Viveka

In Sanskrit the term viveka represents the ability to discern between the real and unreal. The most challenging aspect of your existence is discerning between what in this life is “you”, your spiritual self, the thing that persists beyond this life, and what is your physical self, the thing that dies and is adapting itself to environment and circumstance in order to live. This physical self includes your very thoughts. The thing you’re likely to identify with most. Yoga would say they’re not really yours, they are merely echoes of the outside world.  It’s the discerning eye that sees those thoughts that is really you.

Throughout my life there have been times when I think I’m pretty good at viveka. At other times I come to realize I’m completely lost. It takes a lot of focus and practice to remain discerning at all times. That’s why monks and gurus and other people dedicated to spiritual practice remove themselves from society altogether. It’s literally impossible should you choose to live a normal live.

Despite this, it is still critical that you try. There are very few people who do and as a result they are just completely lost and can’t see the difference at all. They will insist that what they see is reality but it’s far from it. Once again, Jesus said “they know not what they do”. You’ll hear me refer to this often because it’s a prime example of how Jesus teachings overlap with Yoga on multiple levels. It’s just a matter of context and interpretation.

However I didn’t begin writing this entry with the idea of teaching you a spiritual lesson. I’m writing it because Donald Trump just became president and the phenomenon I’m witnessing now is a critical moment in our understanding of reality. You see, as technology has advanced we have moved beyond merely discerning between physical and spiritual reality. Increasingly we now live in a “virtual” reality. For all intents and purposes this reality is our media. And the evolution of our media has been taking us farther and farther away from our true selves.

In an attempt to explain this, I’m gonna tell you a long boring story. This is by no means complete, and it starts long after the advent of what we call media, but it will suffice to convey my point.

Media: A (not so) short story

Once upon a time, long before you were born, there were three channels of television, ABC, NBC and CBS. For the most part, everyone got their information from the same place. We all had different opinions about what we saw but we all saw the same thing. Even if you favored one channel over the other, you were forced to jump around lest you die of boredom. After a while, this became frustrating. What about all the other interesting stuff that never made it to prime time? Since the media channels were so limited, it was very hard to gain access. The gatekeepers chose what we saw based on the collective median of interest. We railed against the system. We longed for something more. Perhaps we had a sense that they were controlling us.

Then came a new technology called cable television which fragmented media and gave us hundreds of channels all dedicated to narrow bands of interest. Suddenly we had more. More flavors of news, more information, more sports, more types of entertainment. But even this began to feel limiting. Like we were surfing 100 channels of crap. It still felt like mind control and we believed there was still a world of content we couldn’t access, that was hidden from us.

Then came another new technology called the internet which added a new twist. We could talk back to it! We could create our own media without having to pass through any gatekeepers. This was a fundamental shift. We were no longer just seeking media, we were contributing to it. Now WE had control. Suddenly we all had access to an infinite array of media, both in terms of consumption AND contribution. Obviously this means media fragmented even further and because it was “two-way” it became “social”. So much so that for all practical purposes we all have our own channel now. There is NOTHING hidden anymore.

When it comes to entertainment, this is great. For the time being the days of longing for better programming are gone. And seemingly it should also be great when it comes to our thirst for knowledge. We should be more informed since we have so much access to information and each other. We should be able to understand the world more, understand each other. Make better decisions that affect our success as a society.

Though this is somewhat true, something else is happening at the same time that is offsetting this value. As a matter of fact, I feel we may have crossed a threshold into a serious dilemma. One that is leading us down a deep rabbit hole.

The problem with our current environment is precisely that everyone can get the exact information they need to prove something that they think. Since media is two way, whatever we’re seeking, someone will step up to provide. It’s a feedback loop. There are a plethora of dedicated channels supporting just my way of thinking. If I don’t feel right about a food, or a company, or a political candidate, I can find very convincing media that conveys exactly why. Add to this that I’m now having social discourse via social media, a place where I’ve crafted a network of likeminded people, and we all seem to be sharing the same media that reinforces our position, and we further amplify the feedback loop. As far as I can tell “everybody” sees things more or less the way that I do (with the exception of the occasional nutso that somebody hasn’t filtered out).

But that’s not the case really. It’s only an echo chamber of my own making.

In another echo chamber “they” are sharing media reinforcement that proves just the opposite position. And they also believe that “everybody” sees it this way. When they find out that there are people that don’t (the nutso that hasn’t been filtered out), they perceive them as crazy or fringe because as far as they can tell “everybody” (or at least the majority) thinks the way that they’re thinking.

We are polarized because after reading 100 articles that reinforce our thinking, shared by 500 friends that think the same way, we discover that there are people that “don’t get it”. What are they thinking? They must be crazy. You would have to stop and make a choice to read 100 articles from the other echo chamber to make any sense out of it.

And there’s the rub. We don’t do that. Now that we have the choice, we WON’T do that. In the old media establishment, they had to create media that spoke to the collective, attempting to find the common ground that would keep everyone happy since there wasn’t a technology that allowed otherwise. Now that there is, we’re all receding into our own echo chambers and losing any connection to the other echo chambers. We’re fragmenting. There is no “society” anymore. There is no common forum where we all see the same thing and debate it. We’re just making it up now as we see fit and we’re spinning further and further from any real truth.

Add to this that nobody is practicing vevika and you see how it relates. We are dissolving into non-reality without any capacity to realize it.

We are lost.

You and me and the phone makes three

You are soon to turn 5 years old and we’ve done a pretty good job of shielding you from screens and media relative to children around us. For the most part I am your media. I control what you see and how you interpret it for the time being. Simply refusing to use the phone as a pacifier has proven to be huge in the development of your personality. You know how to be with grown ups at a restaurant because you haven’t had the opportunity to retreat into the phone and disappear. You’ve had to engage with us to keep yourself entertained, and as a result you’ve learned to be very entertaining. This is how we learn. By being “forced” to deal with adversity. In this case, by being forced to deal with others, which simply means not offering you an easy alternative to escape it.

I remember we used to go visit Dr. Vormbrock (who “delivered” you) and we always had to wait a long time in the waiting room. You were only 3 years old and to entertain yourself you would get up and walk from person to person, asking them their name, telling them you liked their shoes, etc. One time you walked up to a little girl who was your age staring at a phone. You complimented her and asked her name. She looked up from the phone with no expression, zombie face, distant eyes, and stared at you for a few seconds before returning to look at her phone. She said nothing, had no idea how to even engage. I was sitting across the room and it scared me. A perfect example of what I feared about exposing you to personalized technology too soon. You simply smiled and moved on to the next person until you found a lady that was charmed by your personality, and so you sat with her and asked her about her children, and her dog, and could you see pictures of her dog, and so she pulled out her phone and showed you pictures of her life until it was time for us to go. This struck me as a healthy context for media. It helped facilitate a real connection between human beings.

I don’t know how media will evolve exactly and what state it will be in by the time you can understand this, but I’m confident that you should know to be careful. As technology becomes more powerful, media closes in on our very thoughts. It’s been doing this for several years but is beginning to accelerate as technology accelerates. To many already, media is indistinguishable from their own thoughts. Our relationship with Google has become so intimate that we don’t even notice that it’s shaping us. We are now fabricating our own reality in a virtual space and that space is our media. It’s increasingly disconnected from the physical world that grounds us.  

I hope to succeed in making sure you have a strong foundation in the physical world, a strong sense of self, before you jack into the “virtual” world, and have to struggle with what is real and what isn’t. You have enough to think about just figuring out who you are in the physical world. You have such a strong imagination already and for now you’re exposed to just enough media to feed it but not replace it.

When you do jack in, practice viveka. Like Neo in the Matrix, it will take a rare and special talent to keep oneself intact while connected to the illusions of everyone else on the planet.