Some fifty years ago, Alvin Toffler wrote his prescient book “Future Schock, that in which he described how the pace of change within a society will have a decided effect on people’s psyches. Since then, as many of us are now aware, that rate of change has expanded exponentially, almost to the point in which, with the emergence of A.I., it is often even stripping the pace at which we are able to think and process information. This means of course that there is a significant danger that we will all grow increasingly less settled and at peace within ourselves simply because our minds and thoughts are moving inside us at an increasingly faster rate of speed.
Then, as a result of this trend, we can easily grow less creative in approaching difficulties and concerns in our daily lives simply because, due to the movement of our increasingly quicker thought processes, the rate of which we are losing the ability to control because of how the digital world has conditioned our minds and thoughts to move forward at an increasingly faster pace, we will become less likely to slow our mental lives enough to take the necessary amount of time to be as creative with our thoughts as we otherwise might become. As a consequence of this, our creative processes in dealing with events and circumstances in our lives might well grow increasingly shallower and narrower.
There has for a long time now been an old mistaken adage that the more quickly one thinks, the more creative one will be. This is not only necessarily untrue, but it in fact often points us all in the wrong direction, for much of the time one’s capacity to think creatively has very much to do with the capacity to slow one’s thought processes enough to where one can experience moments of direct insight which exist on the other side of thought, memory, and even knowledge. In fact, possibly the single most important dynamic leading toward creative apprehensions of the world is a quiet mind, one that is able to make significant connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information simply because the space in one’s mind had become more open, more expansive.
There is also the tendency, one which has become increasingly pronounced, to let A.I. discover the validity of certain information for us for which we may be looking, rather than to explore the labyrinth of our own thinking minds in doing so. What this no doubt means is that we will spend less time exploring what might be the vast expanse of our minds in attempting to apprehend the truth about something; and in doing so we tend to abrogate the possibility of a larger consciousness growing within us simply because our mind has become less expansive as we follow its contours. On the other hand, as one takes this particular journey far enough in the other direction, as certain visionaries have, one might indeed come to inhabit some sort of larger, potentially limitless intelligence.
For centuries now, almost from the time when people became aware of the thoughts inside their minds and what they might do to control them, mankind has been searching for a quiet mind, one which will allow us to find some measure of inner peace. Unfortunately, with the current advent of digital technologies, particularly an intelligence which is becoming increasingly artificial, that goal may be on the way to becoming increasingly unreachable. And for those who believe such a quiet mind can always be reached by following certain meditative practices, they might do well to bear in mind that true silence within oneself comes during the course of one’s daily life, not through certain practices which are necessarily separate from that existence.