If we do not risk going into the cavernous abyss of our soul, we will never develop the courage necessary to become a whole individual. It is easier, after all, to face one's own emotions than the very source of that emotion. It's personified by the terror looking into the eyes of serpent Kaa—the image of the snake scorched in our ancient collective imagination. That is the risk; becoming the bruised puppet of the ego—indentured to doing time in an unknowable sea of mirrors, or taking the journey one step at a time—no matter if your voice shutters towards the task laid forth at the cave entrance. The road to nowhere and to Godhead, where littered skulls and bones decorate its entrance. Countless individuals thought they could remain in the egos Hall of Mirrors forever. But If we do not risk the task ahead and face harrowing psychic tombs cut like teeth and the razor-sharp claws of the unconscious, we will never claim its treasure which is, our anima mundi soul.
Archetypes like The Hero’s Path can not only achieve everything identity politics hoped to achieve by rectifying one’s particular lineage, but provide ancestral lessons beyond to the enteral collective experiences of humanity. Identity politics is a meme. It is a manifestation of social media thinking, convenient slogans void of the larger meaning of accessing the divine. They assume by Marxist interventions we can subvert the hard path one must walk. They subvert age-old truths of how humanity came to be and bottle the whole thing up into the hollow reconfiguring of society, along man-made structures because, like a meme, the image is enough. If one posts enough images of the hero, they somehow can claim they ARE the hero, no journey, no death of ego, no liberation, no sacrifice.
Instead, one must turn inwards to go outwards. So much of the ancient world has been tossed out, and deeper meaning has been lost due to this technology, producing new pathways of mind, that are not in congruence with deeper longer lasting methodologies of change. We live in a time talking heads, who serve the powerful and wealthy will teach you fear.
Everything around us says no, you cannot do this. You cannot live without that. Nothing is useful unless it’s in service to money. The hero gives in to tides of chaos, trusts the world to support him, and in doing so, turns his back on the fear & obedience he has been taught. He rejects the indoctrination of impossibility.
The dangers of Digital Simulacrum are none other than being reduced to Its "Hall Of Mirrors." With Bruce Lee's Enter The Dragon (1973), we learn to destroy the image (mirror), and you will break the "enemy."
The Computer Chip Seeks To Emulate Consciousness
The Hall Of Mirrors promotes the liability of developing oneself exclusively digitally. Technology spawned from the mind of man, impacting the world and us in all its membranous complexity. It’s critical to understand the dimensions of future tech as they envelop the structures of mind. Social media has already laid the copper pipes and cement foundation necessary for the advent of Future Tech. The dawn of The Digital Mind and its data mining industry sows a world to come from this Created Mind that is simply an echo of something we are going to tactilely forget. As described by Jean Baudrillard, the concept of Hyperreality captures the inability to distinguish "The Real" (a term borrowed from Jacques Lacan) from the signifier of it. This is more prominent in technologically advanced societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together, so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.(3) It allows the merging of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR), and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI).(4)
Social networks and their immeasurable influences on human nature are paving the research necessary to build the world's first autonomous mind-based emulation. Psycho-spiritual conditions like these are known well in Jungian depth psychology as possessions of The Shadow. That is why I have coined the term “The Digital Hall Of Mirrors” to account for the unconscious elements of the mind, where they meet, participate, and in some cases, replace the activity of the mind.
Examining both the continued neurological feedback response and developing consciousness, we look to the individual participating with the self and the self-image created on social media that is both subject to viewing the world through the eyes of Silicon Valley, biological repetition, and the dictates of their ego projected onto the platform. All of this keeps us in the abyss of vanity. Many have become addicted to the power of illusion. In other words, "while there is nothing inherently addictive about smartphones themselves, the true drivers of our attachments to these devices are the hyper-social environments they provide."(6)
I have included the following diagrams to illustrate further the traditional method before Consciousness Replacing Tech (Social Media & Future Tech) was introduced via the birth of the computer chip. Social Media is a Silicon Valley invention where often human hardwired behaviors towards risk and competition are exploited for the good (job creation) and the bad (discrimination, depression, and suicide.) (7)
The universal model of The Self, Ego, Persona, Shadow, and Collective Unconscious.
Like many people's social media usage, how much time we spend on our devices has exploded since the last era when digital programs were once inanimate on desktop computers. In this environment, extensions of the Self are created via apps users can download for free onto their cellphones. Instagram fits into your pocket, available for a quick distraction or hour use, swiping up in the endless stream of streamlined personas often refined to over-aggrandizing that is absent of the biological feedback loop system of having others validate your persona. Instead, an endless loop of reward system response perpetuates developmental stagnation inside the Digital Hall Of Mirrors. In The Hall Of Mirrors, we are at the threat of consuming the individual to a neurological desire and defense of its false image; this is the great tragedy some individuals have befallen. For many, the allure will be too great to abstain, monitor your time, and take time off to work on yourself.
We're less likely to discover the treasure in confronting our Shadow in a realm where the fictitious rewards of illusion and aggrandizement attract us like honey. Instead, journeying within, defeating our daemon, and claiming the treasure of our integration gives the lasting source of a prosperous life. There is gold in doing what is hard. The folks in Silicon Valley churn attention primarily driven by the smooth and easy dopamine rewards of the Hall Of Mirrors, where you risk atrophy or worse psychic possession.
The Only Mirror Worth Looking At Is Your Soul’s Because You Peer Into Eternity
The term 'Hall Of Mirrors' (Galerie or Galerie des Glaces) is the central gallery of the Palace of Versailles in Versailles, France; the most remarkable feature of King Louis XIV's Palace of Versailles. But I borrow that term to explain the dangers of when consciousness is hijacked by images subject to Silicon Valley, manipulating and influencing your behavior and sense of self. Hall Of Mirrors has also become seared into our collective imagination, thanks to Hollywood, as a confusing or disorienting situation in which it is difficult to distinguish between truth and illusion or between competing versions of reality depicted by a carnival or amusement park attraction.
We've seen in films the use of mirrors, consisting of mazes or series of passageways lined especially with curved mirrors creating a distorted perception. We see this exploited for effect in Snow White, Bruce Lee's Enter The Dragon, and 1947's noir flick Lady From Shanghai by Orson Welles, featuring the iconic shooting scene with Rita Hayworth.
From archetypal and mythological understanding, we can see a glimpse of the dream world resonating deeply into the vast history of human beings through bygone yet vivid realms of effervescent illuminations of humanity, that which we call sentient origins. While we are worlds away from origins, the human soul culls from the same eternal non-material dimension, illustrated to us while we sleep. When we sleep, we peer unfiltered psychic images in the form of dreams, the space where personality and that which gives sentient animation of will, soul, or spirit meet. Something was lost by the over-importance we've placed on the conscious element as a society. It is no wonder the Gods punished Prometheus for stealing fire and giving it to mankind. While the animal kingdom is in balance with nature, we are the animals that manipulate nature to our will. While animals embody nature, we have taken something from nature. We have left the obedient world and have split our minds into consciousness. We have taken fire from "the gods" and have never looked back, creating more and more utilities that can enhance our world without any responsibility towards the individual's psyche that is so busy creating and destroying. The condition bestowed by consciousness development in modern man occurred when the fracturing of our consciousness split into unconscious elements (a side effect of modern man's monozygotic fracture.)
We must be free in this sense, as it is critical we remove ourselves from the modern schism so that we may become shepherds of this earth and caretakers of life, much like ancient man was.
Will Our Tools Be The End Of Us?
The problem now is an intersection of the original problem and the new problem: corporations profit from keeping you lost in the hall of the ego's mirrors. This is a critical time; we must peel away the false structures and know that these technologies are more than inventions of thought, but the final tool that blurs the lines of simulacrum and reality. If we are to separate them from our essential nature and journey towards integration, we can return to the original struggle from whence we arrive and return. I am not saying do not use the tool. Would we have asked primitive man as he is about to strike a stone with another to lite a fire for warmth during a blizzard the danger then of this technology? My point is that man has the power to change his environment and make tools to survive. But man has advanced much compared to the power once projected by our not yet knowing mind onto the forces of nature. Now, it is we that are capable of externalizing mind onto itself. Much to our knowledge, the autonomous will be built upon the data that is already being mined.
Technology is not inherently evil, though the mind that is fragmented and has succumbed to the lair of its potential for destruction can have devastating consequences for the world. The destruction is the danger. The destruction comes from the severed half that once was an embodiment of nature that is self-aggrandized by the extraction of human will over nature. Thus in a denial state, we open ourselves to unconsciousness that manifests illness and suffering. I am not asking for us to become entirely primitive again, but to look within the abyss of the individual to find that which is Spirit and to release our severed consciousness from the shadow's possession.
We must be free in this sense, as we must remove ourselves from the modern schism so that we may become shepherds of this earth and caretakers of life, much like ancient man was—a shamanistic consciousness that once interrelated the Spirit of all life. What could our world look like if we rescue our partitioned consciousness? What could our societies and our systems of organization look like if mankind could see through the eyes of Being once again? Would we not also rescue the divine nature within us, transforming outer worlds?
Of course, this would be easy if the possessed were not actively empowered by what the machine gives them, the greatest illusion of all: man's ability to manipulate nature and think he the source of Godhead rather than a unique creature in the scheme of life, bestowed upon him a responsibility rather than a power to use over this sacred vessel all life inhabits. If we return to the world of the new millennia, we should see a world without needless suffering. Why do we spend every waking hour of our lives in service to the matrix of thought? Because we are addicted to what the matrix provides us, people will defend it and do the work of the matrix so that it may spread and live on. Food grows from the earth. Man goes hungry. Oxygen floats freely into our lungs, truly like magic. If thought eases suffering, we should have a utopia, but we are a species newly utilizing thought divorced from the deep pool of unconsciousness whose depths reach so deep they take root in nature and beyond to God. Take the pieces of a man, mend them limb by limb, become the foundation for Spirit, turn a corner, enter a field, leave the funhouse mirror, and know thyself in integrated ways.
You have read an excerpt of Nadeem Gibran Salaam's forthcoming book a collection of essay's on consciousness that's one part spiritual and psychological data for regeneration, and a punk rock fueled journey from the Lower East Side in 1990's NYC. The book is divided into problems and solutions.
