Thank you again for all of your thoughtful comments regarding technology use and how it relates to our spiritual practice. Have you noticed benefits to an additional focus on your use of technology as seen through a spiritual lens over the past few weeks?
Easwaran on Technology (continued) #7-9, excerpted from the Blue Mountain Journal, Spring/Summer 2018
7 I’m interested in the Information Age, but I’m not impressed by it. Information is useful, but it cannot make you good. That’s the ultimate purpose of spiritual disciplines – to make you good.
8 Use technology in detachment, as an obedient servant. Don’t let yourself be used by technology, because it will become a tyrannical master – as we see today.
9 Technology goes where profit goes. And where profit calls, that is a blind alley.
In the next section of our ongoing reading study, Easwaran suggests that we cultivate discrimination by trying alternative forms of entertainment, particularly in the company of children. Is there a substitution you’ve made in the past that you’ve found enjoyable? Is there a technology-free entertainment you’d like to try this week? Please feel free to share your reflections on this week’s reading study or on your experience with alternative entertainment. We look forward to hearing your ideas!
Making Wiser Choices – Part II
By Eknath Easwaran
Protection from the gravest dangers
When we learn how to look for it, we see that this choice between preya and shreya comes up every moment, in virtually everything we do. There is no escaping it. The moment dawn breaks, the choices begin: “Shall I get up for my meditation, or shall I pull the blanket over my head and stay in bed a little longer?” It starts there, and it goes on until you fall asleep at night.
Early morning, therefore, have your meditation right on time. It sets the tone for the rest of the day. The Bhagavad Gita, in a verse that is etched on my heart, assures us that regular meditation will protect us from life’s gravest dangers. “Even a little meditation will guard you against the greatest fears”: against physical ailments, emotional problems, disrupted relationships, spiritual alienation.
Most critical, perhaps, meditation slowly opens our eyes and hearts to the needs of those around us. That is wise discrimination, and I know of no better protection against the mistaken choices that can so burden life with guilt and regret.
After meditation, of course, more choices come in a flurry, generally at the breakfast table. With all the conditioning of the media, where eating is concerned, right choices are not easy.
Food has become a kind of religion, and business is quick to cash in on it. To choose wisely, your senses must listen to you.
That is the essential prerequisite. And for your senses to listen to you, your mind must listen to you.
That is why, as you train your mind in meditation, your eating habits come under your control. Likes and dislikes begin to change, and choices open up everywhere.
Yet, of course, extends not only to eating but to everything. In the Sanskrit scriptures, we are said to eat through all the senses. Just as we learn to be discriminating about what we put into our mouths, we learn to be vigilant about the books and magazines we read, the movies and television we absorb, the conversation we indulge in, the company we keep: in short, in everything we do and say.
When you are training a puppy, you don’t try to teach it limits for an hour and then say, “All right, you’re off duty now. Go do whatever you like for the rest of the day.” It is the same with training the mind. Why spend half an hour every morning in meditation, going through the agony of teaching an unruly mind to be calm and clear, and then go out and stir up all its appetites again in the name of relaxation?
Potent mind drugs at the touch of a button
I have always enjoyed movies, for example, but it is more and more difficult to find something I want to see. A good film is hard to uncover among the hundreds that are filled with excessive, graphic displays of violence. It is not merely that I do not enjoy movies like this; I don’t approve of what they do to my mind.
Potent mind drugs are available to us now at the touch of a button, acted out for us on the screen so that everything is reduced to its lowest level. The real problem raised by this kind of mass distribution of mind drugs is spelled out in two terrible verses in the Gita:
When you keep thinking about sense objects,
Attachment comes. Attachment breeds desire,
The lust of possession which, when thwarted,
Burns to anger. Anger clouds the judgment
And robs you of the power to learn from past mistakes.
Lost is the discriminative faculty, and your life
Is utter waste.
As our minds fill up with junk thoughts and junk feelings, we get addicted to them. We lose our discrimination, and as these junk thoughts fail to satisfy – as they must – the craving for them becomes more and more acute. But we are hooked: we can’t get them out of our heads.
Is it merely coincidence that angry, frustrated teenagers are turning to just what mass media touts – sex and crime?
Consider the effect on their relationships. If a child spends an hour a day with a parent and five or six hours absorbed in the fantasies and so-called realism of the mass media, what images of people and of personal relationships are going to fill that child’s mind? Whether we like it or not, this is the world that child will live in; those experiences are teaching that child how to act.
Draw a line for yourself and your family
I am not complaining about science and technology, or the conveniences of modern life. I’m simply saying, “Draw a line beyond which you don’t allow yourself, or your family and children, to go.”
I don’t think any of us realizes how pernicious are the threats to a child’s mind in the modern world. It is not that the mass media are inherently bad, but we are not mature enough, we are not farsighted enough, we are not selfless enough to use the tremendous power of television and film. Children have wonderful creative faculties which will not come into play if they grow up with interactive video and TV.
So my personal appeal would be to turn your TV off and make time for nourishing your home with the images and ideas needed to make this a better world.
One gentle, effective way children can be weaned from TV and other media is for their parent to take a good book and read to them. If that sounds old-fashioned, try it. Many families of former media addicts will tell you that it works. Younger children love to have a story read or told to them, and if older children want to read to themselves, encourage them and set an example. We need to educate their tastes, show them how to appreciate stories with depth, sensitivity, and strength of character rather than just action – and most parents find that in educating their children’s tastes, they educate their own as well.
Turn to the mystical tradition
There are many good books available today, not only the time-tested classics but good stories by contemporary authors, and no end of books that explore science and culture in ways young people can understand. I have seen children coming to ask for such books. They won’t be content with the cheap substitutes our mass media try to force down their minds.
But we need to set them a good example with our own reading too. There you can do no better than to turn to the mystical tradition. It is a whole world of beautiful literature – inspiring, practical, nourishing, strengthening.
These are words that have endured the passage of centuries. In the Hindu tradition we have magnificent epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which cannot be surpassed for drama, adventure, character, and spiritual insight. Most Hindu children grow up on these stories, which offer noble role models and teach the basic laws of life in the midst of high entertainment.
Every spiritual tradition has its literature, full of poetry and the passionate desire to communicate what words cannot contain, where men and women who have soared to the heights of human experience try to convey to us what they have discovered and what they encountered along the way.
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