The idea of intergenerational relations (f. ex. our relations to the dead ancestors, but also our relations towards those who are yet to come), and different variations on Plato’s ideas about the cave, also complicate the matter. It does not only seem, that one has to weave through one’s personal demons - demons, which could be considered to be ”epigenetic”, that is, those we pick up along the way - and those which seem to originate from somewhere else. Traumas of war spreading their influence over generations was mentioned, but also I keep thinking of those demons of a more deceptive type born through slow and gradual change in the collective unconscious. Maybe the advent of these egregores was completely innocent at first, but then when they grew too big and faded to the background, that’s when their shadows started to take hold. For example the concept of information, or data is something, that tends towards a certain type of monism, which most of us (myself included) uncounsciously take for granted. The allure of cybernetics is that we consider it to tell us what everything really is (that is, information), rather than utilizing it as a prism to shed light on existence from a particular angle. I consider cybernetics being very similar in form to Aristotelian-alchemical thinking of everything constituted from a relations of 4 elements (1,2,3,4), but instead of 4 we get a binary (0,1).
Weaving through demons begotten by those macro-entities (be they cultural, ideological, familial and so on) is also part of the process. And once everything has been unwind, one should also know how to put it back together, since Solve without Coagula is dangerous.
The image of an individual will nurtured by the machine-moon is an insightful image, that opens up the possibility, that one does not have to banish technology altogether. The keys to meaningfulness are varied, and a liberatory revelation of everything being 0:s and 1:s can pave a way for a something beyond them. By analogy, the liberatory revelation of everything being inhabited with myriads of spiritual entities can be a good gateway as well.
Circling back to the question of mediumism: If we consider the possibility of an encounter with a dead relative that is, as Nefastos put it, an enduring block of personality, it is possible, that the said relative has a connection to the same intergenerational trauma for example, and through this connection, one can experience a feeling of resonance: sharing love. But pitfalls are numerous, since there is a difference between an entity with a relatively strong agency (will), and an elemental, that may interact with the physical (like by blowing up lightbulbs, talking through radio), but onto whom I project my feelings, giving it a pseudo-personality. As Camus, who in his conclusions can sometimes be a bit of a melancholic arsehole, describes eloquently in The Fall:
Have you noticed that death alone awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just left us? How we admire those of our teachers who have ceased to speak, their mouths filled with earth! Then the expression of admiration springs forth naturally, that admiration they were perhaps expecting from us all their lives. But do you know why we are always more just and more generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial in between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short. If they forced us to anything, it would be to remembering, and we have a short memory. No, it is the recently dead we love among our friends, the painful dead, our emotion, ourselves after all!