I prefer to define it as “The Digitalization of Reality,” wherein more and more human activities are being translated into bytes. Work, communication, media, entertainment, friends, dating, sexuality, culture, shopping, politics and causes are among the growing number of human needs that have gone digital.

While the Internet was something which earlier we mostly visited, now we are inhabiting the virtual worlds full-time and engineer them according to our mental projections. The Cartesian dream of a mind without a body has almost been fulfilled (even though in his old age Descartes, in Passions of the Soul, affirmed that “the soul is jointly united to all the parts of the body”).

This separation has a long history of Western thought starting from the Judeo-Christian separation between body and soul up to people like the transhumanist Hans Moravec, the artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky, or the singularity guru Raymond Kurzweil who want to download the biological human mind to a safer mechanical medium in order to achieve nothing less than immortality.

Technology itself is less and less “embodied” and physical. Technology is going toward Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and various wireless ways of communicating and even wire-free charging for devices. We have made even hi-tech tools withdraw physically from each other.

Weizenbaum, more than 30 years ago in Computer Power and Human Reason, described a typical computer programmer thus:

Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice…Their food…coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the computer…Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move.

Brenda Laurel, designer of human computer interaction, notices differences in gender:

We have a class of people we call nerds who are radically uncomfortable with their bodies and their sexuality…When men talk about virtual reality, they often use phrases like “out-of-body experience” and “leaving the body.” These guys are not talking about out-of-body experiences in the way that some Eastern mystic or Peruvian Indian would. They are talking about it in the sense that if you slap a screen over your eyes you won’t have to see air pollution…When women talk about VR they speak of taking the body with them into another world. The idea is to take these wonderful sense organs with us, not to leave our bodies humped over a keyboard while our brain zips off down some network (Susie Bright, Sexual Reality, San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1992).

What was an attitude confined to technicians and nerds became “mainstream,” where most people are in front of a computer, TV or mobile screen for most of their waking lives, distancing themselves from a felt connection with their bodies, living in a purely mental world. Alexander Lowen, in Joy, wrote that in the more than 50 years since he began studying the human condition, he has seen a general deterioration in the bodies of the people who come to him; the bodies are less energized, less integrated and less attractive than those of the patients he used to see earlier. He writes that the old-fashioned hysterical patient that Freud wrote about is almost never seen. While the hysterical person couldn’t handle his feelings, the schizoid individual nowadays – dissociated from his body and living predominantly in his mind – just hasn’t many.

If technology is conducive toward the disappearance of physical reality, there’s a second philosophy which seems allied to the same goal. Several mystical traditions and spiritual teachers of the past and present consider physical reality as a dream – maya – as something to overcome in order to expand our awareness and connect with our deeper soul and with the ultimate. Physical reality is then something to be abandoned while advancing on our path toward spiritual enlightenment.

Shri Ramakrishna, in L’Enseignement de Ramakrishna, said that when a man becomes crazy for God, he becomes unconscious even of his body. Taking Chaitanya Deva as an example, Ramakrishna said that he “many times fell on the ground. He didn’t have any more hunger, or thirst, or even become sleepy. He completely lost the consciousness of his body”.

In Ramakrishna’s description of God’s crazy state we can see some similarities with Weizenbaum’s programmers. Apparently. Mystics abandon the body/mind in order to reach what is beyond the mind, while our society has relegated the body to a marginal role in order to give the mind the superior and controlling role.

Technologically-oriented people and mystics have another common point in saying that the world is unreal, an illusionary state. The former involve neurophysiology and psychology, while mystics talk about their first-hand experience in having reached a state where a broader awareness comes to the forefront, not depending on our body/mind filters any more.

But while virtual reality disconnects us from our bodies to give priority to the mind (considered the ultimate attainment of human beings), the spiritual paths toward awareness need to know, feel and live in the body as a source and object of knowledge before going beyond mind and body. In the spiritual path the body is seen as a whole body/mind entity, observed by a broader awareness. In that journey, both body and mind might be lost for a while, to be retrieved later. David Cooper in The Grammar of Living wrote: “We have to lose our heads to enter our bodies. There is a time for minds, a time to leave our minds and a time to recover them.”

The body in the spiritual path is a fragile bridge toward the ultimate which has to be crossed with respect and care, sensing and feeling it without rushing to overcome it, otherwise we risk falling into the waters, losing our minds prematurely as well. Some religions discouraged or prohibited a close meeting with our bodies, particularly in the monotheistic traditions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Being far from the sinful body was supposed to bring us closer to the divine incorporeal entity. But mystics – even the ones who came from those traditions – could not escape experiencing the body in its fullness.

The body can’t be ignored in our will to expand our awareness. Almaas (the pen name of Hameed Ali) expressed the connection with the body in the spiritual search for the truth in these terms:

As we get more present in our bodies, in our bellies, we can get closer to our essence which is truth, which is what makes us know what is true, what is false, not from logical deduction, or from the unconscious. You just know. You are close to that subtle sense which is truth. (A.H. Almaas. Elements of the Real in Man (Diamond Heart Book One). Diamond Books. Berkeley. 1987)

Eckhart Tolle expressed it in similar terms:

The most powerful anchor for staying present is to inhabit the body. That means to have some of your attention in the inner energy field of the body – to sense, to feel the animating presence that gives life to the body, which ultimately is consciousness itself. The physical body is a temporary expression of that consciousness, but the essence of it is the consciousness itself. So to connect with the physical body, and even as you perceive the world and interact with the world, to have some attention in the inner energy field and to feel the aliveness that is there in every cell and every organ as a single feeling. You are then rooted in your body, which becomes the anchor for staying present and for staying out of the mental noise (from Lynn Marie Lumiere and John Lumiere-Wins, The Awakening West, Oakland: Clear Visions Publications, 2000).

Feeling our presence and connection with our bodies works as well as the needed grounding for keeping our minds healthy in a technology-saturated disembodied schizoid condition. “The person who does not act in reality and only acts in fantasy becomes himself unreal,” wrote Ronald Laing in 1959, based on the observations of his patients, in The Divided Self (London: Tavistock Publications, 1959), while Marshall McLuhan wrote that, “By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms”. Through our technological race toward the digitalization of reality, we risk abandoning our bodies and split our minds as well, without finding anything superior for our soul to join, as is conversely contemplated in the Eastern spiritual paths.

There’s an echo of a deeper truth in the desire of replacing reality with a virtual one: the truth that the world as we see it is not the whole story. But through virtual worlds we might bend the distorting lenses of the mind even more, creating a further layer of illusionary maya. Instead of liberating ourselves from the deceptive mind, we liberate the mind from the “restrictions” of the body, coming closer to fulfilling the Cartesian dream. But the mind without a felt connection with the body doesn’t have support from our embodied intelligence and becomes compulsive in chasing every small bit of information which appears in our already-scattered attention, transforming our mind in servomechanisms of technology. Is it not a case that meditation techniques reinforce our concentration ability, usually giving attention to a part of our body or to our sensations.

However, even without any virtual technological life, the unreal can’t be avoided. Lila, the divine game played by the universal consciousness, has been playing the hide-and-seek game much before the human mind created a new hi-tech version of the game. Many spiritual teachers say that we live in a dream state, looking at reality filtered by the veil of maya which gives the mind many layers of conditionings. Perhaps lila is having fun in hiding even deeper, adding another layer by encouraging the collective mind in building its own virtual representations of reality. Ultimately, lila will become tired of playing and will reveal the true nature of reality, maybe through apparently hiding even more.

“To consider Maya, a deeper Maya is needed,” said Swami Nityananda, while Nisargadatta Maharaj said “Let the dream unroll itself to its very end. You cannot help it. But you can look at the dream as a dream, refuse it the stamp of reality,” suggesting that one be attentive and aware of recognizing the nature of the false. Since the real timeless soul (the atman) can’t be simulated or manufactured, Osho said that, “By going deeper and deeper into the artificial, science helps religion, extending the limits of what can be manufactured and thereby defining what the Atman is not”. What will be left from the limits of the artifice can be no more than the real.

In the Buddhist tradition there’s the metaphor of our illusionary ego as a thorn we have in our skin, where the Buddhist teachings represent a second thorn, useful in extracting the first one. Then we can discard both. Even an illusion can break into the ultimate reality as the Zen story, “No Water, No Moon,” where the nun attained enlightenment when the old pail broke and there was no more water in the pail, no more moon reflected in the water and, suddenly no more mind also distorting reality.

So the technological way of disconnecting from reality could be like the moon reflected in the pail which, once we become aware of the unreality of it (perhaps through the supposed big electromagnetic storm forecast in the next few years, which could block every electronic equipment), can break the mind free from any other obscuration?

I don’t know what the plans of lila are – and maybe there aren’t even any – as when kids are playing, but since the nun was carrying water, not Twittering, chatting, browsing websites, trading online or updating her Facebook page, she was present in feeling her body and her mind was probably empty for most of the time, in a state more receptive to be filled by Truth. In many spiritual paths the students are suggested to make repetitive actions, as cleaning the rice as a way to strengthen our presence and attention, taming the wandering mind. Those tasks would bore us to death, while we prefer instead, paraphrasing Neil Postman, to be amused to death.

Google recently discontinued Lively, the Second Life-like project. Even though that’s only one out of many of Google’s projects, it’s symbolic of a turning point from representation to reality.

In 1978, Jerry Mander in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (Quill, 1978) wrote:

In one generation, out of hundreds of thousands in human evolution, America had become the first culture to have substituted secondary, mediated versions of experience for direct experience of the world. Interpretation and representations of the world were being accepted as experience, and the difference between the two was obscure for most of us.

Thirty years later, it is not just about America and not just about TV. The detachment from direct experience grew layers. The attitude of substituting reality with mental representation was also one of the causes of the current financial problems, which constructed the illusionary “wealth,” considering information flowing through the cables as real goods.

Affirming that nothing is real is true both on the neurophysiological and spiritual levels. We have all heard that, especially in the Eastern traditions, the world is “maya,” an appearance, or illusion. Also, one of the mantras of people who populate the virtual worlds is to question reality saying that “there is nothing real in reality” since our experience is in any case mediated by our senses and by our nervous system which, starting from the mechanism of vision itself, only interprets reality. Following this line of thought we can say that there’s no objective reality and perhaps there’s no reality too, since every experience is mediated by our nervous system.

There’s an apparent concordance between neuroscientists, technical creators of virtual worlds and spiritual teachers. All of them, in different ways, say that the world in an illusion.

Since the times of Buddha and Plato, that the world is our representation has been a philosophical, metaphysical, psychological and spiritual assumption much before science and technology came into our lives. Philosophers and mystics expressed this in a much more sophisticated way than any software environment or technocrat.

[/en][it]

Recentemente, Google ha chiuso Lively, il progetto ispirato a Second Life. Anche se questo era solo uno dei molti progetti di Google, il suo termine rappresenta un punto di svolta dalla rappresentazione alla realtà.
Nel 1978, Jerry Mander ha scritto in Quattro argomenti per eliminare la televisione (Quill, 1978; ed. italiana: Edizioni Dedalo, 1982):

Dopo centinaia di migliaia di generazioni, l’America, nello spazio di una sola generazione, è diventata la prima cultura ad aver sostituito l’esperienza diretta del mondo con suoi sostituti mediati e secondari. Interpretazioni e rappresentazioni vengono accettate come esperienze, e la maggior parte di noi ignora quale sia la differenza tra le due.

Trenta anni dopo, questo discorso non riguarda solo l’America e non è più solo relativo alla televisione. Il distacco dall’esperienza diretta si è fatto sempre più grande. La sostituzione della realtà con una rappresentazione mentale è anche stata una delle cause dell’attuale crisi finanziaria, perché ha creato una “ricchezza” illusoria dove le informazioni che attraversavano i cavi venivano considerate come beni reali.

Affermare che niente è reale è vero sia a livello neurofisiologico che spirituale. Tutti abbiamo sentito dire, in particolare nella tradizioni dell’Oriente, che il mondo è “maya”, apparenza e illusione. Inoltre, una delle posizioni ricorrenti delle persone che popolanoi mondi virtuali è mettere in dubbio la realtà affermando che “non c’è nulla di reale nella realtà”, poiché la nostra esperienza è in ogni caso mediata dai sensi e dal sistema nervoso i quali, a partire dal meccanismo stesso della visione, non fanno altro che interpretare la realtà. Secondo questo modo di pensare, possiamo dire che non esiste una realtà oggettiva e che forse non esiste nemmeno la realtà, in quanto ogni esperienza è mediata dal nostro sistema nervoso.

Tra i neuroscienziati, i tecnici creatori di mondi virtuali e gli insegnanti spirituali esiste un’apparente concordanza: tutti, in modi diversi, sostengono che il mondo è un’illusione.

È dai tempi del Buddha e di Platone, e anche prima di questi, ovvero molto prima che la scienza e la tecnologia entrassero nella nostra vita, che si parla del mondo come rappresentazione, a livello filosofico, metafisico, psicologico e spirituale. I filosofi e i mistici hanno espresso questo concetto in modo molto più sofisticato di qualsiasi ambiente software o tecnocrate.

[/it]

[en]

I can easily agree on the unreality of our experience, having myself been on a path of self-knowledge which involves meditation and inner inquiry. But I am afraid that those statements about the unreality of the world, coming from enthusiasts of virtual worlds, are another trick of the mind itself to feed its never-ending hunger.

Our human experience, however subjective and illusory it might be, is to live in the reality of matter and form. Living and becoming fully aware of our nature made up of body and mind will take us beyond matter, form, body, and mind. The next stage of evolution of human beings won’t be supported by living exclusively in the mind, in a disembodied “I think, therefore I am” environment, but through the involvement of mind, body, and awareness.

We will know whether it’s true or not that the mind does build the world if we know the mind’s mechanisms from the inside, becoming aware of the mind’s functionings. This quality of witnessing and observing the mind is quite different from becoming compulsively involved with the mind’s contents (whether those contents come from external media or from our own mental elaboration) or with virtual environments. Saying only intellectually that the world is a representation, just makes us withdraw and alienates us both from reality and from our inner experience. Affirming that “all is in the mind” has to come from a level beyond the mind and its illusory tricks. Otherwise we end up living in our mind only, without being in touch with reality, nor with our bodies nor with a higher awareness.

The goal of meditation is to be in touch with reality. Most people who ignore spiritual work believe that the spiritual path is something alien from reality, something which has to do with a world devoid of matter, passions, and everything worldly. After all, according to Christian beliefs, human beings came in the last stages of creation and are something different from and better than nature. According to this, temporarily borrowed by the earth, we are intended to go back to the heavenly realms in an afterlife where we will be a disembodied soul and the body, in turn, doesn’t have any role in the coming back to the spiritual realms: even more so, it can be a hindrance to spiritual development.

This created the misunderstanding that meditation and spiritual work in general are something “beyond” reality or maybe even a spaced out state. The opposite is true. Meditation and the path toward the truth are journeys toward reality which brings us in touch with our feelings, passions, sensations, and with the real nature of reality. We can’t leave the worldly level before having mastered it through our awareness. We can’t go beyond passions if we don’t become aware of them in their real and sensed nature. We also can’t go beyond the mind if we don’t observe and master the mind’s mechanisms.

The spiritual path is in a way scientific and very tangible. Rational thinking rejects spiritual work as something “unreal.” Instead, rational thinking is not rejected by the spiritual path; it can functional in spiritual inquiry and integrated with other modalities. However, when rational thinking is left alone, and when pushed to its extremes, it produces the technical and virtual worlds, getting farther from the real and the true, misplacing representation for reality.

Meditation is recognizing that we construct reality, recognizing that the mind and its products take us astray. But we can’t be aware of the unreality of the mind‘s beliefs just by saying it is from the intellectual level or by living in a simulated environment. Technology, rationality, the media and representation are very important milestones of human development, but more often than not, they become psychological defense mechanisms to reality itself and the associated unpredictability. Virtual environments give the illusion of a world we can control better.

For millions of years, as long as the world has been in existence, consciousness has been engaged in the play of form, of becoming the ‘dance’ of [a] phenomenal universe, ‘lila.’ And then consciousness becomes tired of the game [chuckle] (Eckhart Tolle interviewed by John W. Parker in Dialogues with Emerging Spiritual Teachers, Fort Collins: Sagewood Press, 2000).

As engineers of virtual environments we substitute ourselves to Consciousness and we enjoy the game of lila too, until Consciousness itself becomes tired of the game and merges with an individual consciousness. When the game is over, even the player is no more.

If I want to penetrate beyond my mind and see what is there, it is a mystery. It is unknowable, completely: one hundred percent unknowable. It is so unknowable that the moment you begin to get a glimpse of it, your mind is blown to smithereens. To realize that your mind lays a kind of curtain over things, a veil, a colored sheet with drawings on it that overlays our reality and says, “That is reality.” But the reality is beyond that: you open that curtain, open the window – and it is unknowable. If you truly look, you do not even know you are looking, and you disappear. Your mind is there, but nobody’s looking. The reality is there and you do not say there is mind or there is reality. And then, what you perceive, although it is mysterious, it is unknowable, we give it a name. We call it truth, we call it God, we call it reality (A. H. Almaas, Indestructible Innocence, Diamond Heart Book Four, Berkeley: Diamond Books, 1990).

If Lively is no more, the real world – while still there’s one for us – will enjoy our attentions and care. That’s perhaps the best reality show.

See also:

A thousand nuances lost by one emoticon

Mail Goggles

Internet and the weakening of central (inner) organizations

Spiritual powers through technology

The Tao of Google ranking

Virtual worlds and Maya 2.0

[/en][it]

Non ho difficoltà a riconoscere l’irrealtà della nostra esperienza, in quanto io stesso ho seguito un cammino basato sulla meditazione e la ricerca interiore. Temo però che le affermazioni sull’irrealtà del mondo provenienti dagli appassionati dei mondi virtuali siano un altro trucco della mente, per soddisfare la sua insaziabile fame.

La nostra esperienza umana, per quanto soggettiva e illusoria, consiste nel vivere nella realtà della materia e della forma. Vivere e divenire pienamente consapevoli della nostra natura composta di mente e corpo ci porterà al di là di materia, forma, corpo e mente. Il prossimo stadio dell’evoluzione umana non accadrà vivendo esclusivamente nella mente, in una sorta di impersonale “Io penso, quindi sono”, ma usando mente, corpo e consapevolezza in modo integrato.

Sapremo se è vero o no che la mente crea il mondo quando conosceremo i meccanismi della mente dal suo interno, diventando consapevoli del suo funzionamento. Il processo dell’essere testimoni ed osservare la mente è molto diverso dall’identificazione compulsiva con i contenuti mentali (a prescindere dal fatto che tali contenuti vengano da media esterni o dalla nostra elaborazione mentale) o con gli ambienti virtuali.

Limitarsi a dire a livello intellettuale che il mondo è una rappresentazione serve solo ad allontanarci e alienarci dalla realtà e dalla nostra esperienza interiore. L’affermazione “tutto è nella mente” deve giungere da un livello oltre la mente e i suoi trucchi illusori. Altrimenti ci ritroviamo a vivere solo nella nostra mente, senza mai entrare in contatto con la realtà né con il nostro corpo e neppure con una consapevolezza più elevata.

Lo scopo della meditazione è entrare in contatto con la realtà. La maggior parte delle persone che non conoscono il lavoro spirituale ritiene che il cammino spirituale sia qualcosa di estraneo alla realtà, relativo a un mondo privo di materia, senza passioni ed estraneo da ciò che è mondano. Dopo tutto, secondo la fede cristiana, gli esseri umani sono comparsi negli ultimi stadi della creazione e sono qualcosa di migliore e diverso dalla natura. In accordo a questa dottrina, siamo stati temporaneamente presi in prestito dalla Terra, ma il nostro destino è tornare al cielo dopo la morte, come anime incorporee e il corpo, da parte sua, non ha alcun ruolo nel processo di ritorno verso i livelli spirutuali: piuttosto, può essere un ostacolo allo sviluppo spirituale.

Ciò ha creato il fraintendimento che la meditazione e il lavoro spirituale in generale siano qualcosa “oltre” la realtà o addirittura uno stato da sballati. È vero l’opposto. La meditazione e il cammino verso la verità sono percorsi verso la realtà e ci portano in contatto con i nostri sentimenti, passioni, sensazioni, oltre che con la natura autentica della realtà. Non possiamo abbandonare la dimensione mondana prima di averla padroneggiata attraverso la nostra consapevolezza. Non possiamo andare oltre le passioni se non diventiamo consapevoli di esse, nella loro natura reale e sensoriale. Infine, non possiamo andare oltre la mente se non ne osserviamo e padroneggiamo i meccanismi.

Il cammino spirituale è, in un certo senso, scientifico e molto concreto. Il pensiero razionale rifiuta il lavoro spirituale come qualcosa di “irreale”. Al contrario, il pensiero razionale non è rifiutato dal cammino spirituale: esso può essere funzionale alla ricerca spirituale ed integrato da altre modalità. Ma se il pensiero razionale resta isolato ed è spinto agli estremi, produce i mondi tecnologici e virtuali, allontanandoci da ciò che è vero e reale e sostituendo la realtà con una sua rappresentazione.

Meditazione vuol dire riconoscere che noi costruiamo la realtà, che la mente e i suoi prodotti ci portano fuori strada. Ma non possiamo diventare consapevoli dell’irrealtà delle credenze mentali semplicemente dicendolo o vivendo in un ambiente simulato. La tecnologia, la razionalità, i media e la rappresentazione sono importanti pietre miliari nello sviluppo umano, ma spesso diventano meccanismi psicologici di difesa contro la realtà e la sua imprevedibilità. Gli ambienti virtuali danno l’illusione di un mondo che possiamo controllare meglio.

Da milioni di anni, da quando il mondo esiste, la consapevolezza partecipa al gioco della forma, del divenire la «danza» di un universo fenomenico, «lila». Ma poi la consapevolezza si stanca del gioco [risata] (Eckhart Tolle intervistato da John W. Parker in Dialogues with Emerging Spiritual Teachers, Fort Collins: Sagewood Press, 2000).

In quanto ingegneri virtuali, anche noi ci sostituiamo alla Consapevolezza e partecipiamo al gioco di lila, fino a quando la Consapevolezza stessa si stanca del gioco e si fonde con una consapevolezza individuale. Quando il gioco è finito, nemmeno il giocatore esiste più.

Se voglio penetrare al di là della mia mente e vedere cosa c’è, è un mistero. È totalmente inconoscibile, al cento per cento. È tanto inconoscibile che, non appena ne hai un bagliore, la mente va in mille pezzi. Comprendi che la mente getta sugli oggetti una sorta di tenda, di velo, di lenzuolo colorato con dei disegni, dicendo: “Questa è la realtà”. Ma la realtà è al di là di essa: se apri quella tenda, apri la finestra… E sei di fronte all’inconoscibile. Se guardi davvero, non sai nemmeno di stare guardando, e scompari. La tua mente è presente, ma nessuno sta guardando. La realtà è presente, ma tu non dici che c’è la mente o la realtà. E poi a ciò che percepisci, benché sia misterioso e inconoscibile, assegni un nome. La chiamiamo verità, Dio, realtà (A. H. Almaas, Indestructible Innocence, Diamond Heart Book Four, Berkeley: Diamond Books, 1990).

Lively è morto, ma il mondo reale – finché per noi ce ne sarà uno – apprezzerà le nostre cure e attenzioni. Forse è questo il miglior reality show.

Vedi anche:

Mille sfumature perse per una emoticon

Mail Goggles

Internet e l’indebolimento delle organizzazioni centrali (interiori)

Poteri spirituali tramite la tecnologia

Il Tao del ranking di Google

Mondi virtuali e Maya 2.0

[/it]