I notice that when I open social media, emails, web browsers, and work apps, my system resists the pull of the screen. I’m often pulled back to my early life, when there was simplicity in communication and connections. It wasn’t so complicated, we never really knew what other people were doing unless we were with them. Although adolescence brought the fear of missing out, of not being included, the force of missing out wasn’t anywhere as profound as it is today. The anxiety behind not keeping up or being included has eroded the clarity of our minds.
I see friends posting snippets of life, as a montage, that show what they’ve been up to. It’s a way of showing the world that they’re still living, it has the feel of, “Please don’t forget about me.” As though not having our lives displayed on the web erases us from existence. There’s nothing wrong with posting exactly, but we need to understand why we’re doing anything.We need to engage with technology in ways that benefit us.
The internet is relatively young, and the creation of it is a new form of ‘intelligence,’ one that hasn’t been governed by our elders and wasn’t tethered to a culture. It came from its own source. It came as a promise of change, a new frontier for life as we knew it. It represents amazing progress for humankind.
Yet, there’s been a subtle shifting, can you feel it? There’s a rumbling in the human consciousness; some are questioning who is controlling our minds and seeing the disconnection that’s a result of being ‘connected.’
New (old) dumb phones are making a comeback— the paired down, old-school phone, without apps: just a phone with the ability to text and listen to music. These technologies have seen a 25 percent increase in sales in the last year alone.
Is consciousness shifting? Are there enough people claiming back their minds that we’re going to see a large-scale shift, a slave revolt away from technology as an omnipotent master? A remembering of the capacity to think and grow our minds in ways that aren’t controlled by dings and scarcity.
We’re changing as a human race; consciousness is shifting. In our own human evolution, we’ve come so far. From the development of simple tools to make life easier, to the creation of fire, to farming, and onto the industrial age. All through these shifts our brains have developed, literally changing in shape and cognition over the last 750,000 years is remarkable.
This is still happening and we’re changing in miraculous ways, although this is not to be confused with the ego’s desire to be outstanding. We’re shifting in ways that we can’t even imagine. It’s possible that our existential crisis won’t be, “What is this all for, why am I here?”anymore. Evolution will take us to a place where the new consciousness understands this, where this understanding arrives at birth.
What if the future will be about figuring out how the threads of love are woven between each and every one of us, and people are drawn to this concept instead? There are millions of us worrying about the voices in our heads, and a society that doesn’t revere intuitives creates fear around intuition. We’ve pathologized intuition in ways that make it scary to listen to the cues, language, reminders, and ancestors that spontaneously move through us in the most unusual ways; we’ve been taught to ignore the whispers. It’s possible that we’re going to begin paying more attention to those ‘intuitive hits,’ that we’re going to find ways to communicate that do not involve the world wide web.
It’s possible we’ll evolve past technology.
We will free the mind in the next evolution, free it from the confinement of fear. Where conflicting ideologies won’t feel so threatening, where the teachings of ancient mystical, spiritual practices will keep us anchored to each other while we explore the next frontier of human consciousness. As consciousness is being altered, the overarching question is, “What forces need to be called inside of us and outside of us in order make this kind of exploration more acceptable?”
What are our rituals? What consumes us? If you wonder why there is so much conflict in the world, where will you focus your attention? Everything we’ve done so far hasn’t worked to ease tension in our connections to one another. We’re going to have to come at this from an entirely different mind in order to evolve.
Albert Einstein said, “you cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” Could we be changing our minds so that the problems we’re facing will be observed and explored through a different mind?
How does that feel? Does it scare you? Anytime we go through a big growth, it’s often scary and tumultuous. Learning skills and tools to support us through challenging times is essential, like our indigenous cultures have practiced for centuries. They have rituals and ceremonies that train for hard times. Our spiritual practices are here to help support us during these times, to equip us with the resilience needed for change.
What practices do you take part in to learn resilience that don’t involve computers and technology? What practices do you have to connect you to the Earth? What practices help you with being in non-ordinary states of consciousness?
Nothing is for certain and no one can tell what the future will look like other than it won’t look like it today.