"Keep as far away as you can from the places where they gather to cheat and insult one another, to to mock one another with their false gestures of friendship."
"Do not read their newspapers, if you can help it. Be glad if you can keep beyond the reach of their radios. Do not bother with their unearthly songs or their intolerable concerns for the way their bodies look and feel."
"Do not smoke their cigarettes or drink the things they drink or share their preoccupations with different kinds of food. Do not complicate you life by looking at the pictures in their magazines." -- Thomas Merton.
We live in a hyper-active world of spectacular technological wonders.
Technology is about "action" and not at all concerned with "contemplation" or meditative attainment. With outward expansion and movement, and not with inward stillness and concentration.
Is it possible to create a "contemplative technology"?
The modern world is a "commotion" of movement, with an intolerance or incomprehension of stillness, silence, and peace.
Commotion is defined as : (1) a state of civil unrest or insurrection; (2) a steady or recurrent motion; (3) a mental excitement or confusion; (4) an agitated disturbance; (5) a noisy confusion.
Isn't that an accurate description of life in the modern world?
Technology allows us to supplant internal restlessness with external commotion. It allows us to distract ourselves, or "escape" from, our inner restlessness, inner suffering, through movement. It is no accident that the contemplative monasteries of Europe were suppressed at exactly the same moment of the construction of the modern state, and its new faith in "progress", movement, and scientific reasoning.
Technology is not the problem, it is the symptom of an underlying sickness that rests in human hearts.
Meditation is the antidote to modern technology. Meditation is a deepening of experience, inner experience, rather than a flight into external activity. If you can't go far, you go deep.
In the contemporary world, action is mistaken for life. Movement is mistaken for life. Commotion is mistaken for communion.
We create a commotion to avoid, escape, express, replace the inner agitation, and anguish of soul, from living in an intolerable world. And to escape or deny the guilt we feel for having cooperated in the construction of such a cruel and selfish world. We feel guilty because we are guilty.
By committing ourselves to a nonviolent way of life, and cultivating inwardness, we can re-inhabit our vacant inner lives. By arousing our energies by keeping the welfare of others at heart, we can attain enough courage to grow patient and compassionate to our own humanity, and awaken to inwardness, to our own Buddha nature, or "the kingdom of God."
At the heart of commotion is an urgent compulsion to MOVE, to move away form "here" in this place, to escape from the present moment.
Commotion is the refusal to meditate. It is "the passion for unreality" Merton said.
The good news is that we can STOP. We can sit down, shut up, and go inward, and pay attention to the trees.
In the Japanese edition of The Seven Story Mountain, Merton says that Modernism, with its "ideology of matter, power, quantity, movement, activism, and force. I reject this because I see it to be the source and expression of the spiritual hell which man has made of this world: the hell which has burst into flames in two total wars of incredible horror, the hell of spiritual emptiness and sub-human fury which has resulted in crimes like Auschwitz and Hiroshima. This I must reject with all the power of my being. This all sane men must reject. But the question is: How can we sincerely reject the effect if he continues to embrace the cause?"
He became a monk as a rejection of the modern technological world, he said. "As a radical liberation from the delusions and obsessions of modern man and his society."
The monastic life is a rejection, and alternative, to the modern world with its values, assumptions, views.
"It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection, a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny which threatens to destroy the whole race of men and the world with him."
"By my monastic vows and life, I am saying NO to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socio-economic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace,"
Technology is a tool, much like a hammer. It can be used for positive or negative ends. I can use a hammer to build a temple or build a house for a homeless family. I can also use a hammer to kill somebody.
ReplyDeleteTools, in and of themselves, are neither good nor bad. The question is how they are used. As long as we follow the middle way and do not allow the technology to consume us, it can be beneficial. Technology can be used to spread the Dhamma, as this site demonstrates. But, as Than Santidhammo says, we need to also allow time away from it to go inward in meditation and metta.
Tony
Technology, in my opinion, is a poor substitute for contact with human beings and nature. For example driving my car, instead of walking, isolates me from my surroundings. I can't reach out to touch or smell a flower or have any meaningful interactions with the people I am passing. Driving also gives me an illusionary sense of security, distance and time as I propel though space (in my little car capsule) oblivious to the physical effort and visceral experience of movement. One reason riding around in a car for long is so boring and unsatisfactory is because we can't engage ourselves fully in the experience.
ReplyDeleteComputers also serve to remove us from ourselves. Facebook, for example, provides the illusion that I am actually communicating with someone although I can't read their nonverbal expression, hear the fluctuations and tone in their voice, or pick up on any of the other subtle nuances of human expression and communication. The latter are the kinds of things that make being human a rich experience and help us to feel interconnected.
I could go on and on about the effects of TV, cell phones, war technology and more. The bottom line is that too much reliance on technology is dehumanizing and isolating.