Not This Crude Matter

Here’s to fusing ideas together from two recent posts: Living in TV and Posthuman Spiritual Existence. Let’s get started with a diagram I just cooked up and then go from there:

In one of the above posts, I theorized that human consciousness is being siphoned off into a media space (see also: sham heaven). We are projecting ourselves into television, and into the media that we consume. Why do we do this? My best guess is that in doing so, we feel as though we are liberating ourselves from the confinement and unsatisfactory conditions of our physical existence. By projecting ourselves into the mediasphere, we become “free” to become anyone and anything, and to go anywhere that other people’s imaginations can take us.

I have also been speculating though that the reality behind our physical existence is actually a spiritual one. And that, as spiritual beings, we have deliberately chosen to incarnate into physical bodies, “just for the shit of it.” That is, as spiritual entities at root, we have access to any and everything at all times. So much so that limitless possibilities become boring. A game with no rules is chaos. And so, in order to gain experience, or maybe through simply curiosity, we choose to limit ourselves for a time to physical forms.

I imagine that to pure spirit, the scale of time is very different than it is for us, or perhaps non-existant altogether. We might imagine it being something like how geological time - the time a mountain experiences - moves irreconcilably slower than human biological time. Perhaps to our spiritual selves, the time spent in our physical bodies - even if it is a hundred years (a very long human life) - is akin to a blink of an eye in spiritual time. Who knows. Fun to speculate on though.

So anyway, according to this narrative I am testing out, we intentionally incarnate to gain experience. But once we get into these physical bodies and experience time on a human scale and the resultant suffering that goes along with it, a lot of us get freaked out and our minds get scrambled. We start wanting a way out because it is too painful. Or else we are coaxed into unreal realms without our recognizing it. That is, someone else who remembers (and is threatened by) our spiritual existence capitalizes on our lack of memory and awareness. And instead of allowing or encouraging us to reconnect naturally to our spiritual selves, they carefully make certain that we are shunted off into irreal realms of the mind and media.

Most of us go willingly though. Because, as I said above, to project yourself into the mediasphere is to gain a semblance of our original spiritual existence. It seems as though we are being liberated from the confines of our physical bodies, and we are. But what we do not realize though is that we are being sucked into someone else’s imaginings, and our spiritual energy is being used to energize someone else’s system.

So, to disentangle ourselves from cultural and media illusions is to get us back in touch with our physical existence, into the forms which we incarnated into. Which leaves us on the doorstep of Buddhism, which in turn tells us that our physical existence is nothing but an illusion, Maya. And then offers us a path of righteous inner and outward action to relinquish us from the hold of the Wheel of incarnation. In other words, it is to draw us back to the spiritual reality of our true selves by smashing the illusions of physical reality.

I imagine that, by extension, we could then extend these types of Buddhist principles to our ensnarement in the mediasphere. How? Well, in Buddhism, it seems that the “proof” that physical existence is an illusion is that suffering exists. Extrapolating my own understanding into the space of that question: suffering is proof that our reality is an illusion because there is part of us that can imagine a world of limitless happiness, love, and satisfaction. And the reality we experience is thus an illusion because it doesn’t match up with what we know in our heart of hearts is truly possible (see also: the essential human brand). I don’t know if that’s necessarily a Buddhist belief, but it’s the best hybrid explanation I can come up with for our purposes here. Using that we can offer the “proof” that media isn’t good for us, or at least doesn’t truly liberate us, because it does nothing to move us into that space of limitless love and perfection which we know to be possible as well. If anything, it traps us further by stoking our desires and then allowing us to fulfill our desires. Fulfilling passing fancies is NOT the same thing as reconnecting to the vastness of spiritual experience which transcends such desires. Or at least, that’s the theory I am operating under as of right now.

So we can remove ourselves from entanglement in the mediasphere by dismantling the system of simultaneous fear and desire that keeps us within it. Presumably, we can follow Buddhist or other esoteric traditions which will enable us to do the same thing with our physical existence: helping us to root out Fear and Desire themselves, rather than just instances of them that spring up within our lives. The point of spiritual practice, according to such a reading (and hey, maybe I’m waaay off base here) would be to climb backwards up out of the chain of projection and incarnation which we have gotten ourselves into, and back to the pure experience of the spiritual entities that we are all along.

But then, that opens the question of why did we commit ourselves to these physical bodies to begin with? Did we mean to do it? Did we want to? Were we trapped? By whom? Was it accidental? If we climb back out of the chain, are we going to just get sucked down into physicality again at some point? These are the questions with which esoteric spiritual traditions seem to grapple with, and which I will continue to unravel and share with you. Perhaps all we can really do for one another is to leave signs scribbled on the walls and trapdoors for others to discover on their own when they are ready.