Texting as a “miraculous thing”?

A TED Talk on the miracle of texting

Comment 1
Well one can study anything that people do and find all the qualities of life in it - but are they there abundantly and in clear shared appreciation?

I meet LOL mostly in those who want to affect a mask of fun while actually being mean or perhaps just just no fun at all. But I don't use text except occasionally for a specific purpose. (So perhaps not qualified to speak on its usage there).

But perhaps the most important aspect of a communication is not the form it takes, but the consciousness of intent that is its context, both in the sender and in the receiver.

Communication is intimacy and words were invented to limit and block intimacy so as to de-localize or dissociate into one's private domain. Since Eden, there's been no going back, and the process of alienating ourselves from our actual living contextual being proceeds to an almost machine-like isolation - in which management and communication of stuff between its distanced parts becomes the new meaning of life!

And avoiding relationship allows much more scope for fantasy existence in virtual identity.

Though everyone can do this without texting and online activity, it is true that these devices extend our capacity to dislocate ourselves from those we may be in the room with.

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Comment 2 - went onto the actual video page:

Language is a way to block or limit intimacy - and then became necessary to convey information and negotiate trading of emotional, psychic and physical exchange.

Of course the mind that withholds itself from intimacy will structure itself to be integrated with itself, insofar as it can maintain itself amidst a field of intimate relation. One doesn't become something different than one is by withdrawing into one's own story and making culture of it together, but the priority of the identification in story will effectively discard, distort or deny the Whole Cloth from which it cherry picks to serve its own interpretation.

The miracle is communication - AT ALL.
It fundamentally witnesses to that minds are NOT actually separate - though the cultural imperative is to deny and limit this Intimacy for a modus of personal authority and control - as if actually a self-separate entity. And so the experience will seem to reflect the validation of private thoughts - albeit within culturally shared beliefs or presumptions. And experience seems to be proof or self-evident and so we each act as if we 'know' - when what we know is our personal experience as a 'take' on something that we may not really be intimately or directly connecting with at all.
The fact that almost everyone goes through life like this and doesn't actually connect with themselves, each other or their world very much, is a kind of sleepwalking or collective mesmerism in which we are seduced by our own thinking and yet it tells us we are free agents, along with a whole load of other stuff.
Yet freedom is not free from intimacy - but is freedom to be intimate - to feel and know viscerally the energies and qualities of life as the full range and nuance of what Communication actually is.
Reality may be posited as a state of perfect communication in which nothing is withheld or rejected. And human consciousness tends to identify as a withholding of embrace or attention from that in itself that it rejects . CUL8r!
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question:
"And human consciousness tends to identify as a withholding of embrace or attention from that in itself that it rejects."   Say what?
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reply:
The inwardness of thinking is a large part of a current split sense of human consciousness, and has symbolic and conceptual structure of thought and language with which to both define and identify its self and its 'not self'.
So the best answer to your question is what arises to your own experience when you ask innocently of yourself in simple curiosity and desire to know.
The activity of the mind is very fast and runs a bit like background processes on a computer, to serve up something of a user interface that one simply uses as if it were real in and of itself.
Clearly,something is going on - but do we look at the apparatus of our mind as part of pur perception and observe both what is within at the same times as apparently looking out? Occasionally in moments of insight - but the default directive tends to be to relate to the world as Reality and one's thought, intent and belief as something not to observe so much as to have freedom to play in or control.

Another way of approaching this is to look at the mind and see that in normal terms, everyone - or as near as makes little difference, has active defence mechanisms at work - which run out from previous interpreted experience and indeed fit exactly the model of Darwinian thought, because they dump the past (interpreted experience) onto the present - so as not to actually connect in presence - but to re-enact the past, albeit in endlessly modified and evolving forms.
Yet you ARE present - at least there IS something here where there is awareness, that is present - only the acts of definition and identification are making exclusive assertion as a basis upon which to judge and effect control over one's own experience. And this inherently rejects aspects of what is intimate to its being in favour of a sense of becoming something in its own right. Yet without the actuality of awareness - there is no being to either reject or to exploit.
In truth we are not in control of life, yet are almost hardwired to seek it.Why?
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Question:
: I believe Nietzsche called it "the Will to Power".

Sorry for the short answer to your long (and enjoyable) post. Some answers to your question might be hidden in the works of Freud, Heidegger, Deleuze and Metzinger.

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Reply:
The question was an invitation to listen (in the remaining 4 character limit available ;-)

When we ask a question, if we ask it with the mind of the mind, we get or embellish what we already 'know', but if the question is of the movement of our being (also called the heart), we listen there for an answer without the noise of our thinking, and sometimes something comes immediately or sometimes the sense is that a real question HAS been asked and to wait on an answer in trust is the presage of more to come. A process of transformation occurs a step at a time.

The disconnection from presence is also the disconnection from an innate sense of guidance or innate intelligence that 'knows how to be appropriate' in any given situation. And so there is the substitution for and the overriding of the natural flow of the parts towards a healing or reintegrative wholeness, by a manually applied wilful intent to control.
Indeed the 'will to power' - yet this is embodied and enacted in every judgemental thought.
The wilful determination to assert a separate mind wielding power in its own right is fundamental to the dream by which the true nature of love is rendered un-recognizable and unwanted in favour of a self and world at war with itself. It is structured to prevent exposure - but there is nothing to prevent noticing its operation but that innate curiosity has become lost to self-certainties, backed by emotional or personal fears of invalidity.
The diversion into psychology or philosophy tends to be subverted by the mentality that seeks to control rather than be itself transformed. As if Life doesn't exist until we 'discover' it and articulate it into a language of separation - and control. When really it is our consciousness that is changing as new information insinuates itself into our awareness. Human consciousness is a conditioned and conditioning set of filters and distortions, upon a Consciousness that is unwithheld or unlimited. Our personal sense is a construct for...