As without, so within.

This lesson is repeated infinitely, in DNA and in fractals, in the way our emotions wreak havoc with our physical appearance, and in the way our individual beliefs and values generate our societal behavior.

We are in a constant state of expressing who we are. Our bodies, our homes, our partners, and our governments are all reflections of us, and each one of us is an integral contributor to the whole of humanity’s experience.

But the connection isn’t always visible. I’ve been corresponding recently with the Belgian philosopher Michel Bauwens, who started the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. He stumbled on my Internet Hierarchy of Needs, and compared it to Steven Vedro’s work on the evolution of teleconsciousness. Steven correlates our technological developments with Hindu chakras; in his sixth level, he touches on this idea that the whole of creation is contained within each particle:

On an inner spiritual level, Buddhism calls the sixth-level realm of perception Dharmadhatu, where “to see one object is, therefore, to see all objects.” In poet William Blake’s words: ‘to see a World in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.’

Our exchange got me thinking about the connection between our human development and our technological development, and I emailed Steven and Michel with the following:

…one of the parallels I’m seeing between the digital universe and the human quest for enlightenment is a growing appreciation that the individual is only a tiny part of an interconnected whole.

This is true in the physical world, but the illusion of disconnection is powerful. Online, people involved in Wikipedia and other crowd-sourcing efforts have the very real experience of being a tiny yet vital component of a larger organism. Increased connectivity drives this awareness further, as the great ocean of information heaving around us becomes more visible.

Twitter is a tangible example of what I’m describing here. Hugh MacLeod describes Twitter as “a river you live beside. You don’t have to see every passing boat or catch every fish to live beside it.” I’ll build on that: if you use Twitter, you are a fish and you are a boat and you are a person sitting on the bank. You’re the weeds and the bullrushes and the crabs and the crocodiles. You are the river.

This is easy to see on Twitter. It’s easy to grasp that the steady stream of Tweet consciousness is created by all of us who participate. And this is the parallel I’m drawing with human consciousness. The world of Twitter is the collective creation of the people of Twitter; the physical world is the collective creation not just of the people of the world, but of all of its life forms.

In a piece on Reality Sandwich called The Next Buddha Will Be a Collective, Michel says:

In this way, a new collective body of spiritual experiences is created, which is continuously co-created by the inquiring spiritual communities and individuals. The outcome of that process will be a co-created reality that is unpredictable and will create new, as yet unpredictable spiritual formats.

The crowdsourcing model—Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube—makes it so easy to see online, but the spiritual advancement comes from understanding that our physical world is also crowdsourced and decentralized, that we are all pieces of a whole, and that, really, there is no difference between you and me.

Feedback welcome.

Photo courtesy John Suler.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 12:08 am and is filed under Twitter, People matter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.