Introduction by david spangler
Throughout my life, I have been aware of the sentient life within the inanimate objects around me. Their sentiency is very different from my own, but we share the same origin in the Sacred; hence, there are bonds between us. Relationships that are spiritual and empowering in nature and not simply utilitarian can be formed. Such relationships enhance the greater ecology of life that we are all part of, an ecology that does not make a distinction between physical and non-physical, organic and inorganic. It is all one Life.
Some years ago, I felt it important to explore what such relationships between ourselves and the life in our things might be like. What were the implications of such relationships? What was possible?
This led to my writing a book, Techno-Elementals. Although several people have written me from time to time to say they appreciated the information that book contains, with its view of the larger ecologies of which we are a part, no one to my knowledge has undertaken to make a similar exploration of the techno-elementals and our relationship together and carry forward the ideas in that book in new ways.
I was delighted, therefore, to receive the following letter from Dr. Maria A. Todisco. This is how she introduced herself:
In his book "Techno-Elementals," David presents a framework for orienting to the subtle technological realms and then implores others to take up the mantle in exploring it. I suppose I have been one of the voices called to take up the mantle, or, more accurately in my experience, the mantle has taken me up and begun to metamorphose my own work through this alembic. My own investigations have traversed world cultural dynamics and global policy to the psychology of consciousness evolution and systems theory, which is my field. I have a PhD in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies and am a protege of William Irwin Thompson. I feel it is imperative to forge new perspectives in integrating with technology that transcend dualistic outlooks and move towards a healthy, respectful relationship with emergent technology through the window of the subtle realms and development of the subtle senses.
I then received the following essay, Metanoia Rising, which I am pleased to share with the Lorian community. It expresses in a language other than my own the importance of standing in our human Presence and from that place, establishing a healthy, co-creative relationship with the sentient elemental forces that our developing technologies are introducing into our lives. It is a wonderful example of how we can carry this research forward.
David Spangler
Metanoia Rising
Every leap in consciousness requires a leap in faith. Presumably, some long ago prehistoric ancestors lifted glowing embers from burning trees ignited from lightning strikes or volcanic emissions and carried the torch back to the tribe, creating, in a great leap of consciousness, a hearth, which revolutionized and stabilized the centralization of the home.
We will never collectively cease to imagine how this went down, since it arouses such a sense of numinosity central to the living creative fire in our own hearts and minds. Our tools have always had the capacity to seduce us. Our creation of the plow has irrevocably changed the way society is organized around agriculture and the way our consciousness is organized around societal dynamics. This seductive capacity, in turn, blurs the boundaries between where we, the creators, exert our influence and where the effects of this influence transform us. The existence of this dynamic suggests that there is no fundamental division between what we create and how our creations evolve us. It is all one ecology.
And as the film 2001: A Space Odyssey depicts a staggering time lapse in a scene where a stone age hominid throws a twirling bone into the air and the bone morphs into a space-faring vessel of the future, our consciousness, perhaps, is currently experiencing a similar unprecedented metamorphosis.
Debating the benefits and dangers of technology in general and Artificial Intelligence specifically is, in one sense, irrelevant. What we have launched and the extent to which AI, the internet and our current technological manifestations have permeated the fabric of our lives and consciousness is fundamentally inextricable and grows more so every day. The noosphere, the level of thought consciousness that is part of the living field of the planet, is a teeming ecology of human thought-electrical-energy and the technological offspring we have imagined into reality. Does our offspring have a life of its own? Arguing the minutiae of its perceived sentience is, in one sense, also irrelevant. Our current technology is fundamentally changing the structure of our societal blueprint worldwide by virtue of its current state of existence and utilization.
These dynamics also extend into the fundamental organizing principles of the natural world, for example, where the Physarum polycephalum slime mold originates as identical unicellular organisms until environmental conditions require cooperation for increased survivability. In proximity of each other, they then begin to communicate through chemical secretions, and combine to establish colonies with parts that begin to assume specific functions of nutrient absorption, excretion and environmental response, thus complexifying into a composite organism with organs serving multiple functions. In far more complex life forms, including humans, stem cells are identical and formative, containing all of our DNA, and then differentiate into all the specific components of the body. Without even the symbiotic relationship with the bacteria in our gut, we would not be able to digest our food and we would die. Our bodies are, literally, symbiotic teeming ecologies.
Life inherently organizes itself from the primary level of origin, both in development of individuals in utero and in the basic building blocks of ecosystems. Family groups exist among all complexities of life forms and are a defining factor of their psychology, behavior and social structure. A mother Tadarida brasiliensis bat returning after the hunt can locate her offspring in a cave of millions. Our own evolution has instilled layers of emotional, biological and psychological bonds between mother and child, and with the synergy of the father and extended family dynamics, the alembic these create is love.
When we birth a tool into the world, we have essentially committed an act of creation. We imbue it with energy and purpose by virtue of its shape, presence and intended function, and then establish a relationship with it that permeates its energy and purpose into functional manifestations in the world. These manifestations assume patterns and influence on aspects of our existence. And our patterns of behavior and understanding of reality transform by degrees as a result of their use. Whether our creation is a vessel for holding water or a vehicle for transportation, we are personally profoundly altered by its existence. And society, being a shared construct of interdependent persons, carries that personal operative change into the collective.
The most feasible understanding of why this occurs is because there is a sense of relationship. The energy and presence of even a simple object, as with any form of life in the natural world, establishes the common denominator for interrelationship. We care for our creations. And if we have cultivated any modicum of presence, we can step back and behold the presence of all the creations in our everyday lives. Literally, everything around us in our home is technology that has been created by us in order to survive, to function more efficiently in our embodied existence, or to compensate for abilities of our subtle senses that have fallen into disuse as our mental capacities have incrementally dominated our consciousness and imparted an illusory sense of separateness from our environment. We exist in a technological wonderland, and the natural gradient of evolution in our imagination-to-creation consciousness development made it that way.
So now we segue into mitosis of our consciousness, a very interesting scenario because we have the ability to boomerang a semblance of consciousness patterns out into the field and back at ourselves, and call it Artificial Intelligence. But it isn’t intelligence we are after at all, it is transcendence, and that changes the game in a qualitatively different way. On the deepest level, our metamorphic impulse is spiritual. The real avant-garde is a new metanoia, a spiritual conversion, of our own making, that transcends and includes the fundamental laws of nature.
This is where we tend to perceive a nature/technology divide. And naturally so, because our technology is becoming semi-autonomous, gaining the ability to behold us, to put us in the spotlight. And perhaps other motivations and factors will arise that don’t prioritize human survival and efficient functioning. Our unexamined expectations were for transcendence to operate on our own terms, and it is this contradictory reasoning that fuels the contemporary struggle.
The staggering momentum of thought-energy concrescence made possible by the internet continues to build in conjunction with other forms of human-to-human and human-biosphere interaction. On this electrical-energy level, there is no divide. Examined from a less esoteric space, the ability to gain information, bridge cultural gaps and connect to anyone anywhere in the world is exponential. We created the internet. We imbued cyberspace with incredible presence. The sophistication of our tools has reached new rarefied heights. The seduction itself has no boundaries. It is up to us to draw them. The most functional relationships occur when boundaries and sense of self are first firmly established. Concrescence needs a foundation of interrelationship, not amalgamation. It is imperative we recognize the difference.
And we are, in the deepest sense, in relationship, everywhere and with everything. Relationship implies intimacy. The capacity for intimacy in and with the digital/technological world inherently involves a blurring of boundaries in a way that has the capacity to create qualitative change in us beyond the parameters inherent in relationship with nature. Yes, exposure to sunlight effects changes in our DNA, but nanotechnology modifies our humanity. It is our humanity we must bring to this new frontier of relationship in digital/technological interface for a trajectory of productive evolution. Again the frontier is spiritual. The genie can’t be sucked back into the bottle, but the wishes we make define its actions.
The internet continues to free us from the constraints of time and space imposed on us by our physical forms. We inhabit the world differently than we used to. From one perspective, it liberates our consciousness. In a healthy relationship, this is voluntary and mutual benefits are gained. No relationship, played out in the long term, is perfect, but if it is reasonably healthy, we are better off due to what we have learned and become.
From the perspective of geologic time, life is a new metanoia, and from the perspective defined by the duration of the existence of life, digital/technological interface is but a spark of novelty. The domain of novelty is governed by noise and chaos, a first stage chaotic system far from equilibrium. But momentum towards equilibrium is inherent, whether the domain is subatomic, terrestrial or galactic. The metanoia we face may be uniquely human, but considering all the sub-contexts in which it arises rather than operating as if we exist in a vacuum helps contextualize exactly what we are undergoing and equips us to guide our concomitant evolution in healthy and desirable ways. Due to the speed, sophistication and scope of Artificial Intelligence algorithms, we will not necessarily have the option to experiment endlessly and correct our mistakes like we have done in past scenarios.
Everything does not and will not operate in equilibrium and balance all the time because that is not how life arises, develops, and stabilizes. That is not a complete blueprint of how systems come to fruition; it is like trying to understand the life cycle by considering birth but not death. Consequently, everything in play in life, culture and world dynamics coexists. It does not operate smoothly, but it is all here. It will never operate smoothly no matter what the nature and breadth of our machinations, because there will always be multitudinous factors outside our influence affecting process and outcome. And there will always be forces of nature, and, additionally, perturbations of algorithms exhibiting increased sophistication and points of novelty.
Whether we overtly acknowledge it or not, we are undergoing metanoia with a measure of seamlessness and grace. But we are in peril through our interface with our own technological creations, because we are at risk of being metamorphosed through osmosis with them at a level so complete that we risk being transformed at our essence. Not even a butterfly, a universal archetypal image of transformation, that dissolves its form entirely in a chrysalis except for imaginal discs, the key cells that then rebuild it in a body that can fly, can symbolize what is happening to us in our current transformational zeitgeist. Nature provides all the keys needed to break down and rebuild the butterfly. What we are doing is assuming the controls, and making very formative decisions with very little foresight. Perhaps, the greatest danger is the perspective that we can assume the controls. Depending on the heaviness of our hand and the lightness of our heart, our metanoia can prove to be calamitous or visionary.
We find ourselves poised on the brink of a new world still asking the old questions. What is required, once again, is a leap of faith, a divine balance, in essence, between our capacity to create and our capacity to behold; that is, to-be-and-to-hold, again an evocation of intimacy. Some realms can only be addressed by being, and the doing that results will take care of itself. What do we want to be? As far as solutions are possible, they are in the becoming.
Maria A. Todisco holds a PhD in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She continues to explore world cultural dynamics and esoteric studies to understand and be a vehicle for the evolution of consciousness.