Human beings are different from what they seem to be thinking, perceiving, or saying asmediated by social symbolic systems [29 ]. They are different from how they are represented intheir own narratives, they are different from language itself. Interestingly, learning to consciouslybecome aware to that difference—the bare human spirit, the preindividual, or being as becoming asSimondon [30 ] puts it—appears to be the state of mind towards which many spiritual traditionsare guiding. David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) refers to this state as thought sans image [ 13], offering itscontemporary conceptualisation via the metaphysical theories of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon andGilles Deleuze, in combination with the enactive theory of cognition [14 ] and inputs from complexityscience

Simondon characterizes modern technics as the appearance of technical individuals in the form of machines: hitherto, the human was a bearer of tools and was itself a technical individual. Today, machines are the tool bearers, and the human is no longer a technical individual; the human becomes either the machine’s servant or its assembler [assembliste]: the human’s relation to the technical object proves to have profoundly changed. Heidegger characterizes this “mutation” with the notion of Gestell (the systematization of the principle of reason). The semantics of Gestell is not foreign to that of system, and, in Gille’s view, the concept of a technical system grounds a scientific history of techniques.