The Great invitation of Tools : To Become More Fully Human
Yesterday I published my first e-book on amazon, and it was thrilling. “This is so easy” I proclaimed. Suddenly words I had written were out there for others to pay for and download, interact with and do with what they pleased. And all I had to do was feed my manuscript into the programme.
Then I was scared.
I sat at the kitchen table to eat and noticed I was trembling slightly all over. It was almost too easy, too airily surreal — “who do you think you are, writing and publishing your own work! Who gave you that permission!” My internal dialogue was loud. I pushed my food away and went to plant seedlings for a while — leaving the dust to settle as I sort to find my new relationship with the world.
I sit this morning with this slow realisation that my computer and amazon are nothing but tools and tools are dead without the human passion to create. That wildly unknowable part that sits pounding with intense curiosity, bubbling with questions, and an unstoppable impulse to be in the world. Raw, real and tangible.
The internet is a tool, my spoon is a tool, Artificial Intelligence is a tool.
Human beings are not tools.
You are likely a human being if you are reading this (unless of course you are an AI programme running my words through your formulars then, in that case, you are a tool).
The Humanness — the being is unquantifiable, undefinable and ultimately unknowable. The more I search for it the more I notice there really is no ONE thing that it is. This is exactly the part that is asking to be embraced in a world filled with labels, agendas, pollution, pace, artificial growth beyond what the planet can hold ….and … tools.
The tools available at our fingers today are numerous and vast — an array of options. If you want to do something you can, via YouTube, publisher, blog sites, mail chimp, websites and online courses.
This is amazing and overwhelming.
It is just as easy to decide there is no space for you out there at all. Your internal dialogue might go something like: “EVERYONE has a YouTube channel, everyone is an expert of some sort, every one has a blog or a podcast, everyone’s life is so beautiful and plush and nobody goes to work, everyone stays at home and makes passive income from bitcoin and their online Shopify… and besides, soon AI will decide how hot I like my bath and the exact tempo of my morning run, so I am pretty much obsolete stock in an over crowded warehouse”.
So what is your job? Our Job?
Then I get it, the fabric of time folds around me, right now my role is to be in process, to be in the evolution of my humanness. The very thing that sets me far apart from machines and robots.
None of the tools mean anything without the human impulse behind them. As human beings we are part of life itself, made of flesh, bone and consciousness. It is this very quality inside each of us that will never be on automation. This impulse that is life itself flowing in human form. It is beauty, power, vigour and unknown splendour. A creative facet of consciousness — itself an infinite resource. Consciousness that evolves and can be in applied to action.
This is the era we are really moving into as humans: The Era of Becoming Fully Human.
This calls for deeper questions. What would it look like to become initiated into our unique human impulse? The one that is so radically individual to each person. Then as initiated adults, take a radical stand for life with the unique piece of the puzzle that each person has as, in deep creative collaboration?
How do we collectively and individually evolve our consciousness to use the tools that are already here, with radical, alive applied consciousness in action?
I have clues to how this could go. Somewhere inside, I know that Women hold a huge key for this to happen. As birthers of life, we hold a blueprint in our cells for how it goes to grow and unfold life, whether that is a child, an idea, a community, a movement, or consciousness.
These are the questions I am exploring and living right now. It is scary and enlivening and as always I am so glad to have you alongside me.
