Surfing the Wave in the Age of Fluidity
Introduction
James Joyce famously wrote, "History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake." While I completely agree with the sentiment, I also believe that historical time anticipates and announces the purpose of humankind. Meaning we could not reach the potential of our species without first developing a narrative that allowed us to build on our accomplishments, learn from our mistakes, and innovate into our future. Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna explained that history did not always exist, humorously saying, “It was not installed with the rocks.” Rather, it was created through the advent of writing, which recorded and “immortalized” the actions of individuals. Instead of the eternal repetition of mythic events – “We plant wheat this way because that is how the First Man planted wheat,” or “We build our city this way because God formed the world in this same pattern,” our ancestors were now able to document current events involving real people acting in unique ways, i.e., history. This innovation allowed us to spiral up and away from the circular notion of time that characterized pre-history.
Literacy moved humanity from a purely Oral Culture to what philosopher Marshall McLuhan described in The Gutenberg Galaxy as a Parchment Culture. At this time, literacy was in the hands of royalty and priests who could afford (and store) the expensive and cumbersome materials used in writing – stone, baked clay tablets, and ultimately parchment (made from animal hides). Parchment culture was still primarily oral for most people, who were illiterate and needed things read out loud to them. Oral transmission of knowledge and ideas was even standard in medieval universities in Europe, where students learned their subjects by listening to professors reading verbatim from parchment copies of classic texts and then transcribing their own copies from what they heard.
Western Civilization transitioned into Typographic Culture with the introduction of the movable type printing press in (around) 1450. New forms of paper and ink were also developed at this time, allowing for an explosion of portable and inexpensive books and a brand-new way of acquiring information and knowledge. Instead of the illiterate masses relying on an elite to orally pass down knowledge within a specific contextual framework, an increasingly literate populace was able to read the content for themselves, creating “a million points of view”. Quiet, personal reading also created the need for the individual to focus attention exclusively on the letters and words on the page, thus pushing out the activation of the other senses. Vision became dominate. Suddenly, legitimate truth was acquired exclusively with the eyes and all the other senses became suspect.
The concept of movable type also foreshadowed the industrial revolution with its production lines of separate parts assembled in an infinite variety of ways. The comprehensive worldview of the artisan was replaced by the homogeneous standardization of parts assembled by robot-like workers in large factories, moving us even farther away from the organic, full experience of the world around us. McLuhan compares this dynamic to the transition from medieval churches, which were dimly lit with thick stain glass windows to the modern Christian sacred spaces that provide the light needed to read the words in prayer books. Worship went from an immersive experience encompassing all the senses to a more fragmented, individualized endeavor that relied primarily on vision, thereby disrupting and unbalancing what he called our “sensory ratio”.
Harnessing electricity and applying it to tools like the electric light, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, movies, and television ushered in Electronic Culture, which reshaped sensory ratios in ways we are still generally unaware. McLuhan suggested that it has reintroduced tribal-like perception of a world that is increasingly tied together by simultaneous exchanges of information and knowledge, utilizing media that activate an array of senses rather than just the visual. He stated that from the academic perspective this is neither good nor bad but remaining unaware of how the type of media used (independent of content) affects our thinking and behavior is unacceptable and unsustainable.
I believe that today, the internet, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, genetic engineering, and autonomous machine learning have moved us into a post-electronic, Fluid Culture. As McLuhan never tired of saying, the impact of the media itself is much more important than the content purveyed by it, “The medium is the message.” Humans navigating through contemporary society are affected by our new trans-materialistic, boundary-dissolving tools in novel ways, creating an extremely “fluid” conception of reality where traditional roles and boundaries have been blurred, shifted, or completely obliterated. Society increasingly allows room for individuals to move beyond rigid identification with specific genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, occupations, and religions. Also, technological advancements give us the tools to create and explore alternate realities that have nothing to do with the physical world. These dynamics invite backlash from conservative elements that want to bring us back to “common sense” notions of how things are supposed to be, generating much of the cultural conflict we are experiencing today. Navigating these contradictory worldviews will be confusing and unpleasant unless we can wrap our heads, hearts, and arms around the impact of recent technological innovation and learn how to keep our balance while surfing this newest wave of cultural disruption.
I hope this brief introduction has created context and provided a stepping off point to discuss a fundamental question, which is, “How do we move forward from here?” From my perspective, this will involve 5 interlocking steps:
Optimizing Our Sensory Ratios
Focus on your senses for a moment. What percentage of your current, overall perception is visual? 40%? 60%? 25%? How about audial? 15%? 50%? And then answer that same question for touch, smell, and taste as well. This is your sensory ratio, which is always affected by where you are and what you’re doing. The percentage of taste activation will obviously be higher if you’re eating or drinking something. But what if you’re eating while watching television? Do you even taste the food if you’re engrossed in a show? What are your senses doing while you walk through a high mountain glade or by a desert stream? Are they activated differently than if you’re writing code on a computer? Of course they are. There are environments and activities that invite and promote an immersive experience of all the senses together and others that draw out and highlight one sense at the expense of the others. This is normal. This is life. A problem arises however when we are unaware of how the technologies that dominate our specific culture impact our experience of reality. Then we are completely at the mercy of the dominate cultural paradigm, which often does not have our personal best interests at heart.
Becoming aware of this situation while actively choosing our sensory ratio is therefore the first step in personal liberation. Placing ourselves in natural, immersive environments as often as possible has been shown to improve health and wellness. Engaging in a variety of activities that flow between different sensory ratios frees us from the unconscious dominance of one sense over the others. It creates more balanced and integrated internal states, which allow us to think and behave in more balanced and integrated ways, empowering each of us to find our unique and optimal sensory ratio. The Age of Fluidity offers unique opportunities to experience a flow between various sensory ratios. For example, this essay was written with pen on paper and then typed into electronic word processing software on a laptop computer – all while listening to music from my phone (using ear buds). It was stored in the cloud, accessed using a tablet, re-read (out loud) and edited while on a hiking trail in the Colorado Rockies, and a link to the essay has been texted to friends to review and comment. I’ve read physical books and books online, listened to podcasts, used a search engine, and watched YouTube videos to become informed on this subject. During the time of this composition I have also been diving into James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake online using something called Finnegans Wiki, which is a platform for multiple users to comment on, and add explanations to, the text. I have learned so much from the other contributors and have added my own comments too. It looks like Finnegans Wiki was created about 17 years ago and has not been added to for quite a while, but it lives in perpetuity on the net and I’m hugely benefiting from it now. That experience has greatly informed this writing as well. Truly, it’s a new age.
Learning to Live Without Closure
Living in an age of dissolving boundaries forces us to come to grips with a world without closure. Most of us believe (or hope) that certain events will change things “for good” and we will no longer be troubled by uncertainty, threatened with calamities, or just be “at loose ends.” We say things like, “If I can just land that job…”, “If I can just buy that house…”, or “If my kid can just find a good mate…”. This list goes on and on. The events we’re hoping for may or may not occur, and even if they do, we’re still left saying, “Hmm…now what?” For instance, I thought I would experience closure when my father died, that this event would put to an end to a painful chapter. But what I found was that he keeps intruding inconveniently into my life through memories, his beliefs, and even his DNA. I discovered that there really was no closure, only a transformation of how he affects me.
Beyond events, we also look for closure in things and concepts. Once upon a time, when life seemed simpler and more defined it was easier to hold onto this type of closure. But now, with boundaries becoming more porous and possibilities becoming more unlimited, this illusion is being recognized for what it is – an illusion. Take a simple question like, “Where do I end?” as an example. Is my skin my “closure”? It can’t be because my voice travels farther than my skin. So, is the distance my voice can travel my “closure”? It can’t be because I can transmit my voice via radio waves to the other side of the globe, or even to the end of the solar system. Is that my “closure”? It can’t be because I can record myself so that I can be seen and heard years after I’m dead, at any time and at any place, etc. I’m never “closed”. In fact, looking at it this way, I’m omniscient and eternal. Let’s look at the demographic page of a questionnaire as another example. There are so many boxes needed in the gender, sexuality, and ethnicity sections it makes you wonder if demographic differences are meaningful anymore. Perhaps we can just get rid of that page? Here’s another, using stem cells, it will soon be possible to grow human organs inside animal hosts. There is a concern however that the human stem cell may enter the animal’s neural network. What do we do with a pig that has attained consciousness? What box do we check, human or animal?
Closure, or the definitive ending of a thing, idea, or person has always been an illusion. The first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed (only transformed), put that notion to bed a long time ago but we must now develop a mindset and organize our lives in a way that incorporates this idea for real. And honestly, nothing could be more liberating. Fairy tales that provide neat answers (closure) to big questions like, “What happens after I die?” or “Why was she born with a disability while that other person was born completely healthy and whole?” may take away some of the pain but they don’t empower us to achieve the potential of each individual moment. Instead of looking for easy answers that provide a comprehensive explanation and “closure” we should be searching for techniques to tap into what Terence McKenna calls, “The felt presence of direct experience,” because we will be more motivated to fully experience the present moment when we stop waiting for some future event to signal that the moment has finally become “real.”
Breaking Out of the Cage of Consumerism
Consumerism is best understood as a preoccupation, or even obsession, with acquiring consumer goods and services. It creates a life devoted to making money for the purpose of spending money. It gives a type of meaning to many lives and is the biggest driver of modern economies. The biggest worry after the Great Recession of 2007-2008 was that Americans were saving instead of spending their money, which became a great drag on our economic recovery. Our system only works when we spend a ton of money on houses, cars, appliances, furnishings, clothes, vacations, entertainment, restaurants, convenience food, drugs, pets, etc. All the socially-sanctioned messaging we receive promotes attaining the “good life” through conspicuous consumption, but if we stop for a moment and take a breath or two, we’ll realize that we end up having no real time to actually use or appreciate what we possess because the conveyor belt never stops – there is always the next “must have” thing to buy or the hottest bucket-list destination to vacation in, which compels us to work even harder and longer to afford them.
The need to make and spend money is a cage that imprisons, keeping us away from fully experiencing and benefitting from all the amazing possibilities found in the new Age of Fluidity, especially in the realm of creativity. The number of tools and platforms that facilitate the making and sharing of music, art, software, and many other creative endeavors increase daily, but even if we buy them, we don’t have the time or headspace to use them. Fluid media and technology open unlimited paths of discovery, but we’re so enslaved by the consumer ethos that we can’t even look up long enough to figure out how they work.
We will only start to benefit from the Age of Fluidity when we burst the chains of consumerism and find new air to breathe. The theologian Ivan Illich promoted what he called, the spirit of conviviality as an antidote to our plight. According to Illich, conviviality is a way of living that empowers the individual, connects people together in friendly camaraderie, and creates a sustainable community by employing tools that can be used in multiple ways, thus unlocking our freedom of expression rather than tools that are only able to be used as prescribed by the manufacturer, keeping us stuck inside the dominate cultural paradigm. This idea aligns perfectly with the worldwide hacker community, which according to Wikipedia, is a “subculture of individuals who enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming limitations of software systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes.” In fact, hacker culture goes way beyond just software, hacking into everything from power tools to silk screen presses, always asking the question, “Why just use it for what it’s made for.” Hackers marvel at people who spend so much money on something they could just make or reinvent themselves.
Living convivially is the antidote to consumerism because in a convivial society most of our time would be spent using our tools and technology to promote individual and communal creativity rather than pursuing a consumer paradise. It also promotes generosity. The universe of open-source materials is a good example of what is possible when operating in a convivial manner.
In his book Tools for Conviviality, Illich compares convivial vs. non-convivial activities. Here are a few examples:
James Joyce famously wrote, "History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake." While I completely agree with the sentiment, I also believe that historical time anticipates and announces the purpose of humankind. Meaning we could not reach the potential of our species without first developing a narrative that allowed us to build on our accomplishments, learn from our mistakes, and innovate into our future. Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna explained that history did not always exist, humorously saying, “It was not installed with the rocks.” Rather, it was created through the advent of writing, which recorded and “immortalized” the actions of individuals. Instead of the eternal repetition of mythic events – “We plant wheat this way because that is how the First Man planted wheat,” or “We build our city this way because God formed the world in this same pattern,” our ancestors were now able to document current events involving real people acting in unique ways, i.e., history. This innovation allowed us to spiral up and away from the circular notion of time that characterized pre-history.
Literacy moved humanity from a purely Oral Culture to what philosopher Marshall McLuhan described in The Gutenberg Galaxy as a Parchment Culture. At this time, literacy was in the hands of royalty and priests who could afford (and store) the expensive and cumbersome materials used in writing – stone, baked clay tablets, and ultimately parchment (made from animal hides). Parchment culture was still primarily oral for most people, who were illiterate and needed things read out loud to them. Oral transmission of knowledge and ideas was even standard in medieval universities in Europe, where students learned their subjects by listening to professors reading verbatim from parchment copies of classic texts and then transcribing their own copies from what they heard.
Western Civilization transitioned into Typographic Culture with the introduction of the movable type printing press in (around) 1450. New forms of paper and ink were also developed at this time, allowing for an explosion of portable and inexpensive books and a brand-new way of acquiring information and knowledge. Instead of the illiterate masses relying on an elite to orally pass down knowledge within a specific contextual framework, an increasingly literate populace was able to read the content for themselves, creating “a million points of view”. Quiet, personal reading also created the need for the individual to focus attention exclusively on the letters and words on the page, thus pushing out the activation of the other senses. Vision became dominate. Suddenly, legitimate truth was acquired exclusively with the eyes and all the other senses became suspect.
The concept of movable type also foreshadowed the industrial revolution with its production lines of separate parts assembled in an infinite variety of ways. The comprehensive worldview of the artisan was replaced by the homogeneous standardization of parts assembled by robot-like workers in large factories, moving us even farther away from the organic, full experience of the world around us. McLuhan compares this dynamic to the transition from medieval churches, which were dimly lit with thick stain glass windows to the modern Christian sacred spaces that provide the light needed to read the words in prayer books. Worship went from an immersive experience encompassing all the senses to a more fragmented, individualized endeavor that relied primarily on vision, thereby disrupting and unbalancing what he called our “sensory ratio”.
Harnessing electricity and applying it to tools like the electric light, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, movies, and television ushered in Electronic Culture, which reshaped sensory ratios in ways we are still generally unaware. McLuhan suggested that it has reintroduced tribal-like perception of a world that is increasingly tied together by simultaneous exchanges of information and knowledge, utilizing media that activate an array of senses rather than just the visual. He stated that from the academic perspective this is neither good nor bad but remaining unaware of how the type of media used (independent of content) affects our thinking and behavior is unacceptable and unsustainable.
I believe that today, the internet, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, genetic engineering, and autonomous machine learning have moved us into a post-electronic, Fluid Culture. As McLuhan never tired of saying, the impact of the media itself is much more important than the content purveyed by it, “The medium is the message.” Humans navigating through contemporary society are affected by our new trans-materialistic, boundary-dissolving tools in novel ways, creating an extremely “fluid” conception of reality where traditional roles and boundaries have been blurred, shifted, or completely obliterated. Society increasingly allows room for individuals to move beyond rigid identification with specific genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, occupations, and religions. Also, technological advancements give us the tools to create and explore alternate realities that have nothing to do with the physical world. These dynamics invite backlash from conservative elements that want to bring us back to “common sense” notions of how things are supposed to be, generating much of the cultural conflict we are experiencing today. Navigating these contradictory worldviews will be confusing and unpleasant unless we can wrap our heads, hearts, and arms around the impact of recent technological innovation and learn how to keep our balance while surfing this newest wave of cultural disruption.
I hope this brief introduction has created context and provided a stepping off point to discuss a fundamental question, which is, “How do we move forward from here?” From my perspective, this will involve 5 interlocking steps:
- Optimizing our sensory ratios
- Learning to live without closure
- Breaking out of the cage of consumerism
- Transcending Law of the Jungle behavior
- Recognizing that our perceived reality is set inside a much larger realm of existence
Optimizing Our Sensory Ratios
Focus on your senses for a moment. What percentage of your current, overall perception is visual? 40%? 60%? 25%? How about audial? 15%? 50%? And then answer that same question for touch, smell, and taste as well. This is your sensory ratio, which is always affected by where you are and what you’re doing. The percentage of taste activation will obviously be higher if you’re eating or drinking something. But what if you’re eating while watching television? Do you even taste the food if you’re engrossed in a show? What are your senses doing while you walk through a high mountain glade or by a desert stream? Are they activated differently than if you’re writing code on a computer? Of course they are. There are environments and activities that invite and promote an immersive experience of all the senses together and others that draw out and highlight one sense at the expense of the others. This is normal. This is life. A problem arises however when we are unaware of how the technologies that dominate our specific culture impact our experience of reality. Then we are completely at the mercy of the dominate cultural paradigm, which often does not have our personal best interests at heart.
Becoming aware of this situation while actively choosing our sensory ratio is therefore the first step in personal liberation. Placing ourselves in natural, immersive environments as often as possible has been shown to improve health and wellness. Engaging in a variety of activities that flow between different sensory ratios frees us from the unconscious dominance of one sense over the others. It creates more balanced and integrated internal states, which allow us to think and behave in more balanced and integrated ways, empowering each of us to find our unique and optimal sensory ratio. The Age of Fluidity offers unique opportunities to experience a flow between various sensory ratios. For example, this essay was written with pen on paper and then typed into electronic word processing software on a laptop computer – all while listening to music from my phone (using ear buds). It was stored in the cloud, accessed using a tablet, re-read (out loud) and edited while on a hiking trail in the Colorado Rockies, and a link to the essay has been texted to friends to review and comment. I’ve read physical books and books online, listened to podcasts, used a search engine, and watched YouTube videos to become informed on this subject. During the time of this composition I have also been diving into James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake online using something called Finnegans Wiki, which is a platform for multiple users to comment on, and add explanations to, the text. I have learned so much from the other contributors and have added my own comments too. It looks like Finnegans Wiki was created about 17 years ago and has not been added to for quite a while, but it lives in perpetuity on the net and I’m hugely benefiting from it now. That experience has greatly informed this writing as well. Truly, it’s a new age.
Learning to Live Without Closure
Living in an age of dissolving boundaries forces us to come to grips with a world without closure. Most of us believe (or hope) that certain events will change things “for good” and we will no longer be troubled by uncertainty, threatened with calamities, or just be “at loose ends.” We say things like, “If I can just land that job…”, “If I can just buy that house…”, or “If my kid can just find a good mate…”. This list goes on and on. The events we’re hoping for may or may not occur, and even if they do, we’re still left saying, “Hmm…now what?” For instance, I thought I would experience closure when my father died, that this event would put to an end to a painful chapter. But what I found was that he keeps intruding inconveniently into my life through memories, his beliefs, and even his DNA. I discovered that there really was no closure, only a transformation of how he affects me.
Beyond events, we also look for closure in things and concepts. Once upon a time, when life seemed simpler and more defined it was easier to hold onto this type of closure. But now, with boundaries becoming more porous and possibilities becoming more unlimited, this illusion is being recognized for what it is – an illusion. Take a simple question like, “Where do I end?” as an example. Is my skin my “closure”? It can’t be because my voice travels farther than my skin. So, is the distance my voice can travel my “closure”? It can’t be because I can transmit my voice via radio waves to the other side of the globe, or even to the end of the solar system. Is that my “closure”? It can’t be because I can record myself so that I can be seen and heard years after I’m dead, at any time and at any place, etc. I’m never “closed”. In fact, looking at it this way, I’m omniscient and eternal. Let’s look at the demographic page of a questionnaire as another example. There are so many boxes needed in the gender, sexuality, and ethnicity sections it makes you wonder if demographic differences are meaningful anymore. Perhaps we can just get rid of that page? Here’s another, using stem cells, it will soon be possible to grow human organs inside animal hosts. There is a concern however that the human stem cell may enter the animal’s neural network. What do we do with a pig that has attained consciousness? What box do we check, human or animal?
Closure, or the definitive ending of a thing, idea, or person has always been an illusion. The first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed (only transformed), put that notion to bed a long time ago but we must now develop a mindset and organize our lives in a way that incorporates this idea for real. And honestly, nothing could be more liberating. Fairy tales that provide neat answers (closure) to big questions like, “What happens after I die?” or “Why was she born with a disability while that other person was born completely healthy and whole?” may take away some of the pain but they don’t empower us to achieve the potential of each individual moment. Instead of looking for easy answers that provide a comprehensive explanation and “closure” we should be searching for techniques to tap into what Terence McKenna calls, “The felt presence of direct experience,” because we will be more motivated to fully experience the present moment when we stop waiting for some future event to signal that the moment has finally become “real.”
Breaking Out of the Cage of Consumerism
Consumerism is best understood as a preoccupation, or even obsession, with acquiring consumer goods and services. It creates a life devoted to making money for the purpose of spending money. It gives a type of meaning to many lives and is the biggest driver of modern economies. The biggest worry after the Great Recession of 2007-2008 was that Americans were saving instead of spending their money, which became a great drag on our economic recovery. Our system only works when we spend a ton of money on houses, cars, appliances, furnishings, clothes, vacations, entertainment, restaurants, convenience food, drugs, pets, etc. All the socially-sanctioned messaging we receive promotes attaining the “good life” through conspicuous consumption, but if we stop for a moment and take a breath or two, we’ll realize that we end up having no real time to actually use or appreciate what we possess because the conveyor belt never stops – there is always the next “must have” thing to buy or the hottest bucket-list destination to vacation in, which compels us to work even harder and longer to afford them.
The need to make and spend money is a cage that imprisons, keeping us away from fully experiencing and benefitting from all the amazing possibilities found in the new Age of Fluidity, especially in the realm of creativity. The number of tools and platforms that facilitate the making and sharing of music, art, software, and many other creative endeavors increase daily, but even if we buy them, we don’t have the time or headspace to use them. Fluid media and technology open unlimited paths of discovery, but we’re so enslaved by the consumer ethos that we can’t even look up long enough to figure out how they work.
We will only start to benefit from the Age of Fluidity when we burst the chains of consumerism and find new air to breathe. The theologian Ivan Illich promoted what he called, the spirit of conviviality as an antidote to our plight. According to Illich, conviviality is a way of living that empowers the individual, connects people together in friendly camaraderie, and creates a sustainable community by employing tools that can be used in multiple ways, thus unlocking our freedom of expression rather than tools that are only able to be used as prescribed by the manufacturer, keeping us stuck inside the dominate cultural paradigm. This idea aligns perfectly with the worldwide hacker community, which according to Wikipedia, is a “subculture of individuals who enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming limitations of software systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes.” In fact, hacker culture goes way beyond just software, hacking into everything from power tools to silk screen presses, always asking the question, “Why just use it for what it’s made for.” Hackers marvel at people who spend so much money on something they could just make or reinvent themselves.
Living convivially is the antidote to consumerism because in a convivial society most of our time would be spent using our tools and technology to promote individual and communal creativity rather than pursuing a consumer paradise. It also promotes generosity. The universe of open-source materials is a good example of what is possible when operating in a convivial manner.
In his book Tools for Conviviality, Illich compares convivial vs. non-convivial activities. Here are a few examples:
CONVIVIAL
- Enlarges the range of each person’s competence, control, and initiative, limited only by other individuals’ claims to an equal range of power and freedom (p.6)
- A society in which modern technologies serve interrelated individuals rather than managers is “convivial” (p.6)
- Tools that guarantee a person’s right to work with high, independent efficiency (p.17)
- Enhances each person’s range of freedom (p.17)
- Makes the most of the individual energy and imagination (p.17)
NON-CONVIVIAL
- Isolates people from one another (p.5)
- Extinguishes the free use of natural abilities for individuals (p.5)
- Undermines the texture of community by promoting extreme social polarization and splintering specialization (p.5)
- Specialization of functions, institutionalization of values and centralization of power, turning people into the accessories of bureaucracies or machines (p.6)
- As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers (p.17)
Conviviality is the perfect response to consumerism and an effective course through the whirling currents in the Age of Fluidity. It's simple. We can break out of the cage of consumerism by working the first list while staying away from the second list.
Transcending Law of the Jungle Behavior
Unfortunately, living convivially is not always simple because we have internal and external forces pushing us toward the second list. By nature, we are like the Great Apes (especially chimpanzees) in our social structure and behavior, which is internally based on male dominance and a hierarchy of control and externally driven by competition and conflict with members of other troops. This Law of the Jungle behavior where the strong dominate the weak and it’s always a “tooth and claw” struggle for survival is our “natural” state (especially when under stress), and left to its own devices, it guides our history as a species. Luckily, humans can override the body’s hard wiring and behave in ways that contradict our instincts, making us unique in the Animal Kingdom – but it takes some type of intervention to accomplish it.
The first type of intervention is societal, including religion and humanistic education that promote welcoming the stranger and caring for the weak and vulnerable, even if it goes against personal or tribal self-interest. However, societal level interventions are not very dependable because religion and education are easily co-opted by powerful interest groups that benefit from a Law of the Jungle way of life. We’ve tried this path for centuries, but educational institutions and religions based on pure spiritual practice are quickly turned on their heads and used as clubs to oppress internal dissenters and massacre external enemies. The second type of intervention is individualistic, including meditation, mindfulness, and shamanic practices that produce heightened states of awareness and expanded consciousness, thus moving the individual to a place where hurtful instinctual behaviors are viewed as abhorrent. This person remains impervious to cultural and instinctual influences while employing these exercises and might even join with other like-minded individuals to create a “social movement” that incrementally changes the world around them.
I believe that developing this type of social movement would involve three steps. The first step would be to become aware of the cultural and instinctual influences that perpetuate the Law of the Jungle mindset and reject them. The second step would be to develop a disciplined set of practices that elevate ourselves into higher states of expanded consciousness. The third step would be to find (or create) a subculture that employs these practices, empowering its members to consistently adhere to an alternative value system. But the subculture would need to remain de-centralized and informal because creating hierarchy just invites power-hungry “petty tyrants” to step in and take over the fledgling movement, sliding it back into tried and true dominator behavior.
Today, we live in an age that offers an unprecedented amount of power and choice to the individual but also bigger and better tools for cultural manipulation. Therefore, it’s becoming more important than ever that we learn how to transcend a Law of the Jungle mode of operating that only benefits a small elite. Implementing innovations like facial recognition tech, personal electronic data collection, deep fakes, and genetic manipulation is a roadmap to disaster unless we first break away from our habitual, Neolithic behavior patterns. Healthy societal-wide change is a heavy lift but it is more possible on individual and subcultural levels. Each of us must do our part and seek out others who are walking similar paths.
Recognizing that Our Perceived Reality is Set Inside a Much Larger Realm of Existence
Think of all the reality you cannot directly perceive: radio and television waves, Wi-Fi, light and sound that lie outside the range of human perception, atomic particles, magnetism, gravity, etc. We know these things exist because we either witness their effects (e.g., Newton’s apple falling to the ground) and/or we’ve developed technology to detect them (e.g., infrared light thermometers). But before these phenomena were discovered they did not really “exist” for us, and now that they do “exist” we still can’t really explain them. For example, there are theories of what gravity is, but nothing definitive. Our explanations fall short because there are still yet-to-be-discovered phenomena at play, and until we know what they are, we will continue to scratch our heads and wonder why our reality acts the way it does. But as incredible as it seems, many people still automatically poo-poo ideas that suggest there are any forces or realities beyond our known world. They get stuck in common sense notions that state unequivocally, “This is all there is,” and announce that anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a fantasy land. Actually, it is people who say things like this who are living in a fantasy land that contradicts experience.
Scientific discoveries and technological advancements have created a new Fluid Culture that laughs at the notion that there is a definitive understanding of anything. We’re becoming more open and amenable to the idea that knowledge and understanding is infinitely malleable and can shape-shift in the blink of an eye. The blurring of social roles in contemporary society is just one indicator that shows how many people have already accepted the idea that truth itself is fluid and all we ever really know is what we experience in this present moment, using our limited perceptions. It’s a humbling insight but one that also frees us to envision and work toward solutions that are “way out there,” at least from the conventional world’s point of view, and admit the possibility of the impossible – and what could be more liberating and empowering than that? Of course, we still need to retain a skeptical, experimental mode of exploration and validation but this perspective greatly expands the field of inquiry, perhaps allowing for the discovery of something that just might take our generation to the stars and beyond.
Surfing in the Age of Fluidity demands going with the flow rather than fighting it. To stay on the surf board, we must recognize the impact our technologies have on us and challenge ourselves to choose our own sensory ratios and set our own personal boundaries. To thrive in these turbulent waters, we must be able to jump off the consumer treadmill and behave in ways that transcend our instinctual hard wiring. Finally, we must be able to accept and internalize what Shakespeare wrote so long ago, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” We live in an age of limitless possibilities. The question is, are we up for the challenge?
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