Is technology dulling our senses?

Has our love of technology so diminished awareness of our surroundings that we are now impaired in our social relations?

I stumbled across two interesting articles this week that highlight this question. One relates to our use of cellular devices; the other to social behaviour in museums, of all places.

USA Today looked at what happens when people spend a lot of time texting, talking on mobile devices or listening to mp3 players. The result is a phenomenon we're all familiar with: lots of us are "present, yet absent." This has many social and personal implications. For example, while on vacation to exotic locales some people walk around with their heads down sending messages instead of experiencing the natural beauty they paid good money to experience. At restaurants, conversations (and relationships) are impaired when we pay more attention to incoming and outgoing messages than the conversation we're also having with our own partners.

Are we becoming "post-human" and are we losing valuable R & R time? Find out in Olivia Barker's story here.

In The New York Times, meanwhile, Michael Kimmelman writes an observational piece about tourists roaming museums. Watching visitors in the Louvre in Paris, Kimmelman asks himself what, exactly, are tourists doing and how do they react when confronted with a work of art? The answer, most of the time, is that they are taking hasty snapshots and moving on. During a morning of observation, almost nobody paused in front of an object for more than 60 seconds.

Kimmelman contrasts this experience with that of visitors in the pre-digital era, when people would bring sketchbooks to museums and interact with a work for much longer. He points out that artists see things differently. "Artists fortunately remind us that there’s in fact no single, correct way to look at any work of art, save for with an open mind and patience," he writes. One cannot review one's "lifetime art history requirements in a day."

Fortunately, not everyone that morning was impatient to move on to the next photo opportunity, as you'll see in the story here.

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Notes:

Thanks to John Lee for his photograph of texting on a mobile phone and to Christian Bauer for his shot of the exterior of the Louvre Museum.

For a related story in Zanepost, see "The present is the only thing that's real."

Can humanity evolve to a new level of consciousness?

Some time ago, I found a great amount of help in a book by Eckart Tolle called The Power of Now. Tolle and other spiritual leaders opened my eyes to the covert and often destructive way in which our own minds and our egos take control of our lives and determine our behaviour. These two aspects of ourselves very often smother and distract us from the true essence of our being.

Tolle stresses the importance of awareness and how we must work daily to stay focused on the present.

One could argue that many sad and painful events in our world are related, in one way or another, to egos influencing people in negative ways. I'm thinking of things like wars, murder, and abuse of all kinds. These are all related to two things. First, a lack of real consciousness. Instead of focusing on what's actually happening around us, we focus on the pseudo-life that plays itself out in the mind. Secondly, we have a tendency to allow bruised egos to determine actions.

Egos demand protection and gratification. They demand revenge, action, retaliation, "honour" and a host of other entitlements. Think of something like the Gollum character in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. (The pictures in the link give you a very good idea.)

And of whom do egos ask these things? Actually, of us, the very people who "own" them.

Tolle says humanity hasn't evolved to its true spiritual potential. He believes this has not happened yet because we have not reached a fully conscious state in which we can separate our thoughts, our egos and our underlying life energy. He argues our true selves are to be found in that underlying authentic essence.

His ideas aren't all that new; they've been around for thousands of years through the words of Abraham, Mohammad, Jesus, the Buddha and of the Hindu masters. However, Tolle presents them in a modern context and reminds us of the value of these teachings.

Now, Tolle's new book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, has caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey, who has made it one of her monthly picks. For the first time in Oprah's media world, an author's work will also be the basis for an on-line course that will be presented on her website, beginning in March.

Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper, offered a primer on the main messages of Tolle's latest book and the structure of the course. I found it interesting.

For a short overview of Tolle's ideas of the "egoic self," see this article.

Last October, a related post appeared here, called "The present is the only thing that's real."

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Thanks to Tibor Fazakas of Romania for his photograph of the park benches in that quiet winter setting.