I read that the viral commercials don’t even result in as many sales. It’s true, they don’t. When they hit on the principle that makes things go viral it weakens interest in the physical product. People are instead fascinated with the spirit expressed by the commercial.

There is a spirit world. If not a literal other world, it could be viewed as a pattern of organic information, as opposed to cognitive information, that conforms to unnatural heuristics, and this spirit world, this exchange of feelings, states, living sensation and communal and ecological well being, or disturbance, well… This spirit world is not formless, not meaningless or structure-less. Shall I give examples of how this relates to everyday life?

You would think only thinking human beings would find value or meaning in human products or technology, no? Yet more and more you can find examples of other species coming to value things human produce, to use and understand things that supposedly only have meaning for humans.

That’s the assumption but I’ve seen videos of cats and dogs watching TV. We must be like magical beings to them. Indeed, but the form that makes us invent something, that generates the want of a new tool, a new practice, a new social rule, is present in them also. It’s the same force, the same process, the same living “spiritual” domain.

That chameleon playing the ant game on an iPod. He bites the owner, I think, at the end of the video. Indeed. He didn’t like having its video game interrupted. Crows have been repeatedly videoed sledding with plastic lids they scrounged. Animals they previously swore stood not a chance of understanding tools at all, let alone our things, are demonstrating comprehension more and more.

My iguana used to climb the stairs then slide down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7hiuXjXJEw&feature=share

Coyotes are learning to observe traffic signals. Wolves have been proven now to be able to learn fairly abstract things from humans, and these are not domesticated animals.

There was something about dogs in Moscow taking the subway. It always gets its stops correct. There are multiple dogs doing that now. There is a penguin that makes the rounds in a small town in Japan. It never gets lost, even performs simple errands, more or less just carrying stuff back home.

My dog likes to run and jump on rugs and slide across the room.

So my point of this is… Needs, imaginings, desires. Would you say we just think them up? Are they things we have to learn to want or like?

I think they are innate. They are innate and shared. They emerge not as ideas, but from our experiences of contact. They are forms of relationship.

So perhaps to conclude… You can find the spirit in the crass material world around you. You dispirit yourself by rejecting the objects of desire around you as somehow beneath you. You live in that world and with people who want and value those things. But just as a crow can reuse some odd bit of plastic for simple amusement’s sake, what comes of our connections with things and people, what we make of the commercial and material world around us, is up to us. Our heart may not be in it, but that’s actually just the outcome of an arbitrary choice. You can find your heart and spirit in anything you have the wisdom to acknowledge your relationship to. Some of the most spiritual work I have seen made use of some of the most crass materials, things we consider meaningless or even trash, but to the creative mind involved they were objects of wonder.

My favourite thing to create with during the holidays is my relationships. The people around me. The holiday reminds me to see the wonder that they are, and to consider new ways they might have meaning to me and to others around them. I don’t have any artistic talent really, but I will even do things like sing Christmas carols badly because it draws people out even if just to react to my silliness, and well, it does inspire its own variety of insipid wonder. What do you think?

So mock commercialized jingles if you feel like it. You really would be doing many people a favour. They are meant to be taken lightly. I have met people who get very depressed around Christmas and some variant of a Christmas carol would go far to cheer them up.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~