FUTURE   SENSE

- A  NEW   GRAMMAR  OF  JOY -

World over a revolution in human awareness is happening. We haven't seen anything quite like this in our lifetime. Maybe when Gutenberg's printing press was invented something similar happened. Maybe when the Morse code and telegrams were invented something similar happened. Maybe when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone something similar happened. Maybe when Thomas Alva Edison invented the electric bulb something similar happened. We can go on in the same vein referring to every path breaking invention and discovery.

No doubt these are all milestones of radical changes in human awareness. However, none of them come anywhere near what the world is witnessing today in the leap of human consciousness that is taking place right now before our eyes. The earlier advances had all contributed a lot but what is happening today is way beyond what was conceived ever before even in science fiction fantasies.

It is the revolution still unravelling through the hand held magic called the cell phone or tablet or iPhone or what have you that enmeshes and links individual human awareness into a web of an inchoate collective phenomenon for which we haven't yet evolved a fully functional lexicon. Already the phrase 'world wide web' or the word 'internet' look slightly outdated. Today I read the phrase 'a sprawling cyberia' in Chidanand Rajghatta's article “Chinese attack on US media sets new bar on digital wars” in the Times of India. A couple of years ago when world leaders were discussing in Brussels the security issues in the world wide web someone said it can be more correctly called the world's wild west, harking back to the wild west of North America two hundred years ago where “men were men, horses were horses, where you shoot from the hip and talk through the corner of your mouth and coffee is hot as hell, sweet as sin and black as a …...'s soul”. A very vivid and earthen portrayal indeed.

Our focus here is not on the essential lawlessness of the wild west that may perhaps be playing out right now in the internet, though that is important and urgent by itself. Our focus is on what is happening to our awareness of life lived, of consciousness being shaped into we know not what. When we get a handle on that, maybe we may carve out some order, some semblance of humane, self-modifying, patterns of behaviour in the virtual and the real world. The virtual may make the real more palpably and productively virtuous is the hope in this endeavour now. The 'sprawling cyberia' of Rajghatta may perhaps be made more habitable than the harsh Siberia of howling winds and icy storms and subzero deserts of frozen earth.

Arthur Koestler used to point out the unique human predicament characterized by the constant inner clatter in human consciousness brought about by the loud language of the primal limbic impulses of the human brain and the soft language of languages and logic and reason lodged in the neocortex that appears to be the most highly evolved among all living beings. He called this the Ghost in the Machine and wrote a book of the same title. Like many of his works this was a very illumining book in his time. Maybe it is so even now. He left open the question of how we exorcise this Ghost in the Machine of the human brain.

I hypothesize that the 'palm held revolution' of human awareness is capable of exorcising the Ghost in the Machine. I have strong reasons to do so.

A lot of innocence is entering the 'cyberworld'. Very young people are populating the 'cyberworld' overwhelmingly. In less than a decade the young will exert a force on the internet that will be a kind of biofeedback for them. Their openness, pliability and innocence, will be reinforced by this new biofeedback. That is, a kind of natural strengthening of the collective will to build and not destroy will slowly emerge because the moment the very young experience even a little bit of the tearing down of their virtual world, a little bit of the negation of their virtual experience, their focus would shift to collective safeguards and banding together to ensure their experience remains and continues to reward them. By its very nature this dynamic will spill to the real world. This spilling over of the innocence and dynamism of the young into the real world is the real reason behind the many mass movements we are seeing all over the world in the past four to five years. In some places it is open and spontaneous. In some places it is yet to hit the streets and public spaces with the same degree of openness and spontaneity. It is indeed bound to happen all over the world. Manipulative measures that try to block the seamless flow of the virtual to the real world may turn out to be counterproductive eventually because the forces of growth, curiosity, learning and venturing out into the unknown that are so characteristic of the young will always prevail as that is the template of life itself.

This is the force, the force of growth, of evolution, of life itself that is likely to act on the Ghost in the Machine and tame it. How so?

The Ghost in the Machine is not new or unknown. The conflict between the limbic impulses, of raw emotions, on the one hand, and the uniquely human traits of highly evolved speech and thought and all that goes with it like science, technology, the arts and every aspect of civilisation, on the other hand, is an age old conflict. It has been addressed by many religions and moralists in any number of ways. All those tools to tackle this conflict are very much alive and available. However, none of them has brought the youth of the world together on to a platform like the social networking phenomenon in particular and sharing of ideas and experiences through the internet in general. We generally tend to ignore the basic fact that a vast majority of people are fairly decent folks across the world. This ignorance of something so basic is pronounced if we are news-oriented and educated and knowledgeable in history and politics across the world. A majority of us are fallible, yes. We fall, yes. But we get up and dust ourselves and get on with life. That is why a majority of mankind consists of basically good people. When these people are young and empowered with the means of communication and networking as they are increasingly getting to be, this basic goodness is further anchored in life by the forces of evolution and growth we referred to earlier. It is getting to be some kind of a collective momentum that easily addresses the Ghost in the Machine. Individual limbic impulse based behaviour is likely to be greatly moderated by the meshing together of the neocortex of pliable, young, eager-to-live-and-learn minds, minds that are self-empowered by the expanding world of shared living and learning through the internet.

Looking at it in another way, the yet-to-be firmed up ways of expression of the libido will be preceded by the excitement of the growing together phenomenon that the virtual world offers to the very young. Knowledge being essentially free in this milieu, sublimation of the libido that Sigmund Freud speaks about takes place easily and in a collective ambiance. This is not to deny the force of the libido. It only means that before this 'Ghost in the Machine' starts its clattering distractions, young minds would be busy experimenting with and experiencing something more deeply satisfying than old and encrusted ways of expression of the libido.

Even if the networked, computer savvy young ones are derided as nerds or geeks, the forces of evolution are on their side. They will be fitter to survive in the emerging milieu. However, they will mesh with their more limbic-oreiented peers because there will be interdependence between them . As a whole the young will fashion a future for themselves that is more likely to be more knowledge and communication driven than it has ever been as far as we know.

Turning to the grownups, the question arises : are we aware of the dynamic of the whole phenomenon described so far? The grownups run governments, run businesses, decide pretty much everything that will impinge on future generations, the generations that would be characterized by a harmonious blending of the neural pathways of the limbic system and the neocortex leading to a more holistic species. What role have they to play in this emerging scenario? It looks like it is going to be a pretty exciting role. Eric Berne identified the child ego state as the mode in which grownups tend to get lost, to feel uncomfortable. They are more comfortable operating in the adult and parent ego states. Governance, solving knotty problems, building durable structures and institutions for social living and so on take so much of their time and energy they have little or no time for the child ego state to emerge. Fun, so characteristic of the child ego state, is no more in curiosity, in teasing a learning experience out of playing and, libido in action is staid at best and downright inhuman at worst. The emerging generations will tease out the child ego state from even the most diehard adult and parent ego operators. This is where the challenge and the excitement lies. If you observe closely you would have noticed that those who scowled at computers a decade ago are bent over it punching words and commands with just the forefinger. They may be anywhere from sixty to ninety, anywhere from being a Pope to a peasant but they are doing it. Grandchildren are asking, grandpa how come you know so much but you can't send me an email? Grandma, they tell me you are the top woman but you never texted me even once ! What's wrong with you? This is where the curious, the eager-to-live-and-learn child that grownups once were, gets a new lease of life. I can't think of anything even half as exciting as this. Thia famous quote from  Eric Berne captures the beauty and innocence of the child ego state to which we are all priveleged to travel and return at our will : "the moment a little boy is conerned with which one is a jay and which one a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing".

When once this dormant child weaves its magic on the adult/parent that we are, there is no telling what we would explore in our adult/parent ways of dealing with the world. Eric Berne's long held vision of the harmony of the ego states would flow like treacle out of a jug. That's life at its craziest best.