The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet. Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli
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capacity for long-term planning, are being stunted by long exposure to digital technologies.
Mindfulness and the love of truth are the capacities that can lead us to dissolving the mental structures that imprison us in our old conditioning. They can even expose the primary events which separated us from the immensity of the original whole state.
Spiritual paths, in moving us toward self-understanding, give back to the heart and the belly their roles which have been usurped by the mind. It is said that the path toward enlightenment is a path beyond the mind, or toward a “no-mind” state. This is often misunderstood as a passive state where the mind just becomes still, and maybe even dumb. The image of silent meditators under a tree with stony expressions remains a popular image.
The mind, in fact, does not become any less efficient when it reaches spiritual states. As Gurdjieff said, it reverts to its role of servant when the real master returns home and higher consciousness is foremost. In the absence of the master, the servant usurps the role, even keeping the house from collapsing in the face of no clear direction. The passage from the mind to higher consciousness happens through self-observation. The role of spiritual inquiry is not to annihilate the mind, but to integrate it. It is necessary to have a mind before overcoming it – possibly even a well-functioning mind.
When the basic skills of the mind are being managed by computers, we might believe we can shift our attention to more creative endeavors. Not burdened by mechanical thoughts, we should be able to devote our mind to higher pursuits like art, philosophy, or spirituality. One of the promises of technology has always been to “free” us from effort and repetitive tasks – starting with mechanical tools which have taken over much of our manual work, and now IT which makes our intellectual tasks easier.
With the basic mental tasks outsourced to computers, we could use our consciousness for self-knowledge and for investigating the internal processes of our mind. We could focus on the mind’s mechanisms for deconstructing our conditioning, and getting to know our mind-medium from the inside. This is the goal of every spiritual path for transitioning from intellect to wisdom, from mind to no-mind, from ego to enlightenment.
But IT seems better able to lock us in the loop of information than to stimulate higher capacities for self-understanding. Survival of ego-mind is in fact supported by IT – yet at the same time IT fragments it, leaving it permanently “under construction.” The endless stream of information keeps us on the same level – only the shapes change, as in a kaleidoscope.
Through IT we risk the atrophy of basic mental skills without developing any higher capacities in return. Part of the mind’s function is to hide from us its nature as something created, having no real substance. Mind has even engineered computers to hijack our observing capacities so we cannot see the mind as the unreal construction that it is.
First . . . you use your mind as the ultimate jigsaw. You take Totality and cut it up into a million tiny pieces. Then . . . having tired of that game you sit down and try to reassemble this jumble of pieces into something comprehensible. Ram Tzu knows . . . God invented time just so you could do this (Ram Tzu, 1990).
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