The internet vs. inner peace

Filed under Notes on 13. February 2007 »

I’m sure many of you recognize the symptoms of being mentally over-stimulated; email, RSS, instant messaging, forums, blogs, podcasts, social networking services, etc., together working to create a constant stream of information that demands your attention all day every day. And we become really good at keeping up with all of it, expanding our capacity for dealing with rapidfire input of information all day long and taking pride in the ability to do everything at once.

Speaking from my own experience, all of this — let’s just lump it as information technology — has proven to be a great challenge in my spiritual practice. I spend most of my waking hours in front of a computer, and so my mind has become very good at processing information. This is a valuable skill to have these days, but also a great liability; not in and of itself, really, but rather because it amplifies the preexisting dysfunction of the mind. It speeds up our thinking, and when the mind stream gathers momentum the easier it is for the ego to play out its destructive thought patterns. The mind is only a tool, of course, but continuously feeding it more and more noise can cause it to spin out of control.

I’m going to write a more in-depth article on this, but for now I’ve made a list of potential remedies for this self-inflicted attention deficit disorder so many people are finding themselves having to deal with now. Small exercises that only require you to set aside a couple of minutes per hour, but need to be practiced diligently in order to work over the long term. The difficulty is in establishing them as habits, but once that has been done the overall effect will be much greater than the time commitment would suggest.

In order of difficulty, easiest one first:

1. Observe your breath
Consciously observing your breath, even if only for a couple of minutes, is much more effective than it sounds.

2. Listen to silence
If you are surrounded by noise all day long, and rest assured you are not the only one, try sensing the underlying silence beneath the noise. The silence out of which the noise arises, the emptiness, the stillness that is always there no matter how noisy it may appear on the surface. One method of getting closer to this is to try and notice a sound that is really far away, something barely audible (or only in your imagination, as it were).

3. Feel the aliveness within
This is about feeling your body from within, to sense the incredible aliveness in your entire body (and it is amazing once you are able to notice it). To start off with, hold out your arms and, eyes closed, ask yourself “how do I know my hands are there?”
Another way of looking at this is to move your point of ‘beingness’ from your head and into the rest of your body. Sensing yourself as being centered in the abdomen, for example, and focusing your attention on that area.

4. Stop thinking
Which is really the wrong way of saying it because you can’t really stop it, or at least not with force. It is more a conscious decision to allow thought to subside, which can with practice start to work in a way that you are able to simply stop thinking, so to speak. You step back and observe the thought stream until it fades away by itself.

The main difficulty with all of these is to simply remember to practice them. It’s so easy to get dragged into a stream of thinking, especially with these modern and information addled little minds of ours, so as long as we keep using information technology we need to be vigilant in keeping it at a certain distance.