Consciousness is said to be immutable/eternal/transcendental but is it really? What will the enlightened say when science figures out consciousness & enlightenment is sold as a cloud to brain download? What will be left of spirituality in the future?

Tagged:

In my estimation, technology moves the world ever closer to how it already works, spiritually. In other words nothing is ever truly novel. Telepathy worked just fine as a communication channel, but telephones take a lot less time and practice to learn, so eventually the skills died out. Body-less existence happens every time you dream, and every time you get on a computer and post on social media. Or play a video game. The rules change and different things become important, and the existence eventually ends. All things that happen spiritually and in the afterlife.

Enlightenment is not new, novel, or even particularly difficult once you understand it. True, it’s hard to understand, but it’s actually fairly simple to convey once you have it. What makes everything difficult, is scale. I can teach anyone motivated to be enlightened. So can any guru. But you have to be motivated to learn. Then you have to come at it with the right attitude. Then you have to put in the hours. It’s not hard. It’s just time and effort like everything else. There are literally thousands of years of effort, theology, practice, doctrine, and even the science world weighs in once in a while.

Why is the world not enlightened then? What’s to say it’s not? The Age of Enlightenment was a point in time in which a critical mass of people started sharing their philosophical insights. Philosophy isn’t all that different than theology. And sharing it en masse utterly transformed Europe from a horrid, provincial backwater to a modern powerhouse. We’d still have slaves and serfdom if it weren’t for those brave souls daring to buck the social norms.

And the Internet has only accelerated that trend. Without it, cultural movements like Black Lives Matter would die the same death most protest movements do that fail to reach critical mass. Authorities just plain shoot the protestors. I mean, they’re still shooting protestors, but they can’t shoot everyone, and the authorities have always been vulnerable to mass uprising.

What’s going to change in the future is that the things people have been studying for thousands of years, what’s always been true, is going to filter out into public awareness. And people will engage with it as they become aware.

Technology may offer a faster route to enlightenment through various hacks, but spirituality is and will always be something experienced individually. If you don’t engage with spirituality, then enlightenment will be meaningless to you. It’ll just be “persistent good feelings” or whatnot. It’s the effort and attention of the individual, that turns meditative contemplation into enlightenment, not a mere brain state.