Sometimes I have a whole day, and less often a whole weekend, where I don't leave my home and yard. Those are times of incorporating absence into my life, and I love those times. The Buddha said, don't just do something, stand there. Standing there is precious. For me, the important thing is to stay in control of technology rather than be controlled by it, and that's very difficult given how we are immersed in technology. The historian Arnold Toynbee said something like the twentieth century was a battle between technology and personhood -- the battle goes on in the twenty first century and I think personhood is losing. I don't think of absence as deprivation. Absence is fullness of stillness. Similarly, meditation isn't deprivation, it's filling one's self with the emptiness of quiet presence. I agree that it's important to root ourselves in our experience, which to me means rooting ourselves in our inside, not our outside. I need for my inner experience to be my home base, my sanctuary, that I am firmly rooted in, so I can be in this technology world but not of it.
On Mar 7, 2015 david doane wrote :
Sometimes I have a whole day, and less often a whole weekend, where I don't leave my home and yard. Those are times of incorporating absence into my life, and I love those times. The Buddha said, don't just do something, stand there. Standing there is precious. For me, the important thing is to stay in control of technology rather than be controlled by it, and that's very difficult given how we are immersed in technology. The historian Arnold Toynbee said something like the twentieth century was a battle between technology and personhood -- the battle goes on in the twenty first century and I think personhood is losing. I don't think of absence as deprivation. Absence is fullness of stillness. Similarly, meditation isn't deprivation, it's filling one's self with the emptiness of quiet presence. I agree that it's important to root ourselves in our experience, which to me means rooting ourselves in our inside, not our outside. I need for my inner experience to be my home base, my sanctuary, that I am firmly rooted in, so I can be in this technology world but not of it.