{"id":1906,"date":"2012-09-14T09:12:25","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T08:12:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bodhicharya.org\/manyroads\/?p=1906"},"modified":"2013-07-01T17:13:49","modified_gmt":"2013-07-01T16:13:49","slug":"living-in-a-technological-world-by-vicki-mckenna-ba-lic-ac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bodhicharya.org\/manyroads\/living-in-a-technological-world-by-vicki-mckenna-ba-lic-ac\/","title":{"rendered":"LIVING IN A TECHNOLOGICAL WORLD by Vicki McKenna BA Lic Ac"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A High Tech Flood<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Many of us are finding the digital revolution to be overwhelming. Some of us are in agreement with the novelist Jonathon Franzen when he calls Twitter \u201cunspeakably irritating…\u201d and describes Facebook as \u201call one big endless loop…\u201d Still we flood the world with our texts and tweets \u2013 in Scandinavia more than 85% of the population communicate by text and worldwide around 294 billion email messages are sent every day. Research tells us that our kids are no longer out playing in the fresh air but are addicted to computer games and almost all of us are on our laptops daily. We are constantly fed by the machines, devoured by a cloud of Electro Magnetic Smog.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And as we get older we find it harder to re-learn how to use a newly upgraded mobile phone\/laptop\/TV\/DVD. The old one seemed so easy to use– how will we ever find our way round this new machine? And in addition to the pressure from keeping up with technological \u201cimprovements\u201d, replying to our emails, extracting our phone messages, being informed by Google and dealing with call centres on the other side of the planet, we have another constant pressure from those flickering screens – according to some researchers we each watch more than 30,000 television commercials a year. Altogether it often feels as if we are being flooded and overwhelmed by our modern technology in one form or another.<\/span><\/p>\n

There’s an old Daoist story about dealing with inundations. A young man sees an old monk fall into a fast flowing, wild river. He assumes that the old man will die, but later sees the ageing man make his way out further down the river. When he asks him how he managed, in his frail state to fight the flow of the waters, the monk laughs and replies; “I didn’t, I relaxed, and let the flow of the river carry me along safely until I found my way to the bank.” This is the essence of Daoist teaching and can help us all to handle the fast moving world of high tech, media and mass communications.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We can choose to fight and resist the changes that we find around us in the technologically fast paced world we now live in and carry on griping about texts and emails being ungrammatical and misspelt and worry about EM smog and its effects on our health. Alternatively we can burn out from over use of all things to do with the media revolution and then flee to live in a far away cave having nothing more to do with qwerty keyboards and the like. Or we can respond to this brave new world in the ancient Daoist way.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Daoist solution is to neither fight nor flee our technological world but instead learn, as the monk did in the wild river, to relax and find ways to mindfully <\/span>handle our high tech environment and so appreciate its benefits. I<\/span>nstead of feeling buffeted by the demands of email and phone, overwhelmed by the stream of media information, exhausted from too much EM pollution , we can respond to this frantic media landscape with ways that allow us to become masters not slaves to our machines. Learning to respond with stillness we transform our energy from frantic to flowing and feel better, calmer and more centred.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0From Frantic to Flowing<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Here are some suggestions to go from frantic to flowing and so handle better our high tech world<\/span><\/p>\n