I read daily news using the Internet; and sometimes I watch conventional TV news. Newsfeed often acts as a machine producing meaningful coincidences that would point to a recent trend in the emergence of creativity. Recently, there have been two news articles that were able to hold my attention for many hours. First article is about North Korea; and this year I have been following news about North Korea with an increasing interest. Something in my guts tells me it is very important to point my attention to the developments in this country. So, in this post I will start with the North Korea theme and then gradually move to the second topic.
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| Kim Jong-il seems to enjoy luxury. |
The article about North Korea bears the title "Kim Jong-il's Label Addiction Revealed." It describes strange peculiarities that, according to a person who decided to escape from the Kim Jong-il's regime (who in a somewhat silly and disrespectful way is called a "defector"), the leaders of the long ago isolated country seem to have. It appears that Kim Jong-il (who, occasionally, was born in USSR) seems to be prone to the kind of very ordinary consumerism which can be observed among the elites and not-so-elites of the world, a consumerism that consists of the addiction to buy and wear expensive clothes, drive expensive cars, and attach oneself to expensive things in general (as we all tend to do at some point).
If this is true—and it can be very true because it simply fits our present-day knowledge of the human nature and biosociopsychology—then the North Korean society could provide another example of the hypocritical splitting which reveals itself as discrepancies between the ideology that is being imposed by the government on the people and the ideology that is being followed by the very leaders of this government—inauthentic communication of one thing and engagement in another is the most ancient secret which is astonishing in its simplicity and yet so carefully guarded by the few! (The splitting which has been exposing itself, to a different extent, in Russia, USA, Europe and many other countries and places. In isolated countries such as North Korea it simply goes to its extreme.)
It becomes a sad and fascinating case study of how the rulers of the world often tend to use their enormous social powers and influence to enforce entire civilizations' self-organization around satisfaction of the rulers' egocentric needs. Obviously, it's nothing personal between me and Kim Jong-il; and I believe that in the depths of his heart we can find remnants/seeds of a wonderful, if unformed, personality but in overall manifestations of his self-system—one shouldn't let oneself be deceived—it's all repeating the same old pattern that we have seen in the Soviet Union and other totalitarian social systems where the few used the many for the benefit of their self-serving drives, the drives that they simply couldn't stop due to their socially-conditioned neurobiology (furthermore, they don't want to stop—and why would they, if all their basic egocentric needs are met at least for the moment and they can feel, if, again, for a fleeting moment, centers of the universe).
It also demonstrates how a passion of the few for accessing a particular kind of states of consciousness (related to igniting the zones of pleasure associated with the areas around the limbic system in the brain) could virtually create entire civilizations centered around human suffering, misery and scarcity! This would be one simple case study that I would refer to if one asked me why I find the projects that articulate the importance of knowing thyself in terms of dynamics of your own states of consciousness to be crucial for our lives right here and now. (Incidentally, the altstates.net project that I am co-developing now will hopefully become one of such initiatives that would skillfully highlight the significant role consciousness and its states & structures have played in the human history.)
In some sense, we're all junkies for blissful states; and this is our "reaching the God state" project, so to say, as Ken Wilber has pointed out in his brilliant The Atman Project. Stan Grof, another pioneer of states of consciousness exploration and investigation, has emphasized that it is in the human nature to unconsciously, semiconsciously and consciously desire reaching a holotropic state, that is a state of the ultimate wholeness which has been historically associated with experiencing God states. In order to figure out today's markets and politics one simply has to master skillful biosociopsychoanalytical action inquiry that takes into account these complex dimensions in a coherent gesture.
Here we can make a discrete leap into the second, seemingly unrelated, news article which, as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, attracted my attention. The Daily Mail claims that "computers and TV take up half our lives as we spend seven hours a day using technology." This claim also seems to reflect something important; in particular I mean a very important notion that the technologies that we are using (and in which we are immersed) increasingly become essential parts of our personal ecosystems and consciousness. It is now a widely accepted reflection that the flow of information becomes so massive and multiplies so enormously that it poses multiple difficulties on societies today. (I should have said here, "it poses multiple difficulties on societies yesterday," for every word I have spoken right now in some sense reflects the past—but the past that influences each and every aspect of our present moment.)
In order to cope with this informational stress we have to always be one step or even a few steps ahead in our creativity; and I would claim that this step would involve at least two parts: the first would be anchoring one's self in the ocean of timeless stillness (which can be achieved via advanced contemplative/meditative paradigms & technologies); and the second would consist of learning to communicate at multiple levels in one bit of information simultaneously (these levels would include the domains of body, emotions, mind, soul, and spirit, with the latter being described as a certain quality of all-pervading and compassionate meta-awareness that is built into the very fabric of the material substrate of our consciousness, that is the brain, the electromagnetic activity, and the entire material system that surrounds the space of our individual being and co-existence). For instance, this very blog should touch all these domains and contain a key for an easy-and-instant access to the holograph of experience it conveys with its limited words and textual canvas.
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| One possible future of a human form. |
It can easily be predicted that, since the computer and information-based technologies are conquering the human minds, there will be a growing need in brain-mind interfaces that would ensure the accessibility of simultaneous engagement with all the essential domains of being-in-the-world (by which I mean the aforementioned body, mind, soul, and spirit distributed across the interiors and exteriors of the individual and collective). For instance, in order to ensure exercising of the body in the operator of a computer in the conditions where the time is increasingly limited and one cannot afford to exercise dissociatedly and separately from the work flow, the humanity would first attempt to create computers working on which would involve kinaesthetic "karate-like" movements. However, the advancement of consciousness/matter interfaces and technologies will quickly move to a different variation of being, the one that would involve working on a computer while exercising karate or strength training (or, better put, at the same moment with body exercises). The same goes for mind and soul and spirit. Each and every gesture would consciously and super-consciously include the involvement of all these domains simultaneously. I would walk in the street while meditating, praying, and doing tai chi exercises and enjoying this fine weather and that wonderful sunset.
And when within a few decades humans will most likely be able to extend their life span indefinitely be prepared to include all the essential domains in your life—for death will become a luxury and if there is anything less than a fully-functioning body-mind-soul-spirit-powered cybernetic human being you are going to slide into an infinite loop of unnecessary suffering—and this is why we would need to establish psychosocioneuroethics commissions that would prevent such unfortunate cases for the greater good of humankind as soon as we are going to be ready to consciously do so.
Sounds like science fiction? Well, in this case I can only advice you to simply remember how it was 20 years ago and look around yourself now—and simply read the news, dammit! We are currently on the verge of living in the world of cybernetic ecosystems, whether we want it or not.
Notes
To demonstrate the heightened awareness in the choices I made around building the current blog post I claim that the placement of the first image in the article is done according to the recent fair use trends. The image was originally displayed in The Chosun Ilbo article. The second image is a work of art created by Richard Marchard and borrowed from here; it is used as an illustration to the ideas expressed in this essay (the picture itself, in my interpretation, points towards an artistic vision of how the future human form might look like); and my position—even though I am a human being and not a lawyer-android—is that the fair use rules are applicable here, too, and also that there should be an easier way to share reproductions of artistic pictures according to the leading-edge sense of basic moral intuition.
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