Читать книгу The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet - Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli - Страница 15

Through technology and the Net we crave divine as well as ordinary powers. So people like Raymond Kurzweil (2005) appeal to us with a future where technological advances will bring us nothing less than immortality – through downloading our mind to the computer. In the history of Western science, he is not the first to apply messianic and religious terms to technology. After all, humanity has already been saved by the technology of Noah’s Ark, so there will surely be a “hack” even for mortality.

What Kurzweil and others are suggesting to drive our evolution through computers and biotechnology is a reflection, confined to the biological and mental levels, of the spiritual quest to elevate awareness beyond our mind. But since the quest is activated through mind-created technology, we can only remain on the same plane as the mind, however expanded and sophisticated it becomes through external supports and enhancements.

Kurzweil claims that “eventually, we leap beyond the boundaries of our planet, and every bit of matter in the entire universe becomes intelligent. . . . This,” he concludes, “is the destiny of the universe.” Sure, but this is already what the universe is, with no need for any contribution of technology. Enlightened spiritual teachers know that the universe is permeated by a brilliant Consciousness which cannot be grasped by ordinary mind, but which can be experienced through advanced states of consciousness as a result of spiritual inquiry.

Since our culture associates human beings mainly with their minds’ contents, then immortality means preserving that information. But if we jump to another level of identification, then the project of preserving our mind is seen as nothing more special than keeping our kidneys functioning by machines in a laboratory. Awareness and the essential human qualities are not a Cartesian matter of a purely mental state. They are a part of the soul which we perceive through our capacity of inner observation. I use the term soul to designate the overall entity of the body-mind, the psyche, and spiritual states. As Almaas says about those essential qualities:

Each of the different ways that Essence appears has recognizable properties and characteristics that differentiate it experientially from the other aspects. Because Essence is not a physical substance, we do not actually perceive its presence with our physical senses, but it can be clearly perceived and recognized through the functioning of subtle inner capacities that correspond to physical senses (2002, p. 250).

Those subtle inner capacities require our awareness of our whole body-mind. We can’t transfer essential qualities to the Net and bring them with us on the techno-immortal journey.