In this paper, I explore the question of the importance of macro-historical metanarratives in the production of religiously affective forms of experiential knowledge, through a correlative comparison of three 20th century examples: integral philosopher Jean Gebser, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and philosopher-yogi Sri Aurobindo. In the 10 th century Indian philosophical school known as Pratyabhijna (self-recognition) we may find an analogous description of such an awareness, now retrieved by digital technology. As the digital architecture comes to mirror the consciousness of which it is an extension, and personality takes form in the relationships cultivated and reflected upon, both within and alongside the digital surround, an expanded notion of selfhood comes into focus, not separate from the world but constantly in relationship with the whole as well as with what is beyond it. ' (Thompson, 2013: 85) As we struggle to adapt to our extended nervous systems and the discarnate, nonlocal interactions produced by this arrangement, the nature of self-awareness is transformed from private individual enclosed in a three dimensional physical body to distributed lattices of consciousness, and yet the obsolescence of a particular notion of private individuality does not necessarily equate to the doing away with all notions of individual selfhood.

(Eliade, 1996: 11) More recent thinkers like Bruce Powe, William Irwin Thompson, and Mark Hansen have written on the significance of new media to the evolution of religion, using McLuhan's work as a prophetic lens, and heralding, in the words of Thompson, a movement toward ' the beginning of a unique/universal self-similar architecture of consciousness that is based upon individual experience and not upon priestcraft, rigid dogma and collective forceful indoctrination. ' We must get used to the idea of recognizing hierophanies absolutely everywhere ' he writes, and the digital surround is emphatically not excluded from such consideration. Marshall McLuhan's idea of the ' discarnate man, ' who's organs without bodies are extended across the global digital nervous system in dialogic interaction with those of multiple Others provides new opportunities for the emergence of religiosity, the ' irruption of the sacred ' as Mircea Eliade called this kind of spontaneous emergence and direct encounter with the divine through hierophanies of all kinds. This is further indicative of more general transformations effected by the mediated environment in the sphere of religion, in which subjectivity itself becomes the locus of religious recognition and the site for the irruption of the sacred, due to its having become electronically externalized in the pervasive forms of media use.

In this 'discarnate condition' our metaphysical state approximates the condition of divinity itself as conceptualized in the pratyabhijñā.

This massive extensivity is further compressed into a single, resonating sphere of electronic interpenetration, rendering all individuals simultaneously present. It is argued that our contemporary media environment composed of digital networked electronic media forms reorients human perception, expanding our normal awareness to spatial and temporal ranges of extension that are, metaphorically and in some senses actually, universal in scope. This paper explores the interface between the media ecological theories of Marshall McLuhan and the Indian philosophical system known as Pratyabhijñā (recognition).

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