How Overstimulation Is Hurting You | Eckhart on Social Media and the Loss of Stillness

It's like the civilization has made a great effort to come up with as many things as possible to prevent people from becoming still and spacious and taking a moment of the normal thing to happen is that the connectedness with your essence. Identity is lost very easily in human relationships because the mind is so active. And we live in a civilization that provides continuously continuous and incessant stimulus stimuli, continuous incessant stimuli for the mind even more than even 30 years ago. Thirty years ago it was just radio and television and people would sit there for hours. But nowadays you have countless sources of stimulus for the mind that draws you into continuously thinking about what's your next Facebook post? What's it going to be? And you look at the ones that are coming in. All these people are doing these fantastic things. And me, I'm just sitting here. And then you have to pretend that you are also doing fantastic things. And usually it involves taking a nice selfie. And then you project your self image, which has existed for a long, long time before in humans. They have a. They have part of ego is to have this image of who I am. But in these Facebook now you have the opportunity to project that image into the world and it will reach hundreds or thousands of people all at once. And then you construct your life. There are many people alive these days without knowing it. They partly live for their Facebook image and they're just looking for the next thing that they can project out into the world. It's Narcissus. You might remember the myth of Narcissus, the ancient Greek myth. There was this young man who had never seen himself before because they didn't have mirrors at the time. But one day he happened to look into a little pool of water and he saw himself and he realized that he was extremely beautiful. He said, oh, that's me. And the story goes, he fell in love with himself, not in a good way, not by becoming one with who he is. But the separation happened. This myth shows the beginning stage of the egoic sense of self expressed as a story. The image that he of himself in a pool is the mental image of the ego. And stories are part of that image. That's me. I'm me and my story. So you have the image of me. And then, oh, so this guy, he experienced that separation and then I think something bad happened to him, but I don't remember what. So. And then you have other divine things that continuously stimulate the mind that almost designed for you not to become still. It's like the civilization has made a great effort to Come up with as many things as possible to prevent people from becoming still and spacious and taking a moment of looking at the sky and feeling the inner spaciousness arise and becoming aware of the leaves of the tree or the branches and the wind blowing entered the noise of water, the simple thing becoming still, alert, sensing that stillness within. And of course, a minute later, another text message is coming in. Of course you have to look at it immediately. And then I'm told. I didn't know that when I first started using text. Aaron told me that the etiquette is that you have to reply immediately. And emails are coming in too. Oh dear, I must be very important. I'm getting all these messages and people as you. I gave a talk last year at a conference with a big conference with people, business people and so on, and they talked about how there's been articles in the paper too, how people's lives get taken over by their devices. Even when they leave work, they go home and the emails are still coming in, even in the evening, and they're still answering emails when they're in bed at night. And this is. Some people are beginning to realize how dreadful that kind of life is. And some more enlightened companies, they may not be totally enlightened, but they're beginning signs of enlightenment. They even forbid you to answer emails after a certain time in the evening. They might even. Some have even disabled your phones. I think VW Volkswagen did that. The employees, they cannot use emails anymore after six or seven in the evening. And this is very wise because otherwise people will go insane if eventually. So there are great opportunities in this new technology also, but it's also very dangerous. They are both. You can spread messages of awareness, you can spread enlightenment through that also. It can travel and incredible madness too. So the essence then is the two dimensions, let's just put it like that, of who you are. Balance them in your life and at work. And you will find inevitably in certain situations, one will become stronger than the other, and then the situation changes, then the other will become stronger. For example, when you have to deal with detailed information, conveying detailed information to somebody else, the mind has to be very active. You have to remember this and that then the being dimension will recede and perhaps you will be 80% in the mind. But then it's still possible to, even while that happens, to have that being dimension there. At other times, when the mind is not required very much, the presence will come forth more and there will be very little thinking and just you will be filled with this wonderful sense of being as our presence.