The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet. Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli
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way, through the heart, that doesn’t just deal with emotions, but has to do with the search for truth and with a direct way of knowing. The knowing heart has been considered by spiritual traditions as receptive to the intelligence of Universal Consciousness.
This spiritual heart has a connection with the body in energetic terms. The heart chakra, for instance, is located in the chest area. Even if the energetic connection is considered unscientific, it has been discovered that the physical heart has its own nerve cells which also send information to the brain.
With the discovery that the heart has its own dedicated nervous system, the Institute of HeartMath is researching the critical links between emotions, the heart-brain communication, and cognitive functions. In the article “Science of the Heart” (2001), they reported that the heart is the organ that produces the largest electrical field, about 60 times greater than the brain. An electrocardiograph (ECG) can detect it anywhere on the surface of the body. Also, the magnetic field of the heart is more than 5,000 times greater than that of the brain and can be detected several feet away, in any direction, using SQUID-based magnetometers. Perhaps further research will reveal that the neurophysiology of the heart is the physical counterpart of our capacities for subtle knowing.
The heart can be a cognitive tool wider and deeper than the mind. The heart’s modalities of knowing don’t come through splitting and reasoning, but in an intuitive and receptive way. A mind emptied of its conditionings and beliefs gives space to the heart’s cognitive faculties.
If the mind works with an either/or – or 0/1 – binary duality, the cognitive map of the heart works with a both/and logic, connecting what the mind has separated – including ourself as an individual separate from the rest of existence. The state of spiritual enlightenment in some traditions is referred to as non-dual, suggesting the end of the dualities of the mind.
How do we connect with the spiritual heart? Experientially through love, as one would imagine – but the love of a special lover. A. H. Almaas (1988) perceived that one basic quality of the soul is the love of truth for its own sake, love being the expression of truth. Just as the mental quality of objectivity necessitates love of truth – a quality of the heart – there is an interrelationship between the many qualities of the head and the heart.
The genesis of ego is defensiveness – which is a way of coping with and concealing experience that is difficult to tolerate. Thus the basic quality required for inner realization is the polar opposite of this fundamental aspect of ego. Defense and resistance are detrimental to truth, while love is supportive. Love of truth allows defensiveness to disappear and can reveal the sort of experiences that were initially defended against to establish the pattern of resistance.
The primary split that created the ego and, with it, dualistic mind, occurred at a very early age in reaction to intolerable pain, as we split good feelings from bad ones. That first illusion was the first virtual reality “software.” It was a necessary, human and unavoidable act that shapes everyone’s life. Nonetheless, it is still an illusion that can be exposed and dissolved through the love of truth in order to regain wholeness.
While the mind can give a great deal of support in working toward the truth, at a certain depth it is powerless, since its very existence depends on hiding the truth. For the mind, exposing truth would be committing suicide. Yet the heart loves to reveal the layers of truth which the mind cannot investigate.
Rudolf Steiner (1991) also pointed to the unrecognized cognitive faculties of the heart. He regarded the capacity for love as the third step in higher knowledge, indispensable for rising to the level of intuition. This can be achieved only by refining and spiritualizing the capacity for love to its acme, though this is not accepted as a cognitional force in our materialistic age. A person must be able to evolve sufficiently to make this capacity for love a cognitional force.
The birth of the dual mind is a necessary part of the development of our soul. In order to recognize ourself, we need to differentiate ourself from others and to become individual personalities. In the more advanced stages of spiritual development, the dualistic mind is transcended along with the individual personality. Osho (2008) offers this perspective:
Existence is undivided; all divisions are just mental. The very way the mind looks at things creates a duality. It is the prison of the mind that divides. [The] mind cannot do otherwise. It is difficult for the mind to conceive of two contradictions as one, of opposite polarities as one. The mind has a compulsion, an obsession to be consistent. It cannot conceive how light and darkness are one.
And Assagioli (1971), the father of psychosynthesis, expressed it this way:
Often we can’t say where actually a person starts and where another ends. In harmonious groups, in an organized collectivity, the limits of the self, of the personalities of their members, tend to flow away, they aren’t clearly distinct. We are literally immersed in a psychic atmosphere, in a collective psyche with its various differentiations (p. 18).
Through duality we lose the intimate connection with wholeness, but acquire powerful mental capacities unknown in other species. Discriminating awareness allows us to define a well-separated ego personality, intervene on external matter, and build sophisticated tools.
Our Identity With Tools – from Chimps to Chips
Apart from humans, only a few animals have the physical characteristics and mental capacities for using tools, monkeys foremost among them. Hand movements are controlled by the F5 area of the brain. Giacomo Rizzolatti (Umiltà, 2008) of the University of Parma recorded the cerebral activity of two macaques after they had learned to grasp food with pliers. He documented the activity in the F5 area and in F1, which is involved in the manipulation of objects. He discovered the same cerebral activity whether the monkeys grasped food by hand or with the pliers. The neuronal activity, he concluded, is transferred from the hands to the tool, as if the tool were the hand and its extremity the fingers.
Furthermore, Rizzolatti pointed out that the F5 area is rich in mirror neurons, a type that he had previously discovered, which become excited both when an act is being performed and when another individual is observed performing that act. The discoveries, according to Dietrich Stout, an archeologist specializing in the use of tools, tell us that “obviously, the use of instruments by the monkeys implies an incorporation of the instruments in the body scheme, literally it is an extension of a body” (Umiltà, 2008).
A monkey cannot distinguish between its own hands and the tool it uses, as if the tool were an actual extension of its body. This brings to mind what Marshall McLuhan said about the media and tools as extensions of our bodies and minds, be it a tool for hunting or the "technology" of language, the printing press or our contemporary cognitive extensions.
Tools may be like body extensions on a neural level even for humans, but our discriminating awareness allows the understanding that the tool is something “out there.” In Rizzolatti’s experiment, the factor of consciousness, still elusive to neuroscience, is missing. Neither the presence nor absence of consciousness nor what it is about can be identified by experiments.
The monkey does not experience the duality produced by human self-consciousness, so it may seem closer to a spiritual condition of “union with everything” – beyond dualities. However, this union occurs on a pre-conscious level, not as the culmination of a conscious path toward truth.
Our consciousness of ourself is at the same time both joy and distress, since it entraps us in the dual mind, separating us from the rest of existence, and splitting our psyche into conflicting parts. But it also allows us to achieve intellectual tasks unknown to our hungry macaque. Self-consciousness, and consequently the development of an ego which separates us from existence, is the intermediate phase between the monkey’s mind and a spiritually enlightened state.
Like the monkey, every time we use tools, we can lose the awareness of ourself. Even knowing that we are separated from the instrument, our attention tends to be drawn toward the tool, and we forget ourself. The monkey cannot recognize what is other than himself. Maybe humans have the same attitude when dealing with tools – our old friends – with which we merged since ancient times, thus