The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet. Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli

      The artificial intelligence scientist Marvin Minsky, talking about a new project at MIT at the end of 2009, pointed to the fact that his iPhone can download thousands of different applications, instantly allowing it to perform new functions. Why not do the same with the brain? “I would like to be able to download the ability to juggle. There’s nothing more boring than learning to juggle” (quoted in Chandler, 2009).

      Minsky believed we can separate the ability to juggle from the inner transformation which occurs in learning to juggle. Knowledge, in Descartes’s style, is seen as something “pure,” removed from our subjective participation and the involvement of our body-mind. If we see knowledge as something which can be represented digitally, then we should be able to download it into our neurophysiology, as we do with software in a computer. This is what Kurzweil and others are forecasting.

      When we don’t give importance to our activities as instruments for growth, nor feel “presence” in our actions, then we want to automate everything that can be automated, including activities which could be helpful for the growth of our soul. The concern shifts from how boring or how useful an activity it is, to how it can shape our soul through the presence we give to that task. In Zen monasteries, even the most repetitive tasks – like cleaning rice and sweeping walkways –are used as a path for awareness. But the ego wants goals – and wants to reach them fast.

      The use of tools has been advocated even by spiritual paths such as Zen. One of the classic books on Zen illustrates the path of soul realization through mastering archery:

      The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull’s-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious[ness] is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of the art (Herrigel, 1953).

      This description sounds puzzling. The archer, who is supposed to have reached a high level of awareness, “ceases to be conscious of himself.” He enters a “state of unconscious[ness] . . . completely empty and rid of the self” and becomes one with the instrument. This looks more like the monkey who mistook the pliers for his hands.

      But there are fundamental differences between forgetting ourself in an external tool and letting go of our ego while mastering a tool in a sacred way. As with the media, we abandon ourself prematurely; we let go of the presence and the connection with our body and inner happenings. Our mind becomes filled with information, but we lack the one-pointed attention necessary for mastering an inner discipline. The Zen archer goes through a long practice of turning his awareness inside. His mind becomes empty till he can let go of his ego and hit the center in a state of no-mind.

      The external target to hit with the arrow is a metaphor for the inner one. The bow and arrow in Zen are tools that act as a bridge to our inner self, not to an external goal. When we reach that center through Zen, we no longer identify ourself with the tool nor the goal – and not even with our ego. With Zen archery our mind becomes completely empty – thus we can connect with everything. With IT we fill our mind till it becomes completely cluttered.

      The Mind Itself is a Medium

      Media can be employed as well for accessing our soul – consider photographs, novels and poems that move our attention from the external to the interior. According to McLuhan (1964), the invention of the photograph may have led to a revolution in the traditional arts. Then, since it was pointless trying to depict things that had already been shown more vividly in photographs, painters took to revealing the inner process of creativity through expressionism and abstract art.

      Writers were similarly affected by photos, print media, film, and radio. Poets and novelists turned to explore the inner workings of the mind by which “we achieve insight and make ourselves and our world.” Art moved from depiction of physical reality to the exploration of mind and soul with the various media competing against each other.

      How about the computer and the Internet? Can they also turn into tools for inner exploration”?

      The shift from using computers as productive tools to inner processing has been stimulated by blogs and social networks which allow us to share our inner lives and thoughts. However, the Net militates against the prolonged attention and silence of the painter or novelist. Like heating water into vapor, there needs to be a critical mass of time without external interruptions in order to change inner states.

      The unprecedented competition now is between the mind and the computer as extension/amputation of the mind. The computer manages and expands our mental capacities – memory, searching for information, calculating, analyzing data, planning routes, and much more. When “freed” of those tasks, our mind can give more attention to meta-thinking, to the mechanisms of our thoughts and their inner working.

      But the computer, as the sum-of-all-media, expands our mind’s possibilities toward external information – which promises to take us even farther away from developing the capacity to observe our mind. The computer mirrors our mind and charms us by the reflected image, just like Narcissus who was so hypnotized by his image in the pool that he could no longer hear Echo’s love – so he was transformed into a plant standing close to the edge of the pond where he could always see his reflection.

      We can acknowledge that the computer is a medium for outsourcing many of the mind’s functions. But what’s never considered is that the mind itself has the nature of a medium – a medium which incessantly builds reality, which can simulate the soul’s qualities which were lost during development.

      Mind is born of the amputation of the original completeness of the soul through the loss of merging with existence. The shock of this loss obliterates the recognition of our original nature. The only thing the mind can then do is simulate the lost wholeness by constructing an ego personality. As with Narcissus, we become numbed by our image reflected by the mind, believing that this self-image is who we really are.

      One of the recurring themes of spiritual teachings is that our consciousness is asleep, and in order to awaken it, it is necessary to reel in the mind’s contents with the introspective capacities acquired through meditation and inner exploration.

      Just as dreams protects us from awakening by including external activity of the mind as part of their story, the mind keeps the illusion of awakeness through incessant activity. When the inner noise is not enough, it can create technologies which multiply the flow of information that calls us. All this makes self-observation difficult and prevents our soul from transcending the illusion.

      The conceptual mind, born as a defense against the unbearable experience of separation, is nothing more than a medium which hides our genuine soul. So perhaps, perceiving a distant echo of that fact, we try to become free of it again by outsourcing it to a mechanical computer, so we can again look at reality without filters. But the very qualities of the mind which could free us from the illusion – sustained inner concentration, meditation and silence, feeling the body fully – are the first to be sequestered by IT. The ego-mind has many tricks to retain its dominance.

      Our mind, which builds the illusory reality (maya), was created by the fall from the soul’s primordial condition of wholeness. Computers, simulating the mind, then dazzle us as a reflection of a reflection – a double layer of illusion. This further layer has the potential to stimulate the revelation of the primary illusion. The Advaita tradition invokes the metaphor of a thorn used to dig out another thorn that is buried in the foot, but is then thrown away along with the invader.

      The state of self-forgetting and the use of the limited set of mental capacities needed for interacting with digital technologies will not bring us in touch again with our depths. We need to balance the overwhelming attention we give to information with some practices to bring back our fullest cognitive skills – which are mindfulness, subtle discrimination, prolonged attention, and the inner silence out of which creativity can arise.

      IT Weakens Our Presence

      The very Will to look