I see it on their faces every day. It is worn on the numerous blank stares I walk by going to class at UBC. It hangs on those who sit next to me on the bus, staring into nowhere. Zombie Mode. That singularity of mind which is exemplified by destruction of all attentiveness to environment and surroundings. Perhaps it occurs because we are bombarded with so many countless stimuli that an awareness shell is our only option. Zombie Mode might be there because it is our response to a deeper knowing of the more beautiful world available, a world which runs so opposite to the one sold by cultural myths and market necessities. The world forced on us through limited career choices and limited expression of our innate gifts to the world.

Austrian designer Victor Gruen recognized that as the American main street dissolved, people would need a civic place to go, somewhere to be with others. He designed the shopping mall. As marketers hired psychologists to find new ways for maximizing consumer spending, videos of people that entered these malls were analyzed and an amazing phenomena was discovered. The Gruen Transfer.

The Gruen transfer refers to the moment when a consumer enters a shopping mall, and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, loses track of their original intentions. Spatial awareness of their surroundings play a key role, as does the surrounding sound and music. The effect of the transfer is marked by a slower walking pace and glazed eyes. [From Wikipedia]

Gruen himself despised exploitation of this technique but it was great for business. It was encouraged and expounded upon many times over. Now our built environments are designed to invoke that Gruen Transfer as much as possible. The Transfer is imposed so frequently it has transcended the characteristic slow walking pace and glazed eyes, it has become a permanent state when walking the street. An almost perpetual Zombie Mode. Sure, I go into Zombie Mode too, we all do, we have to, to protect our psyche from the speed of the thoughts induced. I experienced this need more in the US than in Canada but it is still very prevalent here.

Neil Kramer’s latest blog post on The Cleaver included a possible explanation for the origins of the perpetual Zombie Mode I see around me:

You can see it in people’s faces. They settle for that which they know to be deficient and unfulfilling. The rationale is that some contact is better than no contact. This is particularly prevalent in intimate relationships. When humans are fundamentally disconnected from themselves and each other, they are vulnerable to the insidious gravitational pull of the mainstream cultural paradigm. They get all normal.

At the primary level, those who choose not to be the architect of their own consciousness, and therefore disclaim their own daily existence, are anchoring the density of the construct with every recycled meme that passes their lips and every electro-chemical notion that fires across their frontal lobe. They are hungry pacman ghosts roaming the sepulchral corridors of unreality, forever repeating the same corrosive patterns, unable to satiate themselves on any level. The virus of renunciation consumes its own host.

The only way to offset the muted but incessant background pain derived from this way of living, is to embrace normality. To watch TV and resonate along with its frequency of ordinariness and indifference. To consume. To buy fake products, fake food, fake music. To wear cheap clothes and running shoes that are derived directly from the blood of economic slaves. This is a karmic declaration. And should the inner self spontaneously break through and find its voice amid this toxicity, then with the utmost urgency, the mind must be plunged into the low-resonance, high-density media swamp. When the mind sucks in vulgarity, regression and ignoble deeds, the psychological pain momentarily subsides as the spirit retreats far from the centre of our being.

Why do we pursue the things we do? We want to achieve happiness right? Kramer continues,

People generally want to feel happiness in their day to day lives. Yet what is this elusive state that arises and vanishes with such apparent capriciousness? It is a simple thing. Happiness is a frequency attached to dharmic function. It arises when spirit is aligned – when there is authentic being, gnosis, true creative expression and expansion of awareness. It is the spontaneous acknowledgement of conscious presence. I am here and everything is OK. That is the open gladness that dissolves all illusory negativity in an instant. It is free and is not dependent on anyone or anything. It can come amid great solemnity, pandemonium, even misery, and just as easily it may surface in the middle of philosophy, creativity, intimacy and play.

Making happiness a destination in itself is a mark of deep unconsciousness; a sign that life is off course.

I’m thinking that we are all running around seeking happiness and by doing so we are forgetting that happiness isn’t a final state. Happiness is a by-product of the authentic expression of ourselves. Since we aren’t reaching that happy end-state the only response is Zombie Mode. It grows ever more permanent each time it is imposed until it become a voluntary response.

Once you’ve met someone who isn’t in perpetual Zombie Mode, you’ll notice that he or she is very different. Maybe you won’t know exactly what is different but you’ll know something’s there that’s not quite “normal”. And maybe after thinking about it a while, you’ll see that individual was on a path of authentic expression… and that’s the kind of realization which can truly change the world.