unique flower

Uniqueness and algorithms do not harmonize

1280 830 Elisabeth Karsten

Who you are no online oracle can tell you. It depends entirely on your willingness to recognize yourself. Accordingly the Apollo temple situated where the famous Delphi oracle was had the inscription: Know thyself. Our uniqueness – what makes us specifically – can only be experienced from within, not from outside.

Key question to self discovery

But the question, who we actually are, still drives us. And it is indeed one of the guiding questions on the path to enlightenment. For me enlightenment is the experience and recognition of the all transcending truth, that goes far beyond our own being and our alleged identity.

Until you awaken into this awareness of being you are asleep in certain ways. This entails often mistaking reality and illusion, truth and claim and labels with content. Uniqueness does not fit into this. It is often actually considered menacing and isolating. But we do want to belong and therefore do our best, not to get out of line too much. This is appreciated.

We are always labelled

All our lives others make an effort to tell us who we are. They categorize, judge and label us continuously. First our parents and families, then our teachers and fellow students, our bosses and colleagues, our states and organizations and now finally some random online logarithms!

With increasing discontent and a certain boredom I´ve noticed that these oracle-games are booming. Somewhere in social media you get to click on some pseudo-wise question and then a lottery-like mechanism takes place and presto spits out the answer. The questions go somewhat like this. “What does your guardian angel/starsign/birthday say bout you?” “If you were a plant/an animal/a deity, you would be…” “What heart/colour/timetype are you?”

Ego candy dims uniqueness

And you can play that again every day – and the answers will vary and of course it´s only different today, because you are not who you were yesterday. But the inconsistency of the answers has the effect of candy  that solely consists of sugar, artificial aroma and colour. Who you truly are is not to be learned this way. All players know this and yet it is this question that motivated them to play in the first place.

Furthermore all these programmed oracles are an ideal vehicle to collect electronic data. This also applies to all the psychological online tests. Whether we want to know if our boss is a narcissist, if we have an allergy against electro smog our leadership qualities. In this way all kinds of information is gathered about us. And an ever more detailed outline of our features, our habits and our needs is produced. For that makes us more reachable for customized advertising. And beyond that it refines the parameters for subversive actions – however the relevant guards define them.

Leveling down instead of conscious uniqueness

Actually the exact opposite of what we´re aspiring for happens. Independently of how aware we are of our need to find out what makes us, what our personal uniqueness consists of specifically. The answer is to at least expand our own space for insights and stimulate it.

But in truth this only a more refined way of leveling down. For the answers are limited. And the people who klick on to the same oracle accordingly receive similar answers. But they are…different!

Let´s play in a unique way

I like games too. And I also enjoy gaining new ideas thereby. Or receiving new emotional impulses. I also appreciate a surplus value of learning something. I´m a big fan of the language learning app Duolingo and the language and mindtraining programs.

These also serve the data collection of course. But since this can’t be avoided in playing online games, one could do it with a  casual attitude and i.e. google children´s games, buying a revolver and doing taxes in one go… But I don´t want to digress further.

Our uniqueness can only be felt and experienced

I´m currently obsessed with authenticity – what is our actual match in this very moment? The more you depart from the conditioned need for being “normal” the more interesting and inspiring the answers become. Circling for instance is a great way to explore this.

Our wonderful mind is a very unsuitable tool to fathom our uniqueness. For it is inclined to compare, judge and classify. The mind usually acts according to the conditioning and imprints we´ve received throughout our life. These finally become a habit. We believe, it is our perception – but it is actually no more than an acquired pair of glasses through which we look.

Besides, the mind likes mistaking unique for being special. In the positive sense this is something sublime, in the negative it can be disqualifying. But your personal uniqueness is something natural and neither good, nor bad and sometimes even both. It depends on how you deal with it.

Our uniqueness is our real treasure

We really should celebrate our uniqueness. In ourselves and in others. The more each of us expresses his potentials, the stronger all of us become! Therein lies a huge potential. For us individually, but also for humanity and all being in general!

Only you can what you can do! Only I can, what I can do – when we connect miracles are possible. In order to not waste anymore time with online oracles, I´ve come up with a few ultimate answers…

If I were the oracle I would answer: