Lets look at technology a little deeper. What is technology but a tool of the mind that now creates alternate world in which we can play. Movies, TV, internet is all moving at a rapid place, a new world that is quickly dividing up a new Cold War of values, Red and Blue, to simplify it. But the greater Culture holds them both and the effect is the same: individual are consumers of this objective reality. Oh, we get to choose what part of this digital reality we want to view and participate in, so we have the illusion of creative choice, but this new objective world that includes the subjectivity of you and me as creative participants is one we are still dependent upon, and very fragilely so, because if the power goes off, so does out world. This in itself creates anxiety and fear of loss of power, for without our electoral power we fall into the chaos of the void and the powerless.

Technology is just creating another avoidance of our True Self, a mind that is not dependent upon objective form, a mind, a consciousness that is free from from and physicality, which as the Buddha said, is by our attachment to form and the objective world of senses the cause of our suffering.

The cessation of suffering, which is the Buddha’s teaching, is liberation from dependence upon the common sense objective world. But the objective common sense reality defines this liberation as insanity. In out common sense world we manipulate reality, we control it, but we don’t bond with it. Which, BTW, is what The Avatar and the Voyage to Pandora is all about. The Sky People is the Modern Mind that sees reality of things; the Navi/Pandora is our true Self that is one with the external world, a bond of power.

For instance, a Uganda mother who has bonded with her infant knows when the infant is going to pee before he does so she take him to the bushes. The modern mother, who hasn’t bonded with nature (her child) needs pampers, and that unbounded mother then needs a whole industry of tools and goods to supplement her loss of power. We empty ourselves into our externalized power which has become a whole economy that supplies the need modern culture has itself created.

Technology is not bad, but we do have to understand what is happening to us in our surrender to it.

My view here is not to evaluate the tool (technology) but the world view in which it is used. Basically, our new digital technology unlocks potential in individuals. When I started out in photography, I had to outsource everything to the photo labs. All I did was take the picture, record the objective world as it was. But the whole system evolved to where the photographer does everything now, except make the equipment that allows him to creatively interact with the photo or image. Now we don’t know what’s photoshopped and what isn’t. Remember when we trusted a photo as the exact mirror of reality. The whole world has become fluid now, but the side effect is that we are losing our trust in external reality that used to be solid, a common reality agreed upon by sane people that existed external to the mind that was nothing more than a receptor. The Conscious Creator as Consciousness was a ghost in the machine. On the material map there is no place for Creative Consciousness to rest its head.

But the evolution of materialism is to be invested in form in new ways, but still investing in the physical universe. Religions has always had its eyes on the goal of spirit digested from the corrupted dying flesh. However, religion arrests nature development and holds it hostage in the Church/god as mediator. Church like secular social institutions intervenes in the natural development of consciousness from the concrete to the abstract by creating a wedge, a pseudo reality in which our minds become dependent, cut of from our natural bonding with the universe when we were born into society and its semantic language reality of self generating thought.

Buddhism, Vedanta, Kashmir Shavism and the mystical Christian tradition all point to the transcendence of a thought create reality and the self image that lives in that alternate reality as a real person.