Over
sixty years ago, media scholar Marshall McLuhan suggested that every
medium of communications, regardless of the content it carries, both
extends and impacts our nervous system to both good and ill effect.
Today, our electronic grid of smartphones, social media and
“always-on internet connections” has extended our individual
nervous system to the entire planet. And, just as our nervous system
has its spiritual energy centers – the chakras, so too, I
believe, does the global grid. Each communications technology emerges
as a product of consciousness, and each holds and reflects a
different spiritual challenge. Each is associated with a different
chakra.
I
developed this model in my book, Digital Dharma (2007),
where I traced the evolution of telecommunications from the spark of
the first electric telegraph, through the analog waves of the
telephone’s seductive voice, the power broadcasts of radio, the
broken heart of television, and on into the then-emerging
technologies of global interconnection, digital compression and
virtual reality and the “internet of things,” speaking to each
other via “grid computing” (or,
what we now call “the
cloud”).
Today,
a decade later, the technologies of social media: Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, and our smartphone apps, have become the foundation of
much of our lives, reflecting and impacting the state of mass
consciousness, and its reflection in our contemporary political and
social lives. Using the chakra-based model of Digital
Dharma, I
will look at our Twitter-obsessed “texting”
president, and why his claims
of “false news” are actually shadow intimations of a deeper
spiritual truth; why he continues to be successful in railing against
the internet-driven
consequences of global
integration and boundary deterioration; why
Hillary’s television
image-based appeal was so
easy to mock; and
why the heart-centered
values embedded
in new
visual communications, may
indeed bring someone like Oprah to the White House.
Hillary’s
Fourth Chakra Television-Based Campaign
Hillary
Clinton’s campaign was
built on the “dynamic feminine” fourth
chakra
values of “sharing and caring” – inclusion and cooperation,
compassion for outsider groups, and the protection of individual
rights. The work of this chakra is to integrate the heart’s desire
to be fully loved with the reality of living in an ego-based world of
limitation and attachment. Thwarted
fourth-level emotional energy can easily turn to hypersensitivity and
the high drama of the victim syndrome. 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.
These
are the same core values of the medium of television: the technology
that brought her husband to the White House, but seemed out of date
in the Internet age. Television’s
gift to the “boomer” generation was its face-to-face close-up
view of the world’s diverse community: people, plants and animals,
and our home planet itself. Despite its menu of cowboys and Indians,
crime fighters and violent cartoons, TV also introduced us to
outsiders of different colors, tribe and nation. It connected us,
along with the Space Program, for the first time to 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 feminine: of the intimate family narrative and
soap operas of personal disclosure, bringing the carnage of the
Vietnam War into every living room. In its “shadow reflection” of
the Heart
Chakra,
television offered an addictive emotionalism: the glorification of
desire, and its fulfillment at bargain-basement prices. Instead
of true compassion, its shadow offered a chance to feel pity or
disdain for the parade of the world’s “losers” brought to our
screens (or faux corporate boardrooms), a half-response that only
deepened a sense of spiritual depression and disconnection. As
consciousness evolved, television’s world-view of naive optimism,
and its shadow of self-pity and addictive consumerism, became easier
and easier to mock.
Donald
Trump understood
this, and brazenly
used
television itself
to
belittle
its
feminine side, offering in
opposition a
parody
character of
a loud-mouthed,
self-made
millionaire and beauty-pageant and wrestling promoter. At
the same time, consciousness was pushing us upwards into the
new, fifth
chakra
technology
of the Internet, bringing
with it new forms of social connection, new problems, and
a new form of presidential campaigning.
The
Fifth Chakra, Internet-Presidency, of Barack Obama
While
television offers an opportunity to look
at
the multicultural world, the Internet brings us the gift and the
challenge of actually connecting
with it.
Fifth-level communications presents us with a world of overlapping
instantaneous, unfiltered
interconnection: the
“other” is not just a face on a screen “out there,” but
someone, invited or not, inside our personal space. This is the
multi-cultural, globally-cosmopolitan, knowledge-based, world of
today. At
its best, this is a place of respect for the formerly-unheard voices
of minority peoples, for the organizing of vibrant decentralized
online communities, and the creativity that comes from rubbing
against new peoples and new ideas. It
offers a new holistic
environmental
awareness of the true interconnection of all life, and the
possibility of new tools to better integrate humanity into the
biosphere.
Its
shadow reflection can be found in our fear of viral infection –
from pandemics of AIDS and SARS and Ebola, to the waves of global
migrants at the door of the “developed world,” to the infection,
data thefts, and cyber-attacks on the technological pillars of the
information economy. A
strong fifth
chakra
can cope with this bombardment of messages.
It is a “truth filter,” capable of resisting unhealthy viral
memes, able to discern the underlying
truth
in every system of relationships. When
closed, this chakra manifests as
the intellectual cynicism
of deconstructionism where “nothing is real,”
or its gut-level version of “alternative facts” and “fake
news.” Blasted open, it manifests as compulsive self-regard, a
fixation on “the presentation of self,” the
end of all privacy, and
the
pseudo-communication of outright
lying. The Internet’s constant chatter mimics the babble and
distraction of our planetary “monkey mind.”
This
was the world that Barack Obama understood in ways that the older
TV-generation could not. His campaign was based on data-driven
Internet organizing, and
his Presidency was based on the “cool management” of a less
inflated nation in a multi-polar world. It is no surprise that this
move into fifth-chakra,
network-style
governance,
would
generate unease
and push-back
from those left out of the information economy, 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 stifled by “political correctness.”
A
Return to the Text:
Donald Trump as the Twitter Candidate
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 fourth chakra aspirational
memes (fairness
and multicultural “rights”),
coupled with an
unpleasant
air
of fourth chakra entitlement shadow (“its my turn”). 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-fifth
chakra
avatar.
He ran
as
the anti-diversity, anti-politically-correct speech, anti-feminist,
anti-immigration, candidate. He tapped and twisted the
deconstructionist ethos into casual lying, a disregard for the truth,
projecting
his own fifth
chakra
shadow
into
chants
of “lying Hillary” and “fake news.” He channeled his attacks
against the values
of the Internet
Presidency using not
just his television persona, but even more radically, the medium most
aligned with the primal masculine
“alphabet power”
of the first
chakra
–
the
chakra of security,
survival,
and
fight
or flight, the
140-character “telegraph of self,” the
“I
talk, you listen”
one-way
broadcast of the Twitter feed.
Twitter’s
mini-telegrams
– short textual declarations, free of nuance, without even the
perfunctory hellos and goodbyes, let alone the empathetic responses
of telephone talk, reflect the first
chakra’s
work
of individuation: discovering the I – and presenting it to the
world. At
this stage of development, relationships are evaluated primarily in
terms of one’s safety and one’s gain: the
very applications that drove the early telegraph
system (what
Tom Standage has called the “Victorian Internet”) –
market
transactions,
military and colonial control, and emergency communications. In
Chapter One of Digital Dharma,
I called these wireless services “the telegraph of Aliveness,”
and suggested that this medium was the perfect voice of adolescence:
the time when kids start to push away and declare their
individuality, announcing and reinforcing their ‘Beingness’
to their peers, calling attention to their cleverness. Adults usually
grow out of this narcissism. When they don’t, in Maureen Dowd’s
words, “its as if your id had a typewriter.” Today,
the most prodigious user of texting, the loudest voice on Twitter, is
the President of the United States!
What Might Come in 2020?
The
same force of technological evolution, and
its impact on consciousness, that
brought us from the telegraph to the telephone, radio and beyond, is
still at work. We are accommodating ourselves to unfinished work of
fifth-level communications. In
response to the crudity of the Trump “winner take all”
lower-chakra
politics,
we are already seeing the activation
of a mass movement of deeply-offended women pushing
for a return to
some of the better
fourth
chakra
values (personified
by television’s face of empathy and financial reward, Ophrah
Winfrey).
This trend will grow stronger as text-based communication itself
continues to decline in favor of visual image sharing and voice
networking. Fifth-level shadow will continue to be
exposed as the Internet reveals the impossibility of holding
“secrets” from the public, manifesting in more calls for
“transparency” and “Me Too” campaigns, and also in more fears
of “secret deep state actors” and other conspiracies. Immigration
policy – how to manage boundaries in a networked world – will
also swing between heart-centered compassion for the “dreamers”
and calls to build stronger firewalls and security systems.
Into
this mix will also come the initial impact of sixth-chakra
communications. This is the center of “deeper seeing,” of the
“codes of reality,” and the mystical understanding that “all
reality is but a dream, all reality is the same!” At its best, this
chakra reminds us to treat
all communications as
the product of the ego-self, to act with great humility in “deep
listening” to those we have decided are “others,” and to
connect with all beings at the soul level. It teaches us to "watch the codes," in practices like mindfulness meditation. In its shadow
presentation, this is the center of hallucination, false voices, and
false realities (including the latest dark phenomena of creating real-looking fraudulent videos). Sixth-level communication technologies include all
digital image devices, video games and VR, virtual
worlds such as Second
Life,
and the
coding schemes that make them work. Issues of managing genetic
coding, controlling
AI, and accommodating different variants on the racial, gender, and
neurological spectrum will dominate political debate in the coming
years.
One can imagine further polarization along three versions of
sixth
chakra
“truths” – (1) “My truth is the only truth, (and its written
here in my Holy Book),” (2) “There is no truth, everything is
fake, (and therefore only my tribe’s stories are real),” and (3)
“All things are true, (and we must learn to communicate the deeper
feelings and needs under our words).” Let us hope that our
evolving consciousness
brings us closer to the third response!
