Digital Dharma: A User's Guide to Expanding Consciousness in the Infosphere
223
Digital Dharma: A User's Guide to Expanding Consciousness in the Infosphere
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780835630498 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quest Books |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 223 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Digital Dharma
A User's Guide to Expanding Consciousness in the Infosphere
By Steven Vedro
Theosophical Publishing House
Copyright © 2007 Steven VedroAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8356-3049-8
CHAPTER 1
FIRST-LEVEL DIGITAL DHARMA
THE TELEGRAPH OF ALIVENESS
First-level digital dharma is about mastering how we send out and respond to rudimentary signals of aliveness that encode the most basic message: "I am here. Is anyone else out there?"
At the first (or "base") level of human psychosocial development, the personality operates primarily in the biological and reflexive domain. Survival is the simple goal. Social organization boils down to "me versus everyone else." Because relationships are evaluated primarily on safety concerns, as the emerging personality struggles to distinguish itself as an individual, one's inner work involves discovering the "I"—and feeling strong enough to present it to the world.
In the Infosphere, this core "Here I Am" message is built on binary signaling technologies, from the on-off pulses of the first electrical telegraph to the digital bits that now encode text messaging and radio-frequency identification and power all of cyberspace. The energetic calling out of one's existence starts at the subatomic level, where an electron, dropping from one quantum stage to the next, releases a single, discrete photon. This act of "calling out"—emitting a photon—"collapses" the photon's myriad of concurrent potential wave-function states into one physical object aligned with the expectations of the observer. As a quantum energy packet, the photon moves out of the realm of pure energy to become a wave/particle combination with one of many potential locations. There is no middle state in this quantum dance. An electron is at one level or another; there is no in-between. It is a zero or a one, resting or active, dead or alive, depending on how it is observed.
At the cellular level, this same model applies. As long as we are alive, our cells constantly send out tiny energetic "I am here; is anyone else out there?" chemical, electrical, and audio coordination queries. The "music" of all of these microscopic instruments, writes systems theorist Ervin Laszlo, is one great jazz band, whose improvisation "ranges over more than seventy octaves":
It is made up of the vibration of localized chemical bonds, the turning of molecular wheels, the beating of micro-cilia, the propagation of fluxes of electrons and protons, the flowing of metabolites and ionic currents within and among cells through ten orders of spatial magnitude.
And these same queries are at the heart of first-level communications dharma, reflecting the personality's earliest work of differentiation, the work of moving from potential to specificity, from being part of the background to claiming one's individuality.
In the chakra model of energy yoga, these primitive messages are said to originate from the "root" transmitter at the base of the spine. The spiritual work of this center is to connect physical matter and the primal self. It channels the energy of the physical plane up through the feet to our "higher" centers, while at the same time connecting these centers back to the body. Its focus is on the individual's or clan's physical survival needs. The focus of much of its communication is on material exchange—labor and food. Creation theologian Matthew Fox tells us that "solidarity is what the first chakra is all about: being solidly connected to the solid earth and the earth's home, which is the universe, and being in solidarity with all the sounds of the universe and its yearnings for life." When one is fully present to the joyous side of first-level awareness, one takes in the pleasures of life. One sends out the existential declaration "Hineini"—Biblical Hebrew for "I am here"—meaning fully present, ready to be seen, ready to experience all of the joy and all of the fear of fully being in the physical world (figure 1.1). When this communications center is psychologically blocked, fears are sublimated. One's energy seems scattered, unfocused; boundaries are undefined and not respected. One looks for security in external things—money, power, and possessions—yet has a hard time receiving them. Everything becomes a struggle.
We can see many of these Hineini developmental issues reflected in the history of our "on-off" digital signaling technologies, starting with the first technology to extend our nervous system into the electrical domain—the telegraph. Its dots and dashes represented the first transmission of thought itself across "lines of lightning," as the electrical energy from one "station" pulsed across the wires to the electromagnetic coils of the receiving "sounder" miles away (see figure 1.2 on page 17).
Despite the utopian dreams of global intelligence with which techno-utopians of its day greeted the first transatlantic cable—they trumpeted it as an "instantaneous highway of thought" that would tie together the earth with "electric current, palpitating with human thoughts and emotions"—the telegraph system was initially focused on first-level external concerns: the spheres of commerce; colonialism and war; and community prosperity and personal safety. By the end of the nineteenth century, the world was spanned by a network of almost a million miles of wires and almost one hundred thousand miles of undersea cable, a network amounting to what Tom Standage has called "the Victorian Internet." Electrical messages delivered military orders, government and public safety alerts, weather warnings, and "buy and sell" directives across the world.
The telegraph network also brought a new sense of collective unease. People's sense of time and distance collapsed as cities were linked to cities and nations to nations, as giant spools of cable were unwound across the ocean floor. On some level people sensed that technology was about to push them all energetically closer. They understood that their sense of separateness was about to be challenged in a fundamental way: Communication could now take place without transportation, without embodiment—in a "contact achieved by the sharing of spiritual (electrical) fluids," as media scholar John Durham Peters so vividly puts it. As media sage Marshall McLuhan observed, "In the same year, 1844, then, that men were playing chess and lotteries on the first American telegraph, Søren Kierkegaard published the Concept of Dread. The Age of Anxiety had begun."
First-level concerns with physical safety, commercial market intelligence, the security of possessions, and fears of estrangement, along with high hopes for "universal communications," were all carried over from the dot-dash world of telegraphy into the new technology of "wireless." Suddenly, new connections were now possible between people, countries, and (to some) the spirit world. In fact, much of the original vocabulary of communications over distance and time (such as transmitter, receiver, induction, channel, and resonance) was shared between the practitioners of esoteric spirituality and the early wireless pioneers. One of the earliest Spiritualist newspapers was called The Spiritual Telegraph, and one of the first attempts to market wireless stocks focused on convincing Christian Scientists (whose founder, Mary Baker Eddy, had written, "Spirit needs no wires or electricity to carry messages") that they would speed up the return of Christ by investing in this magic technology.
At first generated by the discharge of stored electrical energy into giant spark gaps, then by the continuous-wave oscillation created by a tuned vacuum-tube circuit, radio waves crisscrossed the nascent Infosphere. "Wireless" was quickly adopted as a critical link to ships at sea: Powerful on-off pulses were adopted for use by radio navigation beacons and for ship-to-shore emergency signaling. The first documented "CQD" distress call was sent by wireless in 1899, and in 1909 a highly publicized sea rescue off the coast of Nantucket made "the marvels of wireless telegraphy" front-page news for days afterwards. The technology was so critical to shipping that the nation's first radio broadcasting stations went silent for ten minutes every hour so that shore stations (figure 1.3) could listen for marine distress signals.
The famous "SOS" distress call, developed for its brevity when sent by Morse code, became forever associated with disasters at sea. The new distress call was pressed into service even before its official adoption in June 1912: In the Titanic disaster in April of that year, "SOS" was used and heard by wireless operators both at sea and at listening posts along the Atlantic seaboard. At a Marconi Wireless Company monitoring station on Long Island, one of the young men passing on the ship-to-ship emergency signals during the crisis was David Sarnoff, the future founder of RCA.
While Sarnoff went on to build a commercial entertainment industry based on broadcasting (a third-level technology, as we shall see), a first-level electrical visionary of the early twentieth century took a different path. This visionary was the Serbian-American scientist Nikola Tesla, known for his invention of alternating-current generators, which at low frequencies made transporting electric power over great distances affordable and at high frequencies made the first continuous-wave wireless transmitters possible. Tesla believed that the earth itself was a huge power generator whose field could be tapped for free universal electricity. His vision was one of radiant energy cascading upwards from the earth's core, a projection into physical reality of what tantra yoga calls kundalini, the powerful force that lies dormant in the root chakra until awakened by deep spiritual practices.
In a 1904 article entitled "World Telegraphy," Tesla also envisioned the expansion of radiotelegraphy into a universal text-messaging service, with transmission centers at all the world's major cities:
A cheap and simple device, which might be carried in one's pocket may then be set up anywhere on sea or land, and it will record the world's news or such special messages as may be intended for it. Thus the entire earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts.
Tesla's dream is visible today in the millions of individual "text receivers" we carry strapped to belts or tucked in purses: our pagers, cellphones, GPS (global positioning satellite) trackers, and PDAs (personal digital assistants). These technologies, while also first used for business and finance, were quickly adapted to express the first chakra's beacon call of personal aliveness.
Today that beacon call has a singularly appropriate new mode of expression: short message service (SMS) technology, better known as text messaging or "texting." PDAs, cellphone-based text messaging, and Internet-based instant messaging or "IM," its linguistic and sociological close cousin, foster the exchange of mini-telegrams: notes in an abbreviated question-and-answer format too short for details (but not too short for flirting, for a Muslim divorce, or, for some Catholics in the Philippines, attending confession and receiving absolution). Just as SMS telegraphs a phone call, IM telegraphs an e-mail. Quick and informal, instant messaging works in real time, demanding an immediate response. It has no time or space for deeper, more penetrating queries, or even for the simple hellos and goodbyes of telephone talk. In Maureen Dowd's words, "It's as if your id had a typewriter."
In the business world, always-on telegram formats could lead to an oppressive, overcontrolled work environment that co-opts every waking moment in every location in the name of "more productive" work. But SMS is also being used to challenge the status quo. As Howard Rheingold has documented in Smart Mobs, it is already changing the social lives of teens and has made possible coordinated real-time group political action. Smart message service was initially designed as an ancillary paging method for European cellphones. Because its messages are limited to 160 characters, developers assumed SMS would be primarily a business tool—for appointment reminders, stock quotes, and terse communiqués from the boss, for example. Yet within a decade of its introduction in 1991, tens of billions of SMS messages were being exchanged each month, primarily by young people in Europe and Asia, and SMS was on its way to the United States. In the first quarter of 2004, 2.6 billion text messages were sent on cellphones in the United States, with more than seventy-five percent of teens using their phones for texting and games. By the first quarter of 2005, this number had tripled, with total revenues from nonvoice services for the four largest U.S. mobile operators reaching $1.2 billion; a year later, these earnings had tripled.
"Texting" is a perfect medium of adolescence, that time when kids start to push away and declare their individuality. Teens now spend hours using text to announce and reinforce their "beingness" to their peers: sending out their location, testing their boundaries, calling attention to their cleverness, and coordinating their activities. In Tokyo they're called oyayubisoko, "the thumb tribe," who silently communicate without even looking at the keypad. In Finland, the world leader in both Internet connections and cellphones per capita, texting is called tekstata; there it has become the tool of a generation that coordinates its entire social life through SMS. Whether sent by cellphone or pager, SMS is short, cheap, safely discreet, and, if preferred, anonymous. Messages can be banal—little more than a casual "howz it goin'"—and still create the illusion of connection, giving an electronic nod that keeps the community connected at the most basic acknowledgment level.
Other messages can be more direct. One Australian cellphone company is now hosting "love-in" events for its subscribers. Attendees (wearing large name badges with their text addresses) are encouraged to send SMS pickup lines to each other. The raunchier messages are displayed on a large public screen, as are the replies. And, in the United States, if you need help with your pickup lines, Comedy Central will provide your cellphone text display with a new one every day (for $2.99 per month). Of course, as Tom Foley discovered at the end of 2006, sending traceable SMS pick-ups is not such a good idea if one is a U.S. Congressman and the recipient is an underage page! As an extension of adolescent power, IM and SMS have sadly also become tools of teenage social cruelty. The ease of instant messaging—when combined with a typical adolescent's lack of (first-level) boundary control, budding sense of (third-level) personal power, and underdeveloped (fourth-level) empathy skills—has led to a spate of electronic taunting and bullying in America's middle and high schools.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Digital Dharma by Steven Vedro. Copyright © 2007 Steven Vedro. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface,
Introduction,
1 FIRST- LEVEL DIGITAL DHARMA,
The Telegraph of Aliveness,
2 SECOND- LEVEL DIGITAL DHARMA,
Reach Out and Touch Someone,
3 THIRD- LEVEL DIGITAL DHARMA,
Becoming a Clear-Channel Broadcaster,
4 FOURTH- LEVEL DIGITAL DHARMA,
The Broken Heart of Television,
5 FIFTH- LEVEL DIGITAL DHARMA,
Living in Truth on the World Wide Web,
6 SIXTH- LEVEL DIGITAL DHARMA,
Seeing Deeper, Seeing Wider,
7 SEVENTH- LEVEL DIGITAL DHARMA,
Teleconsciousness—The Unity of Self and the Cosmos,
A Closing Note,
Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
Illustration Credits,