Returning to Analog

In this episode of The Conscious Classroom, Amy Edelstein questions the use of the popular idiom "returning to analog."  While agreeing with the sentiment that we reconnect with the preciousness of our humanity as technology continues to advance rapidly, she questions placing that sentiment within in technical context. Amy discusses the balance between digital experiences and the visceral richness of our awareness and connections and looks at some of the questions surrounding Ed-Tech and the integration of AI into the classroom. 

Key themes include:
• Exploring the concept of returning to analog in a digital age
• Evoking the transcendent experience of listening to analog music
• Highlighting the sacred nature of the emergence of human awareness in the broad sweep of evolutionary history 
• Emphasizing the importance of genuine human relationships
• Discussing the role of AI and its potential impact on learning and relationships
• Advocating for mindfulness and contemplative practice in the classroom and its connection to our humanity 

Chapters

• 0:10 Exploring how to rephrase the Return to Analog
• 16:20 Embracing the Future of Education, Mindfulness, AI and our Humanity

Transcript

Amy: 0:10

Welcome to the Conscious Classroom podcast, where we're exploring tools and perspectives that support educators and anyone who works with teens to create more conscious, supportive and enriching learning environments. I'm your host, amy Edelstein, and I'll be sharing transformative insights and easy-to-implement classroom supports that are all drawn from mindful awareness and systems thinking. The themes we'll discuss are designed to improve your own joy and fulfillment in your work and increase your impact on the world we share. Let's get on with this next episode. Share let's get on with this next episode. Hello, welcome to this episode of the Conscious Classroom podcast. My name is Amy Edelstein and I'm really excited to be here with you and to talk about something that has been coming across my field of vision more and more recently, has been coming across my field of vision more and more recently.

Amy: 1:10

The first time I was introduced to this concept was probably a little more than five years ago. I was at the 50th birthday celebration for a dear friend of mine who's an evolutionary thinker and a synthetic thinker around changes in culture, and it's always tracking interesting things on the leading edge. We were in the Bay Area on a freezing summer night, as can be in the Bay Area. The event was populated by all kinds of interesting people thinkers, new friends and old, meditation teachers, transformational leaders, technologists. I was having a conversation with someone who was talking about how the rate of change is increasing so rapidly that we are approaching what they call the singularity, a vertical line of the rate of change, and because the rate of change was moving so fast, all needed to go back to analog. What do you mean by returning to analog? I asked, and this person said to me asked, and this person said to me I don't really know what I mean, I just pull things from the air, but we need to return to analog. I thought a lot about this, because analog is a term that refers to a mechanical process. When we're talking about leaving the technological world because we can't keep pace in a humane way with its changes, and return to analog, we are still somehow situating ourselves in a context that's defined by non-sentience, which I take issue with and did at the time.

Amy: 3:11

Now, some five plus years later, at the recent Wisdom 2.0 Summit, which is really an amazing collection of technologists, meditators, transformational leaders and visionaries, the term return to analog has made its way into common parlance. I wanted to unpack this, because the intention of everyone using this term is to value our humanity. To value, as Jon Kabat-Zinn describes, the achievement of 13.8 billion years of evolutionary unfolding of human sentience, of human capacity to reflect on their ability to be aware, to know. And this miraculous emergence of consciousness and sentience, I feel needs to be defined on its own term and not in reference to something that makes us analogous with something non-thinking, feeling and caring, if we're going to use this term in order to highlight what we need to value as we move forward Now.

Amy: 4:50

I'm part of the generation that very much remembers that great musical shift from analog recordings to digital was spent long afternoons into early evenings in converted basements with speakers mounted near the ceiling in each of the four corners of the room and pointed down at some center point in the room where we would gather around, lean forward, pouring over the album covers and any hidden meetings we might be able to find in the artwork. Listening to the tracks in surround sound, noticing the blend in the band of notes and percussion in a way that was visceral, you could feel the tings of the bells and the xylophones as the mallet hit the instrument and then the reverberation, that wave that would move through you. This was an experience for for many of us as teenagers of the dawning of transcendence, of getting out of our minds and into that felt, visceral experience of the unbroken current of life, and analog refers to that. It refers to that wave-like quality where there's no break between the bits of information which is why vinyl is something that people are returning to when we could break music down into little digital bits and translate those beautific continuous waves into zeros and ones little bites of information that you could string together and create the songs we loved and store them in very tiny little iPods in our pockets, it was convenient but it wasn't the same.

Amy: 6:58

We traded in our LPs for compact discs and we traded in our compact discs for streaming services and somewhere along that towards digital bits and bytes, we lost the pageantry and ceremony of listening together in a room to the sensory experience of an entire album from start to finish, a feeling into probably what our ancient ancestors felt when they created music on the plains or the steps or the mountains, and it feel it's valuable, extremely valuable, that we maintain our reference for our relatedness about that beating heart that connects with others and with our world, that has a care and compassion and that can relate in a tactile way to the non-separation, to the wave-like movement of consciousness of all that exists, of how the past and the future and the present are all connected. And because they're all connected, in a sense they are all one thing. And when they're all one thing, when they are all one thing, we recognize the profound way we affect one another and relate to one another. And it calls forth our higher humanity. It calls forth our desire that pull to be noble, to be noble in character when I think about the future of education and the incorporation of more and more technology which is coming, and we want to do it right. We want to do it in a way that can foster independent learning, that can help students identify where they're tripping up and find new ways to determine the solutions to the problems they're working on, whether it's math or chemistry, or to challenge their expression by introducing other forms of meter and verse, so that they can expand and innovate their rhythms and ways of using language, and to learn even forgotten languages, lost languages, to bring them back. I think that AI has just amazing phenomenal capacity. What we want to watch? The recognition of the invaluable nature of our awareness and of animals' awareness and plants' awareness. Living beings have and share, to different orders and different degrees, awareness, consciousness, and that consciousness can demonstrate to us our interconnection and our connection. So we're not so alone. We want to maintain that, as in the context within which we work with AI, rather than taking our human sentience and placing it in a technological metaphor.

Amy: 11:23

The risk that we run when we elevate the digital is that we start creating an ideal of a perfect friend, a perfect tutor, a perfect companion. And human beings aren't perfectly attuned to us. They are independent, valuable in their own right, and that's where our individuation, within our interconnectedness, is part of what gives us the richness of life. We want students to engage in all the messiness of relationship. That's how we grow, that's how we deepen our understanding. We move through loves and conflicts, we move through moods of agreement and disagreement, we move through patterns of synergy and disharmony. That's all part of the human experience and especially a part of the educational experience. And if students feel so met and seen by their digital tutor, their digital companion, they may lose interest in the messiness of sentience. And if we do that, we will be limiting our own evolutionary edge around capacities that are uniquely to do with the living world do with the living world.

Amy: 13:19

Part of the ways we can introduce this in education, as we think about the future of education and AI, is to increasingly speak about, explore and lean into that beauty of the surround sound of connectedness, of relationship, of mentorship, of emotion, of physicality, of the give and take, the back and forth that makes us feel connected to one another, not just interconnected at a level that we can intuit, but connected at a level that we can touch the hands we can hold, the shoulders, we can hug. Returning to analog is a call for valuing that. Returning to valuing our humanity would be to set digital in the human context, the evolutionary context of the formation of life, and technology being, within that, not the definer of that. It's going to take a lot of care to lean into all the different impacts and effects that our increasing reliance on the digital world is creating. It's really hard to see into the future and it's really hard to see what's lost through the dazzle of what we gain, which I believe is very positive and I think can provide amazing diversity. I think we can explore learning in different languages. The nuance of that is often not recognized. English has a certain structure and a certain command to it and a certain phraseology and a certain number of words. Other languages prioritize different values and if we can start conversing in those with the assistance of AI, who knows what capacities for care and wisdom and connectedness will come forward, especially for young people who can explore in that new terrain free and unfettered. At the same time, we want them to explore free and unfettered and uncontrolled in their playgrounds with their friends, without fear of humanity.

Amy: 16:20

The rough and tumble and messiness of our human world is what makes us who we are. Our contemplative practice and exploration of letting go into silence and being intimately with ourselves, with our bodies, with our breath, with consciousness, exploring our experience miraculously releases that curiosity and care, especially if we prioritize the curiosity, care and compassion that traditional contemplative practice is meant to lead to. Mindfulness is not a shortcut for efficiency. Breath meditation is not an alternative to a pharmaceutical attention deficit disorder pill. Attention deficit disorder pill. The contemplative practice in its traditional context is meant to connect us with our higher human qualities and, when we lean in, to define those in the infinite ways that poets throughout the ages of our cultures and times have defined the nobility of heart, the wisdom of a clear mind and the compassion of hands at the service of those in need, we become exalted and when we taste that lightness of being, we sense our potential and an evolutionary direction towards that which is good and true and beautiful, beautiful.

Amy: 18:25

So let's not return to analog, although we're all welcome to go back to our vinyl records and surround sound and enjoy. Let's keep aspiring and reaching towards the future in ourselves and in our educational formats in order to continue that beautiful lotus of evolution. It's unfurling and unfolding, so that we continue to smell its unbelievable fragrance of purity and wisdom and love. And let's have that evolutionary ideal be very connected with all of our evolutionary history, so that we recognize the preciousness and delicacy of this experiment and continue to wonder with awe at how those conditions seem to be just right. So oxygen formed and carbon formed, and single-celled organisms appeared and mammals and, as the great cosmologist Brian Swim used to say, from molten lava to rose bushes, to giraffes, to a mother with her infant consciousness has evolved. Let's keep evolving that edge in all its fullness and no reduction. Let's incorporate this into our educational design and light up children with the wonder of being a human being and all that can be done with our flesh and blood and connection and mysterious access to unfettered consciousness.

Amy: 20:26

Let's close with a short meditation. If you're driving, save this for later. And if you're not, come into a comfortable and alert mindfulness posture where your spine is tall, your head's balanced at the top of your neck and your feet are planted on the ground or in a stable cross-legged position. Begin by focusing on the breath going in and the breath going out, and as you breathe in, let your attention go to a starburst, to a starburst that happened billions of years ago and when that star exploded. In its aftermath, as the gases swirled, oxygen was created and over billions of light years, that atom of oxygen is reaching your nose.

Amy: 21:54

Recognize that you are connected across time, in the immediate present, with your distant past. Wonder at how what is sustaining you, that molecule that goes in through your nose and gets spread throughout your system, traveling to a cell, carried by your bloodstream, creates life in you, energy, growth, all the functions that make us human and whole, and those functions can't be separated in that most intimate way of breath, with our ancient, ancient past and a star billions of miles away, of miles away. As you let that wonder settle into your body, allow your mind to be soft, calm and allow your heart to be filled with gratitude and appreciation for your own mind that can reflect, for the evolutionary process that created our bodies, our brains, language, the thought process, communication and our ability to choose to be still and reflect on the miracle of it all. And as we finish this short contemplation and meditation, let's hold that reverence and gratitude close to our hearts and choose to align our actions and our intentions with the reverence for the mystery and sacredness of the evolutionary unfolding that's created us and all things in our world. That's created us and all things in our world.

Amy: 25:23

Thank you all, till next time. Thank you for listening to the Conscious Classroom. I'm your host, amy Edelstein. Please check out the show notes on innerstrengthfoundationnet for links and more information and if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and pass the love on. See you next time.