Relational Energy Healing

Digital Soul

Posted on 01. Mar, 2009 by Dean Ramsden in Technology

Today I am doing the unthinkable… tearing up books, and then feeding them into a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, in order to change their material reality into a digital one: a computer PDF file. As heartrending a task as it is, the benefits are great: a years-long project designed to make my huge library portable, searchable, and speed-readable. But despite the lofty aims, I’m not having fun. I love books too much, the touch and the sight of them. This is challenging in many, many ways.

I have to keep reminding myself of the advantages. Once in digital format a book content not only attains immortality but can be loaded onto the screen reader of choice – my laptop, a PDA/ iPod, or Amazon’s Kindle. No more packing up heavy book boxes to transport to the next country, or search for hours to find one particular piece of cross-referencing writing. My Right Brain welcomes these benefits, despite loud protestations from my luddite Left Brain.

I have just taught a Psychic Development teleclass (now available for sale as mp3 files), and part of the distinction I made about human consciousness was at this basic level of brain structure. As everyone knows, we have a two-lobed self, a Left Brain rational personality and a Right Brain intuitive identity. Research shows these two aspects of human experience co-exist in a single cranium, one happily adjusted to a structured and verbal-orientated reality, while the more intuitive and here-and-now identity lives in symbols and pictures. In this teleclass we explored an energy practice to charge and balance these two hemispheres as an essential precursor to connecting to – and energizing – the Etheric Double.

Why is this relevant to my awful confession of book homicide? There are parallels to the PDF file and the ego-self identity of everyday reality (ie, “the book”) and the permanent soul-self (ie, “the PDF file”). One has substance, heft, and weight, and the other is ethereal, invisible, imbued with essence of the author. Self and Soul. Physical Book and PDF file. The comparison is unmistakable.

The digital medium of the PDF can be further stripped down (see File Juicer) into a plain text file, and then dropped into an online speed reader (http://www.spreeder.com/), allowing you to read at 300 words per minute, or more. The Right Brain is unimpeded by the Left Brain’s need for word order and sentence pattern. The Right Brain can simply “suck” the meaning out of the author’s writing, and the one-word-at-a-time speed reader will crank out reading well above the conscious comprehension reading level. Researchers speculate that the Right Brain reading speed limit is limited only by training, and the processing power of the visual cortex. While my Left Brain enjoys the tactile experience of holding a book, admiring an author’s elegant phrasing while easing through a literary classic one page at a time, my Right Brain longs to operate at warp speed. Perhaps a thousand words per minute. Or more.

If I want to remember the physical book cover as it once was, or need to see an overview of my virtual library, I can always use Delicious Library, the Mac-only archiving software program.

Research shows us that the plasticity of the human mind slows with aging, but does not stop completely. It is possible – and perhaps even essential – to continually absorb new important information and ideas throughout our lives. It’s crazy to limit learning only to our early adult years. The ability to place both new and old information into meaningful and relevant context increases as we age and (hopefully) results in wisdom. And so, I’m forcing myself to continue processing my beloved books, liberating them from their earthly containers, sending them on to attain digital soul status.

But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to silence the voice of that part of me, the deep lover of the printed word, that wants to hold a book, carry it around with me, fall asleep while reading it. The computer screen is just not quite as sexy as paper and ink. Maybe for me, one day, that will change.

Tags: Personal Development