The Internet as Supraconsciousness.

The visceral experience of high speeds.

I feel high right now, sitting with my friend at the top of Bali’s island world.

We just turned on my Mifi and it is speeding along. I swear I feel faster because the connection itself is faster. Faster and lighter without a worry about waiting through the next page to load.

Internet has been a challenge since coming to Bali. With my Mifi it worked in Ubud but due to absurdly complicated package deals with local internet companies, I didn’t have much access in Gili Air.

Here in Munduk there just isn’t any internet, except for the castle in the sky restaurant Ngiring Ngewedang.

A multistoried steal and concrete structure overlooking Bali’s Northern coast.

It opens at 10 am and closes at 6 pm, and with classical piano playing in the background, views that make me giddy, decent food and internet it is has become a second home to my tent.

I rent a castle’s couch in the clouds for the cost of a meal while connecting to a data trove that spans the world.

Internet, addiction, and numen.

The work I do with clients often asks us to look within and feel out what our emotional engagement is with a particular idea, belief, person, or event.

Here I’m witnessing my engagement with information itself in this ambiguous concept of “the internet” and “connection.”

There is clearly a very visceral response.

As someone who works with people on addiction and neurological conditioning, I am often asking that we reduce our addictive compulsions to check the phone or mindlessly scroll FB.

But this feels different than an addictive compulsion.

I was doing just fine before my internet speeds picked up. I wasn’t really craving anything either. No this was a spontaneous elation when I realized my connection to the global web was stronger.

Internally I better connected. It was as if a cloud lifted and now there is an easier flow to the globe’s information.

I am realizing that generalization of the internet as a flat technology that leads to addiction is missing the fact that internet and technology for better or worse has its own relationship to our psyche.

Similarities with spiritual experience.

I can’t help but think of the similarities here to mystical experiences and/or those of the archetypes and the unconscious.

There is a supraconscious state, a vast reservoir of information, experience, or being that we are able to tap into, to connect with.

Fast internet here in Bali allows me to connect to loved ones, run my business, view other parts of the world, magically plan my future and where I live, all while researching anything and everything that comes to mind.

While mystical experiences often connect us to the timeless sensation of oneness, the internet connects us to all the finite munitia of our collective human knowledge.

Both act as supraconscious states much larger than our individual psyche.

The internet as connected consciousness.

I’m realizing how biased I’ve been in my relationship to technology. I’ve been looking at it as a jumble of neurological triggers, a flat foreign object that we can get addicted to.

I haven’t been treating it as its own being in the realm of the unconscious.

Here it acts as another form of supraconsciousness.

In the unconscious, we have the accumulation of millions of years of experience and evolution all jumbled into dream speak and spontaneous revelations.

In the internet, we have attempted to network our conscious thoughts, experiences, philosophies, and fantasies. We have attempted to network our selves.

Microcosm/Macrocosm, meaning, and danger.

Just as the ego-consciousness if affected by the unconscious, it follows that our internet as a network of conscious works is also affected by the collective unconscious.

New ideas and collective fads rise from seemingly nowhere. Art movements pop up like mushrooms after the rain.

Our fantasies and lusts are projected into porn and erotica. Our fears and xenophobia break out in tides of YouTube videos and articles “telling us how it is” from a viewpoint that can’t see beyond its own belief system.

The danger of the internet is that as with many aspects of the unconscious it is able to use its weight, its numen, in the psyche to convince us that it is reality.

That same elation we get when we feel “connected” can make us believe that we are connected to “the truth” or a more “rational view of the world,” much as our ego believes it is seeing things clearly when its vision is truly biased by its unconscious conditioning.

I think the error of my own cognitive bias is in too quickly writing technology off as a tool I have to use while dismissing it as cold and sterile.

In reality, it is alive, even if it is only animated by our own consciousness and the power it invokes within us.

What about you?

What is your own relationship to technology? How does it make you feel? How do you sort through the impressions it leaves upon you?

Love and share.

I’m starting something new. Writing every day as I put my random thoughts on binary paper.

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