Cognitive dissonance

I consider myself a pretty empathic person. When I see someone suffering, it bothers me – a lot. And lately, it sure feels like the proverbial shit is really hitting the fan. Do you feel it too?

I won’t bother listing the headlines, you’ve seen them all. And I know some of you reading this have even experienced some of these events first hand!

But I think it’s important to bring to mind the fact that vastly more information is being broadcast to everybody on a daily basis than ever before in history. So even if we’re not yet collaborating as a global collective, we are undoubtedly collectively affected by the awareness of a whole lot of suffering.

Problem is: Even though these tragic events certainly invoke in us a profound impulse to make things right, the force or inertia of “business as usual” soon pulls us back into its current. Your compassionate impulse, of practical necessity, never truly satisfied or expressed. I believe this creates a very real psychic-emotional frustration, resulting in a kind of collective cognitive dissonance.

cognitive dissonance (noun, psychology) – the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.

Cognitive dissonance thrives in a field of moment to moment (fleeting) consciousness, distracted by the business-as-usual imperative. Within this context, daily use of the 13 Moon Calendar cultivates (sustainable) continuing consciousness, which diminishes cognitive dissonance.

With continuing consciousness, behavior is motivated from a place of whole systems thinking, including the fluctuations, in time, of that system.

Taking a deliberate approach to your relationship with Time is a key aide in developing continuing consciousness. Like physical therapy to strengthen an atrophied muscle: At first it seems like nothing is happening, but through persistence your arm begins to work again or you can walk more normally until you’re up and running!

So too is the “Time-therapy” offered by the 13 Moon Calendar. After a while of sincerely utilizing it as a daily timekeeping tool, continuing consciousness begins to awaken. How? All its cycles are internally consistent and mathematically coherent, providing a reliable rhythm or pattern which becomes an enduring and stable foundation for your mind and perceptions.

You will more easily remember things from 7, 13, 20, 28, 91, even 260 days ago! And more importantly you should also begin to more clearly perceive some of your own unconscious internal workings, and perhaps even gain a new perspective on the unconscious patterns that play out on the world stage.

Furthermore, since the characteristics of the 13 Moon Calendar are culturally neutral or unmarked by history you also develop an unconditioned (outside-of-the-fishbowl) frame of reference.

You will not only be impervious to the spell of “Monday” – but you will have the opportunity to deliberately experience a “Yellow Magnetic Seed” day, or a “Red Lunar Serpent” day, or a 7-day “Yellow week of ripening” or a 28-day “Moon of Form”. And this draws forth a kind of compassion for how the unconscious programs, such as “the Monday blues” for example, affect us all.

AND (bonus!) the codes and patterns in the 13 Moon Calendar are not arbitrary. They approximate and communicate the structure, flow, rhythm, essence of the vast multidimensional reality with which we are generally out of touch.

This is why I promote the 13 Moons. Not to help you rationalize ending a relationship, or to decide when to cut your hair – nah, this would be like showing you how to use a kitchen knife as a mirror just because it provides some semblance of a reflection. No, I take the time to write articles like this and teach about the 13 Moon Calendar to hopefully assist YOU to cultivate continuing consciousness.

Because I believe when we work on this collectively it creates some ventilation, releasing the pressure caused by collective cognitive dissonance (which, sadly, explodes in exceedingly violent ways more frequently each year).

So instead of, again and again, acquiescing to the stifling deception that we are helpless, with an expanded awareness may we be better equipped to confront the challenges before us, individually and collectively.