Language & Co-Creation in the Ascension of Mankind
Genesis Creation Myth
“And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
–The Book of Genesis 2:19
Information technology is not new. Man’s God-given task in co-creating the Universe is to name everything. Names are the basis of human language, and language is the basis of all technology.
There can be little doubt that the Ascension of Man will include technology. Barring an absolute, unforeseen miracle, it would be impossible at this point in human history to even imagine a world — whether better or worse — that will not feature human technology. It’s inevitable that such a miracle may actually be the result of our technology.
We are fast approaching the Technological Singularity — the point at which human intelligence will transcend the boundaries of biology. The Singularity is not a “New Age” theory — it is a scientific fact that has no basis in spirituality.
Yet the Singularity has profound spiritual implications.
Even within the most conservative predictions, we are only a few decades away from the point in human history that will represent an irreversible paradigm shift. Some half-jokingly refer to this as the Rapture of The Nerds, but it is hard to dismiss the time-frame that includes the end of the Mayan Calendar, and the beginning of the New Age, the Age of Aquarius.
The Ascension of Mankind will be powered by our own technology, and from our humblest task at the beginning, extending to infinity, is our first and primary creative power — language.
The Language of the Creator
God deferred to the language of man as His own. The Language of God, the Source Code of All Creation — The Word — is Man’s word.
Adam’s Task was not discontinued as a result of Original Sin — eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil — it was merely complicated. Rather than continuing in the Garden, simply calling forth the abundance of all life on Earth, man’s godlike new knowledge represented the greater burden — the responsibility — of understanding.
Condemned to toil and labor in order to continue accessing the abundance of the Garden, man developed agriculture. Agriculture and domestication of livestock directly led to the development of human society, which led to the Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Age, and now, ultimately, to the Information Revolution.
Along the way, we’ve made a mess of Nature, pulling apart Creation in our attempts to unravel, decode, and understand the Language of God. We’ve successfully split the atom, we’ve mapped the human genome, we’ve discovered and given names to the alphabet of all matter in the Universe. We are now fast approaching a fluency that will allow us to put Nature back together again, according to our will.
We are about to transcend the limitations of biology and the boundaries of the physical world. And we are going to accomplish this with Ideas and the Words which are their forms.
Made of dust, infused with the breath of life, conscious
We are made of dust — the matter of the stars — ordered into consciousness and living complexity.
Emerging and imminent nanotechnology represents a similar godlike power in the hands of man. Adam has named the very particles of the physical world — we are fluent in the vocabulary of chemistry; we can communicate with the order of Creation at the smallest level of construction.
There is a second wave of the Industrial Revolution approaching, when the bulk of manufacturing might shrinks from the smog-belching factories, with its back-breaking human labor and robotic slaves, to laboratory test-tubes.
Adam, ascended, will remake the New Earth and beyond, at the tiniest — and greatest — imaginable scales.
The Trees — Source Code and Holograms
Why was it necessary to even place the Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in the Garden at all?
Like the alphabets of chemistry and DNA, the instructional information of the physical world is a hologram: the whole blueprint is contained within any individual part; from one cell we may extrapolate, engineer, re-create.
The Trees are Seeds.
The Greatest of Tools
How did we get here? What has allowed us to evolve to this point?
Our ability not only to communicate our knowledge and experience, but to record it. The earliest forms of written language gave immortality to the wisdom of our collective Mind, if not our bodies.
The Book persists as the greatest tool ever developed.
The Book itself has evolved from an expensive, difficult to produce (and re-produce), rare treasure that allows the sharing of information across time and human life-times. Once only the rarest vessel of the most precious information, the Book is now everywhere.
The Book itself has transcended matter — information now resides in a virtual space with almost limitless reach. Freed of its expensive, fragile, still temporary physical format, human wisdom is accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime, instantly.
Information can be produced, preserved, shared, manipulated, and improved upon in a direct communication from one individual author to billions. With access to the Internet, we each now have the potential to share any piece of our minds with everyone, at very little cost and labor.
If you go to your web browser and view the source code, or if you peer into the internal mechanisms of the programs that run your computer, what you will find there is not “math and science” — you’ll find words. Human language.
No matter what the discipline, field, area of study — whether it’s spiritual, artistic, scientific, medical — the one common denominator of All that we know — all the wisdom and knowledge we’ve accumulated across all human history — is our language.
We are the means by which the Universe experiences itself.
It is the goal of the Universe for consciousness — information; knowledge of itself — to pervade every wave and particle of creation.
There is nothing you can name without naming it. You cannot even think a Thing without its name. Thoughts are things, and words are their handles.
Magic & Technology
“I discovered that unlike mere tricks, technology does not lose its transcendent power when its secrets are revealed. I am often reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”
–Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near
Indeed, the power that our technology affords us is increasingly invisible. The wisdom of our language no longer even requires wires.
Electricity is not visible.
“Where” is the Web? Without a browser window to display it, virtual space is not visible either — it’s everywhere and nowhere.
Most of us use cell phones to communicate with each other on a daily basis.
We email and chat with disembodied, non-present voices.
We engage in financial transactions that are increasingly less required to exist in physical form.
We speak to spirits we cannot see.
The very word angel means “messenger” — it’s the messages — the Word — that shapes all conscious reality.
Whether the lowliest infrared remote control, the everyday commonplace modes of communication, the workings of the global economy, or the wishes of our hearts and the dreams of our souls, what we would have called magical and miraculous for the majority of human history is now called technology.
At the root of all spells are incantations — the words, strung together in the right sequence, to call forth change in our physical reality.
Thoughts are Things — Words are Wands
The Internet can be viewed as the fruition — at least the most current iteration — of Adam’s Task. It has grown, evolved, changed — it will continue — but it is still the god-given assignment of co-creation that it was in Eden.
Really, very little has changed: the Creator still presents to us everything under the sun, and we provide names for the pieces. We break the pieces down, smaller and smaller, and we keep naming as we go — specifying, identifying, tagging.
There seems no limit to our task.
The scope, breadth, and depth of Adam’s Task grows in multiple directions and dimensions — inward/outward, larger/smaller, physical/virtual…
The Ascension of Mankind is a Gospel — a god spell, a Story, the unraveling and re-weaving of the Web.
We have always been making history. His story is our story.

Image credit VerseVend via Creative Commons on Flickr





Interesting! I’m slowly re-reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which is heavy with the story of Adam and of Cain and Abel so I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately– not in this exact way but of The Legacy of Adam in general. You’ve given me more fodder . . .
I love the transcendent tone in this piece. The tone fits perfectly with the topic of ascension. You’ve hit on all the current topics and the thinking surrounding the singularity and the ascension of both man and machine.
My son is 22 and works in San Francisco as a computer programmer. He and his friends are well-versed on these topics. They are predicting such things as machines/computers that can update their own source code, free energy world-wide, and the dissolution of money. A lot of these really smart kids who have grown up on science fiction seem to think that ANYTHING is possible, including making the world a better place.
As for language and the words and symbols that will be sequenced into a code for this better world, I just wanted to say how much I love the fact that you didn’t use the most famous of all lines in scripture about the Word, the one about “In the beginning….” That’s always been my favorite verse. You’re one of my favorite writers.
I seriously had an out-loud “Aha!” moment while reading this. I’ve had trouble making the grounded connection between what you read on new-agey sites about how in the near future people will directly be interacting and co-creating reality and the universe. Your article made me realize that through current technology such as nano we can do this literally with endless possibilities.
Sometimes the Singularity guys make me nervous. That’s a great quote I hadn’t heard before from Kurzweil, it made me feel better about him. I feel that if we continue on with developing more advanced technology with an approach to it of a sacred act, respecting the magic of it in a way, then we’ll be better then alright. I often feel I have no real say in how all of this develops at least in terms of the technology so mostly I just try to relax and trust that it will work out in a benevolent way lol.
Thank you for such a great post, one of my favorites of yours so far. I don’t see a lot of articles talking about the convergence of science and spirituality that is happening right now. I love being a wordsmith at this point in history, I feel lucky to be here. It was my dream since high school to be able to easily self-publish my writing. I was very discouraged by what I learned about what the publishing world was like. Now I just need to drop the other excuses and get more of my writing up on the net. =)
Hi Slade,
Wonderful article.
I had not heard of Technological Singularity. It sounds fascinating while at the same time it seems terrifying too. It brings to mind films like The Matrix where intelligent machines have surpassed humans in their intelligence and run the world.
I do agree that while we humans are co-creating our reality with our thoughts/words we are also in partnership with technology.
Thank you for this thought provoking post.
Angela Artemis
Of course technology is spiritual… where else do we thing the ideas comes from? Our brains are simply hard drives – all information and inspiration is derived from spirit. Being inspired is being in-spirit. Our spirit combines with our brain to form the mind… the mind is what has intelligence, not the brain, and the mind cannot exist without spirit… there is no tangible mind to be found in our human bodies, it is a creation of spirit that exists as a conscious state.
Although thoughts and words are code and are in partnership with technology… Let us not forget that it is our human emotion that fuels everything – a word has no power without intent – an intention has no power with the emotion behind it. The human power is in our emotions… our hearts – This is were passion, dedication, commitment, and love come from, and without this emotion to fuel the inspiration and intelligence we create with, there would be no science. Our hearts are the portal to everything.
I do like the overall message of your article and the thoughts behind it… Although I tire of hearing people refer to God as though it is a singular spiritual being. What about the possibility of there being no ‘God’ at all? That God is only another state of consciousness made from all existing energy – and when this energy comes together it forms a state of consciousness called – The Collective Consciousness – and within this conscious state is where all is created.
Slade, you’ve got about five books of material in this post!
Awesome stuff. I do love language. I dunno, though — maybe it’s just my Zen background, but I tend to think language tells us more about the mind than about reality. Take a simple word like “nature”. Originally it referred only to innate qualities, something inherent, as in “nature vs nurture” or “human nature”. The sense of “stuff not made by Man” is a recent development of the last few hundred years; prior to that, everything around us was so doggone natural that we didn’t need to have a word for it. Nowadays we’re so separated from it that plenty of people say things like “I really enjoy being in nature”. So the question is, is the concept “nature” something real about the world, or does it say more about our attitude toward the world?
So if this is Adam’s Task, I say we should tackle it with tremendous caution. We cannot help but categorize and systematize the world, but we should do it with the consciousness that this is something we have created — a sub-creation, perhaps, in Tolkien’s words — and it is not the only way, or necessarily the best way, to go about it. We should be aware of our activity and do it creatively and lovingly and humbly, with the knowledge that this work, like all human works, is bound to be incomplete and transient — but no less beautiful for that.
Thanks for the comments, guys.
This article was originally published in 2007 in a collection of various authors about the Myth of the Ascension and the New Earth. I chose to exercise the vocabulary of Myth and Archetypes in a somewhat literal way in my piece.
Since I retained the copyright, had not previously shared the piece with my own audience before, and given all the heart-wrenching coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill, I felt like revisiting a more positive meditation on Technology.
Darla,
East of Eden is my favorite Steinbeck. Love when Kate disappears into that hole in the wall…
Brenda,
Calling me one of your favorite writers is a HUGE compliment — humbling — thank you!
Katie,
The bridge between Science and Mysticism is one of my favorites to stroll along and contemplate…
Angela,
In my recommended links (short as I keep that list) is a good “starting point” for exploring The Singularity.
http://www.singinst.org/overview/whatisthesingularity
Gil,
I can totally relate to your weariness. Long ago, I consciously chose to make a compromise regarding use of the word “God” — although I agree with your definition 100%, it’s a word I use in deference to the audience, not to myself. What you describe, those who agree with you (us) totally “get” — and for everyone else, what that word indicates may vary, but we all have some personally understanding of what we’re talking about when we use it.
I don’t normally refer to human beings, including women, as “Adam” either…
Jeff,
I greatly look up to your linguistic prowess…
Slade,
Thanks for the link. I read through the article. I’m going to have to read it again to really grasp it though.(Judging from the how I struggled to digest it I believe I could benefit from a little computer mind interface or A.I. infusion!)
Angela,
Not sure how many years we’ve got to go until the direct-mind interface or whether or not it will be wise to be an “early adopter.”
Just found your page today (linked from another blog) and WOW am I ever glad I did. Hours and hours of reading material here today. I can’t wait to read more. I’ll be back!
Thanks, Lindsay!
I love it when I find one of Those Sites, where I just want to hang out and devour… Truly an honor to be on the other end of that.
Enjoy!