The human spirit and the human body seek to be refreshed. Seek to find: the human body feels movement in the cells, a one-way current of life through life, source to sea. The human spirit opens wider and wider as waves of experience crash against its sand and stone; we are carved into bays and bars by the tide.
We seek, at a conscious or subconscious level, to be refreshed, and apparent refreshment appears at our reaching fingertips. We scarcely need to make an effort. A student of mine brings a passage from a book she had been reading… on her telephone. A man or a woman walks down the street, slim wire running from ear-buds to hip, while at the hip a small white box contains hours or days of favorite music, presented in the order or disorder desired, at the highest fidelity.
It’s a miracle (isn’t it)? The finest musicians, the bravest poets, the highest-soaring harmonies — right there for the asking, from ether to heart to mind. Our favorite musicians follow us from bed to work, from work to play, to the running-path, the bicycle, the car, the dinner table, and back to bed again.
Well, a newer model of the same white box was developed a few months later… and suddenly the first white box was no longer a miracle. Miracle had gone stale – possibly the fate of all miracles – and what was once unimaginable, a daydream, was no longer enough.
Enough.
These brilliant sparks of technology have no wood to keep them warming us. They run on electricity, an unsustainable, dazzling flash, without depth and without lasting value. Really, they are empty and (if you think about it) vaguely horrible, like sunlight devoid of warmth, and as our hearts hunger and our spirits watch for renewal, these easy “fixes” capture our attention like babies’ baubles, catch our eye for a few vacant moments, take our attention and take our money, take our attention and fill precious hours with rough stones instead of jewels, and platitudes where there might be vital questions and lasting answers.
To accept the idea that all technology is subversive and vile is ridiculous, of course; the balance must be struck between mind-numbing labor and lack of information, and mind-numbing frivolity with so much information it becomes meaningless.
When I was younger, I met a man on the island of Java, whose four-thousand-year-old culture humbled me. I told him: you must not let this history go, look how much it has to offer! And he looked at me with a kind of disgust in his voice: I would very much like a radio, so I can hear the news and some of this new music. Or: how dare you stand there with your radio and your airplanes that take you to unimagined lands and your ability to have anything you want, whenever you want it, and tell me I should not have those freedoms?
The balance, the balance, the balance. Balance begins and ends with awareness, awareness begins and ends in silence, silence begins when you drop the technological toys and ends when you pick them up. Acknowledge a tool as a tool, and nothing more. A hammer is a hammer, and an iPod is a hammer.
The only thing which is not a hammer is your own being, and any other living thing. I heard the lesson of the Javanese man, and I brought it home with me, changed: Harness technology, so that it does not harness you.
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