THE CHAKRA CRISIS OF SOCIAL MEDIA, AND THE RETURN OF TRUMP

 

I just listened to Ezra Klein’s New York Times’ interview with Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public. The book posits that our transition to a “fifth wave” of (all-to-all) media technologies has swamped our earlier hierarchical (one-to-many) broadcast systems, resulting in the erosion of respect for elite knowledge, elite institutions, and rule by elite politicians operating under the old rules of liberal democracy. Gurri argues that the resulting chaos has left room for an upswelling of nihilistic thinking, nihilistic protests, and nihilistic “resentment politics” around the world.

In the spirit of this discussion, I have updated an earlier essay about the 2016 rise of Trump as a manifestation of a fear-based reaction to the activation of fifth and sixth chakra energies in our Infosphere as our consciousness continues to evolve to higher states, and new media forms emerge to reflect it back to us.

For links to the positive aspects of these activations, see my earlier blog posts. I am finishing a new essay about our seventh (transhuman connectivity) and eighth (AI and consciousness becoming self-aware) chakra activations, and hope to post it soon.

 

Readers of Digital Dharma (and this blog) are already familiar with the idea that our communications technologies impact all aspects of our social, spiritual and cultural life, and that most importantly, this impact is a two-way street. Our technology is both a product of the evolution of consciousness, and a mirror of this evolution. In my writing, I have used the metaphor of the chakras to explore how the light and shadow of each new medium impacts our energy body, our psychology, and our spiritual dharma, as well as our politics, culture and social worlds. This dance of media-stimulated, media reflected, evolution and retreat across all these domains is encapsulated in today’s headlines, and most clearly, in the rise, fall and return (along with the unelected cyberbully, Elon Musk) of Donald Trump.

While “connection to all things” is the spiritual opportunity of the activated fifth (internet) chakra, and “seeing beyond the veil” is the positive opportunity of the (digital decoding) sixth, their shadow aspects are also reflected in our social media and our politics. In many ways, from a digital dharma perspective, Trump’s campaigns were built on this anxiety. His call to build border walls and retreat from global alliances and global trade, and his attacks on the “deep state” (and on the idea of truth itself), reflected these chakra fears. His mastery of first chakra “security signaling” (via Twitter) brought him into power in 2016. His recognition of the power of podcasting to activate third chakra “identity passion” and his mockery of the fourth chakra “television values” of diversity and inclusion drove his return in 2024. His embrace of the “tech bros” fantasies of AI-driven government is perhaps another shadow reaction – this time to the stimulation of our global seventh chakra, the cosmic library of all knowledge. I will explore this theme in another post.

 

From Television to Twitter to Trump

Back in the late 1950’s, media scholar Marshall McLuhan watched as television swept across Canada, ending the dominance of radio and print media, but more importantly, changing family life, social norms, and even political expression. He coined the phrase, “the medium is the message,” to get us to look at the impacts of a communications technology form that had nothing to do with the programming delivered on it. Scores of books and thousands of articles have analyzed television through McLuhan’s lens, looking at the deep changes wrought by this flickering “electronic hearth.”

In Digital Dharma, I proposed that television was an extension of our fourth chakra’s emotional heart: a medium of expression and feelings, stimulating projected romantic attachment to those like us (or those we want to like us), sympathy for those different than us, and an addictive hunger to suppress those new feelings by stuffing ourselves with food, material objects and all forms of distraction. Philosopher Ken Wilber has called this response “boomeritis” – utopian dreaming and multicultural sympathies bordering on collective guilt for all the world’s victims, mixed with unacknowledged attachment to material luxuries and high drama.

Television’s gift to the “boomer” generation was its face-to-face close-up view of the world’s diverse community. Despite its menu of cowboys and Indians, crime-fighters and often violent cartoons, TV also introduced us to the humanity of outsiders of different colors, tribe and nation. It challenged us to see our entire planet as one Spaceship Earth. It was the medium of human and animal rights, the environment and holistic thinking. Balancing its diet of “hard news” and glorified sports violence, it was also a medium of the intimate family narrative and soap operas of personal disclosure, and it brought the carnage of the Vietnam War into every living room. And, at the same time TV was bringing the world to the developed west, it was exporting these values, and the images of consumer wealth, to the rest of the world, destabilizing the old regimes, and stimulating migratory dreams.

In its reflection of the “shadow” aspect of the heart chakra, television gave us addictive emotionalism and disconnected connection – the glorification of desire, and its fulfillment at bargain-basement prices. Instead of deep compassion, it offered shallow pity (and for some, disdain for the parade of the world’s “losers”), a half-response that eventually deepened viewers’ sense of spiritual depression.

As media technology changed, television’s worldview of naive optimism, self-pity and addictive consumerism, became easier and easier to mock. Donald Trump’s network producers understood this and brazenly used television itself to belittle its soft emotional (feminine) side, offering in opposition, a parody television masculinity: a loud-mouthed, unfeeling, phony self-made millionaire, sexist beauty-pageant and wrestling promoter.

At the same time “the Donald” was being introduced to the nation’s viewers, the Internet was moving from a carrier of email and a place to “surf the web,” to the home of Facebook, blogging, podcasts and all forms social media. If television was an extension of the heart, then the all-connected, all-present online world, was an extension of our skin, energetically connected to the throat chakra. Fifth chakra over-connection, not fourth chakra over-emotion, would become the new challenge.

While television offered an opportunity to look at the multicultural world, the internet brought us the gift of actually connecting with it. As Tom Friedman wrote, “Suddenly connectivity became so fast, cheap, easy for you and ubiquitous that it felt like you could touch someone whom you could never touch before and that you could be touched by someone who could never touch you before.” In this world, the “other” is not just a face on a screen out there, but someone, invited or not, inside our personal space.

This was the multi-cultural, globally-cosmopolitan, knowledge-based, world embraced by Barack Obama – a place of multiple overlapping voices of minority peoples and cultures, a place where everyone is speaking all at once. His campaign was based on data-driven Internet organizing, and his Presidency was based on “managing at a distance” the government of one (albeit powerful) node in a multi-polar world.

It is no surprise that this move into network-style governance would generate unease and push-back from those hurt by all this connectivity: those left out of the capital flows of the information economy, those whose jobs were outsourced to internet-linked factories overseas, those frightened by the real or imagined appearance of the “the other” at the door, and those who felt that their (formally-unquestioned and dominant) voices were now being challenged by those they could no longer shut down due to new codes of “political correctness.”

In the 2016 campaign, at a time of deep social division and growing distrust of the new networked global financial corporations and financial institutions, the Democrats offered a candidate steeped in television’s aspirational fourth chakra memes (fairness and multicultural “rights”), coupled with an unpleasant air of boomer entitlement. Donald Trump, who rose to fame manipulating television’s shadow as the exemplar of me-first materialism, crass cynicism and melodrama, easily embraced the role of anti-global, anti-Internet avatar. Like many of the strong man nationalists coming to power today, he ran as the anti-connectionist candidate.

He successfully tapped the deep anxiety that comes feeling “data naked,” unprotected and overwhelmed by both incoming signals and the loss of privacy. From massive data thefts and cyber-attacks on the technological pillars of the information economy, the internet has made us vulnerable to the darker side of being part of one web-linked world. This is reflected in our heightened “fear of infection” (from the pandemics of Covid, AIDS, SARS and Ebola), opening the door to Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign and promise to “build the wall.”

His attacks on the “fake news media” and his embrace of various conspiracy theories was a response not only to the over-connected fifth chakra, but also to the unease felt in our collective sixth chakra, or third eye. This is the center that interprets reality, looking for patterns in all the data we receive, guiding our intuition and insight. Social media exploded during the Obama years, bombarding users with images, opinions and emotional hooks that also triggered the second chakra’s desire for pleasure and cravings for validation and the fourth chakra’s hunger for friendship. It is no wonder that in a social media universe where much of everything is artifice, a place full of bots, scammers, poseurs and grifters, Trump’s list of “alternative facts” was accepted by many voters.

Trump effectively channeled his “Build the Wall” attacks against the metaphors of connectivity using not just his television persona, but even more radically, by mastering a communications medium whose technology form is aligned with our earliest electrical signaling system, and its energetic metaphors with the first chakra’s concern with security and survival:  the command and control, one-way declarative text-based mini-telegrams of the Twitter feed, a rejection of holism and its complexities – the perfect medium of “winner take all” competitive narcissism.

For much of the Trump’s first term we saw a flood of daily imperial text pronouncements, many of them without substance, governance by rage and complaint, dissolution of international commitments, and disastrously at the end, a failure to understand the “network effects” of the COVID epidemic. 

The Biden-Harris interregnum offered a respite from the reactivity of the Trump years, but the impact of social media on the chakras and our culture continued to generate distrust of the old institutions, social unease, and despair. The 2024 Harris campaign offered voters a continuation of the old (non-networked, analog) heart-centered order focused on unity, empathy and care, with a vision of shared sacrifice for a Green New Deal to save the planet. While Trump roared back with a third chakra assertion of power, control and freedom. He rehashed the security fears held in the lower chakras, with a collection of unfinished resentments against “outsiders” – migrants, foreign nations, global organizations and foreign aid, along with an even stronger rejection of the heart chakra value empathy and throat chakra’s openness to deep connectivity.

All the while, the transformation of the Infosphere into a distributed, grid-based cloud continues unabated, offering a model in silicon and fiberoptics of our seventh chakra’s evolving access to our shared spiritual database, interconnected mind, and channeled knowledge from other dimensions – a true “deep state!” President Trump has continued to rage against the nation’s establishment seventh chakra knowledge institutions (such as elite universities, the courts, and government research centers), believing on an exoteric level that their destruction will somehow protect us from the overload of our “deep seeing” and “deep knowing” technologies.

In a world of millions of YouTube videos, constant exposés of leadership failures, drone-taken images that take us over every wall, we are indeed seeing more than our separate selves can handle. Yet this same technology also offers a physical manifestation of the spiritual truth that we are part of an evolving whole where no one is separate. Where our cameras that take us to the outer reaches of the universe and into the workings of the smallest cell remind us that we are part of nature. And the face of the Other reflects our shared divinity.

Trump’s turning over much of government to unelected “masters of technology” who are using AI to purge agencies of their employees and feed the “surveillance state,” is a shadow response to eighth chakra activation. Deep computation and pattern recognition can take us further away from our earth connection, but they can also open our awareness to the complex processes of the natural world. The tools of “big data” are already powering a new “ambient awareness,” tracking myriads of complex data streams, synthesizing their impact and displaying them in easy-to-understand interfaces. One example is a “cyber-cat” whose tail changes color as electrical consumption increases and whose purr is replaced with a sad grumble as more carbon-based power is added to the supply mix.

As we learn to monitor our physical environment through such digital intermediaries, we will be challenged to pick inputs that represent our highest selves. What if we insisted that we use this planetary ambient awareness to electronically track and share 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? Not just status updates from “friends” we hardly know, but reports from our adopted whales, sea turtles, giant redwoods or tiny mushrooms living in the Amazon?

The eighth chakra is also the portal to cosmic knowledge. In a future blog post I will look at these technologies as reflections of consciousness itself: are we separate beings or part of one larger global brain? Are we stand-alone processors, or nodes on a giant “thinking network” that includes all the data inputs from our past and future lives, other galactic beings, angels and spirits?

 

 

Is “5G” a “5D-Technology” Created in “4D-Consciousness?”

As readers of this blog know, I dedicated much of my working life to creating and expanding public media technologies (such as public radio and television, cable television, fiberoptics networks, and then the research internet) for the delivery of distance education. At the same time, hidden from my employers and clients, I was developing my “mystic’s eye.” 

It is with this dual understanding that I welcome the emergence of a new “fifth-dimensional consciousness” (5D), and watch (somewhat bemusedly) my New Age friends’ panic over fifth-generation (5G) mobile data technology and the attempts to link it to Covid-19. From my perspective, we are witnessing, a crisis of over-connection without the preparation of spiritual transformation. 5G is a “smart cloud” grid-technology being introduced within the old paradigm of separation. Our fears about it reflect a distrust, not only that it will be put to “lower-frequency” uses, but on a deeper level, that humanity is still choosing to operate on fourth-dimension (4D) principles, using our emerging technical and spiritual powers for profit, personal gain, magic and control. 

In my 2007 book Digital Dharma, I posited that all of our media technology (starting with the telegraph, “when electricity hit the nervous system”) is an externalization of the inner networks of our energy body: each medium both stimulating and, at the same time mirroring, the psycho-spiritual work of a specific chakra. I wrote about the telephone externalizing the second chakra’s hunger for intimacy, releasing the seductive power of the lover, and unleashing from Victorian constraints, the feminine voice; I wrote of the third chakra power of radio’s “tribal drum” to pull together or tear about communities; and fifth chakra-driven over-connection, and the resulting social media addiction, spread of viruses and the counter reaction of mistrust and alienation.
 
Today, many us of believe that a new, higher frequency of spiritual energy is pushing our consciousness forward into the domain of the upper chakras. Here, the third-eye is free to see beyond the “false news” and conceptual habits of a limited view of reality, and the Crown is opened to receiving new signals, connecting with spirits, connecting with all the beings of the natural world, and in the “we space” connecting us all. Many seers have called this 5D Consciousness.

Well, it sounds pretty good! But as every chakra holds both light and shadow, each chakra’s communications modality is also fraught with pitfalls. The most dangerous is the ego’s need to be “special.” In the realm of the sixth chakra, this means tapping into the energetic domains, not to serve others, but for one’s own needs. In doing so, it is easy to get caught in the (4D) astral planes, unable to discern good from evil, connecting unfiltered to all the ginns and tricksters ready to seduce us; getting lost in a psychic hall of mirrors, caught in a never-ending spiritual attention deficit disorder. This is the dark side of violent video games, virtual reality pornography, and social media terrorism.

In terms of 5G, we have projected these legitimate “4D misuse” fears on to a technology whose very structure reflects the work of the seventh chakra. 5G, or fifth-generation mobile wireless, continues a move from centralized “big towers” (hierarchically-communicating top-down with dumb devices), to a topology of smaller, intelligent nodes, communicating over shorter distances, at higher frequencies and lower power levels, allowing for faster data rates, lower latencies, and real-time peer-to-peer information exchanges. At its best, the 5G-enabled cloud-based “internet of things,” could be more than a way to deliver self-driving cars, instant movie downloads and smarter talking personal assistants. It could enable a world where we are drawn closer to other beings, both human and animal. A world where we can actually see in real-time the health of the environment, hear the singing of whales, and the cries of endangered species. Managed from a place of 5D consciousness, it could be the physical representation of an intelligent self-aware universe, where each “node of awareness” does its specific evolutionary task, monitors its surroundings and shares its experience within the we-space of the communal grid. 

Given the sad history of humanity’s attraction to filling its longing heart with the substitute drugs of power and control, its no wonder we are terrified! In the service of our lower selves these technologies can lead not to greater unity, but to a beehive-like, always “jacked in,” world devoid of quiet personal time; where global corporations use 5G wireless to extend their control to the most remote corners of the planet and our most private spaces; where the smallest personal action is tracked in giant marketing databases; a world where physical nature and even human love are replaced by commercially-driven computer simulations. But this nightmare is not a consequence of the silicon chips, fiber-optics connections and wireless radio frequencies that make 5G possible. It is a consequence of our own shadow! 

Yes, we do need more peer-reviewed studies of RF energy on our bodies. There is some evidence that while 5G’s higher frequencies are less absorbed through the skin than our favorite FM channels and our in-home Wi-Fi routers, like too much sun, too much 5G exposure (especially to the sweat glands) may increase some skin cancers for some people. So, I am not offering a blanket defense of 5G, but I am asking that you consider our 5G fears as a metaphor for a deeper distress. 

Let us be wary of disowning our dark impulses, every conspiracy fear, every loss-of-control dread, on to some external “other” – whether it be a nation, religious or ethnic group, an inanimate virus, or radio-frequency device. Its not about “banning the towers,” but seeing them as ourselves. Not about staying up at night worrying that our electric meters are spying on us, but about enacting laws that protect our data privacy, and breaking up the media monopolies that kidnap our attention and traffic in our very awareness.
 
It is about seeing ourselves as part of a smart grid, not of commerce or control, but of global compassion and co-creation. 5D thinking requires us to look at 5G as a physical representation of a deeper call to engage with each other as “learning nodes” on a great grid of awareness, forming a true cloud consciousness around the entire planet, moving from listening to our smart refrigerators and thermostats, to the Tweets of All Beings, hearing the cries of the ocean’s creatures, the spreading deserts, and burning rain-forests.
 
Moving into seventh-chakra communication means confronting all the parts that we hide from others and ourselves, living in radical honesty and transparency; confronting the fear of ego-death that draws us into separation and the hoarding of power and control. Finally, it means having the courage to move past the distractions of the astral (magical powers, ego-boosting spirit guides) into the true plane of Divine Love, Creativity, and Joy. Living in Cloud Consciousness we are challenged to see that our intelligence has always been connected in every action – past, present and future, and that we and all the other individual processors are sharing the same memory and power source. In the 5D-connected cloud we hold all experiences in common, consciously downloading those wisdom programs that use our individual consciousness for a higher purpose. Our bodies and our life experiences become vessels of divine curiosity; and our prayers of gratitude become the uploading technology that refreshes and heals the great web of Being.

Social Media Yoga for These Time

Social Media Yoga:

  Five “Digital Dharma” Practices for These Physically Separated, Yet Over-Connected, Times

In the space of a just a few short weeks, most of our contact with work, friends and family, as well as our cultural, social and spiritual support, has moved online. Our offices, schools, stores, streets and skies are quiet, while we spend hours looking at faces on two-dimensional screens, relying on social media, video conferencing, and the internet for needed connection and information. Many of us are exhausted, feeling the impact of all this screen time on our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being.

A decade ago, I wrote Digital Dharma, a book that looked looked at the then-emerging web of global communications networks and technologies as externalizations of our inner energy transponders – the seven chakras. Looking at our immersion in the Infosphere, I have drawn upon and updated the book’s digital dharma practices, and offer them as a media yoga for our challenging times.

1. Ground Before Connecting

Stepping into the planetary electronic grid, we are engulfed in a world of instant connection and ceaseless alarms, a chorus of attention-demanding babble that is nearly overwhelming. Spiritual practice teaches us that we can handle our “signal over-sensitivity,” not by abandoning ourselves to every message calling out for immediate response or by building thicker ego-protecting walls, but by calming the mind and strengthening our grounding to the earth. The current crisis has brought forth an outpouring of free online classes on breath-work, movement and meditation. Set time aside to participate in these programs before sitting down to hours in front of the screen. Use apps such as Here and Now, and Stop, Breath and Think, or Insight Timer to program your smartphone to remind you to stop and take a deep breath. And when it’s safe, get out of the house, find a patch of ground and stand bare-footed, taking breaths that connect your Crown to the earth below. Find a tree to hug, and if it’s safe, extend your outside time to include a device-free walk, experiencing your own mini “Digital Sabbath.”

2. Tune to the Tweets of All Beings

Our interconnected global networks of remote sensors and environmental monitoring stations offer a chance to expand our receptivity beyond the noise and chatter of humanity’s monkey-mind messages. From deep undersea observatories, to atmospheric carbon and ozone stations on the tops of mountains, from tectonic stress-sensors embedded deep in the earth, it is now possible to “listen” to the voices of Gaia herself. Instead of following some celebrity’s every text, consider subscribing to the many services that allow one to “adopt” a distant wolf, whale or dolphin, receiving ongoing status reports as to their location and health. On a more personal level, one can practice “heart math,” learning to listen to and align one’s breath and heart rhythms. Find time during the day to turn off your messaging apps and sit quietly under a tree and listen to its sap rise, or tune in to the incredibly slow rhythms of that unassuming rock at your feet. Finally, try to practice the art of mentally sending kind thoughts with every text or tweet, setting the intention as you hit the send button that it deliver the highest good and well-being to all that receive it. And, if you want to be more engaged in sending digital kindness, consider one of the apps such as Kruzo or Text for Humanity that allow you to compose and send a positive text message to a random recipient.

3. Create Safe Distance on Your Social Apps

As we struggle with the loneliness of forced physical distancing and self-quarantine, a healthy relationship with our social media platforms becomes more and more important. Too often we discover that our time on social media has left us feeling less connected, more stressed, a bit vulnerable and more fearful. In a communications environment where everyone has a voice, and multiple “truths” run free, being connected to everyone all the time can easily overwhelm our mental body’s defense systems. Clearly, we need to “curate our connections,” establishing appropriate boundaries for each of our personal online networks.

Putting boundaries on who you friend and follow means creating multiple relationship circles – different accounts for different folks. Some will be more intimate: a place where you can drop your masks and cry, a place of recovery and joy, solace and support, a place where only your close friends can invite their close friends to request membership. Your others groups can face outwards, held together by shared political and social values, creative expression, hobbies or work interests. They must however, be separated from your more intimate-sharing space, which in turn (by government regulation or hopefully, mass social pressure), must be insulated from the commercial forces that have so distorted our common meeting grounds.

4. Bless the Face of the Other, Bless Yourself

Instagram, YouTube and Facebook have put so many faces on our screens – happy or sad, angry, wounded or injured, cute or ugly – they all show up. The Other is no longer someone “out there,” but in our personal space. Faced with this onslaught of images, instead of backing away, lean in to them all. Send silent blessings of goodwill to all the random faces you see on your screen. See their inner Light. Send loving kindness to all those “exposed” on social media, neutralizing the waves of judgment and anonymous cruelty that these channels seem to encourage. This is the core Buddhist teaching of metta: first sending kind thoughts and wishes of well-being to your friends and contacts, then to random faces that you do not know, then moving on to those whose faces bring you discomfort or judgment.i Take a few minutes to do this practice every day, interrupting your me-focused screen time to make it a time of spiritual gifting to the “we.”

Also, extend this practice to yourself. Take a moment as you log onto a videoconference to bless your own image. And before sending out a selfie, stop for a moment. Look at it with deep eyes; take a breath and savor the moment – the colors, smell, sounds and body experience you want to share online. Then before you hit the send or upload button, blink and inhale, sending the memory of that experience to your own energetic in-box and out to the universe as a snapshot of gratitude for being alive.

5. Zoom Out, Zoom In, to Deeper Connection

Even though you may have become isolated spatially, you can use your real-time video connections to zoom-in and forge deeper levels of heart contact. Agree to “compassionate conferencing” practices: allowing for uninterrupted “I-statement” check-ins about feelings, not just thoughts or opinions. Make direct eye contact and share the moment-to-moment experience of being present in creative union with another soul. “What are you experiencing now? What is emerging for us together in this breath? And the next one?” In group meetings, take a few minutes to gaze on all participants in “gallery view,” sending appreciation and goodwill to everyone – all the little tiles of humanity looking out at you from the quilt of the collective we.

You can also use your computer or phone screen to zoom-out of your constricted surroundings, seeing the world with “eyes of wonder.” The internet has blessed us with easy access to millions of positive videos that can take you to the outer reaches of the universe and into the workings of the smallest cell, and time-lapse and slow-motion movies of the once-ignored natural or human-created processes all around us. Instead of spending hours binging on old movies and silly pet videos, visit Mars or the San Diego Zoo. Better yet, find a nature cam of nesting baby eagles on a city skyscraper ledges or remote forest branch. Watch resting sea lions, or the march of tiny insects in the canopy of the rain forest. Zoom out far enough and you will see life as one great tapestry, and recognize that you are called in our post-pandemic job to tikkun olam, to use social media to reweave the tattered threads of community and the natural world we all share.

i A few years ago I developed My BlessingCircle, a service that would present you with a photo of a stranger and a kindness blessing to read out loud as you looked at their face. When you hit the send button, the recipient got the blessing and your photo. No names or contact information was shared in either direction. It didn’t gain much traction, so I mothballed it. Perhaps it’s time to reboot it! Please contact me if you’d like to help.

Evolving towards Cloud Consciousness: A MYSTIC LOOKS AT THE INTERNET OF THINGS

Ten years ago, I wrote Digital Dharma as a way to look at the emerging technology of the Internet as a challenge to our old “consciousness of separation.”i I saw the development of our telecommunications networks as a mirror and guide to the evolution of our global consciousness, and the social/spiritual issues at each level, as reflections of the chakra system and its seven “energetic transponders.” I started with the on-off (first chakra) binary signaling of the telegraph, through the telephone, radio, television, the internet, virtual reality and social media, and ended with what I saw as a model of seventh-level chakra consciousness: the emergence of peer-to-peer (P2P) “grid computing” and the wireless micro-connectivity that would enable “the internet of things.”

Today, the grid-based “cloud” is indeed our dominant communications metaphor, and the United States and China are rushing to control the fifth-generation (5G) communications platform that will allow the smallest “intelligent devices” to connect with that cloud. One one level, it is important that we debate what country manufactures and controls this new technology, as well as the potential dangers of engulfing every corner of the earth in 5G signals, but from a mystical perspective, there is a deeper esoteric question reflected in the electrical structure of cloud technology: are we ready to move from separation consciousness to shared intelligence, from tuning into the grid, to becoming the grid itself?

The Transpersonal Metaphors of the Cloud


In my early posts (and book chapters) dealing with the television, the Internet, and virtual reality, I discussed the critical challenges of always-on-connectivity, and the resulting fear response of “wall building,” projection of a “curated self,” and a retreat from the belief in truth itself.ii Countering these fears requires us to step into integral thinking: seeing the world as one living network, accepting our “data nakedness,” and staying open to wonder of the “tweets of all beings,” as we tune to the voice of Gaia herself. This new “networked awareness” is also at the heart of deep-seeing practices: such as energy balancing, past-life repair and family constellation work, channeled guidance, and other forms of quantum healing. Our new challenge however, is not about our individual connections as nodes on the Divine Network, but in moving past individual identity itself, seeing the universe simultaneously from a place of self, and at the same time seeing ourselves as holograms containing the entire network in our separate being. If the Internet, social media and encoded reality held the projection of the old challenge, the Internet of Things is the mirror of our new transpersonal, inter-subjective evolution.

As we move more and more of our computer memory and processing into the shared space of the cloud, we find the core metaphor of shared intelligence. Cloud-based technology allows for data storage, software and computing processors to reside out on the network "grid" and be called forth only when needed. The cloud has become 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 social media recommendations to make sense of this overflowing abundance: the collages and mash-ups, meshes, mixes, remixes of our popular culture.

The cloud-based “internet of things,” is more than a way to envision self-driving cars and talking personal assistants, but a physical representation of the embedded intelligence of a self-aware universe, where each node monitors its surroundings and shares its experience with the grid itself. Of course, 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 use 5G wireless to 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 ginns and tricksters of the astral plane; lost in the psychic hall of mirrors, caught in never-ending technology-enabled spiritual attention deficit disorder.

But when seen through the lens of spiritual 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. Here knowledge resides equally, both in the network, and at all of its nodes and the spaces in betweeniii; not hoarded by one tribe, gender or species, nor projected into an unreachable central God Authority.

As I wrote in Digital Dharma:

Beyond the web of communicating appliances is the seventh-level vision of an interconnected creative culture… And beyond this cultural vision is this spiritual teaching: We can create a world where all beings are simultaneously aware of their common Source (the universal intelligence of the Grid) and their power to download all the divine love and light their field can handle… deciding to fully connect with every other being, and simultaneously with something greater than oneself… We are conscious of our own programs, but we also hold space for the greater field that connects us all. This is a web where connectivity extends, in Matthew Fox’s words, “into the heavens and into the past (to our ancestors) and the future (to our descendants) to make community happen… it is light meeting light.”iv

Living in Cloud Consciousness we are challenged to see that our intelligence has always been connected in every action – past, present and future, and that we and all the other individual processors are sharing the same memory and power source. On the internet we learned to process our own data, drawing from external repositories as needed; in the cloud we hold all the repositories in common, consciously downloading those wisdom programs that use our human consciousness for a higher purpose. Our bodies and our life experiences become vessels of divine curiosity; and our prayers of gratitude become the uploading technology that refreshes and heals the great web of Being..

i Digital Dharma: A Users Guide to Expanding Consciousness in the Infosphere (Quest Books, 2007; JAICO, 2012)

ii See my “teleconsciousness” blog posts at http://srvedro.com or my Facebook Digital Dharma Notes at https://www.facebook.com/pg/Digital-Dharma-Spiritual-Metaphors-of-Technology-168927409852731/notes/

iii Patricia Albere’s “Mutual Awakening Process” is one new approach to tuning into the inter-subjective wisdom between our individual fields. See: https://evolutionarycollective.com/

iv Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh (Harmony Books, 1999), p.112

The Three Spiritual Metaphors of Social Media

As Above, So Below: The Three Spiritual Messages of Social Media

An electronic web now surrounds the planet. The Infosphere – the totality of our electronic systems for sharing knowledge, is now a field that engulfs our physical, mental and spiritual bodies. The human nervous system has been “outered” (as media sage Marshal McLuhan predicted in the early 1960’s) into a global embrace.

Today, this embrace seems to be choking us! Our social media feeds, while promising connection, often seem to cut us off from really seeing each other’s true inner essence. Fear-filled rumors and hate speech seem to be traveling faster on Facebook and Instagram than any pro-social memes. Teenagers with calluses on their thumbs from sending text messages every few minutes cannot hold a face-to-face conversation, while too many parents spend more time checking their online “friends” than listening to their children. Wireless connectivity seems to have forever breached the border between work and home; destroying what little rest we have eked out for our inner self, while the radiation from the myriad of devices around us has put us into an electromagnetic energy soup of still unknown effects.

Yes, communications technology impacts all aspects of life for good and for bad. But those of us who see the world through spiritual eyes, must also recognize that this relationship works in three ways: (1) technology impacts and changes our consciousness, (2) it is a product of consciousness, and (3) “as above, so below,” it is an external mirror of the evolution of consciousness – reflecting with all of its confusion and shadow, and its misdirected hunger for true Divine connection, the current state of global mass consciousness.

As we commit ourselves to bringing forth a new way of seeing the world: moving from dualism to holism, and separation to unity, we are opening our eyes to the wisdom teachings manifesting all around us. We should also include those metaphors and reminders encoded in our electronic devices of increasing complexity, interactivity, and awareness, and the networks of silicon, radio and fiber-optics that link them together. The electronic web we have created is but a thin representation of what we are truly capable of. The energy body and its chakras are already pre-tuned to the frequencies of the planetary grid. We are being called to activate those higher energetic connections, and by looking closely at the structure of the technologies that have us so worried, we may find some needed tools. Taking the best of them and applying them not just to our online interactions, but to how we connect with the natural world, with each other, and with our spiritual essence, is our contemporary “digital dharma.”i.

Looking at the Infosphere with a mystic’s eyes, we see three important teachings:

• Its time to wake up to our connection to all beings on the great web. We’ve always been connected on a soul level, but now our challenge is to manage this connection in the world of matter, not by building walls of isolation, but by learning appropriate filters for these new inputs.

• Its time to step up to see and hear beyond our habitual reality. In this fully open and aware state, we can fully appreciate the depth of Gaia’s mystery, and in our humbleness, live in radical honesty, compassionately witnessing all of humanity’s light and shadow.

• Its time to hook up our separate “reality-processors” into the “smart grid” of Divine Intelligence. Our tools of artificial intelligence and deep-data modeling are showing us that our true job is to awaken into our role of co-creating and embodying a light-filled reality for all beings.

These themes are reflected back to us in the structures of the electronic web. The Infosphere is a metaphor for, and a challenge to, our move to global oneness. We can use it as a template for higher connection, or we can get swept up in all of its distractions and false promises. From a grounded place, connected to spirit, we can see it for what it is: a blueprint for our next evolutionary step, not the step itself. With that in mind, each of these three spiritual teachings being made manifest in the Infosphere, offers a lesson, not about technology, but about the awakened soul!


Always-On, Always Connected to the Other

Out in the Infosphere, the process of moving into Oneness Consciousness was first reflected back to us on the flickering black and white screens of television – an extension of the fourth chakra emotional heart, a close-up visual medium of expression and feelings. It came into our homes as a conscience-stimulating medium of human and animal rights and environmental awareness. Its focus on bringing the “face of the other” into our living rooms stimulated a new generation’s sympathy for the “underdog,” as it introduced us to people of different colors, tribe and nation. It challenged us to open our eyes and see the entire planet as one Spaceship Earth, and for the first time it brought the carnage of war into everyone’s consciousness.

Today, our video screens (now in full color and high resolution, pocket-sized or room-filling giants,) still invite us to look out at the world and emotionally connect or emotionally recoil, but the world we’re seeing is no longer safely out there. For while television offered an opportunity to look at the multicultural world, the internet has brought us the gift and the challenge of actually connecting with it. In this world, the “other” is not just a face on a screen out there, but someone, invited or not, inside our personal space.ii

Connected to potentially millions of faces, we are discovering that without appropriate grounding and appropriate “energy filters,” stepping into relationship with all the beings sharing planet earth is not such an easy task. Everything now touches us, everything calls for a response, and everything we do impacts everyone else. We are in a place where we can no longer ignore the multiple overlapping voices of minority peoples and cultures; a place where everyone is speaking all at once, where all secrets are outed and every dark corner’s shadow (institutional or individual) is revealed to all. In the babel of this open marketplace is an emerging opportunity for people of spirit to connect outside of our “safe silos,” modeling the creativity that comes from rubbing against new peoples and new ideas. From a spiritual perspective, the internet’s core metaphor of “we’re all connected,” offers an opportunity to embrace the true interconnection of all life, and the possibility of creating new tools to better integrate humanity into the biosphere.

Yet, for many people without the gift of a spiritual connection, the recognition that one’s secrets are no longer safe, and that “transparency” works in both directions, has left them feeling vulnerable, unprotected and overwhelmed. From massive data thefts and cyber-attacks on the technological pillars of the information economy, to the transmission of horrific acts of violence, the internet has shown us the darker side of being part of one web-linked world. It is no surprise that this move into a networked world would generate push-back from those hurt by all this connectivity: those left out of the information economy, those frightened by the appearance of the “the other” on every video screen, and those who felt that their (formally unquestioned and dominant) voices were being challenged by those they could no longer ignore. More broadly, projected outwards, this connection-anxiety is reflected in our heightened fear of infection – from computer and real-life viruses, and from the waves of destitute global migrants pressing on the borders of the developed world – and the resulting calls to “protect our borders” by building stronger (physical, technological, or cultural) walls.

Connecting our separate personality-selves into a greater Oneness is our contemporary evolutionary task. The light and shadow of the internet is only a mirror of this challenge. Turning away from the distractions of digital reality to our deeper knowing, we see that we are being called to open our “spiritual receivers” to Gaia’s voice and the guides and helpers that surround us. Spiritual practice teaches us that we can handle this new receptivity, not by abandoning ourselves to every channeled message from the “other side,” or by building thicker energetic walls, but by strengthening our core grounding to the earth. Yoga, breath-work, meridian tapping and tai chi, are all available mechanisms to balance the over-stimulated (and over-radiated) nervous system.

 We can take these same practices into our relationship with technology. We can program our smartphones to remind us to “stop and take a deep breath,” and, as spiritual pilgrims have been doing for millennia, we can choose the gift of the Sabbath – a time for technology disconnection, walks in nature, and sharing the gift of community in face-to-face group interaction, celebration, and support. From this centered place we can open ourselves to the “tweets of all beings” – listening to the song of our microbiome, the wisdom of the giant whales and redwoods, the pulsing of the stars, and the heart rhythms of everyone we meet.

As we continue to become more and more comfortable with our real-time connection to the planet’s multiple voices, we will continue the evolutionary process of shedding our old way of seeing ourselves as individuals competing for resources, power or status. Looking at the mirror of the computer grid and networked cloud, we will see ourselves as self-aware nodes in a joyously communicating system. And with that system awareness comes the chance to connect, not only with every other being, but through conscious awareness of that unity connection, with the Divine network itself.iii Moving into the true wonder of being part of this evolving planetary system, we can embrace our responsibility for Tikkun Olam: reweaving (at the most personal to the most global) the frayed threads of the web of life.


Deep-Seeing: From Data Nakedness to Soul Transparency

Beyond (fifth chakra level) connection, the internet has opened our communal (sixth chakra) third eye, and with it has come more powerful ways of seeing and hearing, and a deep anxiety about the loss of privacy. We are not only connected, but we are constantly looking, and are constantly looked at. On the internet nothing is protected from our eyes and ears: from leaked reports of government and corporate malfeasance, to all levels of violence and pornography. Every credit card purchase, every trip through the grocery store, and every phone call or text is now “on the record.” On the positive side, balancing the power of government or corporate “Big Brother” has come “Little Brother with a camera” to hold the powerful accountable: from predatory priests and gurus to rogue police and crooked politicians. Every person with a cellphone camera is now a threat to the old order of secrecy and control.

Is it any wonder that one response to always being observed is the creation of a false online self: always happy, always chatting, always presenting the best side to the world, and the concurrent sense of loneliness that so many hooked on social media feel? At its worst, this is a shadow place where much of everything is artifice and falsehood; a dark world where nothing can be believed; a place full of bots, scammers, and poseurs; where everything is “fake news” and dark conspiracies.

From a spiritual perspective, refocusing the third-eye’s capacity for deep-seeing offers a way out of the addictive routine of counting “likes”, responding to false friends and struggling with maliciously-spread false truths. In a world where everything is seen, and it only takes a few keystrokes to pass judgments seen by thousands, communicating with “radical honesty” is probably the wisest choice. Opening our eyes to the light and shadow of the world calls for looking at each other from “witness consciousness.” Holding one’s center in equanimity, refusing to get hooked by every mediated outrage, and choosing to radiate compassion and loving-kindness to every new face, strengthens our discernment filters for truly living with eyes wide open. Our commitment to deep-seeing will help us understand someone’s “bad” behavior – their childhood wounds, their inherited family trauma, or even their soul’s karmic agreements, and the same holds for looking compassionately at our own faults.

Numerous sages have told us that “solid physical truth” is really only a set of quantum probabilities and shared mental algorithms. For those who have not yet woken to this esoteric truth, this is indeed frightening. The fear-based response is either to shut down, withdrawing into to a cynical disconnected stance, or to invent a safer “alternate reality” with its own “facts” and historyiv. We can see it in the popularity of videogame escapism, or in the retreat to a mythical past of ethno-tribal greatness. But should we truly look at our world with fully open sixth-chakra “eyes of wonder,” we will find beauty and creativity beyond our wildest dreams.

The internet has blessed us with easy access to millions of positive images: videos that fly us over every boundary, macro- and micro- cameras that take us to the outer reaches of the universe and into the workings of the smallest cell, time-lapse and slow-motion movies of once-hidden, unheard or ignored natural processes all around us. We are indeed seeing more than we ever used to see!v We can observe wild animals (from nesting baby bald eagles on city skyscraper ledges, to deep-diving seals, to tiny insects in the canopy of the rain forest), or travel to remote monitoring stations under the sea or on the tops of mountains, listening to the voice of Gaia herself.vi

Our spiritual challenge is to insist that these new planetary awareness tools are used for the highest good: to electronically track and publicly display such warning signs as the encroachment of the deserts, the size of the islands of plastic floating in the ocean, or the decline of the ocean’s diversity; subscribing to regular tweets from grid-connected whales, sea turtles, giant redwoods or tiny mushrooms living in the Amazon. Could it be that these new “deep-seeing technologies” are suggestions in the physical plane that we use our spiritual power to zoom out to the bigger picture of Creation, seeing ourselves as part of an evolving whole, where no one is separate, and all beings hold the reflection of our shared unity?


Deep Mind: Co-creation in the Cloud

In the recent years we’ve seen the image of the internet morph from a two-dimensional “grid” to a three-dimensional pervasive “cloud.” Cloud technology allows for storage, software and computing technology to reside out on the network in large interconnected data centers far removed from the local user. The cloud is becoming the place where we store more and more of our cumulative human intelligence, relying on ever-more-powerful search engines, "data mining" algorithms and crowd-sourcing to make sense of this overflowing information abundance. At the same time we are building a distributed processing network, we are adding more and more self-aware intelligent devices at its periphery into “an internet of things.” Many office machines already call in service technicians before their owners are aware of any problems. Tiny sensors monitor soil and water conditions, alerting farmers when to irrigate and harvest. Similar devices in bridges send wind, wave, and traffic data to the highway department, while some vending machines already adjust their prices depending on supply and the current weather and traffic conditions, texting when they need restocking. And, of course, all those self-driving vehicles we are told are in our future will depend on massively-interconnected cloud intelligence.

This rapid shift to a world of machine-augmented interactions, driven by the emerging power of complex (and invisible) self-learning pattern-recognition software, threatens to leave us all “outside the computational box,” watching with great unease. No one wants to see a surveillance-based marketplace that uses these tools to monetize everything about us, including our decision-making processes. Clearly, there is a need for a debate over the role of cloud-connected “AI” and how it can be managed in a democracy.vii

But again, stepping back and looking at the evolution of cloud intelligence, we see a reflection of our work towards our next level of human co-creation. We are individual beings, holding our own stories in our own memory banks. Yet, we are also part of an intelligence greater than we can imagine! Our devices are learning to share knowledge and experience over a grid of 5G radios and fiberoptics, calling upon each other to donate computing cycles to the larger program. So too, we are learning to connect with each other in the soul matrix, understanding that our individual processing of incarnation that seems so important to us, is really part of a larger spiritual computational project: the manifesting of Divine thought in physical form.

Self-learning, self-aware, and self-healing networks are not just computational terms, but are the very essence of the communities of co-creation, directed prayer, and shared intention that are coming together to bring about quantum healing and planetary transformation. Open to deeper connections, looking with deep-seeing eyes, protected by appropriate discernment filters, and with an energy body grounded to the earth, we are prepared to tap into the power of a greater grid: the cloud of divine intelligence that has been with us since Creation. Here knowledge resides equally, both in the network, and at all of its nodes; not hoarded by one tribe, gender or species, nor projected into an unreachable central God Authority. This is a web of seventh-chakra connections, where connectivity extends, in Matthew Fox’s words, “into the heavens and into the past (to our ancestors) and the future (to our descendants) to make community happen.”

Our spiritual challenge being modeled by “cloud computing” is how to stay fully aware as we “run our individual apps of incarnation,” while simultaneously staying connected to the “big network” that is the mind of God – living our lives with full presence, taking in all experiences, and when we die, uploading our soul’s experience to the greater field of All That Is.


i In my 2007 book, Digital Dharma (Quest Books and also available from Amazon) I explored the Infosphere as reflection of the psycho-spiritual aspects of each of the seven chakras.

ii As New York Times’ columnist Tom Friedman writes, “Suddenly connectivity became so fast, cheap, easy for you and ubiquitous that it felt like you could touch someone whom you could never touch before and that you could be touched by someone who could never touch you before.”

iii This is what the mystics have understood as "unity consciousness," the simultaneous experience of individual identity and cosmic oneness (which is awesome).

iv However, just as we must validate every internet-delivered “fact,” so too with our expanded spiritual communications reception. From crop circles to messages from the dolphins and redwoods, from extra terrestrials, spirits, angels, ancestors, and avatars of all forms, our communal intelligence is being bombarded with new data that we too must carefully filter through the discernment of our anchored heart and grounded body wisdom. There are tricksters on both sides of the esoteric grid!

v See Louie Schwartzberg’s great time-lapse videos of flowers opening, and his data-driven mapping of the global movement of clouds, water, airplanes and ships at sea at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1WTX_I4deM.

vi These tools are already powering a new “ambient awareness” of our complex interconnected natural systems, tracking myriads of data streams, synthesizing their impact and displaying them in easy-to-understand visual representations, living maps, or physical devices One example is a “cyber cat” whose tail changes color as electrical consumption increases and whose purr is replaced with a sad grumble as more carbon-based power is added to the supply mix.

vii In a world where every data device reflects the possibility of grid intelligence, we must hold the highest vision. Left to the forces of the marketplace and the surveillance state, the ego-self will be swept up in a false world of constant stimulation, false presentation and unbroken forgetfulness: a world where the “grid” is an echo-chamber of separation – from our bodies, from the earth, and from our Divine nature. This is a desolate earth where the unemployed masses are enthralled by electronic media circuses, and where the super-rich dream of escaping to survival bunkers, colonies on Mars, porting their brains to robot selves, or if all else fails, to the deep freeze of a cryogenics tank.