Listening
by Frank Sontag
"Grandmother moon, we love you and
we are angry
at
the Invaders who trash you and violate our universe
with their mechanical uncleanliness.
We pray for you, for us and for the Invader
who
just can't comprehend respect,
love
or the balance of life,
-John Trudell (Santee
Sioux)
Lately, I
have had a lot on my mind. I'm not quite sure why but I suppose it may have
something to do with entering a time in my life when I have begun to reassess
and reflect upon what is truly important to me. And for some reason, the issue
of technology continues to wear heavy on my soul.
I do recognize that technology is mandatory
in this day and age, and that there are many positive benefits from it,
but still something about our blind and blatant use of it greatly disturbs me.
Maybe it has something to do with how much our world has changed in such a
short period of time. Maybe it has something to do with how much faster the
pace of modern life has become. And maybe it has something to do with pollution,
competition, nuclear waste, greed and our disconnection to the sacred natural
world.
Author Jerry
Mander, writes in his book. "In The Absence Of The
Sacred" of the enormous change that has occurred in his lifetime, because
of technology. "I was born in 1936. At that time there were no Jet
airplanes and commercial plane travel was effectively nonexistent. There were
no computers, no space satellites, no microwave ovens, no electric typewriters,
no Xerox machines, no tape recorders. There were neither
stereo music systems nor compact discs. There was no television in 1936. No
space travel, no atomic bomb, no hydrogen bomb, no 'guided' missiles, as they
were first called, no 'smart' bombs. There we re no fluorescent lights, no
washing machines nor dryers, no Cuisinarts, no VCRs.
There was no, air conditioning. Nor were there freeways,
shopping centers, or malls. There were no suburbs as we know them. There
was no Express Mail, no fax, no telephone touch dialing, no
birth-control pill. There were no credit cards, no synthetic fibers. There were
no antibiotics, no artificial organs, no pesticides or herbicides. During my
lifetime all of this has changed."
The debate
over whether technology has had a positive or negative impact on us is
irrelevant. I think that we've been lured into believing that these inanimate
lifeless machines and devices will make anything and everything possible in our
lives. But remember, all early descriptions of new technologies come from their
inventors and the people who stand to gain from their acceptance. Add to that
equation an advertising industry that spends billions and billions of dollars
each year to subtly and sexily seduce us into believing that we cannot survive,
nor be complete, without purchasing the latest series of goodies and gadgets to
come down the pike.
And finally,
how can we talk about the impact of technology without addressing
The average
American home has a television on for nearly eight hours per day. And the
average American who watches five hours of television per day sees
approximately 21,000 commercials per year. Author Jerry Mander notes, "that's 21, OOO repetitions of essentially identical messages
about life, aggressively placed into viewers' minds, all saying. Buy something
— do it now!" But our overdependence and addiction to technology is
symptomatic of a much deeper problem. You see my friends, our
consumer-oriented, workaholic, frantic lifestyles are external reflections of
the emptiness, chaos and confusion we experience inside of ourselves. We all
yearn for more meaning and aliveness in our lives, but in truth we are
suffering from spiritual starvation and impoverishment.
We are a
culture that places more emphasis on the external pursuit of materialism than
the internal pursuit of spirit. And because of our fervent beliefs about pride
and ego, progress and gratification, and power and money, we are destined to
wander aimlessly in the desert of despair.
We must once
again learn to be coherent by quieting our minds, drawing nourishment as we
drink deeply from the oceans of serene tranquility. We must once again remember
our connection to our Earth Mother, the Creator, and to all Life. And I pray we
once again listen to the spirit wisdom of the ages.
# # #
We must work passionately
and indefatigably to bridge the
gulf
between our scientific and our moral progress.
One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from
a
poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast
to our scientific and technological
abundance.
The richer we have become materially, the poorer we
have become morally and spiritually.
"Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the
external.
'The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in
art, literature, morals, religion.
The external is that complex
of devices, techniques,
mechanisms,
and instrumentalities by means of which we live.
Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal
to become fast in the external.
We have allowed the means by which we live
to outdistance the ends for which we live.
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.