People have become so machinelike that that the most human character will turn out to be a machine. As busy prosumers now sometimes volunteer their machines, instead of their labor, they are uncooking the books. The best-know case is that of SETI, the search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. While the likelihood of our discovering life elsewhere, let along “intelligent” life, may be minute, the scientific, philosophical and cultural implications of such a finding can hardly be overestimated. So volunteers have stepped forward to help. The search required the collection of huge quantities of radio telescope data. However, analyzing it required far more supercomputer power than any individual machine at that time could provide. That led two Seattle computer scientists, Craig Kasnoff and David Gedye, to ask whether, if they could not gain access to supercomputers, they could create a virtual supercomputer to do the job. If they could get PC users linked via the Internet to allow free access to their computers and permit the SETI searchers to use the machines when these were otherwise idle, they could build one, they believed. Optimistically, Kasnoff and Gedye hoped they might link up a few hundred thousand machines. By spring of 2002, more than 3.5 million PC owners had contributed more than a million years of processing time to the SETI venture. The result is a project headquartered at the University of California/Berkeley, which sends out six hundred thousand packets of data daily for processing on these privately owned computers. According to the Planetary Society, “The sheer power of millions of computers Worldwide has made SETI@home the most sensitive deep-sky survey ever done.” The SETI model has since been replicated elsewhere. Oxford University scientists and others have turned to Internet users around the World for help in researching smallpox, cancer, other deadly viruses, climate change and other significant problems.

When envelopes bearing anthrax turned up on Capital Hill in Washington and other sites after the 9/11 terror attacks, they touched off a national panic. In rapid response, three companies—Microsoft, Intel, and United Devices—plus Oxford University and National Foundation for Cancer Research, launched a joint project to search for molecules that could block the deadly action of anthrax. In twenty-four days they screened 3.5 billion different compounds. That helped scientists eliminate as irrelevant all but 300,000 compounds, among which they identified 12,000 priority targets. The project also uncovered a number of potentially useful compounds that conventional methods would have, in all likelihood, overlooked. Even with the backing of such giants as Microsoft and Intel, this breakthrough would have been impossible without the contribution of prosumer/volunteers. The anthrax research partly piggybacked on the machines already recruited for cancer research and added some more. In all, more than 1.35 million people, from Mexico and China to Equatorial Guinea and Azerbaijan, participated. In the United States of America more than 100,000 machines were volunteered; in Germany, 14,000; in France, 4,400; and in South Korea, 1,593. There were even four in Afghanistan—which, considering the hunt for Al Qaeda’s bioweapons, presumably raised some eyebrows. The computer innovations exploited by SETI, anthrax and cancer researchers have since exploded into what has come to be called grid or distributed computing. Imitating the prosumer projects, hundreds of big companies have created their own internal grids to take advantage of the unused capacity of their own networked machines.

What we see here is yet another form of free lunch delivered to the money economy by a prosumer project—in this case early testing of a powerful innovation—that has turned into a multibillion-dollar market in the money economy. Again we see that the wall separating the commercial World from the prosumer World is nonexistent. We see evidence, too, that business and government decision-makers need to understand and take far smarter advantage of the free-lunch phenomenon. Underscoring that statement is the likelihood that prosuming, already far larger than most suspect, is about to become bigger than ever, propelled by mutually reinforcing changes in social, cultural and demographic factors that, it turn, will promote an explosion of new prosumer technologies. Thus, along with a “graying” of the population in the United State of America has come a different kind of retiree. Like so many other boundaries, the line between work and retirement is also blurring, with many more senior citizens falling into a semi-retired category and using unpaid time to volunteer and engage in other prosumer activities. According to AAPR, the organization of Americans over fifty, this age group forms the backbone of volunteerism in the United States of America. It forecasts that volunteering will increase as populations live longer and healthier and refuse to live in idleness. The same pattern is evident in Japan. Similarly, the continuing acceleration of change points to relatively high levels of frictional unemployment—temporary joblessness as people change jobs, switch careers or move to new locations. Today “frictional volunteers” working free for nonprofit organizations include people with a wide range of specialized skills—lawyers, accountants, marketing experts, Web designers and the like.

Beyond all this, the Internet will bring into being temporary groupings of all kinds for as-yet-unheard-of prosumer activities—and with them, very often, temporary new markets—including markets for new technologies. These technologies, in turn, will further diversify and empower prosumers. This self-feeding process has just begun. As it gains force, it will compel us to recognize the hidden half of the emerging revolutionary wealth system—and the serious risks and fantastic opportunities that come with it. If you are still in doubt, listen next to the sound of music. The very expression dignity of man, even when Pico della Mirandola coined it in the fifteenth century, had a blasphemous ring to it. Man as man had not been understood to be particularly dignified. God had dignity, and whatever dignity man had was because he was made in God’s image (as well as from dust) or because he was the rational animal whose reason could grasp the whole of nature and hence was akin to that whole. However, now the dignity of man has neither of those supports; and the phrase means that man is the highest of the beings, an assertion emphatically denied by both Aristotle and the Bible. Man is elevated and alone. If this is to be plausible, man must be free—not in the sense of ancient philosophy, according to which a free man is one who participates in a regime where he rules as well as is ruled; nor in the sense of Hobbes and Locke, according to whom a free man is one who can follow his reason without having to obey God or man—but free in a much grander sense, that of legislating to oneself and to nature, hence without guidance from nature. The complement to and explanation of this view of freedom is creativity. We have become so accustomed to this word that it has no more effect on us than the most banal Fourth of July oratory.

As a matter of fact, it has become our Fourth of July oratory. However, when it was first used for humans, it had the odor of blasphemy and paradox. God alone had been called a creator; and this was the miracle of miracles, beyond causality, a denial of the premise of all reason, ex nihilo nihil fit. What defines man is no longer his reason, which is but a tool for his preservation, but his art, for in art man can be said to be creative. There he brings order to chaos. The greatest men are not the knowers but the artists, the Homers, Dantes, Raphaels, and Beethovens. Art is not imitation of nature but liberation from nature. A man who can generate visions of a cosmos and ideals by which to live is a genius, a mysterious, demonic being. Such a man’s greatest work of art is himself. He who can take his person, a chaos of impressions and desires, a thing whose very results from the free activity of his spirit and his will. He contains in himself the elements of the legislator and the prophet, and has a deeper grasp of the true character of things than the contemplatives, philosophers, and scientists, who take the given order as permanent and fail to understand man. Such is the restoration of the ancient greatness of man against scientific egalitarianism, but how different he now looks! All this new language is a measure of the difference; and reflection on how the Greeks would translate and articulate the phenomena it describes is the task of a lifetime, which would pay rich rewards in self-understanding. The vocabulary of self, culture, and creativity pretty much sums up the effects of what Rousseau began. It expresses the dissatisfactions with the scientific and political solutions of the Enlightenment. It turns around the understanding of what nature is. Somehow nature was always that by which men oriented themselves.

However, no influential thinker has tried to return to the pre-Enlightenment understanding of nature, the so-called teleological view, in which nature is the fullness in its own kind that each of the beings strives to attain. The reaction to nature viewed as matter in motion, which can be conquered for the sake of man’s needs, was twofold: a return to the nation that nature is good, but only the brute nature of the fields, forests, mountains and streams in which beast live contentedly; or a transcendence of nature altogether in the direction of creativity. The latter solution conquered the Continent, and came from Germany to England by way of men like Coleridge and Carlyle. Very from Germany to England by way of men like Coleridge and Carlyle. Very few thinkers were consistent or took seriously the full meaning of this revolution in thought. Hegel is the greatest exception. However, everyone was affected by it, and its influence ran across the entire political spectrum, from Right to Left. Marxism as well as conservatism as we know them are unthinkable without what Rousseau did. A small but illuminating example of the pervasiveness of ant-Enlightenment thought today is how scientists themselves have taken to styling themselves as “creative.” However, nothing could be more contrary to the spirit of science than the opinion that the scientist fabricates rather than discovers his results. If there is anything to it, scientists are to a man against creationism, recognizing rightly that their science is wrong and useless. However, they fail to see that creativity has exactly the same consequence. Either nature has a lawful order or it does not; either there can be miracles or there cannot. Scientists do not prove that there are no miracles, they assume it; without this assumption there is no science.

It is easy to deny God’s creativity as a thing of the benighted past, overcome b science, but man’s creativity, a thing much more improbable and nothing but an imitation of God’s, exercises a strange attraction. In honoring it, the scientists’ opinions are not the result of science or of any serious reflection on science. They are merely conforming to democratic public opinion, which has, unawares, been captured by Romantic notions adapted to flatter it (every man a creator). The artist, not the scientist, has become the admired human type; and science senses that it must assimilate itself to that type in order to retain its respectability intact. When every man was understood to be essentially a reasoner, the scientists could be understood to be a perfection of what all men wanted to be. That was Enlightenment’s way of establishing the centrality of science and making it admired. This change in self-description shows how the Zeitgeist has altered and how science, instead of standing outside of it and liberating men from it, has been incorporated into it. The theoretical life has lost its status. Now the scientist scrambles to recover his position as the perfect of what all men want to be; but what all men want to be has changed, undermining the natural harmony between science and society. Some may consider this labeling trivial, akin to C.P. Snow’s calling a science a “culture.” Science may appear creative only because we forget what creativity really mean and take it to be cleverness at proposing hypotheses, finding proofs or inventing experiments. From this perspective, science is unaffected, and we have just another example of the pollution of language. However, this form of pollution, although less feared than the other kind, is really more deadly. It is the intellectual disorder of our age.

The use of insignificant speech entails loss of clarity about what science and art are, weakening both in an impossible synthesis of opposites appealing to a society that wants to be told that it enjoys all good things. If not detailed in the process, there is here a sinister loss of confidence in the idea of science, the idea which was found at the foundation of democratic society and the absolute in a relativized World. These scientists know not what they do. Philosophy, despised and rejected by positive science, has its revenge when it is vulgarized into coarse public opinion and intimidates that science. So the effects of Rousseau and his followers are everywhere around us, in the bloodstream of public opinion. Of course the use of words like “creativity” and “personality” does not mean that those who use them understand the thought that made their use necessary, let alone agree with it. The language has been trivialized. Words that were meant to describe and encourage Beethoven and Goethe are not applied to every school-child. It is in the nature of democracy to deny no one access to good things. If those things are really not accessible to all, then the tendency is to deny the fact—simply to proclaim, for example, that what is not art is art. There is in American society a mad rush to distinguish oneself, and, as soon as something has been accepted as distinguishing, to package it in such a way that everyone can fee included. Creativity and personality were intended to be terms of distinction. They were, as a matter of fact, intended to be the distinctions appropriate to egalitarian society, in which all distinction is threatened. The levelling of these distinctions through familiarity merely encourages self-satisfaction. Now that they belong to everyone, they can be said to mean nothing, both in common parlance and in the social science disciplines that use them as “concepts.” They have no specific content, are a kind of opiate of the masses. They do, however, provide a focus for all the dissatisfactions that any life anywhere and at any time provides, particularly those fostered in a democratic society.

Creativity and personality take the place of older words like virtue, industry, rationality and character, affect our judgments provide us with educational goals. They are the bourgeois’ way of not being unadventurous. Hence they are sources of snobbishness and pretentiousness alien to our real virtues. We have a lot of good engineers but very few good artists. All the honor, however, goes to the latter, or rather, one should say, those who stand in for the latter in the eyes of the many. The real artists do not need this kind of support and are instead weakened by it. The moneymaker is not the most appetizing personality, but he is far preferable to the intellectual phony. Thus what was intended as an elevation of taste and morality has merely become grist for our mill while sapping the mill’s foundation. This was not the only rest in Europe, where creativity had at times an inspiring effect and where the notion had more to feed off of. Even there, as we shall soon see, the balance sheet is arguably negative. However, here I can see no benefits. And now the mother-word itself—culture—has also become part of empty talk, its original imprecision now carried to the point of pathology. Anthropologists cannot define it although they are sure there is such a thing. Artists have no vision of the sublime, but they know culture (id est, what they do) has a right to the honor and support of civil society. Sociologists and the disseminator of their views, the journalists of all descriptions, call everything a culture—the drug culture, the rock culture, the street-gang culture, and so on endlessly and without discrimination. Failure of culture is now culture. This is how the heroic response to the French Revolution fared when it immigrated to America. Our country is still a melting pot. The crucial core of the True Love Waits philosophy is contained in this pledge that hundreds of thousands of young women and men have signed: “Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate and my future children to be sexually abstinent from this day, until the day I enter a Biblical marriage relationship.

True Love Waits is clear and uncompromising in asserting its values and assumptions about humankind. True love exists as a God-given emotional dynamic. It is an identifiable phenomenon that blesses only heterosexual couples—love intragender is neither true nor sacred. When true love strikes, the man and woman so blessed should respond by making their union permanent, legal, and honorable in a ceremony that is biblically inspired. Afterward, in the final sublime sequence, comes consummation of pleasures of the flesh. True Love Waits (to be wed in holy matrimony before going all the way) was founded in April 1993 in the U.S. Bible Belt city of Nashville, Tennessee, after youth minister Richard Ross was galvanized by fourteen-year-olds who confided to him, We’re the only virgins left in our school.” They may have been, and their plight was replicated in promiscuous educational intuitions all over the Western World. True Love Waits, with its deceptively simple message cunningly touted, soon attracted hundreds of thousands of pledged Waiters. A movement had been born. Celibacy is at the Heart of True Love Waits, a beneficial, confident, reassuring celibacy. It validates and shores up those young your who remain chaste, but also embraces legions of remorseful nonvirgins it designates “secondary virgins.” Students who have failed sexually can be invited to seek God’s forgiveness and make a True Love Waits pledge ‘from this day forward.’” Ergo, instant redemption, and though even True Love Waits cannot repair broken hymens, it does comfort the contrite and pardon the penitent. Amid the barrage of messages blasted forth by our ubiquitous media, the pronouncements of True Love Waits sound calm and clear in the cacophony. God does not condone premarital pleasures of the flesh. Virginity is a “gift you can only give once.” “Put the focus where God does: on the heart.” “Be willing to wait creatively.” It is not wise for Christians to date non-Christians.

God wants you to be in charge of your life. He will bring you the right partner at the right time. Certain attractions are considered not immoral, but sexualizing them may cross the biblical barrier and could be considered sinful. Walk closer to God. The idea of pleasures of the flesh is derived from, based upon, the pair of opposites—masculine, feminine. Like all other ideas it has to be transcended; like all other pairs of opposites, it has to be brought into equilibrium. In the wild, ungoverned, unhealthy, and irresponsible atmosphere of pleasures of the flesh which covers the younger generation’s World today, we may find some explanation why it was regarded with suspicion, or opposed altogether, not so long ago. They turn away from the passionate desires of the flesh; they seek an existence devoid of its animality. However, lacking esoteric knowledge, without understanding how spirit and body are interwoven, too often they suffer defeat. So far as psychoanalysis confirms the demands of pleasures of the flesh craving without putting upon it the basic disciplines which health, character, and self-respect require, so far does it cease to be a therapy, and become an injury. The enchantment and glamour in which lovers find themselves are too often false and deceptive, mere preliminary devices used by Nature to get them together and thus fulfil her larger purposes. The ancient Greek or Roman thinker who likened their condition to a form of madness was not so far wrong as he seems. However, often also it is subject to change; the glamour goes or is transferred elsewhere or, worse, is transformed into repulsion. And where pleasures of the flesh is not the hidden operative factor, one of the two is a victim of—or possessed by—some other force: ambition, economic need, vanity, the power complex.

Pleasures of the flesh polarity provides the force brining the bodies of men and women into intermittent attractive relation, but mental polarity provides a more lasting one. The strict discipline to which desires for pleasures of the flesh was subject in the earlier stages is abandoned in the later ones, for all lusts and wraths fall away of their own accord as one’s own growth, with the touch of grace, sets one free. As the energy of pleasures of the flesh is transmuted by will and mentally distributed throughout every part of the body, it bestows physical strength and resistance to disease. Where fate forces the practice of complete abstinence it should be accepted philosophically and its compensatory benefits recognized. Lust rises like a fever, rages along its course, and then subsides. However, between start and finish much of a lifetime may pass away. When adolescent boys and girls are able to rush from one pleasure to another, from one emotional entanglement to another, without a thought of the consequences involved or of other persons concerned, except what contribution they can make to selfish enjoyment, when all this is done in the name of modern self-expression, then a state of moral danger can be said to exist. A philosophical way of controlling the animal passion in humans it that if we think often of the inevitability of our own death, if we will remember that the upshot of all our activities is the funeral-pyre, the burial grave, we will begin to realize how pitiful, how untimely worthless, and how immediately transient are our all our passions. How will the animal passions appeal to the man lying on his deathbed? The thought of death even to those who are still very much alive will thus diminish the strength of lust, greed, hate, and anger. The force which humans spend in ungoverned desires for pleasures of the flesh keeps them imprisoned in their lower nature. This same force can be sublimated by will, imagination, aspiration, prayer, and meditation. When this is gone, the Overself can then instruct them for they will be able to hear its voice.

True Love Waits is assisted by aggressive and savvy marketing. It offers typical teen paraphernalia: T-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, scarves, baseball caps, wall banners and posters, pendants, pins, ring, necklaces, as well as Bibles, manuals, and general literature. Its slogans—“Stop your urgin’, be a virgin,” “Pet your dog, not your girlfriend,” and for reborn virgins, the wistful “I miss my virginity”—rival in targeted triteness those of any other megasuccessful ad campaign. True Love Waits promotes Christian music (The Newsboys, DeGarmo & Key Steven Curtis Chapman, Geoff Moore and the Distance, DC Talk, Audio Adrenaline) and dances—no Waiter need forgo typical teen recreations. In fact, this music and these dances—free of drugs and pleasures of the flesh—encourage energetic young people to socialize with each other and sublimate their energies for pleasures of the flesh in recognizably typical ways, with no sense of deprivation. However, because of the movement’s focus on sexual abstinence and the moral courage it inspires in believers, they have little difficulty in abiding by their vows. True Love Waits also demands active proselytizing from it converts and orchestrates these drives with sophisticated and practical, detailed instructions. The object is usually to garner media attention as well as new and secondary virgins. In February 1996, for instance, True Love Waiters swarmed into Atlanta’s Georgia Dome to attend a chastity rally. However, the truly spectacular moment was when three hundred and fifty thousand signed pledge cards were hoisted on cables upward to the ceiling. Even more striking was Life magazine’s September 1994 color spread of 211,163 of these cards staked into the ground near the Washington Monument. The 1997 Valentine’s Dy Vision—displaying True Love Waits commitment cards on secondary-school campuses through the USA—demonstrates the organization’s determination and ambition.

Material from the True Love Waits/Goes Campus literature maps out the plan step-by-step: advance planning, conducting motivating True Love Waits retreats, Bible studies and ring ceremonies, communication with other Christian groups and clubs to muster helpful support, dealing with school administrations and the media, and after the great event, dismantling the display. Should recalcitrant educational officials stymie the students’ efforts during the long, complicated process preceding the Valentine’s Day Vision, “the students should graciously say they will need to discuss the issue further and will return at a later time.” Avoid emotionalism, the literature advises the students, it will probably work against you. Resort instead to either creative alternatives—perhaps a display across the street from the forbidden campus—or to the law, especially the Equal Access Act, included with Valentine’s Day Vision kit as an emergency contingency. True Love Waits has spread from its American Bible Belt base through the USA, even to California, where a teenager gives birth every eight minutes. This is no fad, teachers talk about this [chastity] for days in the hallways and school yard. Students who are confused and want to be pure are happy to hear that people are supporting their desire to wait. They believe that signing the pledge will help them stick to their abstinence. God does not count it against the heart which has become pure that it was earlier accustomed “to rise up.” Certainly even the erring and struggling man was “with Him,” for the man who struggles for God is near Him even when one imagines that one is driven far from God. That is the reality of life. However, being with God also reveals to the struggling person that in the hour when—not led astray by doubt and despair into treason, and becomes pure in heart—one comes to the sanctuaries of God. Here one receives the revelation of the “continually.” One who draws near with a pure heart to the divine mystery, learns that one is continually with God.

It is a revelation. It would be a misunderstanding of the whole situation to look on this as a pious feeling. From the humans’ side there is no continuity, only from God’s side. God and one are continually with one another. One cannot express this experience as a word of God; but it can be expressed by a gesture of God. God has taken your right hand—as a father, so one may add, in harmony with that expression “the generation of thy children,” takes his little son by the hand in order to lead him. More precisely, as in the dark a father takes his little son by the hand, certainly in order to lead him, but primarily in order to make present to one, in the warm touch of coursing blood, the fact that God, the father, is continually with one. Through True Love Waits evolved and matured in the heartland of Christian Protestant fundamentalism, its engineers have been canny or ecumenical enough to reach out to the twenty-three thousands parishes and millions of American Roman Catholics The Church has clasped tight their outstretched hands and officially adopted True Love Waits. After all, what is chastity but a new way of sharing an old message for us. The guiding counsel of God seems to by simply the divine Presence communicating itself direct to the pure in heart. One who is aware of the Presence acts in the changing situation of one’s life differently from one who does not perceive this Presence. The Presence acts as counsel: God counsels by making know that He is present. He had led His son out of darkness into the light, and now he can walk in the light He is not relieved of taking and directing his own steps. The revealing insight has changed life itself, as well as the meaning of the experience of life. It also changes the perspective of death. For the oppressed human death is only the mouth towards which the sluggish stream of suffering and trouble flows. However, not it has become the event in which God—the continually Present One, the One who grasps the human’s hand, the Good one—“takes” a human.

If television puts our minds in a passive-receptive mode, if it inhibits thinking processes as the preceding remarks certainly suggest, can this be seen as beneficial? As mentioned before, many seem to like what happens to them. People say “it relaxes my mind,” others use the term “spaced-out,” some call it “meditative.” The evidence that television produces alpha brain waves, commonly associated with meditation states, encourages the idea that something beneficial can result, especially for our mentally obsessed culture. In many ways, we are a people isolated in our heads. Nature is absent. Our senses are deprived. The business person lives in the mental World of offices: paper work and forward-focused, driven-thinking processes. The suburban person lives in predefined mental and physical movement patterns: freeways, mechanical kitchens, repetitive routines. The child sits in schools, fixed in chairs, focused on mental work, attempting to channel thoughts in a way that will help later in this World. As the environment has been reconstructed into linear monolithic patterns, and as our days have been reconstructed to function within those patterns, our minds have had to adjust. We drive them forward into obsessive work. We push our thoughts into line, marching with military precision, objectified, analytical, isolated from our senses, our feelings and any alternate patterns of mind. We need to do this. The creative free-roaming mind would help neither the child get through school nor the adult pay rent. We have celebrated “the life of the mind,” but is this the mind we wanted? When we speak of relaxing our minds nowadays, it is not as though we have been working them at anything like their capacity. If our mind are strained, it is from confinement within one pattern of thinking. Most of our mental capacities have gone fat and soft, or dead from atrophy. It may be that our minds are not tired from overwork, but underwork.

If you have ever done physical exercise on a regular basis, you know the result is not exhaustion, but stimulation. The more of it you do, the more you wish to do, and the more you can do. It is only after extraordinarily long effort that one becomes depleted and needs rest. And then relaxation is sweet. In our culture, the chronically exhausted person is the one who sits all day, or the one whose physical work is chained to fixed patterns: assembly line, store counter, waiting on tables. I believe it is the same with out mins. Confined to one mental process, they are exhausted by underuse and repetition. After a day of paper work, turned off in so many realms of experience, compulsive and obsessive in those that remain, we dearly seek to escape mentally. Psychiatrists report that an increasing number of people these days complain they cannot quiet their mins. One cannot will the mind to cease its fixations and rumination. Even when it comes to sleep or pleasures of the flesh or play, experiences that require shifting out of focused thought, the mind continues to churn. It is little wonder, therefore, that we have seen the sudden growth of Eastern religious disciplines, yogic practices, martial arts, diverse exercise regimens and many forms of meditation. They help relieve the agonies of uncalm minds pacing their narrow cages. They stop obsessive thinking and open alternative mental awareness. They allow for the reception of new experiences. They encourage yielding as opposed to always driving forward. They teach people to take in rather than put out. A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.

The reason, according to attention restoration theory, or ART, is that when people are not being bombarded by external stimuli, their brains can, in effect, relax. They no longer have to tax their working memories by processing a stream of bottom-up distractions. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind. Three dozen people were subjected to a rigorous, and mentally fatiguing, series of tests designed to measure the capacity of their working memory and their ability to exert top-down control over their attention. The subjects were then divided into two groups. Half of them spent about an hour walking through a secluded woodland park, and the other half spent an equal amount of time walking along busy downtown streets. Both groups then took the tests a second time. Spending time in the park, the researchers found, “significantly improved” people’s performance on the cognitive tests, indicating a substantial increase in attentiveness. Walking in the city, by contrast, led to no improvement in test results. The researchers then conducted a similar experiment with another set of people. Rather than taking walks between the rounds of testing, these subjects simply looked at photographs of either calm rural scenes or busy urban ones. The results were the same. The people who looked at picture of nature scenes were able to exert substantially stronger control over their attention, while those who looked at city scenes showed no improvement in their attentiveness. Therefore, simple and brief interactions with nature can produce marked increases in cognitive control. Spending time in the nature World seems to be f vital importance to effective cognition. However, there is no Sleepy Hollow on the Internet, no peaceful spot where contemplativeness can work its restorative magic. There is only the endless, mesmerizing buzz of the urban street.

The stimulation of the Net, like those of the city, can be invigorating and inspiring. We would not want to give them up. However, they are, as well, exhausting and distracting. They can easily overwhelm all quitter modes of thought. One of the greatest dangers we face as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is that one that informs the fears of both the scientist Joseph Weizenbaum and the artist Richard Foreman: a lot erosion of our humanness and our humanity. While many people use ancient disciplines to achieve freedom from the driving of their minds, most people do not, choosing drugs instead. Alcohol is good. Valium is better. Some sleeping potions work. And there is television. They all succeed. Drugs provide escape while passing for experience and relaxation. Television does as well. All help break obsessive thinking, but this is where their similarity with meditation and other disciplines come to an end. It is not only deep thinking that requires a clam, attentive mind. It is also empathy and compassion. When dealing with how people react to fear and physical threats, we found we the higher emotions emerge from neural processes that are inherently slow. When listening to stories describing people experiencing physical or psychological pain, as subjects were put into a magnetic resonance imaging machine and their brains were scanned, as they were asked to remember these stories; the experiment revealed that while the human brain reacts very quickly to demonstration of physical pain—when you see someone injured, the primitive pain centers in in one’s own brain activate almost instantaneously—the more sophisticated mental process of empathizing with psychological suffering unfolds much more slowly. It takes time, the researchers discovered, for the brain to transcend immediate involvement of the body and begin to understand and to feel the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation.

The experiment indicates that the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion, and other emotions. For some kind of thought, especially moreal decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection. If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states. It would be rash to jump to the conclusion that the Internet is undermining our moral sense. It would not be rash to suggest that the Net reroutes our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts. Relaxation implies renewal. One runs hard, then rests. While resting, the muscles fist experience calm and then, as new oxygen enters them, renewal. Similarly, one thinks and thinks, driving one’s mind forward. To relax the mind, one needs to cease thinking to calm the mind. However, people are not interested in empty minds, but minds that are empty only long enough to be refilled by the Net and TV. When you are watching television, absorbing techno-guru, your mind may be in alpha, but it is certainly not “empty mind.” Images are pouring into it. Your mind is not quiet or calm or empty. It may be nearer to dead, or zombie-ized. It is occupied. No renewal can come from this condition. For renewal, the mind would have to be at rest, or once rested, it would have to be seeking new kinds of stimulation, new exercise. Television offers neither rest nor stimulation. Television inhibits yours ability to think, but it does not lead to freedom of mind, relaxation or renewal. It leads to a more exhausted mind. You may have time out from prior obsessive thought patterns, but that is as far as television goes. The mind is never empty, the mind is filled. What is worse, it is filled with someone else’s obsessive thoughts and images.

In this way, television serves to continue the same channeled mental processes from which one is seeking relief. The mind is as weary after watching as before. No invention or creation can result, only sleep, if you are lucky, as with the aftermath of alcohol and Valium. Furthermore, there are those who are hearted by the ease with which our minds are adapting to the Web’s intellectual ethic. Some researchers believe that minds are adapting to the Web’s intellectual ethic. They believe that technological progress does not revers, so people tend toward multitasking and consuming many different types of information will only continue. The report goes on to say that we need not worry, though, because our human software will in time catch up to the machine technology that made the information abundance possible. It is thought that we will evolve to become more agile consumers of data. And somehow, as we become used to the 21^st-century task of flitting among bits of online information, the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. We may lose our capacity to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end, but recompense we will gain new skills, such as the ability to conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media. A prominent the web allows us to borrow cognitive strengths from autism and to be better infovores. Our technology is believed to have induced ADD, which may be a short-term problem, stemming from our reliance on cognitive habits evolved and perfected in an era of limited information flow. Developing new cognitive habits is the only viable approach to navigating the age of constant connectivity. Some of these researchers are certainly correct in arguing that we are being molded by our new information environment. Our mental adaptability, built into the deepest workings of our brains, is a keytone of intellectual history. However, if there is comfort in their reassurances, it is of a very cold sort. Adaptation leaves us better suited to our circumstances, but qualitatively it is a neutral process.

What matters in the end is not our becoming but what we become. Tide of technological revolution could so captive, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile humans that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking. Our ability to engage in meditative thinking, which is the very essence of our humanity, might become a victim of headlong progress. The tumultuous advance of technology could, like the arrival of the locomotive at the Concord station, drown out the refined perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that arise only through contemplation and reflection. The frenziedness of technology threatens to entrench itself everywhere. It may be that we are now entering the final stage of that entrenchment. We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls. Computerized grading systems are already reading and grading essays that students write as part of a widely used test of language proficiency. The system produces the accuracy of human markers while eliminating human elements such as tiredness and subjectivity. In the future, computerized evaluation of essay will be a mainstay of education. The uncertainty is not “when” not “if.” Computers follow rules; they do not make judgments. In place of subjectivity, they give us formula. As we grown more accustomed to and dependent on our computers, we will be tempted to entrust to them task that demand wisdom. And once we do that, there will be no turning back. The software will become indispensable to those tasks. The seductions of technology are hard to resist, and in our age of instant information the benefits of speed and efficiency can seem unalloyed, their desirability beyond debate. However, we continue to hold our hope that we will not go gently into the future our computer engineers and software programmers are scripting for us. We owe it to ourselves to consider them to be an attentive to what we stand to lose. If we were to accept without question the idea that human elements are outmoded and dispensable, how sad it would be, particularly when it comes to the nurturing of our children’s minds. As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the World, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Cresleigh Homes

The future’s so bright we need shades 😎 to fully enjoy this luxury community.

Creseleigh Homes are centered around tranquil neighborhoods, featuing stunning open floorplans with multiple outdoor living spaces, making living outdoors possible year round!

With a Cresleigh Home, you will find an abundance of living space with seemingly endless storage opportunities including a walk-in panty and extensive walk-in closet.

The sprawling 3,348 square foot home offers 5 beds & 3.5 baths, a large loft/game room. Our communityties do it right.

#CresleighHomes