It’s been said before that many modern technologies can make becoming grounded in the body more challenging since they turn people’s attention outwards. The irony of this is that as more technology focuses mass attention externally, the mind and body still remain largely unexplored. Even though externally focused technologies have benefits, addiction to them has ironically created a situation where people’s minds may contract if they spend too much time observing shadows through simulations. On the other hand, exploring the imagination with less aid from simulated realities might be like drinking water more than Monster even though both are useful in different circumstances.
Entheogens also offer pathways for exploring invisible worlds, if used wisely, since they occupy a middle ground between imaginary exploration with computers and mental exploration through nothing but the mind itself. Psychoactive substances may not always displace people from their bodies as much as computers do but still resemble hardware based forms of mind travel since they’re an external tool for moving through different mental spaces. The urge for exploration, no matter what form it takes, is also an innate instinct that encourages people to experiment then build things until they inadvertently create societies. The main difference between exploration today, and exploration in previous eras, is that much of the Earth’s surface has already been roamed even though most of what exists below it’s oceans still remains unknown. On the other hand, mental spaces are one of many frontiers which remain accessible to everyone even as physical space shrinks. Imaginary realms are also one key for unlocking the frontier of deep space since many spaceships get imagined before becoming real.
Similarly, exploring the mind with less stimulation from outside resembles diving deeper below it’s calmer surface into an ocean of emotions to find buried treasures below. Many environmental issues today, such as polluted water and conflicts over artificially scarce resources, might even be connected with the desire to look outwards more than within since stress from being overworked, lust for faster food, and cities which have been built more for cars than people result from struggles to reflect internally. Just like in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers, many individuals have been snatched into artificial realms from their bodies even though technologies which do this, ironically, help people appreciate innate abilities the body gives them from new perspectives while occult knowledge such as hugel-kulture, perma-culture, vortex mathematics, and radionics get rediscovered, tested, then applied in unique ways. The potential gift, and curse, of the inter-net helps everyone go collectively inward as high fructose toxins, mono-culturalized agriculture, new music genres, and more geometrically harmonious methods for creating buildings are revealed through halls of electronic mirrors while puzzle pieces of a fragmented human psyche resonate through electric wires.
It’s also possible that processes of disintegration, which involve being ungrounded from the body and disconnected from the Earth, were necessary so more people are able to appreciate something they’ve almost lost. Maybe destructive eras resemble gateway drugs, or rights of passage, if they aren’t forgotten then repeated too much. This might even be why much cypher-punk literature projects the past onto the future, possibly at an unconscious level, so similar mistakes get repeated less through more advanced technologies. If the past reflects a distant future then maybe the machines of industry which have displaced many people from their land, then from their bodies, can be reconfigured through the mind as man uses them to look both ways and dodge many harmful futures so more individuals can once again ground within the moment as it births new moments.