The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet. Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli
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thereby, assuring our survival.
This forgetting of ourself happens more easily with tools which act on the mind, like TV or the Internet, which absorb us till we give attention exclusively to external stimuli. This is reminiscent of the attention we once needed to give our environment in order to survive.
Much of the appeal of technology rests on its capacity to arouse a sense of urgency and wonder in us. Magic tricks are effective when our awareness becomes redirected or highjacked by the magician. Electronic gadgets are like magic boxes – decreasing our awareness of their broader meaning and directing our attention to its seductive glimmer, creating a totalitainment society.
When we are involved with any gadget, it is difficult to remain an observer, to be in touch with ourself instead of disappearing into the tool and the flow of information.
Reconnecting with the Inner Flow
Then comes a paradox. If instead we totally immerse ourself in an activity which absorbs us, such as dancing or making love, or even using a tool like a musical instrument, we do forget ourself – but an inner “witness” develops. This way, the action and the awareness of the action align. The subject who acts vanishes, but the awareness remains. What we forget is our small ego when we are merged with something bigger (love, music), and we reconnect with awareness. We abandon, however momentarily, the mental third body to reach the fourth body – the aware observer, according to the Hindu esoteric teachings (in which the second is the emotional body).
Then we do not become lost in the action like the monkey with the pliers or a human being with screen media. We find instead a deeper self in the form of awareness through the action.
Such occurrences, Osho (1990) said, are existential, not intellectual – and when they are experienced by doing something totally, surprisingly, something new will be felt. By totally singing, a new kind of awareness arises. The singer has disappeared, and only song remains. But the singer is not at all unconscious. Quite the opposite: awareness will be expanded.
Earlier Osho (1976) wrote:
If you become one hundred percent conscious, you become a witness, a sakshi. If you become a sakshi, you have come to the jumping point from where the jump into awareness becomes possible. In awareness, you lose the witness and only witnessing remains: you lose the doer, you lose the subjectivity, you lose the egocentric consciousness. Then consciousness remains, without the ego (p. 190).
The Western journey, both in the neuroscientific and psychological fields, does not conceive of awareness without an ego which experiences it. Yet even from our egoic condition we can have a glimpse of enlightenment by being totally immersed in our actions. We can become one again. While dancing, we become the dance. While making love, we become one with love and with the beloved. While playing music, we become one with the instrument and the music. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (1991) referred to it as a state of flow.
Totality is a state of joyful expression and of awareness at the same time. Awareness expands and embraces the action, so the actor and the witness become one. Such states can be reached by meditation practices; by activities involving the body-mind like breathing techniques, intense loving; or sometimes by an impending danger which suddenly expands our awareness.
When we are unaware we lose ourself in the object which grasps our attention, like the monkey with the pliers. The witness disappears and we lose our awareness in the external object – whether a tool, another human being, or screen media. We fall into what is called in psychological terms an object relation with that tool or the person.
In an object relation we lose the inner witness, and we incorporate the external reality as if it were a part of our own psyche – for example, when we unconsciously consider a friend or a lover as a functional object standing in for the maternal or paternal relationship. Then we relate to the other person not as an individual with his/her distinctive characteristics, but as an object that is part of our inner structure and expectations.
Turkle (1984) explored how computers function as objects for our psychological patterns. We can merge with a technological object and include it in the constellation of our object relations. A computer can become an object which we relate to as a reassuring fusion with mother.
From Spectator to Witness
When we superimpose our expectations, projections and needs on reality, we are not too distant from the monkey which mistakes the pliers for his own hands. When we fit reality into our mental structures, we do not become one with reality in the way the ego is transcended and when we unite with the whole. We regress, instead, to a pre-conscious state, in which we don’t differentiate what our projections are from what the reality is.
It may seem we have become one again, but we lose awareness on the way. Instead of becoming a witness of ourself, we become merely a spectator – bringing our attention toward the external, while forgetting our inner world.
The poet and stage director Bertolt Brecht believed that uncritical immersion into the theater of his epoch by spectators expanded the attraction of the Nazi choreography. Brecht created a theatrical technique that drew audience’s attention back to themselves. It was a sort of self-remembering technique, as taught in the West by the mystic Gurdjieff. Since Brecht’s time, the fascination with media has grown exponentially, so that today many media are distancing us from ourself, leaving our psyche open to manipulation.
Inner Holes and Techno-Fills
With or without technology, the development of a human being involves both growth and loss. This process of evolution of the soul develops the various inner qualities at different rates during the specific developmental stages. The loss – or lack – of various essential qualities of our soul can occur quite early.
Internalizing our object relations is an essential stage for the development of our personality, but they have to be understood and relinquished in the advanced stages of self-understanding. We need to feed our psyche through relating with others from the time we are born, perhaps even earlier. Later, we internalize those object relations and unconsciously project them on other people and tools – from teddy bears to Facebook. When those relationships fail to properly feed our soul with the needed qualities – as usually happens – we are left feeling the emptiness of our inner holes, which we then try to compensate for.
According to Almaas (1987), the stages in the development of a newborn baby begin with a state of unity. At about three months, a “merged” dual-unity arises that is essential for the development of the relationship with the mother. This period supports the development later of the qualities of Strength, Value, Joy, and the Personal Essence. But these can be only partial, due to interference from and conflict with an imperfect holding environment. Traumatic encounters obstruct specific qualities of Essence, depending on the nature of the trauma and developmental timing. When a quality is ultimately blocked, a feeling of emptiness – like a hole deep within us – accompanies our future life.
It is important for a newborn to enjoy the best psychological and physical care. Yet even with the luck of having had the most attentive familial and social conditions, the partial or total disappearance of the original qualities of the soul cannot be avoided. The process of personality formation itself, from the appearance of duality to the shrinking or disappearance of essential qualities, is inevitable.
In developing self-awareness through a psycho-spiritual path, we can rediscover the soul’s essential qualities that were lost in the first years of life. We can even reach a state beyond duality, one quite different from the original indistinct, merged, non-dual state of the infant who lacked discrimination and awareness.
The absence of connection with the deepest aspects of our soul and the loss of the essential qualities leave a sense of emptiness – that we must be compensated for, somehow. Every human being, consciously or unconsciously, feels those empty spaces within them that need to become whole again – if not in a genuine manner, then with a substitute, like a pacifier for a baby. The mind itself will compensate through internalizing the object relations