INSPIRATION
Awakening from the
Sleep of Modernity
By Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD
As modern humans, we are increasingly absorbed in thought—rational
thought—and caught between two
worlds: the outer and the inner. And,
increasingly, the noise in our head is
being shaped and mediated by our
own technology, such that our human
experience is becoming more and
more detached and self-referential.
M
any of us are entrapped
in the shell of our minds,
and this follows us wherever we go. We wake up
each morning, and rather than taking a moment
of appreciation for the
miracle that is life, we snap to mental attention.
We make an immediate inventory of our egoic self—who we are, what we are, and what we
are going to do today. We remain in the shell
of our thoughts even as we leave the secondary shell of our enclosed houses, sipping our
morning coffee as we enter the tertiary shell of
our automobiles, backing out of our driveways,
barely noticing whether the sun is shining or the
birds are chirping. Bucky Fuller once said that if
an alien being were standing right in front of us,
we would not notice because we are too stuck
in our way of seeing. This is probably true, but
more importantly, we do not notice what is natural to our world any more than what is alien. We
have done our best to insulate ourselves from
the sensuous life-world all around us; we move
from place to place within the shell of our retracted consciousness, literally lost in thought.
17 | NEW CONSCIOUSNESS REVIEW