understood, catalogued, and controlled through software – itself an extension of the mind. The mind becomes then a supreme king.
Minds and digital technologies have much in common. Both can simulate almost anything, and both try to incorporate everything into their domains. The mind and the thinking process are the most cherished entities in our culture. But that is not the whole story.
Beyond the Mind
There are states beyond the mind which can be reached through awareness. There exists a condition of “spiritual enlightenment” which can elevate human beings to the divine and to global Consciousness. Spiritual teachers of every age have pointed to such a state, however difficult it is to communicate through words what is beyond mind.
Words, dual in themselves, are the tools at hand to describe the non-dual state of union with the whole, called spiritual enlightenment, satchitananda (the merging of existence, consciousness and bliss), being a Buddha, God Realization, and Ultimate Understanding.” I have a faint echo of this from the glimpses of higher states my own journey has offered.
But the words of spiritual teachers are the map, not the territory – and my experiences could be no more than delusions. Actually, some teachers say that any experience is not yet that, so a Zen master would probably hit my head with a stick. The truth is that neither I nor anyone has a way to prove the existence of such a state, since every “proof” would stay on the level of the mind itself. All in all, it’s a matter of faith. And even science has its own axioms or postulates, truths which are taken for granted.
The word faith has been associated with the monotheistic religions, with fundamentalism and in opposition to an open quest for the truth. Much blood has been spilled in the name of faith. Faith has been used, as well, to mean not acknowledging scientific truths. I am not talking about that faith.
Where my faith comes from is a mystery. Maybe I was touched by reading, maybe I felt an echo of something larger than the mind or I recognized higher states of being in my spiritual teachers.
If I would add anything more than plain faith to the existence of spiritual enlightenment, then trouble would ensue. For instance, when instead of saying “God exists,” we say “God is goodness,” we are already in a dualistic perspective that can easily slip into “Who doesn’t believe in God is evil.” Also, if the postulate that spiritual enlightenment exists were extended into “I know the only way toward enlightenment,” then we would fall into fundamentalism. The mind wants to pull into its purview even what can never be known by it.
Words are products of the conceptual/dual mind, and nobody can avoid the risk of building structures and dogmas when talking about no-mind. But what’s important is to keep an open-ended attitude at the root of any inquiry, whether scientific or self-inquiry.
The Fragility of Beliefs and Information Technology
Science cannot conceive anything beyond the ego and the mind – not even in human sciences such as psychology (with the exception of transpersonal psychology). Thus, abandoning our mind’s contents seems like total defeat. In the West, nihilism is often knocking at the door, since what the mind creates – by its ephemeral nature – the mind itself can destroy. Without acknowledging a spiritual dimension, one is tempted to say that there’s nothing solid – and ultimately that there’s no sense in anything.
A culture which has been developed on the foundation of “I think, therefore I am” will cling to thinking and will produce tools to keep the mind busy all the time. But for the spiritually-oriented person there’s a plan B. The abandonment of the ego-mind is equivalent to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly.
The ephemeral nature of the mind becomes clear when, in meditation, we try with titanic effort to observe our thoughts and sensations, instead of clinging to them as they carry our mind away. We can see then how weak our skills are to concentrate on a single object, how short-lived our thoughts are, and how little control we have over them. The mind has been compared by spiritual teachers to a drunken monkey. Yet we cherish our thinking process as the highest expression of being human.
Technology and information are also quite ephemeral. The chances of preserving their digital contents are dim compared to other media. Papyrus lasted thousands of years, books hundreds of years, CDs (the very best quality) dozens of years, and hard drives only a few years.
The software I wrote when I was at university was backed up on magnetic data tape. I don’t know if there’s any compatible tape reader still tucked away in some laboratory. Even if there were, most probably the tape would have been demagnetized by now. But even if not, the software will have been rewritten to work with current operating systems.
In recovering data which is just a few years old, there are both hardware and software format problems. Converting our data to ever-changing computer formats is a huge job – which most probably will never be done either by individuals or institutions. Even if it were, who could make sense of that huge amount of data?
Technology is fragile in other aspects too. As shown by Low-Tech Magazine, the energy consumption of hi-tech devices is skyrocketing, especially the energy required to manufacture them. “The embodied energy of the memory chip of a computer alone already exceeds the energy consumption of the laptop during its life expectancy of 3 years” (deDecker, 2009). Digital technology then, like many other developments since we started to drill for oil, is a product of cheap energy. With the growing cost of energy and a lurking peak in oil production, we won’t see as many hi-tech devices around as we are used to. Also, many hi-tech products depend on rare earth metals, more than 95 percent of which are found in China – which plans to limit exports.
Hi-tech products are also very sensitive to the electromagnetic radiation of solar wind. The current 11-year solar cycle, which started in 2007 and will peak around 2013, should be significantly stronger than the previous one. Solar flares shoot energetic photons toward Earth, upsetting the geomagnetic field and potentially affecting power grids, communications, satellites, GPS signals and even electronic chips.
A strong solar storm in 1859 shorted telegraph wires, causing fires in North America and Europe. If such an electromagnetic storm occurred today, it would take four to ten years to recover electric power lines, according to a report of the National Academy of Science. Given the strong interdependence of every system, the effects could be devastating for the whole of society.
As with meditation techniques, in which we learn to observe and let go of arising thoughts, maybe we should begin to practice letting go of our attachments to the information loop.
Chapter 2
“It’s Only a Tool”
If there were a law stating that “people should stay in front of a screen for most of their waking time, both indoors and out, avoiding real-life meetings as much as possible, shop without touching or seeing the product, find their soulmates through Internet announcements, consume an average of 34 gigabytes of information daily” (University of California, 2009), there would be a revolution. But if it’s seen as our “freedom,” then it’s fine. Technology can do this because it acts on a higher level than laws, rules or impositions. As Neil Postman (1993) wrote, “Technology imperiously commandeers our most important terminology. It redefines ‘freedom’ ‘truth,’ ‘intelligence,’ ‘fact,’ ‘wisdom,’ ‘memory,’ ‘history’ – all the words we live by” (p. 8). Facebook now has even transformed the meaning of “friend” and “like.”
For most of us, technology acts deeply
