We invent things we believe we are lacking. We call them new. They are not new; nothing is new. (Lookin’ at you, pistol shrimp.) Everything in nature is in us and everything in us is in nature. When we read in Urgency. that, “All things must be expressed but you don’t have to be the one expressing them,” please recognize that all of the components in us that we call human nature are already expressed throughout the rest of nature. We are a part of nature that expresses the whole. And when the brain self-sacrifices, we express the point of view of the ultimate formless awareness in which the whole is manifesting.
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Living in a world where we block out our wholeness for ourselves, believing self to be the end of discussion, we try to invent our way to freedom. We say there’s an emotional hole and we try to fill it with things like consumerism or lovers or pets. But that doesn’t work. Trying never does.
When it comes to the outside world, we invent things all the time to fill a “need.” Computers are our attempt to fill in all those holes with a magic w that turns holes whole. Computers are for instant communication, learning, teaching, entertainment, sex, ignorance, criminal enterprise, sadism, controlling conversations, meeting people, shopping, and one day, many hope, god.
God?
God.
Used to be we imagined a terrifying day when the internet would come alive and be our all-knowing, all-seeing god. A robotic slave master. The ultimate troll. Pretty much what we would become if we were it. This fantasy branched off into us infusing the internet with our own consciousness and living forever as virtual creatures. And branched off further into the theory that we are already characters in some alien species’s video game.
In blocking out wholeness, Western mind blocks out heart, which is the place in us that understands the web of life, the interconnecting nature of all things. Scientifically, we have finally come to understand the scope of interdependence—and people are beginning to do that, personally—but it hasn’t yet fully penetrated society and popped the brain-bubble fantasy of a mechanical, cold, objective, completely knowable existence. We prefer the invented, computerized substitute. The worldwide web, not the web of life. Instead of seeing this substitute for what it is and asking ourselves what we’re admitting we are lacking by inventing such a thing—then dissecting what it means to lack—we’ve computerized society and our dreams of tomorrow.
Our world is already virtual; it is a copy of our desires. There is no freedom, no wholeness, no release from or into the matrix. There is only our technology speaking to what we’re repressing and us repressing even that, building over it a new city, just like the old city. But just as we can press the OFF button and get out of computerized headspace, so, too, can we wake up to the very wholeness we seek. It is there like the living world is there, when you look up from this screen.
We are metaphors within metaphors screaming WAKE UP! Inventing, WAKE UP! But the part that has been lost in translation for so long is that the brain must wake up out of you. You cannot be the one who awakens. You must be turned off like a video game. Anything less is more game.