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 - 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.

Technology is Holy - An Interview with Kevin Kelly

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.

Technomysticism – A Manifesto

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.

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[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.