Finding Soul Amidst the Digital Deluge
Soul, Solitude, and Data Deluge
This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
~ Joseph Campbell ~ The Power of Myth (p. 92)
Digital Overload: Then & Now
In the 1400s when the printing press was just starting to impact the higher echelons of European society there was concern that the consumption of so much information through books would overwhelm the human brain and advice was given to approach this newfangled gadget and its offspring with caution. As it turned out, humans were thrilled with the opportunity to get their information through reading rather than just through listening and the book industry flourished.
But as any academic who makes their living consuming data from books will tell you, there is a downside to consuming too much information: it can overwhelm the capacity to assimilate, discriminate, and integrate the information conveyed in all of that data leading to “analysis paralysis” - a form of intellectual constipation which is the bane of writers and academics everywhere. Like the intake of food or wine or conversation there must be moderation and periods of repose.
So what are we to make of the current situation in which, as research shows, the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of data each and every day - an amount which would crash your average computer within a week - and not even in one cohesive stream, such as a book would render, but in fits and starts and bits and snatches over an extended period of about 16 hours a day?
I suggest we need look no further for a diagnosis of our current mental and emotional predicament than this environment in which we are flailing and failing to flourish in a flood of information: a digital data deluge!
The Necessity of Quiet for Creative Incubation
When Joseph Campbell penned the quote at the top of this essay it was in the 1970s and he had only recently purchased his first desktop computer; one of those huge old machines which he immediately named Jehovah, explaining that, like its namesake, it was an entity of many rules and very little mercy. Social media had not been invented and one used the computer like a digital book and a quicker way of sending a letter. But even then, Campbell recognized the critical importance of having that mental moat and a drawbridge which one could pull up against the intrusions of the world in order to meditate in the interior garden of the heart.
His own interior garden was so fruitful that he produced books of extraordinary depth and complexity during his long lifetime, books which prove beyond a shadow of a doubt his capacity for entertaining difficult ideas for long stretches of time and slowly weaving concepts together to form radically new theories about myth in the ancient and modern world. It is this capacity for sustained thought and the product of sustained thought which is in such great peril today. The difficulty of maintaining sustained focus is a direct result of the daily intrusion of these 34 gigabytes of data that force themselves upon our awareness every hour that we are awake.
Technology is Training Us to Ignore Soul
An acronym that was very much in vogue a decade ago was the simple GIGA formula (garbage-in-garbage-out) which explained why technology could not save us: it would only give back to us some version of what we had already put in. But even darker and more critical was the insight from Marshall McLuhan who warned that our technology shapes us - the medium is the message. We are directly limited by what our technology will allow us to express and at the most fundamental level the language of technology is zeros and ones - a system of two digits, on and off - a system belonging exclusively to the “10,000 things of the created world" (the Taoist terminology for the material world) and therefore completely incapable of addressing the enormously varied and complex layers of reality which are the source of and the container for the 10,000 things.
Another way of describing this is that every moment that we are tethered to cell phones, laptops, televisions, iPads… we are being held in thrall to a world which recognizes only a tiny fraction of our whole existence, and which addresses us only in our role as consumers, never as fully embodied and ensouled creatures of the universe. We have plenty of research that shows how we tend to become that which we imagine ourselves to be, and that our environment and those humans who reflect ourselves back to us, have a very powerful influence over what we perceive ourselves to be.
If you are being told thousands of times a day that you are merely a consuming unit in a megaverse of consumable bytes, where will your soul reside? When will your soul find a clear space for expression? When will you as the artist, lover, explorer, dreamer, citizen find a way to live out a full existence on the stage of life?
Loss of Soul in the Workplace
This is the current state of affairs which, I believe, has led to what the ancients would call “soul loss.” Symptoms of soul loss include:
• Difficulty staying focused;
• Difficulty being present in your own body;
• Feelings of confusion, apathy, dullness;
• Chronic irritability and anxiety;
• Struggles with hard and soft addictions which includes the addiction to digital technology itself;
• Feelings of alienation from others;
• Disconnection from nature;
• Hopelessness about the future.
In psychology one of the terms that is often used in lieu of soul or religious language to describe these symptoms is dissociation which is the splitting off of various parts of the psyche in response to trauma or chronic stress. The severe compartmentalization of different aspects of your life is one of the symptoms that is most common today and easily seen by the amount of self that you have to leave behind before you go to work. This is the aspect of soul loss that is of greatest interest to me at the moment. I believe that The Great Resignation - the 20 million Americans who quit their jobs over the last two years - is a direct result of the devastating effects of this cutting off of the soul in the workplace.
The splitting of the soul from work has been used as a defense against work that is meaningless, toxic, punishing, or quite simply boring to the point of madness. It is understandable why you would want to protect your deepest self from such an environment. But the problem is that work now occupies a central position in the lives of all Americans and to leave soul out of that equation is to ban soul from the conversation altogether. We identify ourselves with our work, with our contributions to the public market, even our contributions in social media are part of our new work identity as we rack up likes and numbers of friends in a consumable system of points, all of which will be viewed by potential employers or suitors down the line.
Why We Must Bring Soul Back to Work
I really feel that we have no choice but to bring our souls back into the workplace and demand that room be made for them.
This means that we have to stop believing that the current conversation is actually reaching all the places it needs to reach. It means opening up the easy box of zeros and ones and forcing our systems to embrace greater flexibility and messiness. It means coaxing the human representatives of technological systems to engage in conversations that include references to our shared humanity, or shared vulnerabilities, or shared woundings and yearnings. It means standing up for the rights of the soul in the workplace, and this work has already begun in The Great Resignation. We must build on that forward momentum and not lose ground by retreating to the old formalities and listlessness of being nameless and faceless in the ranks of weary workers.
What did Joseph Campbell do in his hour of solitude after he closed the door on the banging and barking of the outside world? Well, he explained to Bill Moyers that his form of meditation was “underlining sentences.” Seeing his books with all the marginalia and paper notes still intact in his archives at Pacifica Graduate Institute assures us that he did, indeed, spend countless hours in this happy past time.
Find Your Method of Soul Retrieval
In my own reading and experience with techniques of soul retrieval I have found that by far the most powerful and direct activity is to literally find a room where you can close the door; play some music that you know your soul rejoices in; pick up a pen or a pencil that feels good in the hand and flows smoothly on the page, and begin to write whatever comes to mind. Like rolling away the stone from the mouth of the cave where the river of life wells up, the soul will pour forth the minute you give it the opportunity to do so.
And if you are loyal to this practice day after day the moment will come when you realize that you and your soul have become fast friends and that your soul is always there to whisper good advice and encouragement in the moments you need it most.
The other best practice that has been known to thousands of seekers worldwide is to develop the habit of sauntering out in the world. Wandering along country roads, skipping down park lanes, treading softly amongst ancient trees, wending your way beside babbling brooks - any of these will bring you back in touch with those places where the soul likes to come out of hiding. Entertain your thoughts and invite in the quieter voices and you will find yourself conversing with the soul. And if you’re not sure if it’s your own soul or the soul of the world, do not be distressed: they are finally one and the same.
And that is the deep truth that the binary language of technology can never understand: the unity of being which is the secret that stands behind the 10,000 things. Only the soul is large enough to hold that amount of data!
~ Rebecca Armstrong, August 2022
