Heidegger, Advaita and Spirituality

 As my previous posts might have shown I'm currently in the process of trying to digest my way through Heidegger's question concerning technology. I don't get much time to read usually so I haven't been making much progress but his ideas relating to technology seem extremely brilliant to me. Though I haven't gotten through and internalized exactly what the essay means to say yet, a lot of different ideas have been bouncing around in my head. I could have started off directly with the ideas but this preface seemed necessary to highlight what got me onto this line of thinking, though I would like to think that these ideas lie on a previously untraveled trail. I also think it's more important to do philosophy than talk about philosophy i.e. to talk about and create ideas instead of discuss a history of ideas to validate some crystallization of a worldview you have come to so I don't really know how much of these ideas are mine and how much are already about to be mentioned in the essay (especially because I haven't finished reading it).

The video that initially pointed me towards reading this essay was about transhumanism, and it used some of Heidegger's ideas to show that even ideas or identities themselves can be interpreted as a form of technology. It described the tendency of technology to become unnoticeable (the classic example of a workman feeling that a hammer has become a part of his body) and how that could be extrapolated to even worldviews with certain basic assumptions about the world. When the essay posed the question to uncover the essence of technology I tried to think about it for myself. 

The more I thought about it, the more things around me could be interpreted as a form of technology, in the sense it is used in the essay. Tools and objects are something we find pretty easy to conceptualize as technology, however once we make the abstraction to start considering ideas and whole worldviews as forms of technology- a means to an end, a human activity, having the tendency to become unnoticeable etc. we can zoom out to almost everything in our objective experience and call it a form of technology. I tried to wonder what does not count as technology in this conception- our identities, our thoughts, our beliefs- each and every thing could be conceptualized as a form of Heideggerean technology. But in the experience of using a technology, there is also something which is not the technology. For the technological tendency to become unnoticeable, there has to be a subject which utilizes and notices that technology. The essence of technology, that which uncovers the truth of it, is hence inextricably linked to the subject which utilizes the technology. 

When I had finished this whole process for myself, I of course realized immediately what I was coming close to. I am a rather hardcore idealist and from what I have read and understood of the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, it seems mostly correct to me (even though I am pretty wary of religion). I realized that unknowingly what I had embarked on was nothing but the process of neti-neti which has been described in Advaita! (For the unfamiliar, this process is basically a way to uncover the nature of your true self which successively observes more subtle objects of experience and then disregards them as being essential to that nature). A question asked to discuss the nature of technology has become full blown metaphysical enquiry.

This definition simply says that all objective experience occurring within the field of consciousness is technology. Paraphrasing a metaphor from Rupert Spira, Pure undifferentiated consciousness manifests itself into the myriad differentiated forms to form a perspective on itself. The subject is presence in which objects of experience manifest. If you look at something from everywhere, it would just appear dark. The most fundamental technology we encounter, our separate self has a tendency to become unnoticeable, is a means to an end and is the very activity which makes us human. 

Well, there is a problem though. I conveyed what I wanted to say here through representational symbols, which are a form of technology. It is impossible to escape the matrix of representation through representation. This is why I think that metaphors of symbols, even as beautiful or close to the truth as those of Advaita Vedanta are ultimately worth little on the journey. This doesn't devalue them of course, and I do believe that through the beautiful chants and the process of shravana-manana-niddhidhyasana it may have been possible for the great sages to become marinated by the teachings to a point where the barrier dissolved by itself. However, to quote a talk from Krishnamurti, Vedanta can be interpreted as "the end of knowledge" or "moving beyond knowledge". To move beyond knowledge through concepts of knowledge is rather contradictory, though it may have worked in different times. If one has to move beyond the matrix of representation and conditioned reality anyways, what is the point in accumulating more baggage along the way through different religions? This does not mean that one cannot enjoy their beautiful metaphors, or chants or singing, however to want to seek pleasure in that which you have already enjoyed is also a form of desire.

This is why I think metaphysical speculation is eventually useless, and the last 10 minutes you spent reading this were wasted. However the conception of all objective experience as technology is a rather helpful framework which I may expand on sometime later.