Digital Minds Blog

Technomysticism - Chapter 5 - Technological Kung-Fu

2011-05-14T16:26:00.003+03:00

This is the fifth chapter from my book "Technomysticism", published in Hebrew in 2009. You can find the previous chapters here: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 3-part2. Chapter4.

How do you do that? How do you retain mindfulness while communicating in all channels, to an endless number of places, in a world which keeps accelerating itself? How does one learn to cope with an increasing number of challenges and still continue breathing deep and fully.

The answer is kung-fu. The term kung-fu is usually linked with martial arts movies in which the heroes fly from one side of the screen to the other side, while bashing their opponents in stupefying speed. However, kung-fu is much more than just a fancy way to beat someone. The term kung-fu can be defined in a variety of ways including: “an ability”, “a talent for learning”, “good effort”, “good habit” or “expertise”. Generally, the term kung-fu relates to the art of learning and evolving while conserving harmony with the world. Martial arts are only one type of kung-fu among many and kung-fu is basically the development of abilities of any sort. If you say, for example, that somebody has a cooking kung-fu or a floristry kung-fu, you mean that he has special skills in that field. (In fact, certain kung-fu films such as God of Cookery [1996] are dedicated to the art of cooking, and feature flying chefs who create almost supernatural stews.)

Each of us has a field in which he excels, and thus each of us is a kung-fu artist of some kind: there is a kung-fu for conversation and a writing kung-fu, a kung-fu for driving, and sexual kung-fu, there is kung-fu of thinking, and kung-fu in deciphering complex social situations, there is a kung-fu for memory and a kung-fu in dancing. Each of us is proficient in one way or another. Our unawareness of our kung-fu skills often obstructs us from getting even better.

Kung-Fu is a classic technomystical attitude in the sense that it is a system which aims to retain unity and yet develops the skill of coping with the many. In its classic forms, the way it is taught in the Shaolin monastery, (where the most famous kung-fu style has developed) the studies of kung-fu are combined with the study of Zen Buddhism. This interesting combination began when Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism arrived from India to China in the 5^th century. Bodhidharma, who saw the monks napping during meditation asserted that the monk’s flaccid body is a sign of spiritual flaccidity and composed a series of physical exercises for them.

The practice of zazen, Zen meditation, helps a person conserve qi, that universal unified life force, which gives life to everything in the universe, according to Chinese philosophy. The exercise of martial arts is the art of the proper way to release qi. This is why the art of qi and martial arts are considered to be complementary to each other. While the first one helps establish a link to unity and conserve energy, the second one teaches the channeling of that energy into the many in the world. Eventually these two arts become inseparable. The kung-fu artist is in constant relation to qi and unity, and also in contact with the world. He performs each action through meditation and devotion in action. Kung-fu is thus a way to cope with technology by turning it into part of a comprehensive view balancing and integrating the one and the many.

Being in a state of kung-fu means being in a state of exercise, development and refinement. It means a state of mindfulness – being aware of one’s surroundings, focused, and experiencing reality in a whole and enhanced way. If technology is the strategy used by the one to deal with it’s becoming many, kung-fu is multiplicity’s strategy in order to reestablish its connection with the one.

The kung-fu artist is able to learn from every detail in his surroundings and use any situation or object to its advantage, an aptitude which is well depicted in some kung-fu films. The wackiest scenes in kung-fu films usually happen when the heroes of the movie are thrown into combat in an unexpected place or situation such as a restaurant or a crowded street. It is then, when man is forced to cope with the new and the unusual, that the true kung-fu artist is distinguished as the one who can use all things, and cope with all situations to defend himself and hurt his opponent. Some of the most famous skirmishes of kung-fu films star Jackie Chan are ones in which he fights using improvised tools such as a bicycle or a bench, and Jet Li will always be remembered for the virtuoso battles which he performs on wood ladders in the movie “Once upon a time in china” and the closing battle of “Iron Monkey” where he fights midair while jumping from one burning pole to another.

Kung-fu means attention and a willingness to learn from everything. The kung-fu artist sees every obstacle as a step to climb upon and every incident as a lesson. The perception of reality as a kung-fu practice is enough in itself to transform life into a process of learning and development.

The basic meaning of kung-fu relates not to a specific technique but to a state of mind. In Tao of Jeet Kune Do, a Bruce Lee’s masterwork, dedicated to explaining his philosophy of kung-fu philosophy, Lee says: “Please do not be concerned with soft versus firm, kicking versus striking, grappling versus hitting and kicking, long-range fighting versus in-fighting. There is no such thing as “this” is better than “that.” Should there be one thing we must guard against, let it be partially that robs us of our pristine wholeness and makes us lose unity in the midst of duality.” (Lee Bruce. Tao of Jeet Kune Do. Valencia, California: Ohara Publications. 1975. Page 23.)

These words by Lee, are true in regard to every possible situation. Whether you fight or struggle as a lawyer, and artist, a programmer or a housewife – the important thing is the level of consciousness one is able to retain while doing what he does, and the ability to break the bonds and limits and turn reality into a kung-fu practice.

There are many opportunities in life to develop kung-fu skills, because life are full of a wide variety of incidents to be related to unity. Whether it relating to physical pain, sleep and nutrition, challenges with the family, at work, or in a relationship – we keep having to deal with disturbances and finding solutions. When we do this while being joyful and retaining harmony: this is kung-fu.

Each of us is his own kung-fu trainer in the never ending battle of becoming a whole human being. Kung-fu is the essence of human experience, the struggle for constant development of consciousness and to refining the right state of consciousness. The principles of kung-fu remain the same, whether we deal with physical battle or with any other kind of struggle in life.

Kung-fu teaches us the importance of on-guard position. Stance should be both comfortable and relaxed as well as keeping the warrior in a state of readiness to quickly go on to perform any number of possible techniques. This principle is true to our emotional and spiritual stance in life which should be both relaxed and ready to face changes (meaning, a stance which is both in unity as well as in multiplicity). Bruce Lee writes that a fighting posture is basically “a ‘proper spiritual attitude’ stance” (ibid, 31) and a “simple but effective organization of oneself mentally and physically.” (ibid, 34) The right stance enables the warrior to kick any kick as if it was the last kick of his life, and yet to be able to kick that way till the end of time.

Kung-fu teaches us coordination, which Bruce Lee defines as “the quality which enables the individual to integrate all the powers and capacities of his whole organism into an effective doing of an act.” (ibid, 43) This sort of coordination is a basic principle in life. Each complex doing requires us to know how to assemble our various abilities and coordinate them for the purpose of real development.

Kung-fu teaches us awareness to sight. The spreading of awareness on a wide area enables a person to see things happening from a distance, and react to them quickly.

Kung-fu is the art of change: it teaches us to cope with new situations quickly and to deal with them in the best and most positive way, while retaining true awareness. “To change with change is the changeless state” said Lee.(ibid, 203)

In an era of ever accelerating change, kung-fu is a necessary practical and spiritual art. The technological era demands a new sort of kung-fu, one which will be synchronized with the digital world. The extensive use of technology demands a “good habit”, to enable us to connect to the many and yet be always related to the one. As technology becomes part of our body, we need to learn to control our new organs, as if we were technological kung-fu masters.

The digital kung-fu master integrates the different technologies which are at his disposal: the browser, the mobile phone, the PDA, the blog, social networks, virtual worlds, etc. he uses them efficiently and religiously, with a sense of joy and devotion, always keeping the feeling of true doing.

However, this kung-fu relates not only to technological gadgets: it is true also to the way one consumes that which the media communicates to us, for example commercials and reality shows. It has to do with the drugs and foods one consumes or from which one refrains, with the way one reacts during a sickness, with how one plans his travels or the physical posture one is using one uses while writing an email.

Smart Reality Consumers

In From Chocolate To Morphine American physician Andrew Weil proposes a different and refreshing angle on drugs. According to Weil there are no bad drugs or good drugs. Every drug can become a positive influence under certain circumstances, or a negative influence in under conditions. The key question which Weil gives regarding the use of drugs is: What is the relationship between man and the drug. Is it a healthy relationship or ones of misusing the drug. One could have a positive or negative relationship with any drug, claims Weil, and so the principle factor is not the specific drug being consumed but the way that is done. Weil’s attitude towards drugs can also be relevant to technology and media. No medium is inherently good or bad. Each medium can be used intelligently or unintelligently.

The next part of the book deals with the intelligent use of technology. Through the examination of different testcases, it aims at raising the awareness to the technomystical situation and to the way in which the media which we consume influences consciousness. This insight is the first step in a journey towards a massive change in the media which we absorb and towards becoming smart reality consumers.

I will point to various exercises and paths which might enable us to deal with certain situation but there will be no absolute or permanent solutions. The technomystical questions are too complex to be dealt with simplistically, seeking ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as answers. Technomystical kung-fu must be a flowing style, outside of any dogma or rigid ritual. The relationship which each of us has with the technologies surrounding us are totally individualistic and any attempt to offer an absolute solution would be hopeless.

Bruce Lee talked about a “style without style”. In the introduction to Tao of Jeet Kune Do his widow, Linda, recommends throwing it away when one is through reading it. The recommendation to break any idol is a basic Jewish recommendation which brings us back to the days when Hezekiah broke the Nechushtan, the brass serpent made by Moses, after the Hebrew people began idolizing it and honoring it with incense. Any image which becomes petrified starts obstructing the real thing, which is why we refer to Bruce Lee’s recommendation to anyone who wants to learn kung-fu from a teacher or a system: “Absorb what is useful, discard what is useful, and add what is essentially your own.”

Technomysticism - Chapter 4 - Technological Devotion

2011-05-14T15:54:00.004+03:00

This is the 4th chapter of my book "Technomysticism", published in 2009.

To read the first 3 chapters (Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, chapter 3-part2)

The “Amputation” of organs is not the only toll which our technological extensions demand of us. Each new organ causes our perception of the world to become more complex and drives us further away from the basic feeling of unity. In fact, the story of evolution is the story of the ever growing distance from the from the experience of unified existence.

Psychedelic philosopher Terrence McKenna, describes evolution in one of his lectures, as the conquest of dimensionality. The evolution of more complex life forms was joined together with the evolution of ever more complex and multi-dimensional consciousness. Primitive life forms such as the protozoa (unicellular organisms) had very simple perception of the world, which does not include the senses which we observe in humans and higher animals. Because of that, one might say that the protozoa is in a state of utter unity: it fulfills its role in the world and never deviates from it. It experiences reality in amazing simplicity. The mind of protozoa, in as much as the protozoa have a mind, is focused completely on what it must focus on. Protozoa do not get confused.

In the course of evolution, as new senses and organs continuously appear and add new dimensions to our experience of the world, such as hearing, seeing, smelling, thermal sensing etc. the feeling of unity slowly disappears. New senses and organs cause our attention to flow and be diverted from the inside, to the outside world.

These senses and organs are, as we’ve earlier noted, unity’s way of coping with the world of the many. In order to exist in the world, the organism needs to develop tools to apprehend the world, to decide on the right course of action and to implement it. These are the technologies.

Seeing is a technology, hearing is a technology, smelling is a technology, a hand is a technology, a vagina and a penis are a technology, the GI tract is a technology, teeth are technology, and so on. In fact many of these technologies, which were created during the course of evolution, are only now developed, in much more primitive forms by scientists. Only now can we start to make robots that see or hear and know to react accordingly, and the development of an independent and efficient energy production system such as the human GI tract is still far from reach.

When new organs appear in the body, they necessitate evermore attention, like a demanding child or lover, taking it away from the other organs. Our consciousness, which in the days of the protozoa, could concentrate on one simple type of message, now needs to divide its attention again and again. In Understanding Media Marshall McLuhan claims that every time a new organ is added to our body the balance of the human nervous system is shaken, as it demands the body to reorganize it sense of being.

Technological organs disperse our attention even further, and take it away from basic functions such as movement, breathing, sensory feeling of our body and various other emotional, intellectual and spiritual experiences. One needs only to compare the breathing of the deer, whose breast contracts and retracts rhythmically and fully to the stressed and broken breathing pattern of modern man.

As more and more technological organs are added to the human body and experience, we also tend to become more neurotic and split-minded in nature. Man becomes a vulnerable to the development of various obsessions, mental loops and also different identities, which he spends a great deal of his time managing. Man’s ability to focus, is thus evermore impaired. That is perhaps the reason why the Hassidic school of Chabad claims that the divine sparks which exist in the animal’s soul are higher than those which exist in a man’s soul. Animals exist in a higher state of devotion than human beings – because they fulfill the wishes of their creator accurately. Animals are focused in the plain experience of the world and do not lose focus. Following the same vein of thought, one might argue that plants exist on an even higher level of devotion than animals.

Freedom is always the freedom different from the way your creator made you. It is the freedom which the father and the mother grant their children. It is the freedom which God gave to the world. As we move up the evolutionary ladder, to animals with more complex neural networks, devotion to direct unitary experience becomes ever more difficult to achieve. This is the state of man.

Freedom is not a bad thing, but a divine thing. Technology in itself is not bad. It is divinity’s way to evolve and express itself in a myriad of ways. The multitude of technologies is the multitude of life, of the potentials of being, a multitude of ways in which unity attains a fuller understanding of itself. When technology increases human potential, it is holy technology. The problem overlaying our culture’s disease is that the way we use technology tends to get out of control. Technologies have become cancerous bodies, focusing on repetitive stimulation of specific circuits of our monkey brain. Instead of developing, they limit us further.

Our mobile means of communication, for example, link us to a network girdling the planet, but they also short-circuit our communication and transform it into an SMS culture of low resolution messages which make it difficult for us to decipher the other side’s intention and force us to use only very brief modes of communication. Technology connects and short-circuits at the same time. It has linked us in a faster but also more precarious way. As technology makes the distance smaller, it also makes us smaller: it shrinks our attention span, and our range of expression and impression.

Technology must be used with devotion: creatively, with joy, honestly, with clear consciousness. The punishment for the unaware, numb use of technology is giving up freedom. Humanity’s problem is not an over development of our technologies. Technologies in themselves are sacred. They are God’s way to transform itself into more developed forms and achieve a more integrated perception of reality and of itself. This is why creation – god’s way of knowing itself – is the ultimate technological act. An act where unity teaches itself to become many.

Thus, the problem is not in the development of technology in itself, but in the unholy relation with it. The human race, in the midst of technological acceleration, can not keep its relation to unity.

Kabbalah tells us that the sin performed by the first the first man, Adam Harishon, was that he concentrated on one aspect of the godhead, and one aspect only (The sephira of Malkhut, one of the ten sephirot of the kabbalistic sephirot tree, which represents this world, among other things) and because he separated it from the tree of the sephirot, and saw it is as God, he has failed to see the relations which connect the whole of his being and distorted the image of God.

The technological sin is a reincarnation of that primal sin which has become an archetype for the failure to see the unity hidden in the many. The link to unity has been lost, and technological development has overridden the evolution of consciousness. Technology has become idolized and made into the only significant factor. It has become an addictive, cancerous element of our culture.

To the many who say: “The mobile phone turns you into an information addict, causes you to waste your time on senseless communication, disrupts your focus, will turn you into a sociopath, to a porn addict, and more…” – I say, yes, this is all possible, however we can not run away from the mobile challenge. Our new technological organs do not grow accidentally, but according to the God’s will, a primordial plan, or however you might call it.

We have eaten from the fruit of the tree of knowledge and we will eat it whole. Only then will we be able to say a blessing or vomit it out – we have the choice. There is no use in dreaming about deserting technology. We can not desert it, if at all, then technology will be the one to leave us. We as a species are only a vehicle which technology is riding, one moment before it leaves our biological semblance and evolves into new forms. However, to treat it that way might also be overly simplistic. Technology is us, and we are it. The image of man is the image of technology. Kurzweil, as we’ve mentioned, defines man as the one who constantly wishes to be that which he is not. Technology is that primal urge within us which keeps driving us to evolve. It was us whot were floating there in the primordial soup of life, it was us who turned to fish, to reptiles, to mammals. And every time we have learned to see the world anew, as a new metamorphosis of our being. We have turned into that which we today call “Man”. But man must always become something new, and since a million years ago, especially since the past 10,00 years of evolution, human evolution occurs mostly not on a biological level, but in a much more efficient and aggressive domain.

Technology is the scattering of the mind, and in that sense those who speak against it were right. However, technology can also become a force in the service of unity. We need a brain to perform meditation or to know God. Without technologies such as speech we wouldn’t be able to exchange ideas about God, without reading and writing, cultures such as Judaism or Islam could not have been created.

One could say that technology complicates our relation to God, but at the same time, it also makes it fuller and more challenging. God is there, where perfect multiplicity and perfect unity coexist. He already knows the one, and, according to Lurianic kabbalah, in order to know the many, he has created this world, the world of the many. The godly will to fuse with this multiplicity, with the other, to surprise itself – is the kabbalistic will to bring the Shekinah, the feminine side of the godhead to a divine relation with Kudsha Brich Hoo, the masculine side of the godhead. God is to be found in the fusing of perfect multiplicity with perfect unity, which is why we need to retain mindfulness, while working divinely through all our technological organs, and through all channels.

Technomysticism - Chapter 3, part 2 - The Mobile Phone Organ

2011-05-14T15:26:00.002+03:00

Quite a while ago I started publishing the first 5 chapters out of my book "Technomysticism" which was published in Hebrew in 2009. After publishing the first 2.5 chapters, I was carried away by other tasks, and never got to finishing the publication of the first chapters.

I apologize for that, and now plan to complete the publication of the other 2.5 chapters which together with the first 2.5 compose the first part of the book.

Those who haven't read the first chapters can find them here: (Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3).

The mobile phone organ

It is easy to see how information technologies become an integral part of our body, if we examine one of the most important organs which have been added to the human body during the past millions of years: the mobile phone

The mobile phone, a technology which became ubiquitous around the whole world, from New York to third world villages, fulfills dozens of different functions for man. Billions of people carry it on their body wherever they go during the day. After all, the mobile phone has already become more multi-functional than the original personal communicator used by the Star-Trek crew in the original TV series.

My perfectly standard mobile phone functions as a beeper, an SMS, a camera, a video camera, a game console, pictures, music and video editing machine, a flashlight, a music player, a recording device, a photo album, a movie album, a notebook, a fax, an internet port, a calculator, a meter for the fourth dimension (a clock), a calendar, an organizer, a memory device and much more. It can even make phone calls.

Not many of my bodily organs perform such a variety of tasks. Who dares leave him without his mobile these days? This organ is totally ours. Yes, there are still some people who are walking without mobile phones, but they seem to be a minority facing extinction. That isn’t necessarily good or bad. It’s just a fact. The mobile phone has become a part of our body.

In a society where all our experiences are communicated through mediating mediums, in which communication with other persons in the other end of the world are mediated through a video camera, USB, fiber optics and screens which lead to the mediation of eye and brain, the mobile phone is a kind of technological “third party organ” which functions as another kind of sensory layer mediating between me and the world.

Electronic gadgets become a part of a global market of organ trafficking, and the greatest organ implant markets of today are the ecommerce sites where electronic gadgets are sold: a free market where we buy and sell super abilities ready to install.

What does it mean, when the mobile phone becomes an integral part of the body? Maybe it means that when I acquire a newer model, my organs are in better shape. If the mobile phone turns me into a cyborg, it can be seen as something which gives me the powers of a superhero. The mobile phone gives me special superpowers and allows me to see in the dark, to know exact time, to record sound, to take pictures, to remember details and of course to communicate beyond time and place.

Maybe this means that in the mobile phone era, the concept of good health is not confined to the physical body, but pertains to the digital world which surrounds me as well? Sometimes, when my computer is slow or stuck my body become tense, agitated and my breathing turns shallow. Is this not a classic case of the technological illness affecting the physical body’s equilibrium directly?

This relation seems to imply that in a future where we and our machines would become evermore entangled in one another, we will have to rethink our concept of health, so that it will include not only man’s biological machinery but also his technological ecology. If today’s integral medicine seeks to view man as a mind-body wholeness, the integral medicine of the future might perceive man as whole composed of mind, body and machine.

At the same time, the increasing dominance of the new technological organs might make it advisable to give special attention to our old organs which have functioned relatively well until the mobile phone and other technologies have arrived and made them obsolete and degenerate. A 2007 study which was conducted in Dublin’s Trinity College has found that increased use of mobile phone might damage your memory. For instance, people who rely on their mobile phonebooks suffer from poor memory performance. The researchers have found out that 50 year olds who don’t rely on their mobile phonebooks could remember more phone numbers, birthday dates and other kinds of data, better than thirty year old people who rely on their mobile phone to remember for them.

One could feel the degenerating influence of gadgets in a variety of ways. Some of the people who use GPS report that their ability to orient themselves in their surroundings has been seriously damaged; others who rely on their word processor to correct their spelling mistakes, report that they have ceased improving their spelling skills.

These phenomenon reverberate much older and deeper currents which have been percolating in our civilization for thousands of years. In the dialogue Phaedrus Socrates tells a brief legend in which king Thamus warns us that instead of helping people remember, the technology of writing will teach them to forget: “it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own”.[1]

Thamus’s admonition was not an empty prophecy. The great Talmudic literature was passed on orally and was written down only after hundreds of years, so was the Indian literature of the Vedas. During the classical antiquity and the middle age many of Europe’s scholars were proficient with “ars memoria”, the art of memory. The “memory palace”, a famous technique for memorizing information during the middle ages allowed savants to memorize hundreds of pages and lists consisting of thousands of items. Since the coming of print, these abilities have long since vanished, and new technologies have further escalated the situation. Today’s scholars would be totally at lost without an internet connection to the world’s databases. They are, in most cases, totally dependent on external memory.

Marshall McLuhan claimed that new technological organs amputate our older organs. Cars, for example, make our legs superfluous. They “become weak” and are “amputated”. Does this also happen to our mental abilities when we use gadgets excessively? Perhaps we should take care not to rely excessively on our new technological organs and to keep in touch with our older organs lest they become defunct.

[1] Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by: Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett publishing company. 1995. p. 79.

12 Psychedelic Videos to Blow your Mind

2010-09-19T10:05:00.005+02:00

A few months ago I started a new project called the Daily Psychedelic Video, a site which explores psychedelic aesthetics and features a psychedelic video each day. Since then I have be joined with 5 other visually literate psychonauts who now contribute to the site with the aim of creating a bank of high quality psychedelic videos available to anyone with an internet access. In fact the site has turned into a kind of modular psychedelic movie show, a kind of one stop-shop for other states of consciousness.

So here are a few of my favorite clips of the last months with links to the original posts made by the contributors which contain more information about the clips:

1. The ultimate trail clip (Link)

2. Pyschedelic Takashi Murakami (Link)

3. Chemical Brothers – Let Forever Be (link)

4. The most psychedelic buildings ever (Link)

‘YEKPARE’ (monolithic) from nerdworking on Vimeo.

5. Birdy Nam Nam (Link)

6. Ecstatic Computer Game Psychedelia (Link)

7. Everything is alive (Link)

8. Muslim Psychedelia (Link)

9. Organic Feedback meditation (Link)

10. Flying Lotus - MmmHmm Music (Link)

11. Psychedelic soap bubbles (Link)

12. An really beautiful movie about 60’s psychedelic animator Ryan Larkin (Link)

Technomysticism, Chapter 3 - We are all Cyborgs

2010-09-04T12:00:00.001+03:00

This is the continuation of my last posts which featured the first and second chapters of my book "Technomysticism". The next few chapters will arrive in the next few weeks.

Stanely Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey, begins with a sequence called “The Dawn of Man”. It is a somewhat peculiar segment of the film, which tells the story of two rival ape groups competing over control of some water puddle in the middle of prehistoric wilderness. Our story reaches its peak when sometime during the primate skirmish, one of the fighting apes grabs a bone and thrashes the leader of the second group of apes using it. The external organ gives the tool-using ape a insurmountable advantage and he drives away the rival apes. This, according to Kubrick, is the Dawn of Man.

But not only according to Kubrick. Different thinkers from Benjamin Franklin to Karl Marx, have defined Man as a Homo Faber, the one who uses tools. The study of evolution also refers to Homo Habilis, a name which literally means “Handy Man” as the first type of hominid. This, after all, is what separates human beings from animals, according to many. As Kubrick showed us, the ape becomes a human being only after he takes an object in his hand and starts using it. The appearance of Man is thus identical to the appearance of technology, non-biological technology. The vision of man, as presented here, is of man as a cyborg.

When Man became Machine

The world cyborg is an abbreviation of the words “cybernetic organism”, or simply put, a combination of organic living being and technology. The term was first coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline as they tried to imagine humanity’s future in space as an integrated composition of man and machine.

The image of cyborg has become widely known in today’s popular culture, owing first and foremost to its popularity in science fiction. For example, Steve Austin, star of the 1970’s TV show “The Six Million Dollar Man”, was an astronaut who had been badly hit in an aerial accident and whose body had to be technologically rebuilt. Austin is given new artificial limbs which enable him to run at 60 Mph and bionic eyes which allow him to see him the world using infra-red vision and to magnify objects by a factor of 20.

Ten years after Steve Austin, we met Robocop, a cop who was badly hurt during his work, and was re-engineered by scientists who wired his body with computers and pieces of metal. As a cyborg, he becomes the ultimate policing machine and the nightmare of Detroit’s criminal underground. Popular culture is filled with other images of cyborgs: From Geordy la Forge, the blind helmsman of the USS Enterprise in the “Star-Trek – The New Generation” series, to Motoko Kusanagi from the Japenese manga and animation classic “Ghost in the Shell” to Darth Vedar of “Star Wars”. Being a cyborg, however, is not something wholly confined to science fiction. Today’s world encompasses a wide variety of people with artificial limbs, eyes or ears. These are clear exemplars of the collision of body and technology, but they are not the only cyborgs in existence.

Marshall McLuhan was the first thinker who claimed that machines are extensions of our bodily organs. Machines, according to McLuhan, extend our organs: and so the wheel is an extension of our legs, the hammer an extension of the hand, clothing or housing, an extension of our skin and the world of electronic media is, according to McLuhan, an extension of our the nervous system. In fact, any person using a cell phone, a car or shoes is a cyborg, since these are technological organs which enable us to move beyond the limits of the human organism. At this stage of our discussion, however, many will undoubtedly raise an opposition against my line of argument. It is not intuitive to grasp how deep and far reaching our relation to the technological world is. “My mobile is not an organ, it is external to me and my body” one often says. “I can turn it off, or just not carry it with me. Hence it can’t be an organ.”

I Cyborg

In order to understand how a mobile phone can be an organ, one must first realize what an organ is, and here we must get back to our definition of technology as multiplicity, and as unity’s way of coping with it’s becoming many.

Let us first begin by noting that our felt experience of living in the world is that of being a single entity: Someone who is a whole. However, despite being whole, it is evident that we are also complex. It is difficult, essentially impossible, to isolate the source of the unity which is in us and to find the basis of our experience of a self. For example, when I visit the lavatory and eject pieces of myself, or when I go to the hair salon and segments of my hair fall down, I do not, even for one moment, question the fact that I am still myself, although portions which were an integral part of my body a moment ago have now been made external and no longer belong to me. If you take away my legs or hands I will probably still insist that I am still me. I would persist in claiming my identity even if you would take my sense of seeing. But what happens if motor ability were to be impaired? And if my speech center would stop functioning? Or if my emotional centers would go out of order? When would I stop being myself? Where does that self exist? Where is the place where the self is focused? It seems quite evident that in a situation in which my motor, intellectual, emotional and spiritual capacities were all taken away from me, I would not really be myself. But where does one draw the line? Where do “I” start where do “I” end?

One possible answer is that this self is everywhere and nowhere. The inside and the outside are an illusion, since everything is both internal and external. All is unity and all is multiplicity. Many philosophical and spiritual traditions have pointed to the fact that our consciousness is composed from a flowing and ever changing stream of fragmental content. When I look at a tree, the image of that tree fills my experience of the world and in a certain way I am then that tree. Masters of meditation can dissociate themselves from certain organs in their body. Some of these masters describe the process of meditation as a process of moving your consciousness through different parts of your body or the world, being everywhere and being nowhere. This is also the process which we go through when we feel immersed in a movie, learn something new or forget some detail from our past.

The self has no beginning and no end. You exist as a network of impressions, which is part of a system of networks. You are a net composed of countless components, some of which add up with the time, while others fall off. There is no place where being begins and there is no place where it ends; there is no place to point at and say: “this is who I am”, and there is no place to point at and say “here I do not exist”.

If we are having difficulty realizing that the mobile phone is a part of our identity, we should remind ourselves that our leg is also not part of our identity, and even not the neurons and synapses shooting in our brains. All these indeed make us into who we are, but at the same time, they are not who we are. They assemble our identity, but our existence also transcends them.

You are a unity, but you are also composed of a wide variety of multiplicities. This pertains to the technologies around you and to the people which surround you. They are part of your conscious life, and hence they automatically become part of who you are. And yet, they are not a precondition to your existence. You will continue to be you (though somewhat different) even when they will cease to be part of you. Some call this model “Complexity”. Complexity creates consciousness: the sheer multitude of things creates relationships between them, and out of the complexity of these relationships emerges consciousness, constituted by a myriad of impressions received by countless organs.

So I am not my sense of sight, and if you took it away from me, I will still be me. And yet, I am my sense of sight and if you take it away from me, I might still be me, but I would also be somewhat different, in about the same way that my mobile phone is not a part of who I am, and yet it is also a part of me.

The aim of this thought exercise is that we, as a culture, stop repressing technology as the “other”. We tend to see ourselves as a distinct being, facing a technological world, but what we must grasp that technology is not external to who we are. We must accept technology as part of the self, and understand that the cyborg is not a different entity, opposed to man.

Cyborg existence, an amalgam of the human experience of being unite with the realities of machine multiplicity, is the essence of our being. This is what Kurzweil means when he says that man is to be defined as that who constantly strives to be what he is not, to transcend what he is, to become something new. A cyborg is a being in a continued state of evolution. A being constantly becoming more complex through interaction with the world. The ultimate cyborg is God.

The will to evolve from a unified being into new forms, to merge with the future, create and become something new, is the divine will. It is the will to become one with the other, to allow the unity of God to surprise itself again and again through becoming one with multiplicity.

Chapter 2 - What is Technology

2010-07-10T21:31:00.003+03:00

This is the continuation of my last post which featured the first chapter of my book "Technomysticism". The next few chapters will arrive in the next weeks.

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To understand the meaning of the vehement flux of technological developments which characterizes our time, we must first understand the meaning of technology and its implications. Technology is of course one of the most popular concepts in the modern vocabulary of our technophile society, however beyond the conventional meaning of the word “technology” lies a hidden and much deeper world of signification. The word technology, beside its modern connotation with shining gadgetry, also implies the manifestation of a cosmic power and a creational principle which stands at the basis of all things. Having this wider meaning of the term technology in mind, we can speak of technology with a lower case t and of Technology with a capital T. technology, is the technology to which we usually refer when speaking about technology: engines, computers, hardware, software etc. Technology, with a capital T refers to any new organ fulfilling a function, any way to manipulate reality, everything which disassembles unity into a multitude of higher degree.

technology is the continuation of Technology through directed and non-biological means. While early Technological systems created by the universe, such as the eye and the ear[1] evolved in a slow and long process of natural selection, the technology developed by mankind evolves in a deliberate way. Thus, it makes the Technological character of the universe more noticeable and furthers its development within the framework of a new paradigm.

When referring to Technology, that is, technology in its widest sense and meaning, as a cosmological force which has been with us since the dawn of creation, one can identify a few contours which characterize all Technologies:

A. Technology is a system fulfilling a function – Technology is a system fulfilling a function. This is true both in regard to an Artificial Intelligence system aiding a robot in navigating a three dimensional space, or to an organ of our body – in the same way in which an eye is a technology for seeing, digestion is a technology for the creation of energy and the brain is a technology for the processing of information and different tasks such as motor control, communication and memory. Technology is any tool which enables us to manipulate reality. A technique which allows us to make a decision regarding the right course of action which has to be taken is a thinking technology, the ability to perform it in the world might involve a physical Technology, and so we can talk about intellectual Technology (such as a highly developed nervous system or an excel table), an emotional technology (emotional intelligence which enables human beings to handle complex social situations and use them in a beneficial way) and even a spiritual technology. Technology is the way in which the one, from which everything was created copes with becoming many. Technology is the way life navigates itself in a world turning increasingly complex and challenging.

B. Technology is an objectifying force – Technologies are objectifying forces. The technological worldview sees the world as made of malleable objects continually subjected to manipulation, for the achievement of different goals. The Technological being searches for ways to fulfill itself along the spectrum of possibilities (The thing which technology adds to our perception of divinity is actually the dimension of time or evolution: the development of divinity), it operates in a world of complex beings – the technological being is a fission of reality. The objectifying force is the force of manipulation, of separating the one from the other, the self from the universe, body from spirit, ego from shadow. Technology is a general name to the ultimate object, the power of multiplicity. It can be identified with that force which is called in Kabbalah, the force of Judgement – the divine aspect which is responsible for setting the limits and for separating things from one another.

C. Technology disassembles unity into multiplicity – Technology is multiplicity, speciation, specialization. The beginning of this trend can be seen already in the Cambrian explosion, about 570 million years ago, in which the myriad forms of life evolved, which held the basic physical adumbrations to all future forms of life.

Before the Cambrian explosion, the world was inhabited by relatively simple life forms. Technological development disassembles the relative unity of the first life forms into different biological species and divides the bodies of these different species into different organs and senses which break down the unitary perception of reality into more and more separate impressions.

The nature of Technology is that is breaks reality into more and more complex patterns and parts. The eye, the ear and the nose break down reality into different impressions. The hand gives the body more information to process, ways to act, and things to notice. Print enabled humanity to be exposed to a greater variety of ideas, the car to a greater variety of places, the truck to a greater variety of products, the internet of a greater variety of everything. The addition of each technology expands the net of possibilities and fragments our attention into more pieces.

D. Technology creates consciousness - Evolution researcher Teilhard De Chardin was among the first to recognize that evolution is not just about skeletons and the development of bone structures but first and foremost about the evolution of consciousness. The history of technology is also the history of consciousness, an observation which is easy to understand once we see technological evolution as a direct continuation of biological evolution.

Each stage in the evolution of life is accompanied by a new stage in the evolution of the brain and consciousness. The evolution of the reptilian brain stem around 300 million years ago led to the development of habits, of territoriality and of the feelings of rage. The development of the mammalian limbic system led to the creation of new consciousness states such as love, playfulness or fear. The appearance of the new cortex in Man, led to logical thinking, abstract thinking, linguistic abilities and so on.

Technological developments, even those which have nothing to do with the brain, inevitably change and reshape our consciousness. Robotics expert Hans Moravec observes a relation between movement and intelligence, in his book Mind Children. According to Moravec, mobile creatures tend to develop the mental characters which we identify with intelligence, more than sedentary creatures.

Similarly, the evolution of technologies such as writing, cars, radio or the computer change the structure of human consciousness. Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media was dedicated to demonstrating this thesis. In this media-theory classic, McLuhan examines 25 different technologies – from the spoken word to clothes, money, clocks, printing, cars, games or cinema – and shows how each of these changed human consciousness and the perception of reality in the societies exposed to them.

technological systems determine the way in which we perceive the world. The invention of money changed and catalyzed economic development throughout the world. Newspapers have aided in establishing the idea of nationality. The first photograph of planet earth in its entirety, taken from space in 1968, is considered today to be one of the main catalysts to the evolution of the global consciousness of humanity.

The history of Technology is the history of consciousness: we think in a manner consistent with our technologies. We understand the world and ourselves through the metaphors and symbols supplied to us by our technologies. In the mechanical age human beings were seen as a mechanical system not unlike a clock, in the age of steam philosophers tended to explain the human body as an energetic system similar to that of a steam engine, during the age of information we tend to compare it to a computer and in recent years to a computer network like the internet.

Technology is not external to us. It is part of the primordial web of the cosmos, and part of the internal web which shapes our bodies and thoughts. We move in technology, think in technology, love in technology, and breathe in technology. Technology is part of who we are. Therefore, if we want to know ourselves well, we have too know technology intimately, as part of ourselves.

[1] The eye and the ear are Technologies. In fact, they are prime examples of Technologies which are currently being transformed to technologies by the multi-billion High-Tech industry.

Technomystica: Consciousness in the Age of Technology - Chapter 1

2010-06-12T14:47:00.002+03:00

During the next months I plan to publish here the first 5 chapters of my book: "Technomystica: Consciousness in the Age of Technology" which was published in Hebrew last year. You can read more about the book here and here (Hebrew).

Chapter 1 – Age of Speed

We live in a world rapidly accelerated by technology. This message has already turned into a kind of cliché, but the surprising thing about it is that acceleration has been occurring not only since the invention of the internet, television, radio or print. The technological acceleration of the world has actually been occurring ever since the big bang.

If we look back 14 billion years, we will find the beginnings of a constantly accelerated process which has been going on since the dawn of the universe. Whereas earlier on in the evolution of our universe, billions of years would pass until the creation of the first living cell, and hundreds of millions of years would slowly linger, until multi-cellular animals evolved, the evolution of mammals occurred in time frames measured in dozens of millions of years and the evolution of the hominids species which have led to Homo-Sapiens proceeded much faster, during the last few million years.

The first technologies used by early man, developed excruciatingly slow in comparison to modern technology, advancing not much faster in fact than biological evolution. The stone tools characteristic of paleolithic technology took hundreds of thousands of years to evolve, almost as long as it would take for a new biological organ to evolve. The evolution of human language occurred, according to most experts, around 50 thousand years ago, the agricultural revolution occurred around 10,000 years ago and the development of writing and the first cities all occurred during the last thousands of years.

The time frames in which we measure development become shorter as we move closer and closer to the present. We usually think of the last thousand dividing them by centuries and examine the 20^th century by decades. Contemporary trends are taking place within the time frames of years and sometimes even months. Thus more novel occurrences are taking place during the course of one year today, than did during a million years, a billion years ago. Development is so rapid that the attempt to forecast the far future has been all but abandoned. Science fiction writers don’t even try to write about how humanity’s future might look 500 years from now. Who would even presume to know what might happen a few years from now?

As evolution accelerates, it also becomes more goal oriented. While evolution proceeds as a slow process based on the accumulation of random mutations, technological developments are based on well-directed action constantly striving for improvement. New technologies such as writing, the computer, or communication technologies are used to make the process of technological development even more efficient, constantly aiding in the further acceleration of the loop. Thus, while four million years have passed since the appearance of the first hominid to the appearance of homo-sapiens, a hundred thousand years passed from the appearance of homo-sapiens to the agricultural revolution, ten thousand years since the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution, and only a hundred years from the industrial revolution to the information revolution, in the midst of which we currently find ourselves.

The most pronounced symbol of the acceleration which stands at the basis of today’s information revolution is Moore’s Law, named after Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of computer manufacturer Intel who claimed in 1965 that the processing power of computer chips (or alternatively put, the processing power which can be bought for a certain sum of money) will double itself every 18 months. The predictions of Moore’s Law have been verified by the computer industry for the past 45 years. According to it, calculation abilities will double themselves by a thousand ever 15 years, by a million every 30 years, and by a billion ever 45 years.[1]

A growing number of scientists and technology experts claim that the process of acceleration is one of the basic principles overlying the cosmos.[2] According to them the process of technological acceleration is about to reach a zenith point which they term a “Technological Singularity”: a moment in which the speed of technological development approaches infinite proportions, a moment in which we will be the threshold leading to a new and fantastic technological age which will change most of what we know about life, the universe and ourselves.

Even if one choose not to buy into this far reaching scenario, it is difficult to ignore the actual phenomenon of acceleration. Whereas a few thousand years ago, one would be born, grow up and perish in the world, without the later being substantially changed, today tremendous alterations are happening in the world during the course of an individual’s life. Everything is turning more fragmented and accelerated: the rapid cuts on TV commercials, the number of stimulations appearing while driving on the road, the number of windows simultaneously working on our desktop, etc.

What does this mean? Does this process even mean anything? If you’d ask a hard necked materialist he will probably frown and tell you that the process of evolution is an absolutely random process in which man is nothing more then a meaningless iota. According to this kind of fundamentalist atheists the evolution of culture, religion and technology is an almost incidental event and the world is nothing but a random collision of electrons (physicists), chemicals moving in our brains (chemists, brain researchers and psychiatrists) or selfish genes continuously spreading themselves using organisms unaware of their higher goal (biologists). It’s not that they are all wrong. These stories are important because the world certainly is also electrons, chemical and genes. But each of these narratives is also a part of a wider pattern which, when apprehended, divulges a more complicated view of reality.

A group of scientists and thinkers which have been working during the past dozens of years offer an alternative and more holistic approach to the process of evolution. This view attempts to explain the universe with more holistic terms, putting what is generally seen by fundamentalist materialism as “coincidence”, within a wider cosmological scope.

These scientists and thinkers point to an unmistakable tendency in the evolution of the universe: The universe started as formless particles (physics) turning into complex molecules (chemistry) which developed into life processes (biology) which eventually create technological forms of life (technology). All this is occurring on a planet which is composed, as biologist Teilhard de Chardin observed, like an onion, layer upon layer. A geological layer (the geosphere), upon which a biological layer is created (the biosphere) and upon which an electronic layer of communication, thought and ideas are created (the noosphere).

The captivating thing about this process, is that it seems almost irrevocable. Once evolution reaches a new level, it never recedes. Once a new form of biological or technological organization like the DNA, the brain or language, appears, it does not disappear, but becomes the basis for more developed forms which develop right off it. Even in the event of an immense catastrophe, such as the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, life recovers quickly and continue in the journey towards more developed biological forms, as if nothing had happened.

This ceaselessly advancing journey of the universe, which is seen by mainstream science as a coincidental and meaningless process receives a more meaningful interpretation within the context of the scientific groups mentioned above. Scientists like chemist Illya Prigogine and astrophysicist Erich Jantsch have claimed that a principle of self-organization is underlying our universe. In other words, our universe is undergoing a process of self-organization in which it self-assembles itself like a puzzle, to higher and higher levels of order and complexity.

The idea of the universe being a bit like a puzzle also explains its accelerating nature according to inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil: Not unlike the way that the assembling process of a puzzle becomes more and more simple as it nears its end and fewer pieces are missing, so as the universe advances and each step becomes the basis for the one following it (the development of molecules, the development of life, the development of the brain, technological developments), the completion of the process becomes hastier. In other words, the evolution of biological life upon the earth is a direct continuation of chemical developments which occurred earlier in the universe and the technological development which we are experiencing today is a direct continuation of biological processes.

We might fantasize about going back to a purely natural existence, about shedding the technological shells which we have assimilated during the past thousands of years, but that would be ignoring the big mission which we are facing, and one might also wonder if that would even be possible. When we understand that the universe has been undergoing a continuous process of evolutionary development occurring through biological and technological means during the past 14 billion of years, and that this process is accelerating and approaching a zenith in our times, the idea of turning our backs to it seems overly fantastic.

The Technomystical Challenge

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, integral thinker Ken Wilber divides the whole of religious thought throughout history to two distinctive schools. The transcendent school is identified with masculinity and emphasizes the existence of God in the “heaven”, in a world above and beyond, a world whole and in a state of unity. Middle age thinkers such as Thomas von Aquin and Maimoindes serve as exemplars for such forms of thinking. The immanent school of thought is identified with femininity and emphasizes the existence of God in its myriad of forms on the earth. This school is closely related to nature religions and paganism.

According to Wilber, however, the most evolved spiritual vision belongs to the school which he call the non-dual school. Non-dual philosophers are thinkers which integrate transcendent and immanent perceptions of the divine. Among them, Wilber finds ancient Indian philosopher Nagarjuna, Greek philosopher Plato, German Idealist Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling and 20^th century Indian thinker Sri Aurobindo.

For these thinkers divinity exists not only above or below, on the earth or in the heaven, but everywhere along the full spectrum: from the transcendent world in which all things are united and are not divided in any sense, to the world of immanent fecundity, the world in which we live, which is composed of the opposites between life and death, true and false and a numberless network of relations between things animate and inanimate, human, technological and beyond.

The great challenge, non dual thinkers tell us, is not in shooting to higher realms, but in succeeding to stay at both ends of the spectrum at the same time: above and below. To unite the opposites, to be able to connect with celestial dimensions and yet find God in the myriad forms in which it appears in the world (From Facebook to the line at your local bank); to be together with the creative and ever evolving multitude and yet to keep you relation to the world above at all times. To go to worlds above and beyond, and come back with a renewed understanding of the world of multitude.

This is the technomystical challenge. It begins with the realization that mysticism is technological. That in a world turning increasingly technological, we have an unprecedented opportunity to rein the opposed forces of multitude and unity to one action; that a world which is turning increasingly fragmentary offers us an unprecedented chance to commute with God in more channels and create a richer concept of God than ever.

The evolution of mankind has almost ceased to advance biologically. It proceeds outside our bodies, in the electronic gadgets which surround us. Man’s attempt to enter this hyper-technological and extremely confounding world and to try to stay devout within it is the great spiritual quest of our times.

[1] According to conservative calculations. According to inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil a doubling of processing power occurs every year, and processing power is thus multiplied by a thousand every 10 years.

[2] In Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near one can view multiple graphs presenting the exponential acceleration in various domains such as the number of patents annually submitted for approval, the turnover of scientific paradigms, the number of servers on the internet, brain-scan resolution, data storage abilities etc.

My Days as an Intergalactic Agent

2010-05-27T14:52:00.005+03:00

A report on my early days as an undercover agent of the covert organization known as the intergalactic underground. Please read it here on Reality Sanwich.

My Days as an Intergalactic Agent

Avatar and the new wave of 3D psychedelic cinema

2010-01-11T16:59:00.003+02:00

For years, the psychedelic community has been anticipating the arrival of a new psychedelic medium which will be ushered in by the appearance of a new technology. The idea that technology and media can enhance psychedelics and even have psychedelic qualities has, after all, been an integral part of the psychedelic movement since the electronic trips festival of the sixties, Timothy Leary's enthusiasm for personal computer technology in the eighties, and Terrence McKenna's advocacy of virtual reality technologies and the internet in the nineties. Bets have been placed on 3D, HDTV, virtual reality, and other technologies, however, for a long time none of these seemed to take off in a massive way or fulfill its psychedelic potential in a way widely appreciated by the public.

Relations between psychedelics and popular culture continued, however, to be prosperous and fruitful. As noted by psychedelic thinkers such as McKenna and Eric Davis, psychedelic aesthetics have been continuously assimilated into mainstream media, as for example in the visual language of contemporary commercials and mainstream films.

The 2000's have been highly psychedelic in media. Ever-increasing film and screen resolution, the use of bright, colorful imagery in commercials and music videos, the imaginary landscapes created by computer generated animation, and the use of extravagant and highly associative visual language have all contributed to a psychedelic tendency in media in the first decade of the 21st century. Today, the advent of computer generated 3D cinema brings on a hope for a major psychedelic turn in electronic media.

Psychedelics and the 3D Experience

Psychedelics have always been about pushing the boundaries of perception, and adding new dimensions to our perception of reality. Similarly, media has continuously sought to add ever more dimensions in its efforts to technologically capture and represent reality -- from still photography to the moving image, from silent films to "talking pictures," and from B&W to color, where the evolution of film seemingly stops. For the past 60 years, motion pictures have had more or less the same appearance in terms of the basic characteristics determined by screening technologies. Now, a new generation of 3D films aims to bring a whole new dimension to entertainment media.

What could be more psychedelic than a medium that requires the viewer to wear strange- looking, outlandish glasses that distort one's view of the world? What better metaphor is there for the psychedelic experience, and the idea that we are continuously experiencing the world through different valves and filters, than the use of lenses that expose a whole new dimension of perception?

The 3D experience and the psychedelic experience make us appreciate the visual richness of the world and become enchanted by the multi-dimensionality of reality. 3D is a highly psychedelic experience not only in the fact that it adds a new dimension to media perception and renews our sense of wonderment at the visual world, but also in shaking our perceptions of the world by giving a third dimension to a picture screened in two dimensions. In one of cinema's earliest and most famous screenings, the crowd ran away from the theatre after an approaching train appeared on the screen; when watching a 3D movie for the first time, many people gasp, clutch their hands, get a dry throat, and after leaving the theatre, some people report a distressing sense of dizziness.

Thus, 3D dissolves the boundary between drugs and technologies. If you take off the glasses during a 3D screening and look around the theatre, you will notice that the people around you don't see you, since the 3D glasses block and darken the majority of their field of view. The uninhibited, almost primal expression one can see on their faces is not unlike that of trippers under the influence of some drug.

3D is the new and the most immersive media drug to have emerged out of our high-tech media complex, the most successful attempt to emulate the effects of the psychedelic state.

Psychedelic Storytelling

Hollywood cinema has been flirting with our culture's subconscious for some time now. Blockbuster fantasy and sci-fi films, ever-more popular in recent years, have acted as a Jungian shadow to our culture's proclaimed rational and materialist view of reality. Films such as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Golden Compass have presented us with a re-enchanted world. The last four of the above list of movies also posit an unseen and outlandish reality existing alongside the "normal" world, and this serves to support a growing sense of paranoia about the deceptive qualities of consensus reality and the existence of hidden and enchanted dimensions to our world. Cinema has thus functioned as our culture's collective dream, bringing to view its most repressed archaic realms.

James Cameron's Avatar, as well as adding a new level of psychedelic visual richness to the 3D film, also features a good deal of these subversive messages and ideas. It is as anti-civilizational and anti-technological as a John Zerzan book, psychedelic like a Terrence McKenna talk, and glorifies the indigenous and shamanic world view. The fact that some people have failed to appreciate these highly explicit traits in Avatar, and call it clichéd or hackneyed is, to my mind, largely based on blindness to Avatar's role as a mythic specimen of our culture.

Some people who didn't like Avatar's story told me that its main shortcoming is that it is told in a too conventional way. It tells a story we all already know. I could certainly see what they mean, but then again it made me think of Joseph Campbell's Monomythconcept which claims that there is one basic story that returns in most of the world's ancient myths. This story, which features the hero with a thousand faces, is a story in three parts (departure-initiation-return) which Campbell describes as follows:

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man"[1]

There is only one story that really matters. This story has been with us ever since the invention of myth and it is the same as the classic story of the heavy psychedelic trip, which is about departure from your everyday world and conception of yourself (taking the drug, and going on an inner journey), death/initiation (facing your demons, which sometimes leads to a feeling of death), and return (the spiritual rebirth which is the catharsis well known to many users of psychedelics). This story, hard-wired into the structure of the far-reaching psychedelic experience, is the primal story, the one that entheogens have conveyed to humans over thousands of years in shamanic cultures around the world. The psychedelic story, told to us by a plant, might even be the origin of the monomyth.

Even though I adore movies unconventional plots structures such as Pulp Fiction, Memento and Shortcuts, I also keep my heart wide open for our primal story. I believe that the primal story about the hero who overcomes his challenges and goes on to triumph, a story which stands at the basis of many religions and myths, is of utmost importance to our culture. It is the psychedelic story that defies logic but gives us hope. So please, do tell us this story again and again, because it makes us believe, because it gives us hope, and that is what we need, and without it we are lost; it is the only story really worth telling. Avatar tells that story.

Avatar and the World of Shamanism

Avatar tells the story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-marine arriving at the alien planet of Pandora to replace his recently murdered brother as the operator of an avatar, an hybrid entity identical in physical structure to that of the alien natives of Pandora, but controllable by a pilot with matching DNA.

Jake now has two twin brothers. One dead, the other, an alien incarnation of himself. In order to penetrate this alien being, Jake must empty his mind, go into dream-state, and connect with him in a special pod from which his consciousness is technologically projected to the Avatar. The life of one is the dream of the other. Where one reality ends, another reality begins.

Transmigrating between two parallel realities is a highly psychedelic idea. This is, after all one of the central tenets of the shamanic view of the world. As extensively described by Michael Harner and others, many shamanic cultures see the reality exposed by psychedelics as the one true reality.

Zhuangzi told us that he once dreamt he was a butterfly, and when he woke up he didn't know if he was Zuhangzi dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zuhangzi. What is reality and what is a dream? Some claim that our whole waking life is just a dream; others propose that we live to dream, and that waking life is just a secondary phenomenon to support dreaming.

Jake falls asleep and connects to an ancient and enchanted land of the cultural subconscious, where he will confront the indigenous shadow of civilization. After establishing contact with the Na'vi tribe, Jake will undergo an inner transformation. He will learn to perceive nature's sacredness, like a Na'vi tribesman, and even begin to see nature as his mother.

Psychedelics invoke a kind of dream experience. They are about traveling between dimensions, leaving the commonplace dimension of reality for an enchanted world. But for a citizen of the west living in a modern society ignorant of the shamanic (and psychedelic) view of reality, penetrating the enchanted realm of the psychedelic experience is a wholly different experience than it is for an indigenous person who was raised within a shamanic context. Following the concept of the re-enchantment of the world in contemporary spiritual thought and culture, as used by Christopher Partridge and Wouter Hanegraaff, one should say that the western user of psychedelics does not enter an enchanted world but a re-enchanted world. He re-enters his world, perceiving a world formerly devoid of spiritual or non-materialistic meaning with new eyes, the supernaturally inclined eyes of psychedelics.[2] This re-enchanted world which Jake enters in Avatar, by becoming a Na’vi tribesman, is the psychedelic world of shamanism.

Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) is a botanist trying to establish relations with the Na'vi, a quest not unlike that of ethnobotanists and anthropologists such as Richard Evans Schultes, Michael Harner, and Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, researching the role of psychedelic substances in shamanic cultures.

The Na'vi, an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Pandorian hominid aliens, is spiritually led by the Tsahik, (C. C. H. Pounder) a female shaman who interprets the will of Eywa, the great mother, whose name and essence seem to resemble both that of Eve, the mother of all life, as well as Gaia, the planet mother of all life. The Na'vi culture, similarly to other shamanic cultures, believes in the "flow of energy," a "network of energy that flows through all living things." It pays great respect to the "spirits of animals" and when a Na'vi tribesman kills an animal, he performs a ceremony to consecrate its soul, as is done in many archaic cultures. The individual's rite of passage includes learning to ride the Ikran, a giant carnivorous bird, which resembles the giant mythic bird that appear in various shamanic cultures such as those of the northwest coast of America, and is closely related to the figure of the Shaman, who is often associated with large birds such as the eagle. If all that wasn't psychedelic or shamanic enough for you, the Na'vi people also worship a "tree of souls," through which, while dancing and singing, they connect to the planet's soul, and become a part of the collective consciousness. The meaning of the wordayahuasca in the Quechuan language, it is worth mentioning, is "vine of the souls."

The singing ritual held by the Na'vi around the tree of souls, in which all members of the tribe become one with it, might remind one of contemporary ayahuasca ceremonies. One of ayahuasca's active chemical constituents, harmaline, was originally known in the west as telepathine, and indeed many indigenous cultures claim to join their minds under the influence of ayahuasca and reach unanimous group decisions in states of collective consciousness, a claim corroborated by McKenna who has also claimed to have witnessed telepathy during ayahuasca ceremonies.[3]

McKenna described the shaman as the one who, when you come to a village in the Amazon where foreigners appear maybe once a year, is distinguished from all others by the fact that he is not at all interested in your fancy boat or watch. The shaman transcends cultural boundaries; he looks at you to see what kind of person you are.

Seeing is important. "I see you," one of the sacred greetings of the Na'vi, refers to seeing into a person, seeing his essence and actual being. When Jake arrives to the Na'vi tribe and is about to be killed by the angry crowd, it is the Tsahik, the shaman, who examines him with her wide-open eyes to recognize his essence, and then decides to let him stay. Later in the film, when all have turned against him, after his apparent betrayal of the tribe has been exposed, she will also be the one to set him free. She has seen something.

Jake is allowed to stay, and then something interesting happens. Borges, in his "Story of the warrior and the captive" tells us of Droctulft, a barbarian warrior who fell in love with the Roman city Ravenna and with the concept of civilization. He deserted the barbarian armies and joined the Romans in defending the Roman empire. In a diametrically opposed way, Avatar is about a warrior coming from a hyper-technological society to destroy nature falling in love with the forest, and defecting in order to defend it.

"One life ends, another begins." The Avatar story is as anti-civilizational and neo-primitivist as it gets. When Jake is accepted to join the tribe for a period of apprenticeship, the tribe's Tsahik says, "We'll see if we can cure the madness." The madness referred to by the Tsashik is of course the madness of civilization, the madness of the materialist technological world from which Jake comes. From the shamanic point of view, civilization is madness (and vice versa). This madness must be cured; one reality tunnel must be given up and exchanged with another one. "Hallucination" and "reality" must change places, in a process remarkably similar to that of the psychedelic experience.

As Terrence McKenna never grew tired of reminding us, the psychedelic experience dissolves boundaries. It dissolves the boundaries between "reality" and "hallucination," between "madness" and "saneness." After all, the common thing to the psychedelic movement and the anti-psychedelic movement is that they both proclaim each other insane. While under the influence of psychedelics, and to a significant extent also during periods of psychedelic use, one experiences the world as magical. The everyday world of yesterday suddenly seems to be the bleak, colorless one, the deadly illusion of an unaware mind. Two opposites, hallucination and reality, dream and waking life, suddenly exchange places. Could the dream life be the true life?

This is what is happening to Jake. He wakes up in his pod and suddenly real life is not in the cold technological world of his unit, but in the forest, running on giant tree branches, riding his giant carnivore bird, the Ikran, and being with his love, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the daughter of Tsahik and her husband Eytucan the clan leader. Jake must choose between cultures and world views, between the technological world with its materialistic worldview and the forest with its shamanic perception of reality. Like Droctulft, he changes sides. By the end of the movie he will be calling the humans "aliens," and in the closing scene of the movie he will kill his human incarnation and transform himself completely into the avatar.

Avatar is not only psychedelic in form but also in message.

Reality Pods

In 1954, John Lilly, a neuro-physician on his way to becoming one of the pioneers of research into the nature of consciousness, invents the isolation tank -- a pod which isolates the person inside it from external stimulation and triggers an alteration of consciousness. Lilly, who kept close relations with the Californian counterculture of the sixties, also combined his isolation tank experiments with psychedelics, going into long trips inside his tank, a practice memorably presented in the filmAltered States (1980), which was loosely based on Lilly's work.

40 years later, the pod is back, and not for the first time. A decade before Avatar, The Matrix featured a person lying in a pod, isolated from reality, and communicating with another reality. What does it mean for us that the two most influential mythic films that our culture has produced since Star Wars both feature a person lying in a pod communicating with a different reality, a being split into two parts, one of them artificial. Could this mean something? Could they mean that we are the ones inside the pod, disconnected from our true body?

Taking off one's 3D glasses and inspecting the movie viewers, identical looking with their 3D glasses on, staring at the screen, immersed in a 3D world, unable to see their physical surroundings and completely unaware of them, one might think that the 3D experience is the pod. But more generally, the pod might represent all our technological shells, from clothing to our cars and our houses -- the technological shells that keep us away from direct contact with the world.

Avatar, it is worth noting, is a highly ambivalent and even paradoxical film. It uses the most advance technology to go on a long harangue against technology. But it has the maybe naïve hope that our pod experience, like Jake's, will make us want to leave our pods and reconnect with our bodies.

This too, is quite similar to the psychedelic experience. Psychedelics return us to our native bodies, to a more primal experience of the body, one which precedes the numbing effects of civilization on our relation with the body. When Jake is projected into his Avatar body for the first time, he spends the first moment examining his hands and feet, moving his fingers and toes playfully and calling “this is great!”. This part actually reminds one of watching a person in the beginning of a psychedelic trip, examining his hands as many trippers often do, amazed about being inside this avatar, the avatar of the body. Realizing that your being is immersed inside a body and being surprised by that fact, feeling amazed by one’s body, is also a well known reaction to the psychedelic experience.

A New Wave of Psychedelic Cinema

In his inspiring book Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken tell the story of one of the first giant Sequoia trees to be discovered by the American settlers, in Calaveras County, California. More than 300 feet in height and thirty feet in diameter, the tree was unlike anything the western world had ever seen. An entrepreneur by the name of George Gale saw a great business opportunity. He and his associates decided to cut down the Sequoia and take it to be exhibited around the world. The 2,500-year-old tree was so big that its felling took several weeks to accomplish, even with a big group of workers. Hawken tells us that when the tree finally fell, the noise woke people in mining camps fifteen miles away. The huge tree held so much water that it remained green for several years after being cut. When parts of the tree were presented in New York and London, the exhibitions caused a public outcry against the utter cruelty of its destruction, and this was one of the triggers of the environmental movement.

The story of that great Sequoia is mirrored in the story of the giant hometree of the Na'vi people which is destroyed by the bulldozers and explosives of the "Sky People" (Earth people). When Jake, praying at the Tree of Souls, asks Eywa (Mother Nature) for help, he says, "See the world we come from. There is no green there. They killed their mother." And indeed the myth of the matricide, the killing of Mother Nature that stands at the base of Avatar, is not fictional at all. Indigenous tribes have been going extinct for the past few hundred years, and are today facing major calamities brought on by oil companies and ruthless international corporations, the mercenaries of civilization who invade the jungle to supply our ever-increasing appetite for energy and products.

One of the most engaging sequences in Avatar is the one in which the Na'vi tribe are fleeing the violence and destruction brought upon the forest by the machines of technology. When I watched it for the second time, it seemed to me that these Na'vi people escaping the machines were actually us, humanity, trying to flee the consequences created by our technologies in the beginning of the 21st century.

Avatar relates a violent and realistic story that is taking place as you read this, which is why its message is so important. But it is also a story of a conversion, of Jake's conversion from the way of technology, from the promethean culture of the "sky people," as the humans are called by the Na'vi, to the way of the forest. Avatar is a story about transformation, one which humanity direly needs these days, when a radical transformation of our relation with nature has become a necessity.

With its psychedelic qualities and ideas, shamanic values, and indigenous politics, Avatar challenges the reigning values of our culture on the most fundamental level. That this film, which challenges all that is sacred to western materialistic thought and champions shamanic ideas and values deemed to be ludicrous by the dominator culture, has already earned more than a billion dollars and is quite probably on its way to becoming the highest grossing film of all time, is for me no less than amazing. Avatarbrings psychedelic visuals and ideas as well as shamanic values to millions of mainstream moviegoers. Could that have anything to do with the fact that it is in the new digital 3D? Considering that the next big 3D event is Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, a story jammed with weird acting mushrooms and even weirder realities, it seems that we might be facing a kind of psychedelic renaissance brought on by 3D cinema.

Could Avatar and Alice in Wonderland be the first messengers of a new psychedelic wave ushered in by a new medium with psychedelic tendencies? Could they be the ones to bring psychedelic values and ideas into mainstream thinking? I'm not sure that would be enough; however it seems that one of the techniques traditionally used to create the 3D effect in cinema might be helpful as a metaphor in understanding the place these films might play in today's culture. The Pulfrich Effect, used to create stereoscopic images, relies on the principle that the human eye processes information slower in darker conditions to cause one eye to see reality in delay, thus creating a 3D illusion when watching moving objects. It is as if your two eyes were watching the screen from two different points in time, or from two different points in space. Similarly, the new 3D wave allows us to view culture from two distinct points of perspective in space and time: one of a culture completely immersed in consumerist mania, the other of a culture which keeps a strong relation to its mythic roots in nature. This multi-dimensional effect, which allows us to view ourselves from two different perspectives at the same time, might hint at the transformations ahead.

[1] Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 30 / Novato, California: New World Library, 2008, p. 23.

[2] By this I do not mean to claim that psychedelics are supernatural, at least not here, but only that they encourage the formation of a supernatural view of reality.

[3] Again it is worth noting that I am not claiming that telepathy actually occurs during ayahuasca ceremonies, although something resembling it is definitely at play in some cases, but only that ayahuasca is considered to be telepathic and conducive to collective states of consciousness in many shamanic cultures

A Global Brain Fragmenting – About Google’s New Search Personalization

2010-01-10T11:30:00.001+02:00

Google has changed. Until a few weeks ago, whenever you would search Google, you would get a series of results constructed by an algorithm which aims to represent the structure of humanity’s knowledge and interests and in some mystical way, maybe even the objective order of things in our world.

Google was thus seen as the global brain, an artifact which informs us about what is more important and what is less important – an electronic brain which connects us all to a global consciousness, by supplying us with a common electro-neural field of associations. A network which integrates humanity by creating a common basis of ideas so that when I think (SEARCH) “Love” I think (FIND) the same ideas (RESULTS) that you think. When I think (SEARCH) Karl Jung I think (FIND) the same ideas (Results) that you think.

Now all that has changed. Starting Dec 4. 2009, Google began to personalize search results, so that the result pages viewed by each user are actually tailor made to fit his particular taste, based on his search history.

What does this mean? It means that each of us is seeing a different web, or perhaps better put, each of us sees the web from a different perspective. The objective order of the early Google days is shattered, and now one does not have any way of knowing what other people are finding when they are looking for something (one could take the effort and turn off customization in the setting menus, but most users won’t, and since most users will use the default personalized search option, the meaning of an ‘objective’ search, which represents the ‘objective’ Google ranking actually loses its significance). Models of search results thus no longer obey a Kantian “thing-in-itself” logic; instead there is only the very subjective the web-as-experienced-by-me.

What does this mean for the global brain? Well, to begin with, it means that our consciousnesses becomes less synchronized, each of us drifts a bit more into a world of his own. But is this good or bad for the global brain? On further consideration, increasing the individuality of search results might actually be beneficial for the global brain. Jesuit priest and evolution scholar Teilahard de Chardin, spoke of an omega point, a futuristic event in which the totality of human consciousnesses would fuse and create one collective super-consciousness of which we will all be part, an idea which many today believe to be manifested in the web, where each computer or user is like a single neuron, and part of a greater consciousness. However, De Chardin had one important condition regarding the omega point. He spoke about the elements composing the Omega Point becoming assimilated in a collectivity but also retaining their individuality. In the same way, the new Google search results page, which combines both personalized results as well as some of the old ‘objective’ results viewed by all users tries to balance between collectivity and individuality. Perhaps this is only the latest step on the techno-evolutionary race to rewire the neural paths of the global brain.

My electronic lover

2010-01-04T09:20:00.002+02:00

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a translation of my book review of David Levy's book "Love and Sex with Robots" in their English edition.

Read it here

Psychedelics and Nutrition: Carnivorous Cultures vs. Fungal Cultures

2009-09-27T09:38:00.006+02:00

One of the positive side effects of psychedelics is their ability to improve one's nutritional habits. Albert Hofmann relates in his book LSD: My Problem Child how extraordinarily his sense of taste was enhanced after his first LSD trip. The experience of great excitement one gets when biting into carrots or lettuce after a psychedelic experience -- sensing their rich sweetness -- is tantamount, for me, to eating for the first time after six days of fasting. Suddenly, each fruit and vegetable regains its original heavenly taste, as though we are experiencing, for the first time, the real taste of food.

Psychedelic Eating

Psychedelic experiences tend to change our relation to food in many other ways. Ayurveda and other spiritual traditions recommend performing a ceremony prior to eating: contemplating the source of your food, and conveying thanks for having given its life so that you can live.

Ayurveda also teaches us to dedicate our full attention to the food we are eating, in a manner befitting the act of sacrifice, while receiving the life of the food: not to talk while eating, not to watch television or read the newspaper, to eat in meditation, in concentration. Mindless eating is a sort of barbarism, like mindless murder.

Psychedelic experiences tend to change our relation to eating in a way parallel to that recommended by a number of spiritual traditions. Devouring food during a psychedelic experience, or shortly thereafter, bestows wholly new dimensions on the act of eating. I remember a special moment when, before consuming a grapefruit, I saw its glowing vivaciousness for the first time. I held it for minutes, which seemed like eternity: fondling it, inhaling its rich scent, feeling it alive and pulsating in my hand. I remember the moment of peeling its skin, which reminded me of defloration -- only much enhanced since our intercourse was totally unique and would happen only once, and end with our complete and irrevocable unification. The red flesh of the grapefruit was exposed for the first time to the light, and while I stripped away its skin, I intently watched its composition -- tens of thousands of miniature succulent fruit pieces interlaced into what seemed like a huge crimson wing, composed of myriad translucent membranes.

That feeling of endless intimacy that I shared with that grapefruit is difficult to describe. I felt as though it was the first time in my life that I was actually seeing what I was putting into my mouth, and this tremendously enhanced the experience of eating.

I ate together with friends, and the act of sharing the food reminded me of the act of grokking, which Robert A. Heinlein so famously describes in his book, Stranger in a Strange Land. I was not only eating the food, I was becoming one with it. The concept of eating finally received its full meaning -- as a mystical ceremony, an act of uniting, a sacred deed accompanied by the categorical imperative to completely change and give full respect to the food that I eat.

Pyschedelic Nutrition

I do not mean to claim that every person who will use psychedelics will change his nutrition. Of course, you can use psychedelics and still eat indiscriminately. One of the common impulses after a psychedelic experience is to run directly to the nearest hamburger stand. You can fall victim to it once, or even for many years, but a serious user of psychedelics will often start receiving messages which call upon him to:

1. Stop destroying your body with harmful nutrition. -- Malignant nutrition is the continuation on a personal level of the ecological pollution caused by the human race.

2. Stop taking the lives of others. -- Develop a moral basis to your nutrition. Start eating consciously -- because barbaric eating is the basis of barbaric existence.

Eventually, although many might disagree, the use of psychedelics is -- in my eyes -- incompatible with eating meat, or to be more exact, with eating the industrial meat grown in cattle concentration camps and consumed today in larger doses than at any other time in our civilization's history. A person who is in close contact with the mushroom (or other psychedelics) will eventually receive, again and again, that same message which calls upon him to forsake this path. He can ignore it once, twice, or even a hundred times -- but with many people, the message will eventually be heard. One stops eating meat or limits meat consumption one way or the other; I have seen this happen many times.

Amusingly, even those opposed to the use of psychedelics are aware, in some distorted way, of their influence on our eating habits. This Anti-LSD film from the sixties tells the story of a girl who takes an LSD trip for the first time and goes to a hot dog stand, ready to shove a hot dog voraciously into her mouth, but after she drowns her hot dog with ketchup and mustard she hears a voice. Suddenly she sees the hotdog as a living creature, and the creature begs her not to eat her and take her life. For the makers of the film, this awakening sensitivity is clear evidence for LSD having driven the poor girl crazy.

Carnivorous Cultures and Shroom Cultures

This brings me to the modern meat-addicted consumer society. While the mushrooms ban the eating of meat, carnivorous society bans the eating of mushrooms. Eating meat and eating mushrooms present, so it seems, two basically opposed cultural alternatives.

While the psychedelic alternative signifies the potential for a society based on awareness of our body, our ecological surroundings, and our fellow people, the meat society is a society based on:

Destruction of the Body -- Eating red meat is, according to many clinical studies, one of the prime factors contributing to cancer, heart problems and many other medical complications.

Ecological Damage – The UN has already declared that the gigantic mass of cattle which is being grown on planet earth, and the great amounts of methane gas emitted by these animals, is one of the chief reasons for global warming.

Economic Damage -- Caused by the growing medical expenses to take care of millions of meat-stuffed citizens suffering from cancer, heart problems and other medical complications caused by the excessive eating of meat.

Moral Damage -- The meat society is based on the mass-killing of life kept in concentration camp conditions. This society, based on sin, cannot help but be a basically violent society -- and this is without getting into the more abstract interpretations the various spiritual traditions give about the negative influence of meat-eating.

In comparison to the millions who die because of meat eating, the number of deaths caused by psychedelic mushrooms sold in Amsterdam during the years of legal purchase amounts to no more than a few dozen. (These tragic cases could have also been easily avoided, since in the vast majority of cases, users were hurt because of the inherently false capitalistic model in which the mushrooms were sold, which meant that people consumed mushrooms without deep knowledge, and while violating the basic laws of the intelligent use of psychedelics.)

Despite this overwhelming data, our society prohibits psychedelic mushroom eating and allows, or even advocates, the eating of meat. For the carnivorous society which sanctifies the values of war and carnage, the harmonious values of the mushrooms are an intimidating alternative which must be suppressed at any price, because they might raise questions about the entire carnivorous civilization, and its values of force and authority.

Eating meat and eating mushrooms are more than just two nutritional options -- they are cultural alternatives, different modes of thought: of relating to the body, to nature, to the other. As long as our society chooses to fortify the former by supporting monstrous corporations dedicated to the raising and killing of cattle, and ban the latter with billions of dollars spent on the “war on drugs,” it cannot pretend to be surprised about the bad shape in which our planet and culture find themselves.

Technomysticism: Consciousness in the Age of Technology

2009-04-24T13:33:00.005+03:00

I am happy to announce that I have concluded the writing of my book Technomysticism: Consciousness in the Age of Technology. The book will be published this May in the Israeli Madaf publishing house. It was written in Hebrew, but hopefully it will be translated to English in the near future.

In a world which is rapidly shaped by a surge of new technologies, the ways in which sense, feel and think are changing incessantly. In this hyper-mediated world technological man has two options: To be a slave to technology or to become a technological kung-fu artist. Technomysticism is a discipline which deals with the question of how to use technology in harmony and awareness.

The book Technomysticism deals with the daily, intellectuals and spiritual implications of technologies such as the internet, cellular phones, digital cameras, television and psychedelic substances.

The book looks at questions such as: How consciousness is influenced daily by various technologies? How to live a spiritual life in a world composed of instant messages and perpetual stimulations? How a society with a technomystic awareness will look like? And why technology and media are an integral life of any inner search?

The psychedelic party of Israeli politics

2009-02-11T13:06:00.003+02:00

The article was originally published in the Reality Sandwich web magazine.

What is the Geula Party? Is it a political statement? Art? A spiritual manifesto? The Geula party seeks to be all of the above, but it is first of all an attempt to transmit a radically different message to the Israeli people on the eve of the Israeli elections which will take place this Tuesday, on the 10^th of February.

Like the Intergalactic Underground, the idea for the Geula Party came from voyages in the psychedelic realms. It was there, while traveling in inner space, that I confronted a voice which urged me: "In this chaotic reality in which you live, you have to raise your voice and say something that will break the wall of lies in which the people are caught, in which you yourself are caught."

"Israel," the voice said, "is in a psychotic state, and what it needs now is an holistic cure."

Psychedelically-induced voices tend to make some curious demands. This one called upon me to leave everything in my life in order to start a new party, one that will be radically different from everything Israeli politics has to offer, a psychedelic party which will bring a truly mind expanding message to the people. This was the Geula party.

"Geula" is the Hebrew biblical word for salvation or redemption, and it has an important part in Jewish thought about inner freedom and the end of time. The Geula Party uses both Israeli as well as Jewish symbols but plants them within a psychedelic context. It was designed to be an alien apparition in the field of Israeli politics, but all the while draw from the bank of the Jewish and Israeli collective unconscious.

So what is it? To put it briefly, I can call the Geula Party a consciousness expansion party. In contrast to the other parties that run for parliament, the Geula Party runs in the inner elections, i.e., the elections going on inside our consciousness (in Hebrew the word "elections" and the word "choices" are the same -- "B'chirot").

Who do we run against? Well, we run against various other inner parties and powers that compete for people's attention and state of mind. We run against carnivorous capitalism, the powers of nationalism, the powers of commercials and mass media, and also the powers of random choice, of just living your life with out making one truly aware choice.

During the past three weeks, since the end of the war in Gaza, we have been broadcasting campaign videos on the web, calling upon Israelis to wake up, to take active inner action and raise the voting turnout in their inner ballots. We have been arguing that while one can only vote every four years and while our influence on politics as individuals is rather limited, we are casting our inner votes at every moment, and our influence there is absolute. You can argue for hours in vain about the political situation, but spending a few minutes wisely exploring your consciousness can change your life. Maybe, we suggest, if people start making their inner choices/elections, then one day things will start getting better in the outer world too.

The Geula Party calls upon Israeli voters (And of course, on people wherever they are) to start taking responsibility for their lives, to drop out from the hoax of culturally defined reality and choose the good, choose the Geula.

The Medium is the Message, and the Message is You

Although I have been openly writing about psychedelics in Hebrew for the past few years, advertising an openly psychedelic party could have been highly unwise in the current Israeli context.

However, a program for psychedelic consciousness expansion for Israeli society was badly needed for the Geula Party to go anywhere. Some tools for our mind to grow needed to be developed. The nine-minute program, another transmission received from the other realms, became the main part of the political platform of the Geula Party.

The nine-minute program is a consciousness expansion program made up of nine one-minute, open-ended consciousness exercises designed to help people cope with life and to enhance abilities such as love, faith, gratitude, and connection with the cosmos, with the past, and with the future.

The idea of the nine-minute program was further developed into the Inner Product Market, a part of the Geula Party website which functions as a web 2.0 platform for consciousness expansion. The Inner Product Market enables people to upload consciousness exercises they developed, and enables others to download consciousness exercises from the site into their consciousness -- thus creating a community for collective consciousness expansion. The idea behind the IPM was to create a basis for a society which will not be based on polluting consumer products, but on consciousness "products," and in which we are not simply consumers but consumers and producers of consciousness.

What we say to people is that we have to assume responsibility for our consciousness. We advance this idea with the slogan: "The medium is the message and the message is you." Marshall McLuhan was of course the one who said that the medium is the message. Adding the statement that "The message is you" means that before all other media, the most primal medium is that of our bodies and consciousness, and these are the first media that need to be explored and taken as the base of our reality, rather than culturally defined identity.

Consecrating Dizingoff Center

On the 10^th of February, election day, the Geula Party will meet in front of the Dizingoff Center Mall in the center of Tel Aviv to perform a special ceremony. The ceremony, which draws inspiration from biblical sources as well as from the actions of the Yippie movement in the sixties, is meant to consecrate the Dizingoff Center Mall which is a symbol of modern day Israeli society with all of its sickness but also with everything that is so beautiful about it.

During the ceremony we plan to encircle center mall seven times while blowing our horns, and then stage a special ceremony in which we will sing some songs, and perform twelve consciousness exercises, one of which will include trying to get inside the consciousness of the next prime minister, whoever they will be, purge them of everything that is evil, and make them into slaves and servants of justice for the rest of their life.

The peak of our ceremony will be the forming of the alliance of the righteous. The alliance of the righteous is the alliance of all the people who are willing to proclaim that in 2009 --whomever the next prime minister will be, whatever our politicians do, and what other forces in the world do -- we choose to assume responsibility for our lives, to be good, and to be happy.

Is this politics? Is this art? Is this mysticism? Terrence McKenna said the first thing every activist must do is to become psychedelic. We like to think of the Geula Party as psychedelic activism, as a movement which advances "art that is politics, politics that are art. Mysticism which is politic, and politics which are mystical".

Israeli politics of consciousness

I realize that this text might raise a few eyebrows. Is it even possible to talk about consciousness given the current situation of Israel?

Since the last elections three years ago, Israel has engaged in two wars, the prime minister had to resign over suspicions of corruption, and the country's international position has radically deteriorated. Israel has polled a few times as one of the most hated or negative countries in the world, along with Iran.

I spent the whole of yesterday evening trying to write an introduction to Israel's current situation. I've decided to leave it out of this article because it was too tedious to read and too painful to write.

I realize with sorrow what the image of Israel and Israeli society is at the moment. I have seen some amazing people here react in totally different ways to the essential impossibility of the Israeli situation, either by becoming nationalistic or by becoming anti-Israeli or just by trying to distance themselves completely from the situation in Israel, sometimes by immigrating to other countries.

After 30 years of living the politics of this scarred country, the more I try to explore and to understand the political situation I live in, the less I feel I know. Both left and right ideologies seem to have crumbled. I personally can not believe anyone who thinks they have a sure solution for the situation. And by this I don't mean to say that we shouldn't look for one.

The only thing I can say about the situation in Israel is that it is not simple. Thinking about it in purely political terms has brought me nowhere. The only thing it made clear to me is the overwhelming pain and fear that people here experience on both sides. It is easy to hate Israelis and it is easy to hate Palestinians, it is easy to pronounce both as fools or fanatics. I prefer to think of them as humans in a really really cruel situation. What I am looking for is a way to feel compassion for all these people, regardless of the horrible mistakes we are all making.

It is difficult to engage in the politics of consciousness in the current situation in Israel. What is allowed for psychedelic activists in other parts of the world is liable to be called escapist in the bleak Israeli reality. But for me, psychedelic activism makes more sense than any other form of activism.

The Geula Party believes that the solution must start from within. And if we do offer a political solution in the conventional sense of the word, then it must be a totally different one, one that starts out from the psychedelic revelation that we are all first and foremost human beings and that the cultural definitions which have been forced upon us are a hoax.

If you ask me about a solution for the situation, I would have different proposals, but the only really good one I would have is: People should be people and live together. There is no other way. The thing that put us in this horrendous situation to begin with is culture. Without culturally-defined identity, there would be no reason for people here or elsewhere to fight in wars. What we must realize is that we are all under occupation, the occupation of false consciousness, the occupation of culture.

If we want to live in peace we must first let go of those cultural definitions that have been forced upon us and which prevent us from living together as human beings. People must realize that before everything else, we are humans, and that everything that hinders people from understanding that is destructive and should not be part of our identity.

Jacques Ellul said in The Technological Society: There are no political solutions, only technological ones, the rest is propaganda. The human race simply deserve a better political system, one in which all people are truly equal, one which brings people together and does not divide them by imaginary lines on a map, a political system in which the hellish wars we are currently experiencing would seem ludicrous since there would be no system to even make it possible.

Amen.

How spam is driving us towards Artificial Intelligence

2009-01-29T13:19:00.001+02:00

An interesting story by Dora Kishinevsky made me think about the way spam might be part of an evolutionary path pulling us towards artificial intelligence.

Kishinevsky is writing about the arms race between spammers and CAPTCHA systems. For those of you who've forgotten, CAPTCHA systems are those systems installed on many websites today in order to prevent spam and hinder bots from creating their own user accounts.

The CAPTCHA system demands proof that the user is human and not a bot. It verifies the user's humanity by asking him to retype a string of characters which are then presented in the form of a graphic image.

This worked fine for a while. The problem is that as spammer's Optical Character Recognition systems are getting better and better at their work, they also have more and more success in bypassing CAPTCHA systems. This created to the need update the CAPTCHA systems time and again, displaying less and less legible texts, in order to keep ahead of spammer's OCR abilities.

Today the characters displayed in the CAPTCHA image are often so deformed that human users themselves can't read them. The text on the screen appears distorted as if the computer is on some sort of trip, and if you yourself are not completely sharp and fit, you can surely forget about getting on the site.

New solutions include more advanced systems which play a recorded word and ask the user to type it. However as Voice Recognition software is a highly developing field today, this solution also seems temporary at best.

"Solving CAPTCHA riddles takes up more and more time" writes Kishinevsky. According to Kishinevsky the next stage might be:

"A system to distinguish bots from humans which will be based on pictures. In one of the experimental versions the user sees a number of pictures, for example a picture of a flower, an apple, a shoe and a glass of juice and has to click on the common element which joins them, say "red". In another version the user needs to choose one of the pictures according to a clue which is presented beside them, say "food", and mark the contour of the object with a mouse".

Because I find it hard to believe that we will defeat the bots, it makes me think that not much time will pass before the bots manage to do those things as well, tell us the names of objects in a picture and solve many other new kind of challenges which we will design in order to perform the task of the classic Turing Test, to try to tell bot from human.

In the end we might reach the moment in which we find no new suitable test, nothing which can help us decide who is bot and who is human. And then? Then we have actually reached some sort of artificial intelligence. Haven't we? And all because of the spammers. So don't you say spammers have no positive role in the world. They too might be part of the big plan.

Or maybe they might be driving us nearer to a technopocalypse. This might be a good time to remember digital prophet Daniel Suarez who says internet bots are one of the imminent dangers currently facing the human race.

Ray Kurzweil revisits his 1999 predictions for 2009

2008-12-31T19:28:00.002+02:00

In 1999 inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil published the book "The Age of Intelligent Machines" in which he made rather daring predictions for years 2009, 2019, 2029 and 2099.

Kurzweil is a considered to be one of the most accurate forecasters of technological advancement, which is the reason why today, in the beginning of 2009, it is extremely interesting to see how well his predictions have stood the test of time.

Most of Kurzweil's predictions are actually astoundingly accurate. Such predictions as "Individuals primarily use portable computers" and "rotating memories are on their way out" seem highly in place considering the extreme surge of notebook and flash memory sales have seen in recent years.

A prediction such as "There are services to keep one's digital objects in central repositories, but most people prefer to keep their private information under their own physical control" also seem to reflect the shifting paradigms occurring today with services such as Google Docs, Flickr and YouTube which exceedingly enable users to keep their digital objects online.

"Digital objects such as books, music albums, movies and software are rapidly distributed as data files through the wireless network and typically do not have a physical object associated with them" also sounds just right. So too do "Documents circa 2009 routinely include embedded moving images and sounds" and "learning at a distance is common place" and "virtual partners are popular as forms of sexual entertainment, but they're more gamelike than real".

However some of the Kurzweil's other predictions still seem a while ago. In June 2008 I interviewed Kurzweil for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and asked him to comment on some of his predictions which still seem a while away. Here is what he had to say regarding chosen quotes from his book.

Kurzweil's Response to his 1999 predictions

"People typically have at least a dozen computers on and around their clothes" (p. 189)

KURZWEIL: Consider someone sitting at their desk. In their pockets there may be a cell phone, a digital camera, an IPOD, a Bluetooth headset, their electronic car keys, each with one or more computers. On their desk is their desktop or notebook computer, a printer, various communication devices, each with one or more computers. So that's close to a dozen computers typically right now. With the advent of multiprocessor architectures, these devices are starting to have 2, 4, 8... computers each in them, so we'll exceed a dozen computers "on and around their clothes" by the turn of the decade.

"Cables are disappearing" (p. 190)

KURZWEIL: There is already increasing use of Bluetooth, WiFi and other wireless technologies to eliminate physical cables. There is technology emerging that allows wireless communication between pocket devices such as cell phones and cameras and desktop devices such as printers and desktop computers. This technology is becoming more ubiquitous. People are increasingly using notebook computers and pocket sized computers and using one form of wireless communication or another to communicate with printers and other devices.

"The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition" (p. 190)

KURZWEIL: People are migrating to pocket sized computers, but these devices do not provide satisfactory keyboards, so this is now starting to create the need for effective large vocabulary speech recognition. Up until recently hand held devices such as cell phones have not had adequate computers to support large vocabulary speech recognition but that is now changing. New cell phones such as the Blackberry Bold from RIM have computers that are fast enough and with enough memory to support effective speech recognition for text creation. We will see speech recognition used in a widespread way on such pocket computers within the next couple of years.

"three dimensional chips are commonly used" (p. 190)

KURZWEIL: Chips in the latest high cell phones are already three-dimensional with multiple layers of circuitry. The number of layers will continue to increase.

"a 1,000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per second" (p. 191)

KURZWEIL: There are many ways of achieving a teraflop for about a thousand dollars around 2009:

* Today, a NVIDIA Tesla C870 with .5 Teraflop peak computation is about $1,000, but computing is coming down in price by half every year.

* NVIDIA's GTX280, coming out the summer of 2008, is 933 GFLOPS peak for about $500 (adding the rest of the computer is about another $500).

* NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 Ultra provides about .5 Teraflops for about $500 (the rest of the computer is another $500).

* ATI's 4870X2 (2x480), coming out the summer of 2008 is 2 Teraflops peak for about $500.

* AMD FireStream 9170 board with .5 Teraflop is now coming out at around $2,000.

Supercomputers are expected to be built from boards such as the above.

Game computers is another approach, and supercomputers have been constructed from multiple game computers. The Playstation 3 provides 160 GFLOPS for about $300 which is about .5 Teraflops for $1,000 today. Price-performance doubles every year so that's about 1 Teraflop for $1,000 in 2009.

"Translating Telephone techonlogy is commonly used for many language pairs" (195)

KURZWEIL: We have two kinds of "translating telephone" technologies already from our company. We have a cell phone that can capture print documents in seven languages and then translate the documents into any of the seven languages. We are adding more languages. The cell phone that can capture print documents in the seven languages is already a shipping product, and the translation feature has been demonstrated at shows and will ship in a couple of months.

We also have a prototype of this technology that can capture speech with speaker-independent large vocabulary speech recognition and then translate to another language with voice output. This will be a shipping product in the next 1-2 years.

We are talking to multiple cell phone companies about building this technology into their cell phones.

"Human musicians routinely jam with cybernetic musicians" (p. 196)

KURZWEIL: There are many software packages that will accompany you with rhythm tracks that adjust to your playing, walking bass lines, and other accompaniments. Such software is also built into home digital keyboards.

The Psychedelic University

2008-12-10T17:39:00.005+02:00

The article was originally published on the Reality Sandwich magazine.

Most sincere and mindful people would not dispute that the use of psychedelics can, under certain circumstances, have positive outcomes. Psychedelics, after all, have played a crucial role in human culture for millennia and continue to be a part of many cultures, even today.

The recreational use of LSD and other mind altering substances during the psychedelic sixties is one of the main factors that frightened society away from the exploration of psychedelic realms. As long as researchers and psychologists kept their experiments with LSD confined to their laboratories and clinics, everything was fine. But the widespread use of psychedelics among large sectors of society, with many people having no knowledge about how to work with psychedelics, led western society into a state of media frenzy and paranoia regarding all forms of consciousness expansion. Psychedelics were rashly demonized and then outlawed without any further discussion -- a fact which has been lamented ever since by psychedelic advocates from fields such as psychology, theology and philosophy.

There's been little movement since the sixties toward the legalization of these substances. Yet it seems that society's willingness to consider positive applications of psychedelics has grown lately. Psychedelic research has finally begun to get back on its feet after being put on hold for decades, and the public discussion of psychedelics seems to be somewhat less ill informed than it had been in recent decades, as was noted in Daniel Pinchbeck's article on the future of psychedelics.

Those who can go beyond the veil of propaganda and misinformation that cloaks the entire territory can discover that, unlike many other perfectly legal and accepted substances (such as coffee, alcohol or nicotine), psychedelics are actually non-addictive, non-toxic drugs which in the long term have no adverse side effect on body and brain functions.

When handled with care and in a knowledgeable, respectful manner, psychedelics can have many desirable personal, psychological, philosophical, spiritual and creative results. These facts are well known to the societies in which psychedelics have been a part of the culture and religion for millennia.

The question of psychedelics

But despite the many merits they possess, psychedelics continue to have a highly ambivalent reputation in our society and are prohibited in most countries.

The reasons behind this global paranoia about psychedelics are complex, but can be summed up in the sentence: Psychedelics aren't dangerous, but careless, ignorant use of psychedelics is.

Even Holland, which has the most liberal drugs laws in the world, is currently in the process of banning the selling of magic mushrooms in local "smart shops." The reason is, as it has been in the past, the occasional tragic cases in which newcomers to the field of psychedelics (usually tourists, usually young people) experiment with psychedelic drugs without much prior knowledge about their effects, the importance of set and settings, and how they interact with other drugs (usually alcohol), etc.

Such blind sighted encounters with psychedelics are quite likely to lead to disaster. And so we have the occasional jumping out of a window, or different forms of freak-outs. It doesn't matter that the number of annual cases of this sort is less than a dozen, while cigarettes kill 400,000 people a year.

Such unfortunate encounters with psychedelics are a side effect of modern society, and are avoided by indigenous societies using psychedelics thanks to the ceremonial manner in which psychedelics are consumed. This is because indigenous societies partake in psychedelics at specific dates and times, in a religious context, and in the company of shamans. The recreational use of such substances is almost unheard of. Thus the ceremonial use of psychedelics is considered safer, more "dignified," and has been legalized in many parts of the world.

Movements advocating the use of psychedelics in a religious context have indeed seen a great surge in recent years, among them the Native American Church use of peyote, and ayahuasca use by the Santo Daime and Uniao de Vegetal religions. Such religions have managed thus far to eschew the stigma shed upon psychedelics by society. Their existence is indeed very positive, but while people might have safer access to psychedelics in these contexts, they do not support the use of psychedelics for creative, psychological and philosophical purposes. These religious uses, as well as psychotherapeutic uses of psychedelics, sacrifice the individual's freedom to pursue psychedelic exploration in favor of being part of certain religious or psychological institutions.

Society doesn't know how to handle psychedelics, and since we live in a capitalistic society the choice about psychedelics has been reduced to: sell them or ban them. It's not relevant that treating psychedelics as consumer products might not be a good idea from the psychedelic perspective. Since our society is capitalistic, we quite automatically apply the model of consumerism to anything that comes along. However, psychedelics aren't your average consumer product. Far from it. And when the choice is between selling them or banning them, most countries choose what they consider the safe path: prohibition.

So, in an attempt to reverse the inertia associated with the image and legal status of psychedelics, those who do believe that psychedelics can be put to good use and benefit society have to find an alternative way to regulate them.

Various thinkers in the history of psychedelic thought have been aware of this issue. Many of them believed that psychedelic substances need not be distributed in a mass-consumption, capitalistic manner. Except perhaps for Ken Kesey, nearly every major psychedelic advocate has also called for strategies to make sure that psychedelics are properly handled and intelligently used.

Albert Hofmann cautioned against the recreational use of psychedelics and believed that their importance lies "in the possibility of providing material help to meditation." Aldous Huxley wanted to give psychedelics to a small intellectual elite. He spoke about the development of "a technique of applied mysticism" -- a technique for helping individuals to get the most out of their transcendental experience and to make use of the insights from the "OTHER WORLD" in the affairs of "This World." Timothy Leary wanted psychedelics to be distributed to small groups of people in a psychological or religious context. Even Terrence McKenna admitted that not everybody in a psychedelic society has to actually take any drugs.

Yet the question remains, how will society determine which people it deems fit to experiment with psychedelic substances? Religious and psychological systems are, as mentioned above, unsatisfactory forums for tapping the full potential of psychedelic exploration in modern society. At the same time, selling psychedelics as a standard consumer product has its own disadvantages, which is why we have prohibition.

The Psychonaut License Model

These questions and the need to advance the field of psychedelics have led me to develop an alternative model for the regulation and use of psychedelics in society. I refer to it as the Psychonaut License Model. This model, as I have recently found out, was actually already proposed by Leary in the Sixties. But for some reason or another it seems to have been forgotten for all these years. Here I would like to offer a variation of this model for your consideration.

Our society has mechanisms for the handling of objects which it deems both helpful as well as dangerous. In order to drive a car or a plane, for example, you need a license. What if we would have a psychonautic license? A license for exploring your mind. A license that would ensure that use of psychedelics is guaranteed to those who are willing to approach them knowledgably and responsibly.

A person would receive such a license after taking part in a psychedelic course. Such a psychonautic course could consist of 10-15 meetings, or a concentrated term of 7-10 days. Each course would educate the aspiring psychonaut about a specific substance, such as LSD, Magic Mushrooms, Ayahuasca, Mescaline, Cannabis, etc.

Classes would deal with key questions about psychedelics, such as: the role of psychedelics in culture, the history of psychedelics, psychedelics and ecology, the chemistry of psychedelics, the medical aspects of psychedelics, psychedelic psychology (how to psychologically deal with the various aspects of a psychedelic trip), psychedelic theory and psychedelic spirituality. Thankfully our community is not suffering from a lack of valuable psychedelic knowledge.

The teachers would be cutting-edge experts from the various fields of psychedelics: psychedelic thinkers, shamans, medical doctors, historians of psychedelics and psychedelic psychologists.

Each course would also include 2-3 carefully built, practical psychedelic ceremonies, guided by knowledgeable individuals. These teachers would strike the balance between allowing the freedom for individual exploration, while ensuring a structured (at least partly structured) psychedelic learning experience.

I believe that such a carefully guided tour through the psychedelic world might be a modern version of ancient initiation ceremonies. It would allow for potential explorers of the psychedelic realms to start their journey in safer, more stable surroundings, setting the stage for more individualized psychedelic experiences in the future.

Such a solution could also set the stage for the reintegration of psychedelics into the social fabric in a way which would be better accepted by society. It would also build the basis for a stronger psychedelic community and allow for the growth of psychedelic research and techniques.

The Psychedelic University

The establishment of such a psychonaut license would of course demand the establishment of a stable, professional institution. Hence, the idea for the Psychedelic University, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading unbiased knowledge about psychedelics, and supporting individuals seeking safe, informed and inspirational access to psychedelic substances.

The establishment of such an institute demands a tolerant legal environment. To the best of my knowledge, such an environment exists in only one place in the world at the moment. So the Psychedelic University should be located in Amsterdam, Holland where it can act in total agreement with the Dutch law.

The Netherlands has been looking for various ways to regulate the use of psychedelics. While Holland has been tolerant of psychedelics, recent tragedies have weakened its liberal stance. Since the country continues to reform its drug laws every few years, it seems that Dutch authorities are still looking for a sensible solution regarding the regulation of psychedelics. The Psychedelic University and the Psychonautic License model respond to the need for such models, and offer an alternative that enables a safe, responsible and yet imaginative introduction into the world of psychedelics.

The purpose of the Psychedelic University is not to polemicize, but to make an example of the psychedelic movement, displaying its radical commitment to the responsible and constructive use of psychoactive substances. Referring to the future of the psychedelic movement, Terrence McKenna said, "Pointing back to my notion that the responsibility always rests on us and that you don't want to go out and really form a movement to change those guys or that bureau -- I think the thing that should be done is: people who are involved in psychedelics should live life of such examplitude and impeccability that the notion that there was anything shay or wrong or curious about this phenomenon would be ludicrous." Making sure that psychedelically inclined individuals get the best drug education would be a first step in that direction.

While the Psychedelic University will not in any way seek to become a governmental institution, its success might encourage the Dutch government and other liberal governments to consider the implementation of this model elsewhere in the world. Such a university would also, in time, become a center for psychedelic research, collaborating with institutions such as MAPS in the furthering of psychedelic knowledge

Our dream is to enable any person on the planet legal and safe access to these sacred substances, which we value so highly, and to help in the distribution of psychedelic knowledge.

While the criminalization of psychedelics has been seen as nearly irrevocable for decades, new possibilities are also emerging. Legalization and the creation of a new path are not a dream.

The Olympic Feeling - A Countercultural Response to the Olympics Games

2008-08-07T18:05:00.003+03:00

The Reality Sandwich site published an article of mine about the real meaning of Olympic Games.

Read it here.

An Interview with Steve Wozniak

2008-07-23T00:27:00.005+03:00

In September 2007 I had the opportunity to interview Steve Wozniak as part of the Digital Minds interviews that I've conducted at the time with leading digital figures.

Wozniak, who together with Steve Jobs co-founded Apple is considered by many to be the inventor of the first personal computer. Since the personal computer has been like an integral organ of my body for the past 2 decades, speaking with Wozniak was a bit like talking to the architect of existence, almost a sort of demigod really.

The Interview was previously edited and published in Hebrew as a part of a magazine piece I did for Nana about Wozniak. I publish here the full and unedited version of the interview itself.

Hartogsohn: Hello Steve, why don't we start with the feeling that are currently keeping you Busy. So what are you up to these days?

Wozniak: Well, I'm doing a lot of speaking engagements around the world. I'm also involved with a few start-up companies including one that started up and went public with some former apple executives. It's called jazz technologies and we were formed to be an acquiring company and we acquired the chip maker jazz technologies. And I'm involved with some other people who are doing energy efficient house start-ups

Hartogsohn: How did your interest in this field of environmental housing actually evolve?

Wozniak: It just sort of always been with me, but only never high priority. Actually the way it evolved was I discovered somebody doing energy efficient housing that was kind of like the clean simple approach to things. Fewer parts doing more. And that's just something I believe in. There is more to that than I'm trying to save energy, because if you try to save energy there is always somebody else who says they are saving more.

Hartogsohn: Let's get back to the beginning of your career when you were making the first computers? When did you first realize the impact of what you were doing? When did you realize that the personal computer is really going to change things?

Wozniak: Oh it's very difficult to say because I've been building computers my whole life. I've even built the hardware for the personal computer 5 years earlier in 1970 but this was the first one that really worked. And I just knew that it would solve a couple of problems that I had like playing games and writing programs to help my engineering. I didn't know that would change the world. I was involved with a lot of other people who believed that the small computer would soon be owned by everyone and make a huge difference in the world. But the differences that we foresaw never came to be. So it's difficult to say that we foresaw the future. No, we were just accidentally right in some way that low cost computer made sense for a lot of people

Hartogsohn: It's always interesting to see how technological inventions look at different points at time. What did you foresee then that didn't happen.

Wozniak: Well we foresaw that the users would be technical people like ourselves writing programs to solve problems, whereas what really came to be the case is that people tried to buy a pre-bought solution to solve the problem. We foresaw the internet in some crude fashion, of people communicating at a very low level. We didn't see such things as music sitting on a computer. Sure we thought of music going through a computer, but not being stored on a computer. So almost anything that goes at all with today's large hard disks we didn't foresee at all. We did not foresee video on a computer, ever. We did not foresee even storing huge amounts of email.

And we didn't foresee digital cameras, but who could have, I mean they weren't here so nobody foresaw them. And besides when they tried to come, they were so expensive that they really couldn't change the world yet. You know when you realize that something is way too expensive to even think about, you don't think about it. And then at a latter year, oh it makes sense. Some things that's been too expensive but had niche markets maybe, all of the sudden they take off and become mainstream.

That happened with apple products quite a bit. The product that we first had was only applicable to a few people. As far as real dollar savings it's very hard to measure. Maybe a person would have a computer and be more capable than other engineers at his work. But it's hard to put a dollar tracker on that. The typical engineer salary back than was maybe 25,000 dollars and if the computer costs 2500 dollars, you have to weigh that in. But still it's a lot less expensive than a computer that costs a 100,000 dollars.

Hartogsohn: At the time when you began working it was still a very small scale industry in which one person could design a computer by himself. How do you feel about the way this industry evolved and the high-tech industry of today?

Wozniak: Well, one thing that changed is: I didn't design a computer for the world. I just designed the best computer for myself. I had No business plan and no intent to sell it, it's just that it was my life long goal to own a good computer someday that I could write programs on, and the way I achieved this was just to build it myself.

As to way the computers have gone to this day it's absolutely wonderful. I love everything about the computer. It's the nicest the interface we have to the world. Sure it's not as good for some things, not as big a screen as my large screen television set. When I look at google earth it's not like a globe. It's on a flat screen.

But just think of the many things that we can do so easily on the computer that we had no way to do in the past. Maybe the smartest most well funded researchers could do those sort of things that we do today.

Hartogsohn: You have been known to be a programming purist. I once heard you say that your best design decisions were made because you didn't have enough money. How does the obese software of today's operating systems and desktop programs make you feel? Does purist programming and technology still stand a chance?

Wozniak: I think it got undone by abundance of resources, basically RAM that allows a programmer today to grab as huge a framework as he can, and just put in a few little things to master routine what somebody else wrote rather than writing their own programs and getting the job done. I think a purist would not program that way, and there are a few examples. On Macintoshes when I buy shareware occasionally it's tiny, it could have been a big programs but its only 47K, which was also a huge program back when we started. So I think the real strongest purists would force themselves to adhere to it.

In my own case I really when I didn't have money. I couldn't even afford an assembler to type my assembly language programs into. So I wrote them on paper and then I wrote down the ones an zeroes they would get translated to by an assembler. Nobody's done that, except in the early days of computers. Or when you're trying to develop a brand new computer and you need a blue scraper team. So I wrote these couple of hundred pages all by hand. It's hard to imagine, but it brings you closer, more intimate with the code that you are writing. It becomes a part of yourself. And you have to understand it so deeply that it is very good for an engineers not to have as many bugs.

Hartogsohn: So vast software possibilities and computing powers degenerated programming?

Wozniak: Sure, but you can't totally say it's wrong. Because for example I had to design a lot of circuitry that put out NTSC video, but now you can buy a chip, one chip, and plug in where you want the colors, and it puts out the video. Why would you bother having 10 chips do the work when you could just buy one, already made. Sometimes simplicity just goes: the world is right here, I just have to do a much less part myself. And that in it's own form is simplicity even though the end result may wind up being monstrous.

Hartogsohn: Let's get back to the eighties. Do you think that had Apple done a few things differently than it could have the power that Microsoft today holds in the operating system world?

Wozniak: I wonder, but it doesn't feel right and proper to look at the past as though as if we had made a different decision we could have owned the world. It might just be that the Macintosh was unfortunately was too early, 5 years too early, before the cost of resources could have justified it.

Apple was pushing out a new technology that was too expensive to do the full job well and especially the problem of software angles. Microsoft had all the software that the burgeoning business market needed and we were leaving that to our apple 3. So we really just pitted the apple III against IBM, and the Macintosh into other people's needs. And maybe we hoped for the right kind of software. The PC's had [Lotus] 1-2-3 and it was just a solid community built around that.

So maybe we should have saved our dollars, fought it out, had more software from the start, or put our resources into the apple 2 in a way that we could make the Macintosh low cost and then the market for it would be used. We diverted a whole company for a market that was gong to be small for 5 to 10 years. And by the time that market got large, Microsoft had an easier play to make. They build a base of fans and those fans just stuck with the hardware. If we had built the Macintosh in the year when we could have sold it for 1200 dollars or 1800 dollars, but we build it when we could sell it for 3,000 dollars. It was so expensive for a tiny little black and white screen. we had to give up so many features to get it out on the year that we did, and if we had waited just 5 years we could have had a very soft transition to the GUI world. I think jumping the gun was probably the biggest error with the Macintosh, not something technical. The pricing, people talk about the pricing, but that's just a factor of jumping the gun.

Hartogsohn: I've read somewhere that you have been doing some teaching and working with children?

Wozniak: I've wanted my whole life to work with 5^th graders. And then I started teaching 5^th grade in 1992 maybe. And then I taught higher grades, and then I taught teachers too. And I kept the press out of it. Just something I wanted to do. One on one.

Hartogsohn: Do you feel that all people or all children can learn to program, or is that something that only a select few are able to do?

Wozniak: I think that you have to be in the age where your mind can adapt to algebra before you can learn to program correctly and well. And that's 7^thgrade. And I do think it can be taught to all. It just teaches mental rigor of getting things right, of building large projects out of small. It's an excellent category of life but we'll never really teach it very much in our schools because nobody really wants to rock the boat and change the status quo. So we are just going to have just as many hours in the class learning the same history, the same mathematics, the same English or writing skills as we have in the past and there is no extra room in school for something like computer science, for programming, it will only be taught to a few.

Hartogsohn: How do you think is a good way to teach programming to children or people who have no knowledge about this world. How do you think is a good way to start with them?

Wozniak: I don't know a good way today. I am sure they exist. I know in my time I'd look for a programming language. I didn't teach 5^th graders to program, I've waited until they were 13 to program. I taught them when they were in the 5^th grade how to make their homework look good and proper, and take care of a computer and everything. For programming I used the language we had at apple called Hypertalk where you could type in programming statements and instantly something would appear on your screen in a window, or instantly something would appear on a menu. And it is immediate feedback that helps learn programming. The language logo has that feature but logo is a very restrictive language. You can only go so far with logo programs.

And I also only picked examples that would be fun for the kids, I didn't have a book on programming. I taught it and everyday we'd practice a few of those steps. And then we'd right our own programs to sort numbers or play Tic-Tac-To. I'd look for fun games, fun results, or have little men animated walking across the screen. Whatever it was that someway they could feel they have done something unusual. Now days this is common, but back when I did it, this was so uncommon that the kids were just in awe to see the ability of themselves on a computer.

Hartogsohn: I understand that you still work in apple

Wozniak: Oh no, I am an employee but I really don't work

Hartogsohn: Sounds like the best kind of job.

Wozniak: I just do it to stay on the computer. The only work I do is I consult with Steve Jobs over the phone or via email, once in a while, on some products and directions of the company.

Hartogsohn: So what do you think about the direction Apple has taken? It seems like the direction is shifting towards more portable machines like iPod or iPhones

Wozniak: I think apple discovered almost unexpectedly what a huge market the iPod was. Finally apple had a great product that really reached the masses and not the Macintosh small percentage community and I think it opened a lot of eyes at apple to some great huge dollar rewards for doing good products in the consumer electronics sphere that don't apply to Macintosh only.

It's the first time apple stepped out of the Macintosh only realm of things very well. They had tried to do printers, but they just hadn't really done it well. So I think the iPod was a very good lesson for apple and the iPhone would follow and basically expand apple into more than one business at the same time, which is very healthy financially. Not just for the revenue within, but also if one product line is doing poorly due to competition or whatever the other one is there.

Hartogsohn: How do you see the future of computers and personal computing in the next years?

Wozniak: I think it is going to continue pretty much as it is. I think the main user interface is still going to be a keyboard and a video type display. I don't have a mysterious sense that says we're going to have many different categories for things that we're going to be doing that are different from what we do today. I don't know what they are.

People often speak about doing the same things better or in a different form factor. I could imagine a flexible display making a globe in the shape of Google earth but I don't really expect it. I do wish that the computer would become reliable and do what you want when you want it to, with less effort on your part to remember how to get things done. And it's pretty unlikely that's going to happen. It's basically Macintosh and windows, and each one of them is a monopoly in their own way. There really isn't the incentive to have new features that kind of work the way a human mind works.

It used to be the Macintosh got a very good reputation for making everything very visible and obvious and now I try to use GarageBand and some of the most important aspects are little hidden icons down below somewhere. Can't even find them on the menu. It's very difficult. You want the world to be simple and really you're told: once you learn it then you know where it is, so it really doesn't have to be simple. But that is what put us in business with the Macintosh. Computing should be much more intuitive, if you remember the early Macintosh we had Mac paint and Mac draw with little icons on the side and it all made sense – a bucket, an eraser, a square, some colors. It was all real obvious and right in front of your eyes all the time. And I am one of those people that likes that kind of world, but now days it's very difficult to realize – oh yeah, there's a plus sign somewhere, oh yeah and that and that will make a new entry. Or provide some of the other commands in menus. I believe in the early Macintosh dreams of people that came with these concepts of how computers would really work as more of a friend side by side with the user. I still believe in those dreams.

No Consensus to Consciousness

2008-05-20T13:43:00.022+03:00

As we walked through the Amsterdam zoo I had some thoughts about the relation between organisms and altered states of consciousness. Each of the animals in the Zoo seemed as if it were in some kind of trance. The zoo is a zoo of consciousness forms. The reptiles are in a reptilian consciousness state, the fish are in a fishy consciousness state, the monkeys have the monkey state, the tiger the tiger state.

Each of them lives in its own world, even that curious looking amphibious creature which we met in the aquarium and looked as if it spends its whole life in a different reality. Each of these animals has a way to see the world, to experience it, to understand it, to react to it. Each one has its own view on the world, and it resides in it, knowing only that consciousness for the rest of its life. There is no consensus to consciousness.

When I was sick I had curious dreams at night. It felt like visiting other realities. This is not the first time this happens to me while I am sick, and I thought about how the influence of having different levels of fever is tantamount to consuming different amounts of psychoactive substances. Having 37.5 degrees fever might be parallel to consuming a certain amount of a psychoactive substance, but having 38 degrees is already double the impact while having 39 or 40 degrees have an impact tens of time more powerful.

A disease is also an exit from the consensus trance of consciousness. There is no consensus to consciousness.

When I left Israel and came to Amsterdam for a visit, I felt as if I am getting direct oxygen supply to my brain. Levantine aggressiveness and the different pressures of Israeli reality - all went away and suddenly I breathed with my entire lungs, literally. I realized that the different places I am in put me in different consciousness states. I realized that it is very easy to forget that these consciousness states are bound by the environment, a certain ecology, and not just who you are. A person that lived his entire life in a certain place might think that his everyday consciousness state is a "normal" consciousness state for him, the only one to which he is capable, just the same way as somebody who never tried a consciousness altering substance might spend his entire life without ever knowing that the world could be seen differently. That person who has spent his entire life in one place, surrounded by one group of people supposes that the Israeli mind-state, the Dutch mind-state, the Senegal mind-state, are the only states, the only way to see the world. But no. There is no consensus to consciousness.

There is no consensus to consciousness

It is always moving around on different terrains, while balancing between the various forces and influences that pass through it. Eating meat creates different thoughts than eating a tomato and a tomato different thoughts than seeds. Consciousness is moving between the different drugs we consume: between the coffee, the alcohol, the nicotine, the tea and all of the less legal drug we might be taking in. Between Ritalin and Prozac, ginseng and aspirin. Between different physical states of fatigue, hunger, anger or joy. Between needing sexual outlet, the trance of sexuality and that certain feeling that comes after sexual satisfaction has been achieved. There is no consensus to consciousness. It flows constantly between borders which can not be measured.

A person in love is under the influence
Dad and mom are under the influence
A horny person is under the influence
A hungry person is under the influence

We are all under one influence or another. There is no consensus to consciousness. Consciousness has only one truth: it is always in a trance. Always immersed within itself and forgetful of all other consciousness states. A trance of fun, work, fame, family, love, studies, sexuality, ravenousness. Always in a trance.

Books are the true psychedelics

Psychedelics call you to develop your awareness to your consciousness and the ways in which it is constantly being formed and changed. It presents to you a world which is made of consciousness. Psychedelics may be the most intriguing phenomenon I have encountered in my life, but there is another thing which intrigued me no less over the years and keeps intriguing me even today. Books. Language.

In spite of everything, books and ideas remain probably the most consistent influence on who I was in life, and who I am becoming. Again this makes me understand that for me, books are the true psychedelics. After reading Brothers Karamazov I plunged into months of incessant spiritual elation. After reading Journey to the end of the night I experienced months of misanthropic thoughts. Doesn't the influence of these books remind one of the influence of certain psychoactive substances?

Ideas are psychoactive, and for me reading a book involves a strange kind of intoxication, sometimes reminding me of trips really. Sometimes when I am reading a book my heart is pounding so strongly as if it is going to burst from the power of ideas. As if any radical idea which might arrive in the next paragraph might cause my heart to explode.

Ideas intoxicate, and they are probably the most dangerous substance for my consciousness. They are the ones that keep driving my consciousness forward in this world, while making this living so exciting.

The entrance of a new idea into the system is like the entrance of a new substance for the Junkie. The idea junkie experiences the new idea like an exploding bomb in the head. Things appear to gain new dimensions, new colors and characters. In the beginning any small dose of that idea is intoxicating, but the more you deal with these ideas and enter that new world, you also develop a sort of tolerance to it. Of course the thing which is better about ideas in comparison to some addictive substances which people sometime irresponsibly meddle with, is that once the tolerance has built up inside you, you do not find yourself addicted to an idea. You just move on to the next one.

And again we get back to language and its amazing role in changing our consciousness. Books are machines for changing consciousness and generations of mystics, theologians and writers have understood that over the ages and used this cover to cover medium in order to create mind transforming machines which are more elaborate than the imagination can grasp. Books are consciousness transforming machines, only not everyone who opens a book knows how to operate the machine.

Do you know this archetypical picture of a book opening and worlds flowing out of it as a cascade of energies. A book so powerful, that upon opening it, you are violently drawn into it, like into a vortex, with no turning back? This archetype appears often in popular fantasy films such as The never ending story and in The Spiderwick Chronicles. However, this is no fantasy. This is the way a book functions when the machine works as it is supposed to work. It sucks you into it, splashing consciousness forms on you without giving out any warning and changing you forever.

Again, there is no consensus to consciousness

When you open a book, you do not know what this will do for your consciousness.
When you start fasting on Yom Kippur and visit the Synagogue you don't know what this will do to your consciousness (Ask Franz Rosenzweig)
When You are watching a commercial on TV you do not know what this will do to your consciousness.
When you decide to move into nature, you do not know what this will do to your consciousness.
When you buy a new cellular phone, you do not know what this will do to your consciousness.
When you started reading this article, you didn't know what this would do to your consciousness.

There are people (some of them regularly drink coffee and smoke cigarettes) that always warn you that psychoactive substances alter consciousness – and that they might change your 'true' consciousness.

My God! Would you please explain to me how it is possible to stay one moment in one consciousness state, without it changing?

I keep going on my path
On the celestial succession of minds
I am a vagabond of ideas
A vagabond of consciousness

do not listen to those
Who try to drag me back home
I know consciousness has no home
It is moving, and I am moving with it

Commercials 2.0: Advertising the divine

2008-04-29T19:42:00.009+03:00

Reality Sandwich published my article Commericals 2.0: Advertising the divine.

It is basically a piece about how to transform and inverse commercials from a malignant phenomena to a visionary, inspirational tool.

Here

The Internet is the collective Trip

2008-04-14T15:51:00.004+03:00

Mark Pesce once said that the Internet is humanity's collective trip. This sentence once sounded vague and unclear to me, but this week, as I was sitting in the social security office in Tel Aviv watching some woman grappling with the security guard I had a certain epiphany and it seemed to me that I understood what that meant a bit better.

As I sat there in the social security office I was reading Leo Buscaglia's book Love and trying to evade that pressing net of negative energies which surrounds this building. On the way out, when I encountered that security guard and woman quarreling I had to think about that bad vibe that rules that place. It was interesting because spiritual teachers in the New Age culture often speak about how we create our own reality, or in other words, how the things we think about influence the net of possibilities which surrounds us. Think good and it will be good, think bad and it will be bad.

Nothing new here yet. In fact the fact that we create our own reality has been reckoned with by spiritual teachers long before the New Age phenomenon was born and this kind of idea is actually crystal clear from within the psychedelic experience where each thought creates an hyperrealist reality. The only novelty here is that these ideas are now conveyed in films such as The Secret and become common knowledge.

But this element of creating your own reality which exists in the life of different people also has a collective aspect. People generally and quite validly argue against The Secret that it ignores the collective elements of the human condition. How can a boy who was born in Iraq, in Gaza, or in Shderot influence the reality of violence and poverty which surrounds him? Can he really create his own reality? Is his destiny not predestined to begin with? This kind of criticism is indeed quite valid, but if we see that the element of creating reality also has a collective aspect things might be a bit less difficult to understand.

And here comes the social security into the picture. The social security is a sort of really bad collective hallucination. It is Kafka's The Trial which has become reality, it is a bad trip you can just walk into any hour of the day if you wish to experience anger of frustration. Actually I am quite sure that a lot of the people who work in the social security office suffer from all kinds of problems just because they are working surrounded by that sort of energies many hours of their day.

In much the same way you can notice how the problems and maladies which are on the mind of the Israeli society is stuff that is being constantly transmitted through the media. I constantly get to meet people who think that the cosmic element which drives humanity and history is 'money' or 'sex'. This idea which might seem quite odd or myopic to people who are part of psychedelic or anyway spiritual circles reflects the order created by media shows such as Survivor or Israel's next top model – an order which is then reflected back by people into the media. And so a feedback system is created in which society and media feed each other with the notion that the important thing is money and sex. In this way the collective hallucination is created using the modern collective drugs of media.

To go back to the people in Iraq, Gaza or Israel. They all have a part in creating the reality in which they live. Something in the collective attitude contributed to the reality in which these societies exist today. But the Americans and the Germans also have a part in creating the psychic reality in which the live – this isn't even mysticism, this is plain mind-ecology*.

Let us get back to media. As I once mentioned in another post McKenna speaks about media as the tool which enables humanity to share symbols, ideas and actually share the collective unconscious. The media, the ruby in the crown of our magnificent noosphere is the psychic reality of our planet – it reflects the thoughts, symbols, feelings and notions which are going on on a planetary scale. It is the conscious and the unconscious of our planet. It is the not very lucid dream that we are having.

The Attention Economy

And here comes Mark Pesche's remark about the Internet as the collective trip back into view. What happens is that the more we continue in the information revolution, so does information become the most valuable commodity. And this trend will continue to encompass bigger and bigger parts of our economy in the next dozens of years, we are now only in the beginning.

Almost the whole of the internet is run on advertisements. The major sites, anyway. This economy which is based on advertisements is called the attention economy. It is called that way because the primary currency in this economy is attention. Everything we give attention to gets power from us. Whether we click on a link to read more about Lindsay Lohan, stay after the commercials to watch an item about Lindsay Lohan or watch a Lindsay Lohan clip on YouTube – we are wiring the planet's global brain and teaching it that Lindsay Lohan is something important – the same as when we click on any other subject, such as reading an article about Teilhard de Chardin.

The problem is of course that most of us would rather click on Lindsay than on good ole' Teilhard. These things are very clearly noted in editorial boards and by various bots and the collective mind keeps reorganizing itself in a process of feedback in order to readjust itself to the culture which has become a slave to primate conditionings, to monkeys with a mouse in their hand and dirty thoughts in their minds, going on in a perpetuate state of digital self-excitement. And while our culture used to have cultural standards which strove to limit or stir this process in a desired direction this is now all long gone.

But that is also the trippy part about this whole story. In the collective trip of the internet we are left to ourselves, to the whims of our consciousness. The attention economy is this trip. It functions like the psychedelic trip where everything we give attention too becomes ever more prominent while that which we ignore simply vanishes from existence.

Attention is the single most resource in the struggle for Humanity's future. Not soldiers, not airplanes, not sanctions, not atomic bombs – attention, something that each of us has a 100% of at all time – and we usually rather give it to Lindsay Lohan and it's myriad consumer variations.

Accusing the editorials and the program managers is in a sense like accusing ourselves. In the global brain there is not they, there is only us, as Rushkoff says. The editors and programmers act as feedback machines responding back to whatever impulses our brains create. We are the neurons of the brain, and we've got to think right – think about evolvement, transforming to something other and higher, to a flower to a new fractal.

In the attention economy confronting the infinite happens when you are holding the mouse in your hand. The place you surf to creates not only your reality, but also the collective reality. That attention is the one which creates reality, the worlds which are created around us. Everything we focus on grows and proliferates. Once we live it be, it will disappear. Your attention is the currency that builds and demolishes the worlds, it is the ultimate power, use it wisely.

* I wish to state that this description only explains a part of the situation and is of course incomplete and not exhaustive. Other parts of such situations are political, historical and circumstantial – and although it is not part of the discussion here. It is clear that no exhaustive debate about the historical fate of groups can be complete without it.

Media Resistance – An Interview with Douglas Rushkoff

2008-03-26T15:19:00.011+02:00

In july 2007 I had the opportunity to Interview Douglas Rushkoff for the Israeli site NRG (The internet site for the Israeli newspaper Maariv).

For those of you who don't know Rushkoff, he is considered by many to be one of the most important media critics of the last decades. He has published a series of bestseller books such as Media Virus and Coercion: Why we listen to what they say which deal (among other things) with media ecology, subversive uses of media and the way media, culture and people interact.

Rushkoff has also written a series of fictional books. Such as the ambitious graphical novel Testament: Akedah which transpires in part in a futuristic world in which future draftees are implanted with location tracking devices and whose other part follows the life of the biblical Abraham in 3 different episodes in his life.

It should be already apparent that Rushkoff does not cringe from taking two seemingly disparate topics and mixing them together. One of these at first surprising links that he's made and which made him both a sought after as well as controversial figure in American Judaism was the idea of "Open Source Judaism" – a blending of Judaism and open source, which actually might not be a blending at all, since for Rushkoff the two reverberate perfectly.

Judaism is for Rushkoff a religion of open source activists, literate people who can see the world around them as a code which can be read consciously and critically and also rewritten or reprogrammed. Judaism is thus actually a lesson in media literacy, our ability to be smart readers of the mediums and realities around us. It is not without reason, says Rushkoff, that the coming of age ceremony of Judaism is the Bar Mitzvah. In proving to be able of reading the biblical text, the code one becomes an adult.

In his Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, Rushkoff states that the basic values of Judaism are critical thinking and the readiness to destroy idols and stay on a never ending, convention breaking search. Rushkoff sees in these Jewish values powerful vehicles which can assist the modern man who is bombarded by a flood of aggressive media and marketing schemes.

If you ask me it is a shame that Rushkoff's ideas about Judaism has thus far not reached the Israeli public, since his radical reading of Judaism could well benefit the moldy image of Judaism in Israeli society today. This was partly the reason for this interview which opted to seek a different angle on Judaism and media.

Judaism is open source

Hartogsohn: Hey Douglas, so what is actually open source religion and open source Judaism?

Rushkoff: I suppose the easiest way to say it is that open source religion is the contention that religion is not a pre-existing truth but an ongoing project. It may be divinely inspired, but it is a creation of human beings working together. A collaboration.

I wrote a book on Open Source Judaism, entitled Nothing Sacred, because I thought Jews in particular needed to reconnect with the open source ethos at the religion's core. For many completely understandable reasons, Jews often use Judaism to justify certain static conditions - presumptions about race, nation, and favoritism. There's a need to "lock down" the religion and understand its stories historically rather than mythologically. And this makes it impossible to actually *do* Judaism.

Judaism is a process of interaction, deliberation, and ethical action. It's the process by which we make the world a better place. This was a radically original and revolutionary idea a couple of thousand years ago. It was illegal to presume that human beings can actually alter the story of the world. But that's what the escape from Mitzrayim (Egypt) was all about.

This is the original open source idea: to learn the underlying codes of the world in which we live, and rewrite them together to serve us all better. To participate.

Hartogsohn: Is this an essentially Jewish thing?

Rushkoff: Now, I do think Judaism's sister religions, as well as those that derived from Judaism - such as Christianity and Islam - have open source tenets as well. But I don't feel they're quite as central as they are in Judaism. People in these other religions really are supposed to *believe* things. As I've come to understand it, Judaism is more about crashing beliefs than constructing them.

Hartogsohn: When we carefully scrutinize Jewish culture from the Talmud and to the way Jewish Halacha has been assembled and received over the ages we can see it is actually already open source. Is open source Judaism anything new, or is it just radical in the meaning of getting back to the roots of Judaism?

Rushkoff: It is as classical as Judaism gets. But Jews don't practice Judaism anymore. It is too scary in light of all that's going on in the world. Judaism is just as hard as Buddhism or any real spiritual path. And it is incompatible with the rationale that American Jews, in particular, use to justify their lives.

It's particularly difficult to justify Israel using Torah stories if you want to also use those stories allegorically. The whole idea that everything is up for discussion is too threatening to those who need to use the text for political reasons. And the enforcement of certain ideas tends to require unifying myths, rather than open ones. If you can get people to believe a particular story in a particular way, they are easier to control.

So the necessities of state and social control really are at odds with the fundamental teachings of Judaism.

Hartogsohn: You have stated before that you see Judaism as a product of media literacy. How is Judaism related to media and media literacy and what is the Jewish message in that aspect?

Rushkoff: To me, Judaism is a product of media literacy. Hieroglyphs were “priestly writing,” and limited to the priest and royal classes. The invention of the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet turned the greater population into readers and writers. So when God says to Abraham ‘you will be a nation of priests,’ he may as well be saying ‘you will be a nation who can read and write.’ Imagine that! A whole nation of people who have attained literacy. What would that mean?

It would mean a people who no longer simply react to the whims of their gods, but instead write their own laws, record their own history, and who take the very controversial stand that human action makes a difference. You have to realize, in pre-Israelite times, to say that human beings made a difference was blasphemy – heretical. For the Israelites to run off to the desert after desecrating Egypt’s highest gods (sacrificing a calf was illegal, particularly on April New Year’s Day when he was being revered) and then create a legal and spiritual system based on life – that was revolutionary. Lechaim is a naughty thing to say in a society based on death cults.

Dealing with Media Viruses

Hartogsohn: Your books talk about a world where the people are being attacked and coerced by continually evolving media viruses. How does the hyper-Jew of the media age defend himself against ever evolving media viruses?

Rushkoff: Media Virus isn't about people being attacked by viruses; it's about how people can create and launch their *own* media viruses. Unfortunately, marketers tended to read the book more than radicals, and so it ended up becoming something called "viral marketing." And in this case, yeah, I suppose people are being subjected to something like viral attack. Except for the fact that the marketers are so very inept at what they do, it's more like flood of shit than carefully crafted viral assault.

The way to 'defend," as you put it, against media viruses is to be secure in own code and outlook. Things will always grab your attention if they're crafted well enough. Like an accident at the side of the road. The trick is the second part - is the code within that virus (like the DNA within a biological virus) - capable of confusing your own thoughts and intentions? You have to know who you are and what you want. Then, a piece of new information can be parsed and digested without throwing you totally off balance. You choose to interpolate the new idea or not to.

Hartogsohn: Your book Coercion which aimed to help consumers gain control in the consumer-media arms race. At the same time you also acknowledge that "they" are really "us" and meanwhile you also consult for corporations like Sony which wish to stay cutting edge. How can "Us" win against "They" when you are on both sides? Can one work with corporations and still "do no evil"?

Rushkoff: My book Coercion was aimed at helping consumers gain some agency in a consumer-media arms race. My book Media Virus was really a celebration of the datasphere's new complexity. I was celebrating how it was now operating more like an organism than a system of control.

Coercion took a step back, and tried to help people see how easily they transferred their autonomy to others. The idea of Coercion is that we see many institutions and people as a "they" - as an authority. When there actually is no such authority. We create "they." Without us, "they" don't exist.

As far as your us and them, there is none. There's only us. There are many human beings working in corporations who are the most programmed beings on the planet. Yes, they are doing terrible terrible stuff - but that's the reason why real thinking human beings need to go in there and help them come back into consciousness. Sometimes, it means convincing people in corporations to quit their jobs. I've done that. Sometimes it means helping a small group take over the company - take it back from those who have perverted its deeper purpose. I've done that.

Sometimes I just give up. I realize the place is too big and the people are too hardened to hear what I have to say. But those aren't the kinds of places that invite me in, to begin with. They look at my website or read my articles and very quickly understand what it is I'd be asking them to do.

Regrettably, Most people seem to think money is real

Marshall McLuhan used to say "There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." Understanding Media, McLuhan's masterpiece reads like a catalog of technologies, media and the symptoms they create. Rushkoff who is considered to be one of McLuhan's theoretical followers in the field of media critic today seeks to raise the consciousness to the various way media functions and foster an active and creative approach to media instead of passive reception.

Hartogsohn: Can the role of media be reversed? Can it turn from a disempowering agent into an empowering force? If so, then How?

Rushkoff: I think your questions betray an over-determined, almost binary way of understanding the world. I don't think things go one way and then we turn them around and make them go another. It is not just one thing. The media is many things, and it acts in many ways at many times on many people.

I think the best first step for helping people exploit media in appropriate, life-affirming ways would be to teach the biases of media. Different media have different biases. They were created with different purposes in mind. TV was created to market. The Internet was created to share. What is a blog? Is that the only way to use the Internet, or are there others? How was the Internet changed from a sharing medium to a publishing medium? Why does Rupert Murdoch like MySpace so much?

By understanding how different media and platforms work, and what sorts of behaviors they encourage, who in particular they empower, we end up in a better position to choose what we do.

But the first step is understanding that this stuff is programmed. It's not pre-existing. It's coded by people.

Hartogsohn: You have been described as a technorealist. Like Marshall McLuhan in his time you seem to be both the prophet of technological promises as well as a skeptic and harsh critic of the media. Has your view of media changed over the years? Where do you see the promises of new sorts of media and where do you see its dangers now and in the near future?

Rushkoff: I'm less hopeful about the immediate impact of the Internet. I thought we, as a civilization, were more ready for collective agency than we turned out to be. Marketers were faster and smarter than I gave them credit for. And money is a bigger force than I realized back then. I've always understood money to be a medium - something created, with rules, and with biases. But most people seem to think money is real. And that's a true obstacle.

So my belief in the promise of technology remains about the same. My respect for the social conditioning that people have undergone in the last century or so has increased, though. I think you could put the key to the universe in front of them and they would still be afraid to use it.

Go get some air

Hartogsohn: How would you advise our readers to go with their relations with the media: TV, commercials, the net?

Rushkoff: I don't have any single piece of advice that fits everyone. The best I could do would be to ask people to evaluate how a particular media experience makes them feel. Especially afterwards. Do you feel more alive? More social? If the answer to either one is "no," then consider doing something else next time.

Hartogsohn: If you could envision a utopist media society of the future which uses media in a smart and empowering way. How would that society look like?

Rushkoff: My utopian vision of the future is people engaging with one another in real space. Literally breathing together in the same room. If media can make the world more efficient so that people get more time to be with each other, for real, then it will have done its job.

Hartogsohn: Actually you surprise me. I was expecting maybe mind altering virtual realities. Why do you attribute that kind of importance to "real space", what is there about it that is so detrimental and necessary in your opinion.

Rushkoff: The body is a terrific interface for this dimension. The five senses haven't yet been surpassed by a screen and sound interface, and I don't expect them to. Most people can still tell the difference between sexual intercourse with a live human being, and masturbating to sexual imagery on the Internet. This is not a bad thing, as it's just possible there are aspects to sex that can't be recreated in a digital communications medium. Not every parameter of human experience can be taken into account in any interface.

And live contact has much much broader bandwidth than even a fiberoptic connection. People in real space communicate through their bodies, through position, through touch. Incarnate activity has many properties and feedback mechanisms that virtual processes don't.

The object of a virtual reality is not to replace life, just as the object of a map is not to replace the territory. Language doesn't replace emotions. God doesn't replace mystery.

Organic Jew – Mechanical Jew – Digital Jew - A Mcluhanesque reading of Judaism

2008-03-03T19:06:00.003+02:00

Yoav Ben Dov once wrote an article in which he divides the history of culture and its metaphors into 3 eras: the organic, the mechanic and the digital. This view seems to be generally true and is widely supported by other major era differentiations such as the three wave theorem of Alvin Toffler or the tribal-mechanical-electronic stages in the mcluhanesque divisions of history.

In this context I have come up with 3 different models of Judaism parallel to these 3 technological eras. These models enable us to understand Judaism in relation to it's surrounding technological environment, and offer a sort of McLuhanesque reading to Jewish history.

The Organic Jew – The organic Jew is the one who is sometimes called the "Simple Jew". This is the Jew who relates to God and religion in an organic fashion – meaning in a natural, direct, undogmatic and manner. Organic Judaism (I refer here to Talmudic times until the time of the Rishonim, but most of all to the time of the scriptures) is a Judaism without clear boundaries. A Judaism which the believer can still shape in different forms according to his understanding – in a way derived of the pre-industrial existence which is closer to the organic world. This begins with the direct and unique relation that each of the characters in the scriptures has with God, the anarchistic tendencies of the Talmud such as in the story about Rabbi Yosi Hagalili who would eat milk with poultry and the descriptions of the simple Jews in the stories of the Baal Shem Tov. The organic Jew manifests a world view in which religion is still a natural and inseparable part of Man's existence and the relations between Man and his God are organic, living and dynamic.

The Mechanical Jew – With the advent of the moveable type and printing technology which Mcluhan calls the first assembly line and the presenter of mass production, so arrives also a new kind of Jew, an assembly line Jew who is created in a uniform Shape.

The standardization of Talmudic [and other] texts which occurred throughout the world as a consequence of the move to print technology has caused the unification of the Halachic [Jewish law] norms. This process which brings about Orthodox Judaism is the direct result of the Gutenbergian world. The great intensification of publishing possibilities has lead to the publication of ever more Halachic laws which have broadened the judicial domain of Halacha to all parts of everyday life in an attempt to include any human deed inside the ever growing structure of Halachic thought. The result was of course a further standardization of religious texts.

The Digital Jew – The digital Jew springs forth at the end of the 20^th century with the information revolution, the growth of the datasphere, of networked existence and of a new class of Jews which reside on virtual terrains. In the postmodern, hypertextual and linked world of the digital Jew any attempt to coerce an exclusive and clearly defined path to Jewish meaning and God loses it's meaning. For the digital Jew any kind of faith or worldview can only be meaningful when is stands in connection with other nodes on the network.

This Jew which has certain similarities with the new-age or postmodern Jew is one with a rhizomatic Judaism which is connected to myriad strains within Judaism and outside it. He takes ideas from religions, philosophies and other spiritual movements and combines them within Judaism. This is in fact, a mashup Jew.

While there are still some organic Jews out there, the great majority of Judaism is still in the mechanic phase and the clearest symptom thereof is of course the stringent opposition to the Internet and information technology by most of the orthodox world, and the clinging to the book and printing technologies.

This orthodox clinging to gutenbergian technologies seems superfluous, though. In terms of the basic Jewish values of opposing idolatry, living between exile and redemption, and the view of the universe as a living text the virtual realm seems to be an even better platform for Jewish thought than the book. However, I am not worried, as more and more digital Jews appear around us all the time. For many who were born outside orthodox and religious systems and chose to identify themselves with Jewish tradition, the digital Judaism seems today like the only relevant choice.

Technology is Holy - An Interview with Kevin Kelly

2008-02-18T18:09:00.014+02:00

Last October I had the chance to interview Kevin Kelly. For those of you who don't know Kelly's work, he has a very long career as a prophet of technology and technological thought. He has been one of the contributors to the highly influential Whole Earth Catalog magazine, editor of the Whole Earth Review, involved in the founding of the seminal virtual community The WELL, and executive editor of WIRED.

Apart from all these impressing titles, Kelly has issued some of the more interesting writing in the junction which crosses computers, biology, evolution, cybernetics and economy. His book Out of Control is a mind boggling introduction to the ways in which biology and technology intersect in the 21^st century and his bestseller book New Rules for the New Economy is one of the most spiritual books I've read about economy, which already in 1998 managed to foresee many of the developments which have shaken net economy in the decade since (Just for example, the book explicitly discusses the long tail [p.103] and web 2.0 [p.121] – just without calling them that way yet). Kelly is also an engaging speaker, and there are some very good podcasts of him on the net which you can freely download. From these I would like here to recommend the inspiring Future of the Webp podcast he did with EconTalk, and his fascinating lecture titled: The next 100 years of science.

Kelly is highly optimistic about technology, its meaning and impacts. For that reason he is often categorized as a technoutopian. While this might be true, he is certainly not your average one dimensional techno-utopist but something more much more interesting than that. Part of that is because he is also a born again Christian, which gives another more theological angle to his writing. Another thing which makes his views even more intricate is that he has spent years of his life back-packing in Asia, writes a lot about biology and even stands as the founder of the All Species Foundation, which means he is committed to life and nature, and is not oblivious, hopefully, to the ecological and spiritual meanings of the natural world.

I originally did this interview with Kelly for the Israeli site Nana, and at the same time also for the Israeli spirituality and alternative culture magazine, Chaim Acherim, So parts of our conversation already appeared in Hebrew both on the nana website, and on the article which I wrote for Chaim Acherim.

The truth is however that most of what we talked about couldn't find its place in both places. Part of the reason was that during the interview I became so involved and interested in what Kelly had to say. His answers were just too meaningful to me on different intellectual and personal levels, so that I did the thing that a professional journalist should never do. I just threw away all my other questions and concentrated on the questions that I had buzzing in my mind in that time, and all through reading Kelly's books – questions that might not always fit journalistic articles, but to my mind held great importance.

So without anymore introductions, here is the Interview:

* One last important comment. English is not my mother tongue. I transcribed the interview to the best of my abilities. However, it is possible that I made some errors in the process. Any grammar mistakes which might be part of the article should be attributed to me and not to Kelly, which, I assure you, speaks perfectly good English

Hartogsohn: Fred Turner's book From Counterculture to Cyberculture describes your move from involvement in the countercultural movement in the spirit of the 1960's into the idea of technology as a tool for liberation, or anyway that's how Turner put that. In one of the interviews with you I heard you say that the vision of simple life in nature simply wasn't enough. What made you turn away from that vision? What was unsatisfactory in this kind of new communal project?

Kelly: Personally, I never lived on a commune, so I haven't turned from it because I was never there. The kind of 1960's counterculture was a very broad movement that included many kinds of countercultures, ranging from many that were very political to many that were very apolitical. From people who were experimenting with communal living to those who were like myself kind of nomadic, not really drifting but hitchhiking around the world. I had dropped out, but not necessarily dropped into anything.

Part of that counterculture was also this idea of trying to remake civilization. So there were people who had moved from the cities to the country, who weren't living on communes but who lived solar green style, growing their own fruit and that was close to what I was doing, and the idea there was that you would try to empower individuals rather than organizations, that's the solution. Secondly, there was a sense of trying to make an alternative, to reboot civilization and start from the grind up and see if we could start up with something different. I think that experiment did not work very well.

I think once you started living on a farm growing your own food, digging a well by hand, grinding your wheat into flour - you can do that for a couple of years and then you rediscover electricity and the marvels of modern life and nobody really sustained that because they decided that actually civilization was pretty good.

But some of the other lessons from that counter culture say the drug aspect, the sense of expanding human consciousness, and the idea of empowering individuals. Those two aspects were brought into the emerging computer revolution. I mean, I think the whole counterculture would have completely died off if it hadn't been for personal computers.

I think what the aging hippies like myself discovered in the personal computer and the communication of the internet revolution - was that it kind of tipped the balance of power back to individuals in a way that was really hard to imagine in the 1950's. and secondly, it gave another opportunity to make another kind of alternative civilization. So you have virtual reality, second life. All these things brought again the sense that we can go back to the primitives, and we can construct some sort of civilization, see if we can do it better.

Then the third thing which didn't come up until recently was this sort of rediscovery of communalism, the web 2.0, the idea of sharing, the gift economy, the what I would call dot.communism, Wikipedia - the whole sense of the collective being very powerful. That by a group exercise you have the highest mind.

All these kinds of things that you had a in the counterculture, like open source, all these things have a new life in this new media and so they are basically being embraced by former hippies and it becomes it's own kind of counterculture although unlike the first counterculture this is being backed by venture capitalists, so it's kind of weird blend of open source revolutionaries getting billions of dollars of ventures capital.

Hartogsohn: Regarding second life and virtual reality which you've mentioned. These are no doubt very exciting technologies, but both are still experiencing some rather troubling difficulties. Virtual reality is a technology that's been promised for a very long time and doesn't seem to ever arrive, and even second life seems to experience a sort of backlash these days, even if only temporary.

There is this feeling that these virtual worlds don't find their place in the fabric of existence yet, that maybe virtual lives are something that fits only certain parts of society, that somehow ubiquitous computing seems to be the more successful trend. Maybe people don't really know what to do inside 3D virtual spaces or even totally immersive virtual spaces that are very interesting to think about, but the question is: are we really built for that? Where do you think this is going? Will virtual reality happen and will virtual worlds become prominent as it is sometimes promised?

Kelly: A virtual reality platform will absolutely, as it continues to be developed, as multiple dimensions of reality continue to be added, as it improves in resolution, at speed, in depth - yes it will certainly be a place that will do things.

There are tons of tons of reasons why now in this current evolution it won't go very far. But to me those arguments have always been there and it's much more impressive to me is how many people are already spending as much time as they are right now [in virtual worlds], because as these ideas was first broached say 1988, let's say 20 years ago, no one believed that people would spend any amount of time in it.

Basically 20 years ago if you showed them second life now people would be dumbfounded, because they were projecting that nobody's going to spend any time [in virtual worlds], it's so flat, it's so artificial, it's a toy. So here we have millions of people spending millions of hours.

So even though it has a long way to go, it has gone much further than a lot of people would have believed to begin with. So there is still a tremendous amount of problems and the reason why we don't spend all our time there, and I don't believe that we'll ever spend all our time there - there is no reason to spend all out time because we have this world which does things very well – is that it's an auxiliary not a substitute, it's a supplement. And all media become supplements. It's another choice, it's another avenue.

And what second life is trying to do right now is trying to figure out the exact talents that kind of world has. What can it do that we can't do in this real life. There is no real reason to replicate the things that we already do, because we can use real life for that.

It's trying to find it's place, trying to figure out really the good things that we can do in there but we can't do anywhere else. And that will take time but it's also a changing destiny, because as technology improves the answer also changes.

Hartogsohn: You write a lot about biology, but does nature still play an important role in your thinking? Do you think that technology and nature can be integrated and if so, then how?

Kelly: My first book, Out of Control, was a book documenting the seemingly opposing faces of one system and those opposing faces were the biological and the technological which many people see as antagonistic: that Technology expands at the price of harming biology, and that biology is everything that technology is not. I suggested that in fact the two are really different facets of the same thing and that as technology increases in sophistication and complexity that it will become virtually indistinguishable from biology and that at the same time, in our efforts to engineer biological things, the biological world will become indistinguishable from technology and naturally I think that the biological world as it is right now has tons and tons of lessons for us as designers of technology.

How biology does things has tremendous importance and can be transferred to the technological world and has to be transferred in order for us to manage these complex systems. Sometimes we will invent ways that nature hasn't, that's fine. But many times we'd find that nature has already discovered things, because it already had 4 billion years of evolution to try almost every possible solution. In the biological world as a whole there is 4 billion years of learning, there is so much that nature has learned. It will take centuries to unravel it.

Hartogsohn: There is also a different aspect about the relations between biology and technology which I wish you could address, though. Mankind has evolved through millions of years in nature, we are built into the fabric of nature. We view nature as something beautiful and relaxing. Just being in nature can have positive impacts on us as biological beings. On the other side, this sort of technological living has its costs and living apart from nature can result in stress or alienation. Do you see what I mean, and if you do, do you see any kind of solution or integration to those two factors of nature and technology?

Kelly: I understand what your are saying that as animals, as mammals with a couple of billion years of recent evolution, that our migration towards being more technological beings is stressful and I acknowledge that. I think that's the way things are. I think technology, in the sense of cultural technologies, things that we build around us: tools and remedies, medicines, all these things are one way that we compensate for that.

And eventually in the long term we will begin to genetically program, genetically engineer our own species, our own selves, in different ways to again deal with the fact that we humans are not just only biological animals, but we also have a mind. Our mind will play a greater and greater role in determining our future so that we will actually modify our bodies to facilitate the extension of our minds.

And the human nature has changed over time. Human nature has always changed and it always will continue to change, so it not a fixed entity, it's something that we are making up that we are checking and they may be more than one human nature, there may be human natures in plural. Certain people may decide that they actually do not believe that we should change our selves from this point on and they may have their own past, and other people are very eager to change themselves as much as possible.

Hartogsohn: I'm researching the idea of de Chardin's Omega Point on an academic basis and I think I've identified 3 key thinkers in the development of this idea. These 3 thinkers are for me Teilhard de Chardin, Marshall Mcluhan and yourself, which is also very interesting because Teilhard de Chardin and Marshall Mcluhan were both devout Christians, which I understand you are too. So I'm very interested in knowing what do you think about the idea of the Omega Point, and about those 2 thinkers, and how does this all relate to Christianity?

Kelly: What's interesting about de Chardin and Mcluhan is that I find both of them are really hard to read. I have trouble getting through any of their books. I was the one that made Marshall Mcluhan the patron saint of wired. I think that's how Marshall Mcluhan is best used. I think you don't want to read it in full length. Just as quotes. Just to read his little quotes. I think if you're reading him this really is a long media for him. He needs to be on TV. Marshall Mcluhan is made for YouTube.

Also when I read de Chardin I kind of plow and trouble and stumble through some of his writings. There's a lot of powerful signals that I'm just not understanding. My understanding of what they mean by these things is very corrupted or in some ways polluted. It's almost secondary, in the sense of what I know about them is really things that I read other people say about them. So I just really wanted to let you know that I don't really feel as if I have a very good first hand knowledge of what they mean.

So that being said, I would add a third person to that trinity. It's de Chardin and Marshall Mcluhan and then the third one is Freeman Dyson. And Freeman Dyson, although he personally claims to be a some sort of Christian, also claims to be a Christian without theology.

What he has is this idea that Omega Point is basically a mind infinite in all directions, that we have an escalating movement, a manifestation of the mind and that basically through his astrophysics calculations, that we have an extension of the mind. And he asks, can a mind or all minds extend into the universe, and he believes that as theoretically possible and sees that as an omega point.

And in the vein of Dyson there is Frank Tipler. His book is called The Physics of Christianity. He goes even further as an astrophysicist and talks about an omega point which is where the mind takes over the entire universe and collapses or converges in the sense of de Chardin convergence into a smaller and smaller space and that in this movement towards a compressed universal computer, that all previous mind is basically simulated so he imagines this as a sort of resurrection.

Basically the whole thing becomes a simulation on the other side which he equates with the heaven and other people would say is kind of like an ultimate second life. So I think that vision colors mine although I don't think I go as far as Frank Tipler imagining that our world is like second life on the other side but I'm closer to Freeman Dyson's in that I think my expectation of an omega point is an information based, its couched in information vocabulary, in the grammar of computation and information and so I don't think I have an articulation but I don't think Mcluhan did either, it's just more of a hunch.

Hartogsohn: So how does your technological thinking relate to your Christianity?

Kelly: I think a traditional question or issue for theologians in the past was wrestling with the relationship between biological life and God. Initially it was trying to understand humans and god. And then Darwin came along and sort of set man and humans apart. So they had this whole other thing: the rest of the world. What is the relationship of all other biology and humans in god. And then we had in the 60's this whole issue of where does the environment, where does ecology fit in terms of the sacred. I am much more interested now in the relationship between technology and God. What is the meaning of technology in the cosmos? what is the relation between God and the cosmos?

My conclusion has been that in order for us to answer the question does the universe have a purpose, the only way to answer that question is through technology. And that technology actually will turn out to be the way that we come to understand ourselves and our identity and our purpose in the universe. And that of course at the same time technology will constantly shift what that purpose is. So it's sort of co-evolutionary in that sense. But it's necessary for us to make technology in order for us to understand our role in the universe.

As an example of that, to go back to Freeman Dyson talking about the mind, I don't think that it's possible for us as humans to have any kind of grasp of the infinite and what God might be, when we have only one type of thinking and that in fact what our assignment so to speak is, is to create as many varieties of minds as possible, that it will take an infinite number of different kinds of thinking and kinds of minds, artificial and alien to begin to grasp what the universe is and how that works.

What that means it that through technology which is either through the creation of artificial minds, or the discovery of other intelligences, or the creation of biological intelligences through breeding, what we're trying to do is to increase the ways of understanding that collectively. Millions and millions of different ways of thinking and viewing the world. Only through that way can we grasp the nature of our purpose.

Hartogsohn: In that vein, I heard you mention a new book you are working on with the title 'What does Technology Want'.

Kelly: Yeah and what's interesting is that the alternative working title of the book is called 'Holy Technology'. And my belief is that the roots of technology actually begin in the big bang, that it's an extropic system. Extropy, the opposite of entropy, is where you have increasing order over time, and so life is an extropic system. The mind and some of our technological systems also often exhibit extrophic properties.

If you go back to the beginning of the big bang, the origins of extropy and extropic systems begin even in the very beginning, as the expansion of the universe allowed galaxies, some of these self sustaining non-equilibrium states which are also necessary for extropic systems.

So the roots of technology reach all the way to the big bang. And what technology brings in the greater sense is increasing opportunities, increasing freedom, increasing possibility space and increasing ways to explore and inhabit and evolve basically through the evolution of evolution. And so those things I'm defining as divine. As not just neutral, As good, as a reflection of the divine spirit. And so I'm saying the meaning of technology is that it increases good overall in the world.

Hartogsohn: When should we expect the book.

Kelly: I haven't written it yet. What I just told you is very poetic but I'm trying to have it grounded it in some way numerically quantifiable. I'm trying to make it as falsifiable as possible which is much harder.

Notes from the Underground: Iranians and Israelis connect online

2008-02-13T10:08:00.002+02:00

About a month ago, I published this article in Hebrew about the links between the Israeli and the Iranian blogospheres. The Canadian-Israeli blogger Lisa Goldman who was interviewed for the article translated the piece into English and put it on her blog today. Meanwhile Arash Kamanajir, the Iranian Blogger which I interviewed for my piece has issued his own Persian version of the piece and published it in his blog, and the German Daniel Rotters have posted his German version of the article in ex oriente, So this has become a sort of multinational joint peace-blogging operation.

I post Lisa's English Version of the article here.

*****

On 25 December 2007, at the University of Tel Aviv, the Netvision Institute held its third conference on the struggle to maintain freedom of information on the Internet. The main topic was Iran: the attitude toward the Internet in Iran, Iranian hackers and also our Persian neighbour’s rapidly expanding blogosphere.

The conference did not go unnoticed in Iran. Five days later, on December 30, the Iranian news site Khedmat, which is considered close to former president Khatami, published an item under the headline, “Zionists Express Interest in the Subject of the Internet in Iran.”

“‘The Internet in Iran and its various facets’ was the subject of a conference that took place at Tel Aviv University in Occupied Palestine,” reported Khedmat. “The conference participants discussed the role of the Internet in contemporary society, and Internet struggles. Iranian blogs, rap music and the role of the Internet in creating other types of music that imitate Western culture were amongst the subjects that interested the Zionists.”

The article further reported that a committee of “Zionist experts” criticized Iran’s limited access to some internet sites.

Israel is a concept that does not exist

The Israeli media has been paying attention to the lively Iranian blogosphere for several years now. Amongst other things, the visit to Israel of Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan (Hebrew link) was mentioned in several international media outlets. From the perspective of the Israeli reader, Iranian bloggers are a comforting alternative source of information about another Iran - one that is friendlier and less aggressive to Israel. Over the years, articles about the Iranian blogosphere portrayed it as a different voice from a society that was usually shown in the Israeli media as closed and extremist.

Recently, the Iranian blogosphere has been the subject of academic studies in Israel. In the talk she gave at the Netvision conference, for example, Dr. Liora Handelman-Bavor said that, eight years after the launch of the first Persian language blog, “The [Iranian] regime’s attempts to suppress the blogosphere have largely failed.” Dr. Handelman-Bavor claimed that the Iranian blogosphere was intimately connected with alternative culture, the graffiti phenomenon and street art.

And now, based on the item in Khedmat, it seems that the Iranian media is aware of Israel’s interest in the Persian blogosphere.

But according to Arash Kamangir, an Iranian blogger who lives in Canada, few Iranian bloggers are aware of the interest they have aroused in Israel. “You probably know that the term ‘Israel’ does not exist in the official language of the regime of Iran. Even in my passport I am banned from traveling to ‘Occupied Palestine,’” he wrote in response to the questions I sent by email. “The average Iranian blogger is very anxious about being known as a person ‘who has connections with Israeli guys.’ A very interesting example happened a short while ago, and I believe it describes the whole situation.”

When Ahmadinejad moved to WordPress

As a means of illustrating the extent to which Iranian bloggers must be careful to avoid contact with Israelis, Kamangir offered an amusing-yet-sad anecdote about an incident that occurred last summer. This incident also shows how ordinary people who are citizens of enemy states find themselves making contact - albeit of a hesitant, groping kind.

“A friend of mine writes a blog about technology,” recounts Kamangir. “And a very helpful plugin for this system is called FireStats and is designed by an Israeli blogger. When my friend started using FireStats he was so fascinated by the functionalities that he wrote a post about it, in Persian of course. The next day he found out that he is getting hits from a Hebrew page. It turns out that the Israeli guys are also amazed that an Iranian person is using their code. So, they write a Hebrew post which reads, in English, ‘The formula to peace with Iran.’”

Omri, the Israeli blogger who discovered the post by Kamangir’s friend with the technology blog, wrote an amusing post that describes an imaginary conversation between Ahmadinejad and the leaders of Iran, in which the latter warn the president against attacking Israel because, “FireStats is developed in Givatayim, so if we destroy Gush Dan [Greater Tel Aviv] there won’t be any more versions!”

One of the Israeli readers surfed over to the Iranian’s blog and left a comment - in Hebrew. This apparently freaked the Iranian blogger out a bit. He deleted the comment and went over to the Israeli blog, where he left a comment asking for an explanation of what had been written about him. And that is how a discussion in awkward English was initiated between Iranian and Israeli bloggers. But a Utopian dialogue that unites “enemy” bloggers in an amusing exchange about politics and WordPress can be taken only so far.

“I wrote a piece titled ‘Iran-Israel Peace through a Wordpress Plugin,” recounts Arash. “Because of the sensitivity of the issue I sent an email to my friend asking for his permission before I would publish the post. The answer was very short: ‘Arash, you know this can be dangerous.’”"

So Iranian bloggers cannot write openly about Israeli bloggers?

“When Iranian bloggers have to censor themselves when it comes to sharing the mutual passion for scripts and other nerdy stuff with Israeli fellows, I guess showing any attention to ‘the Israeli interest in the Iranian blogosphere’ is out of context.”

So why are you not more cautious about entering into contact with Israeli bloggers?

“I live outside Iran, in Canada. There is a saying in Persian, “When you are drowning it does not matter if it’s one meter or 100 meters.”

Posts from the Underground

Estimates of the number of blogs in Iran range from 170,000 to 700,000. These are certainly impressive numbers, but Kamangir says that they are not an accurate reflection of Iranian society - particularly in the sense that the people who live in the less developed areas are unrepresented. “Most Iranian bloggers are middle class university students,” he writes. According to Kamangir, Iranian bloggers tend to be more liberal than the rest of the population.

On the other hand, Kamangir stresses the importance of differentiating between the opinions expressed by the Iranian regime and those of the ordinary people. “A friend of mine who came from Iran a few days ago was telling me that it is quite common to see Iranians criticize the regime, even using offensive words, in the public transit.”

“At the same time,” continues Kamangir, “A big portion of the Iranians have been exposed to the propaganda of the regime for decades and thus have unintentionally become ambassadors of the Islamic entity in many aspects…there is a big difference between an Iranian who is living inside Iran and the one who has had the experience of living in a free society, such as Canada.” According to Kamangir, when Iranian leave Iran they “start to question what they have been fed by the regime for a long time and start to think independently.”

“Blogs written by Iranian students abroad play a major role for these ‘new-born’ Iranians,” he writes. “Fortunately, this trend of free thinking is not limited to the Iranians who live outside the motherland. There is a huge number of blogs written by Iranians who live inside Iran and these blogs substantially question the official opinions of the regime. Interestingly, the questioning covers issues ranging from the official narration of Islam to human rights and sex.”

A different image of Israel

Although the circumstances are not yet ripe for an Iranian-Israeli blogger connection that could be a contra to the enmity of the Iranian and Israeli regimes, Kamangir writes that “…very strong links have been formed between the Iranian and the Israeli blogospheres. The strongest one, which I am aware of, is our communications with Lisa Goldman and her blog, On the Face. From time to time I translate her posts to Persian and the statistics of my blog, which I too get from FireStats, shows that a lot of my visitors follow her posts passionately. There are of course other Israeli bloggers whose blogs the Iranian bloggers follow, but Lisa has become almost an icon* for many Iranian bloggers I have talked to.”

“The Israeli blogosphere in English is a window into Israeli society for Iranians,” said Lisa Goldman in an interview for Nana10. “That is why I often translate items from Israeli blogs [in Hebrew], in order to expose a different view. Because the most interesting things written about Israel are written only in Hebrew.”

Goldman, a Canadian-born freelance journalist, spoke about some of the fascinating encounters created by the connection between the Iranian and Israeli blogospheres.

“I do receive emails from Iranians. It is as if they want us to know that they are not all as they are made to seem in the media, and I’ve had some fascinating encounters. There was someone in Tehran who used to chat with me via Messenger. He was a really intelligent, knowledgeable guy who knew excellent English. We used to chat about the situation in Iran, the elections, democracy and Israel, about which he was remarkably well informed. He even spoke a little Hebrew. But he refused to tell me his real name, and he was pretty paranoid. Each time he logged on, he was at a different computer and using a different online identity. I felt as though I were receiving messages from the Resistance. It was an amazing experience, but one day he disappeared and I haven’t heard from him since.”

How do Iranian bloggers find your blog?

“Look, I try to show a more human, complex and nuanced picture of Israeli life. They’re sort of stuck behind the Middle Eastern version of the Iron Curtain, but they’re very curious about us. They want to find out more, and it’s as if they’re extending their hands out through the Iron Curtain. The fact that I don’t write only about politics, but also about my day-to-day life in Tel Aviv, shows them a lively, modern, Levantine city that they would never see in the mainstream media.”

Fewer reasons to kill one another

So are blogs the way to create unmediated contact between Iranians and Israelis who, it sometimes seems, are led by politicians whose careers were built on a mutual agreement to issue bellicose threats against one another? When the media on one side serves the interests of the regime, and the media on the other side sells newspapers with lurid headlines about existential threats caused by Iranian nuclear warheads, perhaps the blogosphere could be an alternative source of information.

Eli Cohen, a senior research manager at Netvision, says, “The internet facilitates connections between individuals and bridges between cultures. Once you neutralize the political landmine it is possible, with the help of the internet, to create wonderful interpersonal relationships between human beings and to see that both your sorrows and your joys are very similar.”

Goldman, too, sees blogs as a tool for creating understanding between peoples. “We must find a way to get past the pre-conceived notions and one-dimensional portraits presented by the mainstream media,” she says. “They just perpetuate conflicts. I think that if you hear a human voice from the other side, that’s the beginning of the way.”

“I am not a sociologist. Neither am I a philosopher. However, I do know that when people talk they find less reasons to kill each other,” agrees Kamangir. “And this is what blogging is so generously providing us with.”

Technomysticism – A Manifesto

2008-01-28T19:34:00.001+02:00

For the past few years I have been writing extensively (In Hebrew) about a topic which I label with the term "Technomysticism". I am often asked to define the meaning of this term. In this article I would like to outline the field of Technomysticism: the basic problem it presents and the solution it offers.

Technomysticism is, to put it shortly, harmony with technology. But before we try to define harmony with technology we should first ask, what is technology?

What is Technology?

The definition of technology seems clear enough at first, but in order to understand the concept of Technomysticism to tackle the concept of technology at a deeper level, which will enable a more fundamental discussion of the meaning of technology and our relation to it.

Technology, seen from its most fundamental aspect is the power of the many. What technology does is to analyze and divide unitary concepts into distinguished sub-constituents which allows it manipulate them in order to achieve a goal. This can be seen in any machine: mechanical, electronic, biological or intellectual. The clocks ticks with moving parts, the computer runs series of sub-programs, our body is a company of systems, and thought is the analytical divide of reality into concepts.

Technology, in its widest sense is not just computers and gadgets. These are only sub-components of a greater technological society. Technology as a principal of existence is as old as the universe, but on the material level it is at least as old as the biological realm. We find the beginnings of technology around the Cambrian explosion[1] when unicellular protozoa first became multi-organisms, utilizing the power of the many in order to create more and more technological functions. Thus, as Mcluhan implies, all biology is technology: an eye is a technology for seeing, a stomach is a technology for energy production, and a leg is a technology for movement. Biologies are technologies. In fact, de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man can easily be read as a zoological prequel to Mcluhan's understanding media, describing the influence of biological mediums on the evolution of consciousness.

The many finds various manifestations and myriad ways to utilize the powers of the many in order to achieve different goals: thus we have emotional technologies (e.g. NLP), intellectual technologies (e.g. Analysis) and spiritual technologies (e.g. tai-chi). The common factor for all of these is that they use complex functions in order to achieve a certain goal.

Technology is the manifestation of God the one in this world. Seen from a mystics point of view, technology is god's way of handling it's descent to earth, it's growth from being infinite oneness into being many different things, biological and technological. Technology is the process happening to the one source when it's becoming immanent, rather then just transcendent. To put it in other words, technology is the strategy of the one, to deal with its becoming many. From a cosmic or spiritual point of view technology can be called the immanent, the principle of judgment (in the language of Kabbalah, 'Din'), secularism or just logic.

The Fragmentation of Humanity

The history of technology, which includes within it the history of the sub-component of mankind (one of technology's highest achievements, the creation of a technologically evolving species, or meta-technological species) is the history of fragmentation – of the becoming many.

Fragmentation begins in the biological realm, with the rise of ever more diversified biological systems and with the fragmentation of the body to an increasing number of organs and functions. It goes on with the creation of more complex (increasingly wired) brains, capable of more complex thoughts – breaking unitary reality into more and more senses and perceptions.

In the human realm fragmentation is experienced as the fragmentation of knowledge fields and the fragmentation of expertise: a vast range of new professions proliferating, and new specialized knowledge areas which are created incessantly.

The most fundamental effect of fragmentation is the fragmentation of cognition which is experienced very vividly in our times. Carl Sagan has in his "Dragons of Eden"[2] an illustration which shows the relative part of the brain's attention which is allocated to each of the human organs. It goes without saying that each added organ fragments human attention even more. The history of biology, as the history of the fragmentation of the body into more and more parts and perceptual organs has been the history of the fragmentation of consciousness.

In an age where, if one wishes to put it in McLuhanesque terms, technologies as extensions of the human body abound – human attention is being fragmented ever more increasingly. Modern man is connected to an ever increasing number of communication channels and data streams from his incessantly sprouting technological organs: cellular phones, television, radio, printed media and above all the Internet with its dozens of fragmentizing media organs ranging from email and YouTube to instant messaging and Facebook applications.

Technology offers the power of possibility. To have it, is to have increased possibility space. However, does possibility space in itself increase well being? Not necessarily, and sometimes, following the work of Barry Schwartz[3], far from it.

Thus when left to their own the loose forces of technology induce (among other more positive traits) neurosis, schizophrenia and malcontent. Technological maladies cover the range from internet addiction to a decreased span of attention. Human beings who have to adapt to technology at an exponentially increasing rate experience this often as stress and disquiet. Digital existence is experienced by body and soul as a kind of future shock.

Media theorists such as Steven Johnson[4] have proposed that the increasing complexity of popular culture is accompanied by an increase in the complexity of our brains and our ability to process vast streams of data. Playing video games, engaging with an increasing amount of media simultaneously does heighten certain sorts of intelligence and is inspirational in its own way.

However While new networked intelligences and literacies (e.g. media literacy, digital literacy, gaming literacy etc.) are on the rise, we are experiencing a decline of old literacies and intelligences. I am not talking about textual literacy only but about much more fundamental "nature literacy" – the ability to relate to nature or even the ability to meditate – to stay in oneness. This causes a certain imbalance of a humanity lured into the many, without the ability to keep focus.

Technomysticism

"There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." (Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage)

Does this mean that we have to give up technology? By no means, technology is sacred, it is the means of God to manifest itself in the world by ever evolving and more complex forms and attain higher, more diverse and complex forms of self-knowledge of the possibilities within EnSof, the infinitude of Godly power.

Moreover, technology is the basic software running in universe's computer, the cosmic principle of extropy running up against the stream of entropy. It can not and will not be stopped. What can be done is developing a heightened sensibility to technology – a new harmony with technology.

Mystical and spiritual traditions have been divided through the ages[5] to transcendent ones (fundamental monotheism), immanent ones (paganism) and non dual. All great mystical religions, from Buddhism to Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism have non dual traditions within them which are considered by many to be the zenith of sublime religious awareness.

Non-dual traditions sanctify both the transcendent and immanent faces of God, both the heavenly and earthly side – the power of the one, and the power of the many: God's origin in the undivided unity of the one (Mysticism in its purity) and technology in its courage to expand the presence of God from undivided oneness into new structured forms.

Different spiritual traditions also teach a non dual way of being. This is done in the Zazen practice in Zen Buddhism, in the "raising of the spark" in Jewish Hasidism, and in the practice of Kung-Fu to give a few examples.

I wish to concentrate on that last example a bit. According to Chinese tradition the practice of Zen and Meditation assists one in gathering Chi. Martial arts are the arts of releasing that Chi correctly. This is why the Chi arts and Martial arts are considered two complementary arts. While one cultivates the relation to unity, the other one teaches the right way to channel that unitary energy into multiplicity.

The emphasis that Kung-Fu puts on the ability to perform different complex activities while staying intent and focused makes it into to a prime form of Technomysticism. The kung-fu master can perform different complex tasks simultaneously while remaining clearly focused – sustaining a tranquility of both mind and breath.

Is a form of digital Kun-Fu possible? Can we develop a sacred relation to technology, one which will enable us to use technology in a harmonic fashion? Can we learn to navigate vast virtual spaces and stay emotionally and spiritually balanced? I am talking about a technology which will be virtual yet green, engaging yet relaxing, focusing yet mind-expanding.

Technology has a central role in the universe. It stands in the place of one of two poles which according to most spiritual religions are the basis of all creation. Kabbalah teaches that God first created the world in the power of Judgment, which is the power of separation and the many. However a world based on judgment only could not survive and thus God remade the world in a perfect balance between the two poles. This balance is the basis of all life.

If set loose, the power of technology could run over humanity and life. However, if humanity will be able to integrate higher and ever growing orders of technology into a unitary and harmonic consciousness then it will fulfill its evolutionary and spiritual call - the appeasement of the opposites. This is also the vision of the Omega Point as Teilhard de Chardin describes it: where individuality and collectivity are integrated into a new order of being.

Technomysticism aims to further this goal of the integration of the one and the many in an harmony with technology and although I will not go into go into the details of different techno mystic strategies here, I will only state here that I firmly believe it is possible. Moreover, I believe the future of mankind and of technology depends on that ability in this increasingly technological age.

[1] This is a bit simplified, since eukaryotic cells also have divided functions, and thus, technology.

[2] Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden

[3] Barry Schwarz, The Paradox of Choice, Why More Is Less.

[4] Steven Johson, Everything Bad Is Good For You: How popular culture actually makes us smarter.

[5] Among other methods of division of course.

Mind Interfaces

2007-11-28T02:02:00.001+02:00

In order to understand why different psychoactive substances have functioned as great creativity accelerators during human history and why and how such psychoactives lead to greater creativity some metaphors from the world of computing my come in handy.

Drugs are a technology, but they are a mental technology. This technology enables us to think using a different interface. The kind of interface which tryptamines (LSD, Psilocybin Mushrooms, DMT etc.) create enables a much tighter interaction between the different parts which constitute consciousness.

Synesthesia, the mixing of different senses, is often induced by tryptamines. One can see sounds or hear landscapes (This btw. gives new meaning to the part in the Torah in which it is said that during their spiritual ascension on Mount Sinai the Israelites saw the sounds). Other forms of synesthesia are also possible. The interaction between different parts of the mind is much closer, more associative and free. Words become images, images become words, and different ideas are hyper connected to each other in surprising arrays. Whereas in the normal state of consciousness the different parts of the mind are kept sharply separated from each other using, psychoactives these machines become integrated and create a sort of hyper-thought. This in its turn allows new combinations which are the reason for the great creative powers attributed to psychoactives.

In actuality human senses and the patterns in which our brain perceives the world are our interface to the world. We as humans are used to work with one brain, the human brain which is a machine which allows one specific interface to reality. Humans all work with the same brain.

What psychoactives enable you to do is change your mind interface, they enable you to change your brain. Psychoactives illicit the awareness that we are experiencing the world through an interface. Using psychoactives one comes to the realization that the interface you usually work with, the so called concensus consciousness is only one kind of interface among many possible one.

Comparing "consensus consciousness" with alternative consiousness can be like comparing the DOS opearting system to Mac Os Leopard (only the difference is much much further and extremer). For example, using our normal interface solving any kind of simple problem is very tedious and requires much work. Using alternative mind interfaces the same problems might become as easy as copying a file.

The same mind codes which usually demand great mental labor are now already written as procedures, while other mind procedures and functions are erased. The concensus interface includes within it everything: greed for power, money, sex and more. It is filled with bugs that hinder the evolution of mankind. However if you change opeating system you can rid yourself of most of the problems of concensus interface to reality. Like the ShiftSpace Software psychoactives just demonstrate and make you aware that we can choose our interface, that we don't have to be stuck with just one interface to our computing machine, to the internet or to reality.

However, one is not able to be under the influence of psychoactives the whole time. This would be slavery and therefore we have the concept of the work. Working to make a lasting change in our interface. Beside the work, computing and BCI (Brain Control Interfaces), nanobots and virtual realities come to mind again as a future possibility which will enable us to change our interfaces, erase many of those human "software bugs" which many mistake for inevitable but which, as the psychoactives teach us, are only part of our operating system, a part of an interface which we as experienced hackers and pscychonauts should know – is always interchangable.

The Matrix as an Ideological Network

2007-10-27T17:54:00.000+02:00

Note: this article was first published in January 2004, in the Tel-Aviv Cinematheque Magazine.

Abstract: “what is the matrix?” This big question that Morpheus presents Neo and us in the first Matrix, has been a matter for debate over the last 5 years. Since then the Matrix has been interpreted as Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Platonist, Post-Modern, Buddhist, Chsristian, Jewish and what have you. This article tries a different approach to this question. While seeking to preserve former interpretive possibilities, it claims: The Matrix is a devouring ideological network. The capitalistic nature of this network is at the center of this piece.

The Matrix Trilogy may be the Star Wars of our generation, creating a new mythology in a new world. It is undoubtedly pretentious in its special effects, and more so in its theory and philosophy, to the point that some critics dismiss the film's lengthy philosophical discussions as hopelessly muddled. Others have looked for coherent meaning in its symbols and langauge, and found exactly what they were looking for - which is to say, they found what they had already believed. That list includes Matxists, Psychoanalysts, Platonists, post-modernists, and even the believers of the world: Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists. Each of them offered his own biased interpertation of the Matrix, like the six blind men who tried to describe an elephant - each was (partly) right, but also very wrong.

The truth is, the matrix is all of these things: seemingly incoherent, and yet Christian and psychoanalytic and post-modern. Yet everyone who has tried to analyze the film using any of these dogmas has have fallen prey to exactly the same deceptive Matrix with which the trilogy deals. The big question everyone is trying to answer -- the one Morpheus presents Neo and us in the first film – is, “what is the matrix?” This question cannot have a single answer because above all the Matrix is simply the Matrix itself, an irreducible term.

Like the Deleuzian idea of complexity, which claims reality has no simple source, the Matrix lacks any simple, ideologically homogeneous source. The meaning of this notion of “complexity” is that reality in itself is a complex being or experience, which is irreducible to the finite medium of words. The Matrix is likewise irreducible, and contains various ideological complexities as well as ideologically contradictory and complementary possibilities. The movie Matrix, much like the Matrix itself, presents us with an ideological network which is linked to all places. This is the meeting place for all places, an animate free market of religious, philosophical, political and social ideologies.

The plot

In the first Matrix, computer expert Neo is contacted by an enigmatic group of people who tell him that the world he knew is nothing but a simulation generated by an immense network of computers. The time isn’t the end of the 20^th century, as he believes, but about 200 years later. The world is ruled by machines, which use the bodies of human beings to supply their energy needs. Machines grow people in isolated cells where they are connected to conductors that suck out their energy and transfer it to the machines. In parallel, people are also linked from their cells to a digital universe that simulates the world of the end of the 20^th century: the Matrix. The only people living outside of this virtual world are a group of rebels who unplugged themselves from the matrix and built an underground world inside the earth called “Zion.” From this underground world they go on rescue missions across the matrix to save other prisoners of the Matrix.

In one of the classic scenes of the first movie, a scene that repeats in variations through the series, Neo is offered by Morpheus, the leader of the group, two pills which symbolize the choice he faces. If he takes the red pill, his mind and body will leave the Matrix and he will be pulled out into the fierce reality of the war against the machines. If he takes the blue pill, he would be able to get back into the Matrix, forget all that has occurred and continue a life of pleasant ignorance.

Neo chooses the truth, and here the plot starts to get complicated. Neo (an anagram of “one”) finds out that the leader of the rebels has nourished hopes that Neo is “the One,” the messiah, who will save people from the tyranny of the machines. Neo makes a good start in meeting their hopes. Soon he learns to look through the Matrix’s illusion of a world and see the Matrix as it is, a kabbalistic maze of letters that can be penetrated and altered, thus enabling the bending of the rules. Neo, as a digital “mekubal” (an adept of Jewish mysticism), acquires supernatural combat abilities inside the Matrix by playing and controlling the text that composes the world.

In his various adventures Neo also comes to know an array of curious characters, among which is the Oracle, a prophet who leads Neo in his way (although the credibility of her prophecies is constantly in doubt). Another important figure is the Architect, a creator and programmer of the Matrix, a dubious demiurge with dubious motives. The common factor among these various figures is that they are all computer programs, like sub-applications in the immense computer network that is the matrix.

The messiah is the one that lives in the real. And Neo, after learning to bend the rules of the virtual reality, develops similar abilities in the real world as well. The second and third movies have apocalyptic, almost Biblical, battles betweens the machines coming to destroy Zion and the rebels, while Neo – by contrast – goes on a peace mission to the machine city to bring peace with the machine world.

What narrative explains this story? There are several.

The messiah as a Christian, Jewish and Eastern hybrid

One of the Israeli critics who wrote about the third Matrix dismissed it as a Christian movie. This is understandable because that is the most prominent aspect of Neo: Neo arrives as a messiah around whom a small group is gathered. He has his Judas (Cypher), his girlfriend is called Trinity, and his last name is “Anderson,” which can be taken as “Son of Man,” using the Greek root andros for man. During the film Neo dies, is resurrected, and finally leaves the world as a cross of light. These are fairly obvious Christian symbols. But how can you call a movie Christian when it has an oracle, hand-reading, a spaceship called Icarus, and an underworld goddess called Persephone?

The word “messiah” is an example of the ideological network that the matrix presents to us in different aspects. Neo as a messiah, for instance, is not a monolithic figure at all, but rather a complex incarnation of the Christian, Jewish and eastern messianic figures.

Neo as a kabbalistic messiah

The Matrix is full of Jewish kabalistic and Hasidic ideas. The Wachowsky brothers have studied Kabbalah, now their ideas are being taught in Kabbalah schools in Israel. So it is no surprise that the concept of the Messiah in the Matrix borrows quite a lot from Jewish Kabbalah and Jewish theology.

For example, Neo’s perception of the world as a textual world, where knowing the textual source allows the bending of the rules, is reminiscent of ancient Kabbalistic books such as the ancient Sefer Yetzirah from the first century, where the creation of the world is described as a textual event. As in the Matrix, Sefer Yetzirah tells us that the world is created from a sea of letters. One could even compare Neo and the midrashic character of Abraham as a person who has the power to recreate the world by textual acts (see Golem, by Moshe Idel).

Neo first sees through the digital Matrix. What he learns there, he implements later in the real world, which he reveals as another matrix. Interestingly enough, where Neo once found a maze of digits he now finds a blaze of light. Neo perceives the real world as a stream of emanating light that surrounds all things, a worldview reminiscent of the Kabalistic emanation theories in Jewish sources. The Book of Splendor -- the Zohar -- and Lurianic Kabbalah see the whole universe as a creation of light which is immanent in all things.

Smith, that self-duplicating agent against whom Neo fights time and again, could be Kabbalistically interpreted as the klipot. Literally meaning peels or shells, klipot is the kabalistic explanation of why we don’t perceive the true existence of the world as a world of light, the way Neo does. The reason is that things are covered with the klipot, peels which hide and prevent us from seeing the real divine light that is present in all things. The klipot represent the raw exteriority of things, an exteriority that must be peeled away to reveal the true essence, which is light.

Furthermore, the Kabbalah says that the process of the peeling of the klipot is a dynamic process. A person has to peel the klipot his whole life, because the klipot duplicate by nature and put new barriers in men’s search of the truth of reality. Every day in which you don’t clean your eyes, you get new dust obscuring your vision. This is the endless duplication of Smith.

The way Neo gets rid of Smith, by infiltrating Smith’s body and filling it with light until it cracks from the inside and burns with the inner light, calls to mind the radical 17^th-century Kabbalah of the false Messiah Shabbtai Zvi and his believers. Shabbtai Zvi was arrested by the Turkish authorities and given a choice: death, or conversion to Islam. He chose to convert, which was naturally a blow to many (though not all) of his followers. Trying to justify his action, his faithful came up with a new theological explanation which describes the messiah as a worm inside an apple, or a sacred spy. The messiah goes down inside of the source of impurity (Smith; the klipot) and fills it with light until it cracks from within.

Neo as an eastern mystic

Taoism and Buddhism are also very evident in the Matrix. Through the prism of Eastern religion, Neo is not only the Messiah but also “the Enlightened” – the Buddha. Smith tells Neo that the two of them are very similar, and they are. They both identify the self with the world, only in a fundamentally different way. Smith is the Ego, the impurity of Buddhism, the one that sees himself anywhere he looks - egocentricity. This is why, when Smith touches people or other agents, they turn into him. Smith sees himself everywhere. Neo (One), on the other hand, follows the Buddhist ideal of seeing himself as a part of the unity of the universe. Neo can control the world because he is devoid of the ego that separates us from the world and can identify with the universe totally.

Because Neo and Smith are so similar to each other – indeed, Smith is actually part of Neo’s self -- Smith also gets stronger every time Neo gets stronger, as in the old Jewish saying “The greater a person, the greater his temptations.” In other words, in parallel with Neo’s spiritual developments, the traps of Ego (Smith) become more and more dangerous. As in Buddhism, the erasure of the self and becoming one with the surrounding world lead to total control. The Zen Archer doesn’t aim, and this aims his arrow. When the blind Neo fights without looking, and sees his opponents in a mystic way as streams of energies in the world, one can’t help being reminded of the Buddhist Kung-fu series “Zatoichi,” about a blind warrior whose blindness is a background to his spiritual perfection and fighting ability.

Beyond the metaphors from Eastern religion, there are also ideas that are common to all religions such as peace and love. It is easy to forget that, aside from the Hollywood portrayal of these ideas, they have a deeply religious message. In the war of humanity against the machines in The Matrix, the underlying narrative is that the machines are not in themselves the true enemy of Neo. This fact becomes clearer as the Matrix series advances, when we encounter machines that feel (a breaking of the opposition between Machine vs. Man that could be the a subject of another whole article).

In the movie “Animatrix,” a collection of 9 animation movies written and produced by the Wachowsky brothers, the battle between the machines and the humans is actually an outcome following the oppression of the machines by people. The real enemy of Neo is therefore Smith, the klipot which separate machines from mankind in our perception and make them enemies. The difference between humans and machines is an external one that only Neo as the unified-unifier can abolish. This is why the destruction of Smith is in the movies the condition for peace.

In order to lose the klipot and see men and machine as one, Neo must discover love in its religious sense, the love Dostoevsky implies when he says “hell is the inability to love.” This is the love of acknowledging the oneness of things, of withdrawing yourself and making room for the Other: Neo’s ability to leave his city and go to the machine city and face the ultimate Other of the source, the code of all codes. When he totally gives himself over to the machine, when he lies on a bed of little machines, it is a token of that love.

It’s worth noting that the very fight with Smith, the ultimate redemption struggle, takes place within the boundaries of the Matrix. Salvation comes from inside the Matrix. This is the love that can bring the peace that Neo talks about – that peace which actually means the redemptive resolution of the opposition between man and machine, and between all oppositions.

The Meta-Religion and capitalism

Despite the abundance of religiousness in the Matrix, no orthodox clergyman would be content with these films. The Matrix accepts almost every spiritual direction that has ever been invented, and this total acceptance is a negation of every spiritual system that demands any sort of exclusiveness, or uniqueness. Take, for example, Neo’s conversation with the oracle in the second part of the Matrix. The oracle tells Neo that ghosts, angels, vampires, werewolves, UFOs and every unnatural phenomenon he has ever heard about all exist – their explanation is that they are trivial malfunctions in the digital system of the matrix.

So what religion do the rebels mean when they proclaim time and again that they “believe”? No other word is said so often in the Matrix as “belief.” Again and again Morpheus announces his belief in Neo; time and again the others are demanded to answer regarding their belief in Neo. And when Neo asks the oracle how he can be sure of the sincerity of her words, she tells him there is no way of knowing, nor any information which could help him decide whose prophet she is: Satan’s or God’s. The world is an equation composed exclusively of unknowns, and the question is – do you believe, or not? Neo, of course, chooses to believe.

Ultimately the only religion the Matrix is marketing is the meta-religion which is a radical expansion on the ecumenical idea. The Meta-religion is a name for perhaps the most widespread spiritual concept in today’s secular Western society. It is the religion without commandments or sacraments, the virtual-existence religion which is willing to abolish the form in order to reach the inner essence, symbolized by the letters-digits-symbol matrix (released from the klipot).

It therefore makes no difference if we call Neo Savior, Messiah or Buddha. The Meta religion is willing to assimilate all symbols without obliging itself to even one of them. This is a more sophisticated version of New Age. The believers of the Meta-religion don’t limit themselves to any discourse’s rules. The Meta-religion sucks in and makes a salad out of terms and ideas from different spiritual fields in order to reach the content it seeks. Hence the abundance of gods, symbols and ideologies with which the Matrix is saturated.

But whom does the Meta-religion serve? Whom is this Metaphor aimed after? The Matrix of the Meta-religion is first of all the capitalistic Matrix which profits from every commodity that passes through it and takes commission from every sale -- even the sale of Marxist books.

In the second movie Morpheus prepares his crowd of believers for the final battle against the machines in a Masada-style speech. Morpheus appears as the prophet of capitalism and calls to the audience: “Tonight, let us send a message to that army.” To explain what he means he adds, “Let us shake this cave! Tonight let us make them remember this is Zion.” The meaning of these words is conveyed in the next scene, maybe the most baffling in the Matrix series. For many long and seemingly meaningless minutes we watch the minimally dressed rebels dance to the sound of loud rock music and rub against each other sensuously in a sort of pagan fest. The combination of the glistening skin of the young sweaty youth and the rhythmically jumping human waves gives the scene the aesthetics of a commercial. This is the message of the people’s unification scene in Zion: a sex party and sensuality, the essence of capitalistic redemption.

It isn’t that the Matrix really says that capitalism represents redemption, but neither is it Marxist in the classical way. Perhaps The Matrix is a Marxist-capitalistic movie. It does criticize capitalism, but it also makes clear that resistance is futile. The end of any resistance is to be sucked inside the system. In other words, The Matrix is a Hollywood film. The criticism is also part of Hollywood. Without the stars, the production crew and the Hollywood marketing system, none of this would exist.

The cinematic matrix religion of capitalism

In a Marxist reading, one could see Neo’s fight against the agents as a fight against the salesmen of capitalism. Smith, the self-duplicating agent, does look much like one of the businessmen populating Manhattan, and indeed in the third Matrix we see huge skyscrapers full of duplicated Smiths. Smith is dressed in a black suit and impenetrable black sunglasses. In his hand he holds a James Bond suitcase, as if he’d come to sell you something. The commodity Smith would like us to see is of course the symbolic world, the digital simulation which he would like to force on everyone. One could interpret Neo as a sort of Marxist fighter against the duplicating sales agents, but on closer inspection the rebels aren’t any different from the salesmen.

Anyone who saw the first Matrix must remember the digital-visual presentation and the convincing speech Morpheus makes to Neo in their first meeting, when he explained the history of the matrix and tried to convince him to leave the Matrix and join the rebels. Later, when we are told that the rebels’ main occupation is freeing people, which means convincing people to move to their “real” world, one can understand that Morpheus and Neo are in a way also 9-to-5 salesmen, only with a more sexy product: they sell reality.

The matrix in that case is a battleground between two kinds of sales agents, and in capitalism it doesn’t matter what you buy, the house always wins. This immunity of the capitalistic network of the Matrix could be seen in the scene at the end of the third Matrix, where agent Neo and agent Smith fight the final battle between mythic skyscrapers. The interesting detail here is that, despite the huge shock waves rising from the ground during this titanic battle and moving as fierce storms between the skyscrapers, those skyscrapers continue to stand and the panes continue to shine.

The destructive forces of the titanic battle between the two salesmen move through and get swallowed inside the dark impenetrable skyscraper glass. Capitalism watches the great struggle between the symbolic and the real indifferently. At the movie’s end, when the long awaited redemption finally arrives, the only symbol of it is a little girl standing and looking at the glistening skyscrapers – this is the redemption of capitalism.

But ultimately, why should we immerse ourselves in illusions? After all, we are the ones living among symbolic but also very real skyscrapers. The battle between Neo and Smith symbolizes, perhaps improbably, the visit to the cinema, whose results are also capitalistically preordained. The cinema is then the very cell in which the Matrix imprisons us, where you sit as an inert puppet and produce energy for the capitalistic matrix.

What could be more ludicrous than Neo appearing on the screen, calling us to leave the illusion and selling us the world of the “real”? Neo’s voice comes from the inner depths of the simulation, Neo and Smith are both agents of the capitalistic Matrix, designed to keep us docile in our seat. Who would dare to rise up from his seat and go outside to “reality” after paying good money to get inside the matrix of cinema?

The commandment of the sequel

In a very striking way, the ending of the Matrix is a kind of combination between religious theory and pure commercial interests. The prominent feature of the redemption at the end of the Matrix series is that ultimate redemption has still not come. Religiously one could understand that from the existence of distinguishable entities and the occurrence of redemption within the boundaries of skyscrapers and the existing world. This is a restorative redemption, a redemption which brings things back to their functioning state at the past, but does not bring any new and radical message. Ultimate redemption should result in the world becoming One, eliminating any conflicts and dualities. The problem is made clearer in the conversation between the Oracle and the Architect, the Matrix’s demiurge. The Architect doubts the future of the peace that has been achieved. There is a big religious problem here. Is this the peace we have been waiting for? Or merely a ceasefire?

One possible answer can be found in the kabalistic theory of shmitot. According to this esoteric theory the world exists in 7 cycles of 7,000 years. At the end of each cycle there is a renewed creation. The 7^th cycle is like the Jewish Shabbat (the seventh day of the week), the ultimate cycle, at the end of which comes the fiftieth-year jubilee of total redemption.

The Architect tells Neo that he is the sixth in a series of messiahs. The use of this number and the undetermined ending of the matrix make us think that the Wachowsky brothers plan another resurrection of Neo, a seventh redemption battle that would be the Matrix’s Sabbath. Or maybe this is a thought about redemption as a utopian concept which never does fulfill itself as a permanent state but only as a process, similar to the Jewish paradox of an always imminent, yet always absent, redemption.

Either way there is a striking combination of deep religious thought with pure commercial interests, a combination that characterizes the Matrix as a movie which is a meeting point of so many ideologies which coexist on an ideological net – the Matrix.