I must apologize for translating an article. In making a translation, I interpret. In interpreting I subject the article to subjectivity. But I do nonetheless, with this disclaimer, and I urgently invite you to disagree with me and my lousy translation.

The Beatles were most certainly blissfully ignorant of a concept such as Transhumanism – the idea of uniting the human with machine-based Artificial Intelligence, but she could certainly sing a tune about the topic of Transcendance – because they were practicing a thing called “Transcendental Meditation”, which somehow alludes to meditating having something to do with some kind of “superconscious” to be working behind our personal, individual Consciousness…

Oh for fucks sake, where do I start? First – Transhumanism is generally defined as …

the belief or theory that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.

…so why redefine it as the merger of artificial intelligence and the human? What does AI have to do with anything? Transhumanism is a significantly more broad enterprise than the relatively narrow field of AI. AI is emerging as something of a hipster term, because there’s so much discussion about it, but essentially AI right now is about using machine-based learning to make machines perform tasks humans can’t be bothered to do – i.e. all the boring stuff. Yes, you can merge AI with the human domain, in numerous ways, but what about merging humans with scizzors? You can merge humans with magnets, Binoculars comprize transhumanism. Pacemakers. Jet Skies. But mentioning “Artificial Intelligence” will of course allow the author of the article to make the mental leap towards some kind of transcendental universal consciousness.

Provided one exists. If you choose to discuss those things you are essentially appealing to people who somehow decide to miss the divine in their lives, but who in turn don’t like organized religion. We call those people “Itsists” in the Netherland, because these people find a necessity to believe in ‘something’ without having to define it. Defining religion quite often means you have to make statements about what must be done, or is disallowed to do. Religion is making statements about some kind of metaphysical entity or force, and that tends to imply transcendentally derived morality. In other words – if you say something about Metaphysics, you tend to also say other people must do or must not do. Before you know you have Sharia, or Dominionism, right? Maybe I am exaggerating. The Beatles were not very big or finger wagging and berating, granted, but they were exemplary of the definitive and visible unease of people in the baby boomer generation that found themselves bereft of guidance, divine or otherwise. Because we feel alone, we start doing shit that at least temporarily dispels that makes us feel lonely. And if we postulate the idea of some kind of transcendental universal consciousness, we get to not be alone.

This Transcendental Supra Consciousness isn’t always accessible for experience for just about anyone…

Unless you give money to Joel Osteen, obviously..

which is clearly evidenced by all the religious myths and ritual busywork people have crafted around it.

Assuming there’s an It, clearly. Which is still an assumption.

It is a very small minority of Yogi’s and Adepts who have generously shown us the way forward, but sadly their generous guidance was often co-opted by some old guy behind a curtain as to allow these guys to claim exclusive dibs on having access to the Divine.

No shit sherlock. I can easily claim that all of human progress so far has been the result of the twin tagteam all star wrestling effort between autocrats and religious leaders systematically terrifying and culling humanity to start listening to aforementioned spiritual leaders, “or else”. That a spiritual leaders sits all modestly in a cave or wear a loincloth somewhere doesn’t mean he still doesn’t get to enjoy the fruits of his fame.

Nowadays we have access to more and more information and tools to allow us to penetrate in to he depths of our very own ‘soul’.

And there you have it, the truth, cautiously parenthesized (pardon me the pun, parents get it?) to suggest that there is actually something like a soul “out there” or “in here”. Because that’s the problem right? Unless we start looking with considerable effort we may miss something tangible.

One of the wizards who truly found her life’s passons in discovering and describing -and applying!- the wealth of ultra modern devices that allow us to enrich life with life force and similar stuff, long ago associated with this primal biological spiritual essence, is Yfke Laanstra.

Yfke Laanstra is awesome. I actually met her a few times, and her business model seems to be, and I am viciously crudely paraphrasing my impression here, to somehow link up tangible technological progress with the Transcendental. So as to not feel lonely, as I explained earlier in this article. She is doing a really good job at it too, as she’s now written a book about this whole endeavor.

From her deep experiences with (among many many many others) Deepak Chopra as her teacher, she now has access to an amazingly lucid perspective on the far-reaching potental (AND!) serious dangers of this whole computer revolution we are now in the middle of.

You are starting to see a pattern here? Yfke climbed some mountain and had a bunch of talks with a guy of which the media says he’s pretty awesome and it rubbed of and consequently Yfke inherited some of that awesome. And you can now also share in the awesome for just 19,95 euro.

All over the world there’s this constriction (shrinkage?) going on, of the electronic web of radiance, information and espionage, almost as if it were some kind of digital prison whose doors are wide open to have some kind of Brain Chip of the Internet of Things implanted that somehow sounds even more ominous by me mentioning the word Google here.

Really really you should not take my bullshit translations seriously here. I mean, I am really bad at translating.

However, we might as well put all the hardware and software to facilitate us looking for liberating knowledge and to dissolve (?) the bars that have for centuries encased the human heart.

Hardware and Software, now dedicated towards the search for universal solvent!

On the website of this remarkably attractive and amazingly enterprising lady you can read all kinds of stuff about combi-discipline of consciousness- as well as computersciences.

Again, she talked to Deepak Chopra and nobody beats the Deeps. Combi-Discipline and all.

In the next month, say around may 2017, there’s this new book coming out she wrote about all this intensely deep forest of seriously related topic, and we call it “Bits, Bytes and Consciousnessness”. You can actually reserve your copy of this book. As soon as it arrives in our store we’ll send you a copy of this bookwritten by Yfke. Who talked to Deepak Chopra.

My suggestion? Buy the book in question and give Yfke your money. You’ll be able to read stuff written by the pretty lady who talked to THE Deepak Chopra.

And then people have the gall to label me cynical. I wonder why.