In my previous article, I discussed how people in traditional natural societies dealt with the harmful effects of the experiential vacuums in their living environments. Basically, in order to counter the numbing effects of entropy in those aspects of their particular fields of experience that were experiential vacuums – dead subsoil and sand in tropical and desert living environments and numbing cold winters in temperate and Arctic living environments as well as the physical spaces of emptiness that we all experience – people who lived in traditional natural societies filled their fields of experience with all sorts of spiritual entities – God, gods, angels, saints, elves, trolls, fairies, etc. – entities that were rich in floating, blendable, continual stimuli, entities whose stimuli intermingled with the infinite vacuumized stimuli of the empty space surrounding them. Using these spiritual entities, people who lived in traditional natural societies were able to psychologically pull themselves out of the numbness that they would normally feel in such a situation and, thus, live more vibrant lives.
Although some spiritual entities still inhabit some of the vacuumized spaces in modern technological society, other kinds of entities are definitely more prevalent. After all, in the traditional natural societies, it was the excess of organic stimuli in the form of climactic, zoological and botanic phenomena that posed the greatest danger to people, which is why the latter pushed technological invention as a means of transforming where they were living and, thus, supposedly making it safer for them. So, people today have developed a totally different category of entities with which to populate their vacuumized living spaces, a category that is not based on spirituality, but instead on technology.
I am talking about the entities that live behind the screens that fill our modern living environments and contain our fields of experience. Movie screens, televisions, video games, computers, tablets and smartphones. And within these screens, we find images of people and the external world as well as information, data and avatars. These technological entities represent different kinds of phenomena from the spiritual entities that were so prevalent in traditional natural societies. Unlike spiritual entities, their boundaries are sharply defined. There is no possibility of communing directly with these entities, such that they can help to pull people out of their numbness and stimulate them to live more vibrant lives. Instead, these entities are separated from people by an experiential vacuum behind a screen. For people, they are a remote mediated experience that are brought up to the surface of people’s consciousness by frictionless maneuvers, turning knobs and buttons, pressing keys. Some of the entities behind these screens, particularly the data, are mind-numbing. Others of these entities create a content that forms an overstimulating tension-pocket: a lot of violence, a lot of pornography, a lot of propaganda from hate groups, a lot of cyber-bullying. This abrasive stimulation pulls people out of their numbness, but not in a healthy way. It is stimulation in the form of kicks, a stressful shock that temporarily lifts a person out of his numbness.
Bouncing back and forth like this between understimulation and overstimulation does not make it easy to carry on a meaningful life narrative. This sensory distortion does not make it easy to effectively absorb those experiences that are presented to a person from the external world. Without the food for thought that comes from experiences properly absorbed from the external world, because they are experiences rich in the flowing blendable continual stimuli that allow people to effectively commune with an entity, people are unable to generate their own organic imprints, their own organic entities that can serve as vehicles for helping them to feel alive. In addition, if people in today’s world were more easily capable of generating organic imprints, organic entities that could be preserved in the minds of others, in the form of memories, children or on the physical surfaces of inanimate objects including books and other print material, that would allow these people to contribute more easily to their personal surrogate immortalities and thus to prepare for death.
But it is not only one’s own preserved organic imprints that can help a person to prepare for death. It is also the organic vacuumized imprints that one shares with one’s community that help a person to prepare for death. The religious beliefs that one shares with the community form a part of an ongoing collective surrogate immortality that give comfort and solace to all believers but especially to those older or infirm people who have to confront at some point this new and different state of being. But because there is no bonding and grounding involved in the entities created by modern technology, there is no shoring up of a person’s psyche to help him deal with the fear of death. A person is allowed to psychologically go numb and then crumble within a technological world view where he just floats in the experiential vacuum and where his principal encounter with other entities is just to knock up against technological entities with defined discrete impenetrable boundaries.
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