Spirituality in the New Technological Century

In an earlier entry on Hypnosis, I mentioned Heidegger's notion of 'ready-to-hand', which dealt with technology becoming part of the person in the same way we breathe without thinking about it. Modern science has shown that his perception was indeed correct. According to an article posted in Wired, Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College, and two graduate students Dobromir Dotov and Lin Nie, discovered via research that people controlling a normal working computer mouse became attuned to the 'pink noise'--a frequency that occurs often in the natural world, from "universal electromagnetic wave fluctuations to tidal flows to DNA sequences" (Keim) and showed that they were not thinking about the process of steering a mouse when things went smoothly. However, when they were instead given a malfunctioning one to work with, "the pink noise vanished." “The thing that does the thinking is bigger than your biological body,” Chemero reported. “You’re so tightly coupled to the tools you use that they’re literally part of you as a thinking, behaving thing.” More research has shown that subjects wearing goggles which streamed video directly into their eyes of a rubber mannequin or another body which was not there's could feel what was being done to it. This is known as the ghost limb phenomenon--when an amputee feels like the part of them missing is still there. "These experiments have demonstrated how remarkably easy it is to ‘move’ a human centre of awareness from one body to another," a Swedish group of researchers write and is reported in an article in Wired written by Alexis Madrigal. "This speaks directly to the classical question of the relationship between human consciousness and the body, which has been discussed by philosophers, psychologists, and theologians for centuries."

Tom and Nita Horn warn of teenagers "i-Dosing". This phenomenon seemingly has "teens gett[ing] 'digitally high' by playing specific Internet videos through headphones that use repetitive tones to create binaural beats, which have been shown in clinical studies to induce particular brain-wave states that make the sounds appear to come from the center of the head. Shamans," they continue, "have used variations of such repetitive tones and drumming to stimulate and focus the 'center mind' for centuries to make contact with the spirit world and to achieve altered states of consciousness" (Forbidden Gates 205). I have discussed in previous blogs music's ability to excite the spirit's emotions into a frenzy--I think it is important to remember that the ancient Paleolithic peoples believed that everything contained a spirit, something which existed in the invisible realm which a person could not see. The beat of a drum and wailing of a voice had the power to connect with the invisible empire. Upon further research I found a website which allows people to log on and discover the pleasure of 'i-Dosing'. It gives links to download biaural audio, computer software "which is the ultimate way to achieve an incredibly powerful simulated mood or experience with longer effects", and even mobile apps. According to a Mail Online article titled, "I-Dosing: How teenagers are getting 'digitally high' from music they dowload from internet" and written by Daniel Bates:

Dr Helane Wahbeh, a Naturopathic Physician and Clinician Researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, said: 'Binaural beats happen when opposite ears receive two different sound waves.

‘And normally, the difference in sound between each ear help people get directional information about the source of the sound.

‘But when you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it's coming from the inside of the head.’

After all the hoopla, I had to try it out. I put on my headphones, plugged them into the computer and started listening to this 'track' (if you want to call it that) on Youtube.

It is true, the sound does feel like it is coming from the center of the brain. If I were to use this in the middle of the night, with the lights off and the realm of spirits surrounding me, I think it would send me into a wave of either sublime horror or glee. If you are not ready to make contact with the angels and demons, I suggest you not listen to it--yes, it can be a bit freaky. The constant beat and notes flowing back and forth across your cranium appears to be a state of self-hypnosis. It relaxes you to a point where you can communicate with your subconscious and all the good and evil things that reside there. According to the Horns, "the lure of 'digital simulation' can actually produce dopamine releases in the brain that affect the heart rate and blood pressure and lead to drug-like highs and lows" (205). Here is another video for the curious:

According to Dr. Christopher Hook, "If implanted devices allow the exchange of information between the biological substrate and the cybernetic device would be intimately associated with the creation and recall of memories as well as with all the emotions inherent in that process. If this device were...to allow the importation of information from the Internet, could the device also allow memories and thoughts of the individual to be downloaded or read by others? In essence, what is to prevent the brain itself from being hacked? The last bastion of human privacy, the brain, will have been breached" (Horn 207). Tom Horn would relate that this would lead to the 'borgification" of mankind, similar to the villains in Star Trek where individual beings plugged into the larger technological machine at the expense of their freedom. Mihail Roco, the NBIC director said in Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance says, "Humanity would become like a single, distributed and interconnected 'brain' based in new core pathways in society.... A networked society of billions of human beings could be as complex compared to an individual being as a human being is to a single nerve cell" (Horn 209). This is a terrifying prospect--these new technologies could either be a great linker that brings humanity to new enlightenment, or our destruction where we could lose the humanness that made it worth living in the first place.

Check out these mysterious sounds which were apparently worldwide last January:


Are the spirits awakening? Are they preparing for the spiritual war which is on the horizon?
According to further research, many of the sounds above turned out not to have happened on the day claimed or not at all. Never trust anything ever, especially on the internet.