Subliminal messages

Today I find myself thinking again about that phrase "we become disciples of what we pay attention to."

A couple of days ago I took my daughter over to Bellevue to visit old friends of hers from her days in junior high. After dropping her off, I came back to Seattle and got into line for the 10 pm ferry, and decided to amuse myself by playing with the nightlights and my camera.

This morning I was looking over the images and was particularly struck with this one, with the way the camera obviously moved to get the swirls, but also stayed in place long enought to get the two neon signs. These night images tend to be a sort of boring yellowish color, so I began playing with the colors to see if I could make the image more appealing.

I've learned over the years that however irritating the original color set may be, it usually has more depth and richness than any of the alternatives you can get by uniformly shifting the hues. So I got the overall look of the image to where I wanted it, and then restored parts of it to their original color to get the color balance I wanted.

When I finished, it was time to name it and save it -- an important operation when you have as many images as I do. If you ever hope to find the image again, you need to name it something memorable and file it with other like images. I had already decided it would go in my "Playing With Light" folder. But what to name it? When in doubt, I name batches of pictures by subject and date -- seattle ferry dock lights March 09, for example -- but when I looked at this one the title was suddenly far more obvious than that: Pabst Blue Ribbons.

Now I just want to say that I rarely watch TV, and it's even rarer that I drink beer. And I haven't seen a Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer commercial since, well, probably high school. Which was a VERY long time ago! I'm not sure they even call it that any more; the sign in the picture just says Pabst, as far as I can tell. It wasn't until I had been working on the image for almost half an hour, had completed my work, and was ready to name it, that the blue ribbon connection leaped to mind. But what are the chances that it wasn't already there, informing my choices in some subconscious way? And how often do we operate at that subconscious level, making choices that are informed by something something we saw or heard long ago without even knowing it?

I am reminded of that Adele Davis phrase from the sixties: "You are what you eat." Our minds are huge repositories of information, constantly taking in data, drawing connections and making assumptions, often without our conscious assistance. We see this most clearly in our dreams, the way pieces of our days separate out and reform themselves into odd fantasies, some warm and fuzzy, some intriguing, some scary. (I still remember a dream I had long ago, from which I awakened knowing that the word "vanchocstraw" was the key to the universe. It was only days later that I realized that it was actually just the label on the side of a box of Neapolitan (vanilla/chocolate/strawberry) ice cream in our freezer.)

Clearly these subconscious connections happen far more than we realize. Which means that everything we see and hear has an opportunity to plant itself and grow in our brains. Remember how upset we got when it was announced that some advertisers were paying TV and movie producers to plant subliminal advertising in their productions? Why, then, would we consciously choose to expose our brains -- or those of our children -- to the constant violence and materialism of bad television, gossip magazines and the like? Aren't those messages just as powerful as the subliminal ones? (I say this while at the same time admitting that I have been reading my daughter's Twilight books. So do as I say, don't do as I do!)

I doubt most of you who read this blog spend much time watching violent TV shows or reading The National Enquirer; I even suspect that some of you choose not to read newspapers, watch the news, or listen to NPR for these same reasons. But the fact remains that whatever we pay attention to; whatever we choose to occupy our minds with, leaves its imprint. And until we become FULLY conscious -- which I'm beginning to suspect is a highly unlikely prospect -- our actions will continue to be formed at some level by those unconscious imprints.

The obvious moral of the story is this: Choose wisely. Surely the good things we see and hear and watch leave their own subconscious imprint as well. But perhaps there is a subsidiary moral as well: that those of us who are artists have an opportunity and a responsibility to impact those subconscious choices with our art. And if we work to enhance the impact of what we create, and we allow it to be informed by what we know of Divine Presence, then perhaps our work can in turn inspire subconscious awareness of the Divine in others. As Eckhart Tolle says, that is the function of all great art: to serve as a portal to the Sacred.

Hmm. Does that mean I shouldn't post this image?