Spirituality humanised

“When He had fin­ished speak­ing with him upon Mount Sinai, He gave Moses the two tablets of the tes­ti­mony, tablets of stone, writ­ten by the fin­ger of God”.
– Bible, Exo­dus 31.18

The recently announced iPad from Apple Inc. is an inven­tion that causes tec­tonic shifts in the world of com­put­ing expe­ri­ence. “Last time there was this much excite­ment about a tablet, it had some com­mand­ments writ­ten on it,” says The Wall Street Jour­nal colum­nist. Although many may chuckle upon this, same as Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple did, we can­not deny that in people’s minds inven­tions like this one col­lide their own world­views with a new knowl­edge, wraps them in the com­pla­cency of cog­ni­tive dissonance.

Human­is­ing computers

At one level in their mind peo­ple know a new expe­ri­ence will change per­cep­tion of ‘com­put­ers’ and what ‘com­put­ers’ are. Com­put­ers are insep­a­ra­ble part of our work and leisure today, our lives. They’re every­where. There­fore a new con­cept will change our lives together with ‘the com­put­ing experience’.

First whing­ing reac­tions around the globe are mostly caused by denial. How come? Let’s put it in a sci­en­tific way: an entirely new idea has entered the uni­ver­sal holo­gram and peo­ple, as parts of the holo­gram, are aware of it on some level. But they are deny­ing it. It’s a self-defending mech­a­nism: humans will have to rede­fine the entire approach, and change the dic­tio­nary mean­ing of the words such as ‘com­puter’, ‘brows­ing’, ‘email­ing’, ‘desk­top’, etc. It’s too big a step for many, con­sid­er­ing that we have spent decades get­ting accus­tomed to the com­put­ers already around us and that haven’t changed sig­nif­i­cantly dur­ing the last 30 years.

Unex­pected new holo­gram pro­gram will severely hit the mem­ory cores of so called IT spe­cial­ists and IT colum­nists, who will need to rede­fine their exper­tise. Imag­ine this: if every­thing about 90% of the com­put­ing expe­ri­ence becomes so easy to do (and 90% of our com­puter time is ded­i­cated to every­day stuff), pain­less and entirely human­ised as show­cased with an iPad (and even bet­tered by its suc­ces­sors), what will they have to do, and talk about? Their (self)importance ceases.

In his blog Fraser Speirs, tech­nol­ogy writer, notes:

What you’re see­ing in the industry’s reac­tion to the iPad is noth­ing less than future shock. For years we’ve all held to the belief that com­put­ing had to be made sim­pler for the ‘aver­age per­son’. I find it dif­fi­cult to come to any con­clu­sion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.
Secretly, I sus­pect, we tech­nol­o­gists quite liked the idea that Nor­mals would be depen­dent on us for our tech­no­log­i­cal shaman­ism. Those incan­ta­tions that only we can per­form to heal their com­put­ers, those orac­u­lar procla­ma­tions that we make over the future and the bless­ings we bestow on pur­chas­ing choices.

This expe­ri­ence fol­lows the story of Ford’s inven­tions. When they asked Henry Ford does he value people’s opin­ions on what is next, he answered that he doesn’t care about what many think about inven­tions. He added, “If I asked peo­ple what would they really need, they’d all answer they needed a faster horse.” It’s almost exactly what many com­mented about the iPad. With the newly intro­duced iPad, many colum­nists and field experts expected a bet­ter, flat­ter lap­top, a bet­ter phone, a bet­ter .. com­puter they’re already famil­iar with. They grudge: “Where’s the USB 3 port?, and an SD card slot?, what about a super-fast proces­sor?, where is the full-blown OS X oper­at­ing sys­tem and the whole of its sev­eral decades of sacred UNIX core legacy? We need that!”

They just wanted a faster horse, and were ready for it, but they didn’t expect a rad­i­cal shift in think­ing and imag­in­ing com­puter expe­ri­ence. In fact, Apple has com­pletely redesigned every­thing! Redesigned iPad’s soft­ware from inside out, its user inter­face (adding a giant multi-touch screen that flips as you want it), vari­ety of soft­ware key­boards that pop up accord­ing to need instead of ‘one-size-fits-all’ hard­ware key­board every­one must use. The result is that the whole expe­ri­ence becomes less cum­ber­some and more nat­ural. Apple’s iPad chief designer Jonathan Ive says that although no one has used it before the announce­ment, mil­lions of peo­ple will be instantly famil­iar with it — they will instinc­tively know what to do. It is an inven­tion with its basis in the heart of the prob­lem — com­put­ers can do more and can be more, but no one has done it yet.

Vox pop­uli and polls say noth­ing about the power of a true inven­tion, because by def­i­n­i­tion no one is ready for it. All sta­tis­tics deny even the exis­tence of an inven­tion so do any of ‘expert opin­ions’ or cus­tomer sur­vey results about “are you gonna switch to an iPad when it comes out?” matter?

Not at all. iPad is a story all about human­is­ing the com­puter expe­ri­ence, by imag­in­ing and then pro­duc­ing a ground­break­ing device that blends seam­lessly into our every­day life. It is an exten­sion of a human mind for a human mind. From the stiff key­board and hard to remem­ber com­mands through CLI (Com­mand Line Inter­face) as a main user inter­face in the 1970’s and early 1980’s, to the mouse and graph­i­cal user inter­face in the late 1980’s and 20+ years later, to a human fin­ger in the sec­ond decade of the 21st cen­tury and a multi-touch pad, the path is now clear: the idea for those brave ones is to make com­put­ers dif­fer­ent, less intim­i­dat­ing and more humanised.

They sud­denly become some­thing else, not just com­pute things. Rather enjoy things. A com­puter decomputerised.

Human­is­ing religion

Now a reader may ask: What all this has to do with us here? How­ever, com­par­isons like this one have a tremen­dous eye-opening power. In the very much same sense, Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism fol­lows the exam­ple of the iPad, but in the field of reli­gious, philo­soph­i­cal and spir­i­tual thought.

Let me illus­trate. What our every day with a com­puter con­sists of? What is the real work we need to do? The real work is not for­mat­ting the mar­gins of a doc­u­ment, installing the printer dri­ver, upload­ing the doc­u­ment, find­ing lost fonts, fig­ur­ing out how to insert a char­ac­ter from a for­eign lan­guage using English-only lim­ited key­board, fin­ish­ing the Pow­er­Point slides, run­ning the soft­ware update, rein­stalling the oper­at­ing sys­tem, fight­ing com­puter bugs and viruses.

The real work is teach­ing the child, heal­ing the patient, mind­ing the house, log­ging the road defects, fix­ing the vehi­cle at the road­side, cap­tur­ing the table’s order, design­ing the house, reduc­ing waste and green­house emis­sions, organ­is­ing the party. Think of the mil­lions of hours spent, the lengths that mil­lions of peo­ple have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthog­o­nal to their core inter­ests and their job, just so they can get their job done and just work on com­put­ers. How frus­trat­ing! But that was con­sid­ered normal.

Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism rewrites how reli­gion and spir­i­tu­al­ity should be taught, prac­ticed and under­stood, and brings forth a real world inspir­ing solu­tion for all those who want the real job done: love for each other, the world, the God-dess, not some cum­ber­some prac­tices, penances and reg­u­la­tions rooted in archaic world views that have noth­ing to do with today. Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism is an oper­at­ing sys­tem of a spir­i­tual expe­ri­ence com­pletely rewrit­ten — from the ground up — to be joy­ous and haunt­ing jour­ney to all who ven­ture. Its ele­gance is not rooted in a phi­los­o­phy that adds more to lay­ers upon lay­ers of old and fruit­less ideas, but rather in get­ting rid of every­thing that obstructs the human­is­ing expe­ri­ence of spirituality.

Yes, don’t worry: it is per­fectly all right if we walk the spir­i­tual path and not drag­ging a ton of rules, super­sti­tions, obso­lete beliefs and sense­less rit­u­als chained to our legs and bur­dened on our backs. It’s per­fectly okay to walk freely and that’s the whole point of walk­ing: to enjoy the scenery and always learn some­thing new and excit­ing. Spir­i­tu­al­ity needs to be a human expe­ri­ence, not a fran­tic race under bat­tle hel­mets where we lose our sense of human­ity and purpose.

It is per­fectly fine not to depend on shamans, priests and gurus whose whole pur­pose of life is “make sure” you get your “dosage” of mercy upon your “poor sin­ful soul”, exclu­sively deserved by their “hard work” and prayers they utter “in your name” before “the Almighty”. Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism gives you a dif­fer­ent real­ity, a real­ity in which all-present and beau­ti­ful God-dess Radha-Krishna is already here for you, extend­ing you arms and refresh­ing thoughts that release, over­joy and ful­fill. No hard labour required. No penances. No chains rat­tling behind you. No imposed guilt and fear. No use­less chants no one under­stands. No out­dated beliefs. No super­sti­tions. No com­pli­cated rit­u­als. No irra­tional bab­ble no one can prove. No one else’s mercy required. Just be free, be human and love from the depth of your heart because you already know how to do it — it’s in your spir­i­tual DNA. Sim­ply ful­fill your lov­ing goal on this lovely planet Earth and spend no extra minute on irrel­e­vant mumbo jumbo.

Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism is noth­ing you can imag­ine by com­par­ing it to estab­lished reli­gious thoughts of old. This is not yet another horse, or even a faster one — some­thing pre­dictable. It’s a whole new cat­e­gory of expe­ri­ence, a wholly unprece­dented one.

If the iPad and its suc­ces­sor devices free every­day peo­ple to focus on what they do best, it will dra­mat­i­cally change people’s per­cep­tions of com­put­ing from some­thing to fear to some­thing to engage enthu­si­as­ti­cally with. We aim the same for the Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism in the field of spir­i­tu­al­ity and mod­ern thinking.

Uni­ver­sal­ist Radha-Krishnaism — a spir­i­tu­al­ity humanised.

– Zvon­imir Tosic

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 06:06 and is filed under Cursum perficio and tagged with Apple, humanized, iPad, Krishna, Radha, spirituality humanised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.