Precessional Time and the Evolution of Consciousness by Richard Heath;

Author:Richard Heath;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: New Age/Spirituality
ISBN: 9781594779404
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

TECHNOLOGY AND THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

The story of modern science is unintentionally disempowering to the average person, as it attributes life on Earth to being entirely achieved through physical laws, and through the process of natural selection on an accidentally suitable planet. Now that science has developed our technological society, it is technological knowledge and capability that is evolving; we must adapt to it, rather than the knowledge adapting to us. Some expect that through genetic manipulation, we will change our human nature, though we do not know what this will mean; there are so many possible outcomes, and some of these could lead to disaster, which is exactly the scenario painted by Goethe in his poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

The poem begins as an old sorcerer departs his workshop, leaving his apprentice with chores to perform. Tired of fetching water by pail, the apprentice enchants a broom to do the work for him by using the magic he is not yet fully trained to employ. The floor is soon awash with water, and the apprentice realizes that he cannot stop the broom, because he does not know how.

He then splits the broom in two with an axe, but each of the pieces becomes a new broom and takes up a pail and continues fetching water, now at twice the speed. When all seems lost, the old sorcerer returns, quickly breaks the spell, and thereby saves the day. The poem finishes with the old sorcerer’s statement that powerful spirits should be called only by the master himself.1

We humans as technologists are now shaped by our own spell—due to various reasons, technologies are arguably beyond the control of the free-market societies in which they develop so rapidly. We can see this in the introduction of a technology as simple as the cell phone, where the original idea, of a mobile telephone, was soon overtaken by its social innovations and new markets, such as texting and photo capability. Meanwhile, cell phones are the cause of car accidents, anarchic mobilizations, economic activities, exposures to radiation, erosion of free time, and so on. It is likely that biological innovations will have unforeseen outcomes, especially when they involve human beings altering themselves.

A common myth in modern society is that of extraterrestrial beings bringing new technologies to Earth, which is then swamped with the consequences. Technology is such an alien process, but without the aliens: too much of something foreign that comes from outside individuals and changes everything about their lives. All systems need a certain amount of change, but too much change constitutes an imposition from outside, and under such circumstances, systems cannot learn. With more change, they no longer adapt but are changed from outside by a force majeure. In this scenario, the active force has moved to the outside, and this eliminates nature as a means of evolution for human beings.

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