The GPS is a metaphor for a historic shift in paradigms of reality in the West. On the flat map of the Newtonian world, you are a thing moving on a stable space/time grid. You must conform to the map, plotting the right course and not going wrong, and you are an idiot if you do. There is only one right way.

But on the GPS, the map or world boots around you. If you don’t move, the world doesn’t move. When you move, the world moves with you like the outside of the inside of a cup. And, you are always going to your chosen destination no. matter what turns you make. You are never an idiot. There is no guilt on the GPS map.

The GPS navigator is a metaphor for Buddhism and a shift of you from being on the periphery of life to being at the center.

When the mythological dome of the 1,000 year Middle Ages ended, the modern age was born and man lost his center and orientation in the world. Now the earth orbited the sun, just another planet, and then man himself was just another species evolved from lower species. What the hell? Joseph Campbell said the modern man was in free fall. The Age of Anxiety. 

It is through myth and metaphor that we can return to our lost center, that we can find the axis of our wheel, no longer condemned to live on the rim of our life taking all the crap. 

Trump was elected because he “restored center”—not of the nation, all the people, but just his people. Like Moses he showed his people the Center, but not in them, but through Trump. I will be your center, your voice, he said. This is a False Center, a False Idol.

Eastern teachings flooding into our culture in the 60s because they offered a new paradigm that showed us where the lost center was: Inside us. 

The GPS Navigator is a technological metaphor for our lost center.

What’s changed is monolithic advertising to a single audience. Now advertising is fragmented and appeals to target populations. The glory days of Madison Avenue and Mad Men are over. 

The Church of the Trinity (ABC, NBC, CBS, was broken and fragmented by cable, and now the internet breaks up the Church of Cable. On the internet everyone, every computer, is the center of the web.