Holiday Shop

Another holiday shopping season unfolds. I have little involvement with it, but happened to read an essay* about a 'Mall Quest' teaching experience offered by Elias Amidon.

In 1993 I attended a 'Vision Quest' experience offered as a class-for-credit through Naropa Institute. Elias was one of the three wise teacher/guides who accompanied my group of students. This week-long wilderness experience took place in the canyonlands of southeast Nevada. During this time, I spent three days and nights outside by myself in a on the edge of a wide canyon with a couple jugs of water, sleeping bag, and plastic tarp. Sleeping under the full moon without a tent was magical. The experience of interconnection to the entire living planet can be illuminated in the wild or in the mall. Elias quotes a chant voiced by one of his students at the start of the mall quest:

Sacred Mother Mall,

Provider of All,

Give us what we need,

Satisfy our greed.

The mission of the mall quest was to wander in silence while observing physical and emotional reactions to whatever signs or symbols touched the unconscious. Elias comments:

As I entered the mall I felt an astounding difference from any other time I had been there. By maintaining mindfulness, the environment became psychedelic in its intensity. A thousand simultaneous messages flooded in : colors, images, words, sounds, smells, movement, everything beckoning for attention: "Buy me! Buy me!" Each storefront was bursting with abundance, the entire mall a cornucopia. I breathed calmly and witnessed this extraordinary onslaught. It was like entering a mythic underworld, an astral realm where begins wandered perpetually shopping for things to fill an unassuageable void within them. I cautioned myself not to judge, just to witness. It was difficult. I knew that every product in this vast sea of products had left a trail of disruption somewhere in the world: forests clearcut, exhaust smoke in the air, bulldozers flattening some creature's habitat, noise breaking a tranquil morning, oil sheen in the puddles. What were we doing? Is it really worth it? A hundred years ago in this spot, I would have been looking out on a tall-grass prairie running up to the foot of the mountains, there to join with the conifer forests. Antelope and buffalo would be wandering here.

He comments on finding a colorful puzzle of the earth, printed with these words...

In the end we will conserve only what we love:

we will love only what we understand;

and we will understand only what we are taught.

If the elders are addicted to the trinkets of commercial culture....who will teach the young?

What do we love anyway?

* Essay from DHARMA RAIN: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, edited by Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft, Shambhala Publications, 2000