You are welcome to join my new YouTube channel, Power and Presence (named after my latest book). These are short videos on related topics which you should find relevent to the current dilemmas we are facing. In my latest video, for example, I talk about the relationship between nature, transcendent mind and artificial intelligence. I hope…
The psyche weaves its way across life, perhaps not unlike the way a river makes its way from the mountains to the sea. And we never quite know when the river waters might rise, even as we make our way to the other side.
It’s this historical and civilizational impasse that led me to write my latest book, Power and Presence, and I am delighted to announce that it is now available on Kindle and in hard copy format on Amazon. The book’s subtitle hints at my preferred approach to the sensemaking crisis: Reclaiming Your Authentic Self in a Digitized World. I believe that it is in developing a more conscious relationship with ourselves (including the body and mind), the world and technology itself that we can establish a genuine foundation for moving forward. Simply regulating everything and punishing people isn’t going to work, at least not by itself. We have to look deeper than that, right into the soul of humanity, and ask ourselves, “What does it mean to be human in the digital age?” So, as much as anything, this is a meaning crisis, one that long precedes the digital age, and which has been developing for centuries.
Research indicates that when we employ our peripheral vision, our sense of presence, awe and wonder increases. We relax, gain a deeper perspective of our place in time and space and our capacity for spatial memory improves. We become more positive about the future and the jigsaw of life begins to piece itself together. Thus, as our gaze habitually collapses outward while peripherally constricting, we lose touch with the human spirit.
South African author and lion tracker Boyd Varty learned early the deep knowing which life seeks to instil within each of us: that there is something profound which transcends and connects our discrete human minds.[ii]
Varty’s tale of the terrifying involves a single night, set in time a moment or two following the initial post-apartheid elections in South Africa, when chaos and violence were common bedfellows across the troubled nation.
Recently my wife decided to begin letting them out in the evening. We had to chase them back after and hour or so, but they never wandered too far away. Then two nights ago Baxi didn’t come back. My wife was frantic with worry, as she loves Baxi as dearly as her own child. We spent a couple of hours wandering around the huge compound (remember, almost 100 buildings) calling Baxi’s name. At 11.00pm, I told my wife I had to go the bed, as I had to get up early to work.
Mark Zuckerberg says he intends to develop an “embodied” experience within the metaverse. This is web 3.0, an all-immersive internet where you can plug in and, if you prefer, never leave. Horizons Workrooms, an immersive tele-conferencing platform which is Facebook’s 3D challenge to Zoom. Using this program, users morph into their avatar equivalents by wearing an Oculus VR helmet, and interacting in a virtual office space. Mark Zuckerberg sees Horizon Workrooms as potentially launching us into a utopian future. He says:
“Five years from now, people will be able to live where they want and work from wherever they want but feel present when they do it.”
Integrated intelligence is a fuzzy human cognitive skillset which can be developed with practice. It is also my belief that such human cognition will eventually flourish in societies and learning environments that are open to its expression. The problem is, our current science and establishment institutions are either ignorant of integrated intelligence, or are simply hostile to it.
This is my very recent presentation at the Society for Consciousness Studies, 2021. “Embodiment, Classical Intuition and The Future of the Metaverse.” My central argument is that it is vitally important that we retain a strong sense of embodiment & intuitive intelligence even as the 3D Digital Society evolves. To further diminish that awareness would represent the deepening & perpetuation of a major civilisational error that has engendered the crisis in sensemaking. It thus represents an existential crisis that is potentially catastrophic, literally &/or metaphorically. Establishing an Authentic Self via Embodied Presence is a vital component of all this.
Perhaps it is that in the internet age of memetic reality, we have not so much created our monsters, but distorted and expanded them to the point that they have become virtual caricatures; dehumanized leviathans towering menacingly over us, and who can only be met with brute force, and never engaged personally or in presence. Perhaps we have helped create our own Wizards of Oz, given our power away to them, then recklessly, and sometimes violently rebelled against the images that we have helped erect. Could it be that we are fighting the shadows within our own psyches, as much as fighting genuine demons, genuine oppression? Are we fighting ourselves?