Читать книгу The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet - Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli - Страница 32

Media can be employed as well for accessing our soul – consider photographs, novels and poems that move our attention from the external to the interior. According to McLuhan (1964), the invention of the photograph may have led to a revolution in the traditional arts. Then, since it was pointless trying to depict things that had already been shown more vividly in photographs, painters took to revealing the inner process of creativity through expressionism and abstract art.

Writers were similarly affected by photos, print media, film, and radio. Poets and novelists turned to explore the inner workings of the mind by which “we achieve insight and make ourselves and our world.” Art moved from depiction of physical reality to the exploration of mind and soul with the various media competing against each other.

How about the computer and the Internet? Can they also turn into tools for inner exploration”?

The shift from using computers as productive tools to inner processing has been stimulated by blogs and social networks which allow us to share our inner lives and thoughts. However, the Net militates against the prolonged attention and silence of the painter or novelist. Like heating water into vapor, there needs to be a critical mass of time without external interruptions in order to change inner states.

The unprecedented competition now is between the mind and the computer as extension/amputation of the mind. The computer manages and expands our mental capacities – memory, searching for information, calculating, analyzing data, planning routes, and much more. When “freed” of those tasks, our mind can give more attention to meta-thinking, to the mechanisms of our thoughts and their inner working.

But the computer, as the sum-of-all-media, expands our mind’s possibilities toward external information – which promises to take us even farther away from developing the capacity to observe our mind. The computer mirrors our mind and charms us by the reflected image, just like Narcissus who was so hypnotized by his image in the pool that he could no longer hear Echo’s love – so he was transformed into a plant standing close to the edge of the pond where he could always see his reflection.

We can acknowledge that the computer is a medium for outsourcing many of the mind’s functions. But what’s never considered is that the mind itself has the nature of a medium – a medium which incessantly builds reality, which can simulate the soul’s qualities which were lost during development.

Mind is born of the amputation of the original completeness of the soul through the loss of merging with existence. The shock of this loss obliterates the recognition of our original nature. The only thing the mind can then do is simulate the lost wholeness by constructing an ego personality. As with Narcissus, we become numbed by our image reflected by the mind, believing that this self-image is who we really are.

One of the recurring themes of spiritual teachings is that our consciousness is asleep, and in order to awaken it, it is necessary to reel in the mind’s contents with the introspective capacities acquired through meditation and inner exploration.

Just as dreams protects us from awakening by including external activity of the mind as part of their story, the mind keeps the illusion of awakeness through incessant activity. When the inner noise is not enough, it can create technologies which multiply the flow of information that calls us. All this makes self-observation difficult and prevents our soul from transcending the illusion.

The conceptual mind, born as a defense against the unbearable experience of separation, is nothing more than a medium which hides our genuine soul. So perhaps, perceiving a distant echo of that fact, we try to become free of it again by outsourcing it to a mechanical computer, so we can again look at reality without filters. But the very qualities of the mind which could free us from the illusion – sustained inner concentration, meditation and silence, feeling the body fully – are the first to be sequestered by IT. The ego-mind has many tricks to retain its dominance.

Our mind, which builds the illusory reality (maya), was created by the fall from the soul’s primordial condition of wholeness. Computers, simulating the mind, then dazzle us as a reflection of a reflection – a double layer of illusion. This further layer has the potential to stimulate the revelation of the primary illusion. The Advaita tradition invokes the metaphor of a thorn used to dig out another thorn that is buried in the foot, but is then thrown away along with the invader.

The state of self-forgetting and the use of the limited set of mental capacities needed for interacting with digital technologies will not bring us in touch again with our depths. We need to balance the overwhelming attention we give to information with some practices to bring back our fullest cognitive skills – which are mindfulness, subtle discrimination, prolonged attention, and the inner silence out of which creativity can arise.