How Technology Can Disconnect us From the World
The Importance of Mind-Body Integration
Virtual Reality is now at our fingertips. This technology is affordable for everyone who owns a smartphone and it opens doors for education, recreation and even physically or otherwise handicapped.
While listening to an episode of Buddhist Geeks this week — a non-profit organization dedicated to discussing the convergence of Buddhism with technology in an increasingly global culture — something that the interviewee of this episode, Michael Heim pointed out about Virtual Reality and raising consciousness really resonated with me.
He said, with the start of the technological revolution, tech-innovations were geared towards extending our senses, minds, and emotions, providing us with opportunities to enter worlds we may have never entered (and never would be able to) and a way to communicate and extend our thought processes oftentimes unimaginably.
However, the fast pace of the digital world often creates a disconnect with our current realities.
A disparity between our thoughts and reality, and our thoughts and our bodies. In a way, our bodies are the segway between the mental and the real. The most common example of this is probably the “instragramming” situation.
We are at the beach watching the sunset and get the immediate urge to take a picture of it to share it with our social media friends.
So, while we stand on the beach during the sunset, we take the picture, put it through an Instagram filter (to make it look even more beautiful?), think about which hashtags to use, write a funny and thoughtful description for the picture before we finally post it on all our social media, and before we look up from our phone again, the sun has completely set.
All that time we missed out on feeling the sand underneath our feet, the ocean waves crashing in, the salt smell in the air and the cool night breeze lightly touching our body.
We Missed Out On The Moment (MOOM), a moment that could have inspired our mind to reconnect with the segway — our body — and our body reconnecting with nature and the reality in that moment.
Helms argument is that with the advancements in technology we have lost the ability to sync our mind with our body and thus “seeing” and “realizing” the world and reality as it is. He argues, instead of advancing the intellectual internet realm through technological innovations, people need to re-experience their physical energy and reconnect with the earth again.
In general, we walk through the world thinking we are immortal.
We disregard science that clearly tells us that cured meat is a contributor to cancer, or blue light messes with our melatonin and thus, our sleep, or that livestock are contributing the same amount to the greenhouse gas emission as transportation does.
We think we have a magic shield and nothing will happen to us. Nor will global warming affect us, or our kids, because surely by the time our kids are grown up, technology will have advanced so much that we have a cure for that.
Technology is only contributing to this immortality illusion. Not only is our phone now the extension of our hands but the Internet is the extension of our minds. With that, we continue to build a disconnect between the endless possibilities of the technological realms and what is actually happening in our physical reality and in the present moment, which ultimately hinders us from taking action for the betterment of ourselves and the world.
It reminds me a little bit of the social psychological attentional blindness experiment. Even something so obvious as a monkey walking across a basketball field (see link) does not come to our awareness when our mind is focused on something else.
However, once we shift our attention away from the Basketball players in the white shirts, we suddenly see the most obvious that is in front of us. So, the question is, of course, can technology help us to reconnect our minds to our bodies and the reality we are living in?
In order to create change in society, we need to become aware of the “monkey” in front of us.
Whereas it is good to expand our consciousness and be in “other worlds” through technology (may those worlds be FB, films, YouTube videos, or games), we also need to be able to reconnect with the actual world around us. One way to do that is reconnecting with our bodies, as Heim suggests.
This can stretch from physical activity to mindfulness practices and yes, also to take in the sunset without creating it virtually, for a virtual audience and a virtual reward. Why be satisfied with virtual rewards when the reward can be real?
