the information age

The reason we're having an information age is to move beyond information. It may sound paradoxical, but that's the bottom line. Our spiritual evolution currently requires of us that we move beyond our general habit of deriving identity through information.

What does it mean to derive identity through information? It means believing the content of our thoughts is somehow relevant to the core of who or what we are. It's a common belief. The world we live in today is the faithful expression of doggedly persisting in it.

Wars, greed, over-consumption, global climate crisis, the decimation of other species. All these things arise from deriving identity from the content of thinking. From mind-based identity. If we operate from there, the only possible result is the proliferation of problems.

Why is that? Because mind-based identity is not essentially what we are. Because the essence of what we are is not to be found in the mind, and can't be. The mind cannot apprehend it, and tends to dismiss it for that very reason. Don't identify with that tendency.

In fact, don't identify with any of your thoughts. Distrust them all if they want you to identify with them, or form an identity as a result of them. They are only information. They are not the essence of who you are. No information is or can be. Not your essence.

The information age is our attempt to conjure this insight collectively because our survival is at stake if we don't. Without collective comprehension that the essence of ourselves, our nature, is beyond mind and information, extinction is the only outcome for us.

So we inundate ourselves with information. We make an age of it. We create an Information Age. And once we have, once we take our subservience to information to its furthest limit, we begin to rise above information by seeing it's not primary to identity.

This is a normal sequence of events in the process of consciousness expansion. That which is operating unconsciously (in this case information-based identity) directs something to happen (the Information Age) and thereby unexpectedly bursts its own bubble.

That's how consciousness expands. It thinks it's going one way and it is, but by going there completely, the motivation for going there reveals its limitations and loses its influence. The going there stops. It transforms into operating from somewhere else entirely.

With the Information Age we dive headlong into the collection and dissemination of content. We spread it everywhere. We compile it like mad. We think we are primarily interested in the information itself, but discover that why we would be is precisely the problem.

We are malingering in the paradigm of information-based identity. Humans have been stuck there a very long time. But the price of it is high enough now, after industrialization and the spread of technology, that we have to shift paradigms, or perish to keep it.

The purpose of the Information Age is to reveal and eradicate the prevailing inner obstacle to survival for our species. Our next evolutionary leap is spiritual, and involves the transcendence of mind-based informational identity for the sake of all life.