The Essence Of Living Free In The Digital Era: Beyond The Industrial Age

Light within all living beingsSpirit to me is synonymous with essence; animals can have spirituality. I have seen it with my own eyes. I have seen animals regard me, look directly into my eyes, and really see me; they can know me on levels humans cannot, like through smell. They can smell everywhere I have been and know whether I am native to the woods or not. They can detect pheromones, the chemistry of my essence. Am I in fear? Am I predator? Am I not predator but dangerous? Have they encountered me before? All this knowledge attained in a whiff. Our essence, our spirit, exudes without our bodies. We are Spirit, Essence. Our moods, our humors, our emotions emanate from within. It is why someone can be said to be glowing and why beauty is beyond the skin (although skin can be beautiful, but true beauty is more than the physical).

meeting the black wholeSuperpowers–Mental acuity can be another way to denote superpowers. Superpowers can make for, what is called, an evil person, but superpowers themselves have no direction (i.e., no intrinsic implication of good or bad, right or wrong), it is the spirit that possesses them (by possess, I don’t mean in the sense of possession in need of a priest, but in a filling of space, to occupy or influence). Superpowers are very real, though. They are what humans can attain. Today’s protrusion of superpowers can be seen in autistic savants (some famous ones are Daniel Tammet, Kim Peeks, and Temple Grandin), or prodigal genius, or in synesthetes, or in people who have had some kind of head injury or have epilepsy and can perform great feats of calculation or memory. See, I think that humans, in general, are capable of these kinds of feats.

What’s more, these are not feats of the mind; I think that these are ‘normal’ processes, well within the faculties of mind. We are only talking about a kind of comprehension (or maybe apprehension), just a kind of quintessential conversation, a matter of substantial concentration, are we not? Once humans are able to exorcise the mind of unnecessary anxieties, stresses, dis-eases (those habits and grooves of the outgoing society and culture, wherein grooves conceptualize the habits, as well-worn ruts in the synaptic connections, like ditches in grey matter), than we can again realize our full abilities.

SphinxThe internet can be looked at as hive mind/collective consciousness made explicit, like an emergent consciousness arising from the intangible infrastructure of the World Wide Web. I think wireless technology can be perceived as modeled of energy and spirituality. That is (for example) email, web pages, or radio stations transmitting and being received like spiritual messages. You just tune to the frequency and get or give what you need. This is how I see wireless technology. I think Tesla’s idea of wireless technology is the same, he was a man who knew electricity, and if we are just talking about the movement of electrons, then messages are conveyed every time an electron is stimulated. I mean, talking is the same as wireless technology on a certain level. Sound waves received and transmitted as vibrations. What is vibrating? I do not think any thing is vibrating; just that the act of Vibrate exists. It is like saying that there is no driver of the car; we are driver, car, wheel, etc. Therefore, is not wireless technology a kind of telepathy?  Just as television was/is a kind of telepathy, there is a communication with the mind, a sympathetic vibration, an equilibrium, a harmony.

This is what I am most like when in nature, a harmony. This is what I think humans have also lost. Not that humans can ever return to indigenous tribes, but that we can reconnect with our environment at a new point. This is the way I think human suffering can be selected out.

space timeA question emerges: how then do we make sure not to let (or continue to let) the use of technology become a substitute for real intimacy and human connection? To not escape into fear of our own minds and selves — which is what we sometimes run from when we lose ourselves in a screen and if we cringe from human contact and the vulnerability and uncertainty in being seen and experiencing with another? This is what disturbs me most about the internet or about such online “games” as Second Life. Second Life, even the name gives me shivers. It is as if life itself can be replicated (and I do not mean in the sense of reproduction because that is not a replication. There is no copy, not a cloning. A child is an independent being of its parents, not an exact copy), like Frankenstein’s monster, a horrible attempt at mimicry. So, Second Life takes over real life, to the point that real life pales in comparison. Well, online, you can be anything (like a permanent Hallowe’en, save there is no unmasking), a permanent anonymity (or the illusion thereof). Therefore, people take bigger risks, because it seems as if there is no risk at all. This is the mistake of the internet. I think it is because we do not really understand the internet, or the World Wide Web, as we do not really understand ourselves. So, we play with fire. We play with What before we know Why. We are like children, humans, in the universe. Just because we inhabit terra firma does not mean we know everything. I think we fear the uncertainty.

It seems that people are afraid of freedom, really to let go. It is like jumping off a cliff and free falling, except the cliff and the jump were an illusion. I think the part in The Matrix where Morpheus tells Neo to jump from one building to another symbolizes our fear of freedom well. The jump is freedom, jumping into the unknown. The unknown is not the dark abyss that Nietzsche wrote of (at least I do not agree), it can be, but that is in the eye of the beholder. The unknown, to me, is a release, a relief, peaceful. That fighting is unnecessary and that really things are quite simple (thank you Occam’s razor). All the way down to the essence of being, and in all directions simultaneously. This is what humans have forgotten in our ever-pursuit of more, further updates, the next greatest gadget, and the like. We must first remember that we are born free before we can accept that we are consciousness, embodied.

*Image Credits (all work used with permission through CC license)–
“Sphinx” by Eddi van W.
“meeting the black whole” by Eddi van W.
“space time” by Eddi van W.
“Light within all living beings” by Stefan Perneborg

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Self-Inquiry

“To know a species, look at its fears. To know yourself, look at your fears. Fear in itself is not important, but fear stands there and points you in the direction of things that are important. Don’t be afraid of your fears, they’re not there to scare you; they’re there to let you know that something is worth it.” ~C. Joybell C.

 

“The way to embody love completely is to see and appreciate life just as it is, and not as you believe, fear, or desire it to be.” ~Eric Micha’el Leventhal

 

QOTD Alan Watts

“The ego is nothing more than the focus of conscious attention. It’s like the radar on a ship, a trouble-shooter, to see is there anything in the way, and conscious attention is a designed function in the brain to scan the environment, like a radar does, and note for any trouble-making changes. But, if you define yourself as your trouble-shooter, as your ego, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety. The moment we cease to identify with the ego, and become aware that we are the whole organism…then the ego becomes servant, not master.” ~Alan Watts

QOTD Terence McKenna

We have to stop CONSUMING our culture. We have to CREATE culture. DON’T watch TV, DON’T read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your OWN roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are — NOW — is the most immediate sector of your universe. And if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered.Shaquille O'Neal: Most Creative People 2012 You’re giving it all away to ICONS. Icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that, you want to dress like X or have lips like Y… This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion. What is real is you, and your friends, your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And, we are told No, you’re unimportant, you’re peripheral — get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you’re a player. You don’t even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

needs more MiltownA balkanization of epistemology is taking place. There is no longer a commonality of understanding. For some people quantum physics provides the answers. Their next door neighbor may look to the channeling of archangels with equal fervor.
It is accompanied by a related phenomenon which is technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth or redemption myth to lay over the crazy contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist post-McLuhanist electronic pre-apocalyptic existence.
I Want I Want I WantInto that dimension of anxiety created by this inability to parse reality rushes a bewildering variety of squirrelly notions, epistemological cartoons if you will. Conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion, is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. Isn’t it so simple to believe that things are run by the greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and then we can solve our technological problems, or isn’t it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons. Well, these are epistemological cartoons, it is kindergarten in the art of amateur historiography.
consumerism the end resultI believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying, that the real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control, absolutely no one. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. There may be entities seeking control, but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. It’s like trying to control a dream.

SellphoneFirst paragraph quote: Terence McKenna, Reclaim Your Mind, from the lecture “Eros and the Eschaton”, remaining quote from Terence McKenna “Dreaming Awake at the End of Time”

*Image Credits (all artwork used with permission through CC license)–
“consumerism the end result” by Georgie Sharp
“I Want I Want I Want” by ATIS547
“The Rat Race by Polyp/Leeds Postcards” by Duncan Hull
“Shaquille O’Neal: Most Creative People 2012” by Charis Tsevis
“… needs more Miltown!” by James Vaughan
“Sellphone” by Poster Boy

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