The internet provides a unique opportunity for the evolution of human consciousness. It is a great playground for creating new and undreamed forms of expression. It acts both as a mirror and also as a magnifier and accelerator of human consciousness.

For countless millennia human consciousness has evolved slowly as major and minor traumas embedded themselves into our collective consciousness. Exploring human consciousness today is akin to revisiting centuries upon centuries of old nightmares that keep repeating themselves.

It is hardly surprising the world is in such a state of unbalanced greed, fear, and warfare as a result.

As the people researching artificial intelligence seek to trigger a new conscious awareness within their machines, they make fascinating discoveries. They speak of a point of singularity when change accelerates exponentially to a point of massive instantaneous change. They see this occuring solely through the technology itself.

However, they labor under a significant disadvantage. They regard humans as separate from their machines, failing to recognize the all pervasive reality that consciousness underlies everything in a seamless whole.

Greg Braden calls this the divine matrix, which is a useful enough term. Rather than review the scientific basis for the divine matrix, which he presents far better than I could anyway, let us simply use it as a working hypotheses. What happens if we notice that we are intrinsically connected with everything else? That our own consciousness is inherently one with everything, including far distant stars?

Actually, there usually is little practical application for such an idea, especially when we stubbornly dwell in our mental constructs of separateness. What practical relationship does the average person have with a far distant nameless star?

However, if we bring the idea closer to home and look at the internet, practical possibilities begin to show themselves. Everything in human consciousness, from the lowest dregs to the most sublime inspirations, can be found on the internet. With the lightning speed of electronic information transfer, ideas and events propagate through human awareness in ways never before seen.

This is a high risk endeavor indeed since it accelerates the negative as well as the positive in stunningly rapid fashion. Nonsense propagates readily, but then so do previously hidden facts. As the different flows of information intermingle at such high rates of speed, the process takes its own path.

The internet has been surprisingly resilient in its resistance to efforts to control it. In that respect it appears to be a direct manifestation of humanity’s exercise of spritual free will and choice.

Great alarm is raised when the freedoms of the internet are threatened. When Google acceded to China’s demands for censorship, indignation abounded. Yet, if the internet mirrors all of human consciousness, isn’t the heavily controlled Chinese population a part of this consciousness too?

The bigger question is what happens as China emerges as a major power? Will the internet with its surprising ability to change what it touches in unexpected ways, alter the Chinese stance, or will the Chinese ultimately be successful in some form of global censorship?

And just what do the Chinese bring to the table as a culture? They have a totally different concept of the individual and the group than westerners.

In the United States we still hold the concept of the rugged individual in high esteem, without quite noticing how sheeplike the vast majority of the population really is. We pride ourselves on our individuality, on each of us doing our own thing.

The Chinese have such an enormous population the individual is pretty much expendable and group issues are paramount. They have a saying that the nail that stands up will be hammered down, which sums up their general attitude towards individuality. This different awareness of the process of living and working in groups is one of the big pieces they bring to the whole of human consciousness.

The difficulty is that, even as our western concept of the individual holds distortions, so does the Chinese  concept of the group. Mixing distortions with other distortions is a hard way to evolve.

However, the internet does show evidence of the possibility it may be slightly more disposed to further human growth than to accelerate self destruction. The massive pornography segment of the internet with all its degrading qualities has inadvertently led to more positive usages. The porn sites have pioneered many methods that have been adopted in quite different arenas of interest.

The same can be said of gaming, which usually appeals to the extremely violent and destructive aspects of human nature. The process of creating games and equipment to support those games has quickly advanced much of the technology many of us now routinely use for other purposes.

If the hundreth monkey syndrome does hold sway in the untidy realms of the internet, we may be in for some even more surprising developments. Those who understand how to effectively use the internet as a tool will be able to leverage startling levels of growth and change in human consciousness.

The online event Oprah has started with Eckhart Tolle titled A New Earth is an indicator of the potential. As of the first week of this venture, seven hundred thousand people participated. Many of these people were encountering ideas quite alien to their usual manner of thinking and living, yet they began to actively explore the possibilities.

As the internet continues to mirror our collective consciousness to ourselves, as it continues to magnify and accelerate our evolution, we will surely find ourselves on a great adventure!

Copyright © Lexi Sundell 2008. All Rights Reserved.