Mindfulness and Shamelessness: Developing a Personal Program for the Future

I’ve been thinking a lot about connectivity lately. On many levels. From the fact that Comcast really is just a horrible ISP, to the connection between the ecosystems on Earth, I think it’s safe to say we’re not separate entities. We are intimately connected within webs, both virtually (which is why when we all want to stream Netflix in the neighborhood, our internet slows around here) and materially (which is there is a link between an increase of flesh eating bacteria on our beaches after a major oil spill—those little guys just love a good tarball.)

But this is really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to connectivity. The Robot Apocalypse has been in the news a lot lately, and this new race of beings represents just one potential future. While I do believe robots will come and take most of our jobs, I don’t think they’re the new race we need to focus on.

We are.

The new human race will be one that has blended biology with machine.  What exactly that will look like is uncertain. Personally I think there will be many different types of machine enhancements that humans pursue. Race, sexual orientation and religious xenophobia will disappear. Instead, the xenophobia of the future will be between those who adopt technologies to enhance their biology, and those who don’t.

One thing I think can’t be avoided: The networking of the human mind. I don’t mean mind uploading, though anything is possible, but an internet connection via thought. Whether through a headset, implant or neurological brain surgery, humans will end up in a place where your mind and mine are only a thought apart.

This of course opens up a Pandora’s box. My first novel, eHuman Dawn, focuses on what could possibly go wrong in such a scenario, especially if the technology is owned by one group with its own agenda. I would call this a traditional hierarchical scenario and it’s entirely possible, given we’ve been abusing each other for centuries, why stop when we’ve finally got control of one another's minds?

Yet the opposite scenario is also just as possible--An open sourced network of human minds working cooperatively. My new novel, eHuman Deception, attempts to envision such an agreement. A cooperative network, where everything is shared, is honestly the only way to avoid being controlled by special interests. If we have things to hide, whether it be some big idea, or some terrible act we’ve committed, then we’re vulnerable to control. This is because when we have to protect, we have to be secret, and thus build the systems to enable secrecy, which are used by those with less than noble motives to manipulate us. It’s the cycle of fear and we’ve been living in it for millennia. However our technology is about to bring it to a whole new level.

If we are afraid, we will be controlled by those who have the means. If we are fearless, then the future is ours to inherit.

How then, can we become fearless in our minds? It’s impossible to cover that in one blog. Philosophy has spent ages skirting around the idea. In the end, it’s a personal thing, to choose between fear and courage. No one can fix our minds for us, we have to do the work to prepare ourselves for a networked future.

Think of it this way, your brain is the hardware of human existence. We will most likely change that hardware platform dramatically, using technological enhancements, over the next 50 years. Many of us will be alive to see it. So it’s up to us to design and download the new software program within us to work with the hardware upgrade. That software is our self, our emotions, our thoughts and our desires. The software we need to design is one of an esoteric nature—covering all the intangible aspects that make up our personality. The more open sourced this software of the mind is, the freer we shall be as a race.

How? By implementing two key practices that can help us upgrade ourselves from fear to courage: Mindfulness and Shamelessness.

Mindfulness is the ancient practice of watching your thoughts and being aware of the world around you. It’s really nothing more than that. Observing who you are, what you like, what you do, and how you feel, without judgement!!! There are a million ways to get to the point where you’re the observer of your life, rather than the helpless victim. Mindfulness must be a part of the program of humanity if we’re to take the next technological leap collaboratively. We must understand ourselves, our motives and if necessary, bring our action into alignment with our highest principals. It’s a huge thing to ask, but if we’re going to network our very dreams together, then we owe it to ourselves, and one another, to come into the experiment with a true understanding of ourselves and the lives we live.

Shamelessness is the non-judgment part. There are many things we do as a species that are terrible. We also do many beautiful things. And then there are the things we do because society says we’re supposed to, but perhaps aren’t in alignment with our truest selves. We can’t force others to stop judging us, but we can stop judging others, including ourselves! I think we’re beginning to break down many of these issues, mostly in the realm of sexuality, and that’s a good thing. If you’ve practiced mindfulness, and have understood your motives to be pure and true and come from a place of courage, then don’t be ashamed of who you are. Too often we hide ourselves in fear that no one will like us, or approve of us, and then we must be secretive. We keep ourselves protected from that rejection and thus become ever more fearful. This is the greatest vulnerability we have, and the sooner we learn to accept ourselves, the more beautiful our new world will be.

There’s a major hardware upgrade coming for humanity. It’s up to us to prepare ourselves to live the most honest and open lives we can, in clear conscience and action, without shame.

Otherwise, the sheep will become slaves. I personally want no part of that world.

One Planet, Many Policies

“Policy is largely set by economic elites and organized groups representing business interests with little concern for public attitudes or public safety, as long as 

the public remains passive and obedient.”

~ Noam Chomsky on the Transatlantic Agreement and US Policy

The news and I have an on-again-off-again relationship. For the most part, I strive to surround myself with positive elements. After over forty years on this Earth, I’ve learned that worrying about something that hasn’t yet happened, or might happen, or is happening but there’s nothing I can do about it, is actually a waste of time. Right here, right now, in my life, wonderful things are happening and those are the things I do not wish to miss, simply because I was stressed about something that’s completely out of my control. In spite of the fact that I'm writing a dystopian trilogy,  I truly believe that the world is NOT out to get me.

Yet, as a writer of science fiction, I do a lot of research, and the news is a part of that. Particularly political news, since that is where the power lies—in the hands of those who work in our governmental agencies.

This morning, I found the quote above from Noam Chompsky very telling. It sums up the entire attitude of governance in America at this moment in time. Decisions are not made in the name of the people, but rather for those who have an economic hand in them. These decisions are being made daily, behind closed doors. However, given the fact that we are one human race, sharing one atmosphere, one biosphere and one planet, any decision made behind closed doors affects all of us, whether the politicians realize it or not.

It has long surprised me that most people refuse to believe that their government would hurt them. Folks like to complain about the government, but suggest that decisions might be made intentionally without regards to our safety, and people cry, “CONSPIRACY THEORY!” and tune you out.

“That’s impossible! The government would never do that.”

Is it? Take Chomsky’s quote above. I agree it’s a stretch to believe the government would kill citizens intentionally, but when economic powers are concerned, our governments already have a track record of disdain for our safety and our freedom. Take the nuclear testing in the 1960’s, which released new forms of radioactive carbon into the air we all share, and thus into all of our bodies. Remember Erin Brockovich? PG&E knowingly spewed carcinogenic waste into a town’s water supply as a way to cut costs.

And today, as I read Charles Eisenstien’s latest article for The Guardian, I learned that, “the US National Research Council endorsed a proposal to envelop the planet in a layer of sulphate aerosols to reduce solar radiation and cool the atmosphere.”

This plan, also known as geoengineering, is an important one because it involves changing our atmosphere without our consent. One country has decided to spray a layer of sulphate aerosols across the planet, without any testing of the long term effects on human and planetary health. Why would we rush to this type of solution for the environmental crisis we’re in? And why do we, the people, sit back and let it happen? Why are we so obedient?

Let me be clear, I don’t think this is a conspiracy to wipe out humanity, but for some strange reason, we’ve all been trained by the media to think that. Most people won’t discuss it when I bring it up, and I know I risk being seen as “out there” for mentioning it. But hear me out. Geoengineering our skies has been an idea for quite some time. Most likely it started out as a really cool patent that would help some company make a lot of money. It wouldn’t be too hard to figure that one out, there are many patents registered under this category. They’ve been testing and spraying since the late 90’s. Money is the driving factor here.

But now we’ve got a real climate change issue on our hands and geoengineering has yet another reason to be pursued—saving humanity. We must cover our atmosphere in a layer of metals so that we can cool the planet. It will save all of us! Yet will it? I’d like to see some answers first.

What is the impact on human health to be breathing in sulphates? How about animals, or insects? How cool do we want to go? What if we get too cool, how do we heat things back up? What do we spray then? The Earth naturally cools and heats over centuries, in patterns we don’t really understand, so are we sure we know exactly how to do this right?

The questions are endless, yet many aren’t asking them, for fear of being seen as crazy. Instead we look to the skies and say the grid like cloud patterns are normal, and that they’ve always been there. That’s only true for people born since the early 90’s. The rest of us know better, yet we don’t question. It’s as author Miguel Angel Ruiz said, “We only see what we want to see; we only hear what we want to hear. Our belief system is just like a mirror that only shows us what we believe.”

For me, the real reason we need to wake up and ask the hard questions of those making policy is because both business and government have shown us that they don’t understand the web of life in which we live. Policies are short sighted, profit driven and made without regard to safety and wellbeing. A new perspective must enter our leadership. As Eisenstein puts it so well...

“The quick fix mindset behind geoengineering must be transformed to one that seeks a humble partnership with nature if we are to address climate change.”

I’d go even further to say we need to stop assuming that business and government will fix the problems we see, and seek our own humble partnerships with one another, as we begin to make the difference locally. The age of the quick fix has dominated us economically and politically for centuries, but in the larger scope of things, humanity knows instinctively that all is connected and that what we do to our skies will affect every creature on the planet. We’ve been here before, and it’s time to stop being passive and demand that our solutions take into consideration the wellbeing of not only our economy, but life on the planet as a whole.

Where My Demons Hide

"No matter what we breed
We still are made of greed
This is my kingdom come
This is my kingdom come"

~ Imagine Dragons, "Demons"

 

I've been spending time lately diving deeper into the psyche of the villain. My novel, eHuman Dawn, is the beginning of a trilogy about the beauty and pain that are possible in a future transhumanist society. Thus understanding power and control is key to completing the trilogy in a meaningful way. Technology is making progress in leaps and bounds, not in baby steps, and it's entirely possible that in my lifetime I will have to make a choice between dying or living forever through the aid of machines. What exactly that will be like, I can only imagine. But what I do know with all my heart is that such a "transhumanist wager", as author Zoltan Istvan has coined it, is a very serious wager indeed.

To rely on technology in order to live forever and achieve total health is to rely on those who own the technology to consider our lives as precious and important. This means that business and government leaders need to care for each and everyone of us in a way that considers human consciousness and life as valuable and worthy of investment and protection.

Take an honest look at the leadership in our society today--can we trust them with our lives? With our dreams, desires and hopes? NSA surveillance, drone attacks on innocents, dictators approving genocide, business leaders willing to take risks that leave millions without an income, jobs shipped overseas, goods made in sweatshops, children forced into slavery, mountaintops blown off to heat our houses. Yes, there are great things our leaders do, but more and more we are discovering that often our leaders in business and government act without empathy, without fear and without care for humanity and the world as a whole. Their personal interests come first, and if some people suffer, so be it. Sacrificing the many for the benefit of a few has been a theme in the story of domination for centuries.
   
What sort of a person would make such cold and unfeeling decisions? Who is able to shut of their empathy to such a degree that the enslavement of children in order to manufacture goods more cheaply is considered a brilliant business decision? Who manipulates others and markets for their own advantage? In the clinical world there is a name for such a person: the psychopath--a distinct subset of humanity who supposedly can't feel love, empathy, shame or compassion. People who operate for their own advantage, to the detriment of all around them.
   
The psychopath is real, known and well documented. That many of our leaders share traits with the psychopath is not surprising. As the modern philosopher Charles Eisenstein writes in his most recent book, "Living in a system that rewards psychopathy, it is not accident that the psychopathic rise to the top, and that the psychopathic tendencies in each of us rise to the surface. It is a mistake to blame the psychopaths for our present condition; they are a result, not a cause."
   
In a world that rewards the cool, calm and collected human being, is it surprising that our top 1% seem to be distant and callous? For the rest of us, it's no coincidence the use of anti-depressants in America is at an all-time high--we all want to numb ourselves and be distant, detached and level-headed. When our story as a society is that being tough is king and feeling anything at all is for the weak, are we surprised that a businessman might be capable of shipping our jobs overseas in order to make more money for himself? It's the American myth to be independent, self seeking and self-fulfilling. To admit we need each other to grow and learn is to admit defeat.
   
Eisenstein goes on to explain, "Given any cultural trait, there are always some people who embody it in extreme form, holding up a mirror so that we can recognize it in ourselves. These would be the psychopaths."
   
At this moment in history, we are in a place of transition between the story of domination and the story of interconnectedness. The path between the two world views is not straight, it's more like a maze. There is a way out, but in order to find it, we must see the bigger picture. Many look to technology to fix this. I would agree with them, but with a bit of caution.

If we develop the technology to live forever before leaving the story of domination, then the possible future could be one of power and manipulation unlike anything we've ever seen. The ability to own us, program us and abuse us would be very great, and extremely tempting to the psychopaths in charge. The machines would hate us, outsource us and eventually render us useless, because their creators saw humanity through those eyes first. Eisenstein suggests this is because, "…our current story facilitates the rise of psychopathy and empowers the psychopath."

But what if we change our story? What if we see that we are one and begin to look upon the connections between us as powerful, rather than as a weakness? What if we begin to see that humanity with all it's knowledge and wisdom is like the internet--connected, open, free and full of possibility? Would we settle for leaders who disdain us? Would we create machines to dominate us? Or would we create a more beautiful world, where technology serves us and the planet, in harmony with the web of life that surrounds us?

To me, the greatest threat to our race is our self-loathing. Ironically, I share this in common with the villain in my novel, Edgar Prince. Yet here's how he and I differ--He thinks humanity is unable to rise up and respect one another, therefore we must be controlled into behaving. I believe we can do it, because it's what we were born to do. Where he sees weakness, I see tremendous potential.

This is a personal development issue and yet, because we are connected, it's a global one as well. To look at ourselves and one another with respect and dignity is a place to start. From there we take it, person by person, all the way to the top. And perhaps, as a result, when we get to the top we'll discover that we aren't a pyramid at all, rather we're one large web of humanity, co-creating a future of possibility, health, beauty, and most of all, mutual respect and honor. Because when we look into the mirror of the story of interconnectedness, we'll see the light of humanity in one anothers' eyes.

The Web of Life

    There is an old saying, so old in fact, that it's attributed to the ancient Egyptian mystics. It goes something like this, "As it is above, so it is below." Essentially, this statement points to a universal idiom that most modern people aren't  comfortable with: All things are linked together. What happens to me, happens to you. What happens to our families, is happening at a larger scale in our community. When one suffers, we all suffer, for all systems are woven together.

    In an HuffPost titled, "Your Brain is the Universe" by Deepak Chopra and several other modern day thinkers, put it this way,

"As is the smallest, so is the greatest has come full circle from ancient wisdom to modern science once we accept that every system is driven by feedback loops, homeostasis, and continuing self-organization. At this point, it is up to dissenters to prove that we aren't inhabiting a living universe, tied into it by the most fundamental characteristics of biological systems."

    It all comes down to one word: Interdependence. We're all linked, all one, bound by the web of life. This bothers the modern world, because everything from our healthcare to our economic system is based on the idea that we're separate, on our own, and in it for our own selfish needs. We've literally setup a thought system that traps us in our own cages, oblivious to the connections we share with the world, with each other and even with our own technological creations. We feel trapped, but essentially, the door to the prison of separation is wide open. We can walk out of the illusion anytime. The choice is up to us.

    One of my favorite modern thinkers, Charles Eisenstien, put it this way in his book Sacred Economics, "Having made nature into an adversary, or at best a pile of resources, it is no surprise that we manifest the same relationship of our bodies. The defining diseases of our time are the autoimmune diseases, the somatization of our self-other confusion. Just as the village, the forest, and the planet are inseparable parts of ourselves that we mistake as other, so our immune systems reject our own body tissues. What we do to the other, we do to ourselves, inescapably."

    Imagine it, as we cut out parts of nature in the name of progress, we get sicker as a people. When we destroy the land around us, we feel it in our very bodies, for these bodies are made from the same essence, the same set of elements. We are all one, tied together by the material building blocks of life.

    Much research has been dedicated to understanding this web of life. Our science, once set on compartmentalizing and individually naming everything in sight, has begun to see a bigger picture within our biology. Rather than running like a machine, nature operates more like a spider's web-when one strand is broken, the web starts to unravel. Our ecosystems are beginning to break down because we forgot this ancient truth that life is truly a web of interconnecting systems, each one dependent upon the other for survival.

    This web of life analogy isn't lost on me as I prepare to launch eHuman Dawn as an eBook, sending it out on the world wide web to readers that live all over the globe. Research for this novel, and the next two in the trilogy, has led me down many interdependent pathways. The physics of consciousness has revealed how interdependent molecules, waves and particles actually are. Researchers are beginning to postulate that our consciousness is woven throughout our bodies, having no central space to reside in, but rather existing in every cell, in ever piece of DNA, simultaneously talking to one another, sending data in an instant, to keep all parts of the body in synch. And when things aren't in synch, when some part of the glorious communication system shuts down, the illness is pretty obvious. We stop functioning in health.

    Does this elegant system of data transfer within the human body sound familiar? Does it mimic the world around us? Not just the natural world around us, but even our most powerful invention yet, the Internet, works this way. Data moves throughout the fiber optic network at the speed of light and travels across the globe to deliver information to millions simultaneously. There is no central place where the communication resides, rather devices by the millions embed themselves into the World Wide Web to share and receive data, perhaps not instantly, but quickly. There is nothing now we cannot know, for all data can be found, if only you ask the right question. It's no coincidence that we've given it the name World Wide Web. It's our creation, is it not? Therefore it lives and operates within our geometry.

    There's no denying it…the geometry of life, and data, is a web.

    When we use the World Wide Web and interact within its social structures, we might have the tendency to think we're alone, separated from the others by the iPhone in our hands, but in reality, we're not. What you use the Internet for affects me. What I do affects you. That we have some of the most beautiful ideas "floating" around out there alongside some of the most perverted, angry, and destructive impulses is natural. It's human nature to forget that we're all connected, and that everything we do is eventually revealed.

     But life systems seem to find a way of reminding us of our error.

     All forms of life tend towards abundance, and will create systems within its structure that expose secrets and lies. We call these the canaries in the coal mine. Nature gives warnings and hints when we've reached a place in the web of life that's broken and let's us know that the very fabric of that system is beginning to unravel. Though technically the Internet is not "life," it does have a life of its own and within the network, a system of checks and balances and a way to sound the alarm has come about.

Wikileaks is a perfect example of how all things on the internet can and will be exposed. Consider it a neural network not unlike our own, with its unique systems for monitoring health and wellness. We can call it evil and say our technology is separating our society and ruining us. Or we can see it as an organic system, created in the image and likeness of us. Our technology is as good, and as bad, as we are.

    Ecologists tell us that the plight of the polar bear just might be our plight. Using the axiom of "as above so below" the plight of the internet whistle blowers should also be of interest to us. Those who hack into the internet and make sure the web is functional, whole and clean, and report back to us when it's not, are essential to the health of the network. Their plight is our plight as well. They're the canaries in our technological coal mine. If we exterminate them, if we decide to make them criminals, then the consequences will be felt by all of us. They exist to guard the web of data that has become the fabric of modern society, just like organizations such as The Sierra Club exist to protect the natural web of life that provides us with our resources. The two are linked by the human mind.

    Nature created us in her image and likeness, and we created the internet in our image and likeness. Therefore it behooves humanity to protect them both, our data and our natural resources, so that we can live full, interdependent, human lives. After all, "as is above, so is below."