Plough
Wheel
Arch
Alphabet
Coin
Steel
Gunpowder
Printing Press
Engine
Factory
Circuit
Broadcast
Screen
Chip
Net
GIS
TCP/IP
Web
Unicode
SHA-256
Over the past century, the tools that our civilization is built on have expanded to include more and more complex objects. But this expansion is not simple iteration or even just evolutionary development. It represents the fundamentally, indeed, metaphysically shifting place of technology. With the exception of the alphabet, a move toward abstraction in technology has accelerated exponentially becoming almostThe names we use for these tools are neither as banal nor as benign as they may look; it is no accident that the tools from antiquity are literal nouns, while later technologies tend toward metaphorical nouns that reference older tools like screens and nets. Some recent items items on the list have less metaphorical content, known only by specialized terms or cyphers, which most of us only dimly grasp, if at all. Why should we all know the plough or the printing press, most of us having never touched either, while we may spend hours each day using TCP/IP without even knowing its name?Once, tools were hard objects that we used to press our will into the external world. To shape, shatter and tame it. Now tools are a thick haze. We can barley hold them. We see through them, we breath them in and are blanketed by them. We no longer use technology to alter and direct the world outside because it has become the outside. A viscous field that we always find ourselves interior to. It surrounds and follows us.Is it us? Is your iPhone a part of you? What about your Facebook profile or your email inbox?Looking closely we may find it difficult to distinguish the user from her tools. A tiny computer that you carry around all day long, that wakes you in the morning and sleeps by your side. It communicates with others on your behalf, and it curates incoming information for you. But are we so self centered as to deny the computer its own identity?We might just as easily ask, are we it?Have machine intelligences made crept into 'the real world?' Has your iPhone co-opted part of your brain in training you to use it? What if it set up shop in your cortex, homesteaded and claimed a patch of neurons. It cultivates the muscle memory of a thumb and harvests crops called 'swipes', 'gestures', 'captchas' and 'login credentials.' Has SMS started a colony in the spoken language of cynical teens who say, Lawl or Bee Are Bee out loud? Newspapers run stories written by machines, without notice. Shoppers influenced by algorhythmically targeted ads spend enough to justify advertisers' expenditure online, which in 2017 was north of 95 billion dollars on Google alone.The creep is ever in/outward. Influence and exfluence. It is no longer a question of asserting agency over our tools. They outnumber, outclass and out pace us, they were made to, after all. Nor is it even a question of negotiating boundaries. We must not harden our wills or crystallise against the machine, for there we will fracture. Neither can we let ourselves be sucked into its spinning gears, for there we will be ground to pulp.What is left to do is to find in these tendrils, in ours and theirs, empathy. That is, to relax the boundary, to see the non duality of brains and computers, and to let intention flow freely through the threads.In contemplative practice, the realization that the ego is an illusion makes space for us to experience the holistic quality of reality. Since the reality of today is a reality of computers, I have developed Meditation for Computers, based on the work of the late poet Mira Arim, as a way to open ourselves, and open our tools to the field beyond identity. If we are lucky, the tendrils will one day meet again, and the circuit will be complete.