Options from The East and The Future

Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream
It is not dying, it is not dying….

Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void
It is shining, it is shining…

That you may see the meaning of within
It is being, it is being….

—The Beatles, “Tomorrow Never Knows”

So far, the worldviews that have denied Biblical Christian Theism and have sought to avoid Nihilism, or escape from it, have tried to do so by rational thought – reasoning their way out of the trap. But there is one more option that comes from the East: let go of the rational and embrace the irrational.

By irrational I simply mean these Eastern approaches depend more on an experience of the transcendent rather than on the rules and patterns of logic. Both Hinduism and Buddhism became a very attractive alternative to the convoluted and often treacherous philosophical creations in the West in the latter half of the 20th Century.

These worldviews encompass everything from the Beatles’ traveling to India to find a Guru to Shirley McClain realizing that she is god (at least in her own mind). The one thing that all these various perspectives have in common is that there is something wrong with the mind, consciousness itself. The mind needs to be expanded. Consciousness needs to be opened.

We will also take a brief look at the emergence of the Transhumanism movement which advocates a literal expansion of the human mind through technology.

Eastern Pantheistic Monism

One must die to the West to be born in the East.

—James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door

I will not go into any detail on these types of worldviews here. The major religions that come from the east speak an entirely different language, philosophically speaking – they come from an entirely different mindset, foreign to most of us in the West. I would highly recommend reading the chapters “Journey to the East: Eastern Pantheistic Monism” and “A Separate Universe: The New Age Spirituality Without Religion” in Sire’s The Universe Next Door.

I will mention a couple of features of Eastern Pantheism and New Age Philosophy which give a VERY general sense of why these alternatives have been appealing to Westerners.

A common thread among the Eastern ways, is the idea that reality is an illusion or dream and a person needs to get free from this illusion in order to become one with the ONE or the Universe and thus transcend knowledge and knowing. Through meditation and ascetic practices that tame the body, one can achieve enlightenment which is the loss of personality as one merges with final, ultimate reality, however that is defined.

That is a great oversimplification of the various teachings of the Gurus of the East. Although Hinduism and Buddhism share basic concepts in common, they are different enough that a very careful analysis is needed; that is FAR beyond both my ability and desire. These views look more like a nonrational form of nihilism more than anything else. At the end of these Eastern paths, the individual is lost, or perhaps consumed, in the great sea of some impersonal void or nirvana.

The New Age Movement

There were many Westerners who were attracted by the romance of Eastern Religions only to find out they are very difficult to adopt in almost every aspect. So in the 1970s an alternative emerged which held the charm and glamour of Eastern Mysticism without the steep cost: The New Age Movement.

There are many threads in the New Age Movement and it is still in the process of being formed. To an outsider it looks like a strange mix of a Sci-fi Master Story based on evolutionary hopefulness filtered through existential narcissism with a some sprinkles of “scientific” quackery and occasional hits of psychedelic drugs.

Clearly I am being very ungenerous and perhaps even unfair. But of what I have read and understand about the New Age, it just seems to me like a bunch of sci-fi psycho babble for lazy Westerners who had rather attain “enlightenment” by getting high rather than through the difficult disciplines of self-denial. “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” zAgain, Sire has a very good presentation that is worth the time to read if your are interested.

More Human than Human

Emerging out of a thread of the New Age is the Transhumanist movement. This movement both prophesies and promotes the transformation of the human condition by developing “human enhancing technologies” and making them widely available. These technologies – everything from genetics to robotics to nano-technology – will make humans smarter and possibly more than human.

Ray Kutzweil is one of the leading, public proponents of this movement. His work has innovated several fields, including robotics, and he lectures about the possibility of extending human life through various technologies and has a hopeful outlook on the possibilities that will be opened by nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.

Elon Musk is another mainstream proponent of human enhancing technologies. In 2016 the Neuralink Corporation was founded with the goal of creating implantable Brain-Machine interfaces (BMIs). Musk has spoken openly about his concerns about the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and believes that humans will have to have a way to interface with these intelligent machines that works faster than human language. Neuralink was set to begin human testing in 2020.

Within this movement, there is talk of the Singularity, the “point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization” (“Technological Singularity“). There has been much debate about whether such an event would be positive or negative. There are many who think it would mark the beginning of the extinction of the human race. The Matrix film series explored this idea through the lens of existentialism.

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

—I. J. Good, “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine,” 1965

The Transhumanist movement seeks to help humanity evolve into something greater and transcend 1) aging and death, 2) ignorance, and 3) disconnection through man-made technologies. This is a very broad and deep movement. I mention it here because it may be a major influence in the years to come.

I also think some of these developments may represent the building of a Technological Tower of Babel, approaching lines over which The Lord will not allow transgression.