I have always loved the stuff of communications technology. As a child, I was content for hours sitting in front of the big short-wave set in my uncle's living room searching for voices from far away. As a ten-year-old I learned Morse code and as a teenager became involved in pirate radio, regularly ruining the neighborhood TV reception whenever I started my home-brew broadcasts. In college, I spent most of my time at the campus FM station. My summer work as a TV film projectionist and cameraman (I covered home plate at Shea Stadium in New York), paid for much of my tuition. I have produced television programs, designed educational video networks and internet sites, and assisted PBS stations making the change to digital broadcasting. I'm the kind of person who can enjoy a walk down a country lane looking at the wildflowers – and calculating the line loss in the cable television wires on the poles overhead.
As many in my generation, I am also a searcher for something beyond my ego. Even in the midst of my technology work, I knew that something was missing in my mental approach to life. I began studying meditation, which eventually led me to the study of esoteric healing techniques. All of a sudden words like channeling, radiation and field intensity took on meanings quite different from the technical jargon I had mastered years before. While this work opened my heart, I was not at peace with the continued separation of my work and spiritual life. I did not want to quit my "day job" as an educational technology consultant. I was too excited about helping schools and public broadcasting stations build new digital networks. On the other hand, the kinds of experiences I was having as an energetic healer touched a deeper desire to be of service, one heart at a time. I was also bothered by my “more spiritual” friends' reaction to technology. It troubled me that that they took pride in not owning a television or in how much they hated their computers.
I saw no way to bring these two worlds together until I started rereading some of the key books of my college years – the works of Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan on technology and civilization, through the lens my new teachers: the old masters such as Sri Aurobindo, the Theosophists, and Teilhard de Chardin, and today’s scholars of noetic consciousness such as Michael Talbot, John White, Ken Wilber, Peter Russell, Duane Elgin, Christian de Quincy, and Howard Rheingold. I returned to the field of “media ecology” that had stimulated me so much in the 1970’s and 80’s, and gobbled up dozens of new books on the social impacts of the Internet, “flash mobs” and “small networks,” cell phones, and the alphabet itself.
With my newly opened esoteric eyes, I saw how our technologies extend not just our physical-sensory bodies, but our energetic and spiritual consciousness as well. I saw in how we use our external media, the light and shadow of our etheric bodies and the playing out of the core issues of our personal and our cultural evolution. I believe that our love/hate relationship with our electronic telecommunications technologies cannot be separated from the challenges of our spiritual evolution: our own light and our shadow. Our planetary healing work must include the recovery of these exiled senses, seeing them not as curse of technology, but as guideposts on the path of consciousness integration.
It is in this spirit that I offer an alternative vision of media ecology: the media as our externalized communal energy body, whose various forms both reflect and impact our planetary and personal energy systems. They are our "cultural mirrors" holding our highest vision, and our deepest fears. I suggest we don't shirk from taking a long look at the media with an open esoteric eye. Encoded in the very shadows of its negative projections – and we won’t shrink from looking at these shadows – are the same core lessons of transformation taught by all of the world's spiritual traditions. It could just be that our troubling electronic media reflect a set of metaphors that can help us make it through this cultural transition. All we have to do is look with new eyes!