Why Meditation Should Be Your Soul Concern
Making a god whose god is us pt. III: How to reconnect to reality when the internet is trying to replace it
The perils of idolatry: The disconnecting of your intuition from reality
So what’s so wrong with building an AI god or using tech to deliver spiritual comfort?
In the past, people put their faith in statues or lies, and everything went horribly once they went up against something in nature they couldn’t predict. Still, today our spiritual machines can deliver on the promises we program into them. So why can’t we trust them? Isn’t everything building towards us one day getting it right?
Reality sucks, and most of us will soon be out of work anyway due to automation. What’s wrong with a little escapism if the government will pay for it?
Such are the responses of many who have read my previous posts in this series. Weary as I know many of you must be by now–and I promise to go back to the productivity secrets of legendary people or some similar topic next week–it needs a conclusion.
Simply put: technology, when used wrongly, permanently damages your judgment, which people once knew to be the same as losing your soul.
What is your soul?
To answer this, we must understand it in the context of the most commonly spoken-of triplet: body, mind, and soul. It helps to ponder one question as you explore the three:
Where is your self?
The Body is Hardware
It includes all your sensors aka nerves and houses your brain, the vessel containing the experience interface known as your mind. Although really, your mind experiences your entire body, which is your only way of experiencing reality. What you might think of as an unbiased view of reality is filtered through your body.
You have no direct connection to reality since all experience is mediated through sensation.
Still, the entire body is not the self since losing a limb doesn’t mean you split yourself up, but rather your self stays with the rest of the body, and the limb stops being you.
The Mind is your OS
We distinguish between mind and brain because the brain is essentially a giant sensor that houses the mind, aka the operating system that processes and produces consciousness, discerns, etc.: It is your logic and emotions.
First, you pick up something in your environment, e.g., a fist flying toward your face. Your mind processes this by making sense of the image its eye sensors are picking up and making a logical conclusion based on previous fists it’s seen. Then if the fist connects and you feel pain, your mind generates an emotional response to the stimuli, causing you to react.
It is what we most commonly identify as “me.” So much so that it’s mostly been taken as a given in the West since Descartes that all conscious mental activity, known as thoughts, is the sole determinant of our existence. “I think. Therefore, I am.”
But cogito ergo sum is wrong.
With enough self-reflection, aka meditation, many discover that the self is not here. You are not your thoughts; you do not exist because of them. You can actually separate yourself from your thoughts if you sit quietly and observe them all–from deep philosophical conundrums to physical sensations–arise and pass away.
In doing so, you can gain a newfound sense of freedom after realizing a connection to everything and everyone around you, since the more one interrogates the boundary distinctions of ‘me’ and ‘not-me,’ ‘living’ and ‘not-living,’ the more those boundaries blur and disappear.
But if your self isn’t in your body, and it isn’t your mind, then where are you?
The Soul, i.e., how you judge reality, is who you are
I would argue that the soul is what we realize is the self once we strike body and mind from the list of candidates. It’s whatever can recognize a thought or sensation and decide whether to think something else or go along with it.
Your body filters reality into your mind, flooding it with sensations and ideas. Who knows which ones are accurate and which to ignore? You do.
Your soul mediates between mind and body: it makes the judgments and decides what to do based on them. You can logic out several equally valid beliefs, but your soul intuitively picks the one to go with.
The soul gauges whether your perceptions and conclusions about reality are true, concluding what is factually and morally correct. Conscience tends to be the term for moral sensor, while intuition is usually what people call the factual one.
Compromise these sensors, aka override what you consider true and act in opposition to it, and throw off your soul and your perception of reality.
Telling yourself that sugar or shoplifting “isn’t that bad” or “there’s nothing wrong with it” forces the self to accept something it knows not to be true.
This creates a disconnect with reality, aka corruption. And it is the driving meta-criticism of tech: a progressively more convincing simulacrum of reality that is ultimately not real.
Still, we want so desperately for it to be real that we corrupt ourselves through how we interact with it.
5 Ways Tech Corrupts Your Soul and Why You Should Meditate
Indulgence of desire, leading to loss of perspective: Porn, video games, and one-click purchasing have no doubt made lives easier, but they’ve also distorted our view of how easy it is to get sex, commit violence, or obtain manufactured goods in real life.
Inhumane treatment of others, resulting in loss of knowledge of how to treat others in real life: Porn, Onlyfans, games, and other forms of online content distort how we see relationships and interact with people in real life. Transactional sex colors everything with a hyper-sexuality that makes us come across as creepy when interacting with normal people in real life. Political content on all sides tends toward the extremes to garner likes. Then it misleads us to view those who disagree with us as belonging to those extremes, justifying extreme behavior towards them.
Indulgence in fantasy, resulting in a loss of sense of reality and grounding:
The internet has made commerce, i.e., transactional indulgences, hyperefficient. Part of the key to this efficiency is getting us to spend much more time with things we care about on superficial levels. Obsessed with niche superheroes? Endless videos, websites, eBay auctions, and fan art are available to get lost in. Are you a sneakerhead? Because there are endless forum discussions on how to spot the real deal, where to get the rarest ones, and how to clean, repair, and resell your collection.
It is said that a healthy soul focuses on what should be taken seriously and disregards or gives less prominence to what should be taken lightly. If so, technology actively enables the opposite: we obsess over trivialities and keep everything else at an ironic distance.
But rather than condemn ourselves and those who promote technological escapism, it’s better to practice a little compassion: reality is hard to deal with, while the models are easy.
Overwhelmed and helpless, we would all jump at a quick fix rather than train ourselves to find answers within ourselves.
Marcus Aurelius’s book, Meditations, is thus called because people seek enlightenment to know what to do—the right thing to do—in all situations. In the Christian world, this is often termed “discernment.” Among Buddhists, it’s the stage of meditative practice that focuses on right mind and right action. Meanwhile, Taoist practices also contain a tradition of training intuitive spontaneity, a means of doing what’s right without consulting law tomes or making sacrificial offerings.
Whatever the method, the end goal is to know what’s right and to do it.
This is one way to meditate. Many of us do.
Because this whole “creating a sky father” or “birthing an electronic mother” pursuit isn’t working. Instead, if we only set aside time to train ourselves to separate from our impulses, we’d be able to decide for ourselves what our bodies and minds needed. We could develop our souls, which is the same as saying we’d be able to practice our free will.
If you align yourself with what’s real and stick to what is and not what you hope should be, the answer will often be obvious.
And then, you can go back to using data, software, etc., for what it should be: a tool. Creation, communication, or divination–it doesn’t matter. Let tech be what it is—never lord, master, or idol over the promised land, but a tool to help you get there.
That was a great series.
On another note, I clicked on upgrade to paid subscription. I wish there was another option besides $0 or $80, like other. I subscribe and donate to so many things already, I really can't afford another subscription, but would like to donate something, since I really enjoy your articles.