Technology Schmechnology

"With all of our information slipping into the wireless realm, people have never needed yoga and other practices to ground them into their physical bodies more." 

~ Dulcinea Circelli - Los Angeles based yoga teacher, writer, Artist

I borrowed the above quote from an acquaintance's, a fellow yoga teacher trainee with me two years ago, Facebook page. This has been a major theme for me the past few weeks ever since that class on new literacies I mentioned in an earlier post. I have the same question now as I did then: What does it mean to be a human, embodied, in all this digital zaniness? And there's more to that question than meets the eye. I paid attention this week to how frequently I'm drawn into this collective consciousness that is our technology. I've convinced myself that it's useful, and indeed, it can be. I found a decent video clip on YouTube to supplement my science lesson on seed dispersal for my 2nd graders. Ideally we would have wandered into a dandelion field to see the blizzard first hand, and if I could find a plant that bursts and flings its seeds, that would have been more powerful. Since neither of these experiences were immediately accessible, the clip taught more than a dry lecture from me could have done. The grand finale of the clip was a rhino pooping. No way I could duplicate that.


So it's all useful stuff, right? Eh, not so sure. I know I'm going to sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist here, but we, the bulk of the planet's nearly 7 billion inhabitants, are so easily led by the nose by pretty advertisements, misleading information that must be true 'cuz it's on the net, time ticking away at games when the flesh and blood people sitting next to us go unnoticed. How many of our opinions have been formed for us by these entertainments? I read another article this week on Ecological Buddhism, a bit depressing, but necessary to look at, I think. The interviewee mentions how the science of social control is so refined these days that it takes all a meditator can do just to be aware of it, let alone resist. (And then to read that perhaps the best a meditator can hope for is to be able to bear the unbearable when the shit hits the fan...Where's the jewel in the shit?) So there's that. 

No doubt you've heard about the tree octopus hoax, right? I'm pretty sure I'm the last person to catch wind of it. Well, there's this weird thing about being human that enables us to believe really absurd things--sometimes the more absurd, the more tenaciously we believe them. Tree octopus is case in point. Now there doesn't have to be an internet or TV or iPhone in order for this strange idiosyncrasy to manifest itself, but I'm thinking there's something about the electronic world that links directly with a more primitive area of our brain when we plug into it. We don't even recognize that our strong reactions (or lack thereof) to news and events have been conditioned, created really, by something external and not always in our best interest. 

Didn't Star Trek teach us anything?

Then there's the esoteric view. Aside from being a time vortex, getting caught up in little virtual dramas is a lot like living in the future or snagged in the past, anywhere but here, really. There's no "here." It's an un-zen, un-yoga noplace to be (or not be). Here's Zen iconoclast Brad Warner's opinion on the subject. 


Not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, I still plug in. Obviously. I'm doing it right now. But maybe I'll plug in a little less frequently, choose reality over virtual reality whenever possible. Now that this is written up, I see that I would have much rather written on the other side of the issue, about embodiment and the way my yoga practice grounds me both in my physical body and in the present. Yesterday I watched a gymful of sweaty Zumba dancers shake their booties while I waited to teach my class. They looked happy. They looked alive. There were 30 people at my class, too, getting curious about these strange, fleshy mechanisms and how they work.  Yoga and meditation do seem needed more than ever, to explore the mind and inquire about what THIS is, this body/brain/mind/life thing. A topic for next time, perhaps. For now, I'm going to quit writing and go scratch my cat behind his cute little cheek tufts.