The Internet Awakens
The gift of age is the first-hand account of a time before now. We’re all old enough to remember life was different when we were young before our smartphones were installed as our newest appendage and the world inside our computers overtook the world outside. Life unfolds as layers of experience and as a whole; it only expands its diversity, adding new layers to itself as time ticks forward. Technology and more the Internet are the newest additions to this layered complexity. Our age makes us sensitive to the binary rip current of technology while the young, born into technology, are asleep to how strange it is that tech siphons our data, studies our wants and behaviors, and makes the world a thousand times more convenient, attractive, and automatic.
The Internet became common to the public in 1993. Now 4.4 billion of us are users, 57% of the world’s population, with 11 new users going online per second. That adds up to 1 million new users a day. The metrics are clear. The Internet is indispensable to more than half of us. It’s an unprecedented venue for instant communication, a means of mass organization, a hub for entertainment and education, and a global market where goods can be sold, exchanged and purchased. The average person spends 6 hours and 42 minutes dialed into cyberspace because it is so helpful. Its influence is far-reaching. Of every dollar spent in real-world stores, 56 cents of every dollar can be connected directly to online marketing. We are attracted to the access that the Internet provides and now accustomed to the information of its world. It’s sleek and branded. It’s also tailored to satisfy us and playoff our impulses. It makes life easier and most important of all it’s necessary. It’s so entrancing and functional that we’re willing to peer into glass screens and blue light for half of our waking day. With the help of many, tech gurus like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates wired together a reality that gives the outside world a run for its money. As integrated as tech is in our lives our immersion has only just begun. Virtual and Augmented reality are on the horizon. By 2020 there will be 1 billion AR users. The expected growth rate for AR from that point on will be 151.93% annually. The business world knows AR and VR are disruptive technologies that will shift the way the market, users, and businesses operate which directly impacts how we operate through the world. Games like Pokémon Go and apps like Snap Chat prove we are attracted to an augmented world where unreal images and virtual voices are mapped onto an environment that can be manipulated. I fear we will become dreamers who have lost sense of what is real.
Our commitment to technology and the Internet is about more than just its functionality and entertainment value. We’re willing to supplement a quarter of our lives to the Internet because it was designed to expand our reality. Expanse is the Internet’s value. Jobs and Gates knew this. Tech gives us access to the undiscovered for the cost of however much energy we use up to click a link. Expanse is also pivotal to wellbeing. It’s when you stop growing that you start dying and anything that is complete is most certainly close to dead. A yogi would say that expansion is the nature of spirit and because life is imbued with spirit, life seeks spaces in which it can grow. That’s why we are hooked to our devices. We are all impelled to ride the network and log on to our accounts because we’re all looking for a new door to open and the Internet has approximately 1,805,260,010 doors. The fact that these landscapes are digital is hardly a matter of concern. The motivation to open new doors is old. Tech has just provided a new landscape and before the Internet was there to provide an alternate reality there were other portals into other worlds which shaman, mystics, and yogis explored. The Yogi’s discovered their own code to the real world and organized its principles in a philosophy known as Sankhya but to unearth this code they had to expand their minds and learn to see reality itself as symbolic of another reality, more real and more permanent than their own.
Hashish, Shiva, and Symbolic Realities
Yogi’s choose the “red pill” as Neo did in the 1999 phenomenon, The Matrix. They learned to appreciate reality isn’t what it seems. Reality hides in plain sight and only when the mind is sharpened and the heart is opened does it reveal itself. As yogi’s explored the vastness of the mind they started to put shape to their inner conditions. They built complex symbols. Overtime these symbols took the shape of humans and then became gods. And like sherpas, leading the lines of tourists up the mountain, these gods led future yogis through the Matrix of their lives and thoughts. The gods of Hinduism are murtis, or images of the divine One God. Of millions of gods, some have gone viral, so to speak. Adopted through cultural selection, the standout gods were simply symbols that people chose to meditate on most often compared to others, which means they have been tested by the masses. They were designed to communicate particular sets of ethics, practice techniques, and philosophies to the worshipper through the mythology and imagery of their character. In meditation, yogis will hold these symbols in their mind and from the blue of their skin or the hood of a cobra, from a drum, or a waterfall, or a tiger pelt there is the reward of new knowledge. The god itself, a breathing symbol, becomes a positive reality that the yogi can log into, browse, and then download if they choose.
Aldous Huxley, the author of a Brave New World, believed the Dancing Shiva to be one of mankind’s most brilliant metaphors and allowed the stories of Shiva and therefore the heart of Yoga to quietly impact his acclaimed novel. In it, a future society is manipulated into superficial wellbeing through a mass-produced drug called Soma and only one man could see through the façades of surface happiness and prescribed purpose. So he, as any hero does, made the journey into a new reality by leaving his former world behind for a time. Soma happens to be the mythical beverage that the holy seers of ancient India drank to understand life. Meditation is the purest Soma, although there are other substances that do the job.
In Hinduism Shiva is the god of destruction. He was chosen over and over again, in the free market of beliefs, because of what he represented. He is a world-ender. He dances the universe into creation by stomping its current form into ash. He is also the lord of yoga and an avid drinker of bang, a concoction of curdled milk and marijuana. He dismantles one universe in fire so that another universe is permitted to come forward. The same thing happens when he or his devotees drink bang. The high of the bang slows down the thought process and increases body sensations to make space for new perspectives. The symbol of Shiva then manifests as an actual ritual that can be tasted and swallowed. Through it Shiva touches the flesh of his devotee. Whether someone logs into Netflix or invites the symbol of Shiva into their mind through contemplation or intoxication the experience is the same, one world of thought is replaced for another. The difference is always in the intention. A yogi is seeking that which is true and most real. They want the opposite of an augmented reality where nothing is veiled in filters. To the yogis, even what we all know of as reality is a virtual projection. So they call upon Shiva to dance upon their world. We can argue whether drinking bang leads to something truer or not as we can argue about the safety of our devices. No one can make a statement for someone else but when there is that feeling that urges us to look away, do we have the strength to do it? Researchers from Hong Kong claim that 420 million people are addicted to the internet and as technology becomes more alluring and access to the internet grows those numbers are bound to increase.
In northern India, at the top of the world, where the air is free and the winds are rich with cold, the yogis have a custom of smoking charras as another way of honoring Shiva. Charras is hashish. It comes from the dried resin of the cannabis plant versus the flower of the plant. It is much stronger than bang. It’s burnt for a moment and then mixed with tobacco. After being mixed, it’s stuffed into a clay vertical pipe called a chillum. After making it all the way to the ice of the Himalaya they are ready to kiss the Matrix goodbye. The yogi’s place the chillums to their foreheads and utter a mantra to honor Shiva. Then, they start to puff the chillum violently, filling their lungs to capacity with the smoke. Once their lungs are full they hold their breath. The concoction of tobacco, hashish, and carbon dioxide creates a surge of sensation that spirals in the head as if the third eye were opening, and for a few moments after the body dissolves into vibration the mind of thoughts and desires is replaced with an expansive openness. In that openness, the senses become flocks of birds flying freely through the blue of awareness. They come and go unjudged and enjoyed. There is no seeking to know, push, grasp, or forget. No wish for better. No fear of worse. There is only a pure sense of the observing-self against the backdrop of an entire world made up of interlocked realities as a contrast. Again, yogis, as spiritual explorers, sought one reality at the dispense of another, hoping they might bump into the big truth. It’s a scavenger hunt of techniques and experiences, the practice is in the willingness to commit to what works for you.
Their eyes eventually open as the opioids in their brain dissolve. The chillum, the hashish, and the breath were unified into a trade route where these yogis could exchange the softer dimensions of themselves with higher dimensions of reality, not totally unlike why we use the Internet. Both habits are adopted under the promise of discovering something new or different, be it a deeper revelation of surrender through meditating with charras smoke or by being led to a new product, video, or blog via algorithms that might show us something new about our world or ourselves. Everyone is seeking to learn and experience in one way or the other but what makes the yogis’ path special is in what they’re willing to leave behind.
The Yoga Matrix: Sankhya
Atoms, Javascript, or Gunas. Molecules, algorithms, or tattwas. From deep inside the cavernous and curious brown of the yogis’ eyes, the glint of their contemplative fire captured the inner nature of matter. The way the powder of aromatic botanicals, water, and natural gums are stirred and pressed together to make incense, the yogis intuited that life too is built through the interaction of unified and undistinguished bits of matter. These yogis, however, were bewitched by the creation, not the creator. They were interested in the impersonal physiology of life. The moment these cave-dwelling alchemists registered that life was manufactured they glimpsed with complete love the rose that is reality, set apart from Life, and worked to know it fully.
Discovery follows the will to explore and it’s a tincture of both doubt and faith that drives the explorer onward. Yogis are psychonauts who meditate the way space shuttles fly. Not all yogis smoked to experience their highs. Some yogis just contemplated. They deconstructed reality in their minds and discovered that everything from their bodies to the stars at the bottom of the universe are composed of 5 elements, tattwas. Tattwa means suchness or essence. To see the world as purely elemental changed everything. All of a sudden there was a preliminary code of essence that helped yogis read life. From there this code grew to involve 10 key aspects; 5 elemental qualities, 3 states of energy that each elemental quality exists through, the essence of matter, and the essence of awareness.
In the dystopian tale of a techno-armageddon Neo escaped the Matrix to know a world that was more “real” than the virtual prison he was born into. Realness has to do with permanence, reach, and emotional impact. The study of Sankhya introduced the yogis’ minds to a reality that was far older and longer-lasting than what they previously knew. Currently, our world is made of buildings and roads. Before it was made of trails and villages. Before that, it was untouched nature. Before the forests and jungles, there were only rocks, ice, and water. Before that, there was only molten fire. But throughout all of its phases the earth has only known 5 elemental qualities. That is why these symbolic theories are more “real” to a meditator. No matter the expression or the time, it is all the same, always.
All things are made of these five elemental qualities meaning all things have some form of solidity (earth), fluidity (water), heat (fire), movement (wind), and space (ether). Each of these elemental qualities can be in either one or all of its three energetic states. These states are known as gunas. The three gunas are dormant, activated, or balanced. For context let’s use the example of someone with a fever; the element of heat is active because their body is trying to burn out the virus. Because of the heat the body becomes more fluid, so the water element activates as they start to sweat. They’ll start to feel heavy as the illness takes hold meaning the element of earth has also become active. If they take medicine to help them sleep their mind will drift into ether. Once asleep, the fact that their dreams move and change, as all things do, depends on the wind element which is active in every moment of life because life is always moving. All of what we know is an expression of matter and if we lumped all of the matter together it would be called Prakriti. Because matter to the yogis is feminine, Prakriti can be thought of as the womb of the material universe. The last piece of the puzzle is the awareness that registers the material experience. Prakriti is observed by Purusha or consciousness. Your personal consciousness is an off-shoot of a collective awareness that threads itself into all things. Without this awareness material existence could not exist because even atoms must register themselves in some capacity if they are to interact and bond with other atoms. This is the dependency matter has on perception and perception depends on some lingering vestige of consciousness, Purusha.
After Sankhya yogis knew they didn’t have to travel to explore the world and universe. Since all things were made of the same 10 symbolic ingredients the truth was within everything, including themselves. They realized to encounter the truth, realize themselves, and escape the matrix that seduced their senses outwardly all they had to do was look within and follow their guide, be it Shiva, Neo, or their own personal Jimminy Cricket. The yogis and their guides aim to directly experience each of these 10 qualities, climbing them like rungs of a heavenly ladder. Sankhya’s outline of material reality supports the doubtful student in their commitment to looking into the world and as the world becomes increasingly augmented and alluring through technology these 10 qualities will be there for the modern yogi who seeks to do the same. The promise of something new is the flame within our eyes and all of us are moths in the night eager for that new and exciting fire. But the promise of what is true and real, deep and long-lasting is the flame within a yogi’s eyes. Most of us will look into screens for the next trending meme, some of us will look into ourselves to touch the big truth, and the wisest will know deeply its all the same. Elements. Energy. Matter. Mind.