My boss reminded me of a drawing I used to use a lot 15 or so years ago. I called it the barbell, and it looked like this.

I would draw it very differently today. But there is a truth in it. Our exchanges with one another, whether communications, services or products, are only the foreground to a relationship.

That relationship has a continuity to it, and today I would call that continuous relationship a real being that transcends each person in the relationship. It is a collective soul — an egregore.

We can psychologically reduce that being and chop it into bits and stuff the bits into mindstuff  within physical brains. When we do that we gain control over it. We can manage it and measure it. We can buy and sell it, and that’s great. Or we can turn it over to a government for equitable distribution., and that’s also great.

But we lose something when we do that. Because it is entirely possible to understand the world in ways that do better justice to what we actually experience when we relate to one another and participate in beings that we know transcend us. It does better justice to our moral insights and experiences of awe, beauty and love.

This understanding does better justice to scientific and technological practices and understandings than scientific and technological understandings and practices can do to it. But none of this can be explained in scientific and technological terms.

Taking this latter road makes all the difference. Everything changes because one’s own everything has changed.