Drawing the Map of Inner Consciousness

How do you expand your consciousness?

This is one of many questions that we ask the people we film on our travels across the globe. Almost two years ago, a friend of mine came to me in Seattle with a proposal: “Let’s buy a camera, go to another country, and film everything that happens to us along the way.” Six months later we were traveling through Colombia with a camera and a list of questions. Among them were, “What do you think is the greatest problem in the world right now?” and “How can average people make the world a better place?”

The world is changing, fast. Soon, the problems that we collectively face will become a tangible reality for us all, if they haven’t become so already – climate change, over-population, teetering economies, take your pick. Across the globe, people are questioning the methods that our leaders are taking to lead us. In a world of over 6 billion people, how can one person possibly make a difference?

The title of our documentary is The MapMakers: Project Colombia. Before going to South America, everyone I knew warned me about the infamous country I was about to visit. I was told that I was crazy to go there. I would probably get kidnapped, robbed, or killed. None of these people however, had ever been to Colombia themselves. Their information was usually relayed from whatever television news source that they regularly watched. Consequently, their beliefs about the rest of the world were also very similar.

Fear, unfortunately, has become a staple in the American media diet.

Consider that. If we are constantly bombarded with problems with no real call to action, other than fear, how are we supposed to meet the challenges that we now face?

The answer may be surprising.

After asking hundreds of people what the average person can do to make the world a better place, we got an overwhelmingly similar response: Change your attitude.

“If I change my attitude about the world, about the world’s problems, and about myself, and this change in attitude is positive, then I am on my way to improving the world,” said one person.

“Many people are always looking to blame something exterior. It’s the government’s fault, it’s the media’s fault. But if we change our attitude, and look inside ourselves, then suddenly these problems are not so big anymore, as long as we take the next step to change our own behaviors,” said another person.

Hence the name of the documentary, The MapMakers. Each of us has the power and opportunity to look at life any way we choose to – we each travel through life using the map we ourselves have created. We can believe that the world is full of scary people, scary situations, and hopeless scenarios. Some of these beliefs may be true, and some of them may not be true. Life is of course, a very subjective experience.

Now with that in mind, we can choose to look at life the opposite way – that the world is full kind and helpful people, that not everyone is out to get us, and that these big problems that we face are not as overwhelming as we have been led to believe. My point is this: we are at a critical moment in history and our collective beliefs will shape the outcome of our world. If we continue to believe that our problems are beyond fixing then we have already failed the challenge to fix them.

Luckily, we can wield our positive perceptions of the world and share them with those around us. We can begin to map out a new reality, one that is not based on fear but on cooperation and open-mindedness.

Creating your own map of reality is not always easy. But fortunately, you don’t have to go to Colombia to do it. All it takes is a bit of courage and curiosity. It takes courage to question your beliefs about the world, and it is curiosity about the world that creates the canvas on which we will draw our maps.

In March we will travel to Ethiopia to film our next documentary. Literally halfway across the world, Ethiopia couldn’t be further from our concept of “normal”. My own perception of that country comes from what I see and hear on the news – poverty, AIDS, war. But like all else, there are two sides to every coin.

I invite you to visit our website www.themapmakers.org for more information about mapmaking and how we can begin to solve the problems that we all face. I do not believe that these problems are so great that they cannon be solved. But it will take more than just one perception of a positive future…

Challenges to Perception Invoke Evolution

Posted: May 24, 2010 by MapMaker Mike

To get to the center you have to go to the edge.

The backpacker inside of me wants to see it all, the philanthropist wants to help all who I encounter along the way, the prophet wants to share the learned truths, and the cynic wonders if any of it matters in the first place. Thus the quandary I often find myself in.

To clear up a point, yes I think it does matter, I think it matters a lot. But in the midst of personal evolution, I wonder if it wouldn’t just be easier to go back to my old way of thinking. After 9 weeks in Ethiopia and Somaliland, I realize that the reason my system still feels so out of whack is because a lot of my previous beliefs about life, the universe, and everything have radically changed.

Perception is an interesting thing. No two are ever alike yet collectively, we share beliefs and ideas about things we still aren’t able to tangibly define. I think we are alive during a very interesting moment in history. As our world becomes smaller and smaller and as information and perspectives become easier to identify and discern, we are truly beginning to bridge the gap between the individual and the collective. We are seeing that some of these long held beliefs no longer hold as much weight as they once did. We are discovering that there are new ways to experience reality, a reality that many of us never new existed in the first place. We are beginning to shed some of our fears. Who knows, maybe we’re growing up.

Our experiences shape our perceptions and our perceptions shape who we are and who we become. The more we challenge our perception of reality the more opportunity we have to experience a new reality. Now let me say straight away, that you don’t have to go to Ethiopia to challenge your perceptions (though you could – and in turn come home seriously fucking challenged). My point is, reality awaits to be challenged in every corner of the world, including our own.

Every time I return home from a trip I am always surprised how easily I am able to slip back into the comfort of “being home.” No longer am I challenged to pay attention to body language, because everyone speaks English. The shower is hot when I want it to be, turning on a light switch won’t electrocute me, there are parks to relax in, there is one car per lane, no cows per road, and thus less need to be actively involved in the present to get through my day. In the world of convenience of which we live, we must find time to interact with our reality in a way that is challenging, in a way that helps us to evolve.

Returning home, I am inspired by people my age who are taking action on a local level. They have challenged their beliefs, at home or abroad, and are returning to the community with lessons learned and a curriculum in place. I challenge all of us to seek out these individuals, to become these individuals. Let us implement changing ideas for a changing world. Challenging your own reality in a positive way has repercussions that ripple across the community, the country, the planet.

Our documentaries are designed to make you think!

Through personal interviews and conversations with communities across the globe, we document an internal investigation spirituality, philosophy, and science, The MapMakers test the limitation of these teachings through the medium of travel. Follow our team to Colombia, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Somaliland and across the United States as we investigate the power of perception. We are a unique alternative to main stream media, emphasizing the positive, and aiming for solutions. Through a real life process of up’s and down’s, the team taps on the door of evolution to ask, “Where are we heading?”

MapMaking is a continuing process. As we collectively go through this time of acceleration, many of us are changing and transforming in radical ways. Some of us are doing this consciously, some not so consciously. If we choose to change, the first step is to make it a conscious change.

As our consciousness expands, it does so on a macro and a micro scale. The more we open ourselves to new views and ideas, the more highlighted the connections become. This can be taken all the way down to the neural pathways – energy highways in our mind that we consciously choose to allow more traffic to travel upon.

When we form connections about the external world we form them about the internal as well. New patterns begin to emerge where before it was just this unfiltered barrage of random information. We see that our actions take on new meaning when they are done consciously. If our actions are done consciously then it is because we have thought our actions into consciousness, hence, conscious thought.

Now get this: conscious thought begets self-empowerment! A conscious being living in reality can identify his or her beliefs and thus question these beliefs about his or her reality. The more we question our beliefs the more patterns begin to surface – we begin to create a map of our OWN particular reality (6 billion perceptions can’t all be right, you dig?).

Consciously scrutinizing our map, we begin to see a map that tolerates certain beliefs and doesn’t tolerate others. Long held views about the world begin to surface – and since everything reflects the micro, it is only natural that similar long held beliefs about ourselves surface as well. The more we analyze our map of reality the more flexible the reality becomes, due to the conscious awareness of the rigidity of our previous map!

Suddenly, we have become more self-empowered because we realize that we are no longer at the whim of some external “force.” If we have consciously acknowledged that certain fear-based beliefs no longer fit or agree with our map of reality they quite simply fade away and eventually disappear. This is quite a shift from the vicarious reality of being influenced by the media, pundits, politicians, nay-sayers, wet blankets, nincompoops, and the like.

We are a very powerful bunch. And it is my personal belief that the vast majority of us are not assholes. That being said, the more conscious we become the more power we have to create a new reality, a collective reality, that is interdependent on a community of like-minded people willing to learn and share from one another. This is not utopia talk. This is practical talk. We are a very powerful bunch and in my opinion we are not stupid. In fact, we’re beginning to realize just how powerfully conscious we are becoming.