by Erik Davis
With the relative decline of overtly authoritarian political regimes, we now believe ourselves more “free,” but the power of consensus trance may actually be waxing in our highly networked and hypermediated age. As the hairsplitting scientific management of the Taylorist factory proved, capitalism has a long and exuberant history of embracing whatever technologies and institutional frameworks allow it to fit human beings into vast and efficient megamachines of production and consumption. The footloose “postindustrial” economy is supposed to have left such soulless mechanisms of control behind, but in reality the megamachine has simply fragmented and mutated. While handing off its primitive assembly lines to developing countries or illegal sweatshops, it “spiritualizes” its routines into immaterial cybernetic meshes of information labor or the sophisticated marketing games appropriate to a society based on compulsive consumption. Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp, enmeshed in the cogs of Modern Times, has gone virtual, becoming at once the home-shopping networker and the electronic sweatshop grunt whose every key tap and bathroom break is micromanaged down to the nanosecond.
As Marshall McLuhan noted in the early 1970s, “we are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.”2 Today there are far more technologies to get involved with, far more cybernetic loops demanding that we plug in and turn on. With the continued ideological dominance of reductionist science and the sociocultural dominance of its technological spawn, the once glorious isle of humanism is melting into a silicon sea. We find ourselves trapped on a cyborg sandbank, caught between the old, smoldering campfire stories and the new networks of programming and control. As we lose our faith in free will or the coherence of personality, we glimpse androids in the bathroom mirror, their eyes black with nihilism—the meaningless void that Nietzsche pegged over a century ago as the Achilles heel of modern civilization.
Needless to say, the loss of the motive soul unnerves a lot of people. Most of the spiritual, New Age, and religious activity of the moment is committed on one level or another to either trashing or supplanting the reductionist and mechanistic imaginary. Fundamentalist Christians and Native American animists alike attack Darwin’s theory of natural selection, while acupuncturists and holistic healers rekindle the magical life force of vitalism. Archetypal psychologists try to recover the timeless images of the soul, while ecological mystics call for a “reenchantment of the earth” and a rejection of the world of malls and virtual media zones. Even liberal humanists scrabble about for values, for a “politics of meaning” that can resist the steady encroachment of technological thinking.
But can we ever turn back the clock, especially to the time before there were clocks? Perhaps the image of man as a machine holds more promise than its detractors admit, especially if the image is not allowed to totally dominate our vision. For a certain breed of contemporary seeker, in fact, the ancient goal of awakening is not served by a retreat into romanticism, religious orthodoxy, or magical incantations. Instead of denying the mechanistic or automatic aspects of human being, these seekers direct the psychospiritual quest through the image of the machine, using the mechanism, as it were, to trigger its own wake-up alarm. To paraphrase the Sufi mystic Inayat Khan: one aspect of our being is like a machine, and the other aspect is like an engineer. In this view, the first step toward waking up is to recognize how zonked out and automatic we already are; such dispassionate and reductive observations help dispel delusions, reveal genuine possibilities, and thus paradoxically enable us to cultivate some of the most deeply human aspects of being. The machine thus comes to serve as an interactive mirror, an ambiguous Other we both recognize ourselves in and measure ourselves against. This is the path of the spiritual cyborg, a path whose buzzing circuits and command overrides represent both the perils and promise of techgnosis.
Meetings with Remarkable Machines
Loosely speaking, the first spiritual cyborgs were probably the shamans, those ecstatic technicians of the sacred. But the first modern spiritual teacher to productively exploit the language of mechanism was G. I. Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian teacher known for his harsh wisdom, hypnotic charisma, and very large mustache. According to his own writings, Gurdjieff spent the turn of the century cruising the monasteries, yogi shacks, and mystic schools of the Middle East and Asia—though it is difficult entirely to believe a man who once packed up and fled a hamlet after a rainstorm threatened to wash the yellow paint off the “parakeets” he was selling about town. But though some skeptics and spiritual leaders continue to write Gurdjieff off as a metaphysical flimflam man, a close reading of the most important Gurdjieffean texts makes it clear that the master not only synthesized a variety of teachings and techniques into an eminently practical form of esoteric work, but creatively integrated a number of modern psychological and scientific ideas into the ancient goal of gnosis.
Gurdjieff died in 1949, and throughout his life, he had little but scorn for European civilization and its rejection of the great spiritual traditions of old. But in other ways, he was very much a modern man. He mocked Spiritualism, ignored the gods, enjoyed working with machines, and embraced the seemingly reductionist notion that “all psychic processes are material.” Like the Theosophists, he adopted a loosely evolutionary notion of cosmic history, though he balanced the external course of material evolution with the corresponding necessity of involution—the retreat from the multiple laws that govern material phenomena and the turn toward the liberating cosmic All. Many aspects of Gurdjieff’s cosmological system, at least as they appear in P. D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, were grade-A mystical pseudoscience. Ouspensky’s text is chock-full of curious psychogeometric laws, charts of “higher hydrogens,” and descriptions of cosmic chains of command, the latter of which culminated in the amazing notion that the ordinary purpose of humanity’s energetic life was to provide “food for the moon.”
Gurdjieff was a trickster, however, and both his eccentric teaching style and eyebrow-raising cosmology seem designed to keep his students and followers on their toes. The same holds true for Gurdjieff’s withering assessment of human psychology, a vision that basically boils down to the most repellent of axioms: “Man is a machine.” In our ordinary state, Gurdjieff argued, we are just like motorcars or typewriters or gramophones—mechanically pushed and pulled by external chance or internal habits, never genuinely doing or realizing anything ourselves. We always react, and never cause. Though he implied that our zombiedom was written into the human condition, he also believed that modern industrial life perpetuated and reinforced this trance. “Contemporary culture requires automatons,” he said.
Having diagnosed this condition, Gurdjieff made a pretty good case that the only intelligent thing to do in our predicament is to escape—an escape that was synonymous with awakening to our nonmechanical essence. Only by upgrading our ordinary, everyday awareness can we genuinely hope to govern and take responsibility for our actions and our desires. As an alchemical modernist, Gurdjieff conceived of this development as an “artificially cultivated” process. Our soul, our nonmechanical essence, is not born with us; it is made, and this soul-making runs counter to the course of things. “The law for man is existence in the circle of mechanical influences, the state of the ‘man-machine.’ The way of the development of hidden possibilities is a way against nature, against God.”3 Rather than embracing Gaia’s élan vital, the carnal rhythms and imaginative powers beloved by Romantic animists and nature-worshippers past and present, the awakening human goes against the grain, shifting control from mechanical forces to the awakening “I.” Gurdjieff was a gnostic Promethean, seeking to realize the self in an opus contra naturam divorced from any myths of divine intervention. For all his traditionalism, he was the spiritual godfather of the Extropians.
Unlike the Extropians, however, Gurdjieff believed that modern people were so hypnotized by technologies, intellectual concepts, and the mounting waves of information churned out by journalists and scientists that they had lost their potential for re
cognizing and realizing the deeper levels of consciousness. As Jacob Needleman argues, Gurdjieff was the first esoteric thinker to describe the object of spiritual work as “consciousness,” though he did not romanticize consciousness like so many New Agers today.4 Instead, he treated it as a basically material force that could be shaped and transmuted by psychospiritual techne—what students call “the Work.”
The Work begins with ruthless self-observation, a cold-hearted analysis of “our machine.” Somewhat like the Theravadan Buddhist practitioners of vipassana, or mindfulness, the budding Worker is encouraged to notice and register her own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors—an objective process of discrimination that Gurdjieff describes as “recording.” This is not the recording of the ancient scribes, but the unforgiving recording of the camera or the research scientist, gazing through a microscope at a wiggling germ. After recording ourselves for a while, one of the first things we realize is that we have no permanent and unchangeable “I.” As Gurdjieff explained, “Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking ‘I.’ And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion.”5 Here lies our fundamental inauthenticity—the I that makes one promise is not the I that breaks it. Needless to say, the notion that we have “hundreds of thousands of separate small I’s,” oftentimes ignorant of and in conflict with one another, runs counter to our existential sense of a stable self. But Gurdjieff argued that if we committed ourselves to ruthless self-observation, we would come to realize that this ordinary sense of unified being is a sham.
Gurdjieff’s psychological vision owed much to his metaphor of the “man-machine,” for the principle of the machine is the assemblage, the soulless conglomeration of subsystems, working parts, and shifting points of energy and production. Many decades later, the hardheaded mechanists working on the problem of human cognition would bring this “assemblage” model of the mind into popular consciousness. Though possessing considerable variety, most of the models in cognitive science imagine the mind as a construction created through the struggles and alliances of myriad small and densely interconnected symbolic subsystems and agents, a vision that the artificial intelligence wizard Marvin Minsky calls the “society of mind.” More recently, other cognitive scientists have served up less hierarchical or symbolically dependent models; these picture the mind as the product of even more primitive and “asocial” mechanisms of sensation, perception, and memory. The ego, the self, the conscious sense of “me” is seen as an “emergent property,” a vaporous afterimage of the complex machinations of glandular data gates, neurochemical sparks, and the perceptual structures and cognitive templates that whir and buzz beneath the surface of thought.
Gurdjieff was hardly the only spiritual thinker to anticipate what seems at first to be a uniquely modern, technological deconstruction of the self. Buddhist psychology also holds that there is no core essence, no atman, no singular I. Instead, traditional Buddhists divide the self into a number of “heaps” (skandas) that are composed of a shifting array of objects, perceptions, judgments, mental categories, and states of awareness. The material in these heaps is pushed and pulled by habit, desire, and the constantly changing causes and conditions of the world of karma. Because this groundless flow terrifies us, Buddhist shrinks reasoned, we build castles out of the shifting sands of consciousness and proclaim them stable, real, and eternal. Within our minds, we reify an essential self, whose inability to respond spontaneously to the flux of things, or to recognize its own insubstantial nature, generates the delusions and sufferings of samsara.
Indeed, Gurdjieff sounds a bit like a dour Buddhist when he says that “to awaken means to realize one’s nothingness, that is, to realize one’s complete and absolute mechanicalness and one’s complete and absolute helplessness.” But even this depressing analysis contains the seed of hope, a seed that Gurdjieff believed lay in our very capacity for realization and awareness. By paying attention to our own mechanical routines, we cease to identify with them, and this de-identification shifts our attention toward the higher I that observes its own process and directs, as best it can, its own inner growth. This transcendence-through-feedback separates the essential self from the automatism of the machine and creates a crystal of consciousness capable not only of genuinely directing its own activity, but of actually surviving death.
That’s the plan, anyway. In a sense, the Gurdjieffean Work can be seen as an explicitly spiritual analog of the Extropians’ brash commitment to master the sluggish body, control the emotions, and reprogram themselves for immortality and self-realization. Like the Extropians, the Gurdjieff Work can also be accused of being elitist, antinomian, and pretty thin on universal compassion and those other “myths” that remind us of our indissoluble links to the human community and the physical biosphere. At the same time, the Work possesses a psychospiritual sophistication rather lacking among the gonzo transhumanists, and its transcendental thrust is tempered by Gurdjieff’s insistence on a pragmatic engagement with ordinary life. Students are encouraged to live and work in the everyday world, and to refine, expand, and integrate the levels of consciousness associated with the body and emotions—not to leave these “lower” apparatuses rusting in a Darwinian trash heap.
But one of the principal dangers of the Work is not shared by the fiercely individualistic Extropians. Gurdjieff insisted that only an awakened teacher can help students snap out of their most intractable hypnotic habits, and that serious Work thus requires strict fidelity to an external master. As the history of new religious and esoteric movements demonstrates all too well, such situations regularly degenerate into those dangerously authoritarian patterns of behavior we associate with cults. A number of the groups that picked up the Work after Gurdjieff’s death did not escape the clutches of this kind of tyranny. On the other hand, one person’s cult is sometimes another person’s community of awakening. In one passage of In Search of the Miraculous, a group of students tell Gurdjieff that their old friends believe that they have become colorless and boring, nothing more than parrots of Gurdjieff, veritable “machines.” (Today we would say that they were “brainwashed.”) Gurdjieff laughs enigmatically: “There is worse to come.”
Gurdjieff’s chuckle arises from the fact that when you are dealing with religious countercultures, which call into question the assumptions of conventional society, awakening and hypnosis often appear as two sides of the same coin—and it’s not always easy to tell which side you’re on. “Liberating” your outlook and behavior through psychospiritual means does not erase the problem of power and control; disrupting the troubled sleep of ordinary delusion, one runs the risk of simply swapping the old familiar archons for obscure and potentially more maniacal ones. At the same time, if the consensus reality we work in daily (and tune in to nightly) does indeed generate the kind of mechanical trance Gurdjieff describes, then awakening from this condition might make one more aware of, and even obsessed with, the subliminal forces of control. Suddenly, the whole social and symbolic arena of social reality, that rather haphazard carnival of soapbox cranks, snake-oil salesmen, and apparently reasonable discourse, takes on the appearance of a vast, if largely unconscious, conspiracy. Such paranoid specters often dog subcultures that self-consciously slip outside the mainstream, but they can be particularly vexing for those spiritual cyborgs who integrate modern ideas about thought programming, Pavlovian trigger signals, and hypnotic trances into their worldview.
Ideally, the sort of “self-remembering” techniques Gurdjieff described would enable one to evade the lures of paranoia and esoteric authoritarianism, but some psychospiritual sects that engage the mechanistic imaginary have impaled themselves on these two flesh-gripping prongs. Take Scientology, whose far cruder attempt to spiritualize the man-machine has made it the world’s first corporate cybernetic mystery cult. In the 1940s, L. Ron Hubbard was a regular contributor to John Campbell Jr.’s Astoun
ding Science Fiction, where he wrote stories about paranormal and rather fascist supermen who conquered worlds and wielded amazing psychokinetic powers; he also wrote Fear, one of the meatiest paranoia stories in pulp SF. After being hyped by Campbell, Hubbard’s article on Dianetics appeared in the May 1950 edition to great acclaim; its subsequent book form, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, sold 150,000 copies in a year. Offering a hands-on, straightforward approach to the problems that beset the human mind, Dianetics presented simple and sensible techniques that could clear people of the psychological problems and psychosomatic ills that Hubbard claimed constituted most ailments. As an added bonus, Hubbard hinted that these tricks could potentially unveil the same latent psychic powers that drew readers to his tales.
Less a science of mind than an engineering manual of mind, Dianetics began with a bold and now familiar assertion: the mind is a computer. In its optimum state, our “active mind” recalls all data, responds rationally, and solves all possible problems. But our active mind is obstructed by our “reactive mind,” a “memory bank” that corresponds loosely with Freud’s concept of the unconscious. Here lie “aberrative circuits,” dysfunctional habits that Hubbard labeled “engrams”: multisensory records of unpleasant experiences that can resurface in our lives as moments of fear, pain, or unconsciousness. For example, let’s say I was once bitten by a dog in a rainstorm; the sound of falling water and a barking Chihuahua would then restimulate the engram and ruin my day. By “auditing” such engrams—which means bringing them to consciousness and “processing” them through Dianetic techniques—one can step toward the optimum state of “Clear.”