Consciousness Raising

Written by Joy Hoffman

What does our built environment have to do with our consciousness?

A lot.

If you believed that your life was separate from everyone and everything else, you might eventually build a home for yourself that looks something like this…

AND, if you grew up in a home like this, you might grow up believing that you were separate from everyone and everything else.

Our built environments form around our invisible collective consciousness revealing the shape of our beliefs a lot like a hard shell slowly grows around a soft squishy animal.

If the world is your oyster, your home, and our communities, are our oyster shells.

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I grew up in a “developing” suburban sprawl.

My little sheltered, isolated self didn’t really know what to do with the rest of the natural world.

Me and my great-grandfather, Fred.

Fred, my great grandfather, holding me here, was a farmer outside of Atlanta all his life. He was not afraid of squirrels.

Or fish…

Me and my dad.

But I was. Bless my little heart. :)

I mean, fear of nature wasn’t something that I’d say dominated my life or anything. But looking back, it does make sense that I didn’t know what to do with the natural world—and was therefore often fearful of it—because it was so separate from the environment I grew up in. 

With zero choice on my part, my rural/suburban habitat grew around me with strip malls, Walmart, tract homes, and 8 lane highways flanked with fast food and some finer dining establishments, like Waffle House, O’Charly’s, and Applebee’s.

But as I got older, I got to travel some and see people in other places living in extremely different ways.

On one of those trips, I spent the summer between high school and college living with a tiny remote tribe in the Amazon, for example. Just being in this radically different environment was and still is an incredibly formative experience.

These other places began re-shaping me.

As I’ve had time to metabolize, study, and try to understand the experiences, I’ve come to see that one of the biggest differences between the culture (the invisible systems) and built environment (physical systems) of where I grew up in Suburbia, USA, and this tribe in Bolivia—and in fact, most indigenous cultures—is that the indigenous worldview tends to be one of connection, integration, and interdependence rather than separation, fracture, and independence.

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As we’ve talked about in other places on this site, healing = wholing.

And trauma = separation.

We all suffer from trauma and inherited trauma.

And yes, some are worse than others.

But I would argue that nearly all of us live with a baseline of trauma from our built environments that many of us aren’t very aware of. 

I get that it may sound whiney to use a word like “trauma” while growing up in suburbia… “Oh, how sad for her, she grew up to be afraid of squirrels and fish.”

But that’d be missing the point.

—

A kid afraid of squirrels and fish is something we can all laugh at. But what about all the other things we grow up separated from? The systemic pain that isn’t funny…

Fred was not afraid of squirrels because he was not separated from them.

But he was straight-up racist.

He was a poor farmer who couldn’t put shoes on his kids’ feet during the depression...just like many neighboring black farmers. But he did not see them as his equal. His culture and built environment taught and shaped him that way.

That doesn’t excuse him. It explains part of what happened to him.

My dad eventually cut off our relationship with Fred and his own dad, Doug—though he loved them both—because he didn’t want their racism to rub off on us as kids.

Instead, when I was in middle school, my dad dropped us off with friends of his in Trenchtown, Jamaica so we’d know what it felt like to be the only white people around. To know what it felt like to be surrounded by people who mostly didn’t like us even.

It started to re-shape me.

I still have to face all kinds of biases. But you know how Winston Churchill said:

“We shape our buildings, and thereafter, they shape us.”

— Winston Churchill

It goes far beyond that.

All our social and environmental systemic problems (which most of our problems are, I believe) are problems of systemic separation. It’s also true on a communal level:

We shape our built environments, and thereafter, they shape us.

Currently, almost all of our buildings and communities are being built by wealthy white men whose primary goal is building their personal wealth and power.

Their bottom line is financial profit.

I want to believe that given enough time, and iterations, we may come to discover that creating places where everyone can flourish actually does create the most cash flow.

But money isn’t the point.

Money is just energy we can use to get things done.

We have all seen the case of the person with all the money who still isn’t happy.

The question is what do we want to use our money/energy to make?

—

Many philosophers, psychologists, and spiritually-oriented people have created frameworks for thinking about the development of human consciousness or stages of human development.

I find it particularly interesting to see where and how these frameworks overlap.

This is called Spiral Dynamics. If you haven’t gone down this rabbit hole yet, Google it. It’s pretty interesting. (Though I have a hard time with the often simplistic view of the magenta level being “tribal.”)

The idea is that we can move up these levels of consciousness as individuals and as cultures.

Many say we move up a level through great love or great loss, but usually loss.

But I also think we tend to develop to the level of our surroundings. When I think of all the places I’ve been, the people who live there are largely formed by the system they live in. Magenta places form magenta people, red places form red people, etc.

So what if conscious placemaking is a potent form of developing others through great collective love?

Couldn’t we pool our resources, gather some of the most “enlightened” people we know, and form the most beautiful systems they can imagine as a path to collective growth? Can it be a way to accelerate collective growth?

Feels like a worthwhile experiment to me.