The Lytro Camera and "deep Seeing"

In the same issue of the Atlantic, Rob Walker describes the "Lytro Camera." This device incorporates hundreds of sensors and micro-lenses, and captures a scene in all of its depth. "The upshot is a photograph that's less a slice of visual information than a cube... a light-field visual object."

This seems to me to be another technological representation of the spiritual work of the 6th Chakra: that of "deep seeing." This camera reminds us once again that the reality we take so much for granted is really just "one slice of the hologram," that our brain is always choosing a more limited view of reality. Our spiritual challenge at this level of awareness is to see, as Sri Aurobindo challenged us, with "the eye of complete union."

Oprah and the Heart of Television

In this month's Atlantic magazine, Caitlin Flanagan writes about Oprah Winfrey's rise out of the hell of racism, poverty, and sexual abuse, and links it to the heart-centered power of television itself. "Because," Flanagan writes, "into every household in America, no matter how low or mean or outright evil, into each squalid nest and decent place pours the great, pure light of television."

Oprah invented herself, created her own dream of entering into that safe magical place, as a young child watching television when "every story had a happy ending."

I believe that Oprah indeed embodies and fully understands the feminine, embracing, emotion opening, power of this medium. Its light -- its ability to bring us into face-to-face relationship with "the others" in our interconnected family, and its shadow -- its ability to open the heart and then fill it with consumer goods and addictive longing.

This is the theme of Chapter Four of Digital Dharma.

The Trans-personal Metaphors of the Cloud

If texting challenges us at the personal identity level, and the Internet and social media offer us an opportunity to examine our inter-personal boundaries, then our move to “the cloud” can be seen as a technological reflection of the metaphors of the transpersonal.

As we move more and more of our memory and our intelligence into the shared space of the cloud, we confront a set of metaphors based on drawing from a common source of Being.Distributed processing technology allows for data storage, software and computing processors to reside out on the network "grid" and be called forth only when needed. Extremely large-scale computing projects can be shared across millions of smaller processors worldwide, each "donating" its spare computing cycles to the functioning of the whole. In addition to connecting data sensors and data processors, the cloud is also becoming the "place" where we store more and more of our cumulative human intelligence, relying on ever-more-powerful search engines and "data mining" algorithms, crowd-sourcing and the "long-tail", to make sense of this overflowing abundance - the unleashed outpouring of the new and the taking from and recreating of the old, the collages and mash-ups, meshes, mixes, remixes of our popular culture - to our computers, MP3 players, and smart phones.

This scenario has a frightening side - in the service of our "lower selves" these technologies can lead us to a beehive-like world devoid of quiet personal space; where global corporations extend their control to the most remote corners of the planet; where the smallest personal action is tracked in giant marketing databases; a world where physical nature and even human love are replaced by computer simulations. The spiritual metaphor is the blasted open “Crown Chakra” – connecting unfiltered to all the gins and tricksters of the astral plane; lost in the psychic hall of mirrors, caught in never-ending attention deficit.

But when seen through the lens of metaphor, the very structure of the cloud offers us a path to a very different outcome: what mystics have understood as "unity consciousness," the simultaneous knowledge of the knower and the known, of individual identity and cosmic oneness. Beyond the communicating appliances, the mash-ups and the long tails, is the vision of an interconnected creative culture. And beyond this cultural vision is a spiritual teaching, the modeling of a world where consciousness connects with every other being, and simultaneously with something greater then itself.

On the net we negotiate with the other, protective of our boundaries, but understanding that, like it or not, we are all connected; in the cloud we begin to see how our intelligence has always been connected in every action, past, present and future – the we and the other are individual processors sharing the same memory and power source. On the net we share some of our localized content; in the cloud we download what we need from the Divine Treasury and return it to the greater good. On the net we process our own data, drawing from external repositories as needed; in the cloud we hold all the repositories in common, maintaining our foreground processing, but intentionally making room for seed programs to use our spare computing cycles for a higher purpose: our bodies and our life experiences, vessels of Divine Curiosity; our prayers of gratitude, the uploading technology that refreshes and heals the great web of consciousness.

Internet Mindfulness

In the Internet world we are all connected. Boundaries mean little, when all knowledge, both public and private is available to anyone. Our inter-personal relationships are being challenged at every level of intimacy. Infection and contagion, border control and foreign infiltrators, modification of our very DNA, are the metaphors of the day. On the web nothing is protected from our eyes and ears.

It seems that we are becoming “data naked” when every transaction, every credit card purchase, every trip through the grocery store, and every phone call (and its originating location) is now “on the record.” Even once-expunged court records (the “clean slate” granted by a judge for minor convictions years ago) are finding their way on to the Web, as records once held only in paper, are now are routinely digitized.

Pushed into the Infosphere -- all of our secrets revealed, our every thought accessible, connected to the planet's very intelligence -- we are being forced to redefine our boundaries. Who am I and who do I pretend to be? Where am I, and where do I end and you begin? Who do I let into my space, and how can I trust that you say who you are?

This is a core existential challenge, and has brought us a great deal of pain. Yet, from a spiritual point of view, maybe being mutually naked isn’t such a terrible thing. The Internet has allowed us to see beyond the masks of the ego-self, corporate and government posturing, and build our own “peer networks.” Yes, social networking allows for addictive connection, personal posturing and closed-minded self-referential “friends circles.” But, it also offers the possibility of experiencing self as part of a larger web – of friends, of communities of interest and of place, of creation itself.

As we struggle to define our multiple overlapping circles of “close friends, friends, or acquaintances” on Facebook, we are reminded that social connection to a small group of trusted souls (in support group, recovery meeting or sangha), has always been how we found the safety to explore the dreams and the shadows of our own souls. In an environment where everyone is connected and sharing their every experience, learning how to observe incoming data without reacting to every stimulus is a critical cyber-survival skill. The core tool is mindful awareness without reaction to every new message. Our flood of tweets and emails can inundate and overwhelm, or like the stick of the Zen master, invite us to pay attention to where we habitually put our attention. The shaman’s skill is in cultivating a wider-seeing vision that takes in all vibrations, and the shield ofdiscernment, that allows her to know what signals require action, and which ones are part of the background.

Many forms of spiritual practice involve stilling the busy mind and being present to, without being hooked by, these incoming data streams. Awareness meditation is, in effect, a process of observing the instruction codes of reality without processing them into thoughts, emotions and suffering. In Buddhism this is called mindfulness, watching the codes go by, “indifferent” to one story over another, but still very much connected to the experience of life – processing the reality of the outer world in full consciousness that one is in fact,data processing.

Signals of Aliveness: Staying Grounded in a World of Electronic Alerts

In Digital Dharma I discussed the impact of electronic media on each of the body’s seven psycho-energetic centers, the chakras. This approach be too “new age” for many potential readers, who might be interested in the social, psychological, and indeed spiritual, challenges of the Infosphere. So, in my next three posts I will summarize the core impacts of our new always-on, always-connected, information environment on our (a) personal, (b) interpersonal, and (c) transpersonal relationships. This posting is about the "personal" domain.

I believe that the explosion of text messaging among the world’s youth (many send hundreds of messages a day), the constant email alerts on our PDAs, and the never-ending roll of “tweets,” are primal cries for acknowledgement – for recognition of existence and individual ego identities, in a time when everyone and everything is calling out their unique location and update status. The danger of this explosion is a crisis of ego need and electronically amplified narcissism: everyone has a voice, and everyone is afraid of not being heard.

On a positive note, giving everything a “voice” is a deep immersion in what we too often chose to ignore or deny: the voices of the disempowered and marginalized, the voices of objects we take for granted, the voices of Gaia herself, the voices of our own body’s cellular broadcasters. Our challenge is to learn to listen with discernment, to create systems to recognize threatening changes in our ambient data environment, and to both figuratively and literally, keep ourselves “grounded.” Walks in nature, and quiet time listening to our own breath and heartbeat, are important centering strategies, and so is dancing and drumming, making vibrant tweets that arise from our physical being.


For more discussion of "everything has an [IP] voice" see my earlier essay on "Ambient Awareness."

Reflections on James Gleick's "The Information"

In Digital Dharma I argued that as we moved into the Internet Age, our spiritual work would shift to the light and shadow of the core metaphors associated with the “second tier” technologies of the Internet (truth versus falsehood, contagion and connection, firewalls and other rigid “boundaries” versus “smart filtering”), digital compression (coding schemes, consensual reality, mindfulness), and the “cloud” (the universe as intelligent processor and humans as part of a large “grid computing” experiment with the Divine).

These are the same metaphors explored in great detail, and without their spiritual associations, in James Gleick’s book, The Information. He writes about the shift from metaphors of “energy” to “information” in describing the vastness of the universe [as a “cosmic information processing machine… the universe computes its own destiny”] and the microscopic world of our cells [where genes “encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out… Life spreads by networking”]. I described these functions – and the fascination with the metaphor of “the codes” – in Chapter Six, a look at the spiritual challenges of the technologies of digital representation, and their metaphoric association with the opening of the esoteric “third eye.”

I described the value of “attention” (when information becomes cheap), and the importance of “smart filtering” in dealing with the glut of data connections made possible by the Internet in my discussion of spiritual impact of “actually being connected to ‘the other’ versus the earlier moral crisis of seeing the other’s face brought by television into our living room in the 1960’s and 70’s. And finally, in Chapter Seven, I too found hope in the evolution of the cloud, where our true work is that of tikun olam, repairing the world.

Technology as Toilet Paper: Reflections from the SEED Conference

I just returned from a fascinating SEED Institute conference in Albuquerque – a structured hybrid of “Bohmian Dialog” and Native American talking circle, with 24 invited wisdom teachers (elders, teachers, and shamans) discussing the spiritual implications of science, technology and creativity. In a pre-discussion talk, I had a chance to present my vision of telecommunications technologies as external metaphors for the inner spiritual work of evolving consciousness. During the dialog itself, I mostly listened, and when I did contribute to the flow, it was from a place of deep metaphor: looking at technology as extensions of the body, reflecting our flight from limits of embodiment and at the same time, our hunger to connect more fully with the Divine as embodied vessels of Divine curiosity.

This contradiction ran throughout our discussions. Technology as an alienating force, removing us from contact with community, with Nature, and our Mother Earth; and yet, at the same time, we heard of communications technology as something that was preserving native languages, allowing native communities to reach out to each other and to supporters around the world, empowering youth and providing new ways for Elders to tell their stories.

In native communities, one way to resolve these tensions is through storytelling and humor. And one of the most powerful characters in Native stories is the Trickster, the one who forces us to look at our denied and repressed qualities, including our “shitty” attachments to symbols of power and prestige. One the last day of our meeting, Dan Longboat, a Canadian Mohawk environmental educator, told a joke about “technology as trickster artifice” that encapsulated all the themes of the conference. I’ve paraphrased it below:

This morning, Shawn Secatero (Canoncito Navajo), Leroy Little Bear (Blackfoot) and I, met for breakfast. Leroy, as befitting his elder status, was on “Indian time,” and hadn’t yet shown up. Shawn and I, as befitting male Indians showing off their ceremonial jewelry, soon got into a competition as to who had the coolest cellphone.

Shawn had a silver and turquoise Bluetooth-powered wristwatch phone. He could send messages and talk just by waving his arm, and putting his hand to his face. [Dan demonstrated by talking into his wrist, “hello, can you hear me.”] I brought out my I-Phone and showed him the latest “find a Pow-Wow” GPS app. We were going at it fast and furious, when Leroy interrupted us. We turned to him for his opinion. Each of us wanted him to know that we had the best communications technology device.

But while he was thinking about our request, we couldn’t help but notice that he had a long tail of toilet paper sticking out of his clothes. He obviously had just come from the bathroom, and didn’t do a good job of pulling up his pants. We couldn’t help but tease him. “Grandfather, what’s that trail of paper following you around? Were you in such a hurry to get here that you rushed out of the bathroom without noticing?”

Leroy looked at us, and at our flashy cellphones, and said, “That’s not toilet paper. I’m receiving a fax.”

This story has made the rounds in a number of forms before Dan adapted it for a Native American audience. I found a pretty funny version that begins, “A man walks into a bar,” on the web. But I really found the toilet paper metaphor powerful and appropriate when trying to understand the spiritual challenges of telecomm. Our media tools, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, are external facsimiles of our body organs. And, as Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (a powerful treatise on the “psychoanalytic meaning of history”) showed us, when technology is disconnected from our flesh and blood bodies, it becomes alienated containers of our fear of death, mentalized and transformed excrement.

As I learned from Brown (and the Trickster), the repressed always has a way of returning to bite us. I do believe that each of our technologies has a shadow side – externalized parts that we want to hide, repress or deny. Television has made over-consumption a way of life, stuffing ourselves to avoid the pain of really “seeing the other.” The Internet has pushed into our faces all the lies of humanity. Virtual reality has trapped us in a world of phantoms and information hypnosis. While our embrace of “the cloud” can be seen as the final step in disconnection from Mother Earth, from our bodies to the mental astral planes.

But buried within each of these “facsimiles” is a mirror pointing back to our selves, back to our physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies. In Digital Dharma, I proposed that each external technology is a portal into a specific chakra, and that by returning to full awareness of the emotional light and shadow of each chakra, we could begin to heal our alienated selves. Looking at our technological toilet paper, shit and all, could be part of our reintegration process.

Our technologies are putting sensors in every corner of the planet. Our job is to learn to monitor Gaia’s health, and our own inner states through mindful ambient awareness. Twitter can take us out of our bodies, or into the thick of political protest, or playful dance. If the universe, as many cosmologists now think [1], is one big information processing project could it be that we are all part of a great “grid computing” effort - where consciousness, in its desire to know itself, created billions upon billions of small processors called humans, each thinking its own thoughts and living and dying its own dreams and desires, but each running way in the background, a small virus program dedicated to solving some small unrecognizable fragment of this great puzzle?

From this perspective, our technologies must in the end, point us back into the body. Two other stories from the SEED Dialog reminded me of this truth.

A native mother spoke of her fear of technology. How she had banned television and the Internet from her home, and how she was constantly fighting her twelve-year-old’s desire for a cell phone. Then she admitted that if she could, she would put an RF-ID chip and GPS locator into each of her children. She told her grandfather of this desire. “My dear one,” he responded, “you can always ask the eagle to see your children. Have your forgotten your shaman’s sight?”

Two elders from different pueblos had agreed to meet and conduct a healing ceremony. However, a fierce storm had closed the roads. Their grandchildren volunteered to use their cell phones to connect them. The old men greeted each other over these devices, and started their prayers. All was going well, until it was time for the blessing of the corn. “I can’t feel it, blow harder,” called out one of the pair. “No, I still can’t feel it,” he repeated, holding the kernels closer to the phone. Finally, he called out, “don’t worry, I’ll blow for you,” and he breathed into his hand, and smiled.

Is not the first story a reminder that we already have all of the powers of the network within our physical selves, that we can “visit the cloud” and return. The second seems to be telling us that in the end, it is our spiritual connection with one another that really counts. That our breath is most holy, and that while it cannot be sent via fiber optics or radio waves, it can be aligned with the breath of any person, anywhere on the planet.

[1] James Gleick, The Information (2011), Chapter 13.

Wisdom 2.0 Conference

I will be attending the Wisdom2.0 Conference in Mountain View CA Feb 25-27. I will be talking about Digital Dharma at the East-West Bookstore on Saturday night, and hopefully leading a "chakras of communications" session on Sunday.

Now in Brazil!

The Soul of the "Cloud"

In earlier posts, I discussed how the coupling of electricity with our nervous system started the process of (in Marshal McLuhan's words) "outering" our neurons, leading to the leap into "network consciousness" made possible by the Internet and digital media. We have moved into a noisy twittering world of multiple networks, where the other is everywhere, where everything is a reminder that we are part of something much larger than ourselves.

I believe that this shift in perspective is vertical as well as horizontal. What Steven Johnson has called "long-zoom consciousness" - reflected by our digital capability to "zoom out" from the scale of DNA through satellite maps and deep-space imaging to the enormity of the cosmos - is emerging as contemporary culture's defining way of seeing. It has created a new view of space - interconnected and multi-layered - that is as disruptive to our old ways of seeing as the earlier revolutions of Newton and Einstein. It is also bringing us a new set of metaphors appropriate to the spiritual challenges of navigating the inter-penetrating clouds of evolving human intelligence.

The core metaphor of the Internet is the grid, its energetic centers the throat (fifth chakra) and the third-eye (sixth chakra), and its spiritual challenge is that of connection to the other. As consciousness reaches for higher and higher states of awareness, the work of associated with the Crown Chakra becomes activated, and we move to the challenges of operating in the multiple dimensions of the cloud: a space where we and the "other" recognize that we are the same - just different reflections of the divine.

The reflection of this "always on, always connected" relationship with the infinite is found in the convergence of peer-to-peer communications, universal wireless connections, GPS-based location awareness, and distributed information processing. These forces are the drivers behind what is now being called Pervasive Computing - a set of technologies that will enliven the space we move through by permeating it with myriads of ubiquitous, networked, mobile, reactive and self-referencing miniature computational devices.

Distributed processing technology allows for data storage, software and computing processors to reside out on the network "grid" and be called forth only when needed. Extremely large-scale computing projects can be shared across millions of smaller processors worldwide, each "donating" its spare computing cycles to the functioning of the whole.

Grid computing networks are already tackling the modeling of new cancer-fighting drugs, the mapping of the universe, and the tracking of the smallest quantum interactions. Multiple research labs are being networked together across the university-based Internet2, making possible new forms of collaborative instrumentation and collaborative research. From an esoteric point of view, it was not surprising that one of the first grid computing projects was one focused outwards to the vast universe. SETIatHOME involved over two million users, who analyzed a tiny portion of radio telescope data every night on their home PCs to detect signals from possible extra-terrestrial civilizations.

In addition to connecting data sensors and data processors, the cloud is also becoming the "place" where we store more and more of our cumulative human intelligence, relying on ever-more-powerful search engines and "data mining" algorithms, crowd-sourcing and the "long-tail", to make sense of this overflowing abundance - the unleashed outpouring of the new and the taking from and recreating of the old, the collages and mash-ups, meshes, mixes, remixes of our popular culture - to our computers, MP3 players, and smart phones.

This scenario has a frightening side - in the service of our "lower selves" these technologies can lead us to a beehive-like world devoid of quiet personal space; where global corporations extend their control to the most remote corners of the planet; where the smallest personal action is tracked in giant marketing databases; a world where physical nature and even human love are replaced by computer simulations.

But when seen through the lens of metaphor, the very structure of the cloud offers us a path to a very different outcome: what mystics have understood as "unity consciousness," the simultaneous knowledge of the knower and the known, of individual identity and cosmic oneness. Beyond the communicating appliances, the mash-ups and the long tails, is the vision of an interconnected creative culture. And beyond this cultural vision is a spiritual teaching, the modeling of a world where consciousness connects with every other being, and simultaneously with something greater then itself.

On the net we negotiate with the other, protective of our boundaries, but understand that like it or not, we are all connected; in the cloud we begin to see the patterns of how we're connected in every action, past, present and future. On the net we share some of our localized content; in the cloud we download what we need and return it to the greater good. On the net we process our own data, drawing from external repositories as needed; in the cloud we hold all the repositories in common, maintaining our foreground processing, but intentionally making room for seed programs to use our spare computing cycles for a higher purpose.

A Sufi mystic looks at our physical universe as a manifestation of the Divine's hunger to know itself, and our individual consciousness a limited expression of the cosmic desire, love, and nostalgia: Ishq Allah. For the Sufis, our purpose is not to escape into the void, or awake beyond the limitations of physical life, but to awaken in life: to download from the "Divine Treasury" those latent codes and programs that make our minds isomorphic with the thinking of the universe.

Could it be that we are all part of a great cloud computing project - where consciousness, in its desire to know itself, created billions upon billions of small processors called humans, each thinking its own thoughts and living and dying its own dreams and desires, but each running way in the background a small virus program dedicated to solving some small unrecognizable fragment of this great puzzle?

Chakra Meditations for Cyber-addiction

From the telephone to radio and television, from the Internet to the distributed intelligence of peer-to-peer and social networks, we have grown more connected, more accessible, and increasingly more stimulated. In this new environment, we are constantly challenged to set boundaries and create appropriate filters to handle the incessant demands and distracting consequences of data overload.

In my book, Digital Dharma, I offered a psycho-spiritual look at these technologies as extensions on to the planet of our energetic chakras, holding for us reflections of the light and shadow of each of these metaphors of the stages of consciousness. I suggested that the explosion of text-based messaging would stimulate the issues of “Hineini”— Biblical Hebrew for I am here: personal identity, boundary setting, location worry and personal safety. While our new always-on connections to the Internet would bring us face-to-face with the challenges of an over-stimulated fifth chakra: incessant talk, confusion of what is true or false, and boundary loss and the resulting fear of contagion by the other.

The Internet has given us a new freedom to speak truth, to see beyond the masks of individual and corporate posturing, and to build our own “peer networks. It also exposes us to the dangers of connectivity without appropriate boundaries – over-exposure, infection, and false identities. Our extended neurons offer us a chance to experience ourselves as part of a larger web – of relationships, of communities of interest and of place, and by tapping into the emerging networks of global sensors and real-time environmental data streams, of Creation itself. But, without a strong grounding at the first chakra, every message overwhelms, and “multi-tasking” turns out to be a deadly fraud. Distraction from family and friends, the loss of the empathy and attention required for deeper intimate relationships, are all the latest worries associated with “digital addiction.”

We seem unprepared for this newly expanded and networked sensory space: everyone talks, but few know how to listen. Truth becomes a matter of opinion: the latest gossip and manipulated video “going viral” before its veracity can be challenged, the net's constant chatter mimicking the babble and distraction of our planetary monkey mind. Let's not forget that Hermes, the Greek god of communications, is also known as a thief and trickster.

It is no wonder that a number of critics have suggested that we must treat unplugging from the constant stimulation of the net as a “recovery process” similar to AA, or as a religious practice similar to the disconnection of the mundane world as one enters into the sacred space of the Sabbath. Following these models, I would like to suggest some energy yoga practices that strengthen our ability to go back into the global brain without losing our equanimity or our power.


Tuning to the Tweets of the Body:

In a seated position, with feet on the floor, imagine extending the energy cloud of body to the ground. Picture its excess electrical charge seeking to ground with the core of the earth. Allow yourself to merge into the solidity of the earth. Expand this connection. Quiet your mind. Feel cords of energy extending down from your feet as well as your base into the center of the earth. Feel the warmth rising up into your body. Charge your field with this magnetic energy from the dynamo that resides in the center of the planet’s molten core. Feel the “cellular tweets” within your own body: the ‘lub-dub’ beating of your heart, the blood in your veins, the rise and fall of your chest with each breath. Go deeper into these rhythms. Can you hear the circulation in your ears; the tingle of the nerves in your skin; the electricity in your spine?

Slowly lie down. Visualize each body part coming into Being, infused with energy. Rest. Connect with your first chakra. See it pulsing your own special radio "call sign" for all to hear. Grounded and secure in being alive, allow your first chakra to be an energetic lighthouse that announces, "I am here!" Know where you are, strengthen that signal, and let it radiate out to the universe. Open the space; know that you deserve to feel this energetic connection.

Next, move out to the Infosphere, seeing all living beings as chorus of “I Am” transmitters – from the simplest virus, to each and every human. See the planets, the supernovas and pulsars in far-off galaxies, all radiating their own unique beacon. Stay in this place for as long as you like.

Finally bring your attention gently back to your own first-level signal generator. Let it join this universal chorus. Once it is clear and strong, bring your awareness back to your body, to your breath, to your own pulsing aliveness. Wiggle your toes. Gently open your eyes. Return to waking consciousness, but continue to sense your underlying connection to all life.



Firewalls in the Field:

Connect with your Higher Self and become aware of your energy field, especially around the throat chakra. Ask to see any obstacles preventing you from speaking only truth. What filters do you use? Do they need cleaning? Recalibrating? Are they effective or obstructive? Are they quiet or noisy? Imagine returning to a time when your filters became distorted. Who needs to be forgiven for hurting or lying to you? How can you un-learn mistrust and deception?

Visualize someone you need to address, but find it difficult to communicate your true feelings towards… see them on screen; ask the core of your heart to type the message you want to send. Make your words clear and truthful. Say it out loud… Be as assertive as necessary, without aggression. See your words traveling across the net, touching all the others in your universe, clearing out the cobwebs of falsehoods, aligning all of the waves radiating from every human’s fifth chakra into a strong clear coherent symphony of satya – that which just simply is.

Visualize Indra’s Net, the Web around the planet; call on the power of universal love to cleanse the viruses, sending them to the light. Picture it being filled with the pure light of your clear communications, awakening it to its true nature. Visualize your own web of trusted friends, and connect heart-to-heart. Finally, create a strong, effective “protection filter” for all your adventures in cyberspace.



Seeing the Patterns, Changing the Codes

Sit in a comfortable chair. Relax…Follow your breath to any place of tension. Release it. Let go of any thoughts. Ask you Higher Self to support you in this sixth chakra clearing meditation. Feel your feel fully grounded; use your breath to imagine roots growing out the base of your feet down to the center of the earth. Feel a safe curtain of Light rise from the earth and surround and permeate your energy field. Thank your Higher Self (and your name for the Divine) for this protection…Set the intention of opening the third eye center at whatever level is safe for you.

Imagine a small network grid connecting your third eye (at the center of the forehead) to the pineal gland at the center of your brain, to the heart center, and to the physical visual cortex area in the brain (you don’t have to actually know where this is, it’s the intention that counts). Imagine light traversing this network. Slowly ask to “see” one of the patterns of your life that keeps you from fully living your potential. Maybe a person, or a scene of some past or future event appears in your expanded vision.

Ask to “see” the underlying pattern (the encoded belief-system) that brought this challenge into your life. Gently ask to “zoom out” to a wider view. Using your fifth-level skills, ask to see the network patterns and “hooks” at play; maybe you’ve already projected the future outcome of some aspect of your life based on old ways of thinking. Use your skills from earlier visualizations to bring Light and forgiveness from your heart and from the Divine to anyone that helped create these patterns. Once one image is cleared, asked to zoom out to a wide view, releasing and forgiving at each step. If you are comfortable with the idea of a Higher Being, ask to rest in the peace of the “big picture.” Try looking at the whole system as just a pattern being unwound, revealing the pure goodness behind the structures you have held as true. Turn your true face to the face of a loving God.

Interview on "Spirit of Film"

I was recently interviewed by an Internet Radio service dedicated to "new consciousness" programming across multiple channels. The creator, Randall Libero, describes himself as "a pioneering media producer whose mission is to promote a new era of visionary entertainment, motion picture and internet media projects communicating ideas that move people to action by inspiring them to change the way they think and see themselves and the world." A great "Mission Statement," and I think a pretty good interview as well!

More on "telephone reality"

Here is a few paragraphs from Chapter Two of my book. I think it is relevant to today's discussion of the dangers of "cell-phoning while driving."

Talking on the phone invites second chakra emotional connection. Who hasn’t spent hours whispering their deepest secrets to a best friend or lover? Of course long-distance intimacy brings its own vulnerabilities, such as being secretly recorded or reaching for the phone and spilling out one’s most personal thoughts after a few too many drinks! The human brain’s operational mode while “on the phone” is closer to dreaming than its everyday state of navigating the stimuli of the external world. In a recent test, lab volunteers experienced a significant reduction in their ability to process visual stimuli while talking on cellphones. Other studies have reported that talking on a cellphone increased the risk of having an accident four-fold.[i]

Today, more than one hundred years after Alexander Graham Bell made what was essentially the first “911” call, the second chakra’s drive for authentic connection still underlies this technology. Lovers everywhere talk the night away; social networks of all kinds are supported by cell phone “link-ups,” conference call "phone bridges" provide group therapy on the most intimate topics. Numerous support groups for those facing grief, addictions and life-threatening diseases, quietly thrive on phone conferencing systems provided by universities, hospitals and social service agencies. Somehow, at times of crisis, the anonymous intimacy of phones allows for deep connection, even among strangers. Telephone counseling has been shown to improve recovery rates for patients taking anti-depressant drugs.[iii] After exchanging (1^st chakra) emails, most computer daters rely on the (2^nd chakra) telephone to “energetically check out” their potential partners before agreeing to meeting in person.

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[i] Virgin Mobile of Australia has a “Dialing Under the Influence” call-blocking program, that for 20-cents a number prevents you from calling the boss or girlfriend before 6AM. New York Times Magazine, December 11, 2005, 66. "We found a 50 percent reduction in the processing of visual information when you are driving and talking on a cellphone," reported David Strayer of the University of Utah. "Cellphones Called Worse than Alcohol on Road," Newsday News Service, reprinted in The Capital Times (Madison, WI), July 23, 2003, 1. See also, ScienceCentral ”Driving While Distracted,” http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&article_id=218392289.

'Hands-free' car phones, often touted as safer, appeared to be slightly more dangerous than hand-held terminals The first research into the effects of car phones took place at the University of Toronto in 1997. Published in New England Journal of Medicine (http://www.nejm.org), it compared accident reports to phone billing records. See, Andy Dornan, "There Is No Information Superhighway," Network Magazine, Mar 5, 2003; http://www.commweb.com/article/NMG20030305S0016. Jeremy Peters, “Hands-Free Cellphone Devices Don't Aid Road Safety, Study Concludes,” New York Times, July 12, 2005. Online version at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/technology/12auto.html.

[iii] Heather Horst, “From Kinship to Link-Up: Cell Phones and Social networking in Jamaica,” Current Anthropology, December 2005, Vol. 46#5; 755. “New Therapy on Depression Finds Phone is Effective,” New York Times, August 25, 2004, A20.

Another foreign edition!

Technika – Součást duchovního vývoje

Autor analyzuje náš technologický rozvoj jako psychospirituální proces. V moderních komunikačních technologiích vidí potenciální moudrost týkající se hlubších úrovní lidské komunikace.

Its from the Czech edition.

Every Object Getting a Voice

My piece on "Ambient Awareness" talks about how "our technologies are empowering physical locations to tell their stories." I cited examples such as "cellphone-guided neighborhood tours and local living histories are being developed in many communities, one New York artist has recruited his neighbors to record stories about the love life in their building; another uses stickers with text-messaging numbers to alert passer-bys that something of interest lies nearby."

Ian Frazier in the July 26th issues of The New Yorker tells the story of artist Katie Holten's "Tree Museum":

The Tree Museum-goer calls the number on a cell phone, punches in the tree’s extension, and hears a recording about the tree, or the neighborhood, or the Concourse, or the Bronx, or some larger concept like global warming. A visual artist named Katie Holten came up with the idea. Writer describes the experience of a Tree Museum-goer, noting several of the trees’ recordings and surroundings. Tree No. 1 is a London plane at East 138th Street. Dial the number and a poet named E. J. McAdams recites a haiku he has written about the grove. Tree No. 17, near 150th Street, is the stump of an elm that was cut down last year. Its recording is of Jon Pywell, a forester with the Department of Parks and Recreation. Tree No. 23 is a Callery pear at 162nd Street, across the Concourse from a large, two-towered brick building. The recording says that used to be the Concourse Plaza Hotel, where Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Whitey Ford lived sometimes. And at Tree No. 100, a cottonwood beside Mosholu Parkway, the recording tells how neighborhood activists saved this tree from destruction and created the little park around it.

I warned that cellphone danger is in the conversation itelf

This week's NY Times had a front-page story about the scores of tests that show that talking on the phone (any kind) takes the mind away from external processing (of cars or people on the road) and into an altered state. According to the Times, "Research shows that motorists talking on a phone are four times as likely to crash as other drivers, and are as likely to cause an accident as someone with a .08 blood alcohol content."

In Digital Dharma -- and on this blog, I wrote that cellphone use takes us deep into sec0nd chakra hunger for emotional connection, to the sounds of childhood lullabies and mothers cooing to their babies... how the telephone takes us to "dream space," where we create the image of our lover to go along with the "whisper in the ear." New research reported by the New York Times (6/6/08) confirms this model:

"It may be, the study said, that when people talk to someone who is not present, the visual-processing parts of their brain create a mental representation of where the other person might be."

Twitter, Ambient Awareness and Spiritual Practice

Our new IP-based communications systems and forms – the Internet, digital media, pervasive wireless networks and embedded communicating microprocessors – are not only changing our ways of seeing the world, they have pushed us, like it or not, into a new psychic environment of hyper-connectivity. The coupling of electricity with our nervous system over a century ago started the process of (in Marshal McLuhan’s words) "outering” our neurons. From the telephone to radio and television, and now from the internet to the distributed intelligence of peer-to-peer and social networks, we continue to grow more connected, more accessible, more stimulated.

From MySpace and Facebook, and the “twittered” thoughts that fly through one’s mind during the course of the day, our minds are always online, and our personal life is now part of the public record. On the web nothing is protected from our eyes and ears. We have opened every "closet," short-circuited all the old modes of denial. We are all “data naked” when every transaction, every credit card purchase, every trip through the grocery store, and every phone call (and its originating location) is now “on the record.” Even once-expunged court records (the “clean slate” granted by a judge for minor convictions years ago) are finding their way on to the Web, as records once held only in paper now routinely digitized.

Infection and contagion are the health metaphors of the day. Idea fragments flow from brain to brain, reproducing like viruses; the net's constant chatter perfectly reflecting the distraction of our planetary "monkey mind." Pushed into the Infosphere -- all of our secrets revealed, our every thought accessible, connected to the planet's very intelligence -- we are challenged to define our boundaries. Who am I and who do I pretend to be? Where am I, and where do I end and you begin? Who do I let into my space, and how can I trust that you say who you are? In critic John Lahr's words, "we know too much and too little; the world is at once too close and too far away." For many, addiction to email and texting, Twitter and the Blackberry, are all too real.

Much has been written about this new state of affairs – and much of it is deeply troubling! This wired distopia is a place where global corporations extend their control to the most remote corners of the planet; where the smallest personal action is tracked in giant marketing and “homeland security” databases; a world where physical nature and human love are replaced by computer simulations; where endless distractions keep us moving along, without ever being truly moved. However, while this future is indeed possible, I believe that the emerging metaphor of ambient awareness offers a way out of the shadow land and into deeper connection with our fellow beings and the very physical world that virtual reality seems to abandon.

As the internet exposed us to the dangers of connectivity without boundaries – exposure, infection, and false identities, it also gave us a new freedom to speak truth, to see beyond the masks of the ego-self, corporate and government posturing, and build our own “peer networks.” Social networking allows for addictive connection, personal posturing and closed-minded self-referential “friends circles.” It also offers the possibility of experiencing self as part of a larger web – of friends, of communities of interest and of place, of creation itself. The path of conscious web awareness is not a new invention. It is what all the great mystical traditions have been teaching for millennia. Learning how to navigate a world where everyone and everything is connected, where every object has a voice (if not IP address), where all things can be found, and all that was hidden is seen, where reality comes into being based on what coding scheme is chosen, is at the core of shamanic journeying and magical sight. Perhaps it is time to take some of these esoteric practices into the real world challenges of living in the Infosphere.

FINDING GROUNDEDNESS AND PLACE

In many ways the Infosphere is “placeless.” Our communities are defined by interest, not local geography. We email, text, talk and share video with friends anywhere and at any time: communications taking place without the need for transportation, communication without embodiment. Yet being disconnected from the physical solidity of the body, and from the grounding power of the earth, is something no shaman would allow. Even while traversing the astral realms, he or she maintains the silver cord anchored in this dimension, for without a reference ground, one has no way to decode binary information, to determine a one from a zero. All that remains is noise.

Without a connection to the earth and to the physical body, all signals become static.

We instinctively know this. So many of our technologies involve helping us find our location. Text messages and twits are often simply about place: where I am, what am I doing here, and where am I going. GPS-equipped phones can point the believer to Mecca or search the web for a nearby mosque, or on a more mundane plane, find a particular type of restaurant and tell you how to walk there. GPS tracking allows parents to keep an eye on their children’s driving habits or their pet’s whereabouts. Satellite images of any structure on the planet are now available for all to see – often over the objections of the building owner or the local government. Our technologies are empowering physical locations to tell their stories: cellphone-guided neighborhood tours and local living histories are being developed in many communities, one New York artist has recruited his neighbors to record stories about the love life in their building; another uses stickers with text-messaging numbers to alert passer-bys that something of interest lies nearby.

But, beyond personal awareness of place, the web has given a voice to Gaia herself. We are building grids of network sensors that will crisscross our world. From interactive underwater observatories, connected to each other and to land-based research laboratories, to atmospheric carbon and ozone monitoring stations on the tops of mountains; from stress sensors embedded in roads and bridges, to the emergence of the “smart electrical grid,” data will be pouring in from so many places in our everyday environment: each sensor with its own IP address, each adding its own signal to our collective nervous system.

Like the incessant chatter of our Facebook news feeds and Twitter accounts, we must learn to synthesize and integrate the messages from these extended neurons without becoming overwhelmed or overly thick skinned. The technology of “ambient devices” provides one tool – and a core metaphor – for coping with information overload. These devices track myriads of complex data inputs, synthesize their impact and display them in easy-to-understand interfaces such as a “personal dashboard” or a cyber-pet whose tail changes color as electrical consumption increases and whose purr is replace with a sad grumble as more carbon-based power is added to the mix.

As we learn to monitor our physical and social environments through such intermediaries, we will be challenged to pick data inputs that represent our highest selves. What if we demand that our signaling technologies send us easy-to-understand messages about the planet’s true health as opposed to just the rise and fall of the financial markets? What if we insisted that we use this planetary ambient awareness to electronically track and share the conditions of our environment, the encroachment of the deserts, the thinning of the Ozone Layer, the decline of the ocean’s diversity? Not just the condition of our investment portfolio, but the number of malnourished children in the world?

And, just as we expand awareness to the outer reaches of our environment, we use our sensitized consciousness to tune inwards – to listen to the “cellular tweets” of our own bodies? Imagine receiving a twit from an “awareness partner” asking you to stop and center, to take a deep breath and reflect on one’s inner state. Imagine doing this four or five times a day!

DATA DISCERNMENT AND FILTERING

In an environment where everyone is connected and sharing their every experience, learning how to observe incoming data without reacting to every stimulus is a critical cyber-survival tool. Too heavy a shield (firewall) is as bad as no shield at all. The challenge is to create and flex filters appropriate to the level of protection needed. Knowing whom to trust is the key, and the best filter is a trusted reference. We do this naturally when we decide whom we add to our social network – who will be an acquaintance, and who will be an intimate. Our web networks reflect the same levels of trust that we bring to face-to-face relationships: wide circles of loose friends, and tight sacred circles such as recovery groups, prayer and meditation sanghas, and ad-hoc dance and celebration communities.

Beyond conscious boundary setting, the other lesson of mystic practice that is embedded in digital life, is the recognition that our consciousness is shaped by how we choose to process the signals of our senses. Ambient awareness need not be unconscious. It is a skill that can be cultivated into a powerful tool for not only coping with electronic overload, but also a doorway to greater compassion, peace and personal power. Our flood of tweets and emails can inundate and overwhelm, or like the stick of the Zen master, invite us to pay attention to where we habitually put our attention. The shaman’s skill is in cultivating a wider-seeing vision that takes in all vibrations, and the shield of discernment, that allows her to know what signals require action, and which ones are part of the background symphony of existence.

The mystic sees all reality as a stream of compressed data that most of us decode using habitual, consensual algorithms. Many forms of spiritual practice involve stilling the busy mind and being present to, without being hooked by, these incoming data streams. Awareness meditation is, in effect, a process of observing the instruction codes of reality without processing them into thoughts, emotions and suffering. In Buddhism this is called mindfulness; in Sufi practice it is called Vairagya, watching the codes go by, “indifferent” to one story over another, but still very much connected to the experience of life. Sri Aurobindo called it “seeing with the eye of complete union” – seeing the point of view of each separate thing, while at the same time remembering that all the points are in fact the same – processing the reality of the outer world in full consciousness that one is in fact, data processing.

EXTENDING THE PRACTICE

Without the cultivation of discernment (in whatever form), our technologies of connection will continue to overwhelm us with “data smog” – drawing our attention to every stimulus, resulting in either debilitating hypersensitivity or protective numbness. With practices that expand consciousness and teach appropriate filtering, we can extend the web metaphor into all dimensions, seeing in all of our tweets, texts, emails and videos, the raw data that we use to create personal and consensual "stories" through patterns of prediction based on (intentionally) limited data. Stopping the processor that Joseph Chilton Pearce calls our over-eager "reflective memory,” gives us a moment, however brief, to be in the Now.

I believe that the “ambient awareness” that is emerging within Twitter circles can be extended beyond the subconscious knowledge of what one’s friends are up to, into an actual mindfulness practice. Beyond receiving a tweet to “stop and center” and reflect on one’s inner state, one can set aside time to listen to (and write down or draw) the tweets of one’s heart, of one’s cells, of the water and the rocks, of the sun and stars that surround us – each sending us its own pulse of aliveness. We only need to commit to stop and listen.

As we become more adept at taking in all the signals of our various networks, we may find ourselves reaching beyond the equanimity that comes from awareness practice to something even more powerful: the “seeing-everything-all-at-once” consciousness where one is a node on the network, and simultaneously the entire web itself – an individual data packet traveling outward over a specific radio channel, and the entire spread spectrum symphony of frequencies, part of a joyously noisy communicating system.

New Examples of RF-ID "Heneni" Calls

In an earlier post, I wrote about the growth of RF-ID, and how it mirrored our first-level hunger to announce our birth and call out our location.

The electrical mirroring of first chakra signaling into the Infosphere will become nearly universal with the explosion of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) devices. As this technology gets cheaper and smaller, it is likely that our physical environment will be flooded with millions of these “calling out” radio transmissions. Tiny, silently signaling tags – often as small as a grain of sand – are already riding in bulk shipping containers, wholesale pharmaceutical cartons, warehouse inventories, and soon in airline baggage tags and in consumer packaging to prevent fraud, track deliveries and provide accurate, near real-time inventory control. Some schools are experimenting with student RFID necklaces for security and tracking attendance (with mixed initial responses), and RFID bracelets are available for rent at an increasing number of large amusement parks. Our currency too may someday have embedded signaling to track money laundering and foil counterfeiting. RFID is helping nursing homes automatically track elderly residents who also have a “help alert” button on their badge.

This month's Wired [March, 09; page 029] lists some new applications:

• tagging endangered cacti and elephants
• tracking surgical sponges -- and making sure none are left behind
• tracking released parolees -- and alerting authorities when they go into forbidden locations
• embedding the wealthy -- to track them in case of kidnapping (in Mexico)

The list keeps growing!

Sex, Water, and the Invention of the Telephone

Science Friday (on NPR) just had an interview with Seth Schulman, who discussed his book [The Telephone Gambit] on the hidden secret of Bell's theft of the "idea" of the telephone from his arch-rival Elisha Gray.

What struck me about this story is how deeply the "invention" of the phone is connected to the watery energy of the second chakra! In Digital Dharma, I talked about the impact of Bell's device on the sexual/gender relations of the late Victorian Age -- how the phone freed young women from the oversight of their fathers, gave them new employment opportunities, and liberated the farm wife from isolation; and later, how the phone was immediately associated with sexual power.

I retold (the now disproved) story of how the first phone call was a [second-level] cry for relationship -- "Mr. Watson come here I need you" -- and compared it to the first-level "birth announcement" associated with the telegraph: "What has God wrought?" [Numbers 23: 23].

In Mr. Shulman's investigative research, we learn that the device that Bell alledgedly copied from Gray's original patent filing was for a device that suspended a needle in liquid so that sound waves from the person talking into a transmitter would vary the resistance in the electrical circuit running to the receiver: analog waves from air pressure to metal plate to needle in water to electrical voltage!

The other thing that Shulman points out is how Bell was deeply in love with the daughter of his principal financial backer. And, how that passion fueled Bell's hunger to succeed at all costs -- even through chicanery!

Dutch Edition!

The Dutch edition of Digital Dharma has just been released! Here is a link to the announcement.

The LOVER IN THE INFOSPHERE

In this essay I will look at the protector archetype of the Lover, the part of the self that hungers to establish clean connections with "the other," the part that holds our magical inner child – and its creativity and its wounds. The Lover energy is held in both the second and fourth chakras: the first in the interpersonal realms of creative expression, relationship and sexuality; and the second in the transpersonal qualities of the heart center – compassion for the pain and joy in the joy of the other. The first extended into the Infosphere by the telephone; the second through the medium of television.

Relationship is the core communications issue associated with the second chakra: the transponder of attraction and the center of one’s creativity. From here, one radiates the primordial drive for union embedded in our very protons and electrons, seeking on the physical plane to “reach out and touch someone,” to heal the wound of incompleteness. When protected by the Warrior and guided by the wisdom of the Magician, the Lover can dance the analog rise and fall of reciprocity. But when damaged, this connection-craving center calls out to anyone. Obsessive talking and poor relationship boundaries are signs of unbalanced second chakra energy. At its most extreme, this transmitter’s shadow side engenders seduction, entanglement and shame.

Both sides of second chakra communications can be seen out in the Infosphere: over the phone and across the net. Shared talk is an intimate act, and the telephone brings one to a state of intimate proximity with whoever is at the other end of the line. The drive for authentic connection underlies most telephone talk. Lovers everywhere talk the night away; conference call "phone bridges" provide group therapy on the most intimate topics. Support groups for those facing grief, addictions and life-threatening diseases, quietly thrive on phone conferencing systems provided by universities, hospitals and social service agencies. The anonymous intimacy of phones allows for deep connection, even among strangers. No wonder this technology has also had its sexual side. From the earliest days “dirty talk” over the telephone troubled its inventors. This was a tool that allowed Victorian Age young women to find their voice, to connect with their friends and their lovers outside of the control of parents and chaperones.

Not much has changed today. From phone sex lines to cellphone-connected lovers revealing their most intimate secrets to everyone nearby, the second chakra power of telephone is everywhere. Even in Saudi Arabia, a country with one of the most conservative (and repressive) gender-segregated social system, the mobile phone has emerged as the tool of courtship – or at least flirting. According to the New York Times, all a young woman has to do is turn on her phone's Bluetooth feature and within seconds “it is bombarded with love poems and photos of flowers” sent by nearby young men. Some men are even buying high-powered radio belts to extend their wooing range.

The Lover also resides in the heart center. At this level, the work of connection is not about finding one’s soulmate or friend, but about seeing our connection to all things. The mature heart is open to seeing all beings as reflections of the self, and all these reflections as part of a larger divine pattern (understanding these patterns is the Magician’s gift). The heart’s challenge is to remain open and fully compassionate to whatever comes its way; and its shadow is rooted in its attempts to sidestep the grief of seeing all the pain in the world of limitation and attachment. As I wrote in my essay on television and the heart, “seeing the other” is the transpersonal challenge of the Lover, and its transpersonal shadow is mistaking codependency for compassion, sympathy for others “stories” with true appreciation and reciprocity.

Telling compassionate stories is what drives the best television programming. Previously disenfranchised people -- the poor and homeless, even endangered species like whales and dolphins -- have all found a place in TV's all-embracing portrait of the global family. Throughout the 1970's and 1980's, Sesame Street and the early versions of Star Trek embodied television's heart-softening magic, connecting us with other families, neighborhoods, cultures and even distant galaxies. This medium not only brings the ugliness of war "home;" it tends to humanize the "enemy." In the 70's, television coverage of the Vietnam War helped turn the tide of public opinion against this otherwise remote conflict. This subversion of military victories by TV's coverage of its consequences on "regular citizens" continues today. The horrific images of American soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraid Prison shown on television in the summer of 2004 did more to turn the world against the Iraq war than dozens of street protests.

The Shadow Lover wants connection but can’t stand the pain that comes along with it. Shadow media provokes our hearts then offers the perfect anesthetic – addictive consumption without end, gratification of false wants, desires and attachments, without the mess of embodiment. Clear television viewing demands that we look deeply into all of the pain we hold in our own energy field and in all of mass consciousness. It asks the heart to break open in compassion. But for most of us, this is too much to ask. Without a strong grounding in the lower chakras and without the connections to the divine self held by the higher centers, the ego-mind turns away from all the painful data global video links bring from the outside world, and quite naturally searches for some kind of "jamming signal."

Commercial television's shadow side destroys our peace and tranquility because the Shadow Lover demands it! We empower this industry to use all of its artistic power to cover the possibility of confronting global grief with attention grabbing, but essentially empty, mini-dramas. Commercial television's world is a place where nothing interferes with desire: a perfect consumer society, united by a shared love for consumer products. Many web videos traffic in porn and cynicism, deflecting the hunger for connection, or mocking it with teenage aloofness that disguises a fear of intimacy. We self-medicate, but of course, the cure is worse than the disease.

Calling in the Protector Lover from the heart and from the sexual centers brings us back to the joy of connection, and of gratitude for having a chance to experience compassion. Shared rituals of co-creation and appreciation, dance and prayer [from Burning Man to the Dances of Universal Peace], bring these Lover qualities to the fore. On in the Infosphere, we can radiate these qualities to all we link up with. Safe behind the Warrior’s shield, we can show our playfulness and our grief. We can inspect our “cellular” connections and disconnect all the cords of inappropriate attachment. We can find ourselves in the face of the Other in every image and video clip.

Our Evolving Global Brain

Last year, the Institute of Noetic Sciences published a short article of mine that looked at some of the impacts of new media on the brain. That article is now available online as a PDF file. Enjoy.

KBOO (Portland) Radio Interview

Back in October 2007 I visited with Paul O'Brien, host of the Pathways program on community radio station KBOO-FM. Paul made his millions by creating (in 1988) an online Tarot reading site and then "retired" to create the Divination Foundation to "promote pathways of personal and cultural transformation."

One of his activities in the Pathways Program on KBOO.

Here is a podcast of that 30-min interview.

The Warrior Archetype in the Infosphere

As I wrote in Digital Dharma, the Internet and all of our hyper-connected communications networks can be seen as physical representations in glass, silicon, photons and magnetism, of different ways our consciousness is reaching out as it evolves into a global field of awareness. The coupling of electricity with our nervous system, as Marshal McLuhan wrote fifty years ago, has "outered" our neurons, projecting the light and shadow of our collective psyche into the tools of telecommunications.

In this essay, also posted on REALITY SANDWICH, my focus will be less structural, and more metaphoric. Specifically, I want to look at the impact of having our global nervous system so rapidly extended that we are now at the cusp of a true transformation into "second tier thinking," where in Ken Wilber's words, one's thinking moves from relativism to holism, from pluralism to integralism. Here, one lives in multiple overlapping and integrative networks; here the other is found everywhere; here one is a part of a commons much larger than one's family, nation or culture.

The challenge of second-tier consciousness is to stay fully present in the lower chakras -- maintaining power and compassion, centeredness and truth, while also remaining fully open to the waves of information that now bombard us all. In this newly expanded and networked sensory space, openhearted attunement without appropriate self-protection is dangerous to self and others. Without proper tools and spiritual preparation, hyper-connectivity can be an endless hall of mirrors, trapping us in the morass of our electronically magnified addictions and fears. Pushed into the Infosphere -- all of our secrets revealed, our every thought accessible, connected to the planet's very intelligence -- we are challenged to define our boundaries. Who am I and who do I pretend to be? Where am I, and where do I end and you begin? Who do I let into my space, and how can I trust that you say who you are?

Television prods us to open our hearts to the world. The Internet reflects the challenge of dealing with the consequences of such openness. "Always-on" network connections have thrown us head-first into a sea of memes, idea fragments that flow from brain to brain reproducing like viruses, the net's constant chatter perfectly reflecting the chatter and distraction of our planetary "monkey mind." We are discovering that living with such an information glut without adequate "boundary protection" can be dangerous. In critic John Lahr's words, "we know too much and too little; the world is at once too close and too far away." [i]

Surfing the Internet puts us in direct contact with many of the unpleasant truths of humankind. Because it cannot effectively be censored, it forces us to ask the hard question of "what is the truth when everyone can speak?" It drags us into hard places, exposes us to situations where we must make our own values clear and public, forcing us to examine and defend our own core beliefs. Our inability to know if the person in the chat room is really who they say they are, our fears of fraud and identity theft whenever we enter personal data online, and our being deluged with false spammed messages all reflect our trickster self run amok.

Way beyond anything on "tabloid TV," on the Internet nothing is protected from our eyes and ears: from the stupid and silly "ex-girlfriend revenge" photos, to the painful facts of spousal cheating, to the horrific exposé of prisoner abuse in Iraq. Our Internet-connected computers have opened every "closet," short-circuited old modes of denial - for wayward spouses or for Presidents challenging the definition of "sexual relations." Once-hidden religious doctrines, secret practices, and mystical texts are now available to all. Even online "bookies" are finding that their clients now know more about the odds than they do. As Cluetrain Manifesto contributor David Weinberger, observes, "hyper-linked organizations never met a wall they liked." [ii]

Traversing this new world we can draw upon the deep wisdom of the protector archetypes: the Warrior, whose work it is to set and protect boundaries from a deeply grounded place; the Lover, who can establish clean connections with "the other;" the Magician, who is able to discern shadow from light, and recognize the larger patterns; and the Elder/Crone/King, who through the act of blessing, can not only see, but change the codes of reality, healing the web of creation.

There are many web behaviors that reflect the Shadow Warrior (who is really the Savage): angry words and flames, scattershot spam, trolls intent on destroying not only the false shield of persona, but the entire being behind it, violent games, hate speech and hateful religion. The true Warrior metaphor however, is now manifesting in the return of groundedness to the web. We can see this in the explosion of RFID devices, giving more and more objects their own IP voice; the extension of ecological sensors across the ocean floor, in bridges and farm fields, across the electrical grid, in our everyday environment; and the mashing-up of this data with GPS-powered geo-spatial information.

Much texting content is about place: where I am, what am I doing here, and where am I going. A GPS phone can point one to Mecca or search the web for a nearby mosque, or on a more mundane plane, find a particular type of restaurant and tell you how to walk there. One can call or Twit a friend and get block-by-block directions to their house; better yet, the phone can alert you if the friend is sitting at a coffee shop nearby. On a much larger scale, the Warrior can now listen to the earth's voice via ambient devices that integrate and display complex data patterns about global warming, population growth, or world hunger in formats that we can all understand.

The Warrior's shield can be painted with many designs, projecting different identities out into the networked world. Safe behind our aliases and proxies, we now have the freedom to reclaim the power of our voice -- whether by text, video or podcast. One can download personal ringtones that announce to the world your "tribe of the moment." One can practice playing with the shields of persona, trying on different identities, exploring in Sherri Turkel's words, one's "inner diversity."

On the other hand, sometimes throwing down the shield is the biggest high: requesting in the act of blogging exposure, a validation of one's existence, telling the world, in Emily Gould's words, "all my secrets [so that] you won't have any ammo against me that I haven't given you." A healthier (more Warrior-like) stance is not to throw down the shield in the Lover mode, but to invite our trusted ones to gather behind it in safety. While one may have hundreds of Facebook, Twitter or MySpace "friends," the truth is that our intimates fit in a much smaller circle. Just as in the physical world of "recovery circles" (and our original tribal groupings), the net has made it possible to build small networks based on trust and earned respect. And within these networks, the old cartoon of "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" has been flipped. As sociologist Zeynep Tufekc, told Clive Thompson, "If you don't want people to know you're a dog, you'd better stay away from a keyboard."

With the Warrior providing grounding, protection, and a safe place for circles of intimacy, we can call upon our Lover and Magician qualities - the subject on my next essay.

FOOTNOTES:

[i] John Lahr, "Cultural Gas," The New Yorker, October 6, 2003. 136.

[ii] The Church of Scientology has been trying for years to block Internet sites revealing their practices. See: http://www.answers.com/topic/scientology-vs-the-internet. The Internet made earning real money on bookmaking possible by sharply increasing the volume of gamblers a bookie could handle, but it also made the average gambler, 'the square,' somewhat smarter too... Valuable information now appears instantaneously on the Internet, and it takes only a tiny bit of it to start a bookmaker on his downward spiral. They just can't keep up with it." William Berlind, "Bookies in Exile," The New York Times Magazine, August 17, 2003. Frederick Levine, Christopher Locke, David Searles, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, (Cambridge MA: Perseus, 2003), p. 155

Is the Shift to 5th Level Consciousness Changing the Brain?

In Digital Dharma, I argue that we have moved from the dominant television metaphor of the Heart Chakra -- with its challenge of compassion versus emotional (and sometimes physical,) addiction, to the Fifth Chakra challenge of telling truth from lies as we are all hyper-connected by our electronic networks.

In brain studies conducted at UCLA, and summarized in a new book, iBRAIN (reviewed in October 14th's Newsweek), neuroscientist Gary Small reports that regular users of the Internet had more brain activity in centers devoted to decision-making and complex reasoning than those who were light Internet users.

"Digital natives" — as Small calls them, appear to have developed more neural connections to handle the flow of near-constant sources of sensory data. "Digital immigrants" on the other hand, according the the Newsweek review, appear to have more connections in the areas associated with reading facial expression."

I would say that "immigrants" were trained by the close-up facial medium of television, while the new generation has been trained to learn how to process and filter.

Twitter, Ambient Awareness, and Mindfulness

Clive Thompson, writing in the New York Times Magazine, describes the growth of “ambient awareness” as groups of friends forming Twitter circles to keep each other constantly updated as to their experiences, moods, and occasionally, the state of their inner life.

I believe that what we are seeing in this phenomena is a continuation of the externalization of the nervous system into the Infosphere, and along with it, the development of what I call teleconsciousness. Just as radio externalized third-level issues of power and group identity, and television reflected the light and shadow of the heart center – compassion and community versus codependence, consumption and “boomeritis,” the internet and social networking technologies offer us a window on the work of experiencing self as part of the larger web of creation. The internet exposed us to the dangers of connectivity without boundaries – exposure, infection, and false identities, and also the freedom to speak our truth, see beyond the masks of the ego-self, corporate and government posturing, and build our own “peer networks.”

The Twitter networks described by Thompson bring into left-brain awareness what right-brain mystical practice has known for millennia: that we are all-connected, and that from a place of trusted intimacy, with the appropriate filters in place, we can open to receiving the messages of all creation. “Filtering” social network sites to one’s trusted friends is no different from what we do in recovery circles and other support groups: revealing all of one’s “shadow and gold” in a place of non-judgment.

The spiritual opportunity reflected in the technologies of social networking is to move from personal “story sharing,” to the transpersonal work of being present to, without being hooked by, all the incoming data of life. In Buddhism this is called mindfulness. As I wrote in Digital Dharma about the metaphor of deep seeing present in all digital representations of “reality":

Sixth-level digital dharma asks us to recognize that we are always processing codes of consensual reality, and pay attention to where we put our attention. Doing practices that open one to this stage of awareness is a form of “esoteric signal decompression,” allowing one to look beneath surface identities to decode richer and subtler dimensions. Without preloaded (habitual) coding schemes, the fully aware brain takes in each new signal with fresh wonder as a sacred surprise; each sensory stimulus is decoded in the immediacy of the Now, without reference to old memory patterns. At its best, unclouded sixth-level vision brings one closer to experiencing the unity of creation, seeing the underlying continuity and hearing the hidden harmonies behind humanity’s often painful apparent differences.

Sixth level teleconsciousness requires one to widen their reception channels, to take in more frequencies, to consider other “truths” than those one is most attached to. This is the practice of “turning” from the limited data of the ego-self to something much bigger. Seeing the world through what Indian sage Sri Aurobindo(1) called “the eye of complete union.” Seeing the point of view of each separate thing while at the same time "remembering itself totally." Twitter “awareness circles” could offer such an opportunity. Imagine receiving a “Twit” to “stop and center,” to take a deep breath and reflect on one’s inner state. Better yet, to take a moment and join in a group intention of healing the planet, of sending happiness to all beings.

Ambient awareness can also extend beyond taking note of your friends’ cyber-presence; it can include taking a few moments each day to consider the “twits” of one’s heart, of one’s cells, of the water and the rocks, of the sun and stars? Networked grids of sensors will soon cover the Earth, extending our collective electronic nervous system to new realms. What if we insisted that we use this new awareness to reveal the planet’s physical health: to electronically track and share the conditions of the planet’s crust, the condition of its forests, lakes and streams, the encroachment of the deserts, the thinning of the Ozone Layer, the decline of the ocean’s diversity? What if society used these signaling technologies to monitor and display in real-time not just our personal wealth, but also our energy consumption or the number of malnourished children in the world? The technology is available. The choice is ours.

(1) Satprem, Sri Aurobindo, or The Adventure of Consciousness, New York: Institute for Evolutionary Research (1984), p.168, 66.

Breakfast at the Inside Edge

I spoke at the INSIDE EDGE at the University Club at UC-Irvine on October 15th.

I received the following kind letter of appreciation from Dr. Adrian Windsor, Ph.D., program director:

...the implications of your message are so profound in this push-me, pull-me, technological whirlwind world. It is extremely useful to have it broken down with the chakra demonstration... It has never been more true that the "medium is the message," and it leaves us vulnerable. Your workshop was a special gift for those of us who were presented with your work at a deeper level... Thank you for sharing your wisdom as the work of a mystic demystifying the infosphere...

Returning HOME to Salem Oregon in October

I led a workshop on the "energetics of the Infosphere" at the HOME CENTER in Salem Oregon on Saturday, October 11th. I also spoke at services at the Center on Sunday, and conducted an evening Men's Spirituality Retreat.

Future Forum Video

My talk at the Silicon Valley Future Salon (hosted by SAP) has now been posted. This was a long evening (almost 2-hours) with great questions from the audience. It was streamed live at the time, but not well publicized outside of the Future Forum community. Enjoy!

What is Enlightment Audio Interview

Carter Phipps, editor of What is Enlightment Magazine, interviewed me this week on how Digital Dharma relates to the evolution of consciousness. WIE is produced by Enlightenment Next, the organization created by spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen.

To listen to the interview you can visit WIE Unbound and sign up for their free 15-day trial. WIE Unbound is the gateway to the behind-the-scenes audios and videos including interviews, lectures and dialogues with the leading spiritual teachers, philosophers, scientists, and activists featured in every issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine. All audios and videos are available to download or stream online.

This is how they describe the podcast on their website.

In this Unbound audio, WIE’s Carter Phipps speaks to Vedro about why he thinks that the spirituality of the future will be one that finds a way to embrace the rapid technological change that is increasingly shaping our lives as we move deeper into the twenty-first century. Drawing upon the ideas of a rich array of thinkers, including Ken Wilber, Don Beck, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Vedro describes how technologies native to each stage in human history, from the printing press to television to the world wide web, have simultaneously molded—and been molded by—developments within society, culture, and consciousness.