Technomysticism - Chapter 5 - Technological Kung-Fu

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

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

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.

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

12 Psychedelic Videos to Blow your Mind

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

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

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.

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[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

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.

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[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.