With pills modifying personality, machines modifying bodies, and synthetic pleasures and networked minds engineering a more fluid and invented sense of self, the boundaries of our identities are mutating.
People inhabiting all frequencies of the socioeconomic spectrum are intentionally reaching for some of the oldest navigational tools known to humankind: sacred ritual and metaphysical speculation, spiritual regimen and natural spell.
The quest for meaning and connection has led individuals and communities to construct meaningful frameworks for their lives, worldviews that actually deepen their willingness and ability to face the strangeness of our days.
Of all technologies, it is the technologies of information and communication that most hold and shape the source of all mystical glimmerings: the human self.
The moment we invent a significant new device for communication—talking drums, papyrus scrolls, printed books, crystal sets, computers, pagers—we partially reconstruct the self and its world, creating new opportunities (and new traps) for thought, perception, and social experience.
More than any other invention, information technology transcends its status as a thing, simply because it allows for the incorporeal encoding and transmission of mind and meaning.
The immediacy of communication continues to challenge formal limitations as it crackles from mind to mind, pushing the envelope of intelligence, art, and information flow. By creating a new interface between the self, the other, and the world beyond, media technologies become part of the self, the other, and the world beyond.
Aning—that signifying magic that, for all the analyses of linguists, sociologists, and cognitive scientists, remains one of the trickiest, most seductive, and most consternating glyphs in the human equation.
Information technology allows even the most hard-core materialists to ruminate once again on the ancient dream of slipping the incorporeal spark of the self through the jaws of death unscathed.
One of the most pressing existential needs in twentieth-century thought: to find in the sloppy mechanics of evolution a positive basis for human life, some cosmic pattern or pulse that might enable us to see ourselves, our minds and cultures, as more than blind flukes doomed to bow down before the entropic second law.
Technology is launching us into a new phase of cultural evolution, one which will lead to the creation of a cybernetic superhuman organism, possibly through the mediation of the Internet.
Systems theorists de-emphasize the usual reductionist tack of dividing the fluctuating webwork of reality into isolated chunks of stuff. Instead, they look at the world as a nest of holistic and interdependent processes, a cosmos characterized by pattern and flow rather than form and matter.
Buddhism’s quest for awakening, for realizing Indra’s net, can be seen as a path of gnosis, of the saving knowlege of the self. But because this self is not separate from the totality of the real, it can be saved only by being seen through, like a jewel polished until it becomes translucent, or a pair of sunglasses, or a mind that breaks through the desiccated concepts that always seek to order and stratify the chaosmos.