the cycle of losing sight of ourselves in lieu of gaining acceptance via the materials we hide behind. However, if you can make clothing more of a unique artistic experience, an experience that promoted a genuine emotional response, then there is no mask to wear. The potential for our decorations to mean something more, to expose our Self, is just on the precipice of fearfully being accepted and the weightlessness of Being.

It is now up to the designer to set a bridge of working with mass media and the artistic experience. Designers are essentially artists that have compromised their gifts to serve a function in society in the traditional sense. Mass producing goods is the best and most profitable method for society at large, but the result of mass production is to use cheap materials and cheap labor, which calls for quick, easy, and unimaginative designs. Thus, when the world at large only has access to cheap and boring creative expressions, so our standard of taste is lowered, our style is lowered, and the emotions these creative expressions provoke are weak. There is, however, a new method of creativity on the horizon, that of using recycled materials to produce goods. For a designer, the process is the most exciting aspect, not the materials, per se. A designer does not need the best tools, freshest materials, or cheapest labor to produce something amazing, thought provoking, emotionally stirring, and supremely awesome. The talent lives inside the artist, pounding on the door of the Self demanding release, and the more challenging the medium, the more creativity is evoked, like a muse. The more creative and unique the goods become, the more emotional response it will draw out of the consumer. It raises the bar of taste, and the definition of style is reborn.

We all want to belong, to be accepted and participate in the growing of our human race baby. We want to earn love and respect, to be understood and praised, to have our voice heard without judgement, to be apart of it all. We default to having all the decorations and adornments as those we admire, trying to fit as closely to the rules of style that grant us the acceptance we need to belong. Once our decorations and adornments become one-of-a-kind, societal acceptance is redefined. Your current choice is to follow the rules of finance, practicality, and conformity, with just enough emotional satisfaction to justify everything you sacrificed for your state. The new choice, the one-of-a-kind choice, is to follow your emotional stimuli in the direction of the design that resonates the most with your Self. People will see you clearer. They will have the artistic experience that is simply felt and understood, without explanation or judgement, for the most confident and realistic part of yourself will be revealed. Once the mask has dropped, our fears imprisoning our minds will start to vanish, and we will have room in our hearts to see injustice, and the voice to no longer tolerate imprisoning nations for the consumption of trash. We will all see clearly that the Emperor wears no clothes, and he will be ashamed, and we will see change.