Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD December 19, 2014
Is technology anathema to soul? Does it necessarily reduce people to objects? Can technology engage us sensuously with others in a feeling community? Are computers a psychic extension of the mind-body-spirit instrument?
In trying to find the soul of technology, Robert Sardello positions technology within the context of culture. He views technology as story, image, and value, as much as it is a mechanical means for getting work done. By viewing technology as culture and philosophy, he identifies technology as part of cultural systems of symbols developed over millennia. Following Sardello, It is helpful to the present discussion to speak of “poly-technology” to include mechanical, natural, and spiritual technology.
Today we use the word “technology,” derived from techne, to mean a mechanical ordering of things. For the ancient Greeks, however, techne did not mean technology in the mechanical sense, nor did it mean art in the sense of skill or proficiency. Techne meant knowledge that resulted from grasping beings as emerging out of themselves in the ways that present themselves in their essence. As an understanding of what it means to be at all, techne is identified with wonder, the basic disposition of philosophy and knowledge. For the ancient Greeks, as for Heidegger, to be technological meant to be aware of being, aware of soul.
An intimate relationship between technology and soul can be found within folk and indigenous traditions. Shamans, medicine men, sorcerers, and priests contact the world of spirits by use of ancient technology: drumming, dancing, or ritual music that narrates ecstatic flights of the soul. Sacred rattles, drums, and gongs trigger illuminating visions. Shamanic instruments of technology also include rock crystals, eagle feathers, magic sticks, bells, helmets, shields, and spears, animal skins and furs. Totems impart a natal kinship with powers of the earth. Herbology, pharmacology, and dream interpretation are also potent technologies.
In many ancient wisdom systems, technology is a tool of learning and knowledge, valued not simply for its utility but also for its essential truth and potential to trigger transformation. Tools of technology in shamanic contexts also include embodied modalities of learning: seeing, feeling, touching, moving, hearing, and tasting – intersensory means of disclosing spiritual reality.
The ultimate “instrument” of transformation is the shaman herself: body-mind-spirit. Chanting of the Inuit involves an accelerated, rhythmic hyperventilation. Circular or continuous breathing is required to play the didgeridoo of the Australian aborigines and the long curved horns of the Tibetans. In Indian and Tibetan yoga traditions mantras realize effects upon consciousness with their sound quality alone, quite apart of their meaning content. Vision fasts and acts of sensory deprivation and stimulation among Ojibwa shamans initiate spirit contact. Directed imaging, personal and collective visualization, breath control techniques, and physical postures are used to develop special states of awareness that generate healing, insights, dreams, or visions.
Rather than dehumanizing shamanic practitioners, their technologies make them “theoretical” (thea-horetical), that is, possessing insight into truth and reality of Being. A law well known in the history of religions is referred to as “sympathetic magic”: one becomes what one displays, or like attracts like. Shamans are the mythical ancestors portrayed by their masks, ceremonial costumes, and ritual hats, undergoing a total transformation of the soul’s essence into something other. They are simultaneously not-themselves and not-not-themselves.
Soul is not simply individual and subjective; it is present whenever people enter into communal relationships wherein their feelings are engaged. John Seely Brown points out in New Learning Environments for the 21st Century that college students with classroom laptops can engage in a transformational shift from “learning about” information to “learning to be” practitioners in a community of practitioners.
Soulmaking via social learning platforms requires that students assimilate values, sensibilities, attitudes, and worldviews embodied in communities of practice. As such, computers and digital tools provide powerful forms of distributed cognitive apprenticeship that function globally and parallel the situation of shamans who apprentice themselves to power animals and tutelary spirits in supra-sensible worlds. Like shamans whose transformational learning is facilitated by tools of their technology, today’s students may undergo technology-assisted alterations of being, constructing new forms of the self as cognitive apprentices and members of immersive communities that are highly expressive, sensuous, and collaborative.