The giant leap from 'I am' to iPad

Can Twitter save our planet?

Will Facebook free mankind from the twilight of collective stupidity, religious fanaticism and crazed dictatorships?

Is WikiLeaks the fulfilment of the ancient prophecy contained in Johan 8:32?

In short: is the internet the next step in the evolution of human consciousness?

This isn’t just idle speculation. Many people are starting to ask questions like these. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why a novel I started writing on Twitter — Twitter Dawn — is attracting so much attention. I didn’t expect it, it’s one of those things that just sort of started happening in an idle moment. And when I first started entertaining thoughts like these myself, 16 chapters ago, I thought it was just the Beyerskloof talking.

Now, I find myself a click of the mouse away from other social media users in places like far-out Iran and other oppressed and turbulent nations. And I’m starting to believe my own mad theories.

The new revolution is indeed not being fought with guns and bombs, but with tweets, blogs and status updates.

Even as the beasts are slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, even as the spectre of totalitarianism and global catastrophe looms, ordinary people are talking … and meeting … and taking hands, virtually taking hands, all over the planet.

Of course, not all of this is new. This may be simply the coming of age of several trains of thought and tendencies that have been developing for a number of years now. It seems like a long, long time ago when, one evening, in a smoke-filled backroom somewhere in the trenches of the Alternative Afrikaner rebellion, my friend Dirk Uys introduced me to the literature of M Scott Peck.

M Scott Peck (now deceased) was the author of, among other equally seminal titles, the hugely popular self-help book The Road Less Travelled. This man’s philosophies have had a huge impact in my life. I rank my personal introduction to the work of Peck among the milestones of my own personal growth. Discovering Peck was more important than hearing the Beatles for the first time in 1964, and almost as important as tasting sushi for the first time in 2001.

According to Peck, man (or woman, whatever the case may be) goes through four stages of mental and spiritual evolution. Peck’s theory is too long and too complex to repeat here, but I have adjusted it for my own purposes. And, for the first time in my life, I have now taken the liberty of adding a fifth stage. (I’m not sure if Mr Peck would agree, but they allow that sort of minor adjustments on Wikipedia, don’t they?)

In short, I believe that the purpose of life on this planet — or life anywhere — is for life to become aware of itself. Plants, amoebae, fish, cats and humans have different levels of self-awareness. Plants and amoebae know, on some deep molecular level, that they exist, but they would not be able to tell you where the nearest sushi restaurant is.

Neither will fish. (Well, fish may be aware of the existence of sushi restaurants, but in their mythology it would represent “the hereafter”.)

Cats might certainly be aware of where the nearest sushi restaurant is, but they will be unable to give you directions.

As for man? Well, man, as Peck said (and as I agree) has several stages of awareness.

During these stages of awareness, man asks himself questions, or issues certain statements of intent. These questions or statements evolve from the simple to the complex, the obvious to the ontological.

In the first stage of his development, man asks: “Sushi? What’s that? Hmm. Gimme some.”

In the second stage of his development, man says: “Let’s bomb Japan and take all their sushi.” (This actually happened in 1945).

In the third stage of his development, man asks a rhetorical question: “Perhaps, if we stop bombing the Japanese, and sell them useless things like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s hamburgers, they would sell us some sushi?” (This is the stage of development a huge chunk of the so-called civilised world is in today.)

In the fourth phase of his spiritual evolution, man returns to the question: “Sushi? What’s that?” But this time, he does not simply ask the “what’s sushi” question because he does not know what sushi is. Indeed, he knows what sushi is, but he wants to penetrate to the deeper meaning of sushi. He is actually asking: “What is sushi really?” And: “Is eating sushi sustainable in terms of the eco-system?” Or: “Just what IS this sushi thing, and what does it represent in terms of everything else we know about the universe?”

Then comes the final stage of spiritual development. Total awareness. Once again, man simply says: “Hmm. Sushi.” But he says it with a different tone of voice than before. He does not attempt to describe his sushi-eating experience in long-winded prose (140 digits are enough). He does not analyse it. He becomes the sushi. And then he tweets about it, thus sharing his experience freely with the rest of the planet. This is the Ohm moment. This Enlightenment. This is the place where all ideological points of reference fade away, and nothing exists except this moment, this bite of sushi, this trending topic. Man is one with nature once again. He is back in Paradise.

I think that social media like Twitter, more than any other modern invention, are helping to lead mankind towards this final leap of faith, this new interaction with reality, this final revelation of the purpose of our existence on this planet.

No wonder governments across the world, from dictatorships to the leaders of supposedly developed countries (like the US!), fear the internet. They might not all ban the whole thing, but they certainly don’t like WikiLeaks. Why not? Because people like Julian Assange may just represent the next step in evolution!

It’s been a long road from amoeba-like thingies oozing in the primordial mud to civilised man. What an incredible distance we’ve come! First we left the oceans and started crawling around on dry land. Then, we started walking on our hind legs. Next, we discovered the wheel and braaivleis. And now, we’ve dumped wheels and braaivleis for space ships and sushi. We’re back to eating raw stuff, in other words, and we’re phasing out the wheel in exchange for hovercrafts and other means of travelling.

Full circle!

Let’s look at it from another angle. Let’s divide the development of man in five stages by using a certain phrase in slightly different ways. This phrase doesn’t necessarily have to be ”What is sushi?” It can be something simple as “I am”.

The first-stage man, the animal-like man, the cave-dwelling man, the grunting hair-covered man, probably had a phrase for the concept “I am”, but we can be sure that he meant such a phrase on a very rudimentary level. Something like “Here I am, here’s my cave, and here’s the bison I just killed. Let’s have a braai! Ha!”

Then, some millennia after that, came another profound “I am” moment. This probably happened in different places all over the planet, but since I come from a Judeo-Christian background, I trace my tribal memory of this event back to the time of Moses.

What happened to Moses? God appeared to him in a burning bramble bush. God did not have a name yet. Nor did he have a Facebook profile. No one had ever seen him before. It was the first time he introduced himself to the human race. And what were his first words? “I am!”

Wow! I would have loved to be a fly on the wall — or on one of the other bramble bushes nearby — to witness that incredible encounter. “I am!” Those were God’s first words. It was almost as if, with those words, God was becoming aware of himself for the first time. (Karen Armstrong would certainly agree with that last statement. In fact, she has written a whole series of books about this very thing, the process of God’s evolution as an integral part of man’s evolution. Fascinating stuff.)

Moses meeting God was a quantum leap forward. It led to the era of tribal deities. I know nationalism is frowned upon in this day and age, and I have serious qualms about the politics of Israel myself, but I believe that tribal consciousness was a very important step forward in the evolution of man. Without tribal consciousness, we would not have city-states, flags, national anthems, farms and factories, and of course we wouldn’t have the Soccer World Cup. What a bland, uninteresting world this would have been if Chinese people, black people, French people and Turks all looked the same, talked the same language, and all ate McDonald’s! There’d be no British comedy shows! No French film festivals! No sushi!

The third stage — and here I still follow the same sequence as Peck — was the intellectual development of man. It probably started quite long ago, here and there, in places like Stonehenge and other pockets of academic excellence, but, as far as we know, the first guys who started writing down their thoughts in a coherent and systematic way were, of course, the Greeks. What the Greeks started doing in the few centuries preceding Christ, was very much the same kind of thing Descartes did centuries later. Whenever intellectual pursuit raised its head, there were new “I am” moments. This time, however, it was more than just “I am”. This time, man was saying: “I think, therefore I am.”

This was the third “I am” in the evolution of the human race. This “I am” led man past the edifices of tribe and nationality and called him to worship at the shrine of reason and individual thought. Most of the so-called civilised world is reaching this particular pinnacle of evolution only now. It is a great place to be. As a detribalised Afrikaner, for instance, it frees me from the baggage of being angry at the English for the Second Boer War and silly things like that. People who reach this phase no longer say “let’s bomb the Japanese and take their sushi” or “let’s invade Africa and fetch us some cheap labour”. Instead, they say “let’s import sushi from Japan” or “let’s export arms to Africa and watch them on TV kill one another all by themselves”. Oops, what did I just say? Could there be a downside to this?

Famous thinkers (such as Gareth Cliff) might disagree with me, but, like Peck, I no longer believe that humanism and individualism, wonderful as these concepts may be, represent the final phase of human evolution. If that were true, the French revolution would not have given birth to Napoleon. Being liberated from the old religions may feel like a step in the right direction, but without God, or without any spiritual dimension, man finds himself facing the abyss of his own existentialist angst completely alone. No shit!

No wonder Sartre got so nauseous! No wonder Camus killed an Arab (have I got that the right way round?)! No wonder the best-selling literature in the entire Western world today is still not Richard Dawkins, but JK Rowling!

We may be well-informed and civilised and we might know all about quantum physics and we may have GPS systems to lead us to all the best sushi restaurants, but, deep down, we’re scared and lonely! Deep down, we’re still looking for an escape, for a way to get on to platform nine and a half! Our myths, our superstitions, our sense of mystery and awe have been invaded and destroyed by the stark and merciless electric glare of our modern cities! No wonder so many people are heading into the twilight to hunt vampires all over again!

Which brings me to the fourth stage. The stage which, in Peck’s philosophy, was the final step. Though this step may have been formulated by many thinkers and seers, my favourite (being from Judeo-Christian lineage) example of stage four is none other than Jesus Christ.

I am not a Christian in the traditional sense of the word, nor do I belong to any church, but when I read the words of Jesus I am moved to tears, even though I do not quite understand them. He said a few things that were remarkably like Descartes. He said: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

What did he mean? Was he talking about WikiLeaks? Or did Jesus mean that the “truth” is more than just information or the relevant facts?

This is an important question. What did Jesus mean when he said “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life”? I don’t think he meant “Christianity is the only true religion”. (Remember, in the time of Christ, Christianity had not even been invented yet.)

Whatever he meant, I just love that statement. I think it is the fourth “I am”.

When Jesus uttered those words, he might have been saying: “All your knowledge and all your science and all your theories of individual freedom will never be enough to satisfy the hunger or the thirst you feel inside. You are hungering and thirsting after a truth that goes deeper than mere facts. You are longing for the meaning of life.”

In other words, he implied that it’s not enough to ask “what is sushi?” One needs to ask “what is the deeper meaning of sushi?”

This is the dilemma of modern man. That is the kind of question people are starting to ask one another on Twitter.

So if this stage is so vital, why am I saying that it is not yet the final stage of evolution? Simply because the question has not been answered. I have read dozens of self-help books, I have been to dozens of different churches, I have researched the ancient wisdom of the Mayas and I have investigated the myth of Planet X and I have watched every YouTube video clip about shape-shifting, and what conclusion did I draw from all that? Simply this: if this is modern spirituality, it’s a load of crap. I want no part of it. It’s a scam. The Pope is a scam. New Age is a scam. While we are out looking for God in the mall, someone else is always making money. Or molesting our kids in the pews. Or wasting our time with wish-fulfilling fantasies like The Secret. Or pulling the wool over our eyes in countless different ways. We have all evaded the challenge of the Christ, we have turned down his invitation, we have done everything in power to avoid the real issue. Instead of taking his teachings at face-value, we have turned him into a religion, a hierarchy, a theological treatise, a pop theory. Many claim to have the formula for living water, but most are refusing to drink it. We can smell the sushi, but have we entered the restaurant? No, sir!

That’s why I believe in the imminence of a fifth stage. And I believe that the fifth stage looks — on the outside, at least — exactly the same as the first stage. The fifth stage is the stage where we finally stop philosophising about sushi and, once again, simply enjoy it for what it is. Hmm. Lekker sushi. Screw it, just do it. Or, as Dave Bullard said: Screw it. Let’s do lunch!

The fifth stage would be to take the “I am the way” statement to its logical conclusion. If the same guy who said “I am the way” also said “be like me”, or “be perfect, like my Father is perfect”, what did he mean? It meant that he wanted us all to say “I am the way”. While others referred to him as “the son of God”, he referred to himself as “the son of man”. He also said “man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for man”.

The fifth stage would be to take Sheldon Kapp’s advice of “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him” one step further and say “if you meet the Christ on the road, deconstruct him”. In other words: take him out of the realm of religion and make him accessible to everyone.

Jesus did not lead the way to God, but to man. He never spoke of God. He spoke of the Father. He said “in my Father’s house are many mansions”. We can all find our own way to happiness. There are many roads to happiness, but they all start with us.

The final “I am”, then, is the “I” in lower case. Not “I”, but “i”.

This is the final revolution. This is the way to world peace. This is the direction we are travelling, all the way from “I am” through “I think, therefore I am” through “I am the Way” to iPhone and iPad.

Yes. This might very well be the next “I am”: iPhone, iPod and iPad.

This might be our final moment of truth as a species.

And this moment of truth, once it sinks in, once we implement it, might just lead us to world peace. It will never lead us to a perfect utopia, of course, but it might lead us to a world relatively free of most of the major skirmishes and madness we are experiencing right now. A world where every “i” matters; a world where Christians do not feel threatened by atheists or vice versa, a world where different societies are invited to experiment with democracy at their own pace without any coercion by George Bush or his only-begotten son, a world where Muslims in France and Britain are not threatened or stigmatised, a world where Jews and Arabs can buy property side by side in Jerusalem, a world where sushi is available to everyone at market-related prices, regardless of race, colour or creed.

The day that happens, it will be like the Second Coming. It will be the true Twitter Dawn.

The day that happens, “every ear will hear him and every eye shall see him”. Like we all saw the uprising in Egypt. Because the whole world has TV.

And because, by that time, hopefully, everyone will have Twitter.