Consciousness:
Consciousness is a characteristic of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. It is a subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. (Thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness)
Greetings.
Since my last blog post there have been two events, one wonderful and one terrible, that caused me to become aware of some subtle (and not so subtle) changes in my understanding of the world and our place in it.
To review, last time we mentioned the curve of Internet connectivity and connectedness - being able to log on to servers in 1989 (ten foot pole), updating to 9600 baud modems and the ability to have listserves and websites (the equivalent of Braille) and recently to find ourselves it the last couple of years through YouTube and iTunes to bring sensation right to our eyes and ears. An immersive reality...
In considering this curve, I pondered what the next stage was. When something rushes up to you, it typically knocks you over or goes around you. It is not in our understanding of the everyday world to have something rush up to you and not only go inside you - but turn you inside out...
Now, on to the two events. The wonderful event was finding out that in Germany, someone was using the name Ars Divina (divine art in Latin) which I have been using as my business name for over 10 years. This person had started up in April and she contacted me on Facebook near the end of November. I found that we shared the same goals and ideals, and as my tag line is to be an umbrella organization, there was plenty of room for both of us.
Her name is Claudia Sophia Fuss and she is an artist and philosopher among other things. In time, she discovered my various activities and we discussed art and dreams. In order to really explain an understanding of a dream sequence to Claudia, one day I sat down at Photoshop and designed "The Arc Of A Dream".
This, in turn, inspired Claudia to paint four pictures...
Claudia had already planned to have an Ars Divina art exhibit in her hometown in January, and with this mutual respect growing, she invited me to participate. I then printed several large format images of mine, sent them to Germany, and Claudia framed and hung them with the several other artists in the exhibit. This is quite an honor and my first public exhibition - realized through enhanced communication in Facebook, specifically. There is a tour posted here: http://snipurl.com/aix9v
This was the wonderful event, and it is happening right now.
On the other hand, a very tragic event also occurred, driving home to me the emotional healing potential of Facebook relationships.
This story involves my family, and it started out pretty neat. Over the past two months my brothers and I have manged to bring our family (including our 88 and 90 year old parents) into Facebook. Many of the kids were already there, but as of the new year everyone was in and accounted for. I have two brothers, one nine years older than I and one 14 years older. Dave, the eldest, has three children, Michael, Mark and Michelle (37, 33, and 26). As they have all grown up in and around Minneapolis and I have spent my life in Seattle, there was little interaction with the kids (now adults). Michael I had not seen (or spoken to) since he was a teenager, same with the other two. Now Michael and I were Facebook friends and we found that we shared similar hours and began to have IM chats at night, getting aquainted for the first time. I was looking forward to doing the same with Mark and Michelle.
This is when things get very human. On Tuesday, January 6, as I understand it, Mark had an issue with a defibrillator that he had implanted for four years. There was some kind of defect that caused it to start beeping in his chest - not fun. He went to the doctor and they decided to replace it, a reasonably routine operation. Evidently, the way defibrillators are replaced is to shoot a laser down the lead and dislodge the lead from the heart. In Mark's case, the lead was fractured and the laser diverted into cutting a three or four inch hole into his heart. The doctors did not realize this for a while, and in the confusion Mark lost oxygen to his brain for about 20 minutes. The next day, after much tension and confusion he was gone.
He leaves behind a chronically ill wife (for whom he was caretaker) two children and lots of pets. And a loving family. Pre-Facebook, we would have heard the story, sent a card and grieved. But, with everyone on Facebook the extended family could see the love Mark had generated in his community and could participate as if not at a distance. The most striking aspect for me was the continuing IM discussions with Mark's brother through this time - someone I had not communicated with for decades, I now had the honor of grieving with.
So now Mark is gone (his funeral was on Dave's 63rd birthday). And I have a much deeper understanding of the events around this event.
How does this relate to the Emerging Global Consciousness? I think through these two events I have experienced what comes next in the curve of internet connectivity and connectedness. We have become intelligent agents - neuron-like, with synaptic inputs generating through our actions and decisions synaptic outputs.
The people walking down the street with bluetooth earpieces receiving messages to pick up milk on their way home are very similar to the nerve cells I activate when I ask my arm to pick up a glass of water to drink.
It feels to me as if the state of the world and the population taken as a whole is like a hung-over college student that passed out laying on their arm in a very uncomfortable position, and just waking up. The structure for consciousness and the autonomic systems have been in place for a long time. The discomfort of the situation is causing people to connect in new ways that may actually bring about positive transformation in the whole.
I am observing one more activity on Facebook that leads me to these conclusions; spontaneous communities. For example, a friend of mine was recently "freshly self-employed" from a local pro audio manufacturer. He was quite active in the music scene in Seattle prior to the Grunge movement of the 90s. This scene was from the later 70s into the early 80s and was dubbed recently the "Seattle Syndrome" after a local compilation album. I was in a synth pop band in Seattle during this time (The UltraViolet Catastrophe) and there was a significant community at the time.
My friend decided, since he had the time, to create a Facebook group called Seattle Syndrome and invite a few dozen friends and post a few pictures. Within a couple of weeks there were 200 members of the group and hundreds of pictures - all generating comments and finding others not yet a part of the group. This spawned (or was co-incedent to) dozens of subgroups based on various local clubs and hang outs of the time. All these groups (and I assume this is happening all over the world) feel to me like aveoli in the lungs of the Emerging Global Consciousness...
I read lately that the population of Facebook would make it the eighth largest country in the world. I have connected with a large subset of all the friends I have ever had in my life, and my entire direct family. Those that are not on Facebook with me are conspicuous in their absence.
Another behaviour I have discovered much value in is the posting of positive information to my Facebook profile. I habitually post links to scientific breakthroughs and items that have meaning to me. This nourishes me and those who get value from the information. I look forward to the day when more of my connections are also posting links that teach me and allow me to share even more with others.
In conclusion, I believe we have a new scale for decisions - actions and behaviours that encourage and lift the emerging global consciousness will be rewarded, those that supress it - not so much. It turns out there is even another Ars Divina - this one a Museum of Modern Art in the south of Sweden... Many hands make light work...
