Psyche and Technology

The cell phone. The television. The movie camera. The computer. All exist, all at one time did not exist, and all have always had the potential to exist. Therefore, all are mere locations on the spaceless, timeless map of collective psychic terrain.

Think about it. We didn't just invent the stuff that cell phones, TVs and computers are made of. The stuff was here. The universe, remarkably, made it possible for these things to exist. Satellites, spaceships, remote controls - all this stuff works. The Earth could have very easily
not had the materials to make these things, but it did. Surely it took human ingenuity to assemble them - but these technologies were all bound to happen because they were possible. It's kind of amazing, when you stop to ponder it: all these things are of the Earth - from the Earth. They have forever been possible to make. The difference is that now they are manifest. Now our minds have stumbled upon the pathways to make them.

So we should not delude ourselves in thinking that our prized technological creations are pure invention. They are discoveries, to be sure, but not invention. Nor should we fool ourselves into believing they are "advancements." Technology is not making our lives "easier." This is a misguided fiction that is circulating, and it needs to stop. A thing like the internet may make it easier to communicate with your relatives in India, and a thing like the satellite may make it easier to detect the weather patterns of the next few days. These things unequivocally help - they may even save lives - but they have not made life, as a phenomenon, easier. Life is always hard, and it will continue to be hard ten generations of technological evolution down the road.

What is really happening is change. This should not, I must stress again, be confused with "progress." There is absolutely no forward line of development that we are cruising upon. This worldview is only an illusion produced by the psyche. The psyche naturally makes images, and, in the example of Time, when the psyche has not expanded enough to make room for alternate conceptions of Time, creates a straight line by default. But there is evidence to suggest a view of time that is circular, or even shapeless.

It may help, in this exposition, to imagine the collective psychic activity of human beings - all thoughts, images, emotions, actions (both conscious and unconscious) that ever were and ever will be - as a gigantic "cloud" in an invisible, psychic sphere. This "cloud" is of course only a crude pictoral representation, but it is far from ridiculous, as the facts of mythology (where similar - even identical - motifs appear in disparate cultures without their intermingling) - not to mention Buddhism and other religious/philosophical traditions - seem to support some such phenomenon, regardless of whether or not it looks like a cloud. It (and here we are talking about psychic, not physical, reality) could just as easily be called "the human experience." It just requires a little imagination. (And if we cannot imagine, what can we do?)

My cartoonish illustration of the psychic world aids in communicating a crucial fact: when individual humans encounter any psychic territory at all (as happens in every mind in every moment of every day) it becomes manifest, lifting it out of a state of "unmanifest." As I mentioned above, the unconscious comes to us consciously in four discrete forms. Put another way, we might say that there are only four things that we can be conscious of: physical action, emotion, image, and thought. If you think you've been conscious of something else, look closer and you'll notice that it is either a combination of the above that can be broken down into two or more of the four elementary forms, or a "hint" of (or vague "push" from) the not-yet-formed, unmanifest (and unconscious) cloud.

(One example of this is an "impression" or psychic "graze." For example, you can be impressed by a great pass and catch at a football game, but until you speak it or make a point of thinking to yourself, "That was a great pass," it is not consicous. It was only lingering in an impression-state. These "impressions" cannot be given a distinct category, but they are everywhere. They are almost conscious, but not quite.)

So now, to return to technology: we must of course distinguish between the minds of the few who created the technology, and the minds of the many that use it. It seems, just as is the case with prophets and seers, that the idea for a new technology enters the world through a single, or a relatively small number of psyches, and then, as it spreads to other, more numerous, using minds enters the collective psyche. Thomas Edison is a good example. Things like a more efficient way to use electricity to light things, and the phonograph, seemingly came through this unique personality. But no matter who the idea came from, it soon started showing up on the psychic registers of everybody who witnessed it. This is what I mean by psychic territory.

Now, the psychic territory that the lightbulb occupies is new, but, as detailed above, it did not appear out of thin air. It must have existed in an unmanifest state in the domain of the "cloud," or collective unconscious. The interesting part is that Edison's lightbulb became not only an external object with which people began to be familiar, but electric light itself became a more frequent psychic content. A psychic version of electricity was now at play. This was a monumental change in the history of the human psyche. No longer was this light-phenomenon relegated to occasional appearances courtesy of Mother Nature. Now it existed in common, and it has forever altered the nature of the human psyche.