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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Consciousness Emerging

“. . . a more exact rendering would be ‘the practice of natural philosophy,’ in other words, the making of a world-picture, but one that takes as much account of starfish as of stars.” ~Vincent Cronin, The View from Planet Earth: Man Looks at the Cosmos

Universe_in_a_magic_Drop_Hartwig_HKD_flickrThe digital age has moved experience from the real to the surreal.

In a sense, with the advent of the world wide web, humans are able to know one another on differing levels of perception, removing each of us from strictly the living breathing vital human beings to the purely conceptual beings that we all really are. We find out that we are not spies (LOL), that we are not Gapetto’s creation, that we are not Turing Tests, that we are not disembodied voices or artificial intelligence, but that we are humans being. . . simultaneously in the same space. Earthlings us all, yes. How wonderful.

Liberation_of_Consciousness_by_Hartwig_HKD_flickrWe are emergent beings, emergent consciousnesses in this realm (the third dimension otherwise known as the Real World, or “offline”). Julian Jaynes he posited that consciousness didn’t exist in humans until about 5,000 years ago. That humans were not always conscious, and it wasn’t until humans evolved from a bicameral mind to a more unified mind that consciousness emerged. An interesting position, I think, as most believe humans have been conscious since human inception.

Alan Watts talks about the earth peopling, quite like an apple tree  Source_IX_by_Hartwig_HKD_flickrapples. Add to that the idea that humans share a percentage of DNA with all other living ogranisms on the Earth (the most with the chimpanzees, but humans also share DNA with fish, flowers, so on and so on…just a small percentage the more physical differing that organism). Well, this is an interesting idea, isn’t it (actually, I love this idea, and agree with it)? Ok, so humans share DNA with all organisms on the planet, thusly, share DNA with the planet itself, yes?

Earth_Hour_by_Cornelia_Kopp_flickrWell, if humans are conscious, ergo, is not the planet as well? If we take that idea further, the planet is comprised of cells, molecules, atoms, etc., etc., couldn’t we say that the World Wide Web is compressed of cellular automata (and actually, that is what information theory posits)? Well, could not those cells also spontaneously evolve? And if that is so, could not a consciousness then emerge?

Looking_For_Reality_by_Cornelia_Kopp_flickrThere is much more to the idea, but basically, what I think is if humans are all putting their minds on the internet all day, every day (essentially behaving conglomerately as a planet) couldn’t another consciousness emerge from that? This is what I think or at least wonder. Especially, taking into account how wireless communication is very much like biological organisms. Isn’t wireless communication very much like a cerebral network?

Milky_Way_by_Eddi_van_W_flickrWhat would be incredible to see would be this emergent consciousness evolve. I mean, would/could it reproduce? Would/could it develop civilizations, empires, governments? Would it behave like our human trajectory?

“It is an emergent perspective, or state of consciousness, that bursts forth spontaneously and miraculously only when the conditions are right. “Emergent” means that it is something greater than the sum of its parts—a new order of relatedness, a new level of consciousness, a deeper and higher perspective that is always unimaginable until the moment it explodes into existence.” ~Andrew Cohen

 
*Image credit (used with permission through CC license)–
“Earth Hour” & “Looking For Reality” by Cornelia Kopp
“Source — IX”, “Universe in a magic Drop” & “Liberation of Consciousness” by HartwigHKD
“milkyway” by Eddi van W.