“All that once was directly lived has become representation. . . . The real consumer has become a consumer of illusions” (Guy Debord, 1967).

The Situationists, an international revolutionary group of the ’50s critical of capitalist culture, spoke of “The Society of the Spectacle” – which alienated people through a mediated and commoditized social envinroment.

Media and products, in the Situationists’ view, dull the audience and control desire. Half a century later,  we have newly created media with greatly expanded scope –which reinforce the Situationists’ principles. In the new digital millennium it seems that desires are not controlled, yet are accepted as long as there is a market product associated with it, channeled through and stimulated by the media.

Situationists perceived that in capitalism, emotions become transmuted into market products – and we have to pay up to redeem our emotions. The market, as they saw it, first takes away our real needs for connection and authenticity, then offers a pale reflection of the real – making us always thirsty for a real which will never come.

The need for connection today is expressed through social networks which appear free and democratic. Yes, many Internet services are free of charge, but if we calculate hardware, software, the Internet connection – plus our time and attention – the cost must be reconsidered.

Moreover, the Situationists observed that people in our society are programmed to live a life that is merely a representation of a real life. Through technology needs have been created in order to sell solutions. And the hi-tech market doesn’t even require much in the way of commodities any more, since it is represented digitally – making Debord’s words about becoming consumers of illusions blatant.

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left” (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964).

In kindergarten, therefore, an emphasis on play and social skills – not premature pressure to master reading and arithmetic – seems most likely to prepare children for later academic success. Researchers have documented how much young children learn intuitively through their bodies, and how this lays a critical foundation for later conscious comprehension of the world. The child’s first experience of geometric relationships and physics, for example, is literally a visceral one.

A study published in Nature by the University of California at Santa Cruz’s researchers demonstrated that while animals learn a new task involving motor learning, new connections begin to form between brain cells almost immediately and they become consolidated in a permanent way in the brain. We all know that when we learn something involving the body, as in driving a bicycle, this knowledge stays with us.

On the evolutionary route, we first see the muscles appearing, and then motor functions, as consequences of living in a certain habitat, and later the associated neuro-physiological functions. The motor activity acts on the brain which in turn acts back on the body allowing a more perfected action. The opposability of the thumb and the erect position of human beings came millions of years before the further development of the brain. It was the work that altered the brain, and not vice versa, as Engels perceived what has been later confirmed by fossils (see Genesi dell’uomo-industria for a longer explanation in Italian).

The hand especially, with its subtle movements, shaped our nervous systems more than any other motor activity of the body. The “technologies” of body movements and of manual labor shaped and developed our brains since primitive times. In mutual feedback, our brains shaped our tools in growing complexity until we arrived at contemporary tools which interact almost exclusively with our minds.

In an experiment, researchers used magnetic scanners to read the brain activity of taxi drivers while they navigated their way through a virtual simulation of London’s streets. Through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning, they obtained detailed brain images of 20 taxi drivers as they delivered customers to their destinations. Different brain regions were activated as they were planning their routes, spotting familiar landmarks, or thinking about their customers. The BBC article says that:

Their brains even “grow on the job” as they build up detailed information needed to find their way around London’s labyrinth of streets…earlier studies had shown that taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus – a region of the brain that plays an important role in navigation.

Technologies which interact primarily with our minds have an immediate effect on our neurophysiology. Gary Small writes in Ibrain:

Functional MRI studies of young adults ages eighteen to twenty-six years who average fourteen hours a week playing video games have found that computer games depicting violent scenes activate the amygdala. It is perhaps no accident that many autistic individuals, with their small amygdalas and poor eye contact, are almost compulsively drawn to and mesmerized by television, videos, and computer games (p. 73).

The amygdala is an almond-shaped part of the brain located in the temporal region, considered part of the limbic system, where our emotional reactions take place. It modulates our reactions to threats as well. It could be considered a part of the ancient reptile brain, connected to survival, fear, and aggression.

Other experiments demonstrated that only five days of searching with Google by computer-naive subjects were enough to change their neural circuits, in particular, activating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain has an important role in our short-term memory and in the integration of sensory and mnemonic information.

Whether we use IT which interact primarily with our minds or mechanical technologies mainly through our bodies, they affect our body/mind even in permanent ways.

In astrological symbolism, the planet Uranus is associated with the hand, with technology, and with the nervous system in its capacity to transmit information. The symbolical–analogical knowledge of Uranus seems to connect all pieces together in a whole. The human nervous system developed from the subtle movements allowed by the human hand, which in turn developed tools and technology.

Technology, even in our hi-tech era, is still something which keeps a connection, though faint, to our hand. The only body movements we do when we use hi-tech tools are by our hands and fingers, through the mouse, the keyboard or a touch screen. Research published in 2009 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) demonstrated that hand gestures activate the same brain region of language (the inferior frontal and posterior temporal areas), something which any gesticulating Italian can easily agree with.

Ritual gestures (i.e. of the hands) have always been connected with the activation of inner states of the mind. Hinduism’s mudras are a whole discipline of spiritual gestures formed by the hands and fingers. Ancient disciplines such as the tea ceremony or tai-chi which involve many gestures are visible arts as much as an inner development.

The wider neural connections are between the hand and the brain. Handwriting itself, with its subtle and highly personalized movements, can even give a glimpse of our personality through graphology.

What happens when we use technologies which interact almost exclusively with our minds with no or mininal involvement of the body, apart from the obvious cardio-vascular and obesity risks in sitting for a long time in front of a screen?

We’ve seen that even pure IT in terms of searching with Google’s mold our brains, but is the activation of certain areas of the brain the whole story about the potential of human evolution? Can  it be that our cognitive capacities are as much in our brains and nervous systems as much as in every organ and cell of our bodies, and perhaps even beyond our bodies? Consciousness itself cannot be inferred by neuroimaging, much less locate wisdom or ethics.

As a culture, we didn’t investigate what happens when we substitute all manual with mental labor, which tends to have direct contact between our minds and the instrument. For instance, if London’s taxi drivers develop a part of the brain according to their navigational efforts through London’s streets, what happens when we rely on GPS for our navigation? As a personal anecdote, one of my acquaintances drove his car from the south to the north of Italy. When I asked him which route he took and whether he passed one town I named or another, he answered that he didn’t notice because he just followed GPS indications. Is there a possibility the same brain areas atrophy which become developed in taxi drivers?

Prof. Mauro Magatti: The idea is to give a complete picture of the last 30 years which began with the coming of so-called neo-liberalism in the Anglo-Saxon countries. My book traces and develops the hypothesis of authoritative colleagues, especially the works of Boltanski in France, Bauman in England and Beck in Germany.

The idea is that those 30 years represent something as unitarian, which is detached from the previous stages (which I call “societal capitalism”), and is based not only on the nation state, but on the social and economic effects which the nation state is not able to load and which are usually referred to as “the welfare society.” The fundamental peculiarity of techno-nihilistic capitalism is a kind of new vision of the world, a new weltenshaung, which makes nihilism, traditionally a philosophy which expresses itself in stages of decadence when the established values had to be destroyed, a useful vision for accelerating both economic and technological growth on a planetary scale.

There’s a capitalism which tries to free itself from the cultural background which the national state established. This capitalism defines itself in an alliance between a technique which is supposed to be intangible, in a very thin cultural setting, or even when it is absent and, on the other side, a full availability, a full manipulability of every cultural meaning, which has to be continuously redefined, transformed, and overcome.

Quartiroli: You affirm that technology gives an imaginary freedom, yet many people, based on this very interview, could well say the opposite. I came to know about your book on the Net, sent you an email and you graciously agreed to be interviewed by me. We use Skype for the interview and then I will publish it in my blogs. This gives us a broad freedom. We don’t have any editorial limitation regarding space or length and we don’t have a director to approve our conversation. Online, we don’t even need to publish it before a certain date. And even better, we can reach hundreds or maybe thousands of readers in every corner of the world directly.

Kevin Kelly, one of the most passionate supporters of technology, in his recent article “Expansion of Free Will” says that, “Technology wants choices. The internet, to a greater degree than any technology before it, offers choices and options.” And more, “the technium continues to expand free will as it unrolls into the future. What technology wants is more freedom, expanded free will.” The idea of freedom and expansion of our possibilities is chased by every technological gadget and by every software which interacts with us. All seems very pleasurable, free and fulfilling, so what’s wrong in this expansion of our options?

Magatti: Kelly’s quote is excellent and gets to the point. Techno-nihilistic capitalism, passing the previous stage of societal capitalism, legitimates itself through this increasing of possibilities, which then is connected to the expansion of choices.

Nobody can deny that, in general terms, to go from a condition where we have less opportunities and choices to one where, instead we have the possibility of expanding our doings, in a way expands our freedom. For instance, when we can move easily and quickly from one part of the planet to the other, we get more chances to “do.”

The point is, what happens in a world where the freedom of choices, where this increase of opportunities is being produced with the speed we experience in our personal and collective lives? We should ask ourselves whether this increase has any effect on the very freedom we want to achieve.

A tangible example to make the point: freedom is somehow like the eye. The eye opens to what is in front, is a sense organ somehow indeterminate since it is connected to what is being seen. The fast-increasing choices in the individual experience give us an excess of things we can see, as fundamental changes in our way of seeing, and we are even subject to the powerful systems which are there to put things in front of our eyes.

This brings the risk of becoming people who are driven from the outside: something is being presented as a choice, which is pleasurable and which increases our power and our fulfillment, but with the risk that freedom implodes on itself and that will deliver us completely to something which is external of ourselves.

To this first problem there’s a second one: all of those opportunities presented to us aren’t as real for most people as they are supposed to be. Therefore, the opportunities in front of us are kept only in an illusory and fantasized state and we withdraw them in. To give a banal example, miraculous or even magical solutions, as would be winning 130 million euro on the Lotto which would allow us to do anything we wanted to, at least in our fantasy.

Because of those two reasons, that world with expanded possibilities which is theoretically associated with an increased freedom, then carries the risk of encaging freedom again. In the book I don’t envision a world where we go back in limiting our opportunities, but to ask ourselves about our freedom and understanding if we are as free as we think we are.

Quartiroli: On page 126 of Imaginary Freedom, you write:

…the changeover which happened between the seventies and the eighties went consistently in the direction of the shift of what “need” – still connected to an objective and material idea, in itself saturable, to “desire”, the place of subjectivity and immateriality, as such, non-saturable.

Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, compares Orwell’s 1984 with Huxley’s Brave New World.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”…In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

The shift from need to desire and vice versa, transforming as need the object of infinite desire, is no doubt a practical mechanism for expanding corporate sales, but in what you define as “surplus enjoyment,” which is encouraged by contemporary capitalism, there is the superego aspect too (the set of rules and prohibitions given by the state, by morals, family and by religion), which have been loosened in what you define as techno-nihilistic capitalism.

The liberation from the superego and the quest for pleasure have a positive effect in the release of new life energies and in exploring ourselves and the surrounding world. However, in my opinion, if this, though welcome loosening of rules doesn’t match the development of the essential human qualities (compassion, perseverance, search for truth), we end up living only at our instinctual levels, combined with the mental area, which is overstimulated by technology, without a mediation of the heart. Intelligent beasts. A dangerous combination both for the human relationship and for the environment (many of the desires are fulfilled by goods and products which somehow contribute to environmental disaster).

On the other side, I don’t foresee nor welcome a return to the rules of the “old” capitalism which gave structure, rules and rigid roles. We would hardly give up desires, even though those will be like mirages. The genie is already out of the bottle. What’s your opinion about it?

Magatti: The question is very challenging. First, a one-liner about the fact that Lacan was right regarding Marx. It is not capitalism which creates desires, but capitalism, as a system, is even able to supplant religion, understands the importance of desire in the human experience and give fuel and substance to it. In particular, with the development of the consumer society first and with the communication society later, and finally in what I call techno-nihilistic capitalism, desire is being made pleasure.

The point is not to put the genie back in the bottle, which is impossible; the point is to get desire back not only on an individual level, but on the collective one as well. In the twentieth century, as well as a reaction to the repressive approach of industrial needs, of bureaucracies and of religions seen as a rule system, desires have been rediscovered even in relationships with the body and, this is something which has to be valued and not discarded.

The problem is that techno-nihilistic capitalism again seized desire and constrained it, in the sense that my experience, my sensation is like living in a big cathedral, almost a medieval monastery where you cannot turn your head without being continuously solicited, first on the sensorial level, in reducing our desire to what is being sold by the market or by TV. Desire in this way is being dramatically flattened in a materialistic experience which produces selfish relationships and, on the environmental level, has devastating effects on the environmental balance since, in order to satisfy this desire with no limits, it produces the effects we are experiencing.

Capitalism understood that this desire can be reproduced at will, so it got into it with great ease. I think that, if there is a solution – and this is, of course, very difficult and complex to find – it is in coming back to ask ourselves about desires, which is a mystery for everybody. Of desire, we can on one side be aware of the physical and sensorial aspects and of the deep aspects of our Self in psychoanalytical terms and, on the other side we can consider the metaphysical dimensions too, connected to the sense of mystery, of the infinite, to the meanings which can direct our lives.

We could also try to find a new synthesis between the pulsional element of desire, the deep element which goes back to the development of our personality and, as well, with the intellective element. In the twentieth century, we created this opposition between reason and desire, as if the two would exclude each other. I think instead, that the two can talk to each other, a communication between the pulsional element and reason. Both are important to feed desire, even with different forms and modalities.

Quartiroli: This reminds me of a Buddhist image, where in their tradition there’s the “hungry ghost” realm, greedy ghosts who can never satisfy their hunger, having a huge stomach and a tiny mouth, representing the impossibility of satisfying every desire. In this tradition, the way out from this hellish circle is about loving the truth, substituting compulsion with the desire for truth. In this regard, the metaphysical and spiritual aspects, which take different forms in different traditions, could show us the exit from this dead end, since we cannot go back denying desires but can’t go forward on the road of desires either, because desire, even before being fully satisfied, will devastate the planet and maybe even our psyches.

Magatti: Assuming that the East and the West follow very different paths, though in some aspects are complementary, so both journeys are interesting if they are part of the question. I resume from the last words, “love of truth.” Well, one of the dramatic things which are present on the historical stage we are populating, is the crisis of truth the West has experienced, the crisis of truth in the way it has been built in the previous centuries, up to the point of rejecting the issue of truth itself.

One thing is pretending to know truth and impose it on people; another is the desire for truth and accepting that, even though it is something which is larger than us, is something which we all long for. Wanting to separate any connection between freedom and truth is for sure one of the basic reasons which then progressively leads to what I call techno-nihilistic capitalism. On this basis, I agree fully that those hungry populations which run after their desires are really amazing.

Desire, if we don’t compress it immediately in the material dimension but leave it open on the spiritual dimension, gets a perspective such as this Western destructive effect, which at least can be reduced. Being able to again open this space in Western culture is really quite a big job because the obsessive presence of those ghosts which are conjured by the media system continuously saturate our horizons, and frame our horizons. Then the reopening to the sense of mystery, to the search of the truth seems literally inhibited.

Quartiroli: Since desire is what keeps the entire production machine running, it has to be continuously stimulated. The naked women on magazines’ covers are certainly functional to the selling of the magazines themselves, but are probably even more useful to predisposing the reader toward a desiring attitude which will then be transferred to the advertised products. Depression, perhaps as well as a result of the frustration of unfulfilled desires by most people, is the most widespread contemporary mental health discomfort.

The use of antidepressive and stimulant drugs, legal and illegal, has been increasing over the years. Depression, the real enemy of the market which needs ever-desiring people, has thus found its market in the treatment of depression itself, up to making pathological even those behaviors which are part of the normal human experience, as sadness or simple introversion. Any moment of emptiness has to be filled, if not otherwise, by a drug which operates on our nervous systems. Recently, I was reading that some psychiatrists are suggesting the use of antidepressives for babies 3 years old and less. As you wrote on page 187:

In front of the complexity of reality and on its incessant change, the self has to give up its unity, because that’s nothing else than the infinite series of stimuli which it is exposed to. This pressure is infinitely more powerful than any inwardness.

So, when those stimuli stop, an inner void opens showing a frightening abyss which is avoided as much as possible but which could be the door itself toward reconstructing an identity based on the deep inner perception instead of the external messages. When the techno-nihilist machine stops, who are we, Prof. Magatti?

Magatti: The dramatic condition of the contemporary Self, of the subjectivity, is to find itself scarily empty. The disproportion between the surrounding world and our psyches is so wide that we are always forced to conform to the external instead of investing in our inner lives, instead of loving and preferring what could allow us to grow something inside from our experience and to mark our paths in life. Our paths can be unique only if we accept the limits, as when the painter has the whole color palette in front of him. If he doesn’t decide to choose some and to stay inside the limits of the frame, then there will just be a mess.

One of the contemporary syndromes is the inability of many people, as psychotherapists say, of being able to narratively recount ones own experience, which is made up of individual and separate moments, experiences and situations which we cannot explain why they came out and why we found ourselves in them.

Depression comes when stimuli stop, for instance, with retired or unemployed people, or as also happens because of exhaustion: the physical and psychological effort needed to chase every opportunity is huge. There’s a time in life when we can’t take it any more or we feel inadequate compared to this very demanding model. Depression occurs from lack of sense as well, which produces not only the inability to understand ourselves and others, but on arriving at a point where there’s a growing difficulty in feeling anything in those opportunities and experiences which are more or less amazing if we throw ourselves into them.

So we have a being who manifests as powerful and skilled but actually hides an incredible incapacity to trace his peculiar history and his particular vision of the world. This brings us to the massification of behaviors we dramatically read in statistics where we all behave the same way.

One of the basic points of the book is that what Nietzsche introduced at the end of the nineteenth century is central to understand what’s going on. Our will to power is continuously called up as a fundamental energy to push the individual to match the surrounding environment. However, this will to power is reduced only toward the external and becomes useless toward the deep desire and instinct which we all have about becoming and letting others become.

One of the shocking things about the contemporary reality is that we have many options in many life situations, but we lose the basic, that is how to be and let others be. For a time which boasts of being a model regarding freedom, this is a dramatic outcome.

Quartiroli: A young woman, one of the so-called digital natives, part of the generation which grew with the Net and high technologies, recently wrote to me, referring to the precariousness of everything (work, relationships), that “in this confusion, the Net, paradoxically, offers an anchor.”

The Internet, and especially social networks like Facebook, represent a continuity, as they are a primary object relationship, a very early one. As the dean of the Faculty of Sociology at the Università Cattolica of Milan, you are in a favored observatory about the digital natives. How are relationships redefined and, in particular the Self relationship and the issue of identity?

Magatti: First, I think that being young nowadays – and this has been happening for a number of years – is an experience opposite to the one which the 1968 generation had. Then, there was a world of adults and of institutions which claimed to be coherent, cohesive and to express meanings and values. One could agree and integrate, or one could challenge that world and take a contradictory stand.

Today, the experience is the converse: the world of adults is a confused one, is contradictory, institutions are basically voiceless, and the level of legitimation is very low. The fundamental concern of young people is not to oppose somebody: when a problem is encountered, when a contraposition is met, they turn around and move in a different direction in order to avoid conflicts.

The main problem of today’s youth is to eventually understand whether they subsist as personal entities, even though changeable and contradictory, that is, whether there’s still any passion about searching for a lasting center of gravity around which they can base their lives. This explains why young people often appear lost and dazed regarding the surrounding world. Of course, they are thirsty and they enter life with the enthusiasm and creativity of their age to find supports and places which could possibly help them to realize this circular and complex process of circumnavigating their experience without immediately feeling closed or identified in a specific position.

In this regard, the Net is definitely a tempting tool and, in many aspects it is on the extent that the Net will be able to let experiences, questions and context be born which will have the sensitivity to avoid the ephemeral which characterizes our times. Obviously, the big limitation of the Net is the lack of direct relationships, of face-to-face connections, of the complexities of contextual relationships and its aim of building a network of connections which by definition remain ever-susceptible to being dissolved by the participating subjects. The potentialities which can be found in this setting are immense and have to be balanced with the limits, whereas the interacting person can always participate in the process, keeping a part out of it.

This has always happened even in face-to-face relationships; we do that every day at any time, showing one face and keeping other faces hidden or uninvolved. But perhaps in direct relationships this is more difficult, while on the Net’s relationships this is easier and is an aspect which shouldn’t be underestimated.

Quartiroli: These days I am especially struck by the indifference of the collective answer regarding the tragedy of the immigrants who died in the sea trying to reach our coasts and, in general on themes of sorrow. On compassion, on page 265, you wrote: “Demobilizing values – seen as unnecessary obstacles – and riding the will to power, the techno-nihilistic capitalism erodes the very bases of compassion and the human capacity of taking care.”

I find your assertion true and ask myself about the roots of the lack of compassion. There’s a sentence of Mark Slouka from War of the Worlds (Basic Books, 1995), one of the first generation’s books critical about technology of the Internet era.

The world provides context, and without context, ethical behavior is impossible. It is the physical facts of birth and pain and pleasure and death that force us (enable us) to make value judgments: this is better than that. Nourishment is better than hunger. Compassion is better than torture. Virtual systems, by offering us a reality divorced from the world, from the limits and responsibilities of presence, offer us as well a glimpse into an utterly amoral universe.

The technological setting is basically disembodied, where the body has a marginal role, when not seen as an impediment; likewise, Descartes regarded it as such in his scientific method. This negation of the body has more ancient roots then Descartes’ philosophy which characterized the scientific development of the last centuries. The roots have to be found in the Judeo-Christian tradition which relegated the body to a role far from the divine, when not an instrument of sin. You end the book writing of a coming back to bare faith as an antidote to the loss of sense and you wish for an open and non-dogmatic faith.

Do you think that the body, in this faith, could be brought back to a new worthiness and healthy vitality, instead of letting the body being managed by the society of surplus enjoyment? Christianity, in denying the body, in my opinion also negated the very bases of compassion, which become active in an integrated process of body, empathy, feelings, mind and divine values present in any human being, which we can approach through our body.

Magatti: One of the cultural traces of the twentieth century is this ambiguous rediscovery of the body, against its negation in the previous cultural structures. The problem is that technical development produces a new compression of the corporeality, mainly because techniques need abstraction. In its constituent language and in the kind of conditions created, this has to be over-contextualized and based on the creation of distance.

This created a new reduction of the corporeal element, which seems to weaken especially over face-to-face connections and caring connections and compassion. I think that our era pays a big penalty to an anthropological idea of the human being, the will to power which Nietzsche referred to. This is a very complex power, of course, known only negatively, even though it can be managed with difficulty, but which forgets other anthropological dimensions which are equally fundamental.

In particular, it forgets the experience we make of others through what, according to Levinas, the other’s face conveys to us or, according to Ricoeur, through what he calls the ordinary kindness, that is the human attitude to understanding each other, to find acknowledgment in each other and to depend on each other regarding our needs.

All of those dimensions are based as well on direct physical experience, on face-to-face dimensions which are dramatically negated and seized in social life. This not only damages the individual at the psychological level but also creates a series of problems in interpersonal connections and in the social world we live in. It’s impressive to see that in techno-nihilistic capitalism it seems almost annoying referring to and talking about questions which have to do with justice, poverty, about people who live in worse conditions, about the mutual sensitivity human beings have for each other.

I really think it is a lack of anthropological definition which when translated in an institutional organization and in lifestyles then makes this caring attitude even weaker. I think that they might instead (even on the institutional level) open channels, creating spaces and stimuli where this attitude can grow and compensate and balance the destructive aspects which the will to power can provoke if left to itself.

Quartiroli: Nihilism states the lack of meaning and of value of many aspects of life. From time to time nihilism emerged in the Western world in different forms. You say that contemporary capitalism, even with the important support of technology, tends to fragment, dismantle and melt any meaning and value, leaving only the society of surplus enjoyment.

I ask myself what the roots of nihilism in the Western world are and why we don’t have an existential perspective – we could say metaphysical or spiritual – beyond ideologies and the world of matter.
While some religious traditions, especially the Eastern ones, contemplate that human beings can reach divine spiritual states in this very life and in this very body, in the Christian tradition it is not possible to become like Christ, who is the only son of God and as such at most can be imitated through our virtuous actions, but not reachable as a state of being, at least in the earthly life.

So I’m not surprised that, given the impossibility of reaching the transcendental, and in the face of the intrinsic weakness of ideologies in the given sense to humanity, nihilism can slip in, which cancels everything and one can refer only to the certainties of consumerism and materiality.

Aurobindo said: “Every finite struggle to express an infinite which feels is his very truth.” Lacking the authentic transcendental infinite, the ego craves for it on the mental plane, which is being chased at the technological level, of information, of production, which gives the hope of obtaining divine powers (being in every place at the same time through the Net, extending life with bioengineering, life and death managed by medicine, omniscience with Google and so on). What’s your opinion about it?

Magatti: The point you raised is of crucial importance. It is based on events that are centuries old and mark different civilizations in depth. I won’t, in this instance, take a stand on what I was formed as and where I find myself, which is Christian and Western. However, I find an important convergence about the point where a human being is the intermediary between the finite and infinite and the way which this intermediation is played decides many things in our real lives and in social settings.

In the Christian tradition, transcendence is the ultimate source of desire, the deep drive of human beings. As Severino writes, the whole history of modernity is marked by the pretension of reducing transcendence to immanence through the systematic application of the will to power to the expansion of the freedom of goals.

As far as it is a carrier of material well-being, such movement is designed to create many problems, as history tells us. Here comes the Christian solution which asks to never close this frontier but to always keep the look open on the infinite.

Techno-nihilistic capitalism is a system which wants to be based on an immanence-immanent, subjugated to the systems of power which give a continuous mutation. Even if it introduces itself with no claims, techno-nihilistic capitalism is a view of the world and of history. Somehow, it is a religious system.

Unmasking this pretension is the first step to reopen the discourse about freedom and happiness.

Mauro Magatti. Libertà immaginaria. Le illusioni del capitalismo tecno-nichilista (Feltrinelli, Milano, 2009)

The problem is that for every task made simpler, more tasks are added. We will never save time through technology because the nature of the mind itself is to be kept busy, more so when our bodies are frozen in front of a screen. So we welcome new ways to keep it busy and we overload our minds with more – mostly useless – information and procedures.

Peter D. Hershock in Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) writes:

According to Marshsall Sahlins, whose Stone Age Economics (1972) is an eye-opening classic, the average work week in Hawaiian and most other so-called “Stone-Age” cultures is about twenty-five hours (p. 45).

We lost the capacity to stay in empty spaces where our minds are not engaged and could be fed by an inner view, instead of giving attention only to external inputs.

Our capacity of conscious attention and presence does not grow according to the amount of information available. It actually becomes scattered and less. We can “be there” with just one thing at a time. We can even be there with none. Then we will be really “there.”

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Uno dei mantra più ascoltati dei fan delle tecnologie è che “fanno risparmiare tempo”. Ogni nuova versione del software ha delle procedure per rendere le operazioni più semplici e più veloci, meglio di prima, automatizzando i compiti che richiedevano procedure più lunghe.

Il problema è che per ogni compito che viene semplificato vengono aggiunti altri compiti. Tramite la tecnologia non risparmieremo mai tempo poiché la natura della mente stessa è quella di mantenersi occupata, e ancor più quando i nostri corpi sono immobili di fronte ad uno schermo. Allora diamo il benvenuto a nuovi modi per tenerla occupata e riempire le menti con ulteriori, e più che altro inutili, informazioni e procedure.

Peter D. Hershock in Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) scrive:

Secondo Marshsall Sahlins, il cui Stone Age Economics (1972) è un classico rivelatorio, la media della settimana lavorativa nelle cosiddette culture dell’Età della Pietra e nelle Hawaii tradizionali era di circa 25 ore (p. 45).

Abbiamo perso la capacità di stare in spazi vuoti dove le nostre menti non sono coinvolte, dove potrebbero essere alimentate da una visione interiore invece di dare attenzione solamente ad input che provengono dall’esterno.

La nostra capacità di attenzione cosciente e la nostra presenza non cresce al crescere della quantità di informazione disponibile. In realtà diventa frammentata e indebolita. Possiamo “esserci” solo con una cosa per volta. Possiamo anche esserci senza niente. Allora saremo davvero “lì”.

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Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield questions what technology is doing to human identity in Perspectives: Reinventing human identity (New Scientist of May 21, 2008.)

According to one estimate, Western children spend some six hours a day at a computer screen. Given the plasticity of the human brain, shouldn’t we ask how living effectively in two dimensions might leave its mark on neuronal connectivity?

Then she muses about whether it is a fact that interacting continuously with a fast-paced multimedia environment would predispose our brain to attention deficit disorder and, that

the visual world of the screen might affect our ability to develop the imagination and form the kind of abstract concepts that have until now come from first hearing stories, then reading on ones own. Will future generations prefer the here-and-now, opting for a strong sensory experience over a more personalized cognitive narrative? … Could we even end up living in a world where there is no personal narrative at all, no meaning, no context, just the experience of the thrill of the moment? Humans have always been hedonistic. Much of what we enjoy, from sex and drugs to fine food and wine, involves an abrogation of a sense of self. We “blow” our minds, “let ourselves go”: we are back in the booming, buzzing confusion of the moment, our identity suspended.

She calls this state the “Nobody” scenario, predisposed by twenty-first–century technology, different from the “Someone” identity of Western societies or the “Anyone” persona of collectivity cultures like communism. She also envisions a fourth “Eureka” scenario where creativity gives fulfillment and builds an individual identity.

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La neuroscienziata Susan Greenfield, su New Scientist del 21 Maggio 2008 si chiede qual è l’impatto della tecnologia sull’identità umana:

In accordo ad una stima, i bambini occidentali passano qualcosa come 6 ore al giorno di fronte ad uno schermo del computer. Data la plasticità del cervello umano, non dovremmo chiederci come il vivere di fatto in due dimensioni possa lasciare il segni sulle connessioni neuronali?

Quindi riflette sul fatto che una interazione continua con un ambiente multimediale veloce potrebbe predisporre il cervello al deficit di attenzione e che

il mondo visuale dello schermo potrebbe influire sulla nostra capacità di sviluppare l’immaginazione e formare il tipo di concetti astratti che fin’ora sono arrivati dall’ascolto delle storie e dalla lettura. Le future generazioni preferiranno il “qui e ora”, scegliendo un’esperienza sensoriale forte al posto di una narrativa cognitiva più personalizzata? [...] Potrebbe anche essere che finiamo a vivere in un mondo dove non vi è alcuna narrativa personale, nessun significato, nessun contesto, solo l’esperienza del brivido del momento? Gli esseri umani sono sempre stati edonisti. La maggior parte di ciò di cui gioiamo, dal sesso alle droghe al buon cibo e al vino, comporta un’abrogazione del senso di sé. Ci troviamo nella rimbombante ebbrezza del momento, con la nostra identità sospesa.

Susan Greenfield chiama questo stato lo scenario “Nessuno”, indotto dalla tecnologia del ventunesimo secolo, diverso dall’identità “Qualcuno” delle società occidentali o della persona “Chiunque” delle culture collettivistiche quali il comunismo. Anche, lei concepisce un quarto scenario “Eureka” dove la creatività dà appagamento e crea un’identità individuale.

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Our identities have actually become very thin. The traditional supports which were giving identifications in our lives in the past aren’t forming our identities much anymore. Just take families, where parents don’t have time to attend to children, histories of family roots are hardly known, extended families have disappeared and grandparents’ tales have been substituted by TV. The process of economic globalization has blanked out most of the local cultures of the world. The end of ideologies has made our mental identifications collapse. Religions aren’t filling our lives any more as much as they did in the past.

We give form to our identities and, even more, we develop our psyches by the blending of our experience with inner observation. Both are formed by what we do (or what happens to us) and how we inwardly elaborate the external reality, where awareness is a needed ingredient. No experience in itself can have an evolutive outcome if it doesn’t go through our awareness.

In a condition of flattened identities, we find ourselves interacting mainly with screens and with human contacts mediated by technology. The massive presence of the media in our lives brings us to give attention mainly to external stimuli and in a continuous way, which doesn’t permit inner silence and suspends the need for looking into ourselves and for letting external stimuli sink deeper.

There is an aspect of this story which struck me. The state of being “here and now” and the zeroing of personal identities are goals of the spiritual paths toward self-knowledge, aspects not considered by neuroscientists. Living in the here-and-now and living without personality are interconnected. When we are without personality, therefore without our past, our reactions to life are devoid of the weight of our conditionings and happens in the immediacy of the “here-and-now.” We become free from the weight of the past and life presents itself with immensity and spontaneity. Numerous spiritual teachers of every kind of tradition described this state of awareness and the path to reach it.

Therefore, is technology speeding up the process and bringing us to a happy condition of joy and inner freedom? Actually, the here-and-now condition and the lack of identity which occurs under the pressure of the media is a pale simulation of the transcended state of the personality on the spiritual level, maybe even an echo of that state which fascinates the mind, which seems free of inner burdens, involved only with what happens in the moment.

But to transcend a personality, we need one. Giving attention only to a screen and forgetting our inner lives we aren’t in the real here-and-now, which implies an intimate association between the observed object, the observer, and awareness. Instead, we are only entangled in unending news, feeding the addictive neural reward pathways.

We have been emptied of the narratives and meaningful content of our lives and we unconsciously continuously perceive the emptiness of our lives, so we want to be filled. For want of anything better our inner selves are invaded continuously by products and information. Products and brands seem to give us back a label, our profiles on Internet sites attempt to define identities of ourselves to show to the world, where we are guided and prompted in the selection of our tastes, our pictures, ambitions and so on from several available choices.

All of these fillers won’t ever (being without human depth) fill a void which is an inner one. But we try and again we try, one click after another, one purchase after another. What if, instead, we give attention to one breath after another? Several studies on meditation associate it with increased cortical thickness and stimulating the growth of the areas dedicated to attention, even reversing the neuronal processes related to aging.

Susan Greenfield’s Eureka scenario could then be “implemented” not on the level of the ego and the ordinary mind, but as an incessant flux of universal awareness which astonishes us every moment, always new, always unexpected, in the authentic here-and-now.

See also:

Downloading our mind

Unlinking ourselves through technology

Brain waves facing a screen, and meditation

Spiritual powers through technology

The Tao of Google ranking

Facebook and the sorcerer’s apprentice of the Net

Neural reflexes and reflections on meditation

Disembodying at broadband speed

Heavenly Technology

The Tibetan watch: how a spiritual teacher learned about technology in the West

Virtual worlds and Maya 2.0

Bytes and bites of the net

Computer addiction as survival for the ego

Programming and self de-programming

Metabolizing information

Mental territories

Is Internet empowering us?

Wireless communication and reality mining as a reflection of pervasive consciousness

Multitasking to nothing

Biotech as an information system

Virtual worlds, mirror worlds, Second Life: backing up the messed planet

Mechanisms, mysticism and Amazon Mechanical Turk

Zen archery and computers

Lifelogging

The heart of the binary code

Downloading our life on Internet

Google, privacy and the need to be seen

Personal consumer

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Le nostre identità sono diventate, in effetti, molto sottili. I supporti tradizionali che davano una identificazione per nel passato non forgiano più di un tanto le nostre vite. Prendiamo solamente le famiglie, dove i genitori non hanno tempo per occuparsi dei figli, dove le storie riguardanti le radici familiari non sono più tramandate e i racconti dei nonni sono stati sostituiti dalla televisione. Il processo di globalizzazione economica ha azzerato la maggior parte delle culture locali del mondo. La fine delle ideologie ha prodotto il crollo delle nostre identificazioni mentali. Le religioni non riempiono le nostre vite come avveniva nel passato.

La nostra identità e soprattutto lo sviluppo della nostra psiche si formano miscelando la nostra esperienza con l’osservazione interiore. Entrambe si formano in conformità a quel che facciamo (o a quel che ci capita) e da come elaboriamo interiormente la realtà esterna, dove il fattore consapevolezza è un ingrediente necessario. Nessuna esperienza di per sé avrà un esito evolutivo sulla nostra psiche se non passa attraverso la nostra consapevolezza.

In una condizione di identità appiattite, ci troviamo ad interagire principalmente con schermi e con contatti umani mediati dalla tecnologia. La presenza massiccia dei media nella nostra vita ci porta a dare attenzione in modo predominante a stimoli esterni ed in modo continuo, che non ci concedono il silenzio interiore e le pause necessarie necessario per osservarci e per far scendere gli stimoli esterni in maggiore profondità.

C’è un aspetto di questa vicenda che mi ha colpito. Lo stato dell’essere qui ed ora e l’azzeramento dell’identità personale vengono raggiunti nei percorsi spirituali di conoscenza interiore, aspetti che non vengono presi in considerazione dai neuroscienziati. Vivere nel momento e vivere senza personalità hanno una connessione. Se siamo senza personalità, quindi senza passato, la nostra reazione di fronte alla vita è ripulita dai pesi dei nostri condizionamenti e si attua nell’immediato del “qui e ora”. Si diventa liberi dai pesi del passato e la vita si presenta nella sua immensità e spontaneità. Innumerevoli insegnanti spirituali di ogni tradizione hanno descritto questo stato della consapevolezza e le strade per arrivarci.

Allora la tecnologia ci sta accelerando il processo e ci sta portando ad una felice condizione di gioia e libertà interiore? In realtà la condizione di “qui e ora” e la mancanza d’identità che avviene sotto pressione dei media è una pallida simulazione dello stato di trascendenza della personalità sul livello spirituale, forse addirittura un’eco di tale stato che affascina la mente, che pare libera dai pesi interiori, coinvolta solo da ciò che avviene nel momento

Per trascendere una personalità però dobbiamo averne una. Dando solamente attenzione a uno schermo e dimenticandoci della nostra interiorità non siamo nel vero “qui ed ora”, che presuppone un’intima associazione tra oggetto osservato, osservatore e consapevolezza, ci facciamo invece solamente coinvolgere dalle continue novità alimentando i circuiti neuronali della ricompensa, tipici delle dipendenze.

Siamo stati svuotati dalla nostra biografia, ma inconsciamente percepiamo in continuazione il vuoto della nostra vita, quindi vogliamo essere riempiti. In mancanza di meglio siamo invasi in continuazione interiormente da prodotti e informazioni. I marchi dei prodotti sembrano restituirci un’etichetta, i nostri profili sui siti Internet sembrano definire un’identità da mostrare al mondo, dove siamo guidati per la sua compilazione (i nostri gusti, le nostre foto, aspirazioni, ecc.).

Tutti questi riempitivi non potranno mai, poiché senza spessore umano, riempire un buco che è interiore. Ma ci proviamo, e ci riproviamo, un clic dopo l’altro, un acquisto dopo l’altro. E se provassimo invece a dare attenzione ad un respiro dopo l’altro? Diversi studi sulla meditazione hanno evidenziato che può aumentare lo spessore della corteccia cerebrale e stimolare la crescita delle aree dedicate all’attenzione, invertendo anche i processi neuronali legati all’invecchiamento.

Allora lo scenario Eureka di Susan Greenfield viene “implementato” non più a livello dell’ego e della mente ordinaria, ma come continuo flusso della consapevolezza universale che ci meraviglia ad ogni istante, sempre nuovo, sempre inatteso, nell’autentico “qui e ora”.

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A couple of years ago I started to write this short essay on the inner motivations and the addiction to production. At that time the environmental problem was already full-blown, but the crisis of energy sources which will be with us for a long time wasn’t felt yet.

I asked myself what the psychological roots would be and what conditioning was at the base of the addiction to production in the West, exported thereafter around the whole planet.

The origins of the compulsion for production and the resulting devastation of the planet date back to the interpretation of the messages spread by religions, particularly the Judaeo-Christian religions.

Christianity propagates messages regarding original sin and the impossibility of reaching the divine in human form. Those and other messages produce psychic double binds, like short circuits.

The only way out for human beings was to redeem themselves, re-creating heaven on Earth through “virtuous” acts, ruling over nature for this purpose, as authorized by the Bible itself.

Religious statements made a sense originally as tools for the spiritual path, but those messages have been misunderstood by the ego in other ways.

Since this article is quite long, is available as a free e-book which can be downloaded clicking on the cover.

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Avevo iniziato a scrivere questo breve saggio sulle motivazioni interiori che stanno alla base della dipendenza a produrre due anni fa. Il problema ambientale era già conclamato ma ancora non si avvertiva la crisi delle fonti energetiche che ci accompagnerà per lungo tempo.

Mi sono interrogato sulle radici psichiche e sui condizionamenti alla base della dipendenza a produrre in occidente, poi esportata in tutto il pianeta.

Le origini della dipendenza a produrre e della conseguente devastazione del pianeta risalgono all’interpretazione dei messaggi diffusi dalle religioni, in particolare della tradizione giudaico-cristiana.

Il cristianesimo ha propagato i messaggi concernenti il peccato originale e all’impossibilità di raggiungere il divino in forma umana. Questi e altri messaggi hanno prodotto dei doppi vincoli psichici, dei corti circuiti.

L’unica via d’uscita per l’essere umano era rimasta quella di riscattarsi ricreando il paradiso in terra, tramite azioni “virtuose” e dominando la natura a questo scopo, autorizzati dalla Bibbia stessa a utilizzare la natura per i fini umani.

I messaggi della religione avevano un senso originario come strumenti per la ricerca spirituale, ma tali messaggi sono stati interpretati sul piano dell’ego nei modi che questo poteva.

Poiché l’articolo è piuttosto lungo, l’ho impaginato in forma di e-book gratuito che si può scaricare facendo clic sulla copertina.

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Marshall McLuhan told us that every medium and every technology has a role in the extension and numbness of our organs. The mind’s extensions created by computer technology on the one hand expand our mental possibilities in terms of research, information, and knowledge processing, but on the other bring us to amputate or to numb some of the capacities of the same mind.

The computer can seem an extension of the mind’s capacities, but in reality it numbs our capacities to observe our minds from the inside, as self-consciousness, of our mental mechanisms, and of our whole body/mind systems.

At this point, my hypothesis is: If the computer is a way of outsourcing the mind’s functions, the mind itself could be considered as a “medium” which determines an extension and an anesthesia, in this case in relation to the original completeness of the soul. This is an application of McLuhan’s theories considering the knowledge that comes from the psychology of the ego.

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Sappiamo da Marshall McLuhan che ogni medium ed ogni tecnologia hanno un ruolo nell’estensione e nell’intorpidimento dei nostri organi. Le estensioni della mente create dalla tecnologia del computer se da una parte ci espandono le possibilità mentali in termini di ricerca ed elaborazione di informazioni e conoscenze, dall’altra parte ci portano ad amputare o intorpidire alcune capacità della stessa.

Le estensioni della mente create dalla tecnologia del computer se da una parte ci espandono le possibilità mentali in termini di ricerca ed elaborazione di informazioni e conoscenze, dall’altra parte ci portano ad amputare o intorpidire alcune capacità della stessa. Il computer, che può sembrare un’estensione delle capacità della mente, in realtà intorpidisce le capacità di osservazione della nostra mente dall’interno, intesa come consapevolezza di noi stessi, dei nostri meccanismi mentali e del nostro sistema globale corpo/mente.

A questo punto la mia ipotesi è che se il computer è un modo di esternalizzare le funzioni della mente, la mente stessa può essere considerata come un “medium” che determina una estensione e una anestesia, in questo caso in relazione alla completezza originaria dell’anima. Un’applicazione delle teorie di McLuhan considerando le conoscenze della psicologia dell’ego.

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In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan affirmed that, “Any invention or technology is an extension or a self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.” For example, the extension of the car gave us the possibility of moving faster, but at the same time brought about the degradation of the legs’ muscles.

Moreover, McLuhan analyzed the Greek myth about Narcissus, who took his reflection in the water for another person as if he was a number (Narcissus is derived from narcosis) by the extension of himself in the water. This misunderstanding, according to McLuhan, made him become the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image:

Narcissus was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system. Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves. “…This is the sense of the Narcissus myth. The young man’s image is a self-amputation or extension induced by irritating pressures. As counter-irritant, the image produces a generalized numbness or shock that declines recognition. Self-amputation forbids self-recognition” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

We know that every medium and every technology has a role in the extension and numbness of our organs. But the computer as a medium gathers all the pre-existing heredity of the media and in its turn adds new extensions. The computer is an extension/amputation of the whole mind.

The mind’s extensions created by computer technology on the one hand expand our mental possibilities in terms of research, information, and knowledge processing, but on the other bring us to amputate or to numb some of the capacities of the same mind.

With the pervading accessibility of information there is no necessity to remember, to read, to reason. The manner of writing for the Web does not require going too much into detail, nor in the profundity of the message, because the capacities of attention spans on the Internet are limited. Consistent with this, in the last few years, for the first time in the developed countries a decrease in young people’s cognitive abilities has become evident, after years of uninterrupted growth.

But the other characteristics of the computer medium as an extension/amputation of the mind also goes in the direction of numbing the self-recognition of our minds. But what does it mean, not recognizing our minds, when it is the mind itself that accomplishes the recognition? Observing the modality in which the mind places itself when it has something to do with information technologies, it is evident that it tends to be compulsively busy trying to find, to communicate and elaborate the information, which in turn will produce further information.

The computer can seem an extension of the mind’s capacities, but in reality it numbs our capacities to observe our minds from the inside, as self-consciousness, of our mental mechanisms, and of our whole body/mind systems. Often, the capacity of focalized attention is decreased by the excessive number of mental inputs. The body literally becomes benumbed and the mind tends to give attention only to the external stimuli, making the capacities of self-observation and inner focalization benumbed, qualities which are the bases of meditation.

We do not recognize ourselves anymore, we lose contact with our depth and the felt connection with our body and, as a consequence, with the messages the body sends back to us. The computer as an extension of the mind as an organ extends us and makes us avoid the recognition of the same mind, meant in an extended Buddhist sense as a wholeness of thoughts, emotions, sensations.

The computer medium – the sum-of-all-media – extends our minds toward the external and brings us further away from the aware connection with it. It brings us to become charmed by the reflected image in the water, just like Narcissus. And just like Narcissus, we are fascinated by our images, on the intellectual level, as well as photographic, creative ones, reflected in our blogs, in social network sites, dating sites, forums. When we do not recognize ourselves, we look for external confirmation.

Psychologically, the primary narcissism develops when the psyche loses contact with its totality.

Narcissism develops when the soul loses touch with its wholeness, especially as it loses touch with its true nature. The soul loses awareness of its wholeness through the loss of the immediacy of experience, which results from experiencing itself through past impressions. The loss of immediacy is identical with the loss of awareness of presence, and since presence is the “glue” that unifies all aspects of experience, wholeness is gone. The baby loses her primary self-realization (and her primary narcissism) as she begins to experience herself as an object (A.H. Almaas, The Point of Existence, Berkeley, CA.: Diamond Books, 1996).

At this point, my hypothesis is: If the computer is a way of outsourcing the mind’s functions, the mind itself could be considered as a “medium” which determines an extension and an anesthesia, in this case in relation to the original completeness of the soul. This is an application of McLuhan’s theories considering the knowledge that comes from the psychology of the ego.

The mind, as we know it, as any other “medium,” is born from a shock and from an amputation: a shock due to the separation from the condition of fusion with the existence and consequent numbness in respect to the recognition of our more genuine nature. Spiritual teachers tell us that we are sleeping and that in order to awaken it is necessary to rewind the mind’s contents with the discriminatory and introspective capacities acquired through meditation and interior exploration. Just as the dream protects us from awakening, for example, by including some noise in the dream story for not getting awakened, the virtual world’s dream maintains the mind’s activity in a non-meditative modality which makes self-observation difficult.

Therefore, it prevents our soul from transcending the mind.

In the early stages of mental development, the infant’s capacity for perception – and especially for understanding – does not develop fast enough for him to recognize his identity as Being. The first perceptions that can become memory traces are those of forms and images. Also, the need to learn how to function dictates a certain attachment to such images. When one is familiar with non-conceptual Being, it becomes clear that the development of the mind cannot be divorced from the creation of images, since mind deals with images. There is no knowledge without images, for knowledge is composed of concepts, which are various sorts of images; the creation of these images is indispensable for discrimination in the mind. To know that one is Being, which is not within the realm of images, is such a stable understanding that it seems impossible for a child to have this knowledge (A.H. Almaas, The Pearl Beyond Price, Berkeley, CA: Diamond Books, 1988).

Sometimes, spiritual teachers use shock techniques to bring us back to awareness, in particular in Zen Buddhism traditions. One pain drives out another.

Perhaps, perceiving a distant echo of the fact that the conceptual mind itself, born as a defense from unbearable sensations of separation, is nothing more than an external medium of our genuine soul: even though it is inbuilt in our central nervous system, we try to bring it back outside us and to deliver it to a mechanical agent called a computer so that we can be free of it.

Everything which can be simulated and brought outside as an extension/self-amputation in reality is not “ourself.” Spiritual teachers say there is little of ourselves other than a global awareness which is connected to a specific body/mind. This awareness certainly can’t be externalized in a medium.

If the mind was created by the downfall from the primary soul’s condition of wholeness and the computer is the mind’s extension, the computer dazzles us like a reflection of a reflection, a double maya, with the associated opportunities and risks.

To make our minds numb is certainly not useful in getting us in touch again with our depth. The state of trance and the use of a set of limited mental capacities, needed for adapting to the interaction with the virtual technologies, will have to be balanced by practices in order to bring back the full availability of the mind’s tools, which are discrimination, deep research, prolonged attention. Discrimination and the subtle penetration of the truth are the capacities that lead us to overcoming the mental structures that are imprisoning us in the old conditionings, among which are the primary conditionings which separated us from the immensity of loving awareness.

It is necessary to have a mind before leaving it, possibly well-functioning and connected to the rest of the body in a deep and sensual way.

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Ne Gli strumenti del comunicare Marshall Mcluhan affermava che “Ogni invenzione o tecnologia è un’estensione o un’autoamputazione del nostro corpo, che impone nuovi rapporti o nuovi equilibri tra gli altri organi e le altre estensioni del corpo.” Ad esempio, l’estensione dell’automobile ha fatto sì che ci potessimo spostare più velocemente ma che si degradassero i muscoli delle gambe.

McLuhan inoltre analizzava il mito greco di Narciso che scambiava la sua immagine riflessa nell’acqua per un’altra persona come un intorpidimento (Narciso deriva da narcosis) dato dalla estensione di se stesso nell’acqua. Questo malinteso, secondo McLuhan, lo fece diventare “il servomeccanismo della propria immagine estesa o ripetuta”

Narciso era intorpidito. Si era conformato all’estensione di se stesso divenendo così un circuito chiuso. Il senso di questo mito è che gli esseri umani sono soggetti all’immediato fascino di ogni estensione di sé, riprodotta in un materiale diverso da quello stesso di cui sono fatti. [...] Questo è il senso del mito di Narciso. L’immagine del giovane è un’autoamputazione o un’estensione determinata da pressioni irritanti. In quanto revulsiva essa produce un torpore generale o uno shock che impedisce il riconoscimento. L’amputazione di sé vieta il riconoscimento di sé. Marshall McLuhan. Gli strumenti del comunicare. Mondadori. Milano. 1990

Sappiamo che ogni medium ed ogni tecnologia hanno un ruolo nell’estensione e nell’intorpidimento dei nostri organi. Ma il computer come medium raccoglie l’eredità di tutti i media preesistenti e aggiunge a sua volta nuove estensioni. Il computer è una estensione/amputazione dell’intera mente.

Le estensioni della mente create dalla tecnologia del computer se da una parte ci espandono le possibilità mentali in termini di ricerca ed elaborazione di informazioni e conoscenze, dall’altra parte ci portano ad amputare o intorpidire alcune capacità della stessa.

Con l’accessibilità pervasiva delle informazioni non vi è la necessità di ricordare, leggere, ragionare. La modalità di scrittura per il web richiede di non entrare troppo nei dettagli o nella profondità del messaggio, in quanto le capacità di attenzione prolungata su Internet sono rare. Conseguente a questo, negli ultimi anni è stato evidenziato nei paesi sviluppati per la prima volta un calo della capacità cognitive dei ragazzi, dopo anni di crescita ininterrotta.

L’altra caratteristica del medium computer come estensione/amputazione della mente va anche nel senso di intorpidire il riconoscimento della nostra mente. Ma cosa significa non riconoscere la nostra mente quando è la mente stessa che compie il riconoscimento? Osservando la modalità in cui si pone la mente quando ha a che fare con le tecnologie informatiche, è evidente che la mente tende ad essere compulsivamente occupata a cercare, comunicare ed elaborare informazioni, che a loro volta produrranno ulteriori informazioni.

Il computer, che può sembrare un’estensione delle capacità della mente, in realtà intorpidisce le capacità di osservazione della nostra mente dall’interno, intesa come consapevolezza di noi stessi, dei nostri meccanismi mentali e del nostro sistema globale corpo/mente. Spesso la capacità di attenzione focalizzata viene diminuita dall’eccessivo numero di input mentali. Il corpo viene letteralmente intorpidito e la mente tende a dare attenzione solamente agli stimoli esterni, intorpidendo le capacità di auto-osservazione e di focalizzazione all’interno, qualità che rappresentano le basi della meditazione.

Non ci ri-conosciamo più, perdiamo il contatto con la nostra profondità e la connessione sentita con il corpo e di conseguenza con i messaggi che questo ci rimanda. Il computer come estensione dell’organo mente ci estende e ci evita il riconoscimento della stessa mente, intesa in senso esteso buddista come l’insieme di pensieri, emozioni, sensazioni.

The computer, medium-somma-di-tutti-i-media ci estende la mente verso esterno e ci allontana dal contatto consapevole con la stessa. Ci porta ad essere affascinati verso l’immagine riflessa nell’acqua come fece Narciso. E come Narciso siamo affascinati dalla nostra immagine, a livello intellettuale, fotografica, creativa, riflessa nei nostri blog, nei siti di social networking, nei siti di incontri, nei forum. Quando non ci riconosciamo cerchiamo conferme dall’esterno.

Psicologicamente il narcisismo primario si sviluppa quando la psiche perde il contatto con la propria totalità:

Il narcisismo si sviluppa quando l’anima perde contatto con la propria totalità, specialmente quando perde contatto con la propria natura autentica. L’anima perde consapevolezza della sua completezza attraverso la perdita dell’immediatezza dell’esperienza, la quale deriva dallo sperimentare se stessa attraverso impressioni passate. La perdita dell’immediatezza coincide con la perdita della consapevolezza della presenza, e poiché la presenza è la “colla” che unifica tutti gli aspetti dell’esperienza, la totalità scompare. Il bambino perde la sua auto-realizzazione primaria (e il suo narcisismo primario) quando comincia a fare esperienza di sé in quanto oggetto. A.H. Almaas. The Point of Existence. Diamond Books. Berkeley. 1996.

A questo punto la mia ipotesi è che se il computer è un modo di esternalizzare le funzioni della mente, la mente stessa può essere considerata come un “medium” che determina una estensione e una anestesia, in questo caso in relazione alla completezza originaria dell’anima. Un’applicazione delle teorie di McLuhan considerando le conoscenze della psicologia dell’ego.

La mente, così come la conosciamo, come ogni altro medium, nasce da uno shock e da un’amputazione: shock per la separazione dalla condizione di fusione con l’esistenza e conseguente torpore rispetto al riconoscimento della nostra natura più autentica. I maestri spirituali ci dicono che dormiamo e che per risvegliarsi è necessario riavvolgere i contenuti della mente con le capacità discriminatorie ed introspettive acquisite tramite la meditazione e l’esplorazione interiore. Così come il sogno ci protegge dal risvegliarci dal sonno, ad esempio inglobando nella trama del sogno un rumore per non essere risvegliati, il sogno dei mondi virtuali mantiene la mente attiva in una modalità non-meditativa che rende difficile l’osservazione di sé. Di conseguenza impedisce alla nostra anima di trascendere la mente.

Nei primi stadi dello sviluppo mentale, la capacità del neonato di percepire, e specialmente di comprendere, non si evolve alla velocità necessaria per permettergli di riconoscere la sua identità in quanto Essere. Le prime percezioni che possono trasformarsi in ricordi sono quelle delle forme e delle immagini. Inoltre, il bisogno di imparare a funzionare impone un certo attaccamento a tali immagini. Quando si acquisisce familiarità con l’Essere nonconcettuale, diventa chiaro che lo sviluppo della mente non può prescindere dalla creazione delle immagini, poiché la mente opera con queste ultime. Non esiste conoscenza senza immagini, in quanto la conoscenza è composta di concetti, che sono vari tipi di immagini; la creazione di queste immagini è indispensabile per la discriminazione mentale. Sapere che si è l’Essere, il quale non appartiene al regno delle immagini, è una comprensione così stabile da sembrare impossibile per un bambino. Almaas. The Pearl Beyond Price. Diamond Books. Berkeley. 1988.

I maestri spirituali talvolta utilizzano tecniche di shock per riportare alla consapevolezza, in particolare nella tradizione del buddismo Zen. Chiodo scaccia chiodo.

Forse, percependo una lontana eco del fatto che la mente concettuale stessa, nata come difesa da sensazioni intollerabili di separazione, non è altro che un medium estraneo alla nostra vera anima pur se innestato nel nostro sistema nervoso centrale, tentiamo di riportarla fuori da noi stessi e di consegnarla ad un agente meccanico chiamato computer affinché ce ne possiamo liberare.

Tutto ciò che si può simulare e portare all’esterno come estensione/amputazione di noi stessi in realtà non è veramente “noi stessi”. Stando a ciò che dicono i maestri spirituali, vi è ben poco di noi stessi se non una consapevolezza globale che si connette ad uno specifico corpo/mente. Tale consapevolezza non è certamente esteriorizzabile su un medium.

Se la mente è stata generata tramite la caduta dalla condizione primaria di completezza dell’anima e il computer è un’estensione della mente, il computer ci abbaglia come il riflesso di un riflesso, un doppio maya, con le opportunità e i rischi associati.

Intorpidire la nostra mente non ci è certamente utile per riprendere il contatto con la nostra profondità. La trance e l’uso di un set limitato delle capacità mentali per adeguarsi all’interazione con le tecnologie virtuali, dovrà essere bilanciata da pratiche per riportare la piena disponibilità degli strumenti della mente quali la discriminazione, l’indagine profonda, l’attenzione prolungata. Sono le capacità di discriminazione e di sottile penetrazione del vero che ci portano al superamento delle strutture mentali che ci imprigionano nei vecchi condizionamenti, tra i quali i condizionamenti primari che ci hanno separato dall’immensità della consapevolezza amorevole.

E’ necessario avere una mente prima di lasciarla, possibilmente ben funzionante e connessa con il resto del corpo, in modo profondo e sensuale.

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The New York Times article “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop” provoked a certain sensation on the Web.

Advertisements of cars still show them in the deserts or on isolated mountain roads. The reality: lines of heavy traffic, traffic lights, stress, costs, social isolation, poor quality of life. Even after many years during which cars went from being portrayed as symbols of freedom to the sardine cans that are imprisoning us, the image of freedom associated with them refuses to die.

But since a few years a new image of freedom in the collective mental imagery has been promised by advanced technologies, which permit us to be free from fixed timetables and workplaces. Wi-fi, Web on mobile phones, and always-on Internet connections promise to let us work when and where we want to, free from the obligations of time or place, with our laptop on the top of a mountain having an uninterrupted view in front of us.

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L’articolo del New York Times In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, che racconta la morte di un blogger per stress e la pressione a cui sono sottoposti i blogger, ha provocato un certo scalpore sul web.

Le pubblicità delle automobili le ritraggono tutt’ora mentre vengono guidate in deserti o in strade isolate di montagna. La realtà: code, semafori, stress, costi, isolamento sociale, bassa qualità della vita. Dopo tanti anni in cui le automobili sono passate da simboli di libertà a scatole di sardine che ci imprigionano, l’immagine della libertà associata alle automobili non muore.

Ma da alcuni anni, nell’immaginario collettivo, la nuova immagine di libertà è stata conquistata dalle tecnologie avanzate, che ci promettono di liberarci dall’orario e dal luogo di lavoro fissi. Wi-Fi, web sui cellulari, connessioni alla rete sempre attive ci promettono di poter lavorare quando e dove ci pare, liberi dalle costrizioni del tempo e dello spazio, con il nostro portatile in cima alla montagna avendo di fronte un panorama incontaminato.

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In reality, everyone having to rely on the Internet for work or for writing articles for his blogs needs a fast and stable connection. Thus, the choice of places from where to get connected necessarily gets restricted to cities rather than to the countryside, and to the developed nations rather than underdeveloped ones.

In 1997 I used to connect to the Internet in the Tuscany countryside from my old hippy camper through a Psion 5. I could read and send emails and connect to the Web. This was enough for keeping connected with work, colleagues and acquaintances. But it is different now. Sites are getting “heavier” and thus take more time to load, the number of social networks and the daily information to follow has multiplied. To keep pace, calculation power and fast connections to the Internet are needed.

And time is needed for reading blogs, technology news, upgrading software, reading the world news, and responding to emails. People we are connected to on the Net expect quicker replies. If some years ago it was acceptable to respond to emails after a few days, later, one was expected to answer the same or mostly the next day, and now we expect people to reply to messages after hours or even minutes. It becomes almost unmanageable to let emails get accumulated for several days.

But email is already considered too slow: social networks, instant messaging systems and Twitter are substituting email as means of communication. Always-on communication implies a powerful computer, a fast connection, a place where this connection is stable and where there is a certain quietude. In other words, preferably at home or in a good hotel if one is elsewhere.

Therefore, the point about freedom from a place is an illusion. How about freedom from timetables? One is free from “9 to 5” work, but the hours and days when one is connected have got expanded further. I have contacts with people living on different continents both on the personal and work levels, as, I think, it is with many people who work on the Net. There are different time zones and holidays, and an intangible urge to be available as much as possible, irrespective of the time of day or night or brief pauses on the job.

Marshall McLuhan said in Understanding Media:

“Work,” however, does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor and the specialization of functions and tasks in sedentary, agricultural communities. In the computer age we are once more totally involved in our roles. In the electric age the “job of work” yields to dedication and commitment, as in the tribe.

Today’s dedication and commitment are toward the communities of our websites and readers of our blogs, for a tribe of contacts in the social networks or for the software programming group. People of such communities are perhaps dispersed over the continents and we probably know only a tiny part of them in real life.

This return to the dedication prevalent in pre-literate societies has returned now after having been immersed in the literate societies where we have privileged the mind and its contents. Our total involvement in the new extended tribality of the Net consequently assumes the aspect of information overload, of mental compulsion – and even of addiction.

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In realtà chiunque abbia a che fare con Internet per lavoro o perché scrive nei blog necessita di una connessione stabile e veloce. Quindi la scelta di luoghi da dove potersi connettere si restringe necessariamente alle città piuttosto che alle campagne e a nazioni sviluppate piuttosto che in via di sviluppo.

Mi ricordo che nel 1997 mi connettevo ad Internet nelle campagne toscane dal mio vecchio camper da hippie tramite uno Psion 5. Leggevo, mandavo le email e potevo anche connettermi al web. Questo mi bastava per rimanere connesso con il lavoro, i collaboratori e i conoscenti. Però ora è differente. Ora i siti sono sempre più “pesanti” da caricare, il numero di social network e di informazioni quotidiane da seguire si è moltiplicato. Per mantenere questo ritmo si necessita di potenza di calcolo e connessione veloce ad Internet.

E si necessita di tempo per leggere gli articoli dei blog, le novità della tecnologia, aggiornare i software, leggere le news mondiali e per rispondere alle email. Gli interlocutori si aspettano una risposta in tempi sempre più brevi. Se qualche anno addietro era accettabile rispondere alle email dopo qualche giorno, si è passati ad una risposta quotidiana e poi a più volte al giorno. Lasciare accumulare le email solo per qualche giorno diventa quasi ingestibile.

Ma l’email è già considerata troppo lenta, i sistemi di instant messaging, i social network e Twitter stanno sostituendosi alle email come modi di comunicazione. Una connessione sempre attiva significa un computer potente, una connessione veloce, un luogo dove questa connessione è stabile e dove si sia una certa tranquillità. In altre parole, preferibilmente una casa o un albergo attrezzato se ci si trova in giro.

Quindi la libertà dal luogo è un’illusione. E a proposito della libertà dagli orari? Si è liberi dal lavoro con orari fissi ma le ore e i giorni in cui si è connessi si sono espanse ulteriormente. Come credo avvenga a parecchie persone che operano in Rete, ho contatti con persone che vivono in diversi continenti sia a livello personale che di lavoro. Vi sono diversi fusi orari e diverse festività, e la tendenza è quella di essere disponibili per quanto possibile a prescindere dalla rotazione locale del sole o pause dal lavoro.

Marshall Mcluhan in Gli strumenti del comunicare affermava:

In un mondo non alfabeta comunque non esiste il concetto di lavoro. Il cacciatore e il pescatore primitivo non lavoravano, come non lavora il poeta, il pittore o il pensatore d’oggi. Non c’è lavoro dove l’uomo è coinvolto nella sua totalità. Esso incomincia nelle comunità agricole sedentarie con la divisione della mano d’opera e con la specializzazione delle funzioni e dei compiti. Nell’era del cervello elettronico siamo di nuovo totalmente coinvolti nelle nostre funzioni. Il lavoro come “impiego” cede il posto alla dedizione e all’impegno come nella tribù.

La dedizione e l’impegno di oggi sono per una comunità di lettori dei nostri siti e blog, per una tribù di contatti nei social network o per un gruppo di programmazione software. Le persone di tali comunità sono forse sparse nei continenti e probabilmente ne conosciamo dal vero una piccolissima parte.

Questo ritorno alla dedizione che avveniva nelle società pre-alfabete ora si rimette in atto dopo che siamo stati immersi nelle società alfabete dove avevamo privilegiato la mente ed i suoi contenuti. Il nostro coinvolgimento totale nella nuova tribalità estesa della rete assume quindi l’aspetto del sovraccarico di informazioni, della compulsione mentale e anche della dipendenza.

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Any time there is contact with a new technology, as Marshall McLuhan tells us in Understanding Media, this brings us to “an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.”

The self-amputation aspect is hardly considered by people who deal with the media and technologies, much less by marketing offices. The potentialities of any new technology in extending our abilities are magnified, but there’s attention on the self-amputation side only when there is obvious damage.

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Ogni volta che vi è il contatto con una nuova tecnologia, Marshall McLuhan, ne Gli strumenti del comunicare, ci insegna che questa ci porta a “un’estensione o un’autoamputazione del nostro corpo, che impone nuovi rapporti o nuovi equilibri tra gli altri organi e le altre estensioni del corpo.”

La parte di autoamputazione viene presa meno in considerazione da parte di chi si occupa di media e tecnologie, e ancora di meno da parte degli uffici marketing. Ogni nuova tecnologia viene esaltata nelle sue potenzialità di estensione delle nostre possibilità ma l’altra faccia della medaglia, l’autoamputazione, viene considerata solo quando vi sono dei danni evidenti.

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A classical example of how our consciousness gets disconnected from parts of our bodies, making us less “embodied” (though other technologies could affect prevalently inner parts) is a car, which on one side extends the possibilities of our legs but on the other limits their use, making them weak and reducing our dependence on them.

On an evolutionary plane of the psyche, disconnecting parts of ourselves through technology could seem similar to the process of disidentification that is being carried out on the spiritual path toward self-knowledge. The more we deepen our self-knowledge, the more we let go the identifications with the inner images of our body and our minds’ structures (beliefs, preferences, or aversions) that we have built starting from early childhood as defense mechanisms.

Several spiritual teachings (Buddhism perhaps being the best-known in the West) affirm that the body and mind are impermament entities. Identifying with them makes it difficult to reach ultimate awareness. Our body is liable to continuous change and decline. Similarly, the mind is liable to continuous transformations: we change opinions, skills, we create, and dissolve our subpersonalities. Neuroscience says that there is no center of consciousness as such which combines the different parts of our psyche.

All of this and more brought the Buddha to say that actually we don’t exist as separate individuals who can identify themselves in a body-mind system, being constructions which lack the substance that can be reached through the ultimate consciouness. The very existence of an “I” as I consider myself to be is being challenged both by spirituality and science.

If we aren’t our body-mind, what are we? This question can only be answered through searching. Every teacher made efforts at describing such a state, nonetheless the path has to be trod individually. Intellectual or scientific knowledge can be passed on from person to person without the recipient having to go through every stage again that brought the first person to the conclusions.

Spiritual knowledge needs the experiential and total engagement of our consciousness; the path has to be traversed again from the beginning. Reaching enlightenment (even though the word “reaching” would probably be challenged by enlightened beings) passes through a progressive disidentification from what we think we are, not to become less, but to become part of a broader consciousness.

On the path toward wisdom we progressively lighten our load of identifications. The more we enquire into ourselves, the more we realize that what we thought to be was actually an apparition of the same dim texture as a mental construct. This disidentification process is liberating yet hard while following the path. Taking away what we thought to be can bring stages of mourning and confusion because our (fake) inner supports are disappearing. Therefore, this is a process which needs will and the ability to withstand pain.

The process of spiritual disidentification from a mental, emotional, relational or body image takes place when we become deeply aware and can observe it without further interference by our conditioning. It is important to understand how we place ourselves regarding our identifications, feel them, live them and then let them go. Therefore, we can let go an identification when we have felt it, understood it, and lived it wholly.

However, through technology the process of disidentification, instead of becoming internalized, is made external, disintegrating us instead of making us free. The process seems a progressive withdrawal from the body and the world which looks more like the withdrawal attitude of the typology Five of the enneagram than a conscious detachment from inner aspects or external attachments because of maturation.

Coming back to the car example, losing touch with our legs doesn’t mean going “beyond” the identification with a part of our bodies, but just depriving oneself of a conscious connection with a part of ourselves which could be useful for the soul’s evolution. The process of spiritual evolution starts from where we are and uses every human quality we have at that moment.

Therefore we project – to give some examples – our memory skills toward the computer (at the same time causing our minds and memories to deteriorate), our authentic needs for connection with people on social networks, or our drive for knowledge to Google (though the search can happen on just a mental instead of an experiential plane).

With the aid of technology we don’t have the chance to live and understand our identifications and qualities fully. Technologies bypass our awareness, creating extensions which prevent the recognition of the corresponding inner function. They anesthesize parts of ourselves and take charge of the corresponding inner function of the body or psyche. If we substitute the car for the legs, we won’t recognize the wholeness of our legs any more. If we substitute our need for human connection with Facebook or Myspace, we will numb our need for genuine contact.

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Un classico esempio di come le tecnologie portino la nostra consapevolezza lontana dai nostri corpi, rendendoci meno connessi col nostro corpo (tuttavia altre tecnologie potrebbero incidere prevalentemente sul mondo interiore) è l’automobile, che se da una parte ha esteso le possibilità delle nostre gambe, dall’altra parte ha limitato l’uso delle stesse, determinato un loro indebolimento e un intorpidimento della nostra connessione con le stesse.

Su un piano evolutivo della psiche, disconnettere parti di noi stessi tramite le tecnologie potrebbe ricordare il processo di disidentificazione che viene attuato nel percorso spirituale di conoscenza. Man mano che approfondiamo la conoscenza di noi stessi, lasciamo cadere le identificazioni con le immagini interiori del nostro corpo e con le strutture della nostra mente (convinzioni, preferenze o avversioni, credenze) che abbiamo costruito a partire dalla primissima età come meccanismi di difesa.

Diversi insegnamenti spirituali, tra i quali il Buddismo è forse il più conosciuto in occidente, affermano che il corpo e la mente sono entità impermanenti. Identificarci con essi rende difficile il raggiungimento della consapevolezza definitiva. Il nostro corpo è soggetto a cambiamenti continui e a decadenza. La mente analogamente è soggetta a trasformazioni continue: cambiamo le opinioni, le abilità, creiamo e dissolviamo sub-personalità. La neuroscienza stessa afferma che non esiste un centro di coscienza che raccoglie le diverse parti della nostra psiche.

Tutto questo e molto altro portò il Budda ad affermare che in realtà non esistiamo come individui separati che si possano identificare in un sistema corpo-mente, essendo costruzioni che mancano della sostanza che si ottiene incontrando la consapevolezza ultima. L’esistenza stessa di un “Io” per come mi considero essere viene messa in discussione sia dalla spiritualità che dalla scienza.

Se non siamo il nostro corpo-mente, cosa siamo? A questa domanda si può rispondere solamente cercando. Ogni maestro si è sforzato di descrivere tale stato, ma il percorso va comunque fatto individualmente. La conoscenza intellettuale o scientifica può essere trasmessa da persona a persona senza che la persona che la riceve debba ripercorrere tutte le fasi che hanno portato la prima alle sue conclusioni.

La conoscenza spirituale necessita dal coinvolgimento esperienziale e totale della nostra consapevolezza; il cammino va ripercorso personalmente dall’inizio. Il raggiungimento dell’illuminazione passa attraverso una progressiva disidentificazione da ciò che pensiamo essere noi stessi, non per impoverirci, ma per divenire parte di una consapevolezza più ampia.

Durante il cammino verso la conoscenza ci alleggeriamo progressivamente del nostro carico di identificazioni. Più indaghiamo al nostro interno e più ci rendiamo conto che ciò che credevamo di essere era in realtà una apparizione della stessa vaga consistenza di un costrutto mentale. Questo processo di disidentificazione è liberatorio ma arduo nel cammino. Togliere le identificazioni da ciò che credevamo di essere può portare fasi di dolore e di smarrimento per la scomparsa dei nostri (finti) supporti interiori. E’ quindi un processo che richiede volontà e capacità di accogliere il dolore.

Il processo di disidentificazione spirituale, sia esso da un’immagine mentale, emozionale, relazionale o corporea, avviene quando ne diveniamo profondamente consapevoli e la possiamo osservare senza più interferenze da parte dei nostri condizionamenti. E’ importante comprendere come ci poniamo nei confronti delle nostre identificazioni, sentirle, viverle e poi lasciarle andare. Dunque possiamo lasciare andare una nostra identificazione quando l’abbiamo sentita, capita e vissuta nella sua interezza.

Ma tramite le tecnologie il processo di disidentificazione, invece che essere interiorizzato, viene esteriorizzato, dis-integrandoci invece che renderci liberi. Il processo sembra quello di un ritiro progressivo dal proprio corpo e dal mondo, che ricorda più l’attitudine della tipologia Cinque dell’Enneagramma che un distacco consapevole da aspetti interiori o attaccamenti esteriori per “maturazione”.

Per ritornare all’esempio dell’automobile, perdere il contatto con le nostre gambe non significa andare “oltre” all’identificazione con una parte del nostro corpo, ma semplicemente privarsi di una connessione consapevole con una parte di noi stessi, che sarebbe di ausilio alla crescita spirituale. Il processo di crescita spirituale parte da dove siamo e utilizza ogni qualità umana che abbiamo in quel momento.

Allora proiettiamo, per fare alcuni esempi, le nostre capacità di memoria verso il computer (facendo calare la memoria mentale), i nostri bisogni di connessione autentica con le persone ai social network, la spinta verso la ricerca a Google (che può avvenire però prevalentemente su un piano mentale e non esperienziale).

Con l’ausilio delle tecnologie non abbiamo modo di vivere e comprendere le nostre identificazioni e qualità fino in fondo. Le tecnologie bypassano la nostra consapevolezza creandoci delle estensioni che ci impediscono il riconoscimento della corrispondente funzione interiore. Anestetizzano parti di noi stessi e assumono il controllo della corrispondente funzione del corpo o della psiche.

Se sostituiamo l’automobile alle gambe non riconosceremo più le nostre gambe nella loro interezza. Analogamente, se sostituiamo il bisogno di connessione umana con Facebook o Myspace verremo intorpiditi nel sentire il bisogno di contatto autentico.

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[en]Strip courtesy of Andy Rementer – Techno Tuesday.

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Vignette di Andy Rementer – Techno Tuesday, per gentile concessione.

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See also:

Brain waves facing a screen, and meditation

Spiritual powers through technology

The Tao of Google ranking

Facebook and the sorcerer’s apprentice of the Net

Neural reflexes and reflections on meditation

Disembodying at broadband speed

Heavenly Technology

The Tibetan watch: how a spiritual teacher learned about technology in the West

Virtual worlds and Maya 2.0

Bytes and bites of the net

Computer addiction as survival for the ego

Programming and self de-programming

Metabolizing information

Mental territories

Is Internet empowering us?

Wireless communication and reality mining as a reflection of pervasive consciousness

Multitasking to nothing

Biotech as an information system

Virtual worlds, mirror worlds, Second Life: backing up the messed planet

Mechanisms, mysticism and Amazon Mechanical Turk

Zen archery and computers

Lifelogging

The heart of the binary code

Downloading our life on Internet

Google, privacy and the need to be seen

Personal consumer

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Vedi anche:

Le onde cerebrali di fronte allo schermo, e la meditazione

Poteri spirituali tramite la tecnologia

Il Tao del ranking di Google

Facebook e gli apprendisti stregoni della Rete

Riflessi neurali e riflessioni sulla meditazione

Rendendoci incorporei a velocità di banda larga

Tecnologie divine

L’orologio tibetano: come un insegnante spirituale venne a conoscenza della tecnologia in Occidente

Mondi virtuali e Maya 2.0

La morsa e i morsi della rete

La dipendenza da computer per la sopravvivenza dell’ego

Programmazione e de-programmazione di sè

Metabolizzare le informazioni

Territori mentali

Internet aumenta davvero il nostro potere?

La comunicazione senza fili e il reality mining come riflesso della consapevolezza globale

Il multitasking: strafare per niente

Le biotecnologie come sistema informativo

Mondi virtuali, mondi specchio, Second Life: fare il backup di un pianeta nel caos

Meccanismi, misticismi e Mechanical Turk di Amazon

Il tiro con l’arco Zen e i computer

Lifelogging

Il cuore del codice binario

Download della vita su Internet

Google, la privacy e il mettersi in mostra

Personal consumatore

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As Marshall McLuhan sensed, technology creates extensions for our capabiilities but at the same time amputates or alienats parts of ourselves. The classic example is of cars. On one side cars extend the legs’ capabilities letting us go further and faster, but on the other side the leg muscles are getting atrophied and towns being transformed into what they are now.

In addition to extending our physical bodies, we projected even our inner qualities on technology. So we project our need of strength, intimacy, will, peace and other qualities on technological tools which promise to extend our possibilities.

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Come ha intuito Marshall McLuhan, la tecnologia cerca delle estensioni per le nostre capacità ma allo stesso momento crea delle amputazioni o alienazioni da parti di sé. Un classico esempio è l’automobile, che da una parte estende le capacità delle gambe potendo portarci più lontano e più velocemente ma dall’altra atrofizza i muscoli delle gambe e rende le città quello che sono.

Oltre alle estensioni del corpo fisico, abbiamo proiettato sulla tecnologia anche le qualità interiori. Quindi proiettiamo il nostro bisogno di forza, intimità, socialità, volontà, pace interiore, ecc sugli strumenti tecnologici che ci promettono di estendere le nostre possibilità.

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The creation of a human personality is as much a growth as a loss. The process of evolution of the soul goes through different stages, some of them witnessing the progressive or sometimes even sudden disappearance of deep inner qualities that emerged in other life stages.

The newborn baby is mainly in the state we call the Essence of the Essence, a non-differentiated state of unity. At about three months, the baby is in a “merged” state, which is necessary for the development of the relationship with the mother. After the merged state, strength develops, then value, joy, the Personal Essence, and so on. But, of course, because of interference from and conflict with the environment, this development is only partial. Every time there is painful trauma, there is a lessening of a certain quality of Essence. Which quality is affected depends on the nature and the time of the trauma. Sometimes our strength, sometimes our love, sometimes our self-valuing, or compassion, or joy, or intuition, are hurt, and then, eventually blocked. When a quality of Essence is finally blocked from a person’s experience, what is left in place of that quality is a sense of emptiness, a deficiency, a hole (A. H. Almaas, Elements of the Real in Man [Diamond Heart Book One], Diamond Books, Berkeley, 1987).

It is important that a newborn child enjoy the best conditions in terms of psycho-physical care and respect of his nature, but even though he may have had the advantage of the most attentive family and social conditions, this won’t prevent the partial or total disappearance of the qualities of the soul, because of reasons inherent to the process of personality formation.

In bringing awareness toward ourselves as adults through a psycho-spiritual path, we can rediscover the soul’s essential qualities that were lost or diminished during the first years of life, like love, compassion, strength, will, inner peace, intuition, joy. But this is a long path that is faced by a few.

The absence of connection with the deepest aspects of our soul and the loss of the Absolute leave a sense of emptiness that somehow has to be compensated. The mind itself will provide the tools so that through imagination we could create a world where our soul’s qualities and spiritual states are present, though in different forms.

The loss of parts of the soul are felt as amputations, which, lacking the authentic rediscovery of ourselves, require prostheses to perceive a sort of wholeness again.

The place of essential qualities in most cases is being taken by impostors: aspects of the ego which simulate those qualities substituting the authentic ones. For instance, the loss of will could get transformed into stubborness and in pressing ourselves, the loss of strength could get directed toward arrogance, the loss of compassion could get redirected toward superficial sentimentalism. In addition to simulations by the ego, there are more ways of trying to compensate for the loss of pieces of our souls.

Not being fully aware of the fact that every quality can be found inside ourselves, the search is directed on the external as a way to compensate. For historical and religious reasons, technology became a way of substitution and hope in our society to return to a happy original state.

Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media: “Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.”

In my opinion, the need to extend our possibilities through technology originates basically from the need to recover the parts of ourselves that were lost during the way or that weren’t fully developed. Every human being consciously or unconsciously feels that there are empty spaces inside that need to be filled, in a geniune manner or, in its absence, even with a substitute, as a pacifier for a baby.

As Marshall McLuhan sensed, technology creates extensions for our capabiilities but at the same time amputates or alienats parts of ourselves. The classic example is of cars. On one side cars extend the legs’ capabilities letting us go further and faster, but on the other side the leg muscles are getting atrophied and towns being transformed into what they are now.

In addition to extending our physical bodies, we projected even our inner qualities on technology. So we project our need of strength, intimacy, will, peace and other qualities on technological tools which promise to extend our possibilities. But extensions and amputations go hand in hand, so that the amputated part itself creates a deficiency that attempts to be compensated by new technologies, in a vicious circle.

Let’s take as examples three necessities of the soul: inner peace, intimacy, and will. Television promises to satisfy our needs of peace and relaxation with a passive modality where we enter a receptive state, but at the same time brings us, as seen in several surveys, to restlessness and frustration once the viewing comes to an end. This very restlessness needs to be appeased by more television.

Another basic need, that of intimacy, can be extended beyond the possibilities of our neighborhood through social networds and dating websites. When such connections drive home the lack of real contact, we feel even more isolated and the solution is to offer even more ways to make connections through the Net.

The need to have inner will is being projected to tireless machines which work instead of us and to the quest for further mechanization. This mechanization doesn’t bring us to feel our will as part of ourselves, therefore we need more automation and power for our technologies.

Every technology triggers a process of illusion and addiction, promising to bring back our lost qualities and to extend our need of expansion and growth embedded in our souls. Technology promises to give back what has been lost, but its expansionist goals don’t stop there. It is not satisfied with simulating the recovery of our human qualities – it wants to give us superpowers, bringing back humans to an edenic condition and simulating the state of the spiritual enlightened being and, more, of the spiritual powers, which in the Indian tradition are called “siddhis.”

Siddhis come to a few individuals as “side effects” of their spiritual progress. Likewise, the drive to technology, unconsciously, wants to recreate a world appearing as the worlds described by mystics.

Akashic records could be defined as a universal and collective consciousness which keeps any sort of information. According to Egdar Cayce:

Imagine having a computer system that keeps track of every event, thought, image, or desire that had ever transpired in the earth. Imagine, as well, that rather than simply a compilation of written data and words, this system contains countless videotape films and pictures, providing the viewer with an eyewitness account of all that had ever happened within any historical time frame. Finally, imagine that this enormous database not only keeps track of the information from an objective perspective but also maintains the perspectives and emotions of every individual involved. As incredible as it may sound, this description gives a fairly accurate representation of the Akashic Records (Kevin J. Todeschi, Edgar Cayce on the Akashic Records, A.R.E. Press, Virginia Beach, 1998).

Akashic records encompass every kind of knowledge. Some mystics say that this knowledge can be acquired through peculiar states of consciousness. Several mystics (including Western ones) have talked about their connection with this huge archive. Recently, British biologist Rupert Sheldrake theorized about morphic fields that “the organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory.” Akashic records and morphic fields act like collective holders of memories.

Google, through its huge archives which keep the past and present of everything that happened on the Net, meaning every bit of information, knowledge, interaction and click and, perhaps in future, even thoughts and feelings, is mimicking the role of Akashic records. Personal computers have Google Desktop and similar tools to index everything inside them and search anything that happened in our interaction with the tool and with the other people connected to us through the Net. All of our individual and social life is being indexed.

Searching inside our computers is like doing self-archeology. Google and the possibilities it gives us in accessing every source of knowledge is what is technologically closer to Akashic records, but on a mental rather than spiritual plane.

Siddhis come to the advanced spiritual practitioner. Even these are being emulated by technology.

Just to mention a few examples, there is Vayu Gaman Siddhi which allows one to move instantly from one place to another and to fly in the skies (Google Earth and other simulators), or there is the siddhi which gives the capability of creating worlds (technology allows us to create virtual worlds like Second Life), or manipulating matter (nanotechnologies).

Then, even though the comparison is to be taken lightly, we even have the Haadi Vidya Siddhi, in which a person neither feels hungry nor thirsty, as many heavy users of computers can recognize of themselves, losing connection with their bodies.

On the genuine spiritual paths siddhis are considered more as obstacles than aids in attaining liberation and truth. The spiritual researcher could become attached to the powers attained, become dazzled by them and stop his evolutionary process. Technological evolution intentionally wants to look for ever more powers through tools. Rarely do we question the real meaning of their function in our psyche in regard to our inner needs or as repercussions on society.

The need to create ever more powers through technology is not challenged in society. It seems an unquestionable religious assumption – and somehow it is. Technology, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, assumed the role of savior of the human condition following the Fall and have been deputized to create a new paradise on Earth.

As the attachment to individual spiritual powers blocks further individual evolution, on a collective plane, attachment to the substitutive powers given by technology likewise blocks the awareness of what we collectively lost with regard to human qualities.

See also:

The Tao of Google ranking

Facebook and the sorcerer’s apprentice of the Net

Neural reflexes and reflections on meditation

Disembodying at broadband speed

Heavenly Technology

The Tibetan watch: how a spiritual teacher learned about technology in the West

Virtual worlds and Maya 2.0

Bytes and bites of the net

Computer addiction as survival for the ego

Programming and self de-programming

Metabolizing information

Mental territories

Is Internet empowering us?

Wireless communication and reality mining as a reflection of pervasive consciousness

Multitasking to nothing

Biotech as an information system

Virtual worlds, mirror worlds, Second Life: backing up the messed planet

Mechanisms, mysticism and Amazon Mechanical Turk

Zen archery and computers

Lifelogging

The heart of the binary code

Downloading our life on Internet

Google, privacy and the need to be seen

Personal consumer

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La creazione di una personalità umana è tanto una crescita quanto una perdita. Il processo di evoluzione dell’anima passa attraverso diverse fasi, alcune delle quali vedono la scomparsa progressiva o talvolta repentina di profonde qualità interiori che erano emerse in altre fasi della vita.

Il neonato è perlopiù nello stato che chiamiamo l’Essenza dell’Essenza, uno stato di unità non-differenziato. A circa tre mesi, egli è in uno stato “fusionale”, necessario per lo sviluppo del rapporto con la madre. Dopo lo stato di fusione, si sviluppano la forza, poi il valore, la gioia, l’Essenza Personale e così via. Ma ovviamente, a causa dell’interferenza del conflitto con l’ambiente, questo sviluppo è solo parziale. Ogni volta che si verifica un trauma doloroso, una certa qualità dell’Essenza diminuisce. Quale qualità ne risenta, dipende dalla natura e dall’epoca del trauma. Possono restare feriti e, forse anche bloccati, la nostra forza, il nostro amore, la nostra autostima, oppure la compassione, la gioia, l’intuizione. Quando alla fine una qualità dell’Essenza scompare dalle esperienze di una persona, ciò che resta al posto di quella qualità è una sensazione di vuoto, una carenza, un buco. A.H. Almaas. Elements of the Real in Man (Diamond Heart Book One). Diamond Books. Berkeley. 1987.

E’ importante che un neonato possa godere delle migliori condizioni in termini di attenzioni psicofisiche e di rispetto della sua natura, ma anche se potesse avvantaggiarsi delle più attente condizioni familiari e sociali, questo non impedirebbe la scomparsa totale o parziale delle qualità dell’anima per ragione intrinseche al processo di formazione di una personalità.

Portando consapevolezza verso noi stessi, come adulti, tramite un percorso psicospirituale, possiamo ritrovare le qualità essenziali dell’anima che sono state perdute durante i primi anni di vita, quali ad esempio l’amore, la compassione, la forza, la volontà, la pace interiore, l’intuizione, la gioia. Ma questo percorso viene affrontato da pochi ed è un cammino lungo.

L’assenza di connessione con gli aspetti più profondi della nostra natura e la perdita dell’Assoluto lasciano un senso di vuoto che in qualche modo deve essere compensato. La mente stessa fornirà gli strumenti affinchè con l’immaginazione ci possiamo creare un mondo dove sono presenti le qualità dell’anima e gli stati spirituali, pur se in forma diversa.

La perdita delle parti dell’anima vengono sentite come delle vere e proprie amputazioni, che quindi, in mancanza della riscoperta autentica di noi stessi, necessitano di protesi affichè possiamo ritornare a percepire una sorta di completezza.

Il posto delle qualità essenziali viene preso nella maggior parte dei casi da “impostori”: aspetti dell’ego che simulano tali qualità in sostituzione di quelle autentiche. Ad esempio, la perdita della volontà potrebbe trasformarsi in testardaggine e nel fare pressione a se stessi, la perdita della forza potrebbe dirigersi verso la prepotenza, la perdita della compassione potrebbe volgersi in superficiale sentimentalismo. Oltre alle simulazioni interiori dell’ego, vi sono altri modi per provare a compensare la perdita di parti della nostra anima.

Non essendo pienamente consapevoli del fatto che ogni qualità si trova al nostro interno, la ricerca si rivolge all’esterno in modo da compensare. Per ragioni storiche e religiose, la tecnologia è diventata nella nostra società una delle modalità di sostituzione e una speranza di ritorno ad una felice condizione originaria.

Marshall McLuhan ne Gli strumenti del comunicare affermava che “Ogni invenzione o tecnologia è un’estensione o un’autoamputazione del nostro corpo, che impone nuovi rapporti o nuovi equilibri tra gli altri organi e le altre estensioni del corpo.”

A mio avviso, il bisogno di estendere le nostre possibilità tramite le tecnologie deriva fondamentalmente dal bisogno di ritrovare le parti di noi stessi che sono state perdute per strada o non si sono sviluppate in pieno. Ogni essere umano, consciamente o inconsciamente, sente che al suo interno vi sono dei vuoti che vogliono essere riempiti, autenticamente o, in mancanza, anche con un sostituto, come il succhiotto per un bambino.

Come ha intuito Marshall McLuhan, la tecnologia cerca delle estensioni per le nostre capacità ma allo stesso momento crea delle amputazioni o alienazioni da parti di sé. Un classico esempio è l’automobile, che da una parte estende le capacità delle gambe potendo portarci più lontano e più velocemente ma dall’altra atrofizza i muscoli delle gambe e rende le città quello che sono.

Oltre alle estensioni del corpo fisico, abbiamo proiettato sulla tecnologia anche le qualità interiori. Quindi proiettiamo il nostro bisogno di forza, intimità, volontà, socialità, pace interiore, ecc sugli strumenti tecnologici che ci promettono di estendere le nostre possibilità. Ma le estensioni e le amputazioni vanno di pari passo, quindi la parte di amputazione crea a sua volta una carenza e cerca di essere compensata con nuove tecnologie, in un circolo vizioso.

Prendiamo come esempio tre bisogni dell’anima: la pace, l’intimità e la volontà. La televisione ci promette di soddisfare i bisogni di pace e relax con una fruizione passiva dove entriamo in una condizione di ricettività, ma allo stesso tempo ci porta, come dimostrato da diversi studi, all’inquietudine e alla frustrazione una volta terminata la visione. Questa stessa inquietudine chiede di essere placata, da ulteriore televisione.

Un altro bisogno fondamentale, quello di intimità, lo possiamo estendere oltre alle possibilità del nostro circondario tramite i social network ed i siti per gli incontri sentimentali, sessuali. Quando questo tipo di connessione ci porta alla mancanza di un contatto reale, ci si sente ancora più isolati e la soluzione che viene proposta è quella di offrire ulteriori siti e modi per connettere le persone tramite la rete.

Il bisogno di volontà interiore viene proiettato su macchinari instancabili che “fanno il lavoro” al nostro posto e nella ricerca di automazione sempre più estesa. Ma questa automazione non ci porta a sentire la qualità interiore della volontà come parte di noi stessi e di conseguenza necessiteremo di ulteriore automazione e potenza per le nostre tecnologie.

Ogni tecnologia crea un processo di illusione e di dipendenza, promettendoci di riportarci qualità perdute ed estendere il bisogno di espansione e crescita intrinseco nella nostra anima. La tecnologia ci promette di darci ciò che abbiamo perso ma le sue mire espansionistiche non si fermano lì. La tecnologia non si accontenta di simulare il ritrovamento delle nostre qualità umane, vuole darci dei superpoteri, riportare ad una condizione edenica e simula lo stato dell’essere spiritualmente illuminato e dei poteri spirituali che nella tradizione indiana vengono chiamati “siddhi”.

I siddhi giungono ad alcuni individui come “effetto collaterale” del loro progresso spirituale. Allo stesso modo la spinta tecnologica, incosciamente, desidera ricreare un mondo che ha le sembianze dei mondi descritti dai mistici.

I record Akasici possono essere definiti come una coscienza univerale e collettiva che mantiene ogni sorta di informazione. Secondo le parole del mistico Edgar Cayce:

Immagina di avere un computer che conservi traccia di ogni evento, pensiero, immagine o desiderio che siano mai accaduti sulla Terra. Immagina anche che, anziché una semplice raccolta di dati e parole scritte, questo sistema contenga una quantità infinita di immagini e filmati, in grado di fornire allo spettatore un resoconto visivo di tutto ciò che sia mai accaduto in ogni epoca storica. Infine, immagina che questo enorme database conservi traccia non solo delle informazioni oggettive, ma anche delle emozioni e dei punti di vista di ogni individuo coinvolto. Per quanto incredibile possa sembrare, questa è una descrizione abbastanza precisa dei Registri Akashici. Kevin J. Todeschi. Edgar Cayce on the Akashic Records. A.R.E. Press. Virginia Beach. 1998.

I record Akasici contengono qualsiasi tipo di conoscenza. Alcuni mistici affermano che a questa conoscenza si può avere accesso tramite stati di coscienza particolari. Diversi mistici, anche occidentali, hanno parlato della loro connessione con questo immenso archivio. Il biologo inglese Rupert Sheldrake in tempi più recenti ha ipotizzato la teoria dei campi morfici, come “i campi organizzati dei comportamenti umani e animali, dei sistemi sociali e culturali e delle attività mentali possono tutti essere considerati come campi morfici che contengono una memoria intrinseca”. Record Akasici e campi morfici come contenitori delle memorie collettive.

Google, con i suoi immensi archivi che mantengono passato e presente di tutto ciò che è avvenuto nella rete, ogni informazione, conoscenza, interazione, clic e magari in futuro pensieri ed emozioni sta simulando il ruolo dei record Akasici. Gli stessi personal computer si stanno attrezzando con Google Desktop e analoghi strumenti per poter indicizzare ogni oggetto del nostro computer e cercare tutto ciò che è avvenuto nella nostra interazione con lo strumento, e con gli altri individui che sono connessi a noi tramite la rete. Tutta la nostra vita individuale e sociale viene indicizzata.

Ricercare all’interno del nostro computer sarà come fare archeologia su noi stessi. Google e le possibilità che ci dà nell’accedere ad ogni fonte di conoscenza è ciò che di tecnologicamente vi è di più vicino ai record Akasici, ma su un piano mentale piuttosto che spirituale.

Nella tradizione induista vengono elencato parecchi poteri spirituali, chiamati siddhi, che giungono al praticante spirituale avanzato. A loro volta, anche questi siddhi individuali vengono emulati dalla tecnologia.

Per citare qualche esempio, vi è il Vayu Gaman Siddhi che consente di spostarsi in un attimo da un luogo ad un altro e di volare nei cieli (Google Earth e altri simulatori), oppure vi è il siddhi che dà la capacità di creare mondi (la tecnologia ci consente di creare mondi virtuali quali Second Life), manipolare la materia (nanotecnologie).

Poi, pur se il paragone è da prendersi su un piano scherzoso, abbiamo anche il siddhi chiamato Haadi Vidya, dove una persona non sente più i bisogni legati alla fame e alla sete, come qualsiasi grande utilizzatore dei computer può riconoscersi, perdendo il contatto con la propria realtà corporea.

Ma nei percorsi spirituali autentici i siddhi rappresentano più un ostacolo che un ausilio nel percorso verso la liberazione e la verità. Il ricercatore spirituale potrebbe attaccarsi ai poteri ottenuti, farsi abbagliare da essi e fermare così il suo processo evolutivo. L’evoluzione tecnologica vuole intenzionalmente ricercare sempre più poteri tramite gli strumenti. Raramente ci si interroga sull’autentico significato della loro funzione nella nostra vita psichica, relativamente ai nostri bisogni interiori e come ripercussione nel sociale.

La necessità di creare sempre maggiori poteri tramite la tecnologia non viene messo in discussione. Sembra un indiscutibile presupposto religioso, e in qualche modo lo è. La tecnologia, nella tradizione giudaico-cristiana, ha assunto il ruolo di redentore della condizione umana a seguito della caduta ed è stata delegata a creare un nuovo paradiso in terra.

Così come l’attaccamento ai poteri spirituali individuali blocca ulteriori evoluzioni individuali, su un piano collettivo attaccarsi ai poteri sostitutivi dati dalla tecnologia blocca analogamente la consapevolezza di ciò che abbiamo perso collettivamente rispetto alle qualità umane.

Vedi anche:

Il Tao del ranking di Google

Facebook e gli apprendisti stregoni della Rete

Riflessi neurali e riflessioni sulla meditazione

Rendendoci incorporei a velocità di banda larga

Tecnologie divine

L’orologio tibetano: come un insegnante spirituale venne a conoscenza della tecnologia in Occidente

Mondi virtuali e Maya 2.0

La morsa e i morsi della rete

La dipendenza da computer per la sopravvivenza dell’ego

Programmazione e de-programmazione di sè

Metabolizzare le informazioni

Territori mentali

Internet aumenta davvero il nostro potere?

La comunicazione senza fili e il reality mining come riflesso della consapevolezza globale

Il multitasking: strafare per niente

Le biotecnologie come sistema informativo

Mondi virtuali, mondi specchio, Second Life: fare il backup di un pianeta nel caos

Meccanismi, misticismi e Mechanical Turk di Amazon

Il tiro con l’arco Zen e i computer

Lifelogging

Il cuore del codice binario

Download della vita su Internet

Google, la privacy e il mettersi in mostra

Personal consumatore

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