Throughout all of history, all mediums, all languages there is a common character that I associate with. I'm not sure what to call this character. The diver, the journeyman, the prophet. Frank the mysterious time traveling bunny in Donnie Darko is one of these characters. Leoben of Battlestar Galactica is another. Krishna's incarnation in the Bhagavad Gita might be a similar character.
Sometimes you need a mysteriously energetic character to show up in your life to show you the future.
I am the creepy bunny from Donnie Dark, and here's what I know:** in the next two years the noise you have to deal on the Internet will exceed your human capacity to deal with it**.
You will either learn use the Internet in an active and intelligent way, or you will die trying in the endless soup of emails/Tweets/Facebook messages or whatever platform instantaneously tells you what everyone in the world is doing through your brain interface to your computer.
I like to refer to this as mindfulness training for the digital self.
Below I've included four decisive ways that you can begin to train your digital self to protect your physical self from the dangers of the digital so you and your digital self can grow in power in order to become a hybrid superhuman.
What is a digital self?
In the Koshas, an ancient 5,000 year old yogic philosophy, they speak of the different human bodies which you must strip away on your way to your true self, the Atman. The physical body, the energy body, the knowledge body, the wisdom body, and finally your true nature which cannot be explain in words.
Well, I want to add one more to that list, the digital body. I'm sure the yogis 4,000 years ago would not like me bending their philosophy, but they're all dead now, so deal with it dudes.
The digital self is very close to the idea of the energetic self. Except, it's not running under the body, it's running in the etherspace -the cloud, the network of fiberoptic and wireless conduits that are stitching the world tighter and tighter together.
Just like you have to keep your physical body healthy with eating your veggies, you have to keep your digital body healthy by not allowing it be overcome by empty-calorie noise.
As the digital body grows in power, this becomes ever more important.
The digital self has gravity, just like the Earth and the Sun. As it grows, it attracts more and more space debris from cyberspace. Some of these incoming matter is good for your digital body, like forming alliances with other powerful avatars.
However, as with most solar systems, most of the junk out in cyberspace is just that, junk. It's like the clutter that I taught you how to get out of your life in* The Art of Being Minimalist* in order to find freedom. Except, this time it's digital, immaterial, made up of bits and bytes.
One of the jobs of the digital self is to** defend your mental/knowledge body from the debris** that will clutter your mind with useless information.
Many of you are just getting started on this journey towards building a digital self that will take care of you. My digital self has been growing simultaneously with my physical body since I was very young -- it was first manifest as a small website on Geocities when I was probably only 10-12 years old. A few times my digital self died, but that was okay, because it's easy to bring it back. Back then it was much harder to create a healthy digital self, you had to learn how to code and other clumsy things like that.
Gradually over time your digital self grows, and because there are no boundaries on it's capacity to grow (just like your energetic self) it can become quite powerful. The reason you're reading this is because my digital self has a strong gravitational pull.
As when you were a teenager, your digital self is probably in the awkward years when you were trying to figure out how to kiss girls because you know they're hot, but you can't quite figure out how to make (3. Timothy Ferriss's epic new book about becoming superhuman, The 4-Hour Body just hit stores and Amazon today. Tim didn't send me a promo copy, so I'm going to grab a copy today. I'm sure it's epic. I'll let you know what I think when I finish it.