4,000 Years Before Smart Phones, People Were Concerned About Distractions
I don’t always look forward to having a salad for lunch, but I always feel better after I’ve eaten one. But in the last week or so I’ve noticed I’ve been feeling REALLY good. Like, mind body and soul kind of good. Which is a lot to expect of a salad, even one made with locally sourced organic ingredients.
It occurred to me I’ve been reading the Upanishads during my lunch break, which might be augmenting the whole vegan salad experience. The Upanishads, FYI, are ancient Hindu texts that are several thousand years old. Of course, it could be that I’m not reading about politics or current events during lunch, which in itself is making me happier.
The Upanishads are amazingly consistent from one to the next, far more than the Books of The Bible. For instance, in many of the Upanishadic texts it is pointed that the individual is composed of a physical sheath, which contains a vital sheath, which contains within it a mental sheath, followed by an intellectual sheath, ego sheath, and a beyond-all sheaths (I would explain it to you but it is not relevant right now. Plus, I have no idea what it means). Among other recurring ideas are maya, (the idea that the world itself is an illusion) and that the aspiring Hindu should seek to rid himself of attachment and to abstain from worldly comforts and pleasures.
Which causes me to wonder what sort of worldly comforts and pleasures were available to the average person living in India some 3–4 thousand years ago. I’d always been led to believe that prior to the 20th Century people led the most penurious and precarious of existences, that life was an unceasing struggle for food and shelter and from attacks by wild beasts and rival tribes. Yet here in ancient India — and indeed in countless other religious texts around the world — people are warned against overindulgence. Is it possible that the era we now live in has certain cultural biases and misunderstandings about the way things used to be?
If, as the Upanishads say, the world is an illusion from which we wish to awake through meditation, it seems society’s been moving in the wrong direction for, say, three thousand years or so. As William Wordsworth noticed even three hundred years ago, “the world is too much with us”. I could hardly imagine what he or a Hindu guru would have to say about smart phones. Or televisions. Or the myriad technological inventions that beep at us to gain our attention (or should I say destroy it?).
All that we call technological progress has been one big means of distracting ourselves from not only the outside world of nature but to what is going on within us, our thoughts and the signals our bodies are sending us. Not content with the illusion of the natural world, we have created an illusion within an illusion, creating simulations and simulacra that further distance ourselves from direct experience. And then we top it off by watching it all through screens.
I would suggest we all unplug ourselves from this artificial machine, but the truth is the machine is now in control of things. For us to simply unplug would be to leave the machine in the hands of those who are running things and are the most distanced from truth and direct experience. Not that anybody’s overseeing them now, but perhaps if we were to decompress ourselves, we would become more aware of those who are most lost to the machinery.
I do believe we should all at least make a conscious effort to regularly step away from the illusions and distractions we modern humans have made for ourselves , to search out and become acquainted with a reality that exists independent of our desires and flawed and imperfect mental processes. In this way at least we can hope to achieve some of the wisdom once possessed by even our crudest and most primitive ancestors. I do not expect everyone to achieve enlightenment or become one with Brahmin, but I do feel there is something to be gained by all of us putting our phones down for a few minutes. I firmly believe there is an essential something that has not been and cannot be acquired through the internet, not even on Amazon.