OM C. Parkin

The Digital Age from the Viewpoint of the Wisdom Teachings

Question: We are undergoing the so-called "Digital Revolution," which was triggered by the invention of the computer, and there is a term that is associated with this, namely the "Second Modernity." The "First Modernity" was about muscle power being replaced by steam engines, and now in the "Second Modernity," it is important that the brain power of the people is replaced by artificial intelligence.

Where are we?

OM: I do not know. From the point of view of the eternal wisdom teachings, the "Digital Age" is not a revolution, it is not even a point of reference. The digital revolution will change the external world very much, in a good way, but also in a bad way, that is for sure. And it also marks a step in human evolution. But the eternal wisdom teachings and their laws will remain entirely unimpressed. This revolution is led by idealistic self-proclaimed benefactors of humanity from the Silicon Valley in California, who share a big misunderstanding. They are all subject to a serious internal/external levels confusion.

This is a rather unwieldy term that you have used frequently. Does it mean that they become unable to distinguish between the internal and the external world?

In the minds of these digital conquistadores, there is the belief in a doctrine of salvation for the whole human race through technological progress, which is supposed to substitute for religion. In other words: They confuse the seemingly infinite creative possibilities of the digital revolution and the life-enhancing conditions for many people in the world that they may be able to create with an awakening path for humanity. An awakening path is an inner path, and the leading heads of this revolution will probably not even know what an inner path is. Do you know why I find Apple© so unsympathetic?

Why do you find Apple so unsympathetic?

Not that their products are bad. On the contrary. It is the spirit. Apple is a good example for what I called "the descent of the sacred into the dullness of the material world" in the book Intelligence of Awakening. They consciously drive a mystification, a quasi-religious excitement about a product that ultimately nobody needs. A good example was their advertising for their iPhone: "If you don't have an iPhone, well, you don't have an iPhone." This is pure megalomania. Following that, an artist arranged an installation at the Altona train station in Hamburg, with a giant iPhone showing a different advertising message: "If you don't have a soul, at least you have an iPhone." From the viewpoint of reality it is completely immaterial whether there is an iPhone, or not. I could not care less about it. It is a testimony to the poverty of the soul and extreme naivety, when people, who are eager to purchase the next device, spend the entire night in front of the Apple Store, just to be the first ones who are able to walk out of the store with the device in their hands. The consequence of this mystification is that many owners of an Apple product, who suffer from a lack of self-worth, believe they hold a precious totem in their hands, which is charged with a force that is able to increase the value and meaning of their ego-mind.

This descent of the sacred, commercially exploited by many companies (all of them manufacturing something that ultimately nobody needs) is a purely blasphemous act, initiated by people who in their own spiritual world suffer this descent of the sacred into a world which is more or less devoid of significance and depth itself. This descent inevitably leads to a confusion of the internal with the external.

The replacement of the thinking capacity by artificial intelligence in the "second modernity," as you suggest in your question, has quite a lot of advantages. It means, for example, that we no longer need to save each and every known fact in our minds (a brain researcher would say "in our brains.") A few mouse clicks are sufficient to reel it in from the Internet. Artificial intelligence can be seen as the exposure of the thinking mind as a machine with inadequate properties. We could therefore focus on essential knowledge, which is never to be found on the Internet: The knowledge of the Self.

You also called the digital age a sublimation of the technocratic age. Does this, from the point of view of the wisdom teachings, imply also a collective developmental step, an evolutionary ascent? The introduction of the digital age has the potential to be the external reflection of a collective overcoming of the limitations of a purely rational intelligence. The limits of linear thinking will be blown out of the water and the next stage in the development of consciousness, the integral a perspective level is approaching. This term was coined by the consciousness researcher Jean Gebser. In his main work The Ever-Present Origin (first part), he writes about this level of awareness: "We understand this as ... the completion of wholeness, i.e. the recovery of an intact, original state in an enriching inclusion of all previous performance. ... The restoration of the 'dimension' of the human." What Gebser describes here is the integration of the Spirit in the human artifact. So how can the digital revolution contribute to leaving behind the developmental stage of a purely rational intelligence?

The digital age is also the age of information, since one of its characteristics is the increasingly complex networking, the provision and dissemination of information. Information is the content of the mental world. This means that the essence of the digital age is of a mental nature. In the inner order of the theory of evolution of human consciousness, this constitutes the final ascent to the third brain and the potential advancement of human consciousness into the realm of the subtle.

Sublimation is the evolutionary advancement in the direction of a spiritualization of the human being liberated from the entanglements of the gross material world. Spiritualization is therefore the expansion and increasing subtleness of human consciousness, a goal of the realization of the human evolution, taught by mystics of all times. However, this should be described in a subjunctive clause, because for the general population the digital revolution shows no signs of a spiritualization at all. This can only take place on an inner path. The digital revolution is more of a mentalization. Mentalization is the rotten fruit of an unhinged, disintegrated developmental path of a person lost in the labyrinth of a virtual mental world, because all the stages of development, which are the foundation of a culminating spiritualization, are truncated, or only partially accessible. In any case, they are not integrated in a healthy way. Mentalization is also a description of the state in which the main faculty of discernment on the inner path is lost; the real can no longer be discerned from the unreal. The mentalization itself is an artificial, non-real state, which is only imitating true spiritualization. The digital revolution, which will not be satisfied with artificial intelligence alone, but is obsessed with the creation of artificial consciousness, is doomed to exponentially escalate the collective...