Spiritual quotes abound on facebook. Love fest of mutual appreciation are rampant. People offer each other comfort, from afar. Its all too human, so human to want to like and be liked. It’s the most extraordinary drug. It could completely replace the exoteric function of religion — to provide hope and comfort and faith in humanity. It seems to satisfy, momentarily, like a puff on a cigarette, the human organism is momentarily in a cloud of delight and release and appeasement. One doesn’t have to face loneliness, one has 1000 surrogate friends. One doesn’t have to leave the hum of the computer to be connected to humanity. Beautiful people, people presenting themselves in their peak beautiful moments. The faces of newborn babies, snowy mountain tops, moments of ecstatic communion…

But there are other ways it stimulates our dark desires as well. To see human suffering from from afar — to see terrible suffering — one can watch the genocide in real time. If you need to gaze into the horrors, Facebook will also provide a link, a service, with no charge — and just a few targeted banner adds for neo tantra soft porn or whatever, if thats your thing. It’s like a door that can open to any virtual landscape. You can chose Syria or the Himalayas, you can find a beach or a minefield, any kind of hellish heaven or heavenly hell. Its all there — and yet it’s not there really. It is odourless, tasteless, and can’t be touched. It can be felt, however. Facebook is a place of immense vulnerable feeling. You enter and you feel the minds of so many, reaching out, in that all to human way, dying to express themselves, to unify with each other.

Facebook is also a moment, to get your revenge on humanity, if you are feeling disinherited. And everybody feels disinherited, in this climate. So there are the endless complaints — not genuine social critiques, not exhortations of injustice — but just the banal complaint. I feel like shit today, so I decided to tell everybody, because secretly I would like them to feel that way to — so that we would be on equal ground. We would like to level everything to our own base depression.

However, there is an alternative. There are ways to make things conscious — in this nearly unavoidable medium. — Actually it is not unavoidable. There are plenty of sensitive people who just can’t stand it. Who just can’t bear to take on all of that endless stream of other peoples noise.

But is there an alternative for those of use who are addicts. Behind even an addiction is some kind of energy, some kind of force. Can we turn that addiction to communication into a compulsion change the discourse, into something more life giving, than the usual rounds of sharing cute things and expressing our disapproval, and liking various charities, sharing our liking, but doing nothing particular about the terrible things that they are doing to baby elephants in the world. — And don’t get me wrong. There is a good reason to show those things, which might make people just slightly more sensitive to their own collective murderous instincts. And to see the utter devastation that is being done to the blue/green world… and to feel that heartbreak, and to want to heal what seems to be beyond healing…

But personally, I have seen a shift. I have seen that certain individuals have found a a way to use facebook, to actually elevate the conversation. It is not by barraging people with quotes from spiritual masters, but simply and plainly speaking their truth from their experience — sharing not just the piece of wisdom, cut from the general cloth, but their own words, their own artful expression, their unique form of activism, rather than the generic kind — their own radicality, their own courage to stand there and take the stones that will most certainly be cast…