Are We Becoming Robots?

What about old-fashioned mutual voice-into-ear communication then? I thought to myself having spent the best part of an hour tricking the phone network provider’s labyrinthine system to put me through to an actual person to pay a bill that had gone astray.

Have we become so afraid of actual human-to-human contact, so enamored of the typed or recorded word we dread the very thought of non-typed live interaction? And along with this burgeoning deficit of interpersonal communicational facility, this evident collective spread of numbed albeit intelligent, superficially clever-clever, imbecility, at which point did we collectively succumb to this trance, what are its causes and is there anyone directing it for personal gain of whatever sort/s?

By nature I’m not a conspiracist, not really an anything-ist, not even a Taoist –no self-respecting follower of the Way (literal meaning of Tao) would be so crass as to deem to call themselves Wayist or Taoist. Such gratuitous distinctions and labels are anathema to the whole Taoist life-schema, which emphasizes eschewing distinctions and seeing past superficial appearances to the unifying field or Tao behind them.

But I can’t help feeling there’s a background agenda, whether opportunistically jumping on the imbecilic trend or actually driving it. I recall in the 80s politicians and various players talking openly about the need to dumb society down, and it has certainly gone that way. The trance of mindless herdal obedience to whatever social meme is currently trending is evident. Facilitated and expedited by our increasing willingness to hand over such basic modern human skills as navigation or remembering when your flight departs, the temptation to let your memory functions atrophy altogether is ever-present.

Along with abnegating responsibility for remembering how to get anywhere without looking at a phone screen comes, it seems, a loss of any historical perspective, and even the desire to know how things got to be as they are is collectively diminishing.

This makes populations far easier to keep control than when people are actually using their cognitive skills properly. Whether this is intentional or a coincidence I can only surmise.

Interestingly this amnesiac trend doesn’t extend into all the various specific arenas of human endeavor. To the contrary in every field of commerce, industry academic research, art and whatever else, focus is sharper than ever and the sheer brilliance and ingenuity evident in all spheres is staggering. Yet outside of that, in the realm of non-achieving, simply being-here human activity we collectively seem to default to a paradoxical doltishness as remarkable in its way as the brilliance and ingenuity are in theirs.

Along with this the apparent levels of emotional literacy are declining as rapidly as lexical (word) literacy. In the same way people no longer understand the purpose of apostrophes, they no longer understand the purpose of soul-to-soul connection, and resort to communicating their most heartfelt feelings with emoticons or set-piece faux-emotional gestures learned from low-level TV sitcoms or soaps.

All in all it looks as if we’re increasingly, electively, living in a cartoon, thus paving the way for AI to take over the collective mind, by which time if the sea hasn’t yet risen sufficiently to require us to wear snorkels to work, or some geopolitical flashpoint hasn’t triggered the next world war, or we haven’t simply numbed ourselves into oblivion altogether, or some hacker hasn’t managed to sabotage all the self-driving cars and self-flying planes and cause a global pile-up that brings everything to a permanent standstill, we’ll probably find we’re all working as slaves for some quantum supercomputer, policed by robots, and we’ll be so dumbed down we won’t even notice – we’ll think it’s ‘cool’ as in ‘that’s a cool gadget’, as opposed to the genuine ‘cool’ that preceded this current era.

But what I find most interesting about it, being a sound man in both senses of the word, is the electronic bird effect.

It started about five years ago, just around the time word was out that sound-weaponry was being developed at a clip – the police told the press they were using the benign end of that to keep the 2102 London Olympics crowds quiet, so there’s nothing imaginary about it. I’d be lying in bed at the end of the day, and I’d hear the electronic birds. Had I not treated thousands of cases of tinnitus over the years and even experienced some of it myself, often after one of my twice-a-week Ibiza ‘get healed while you party’ so-called conscious clubbing (it was me who first coined the phrase, now fast becoming a cliché) all-nighters, I might have mistaken the electronic birds for that. But the quality is distinctly different and the source quite clearly exogenous rather than endogenous (caused from without not within).

So I started wondering whether this was the sound technology being deployed perhaps mostly at night as most people are sleeping, on a mass scale.

But as with all these theories an open mind is necessary until proof comes through if indeed it does.

However when casually falling into conversation with an older American guy in the street in Spain last week, who happened to be a scientist specializing in sound technology, and he out of the blue started going on about how three or four of the more technologically advanced countries (that didn’t include Spain), were now using constant sonic bombardment to make people more obedient and supplicant, and then told me it sounds like electric birds, it somewhat alarmed me, because if he’s right, and my own aural experience leads me to believe he is, I reckon it’s time to start actively retraining our brains to recover our innate cognitive skills before we all turn into such dolts we’ll be no better off than cattle.

I can give you a hundred and eight different ways to enhance cognitive skills, but the most important is to situate your consciousness in the back-brain not the lateral prefrontal lobes as is normal nowadays.

The lateral prefrontal lobes are where we process the ideas we have about how others are perceiving us, and then create stories around that upon which we make many of our decisions – it’s the area of the brain in which we create our stories about life and about ourselves living it. It’s the realm of our personal fiction in other words.

The back-brain is the realm of transpersonal omniscience. This is the part of the brain Taoist masters (it’s ok to use the -ist in this context as a descriptive device, obviously) activate and habituate themselves to, whence originate all their so-called super-powers, which are actually ordinary human powers that still remain asleep in most.

And it’s not just the back-brain they inhabit, but the whole of the back sector of the body, because it’s from your back all the strength issues, it’s from the back you operate the vehicle best and so on.

Once back inside you don’t care nearly as much what others think of you, simply because thinking and opinions in general lose value compared to the omniscient (all knowing) state.

And you’re far more able to activate intention. In this instance we’re talking about activating enhanced recall functions and motor skills in order to continue functioning as a human rather than continue gradually morphing into an android.

So sitting in the back-brain and back of the body, you say to yourself, ‘my recall is now sharper than ever and getting sharper all the while and I don’t even know why, or I do but it doesn’t matter’ – or words to that effect.

Say it a few times a day, and as you do quickly visualize operating with surprising mental acuity in various situations.

You’ll find within a day or two your mental acuity will have increased notably. But don’t stop there, keep it going and no amount of sound technology and whatever else will dumb you down.

This is important because we are such fundamentally magnificent beings, and the trance of obedient imbecility mustn’t be allowed to reduce us to mere morons.

And none of this is political on my part, none of it intended as a rabble-rouser.

To the contrary, I’m fully apolitical and wish for social continuity as the medium for improving the human condition. I believe fully in going with what is rather than against in order to effect benign social transformation. Society only works through collective agreement. And to a great extent that agreement is maintained by the rule of law. The less we adhere to the rule of law the more society crumbles. But if we respect ourselves our adherence must come from knowing things only work if we stick to our agreements and obligations, not by being such dumbed down cattle-people we don’t even question the game.

If we wish to function optimally in all ways we must be mindful of what’s occurring rather than in denial of it. Whether the sound-wave notion is real, exaggerated or merely imaginary, is not the point. What is certainly not imaginary is our increasing willingness to allow our innate cognitive abilities to be taken over by the operating systems and apps in our phones – and soon these will be chips implanted subcutaneously.

Stay awake in other words and don’t confuse your dexterity in handling your apps with being awake.