I never thought that after almost a year of not writing that a story about apple would get me back on my blog, but I’ll take any opportunity to write again.   Today, Tuesday July 27, 2010, I received this email (attached image capture) from Apple about their latest iMac computer.  What captured my attention was the subject heading “Introducing the most powerful iMac ever”.  I think by now everyone knows that Apple’s business model is to always release a computer that is faster than the previous generation – hence the notion that the latest version will be the “most powerful iMac ever” is a given and a moot point.  Then I reminded myself that Apple is very precise and calculating. Every word in an ad copy is there for a reason. Every word on Steve Job’s PowerPoint presentation is there for a reason.  These words are powerful and  incite in customers the intended feeling that they must buy this amazing product even though the words in the subject lines are utterly absurd when held against the backdrop of reality.   Why did this newsletter from Apple incite such passion in me today? I think it was a combination of this newsletter and another newsletter from a internet marketing coach  named Mark Joyner at www.simpleology.com who’s been sending emails after emails wanting people to buy his marketing program and today he was giving away couple of chapters to a book called  “Mind Control Marketing”.    As a marketing professional myself, I had to think about whether I wanted to read a book with that title.  Do I want to learn “tricks” to get people to buy stuff?  In an age where the preferred method of learning about products is through word of mouth and one’s “social network”, I’ve got to believe that we are entering an age where we don’t need mind control tricks anymore.   I’m now taking a pause to reflect on what is “ethical” marketing? Language that clearly assumes gullibility or even worse, ignorance in the part of the people interested in a product clearly is not language fitting of an advancing civilization.

If you’re wondering what may have been a cleaner subject heading…well here’s one: “Introducing the new & faster iMac.” This new subject line doesn’t make the notion of Apple releasing a more powerful iMac a new phenomena in a computer launch- every computer from Apple since the release of Apple II in 1977 has been “more powerful” than their previous generations.. Just wait another year or two and Apple’s newsletter headline will once again be “Introducing the most powerful iMac ever”.  I’m a believer that words are powerful and that the words we use when we speak to our children, partners, friends, family members and to the public in general – i.e. our fellow human beings -  should carry the highest of intentions.  I can’t say that I follow this rule all the time, but I’m often reminded when I don’t – so Apple marketers, what do you think?

Last week April 15th not only marked the day for our collective Taxes to be mailed but it was also the day where teabagging rallies/protests and tea-parties were happening across the country.   This post is not politically motivated, so I’m not going to talk about the virtues/vices of these events or whether either of the two political parties in the US are right or wrong in their position on the Obama stimulus package.  If you’ve read any of my posts on the economy you’d know where I stand on the way the government spends money.  What I want to talk about is another tea party of sorts I performed on my own last week, totally unrelated to the teabagging events that happened around the country but in a mystical kind of way it is very much related.  This particular tea “non-event” happened in fact prior to me even knowing about the tea party protests happening in the US.  This synchronous coincidence alone made it all that much more special.
Here’s how the story goes: I have been working diligently for the past few months to simplify my life and shed all attachments to the past that have been weighing me down energetically…attachments to my old jobs by keeping around old job related documents, old pay stubs, staionaries from my old company, etc.  all in order to move forward with a clean, confident slate.  Parallel to this process, I had also been looking at getting rid of clutter by identifying anything that I hadn’t used in more than 6 months to a year.  I was getting rid of these items by both giving them away for free as well as selling them on Ebay and Craigslist.   As I began to purge, I found a new sense of space, both in my physical world but also in my psychic space.  What I didn’t realize was that this new found way of bringing about a shift, wasn’t limited to all the items and junks in our storage space, but it was just as applicable to our drawer full of tea bags.  I noticed last week that we had been keeping a particular number of tea bags that my wife and I had received a few years ago during a trip to Montreal. These were all flavors that neither my wife or I liked.  Needless to say, these tea bags have been sitting in our cabinet for over a year and a half.   I can’t speak for my wife, but I had always held a belief or fantasy that one day, a guest in our house was going to want tea and magically select one of these bags. On the 14th of April, I decided that once and for all, there was no reason to hold onto these old bags of tea for the sake of some unknown future event based on a thought-form or fantasy in my head.  What made this a guilt free decision was that we have a composter in our backyard, so all the bags were “recycled.”
With the bags gone, our drawer is now more spacious and I don’t have to expend another ounce of energy thinking about those bags as I did in the past every time I came across them in the drawer.  The moral of this story is that sometimes we get things in order to fill a void in the present moment and later in the future we hold to those same things for way too long.  Our attachments to Inanimate objects and forms really get us into trouble sometime, least of which is our identification with them (ie. sense of self).  Ironically all forms and objects are transient.  Everything in time will either decay or die, either physically or in our conscious mind(at least between birth and death).  To that end, it is futile to hold on to forms.  In this particular case I held on to those bags of tea way too long and I learned that even bags of tea, the ones I held on to for so long for reasons I didn’t even fully understand, had no business staying around and taking up mental space.  How does my tea bag story dovetail into the current economic crists you ask? Our individual collective acts in buying “stuff” that we didn’t need, and holding on to them in ways that only filled up our garages, storage spaces and even tea drawers, is what got us into this financial mess.  When we can free ourselves by releasing these “things” into the world, either to people who have a more pressing use for them, through recycling or back to mother earth via composting, we will allow the circle of life to continue un-impeded.  This purging process is a great way to re-learn how to spend, what to store and how, why and where to re-distribute.

Just like the saying “be the change you want to see in the world”, then “have your own conscious tea party at home” and leave the silly politics to the poleticians and the protesters.