Saturday, May 1, 2010

Can you Be Spiritual and a Cell Phone User?

Well, I am a hold out so far. I don't have a cell phone. I may one day, when landlines are obsolete. But why hurry? My objections to cell phones are legion. If you read the warning that comes with it, you realize that the company knows there is a problem.

Common sense tells me that a microwave strong enough to send a signal to a satellite and back to my ear is probably going to do some mischief in my brain, less than one inch away. Hello! Wakey... Wakey.

But a really interesting question is the more subtle ways that it creates interference in our lives.

More and more I believe in the idea promoted by all spiritual traditions that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. When we embrace the present moment, we are able to co-create reality with the Creator. To be present to everything happening right now is the goal of countless spiritual disciplines like yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, Chi Gong,

They had other ideas in the middle ages but current wisdom, informed by quantum physics even questions the existence of time. So, according to Eckhart Tolle, the past is a memory residue. It doesn't exist in any real way. Neuroscience cosigns that idea with the newsflash that how we store memories actually distorts them, so even our impressions of the past are seriously subjective, i.e. not real. The future, it should be obvious doesn't exist at all, yet. Therefore, if I am thinking about the past or future, I am not in reality. So the present it is.

How do cell phones figure in this? Here I am driving over the hill to Ronan. In the present moment, I am noticing the wildflowers, growing grass, clouds along the Missions, oncoming traffic. The cell phone rings and I leave the present moment, because I am talking to someone who isn't there! That is level 1 displacement. I am talking to someone who is not in my present moment with the road curves, soft breeze, and wildflowers. Then, when they start talking about their wildflowers, wind, etc., I have second displacement into another reality that is not my own (right now).

We start talking about another person, a meeting we will be having, a problem to solve and there is the 3rd level displacement to the future and to other people in other places. Then we talk about a 3rd person's reality and what is happening to them. You can see where I am going with this. Depending on the topics and how riveting they are, the cell phone talker has left the present moment by a magnitude of 6-10 in a few short minutes. No wonder the driver who is cell talking doesn't see the pedestrian crossing, the car pull out, or the speed sign.

So you could say, well, any phone call does that. People have been talking on phones for decades. What's the big deal. But cell phones are mobile. When I get a call on my land line, I am not hurtling down the road, rounding corners, pulling up to stop signs.

So I just realized, there are really two dynamics I am looking at. One, is how a cell phone conversation creates a fracture that takes you out of the present by various magnitudes of displacement. Two, is that we are inadvertently training our minds to divorce our senses.

What if I trained my two eyes to look in two different directions at once. Would it be possible that they might get used to that independence and do it without my okay?

What effect over time will these phone calls have on people, with their multi-level migrations from the present moment ? But more importantly, by forcing the mind to focus so far from actively operating senses, what consequences might be in store for cell phone users? Could it eventually cause permanent disabilities such as inability to concentrate, mental confusion, intensification of sensory stimulus to the brain, or possibly psychosis?

Don't shoot the messenger, dude. I just think we need to look at how we are asking our minds and bodies to do things they weren't designed to do. Eventually we might realize that we can't be in 2 (3,4,5,6) places at once unless we are Jesus or Padre Pio, who clearly had the super powers and a super calling. as well as a lifetime of prayer, meditation and service to God which all took place in the sacred present.