heaven in a silicon chip

Of course, there are a lot of secretaries who swear by their word processors, businessmen delighted with their spreadsheets, kids lost in their Zork Underground Empires—but in a culture already isolated from much of its own feelings, from its mysteries (Fig. 1)—have computers become part of the solution or part of the problem? Will MS-DOS (whatever that is) lead us out of the desert? Or Unix to the promised land? Do they speak Fortran in Paradise?

The problem is that right-brain functions cannot be measured by left-brain tools. And any culture whose prevailing mind-set is: if you can’t measure or market it, it probably doesn’t exist, will have a hard time accepting that right-brain activity is not just another block of information you learn and utilize, like Calculus, or how to use a spread sheet. Nor is this process an “artistic” skill like figure drawing.

It can’t be taught.
It can only be caught.

It’s a whole other way of being. In fact, it’s the way we were as children, then gradually learned to ignore. It’s just a question of whether you can re-open the door.

And now it turns out that the Macintosh is somehow able to help open that door, to stimulate the right brain creative-intuitive process.

It offers a unique and beguiling environment to catch it, to exercise it, to reintegrate it with that linear, literal, minding-the-store A B C D world of the left hemisphere.

And, as everybody should know by now, a clear working balance between the left and right hemispheres is the essential foundation for any real foray into personal evolution.

Getting your act together.

Which is the first step in getting the Big Act together, what is sometimes extravagantly known as Saving the World.

Grand claims for a computer, no doubt. But then again—if there are those who have found heaven in a grain of sand, why not in a silicon chip? (Fig. 2)