Читать книгу The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet - Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli - Страница 27

Then comes a paradox. If instead we totally immerse ourself in an activity which absorbs us, such as dancing or making love, or even using a tool like a musical instrument, we do forget ourself – but an inner “witness” develops. This way, the action and the awareness of the action align. The subject who acts vanishes, but the awareness remains. What we forget is our small ego when we are merged with something bigger (love, music), and we reconnect with awareness. We abandon, however momentarily, the mental third body to reach the fourth body – the aware observer, according to the Hindu esoteric teachings (in which the second is the emotional body).

Then we do not become lost in the action like the monkey with the pliers or a human being with screen media. We find instead a deeper self in the form of awareness through the action.

Such occurrences, Osho (1990) said, are existential, not intellectual – and when they are experienced by doing something totally, surprisingly, something new will be felt. By totally singing, a new kind of awareness arises. The singer has disappeared, and only song remains. But the singer is not at all unconscious. Quite the opposite: awareness will be expanded.

Earlier Osho (1976) wrote:

If you become one hundred percent conscious, you become a witness, a sakshi. If you become a sakshi, you have come to the jumping point from where the jump into awareness becomes possible. In awareness, you lose the witness and only witnessing remains: you lose the doer, you lose the subjectivity, you lose the egocentric consciousness. Then consciousness remains, without the ego (p. 190).

The Western journey, both in the neuroscientific and psychological fields, does not conceive of awareness without an ego which experiences it. Yet even from our egoic condition we can have a glimpse of enlightenment by being totally immersed in our actions. We can become one again. While dancing, we become the dance. While making love, we become one with love and with the beloved. While playing music, we become one with the instrument and the music. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (1991) referred to it as a state of flow.

Totality is a state of joyful expression and of awareness at the same time. Awareness expands and embraces the action, so the actor and the witness become one. Such states can be reached by meditation practices; by activities involving the body-mind like breathing techniques, intense loving; or sometimes by an impending danger which suddenly expands our awareness.

When we are unaware we lose ourself in the object which grasps our attention, like the monkey with the pliers. The witness disappears and we lose our awareness in the external object – whether a tool, another human being, or screen media. We fall into what is called in psychological terms an object relation with that tool or the person.

In an object relation we lose the inner witness, and we incorporate the external reality as if it were a part of our own psyche – for example, when we unconsciously consider a friend or a lover as a functional object standing in for the maternal or paternal relationship. Then we relate to the other person not as an individual with his/her distinctive characteristics, but as an object that is part of our inner structure and expectations.

Turkle (1984) explored how computers function as objects for our psychological patterns. We can merge with a technological object and include it in the constellation of our object relations. A computer can become an object which we relate to as a reassuring fusion with mother.