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Mont La Salle
Monastery,
Mount Veeder, California, USA
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The cost is enormous. Even those who don't migrate to Silicon
Valley are likely to be swept up by tech. The plummeting number of
new inductees into the
monastery
is simply an extension (no, a
litmus
indicator) of that fact. This isn't so much a comment
on a lower number of new inductees into
monasteries
(and it is that too) as much as it's a comment on how the
true
nature
of tech sweeps over (ie sweeps away) the
essentially
human
endeavor of
discovering
a
way
to be
who we really are,
and to bring that to bear on our lives and on
Life itself.
We're indeed
machines.
Without the
miracle
of
transformation,
the
nature
of tech ensures we'll stay
trapped
that
way.
There are two distinctions for each of us to
discover,
which herald the onset of
transformation
(the
monks
know
them, even though they may couch them in different terms): as the
context
in which the events of our lives occur, there's
who we really are;
as the guardian of the content of our lives, there's
our lizard brain, our thrown behavior, our
survival machinery
- in a
word,
our
mind.
It's this which finds an abettor in tech, is aided by it, and is
enhanced and extended by it.
Now, to assert tech has no redeeming features, is both naïve
and absurd (ask any
parent
like me who's
experienced
the joy of
being
in
close
communication
with their adult globe-trotting
children
via, say, WhatsApp). So
who we really are
(like a
context)
can hold tech. Here's the
trouble:
tech doesn't reciprocate. Given our propensity to be
absorbed and distracted by it (see all good
people
looking down
at their smartphone screens at dinner), it's
costing us our access to
our humanity.
Look
(I really want you to be
clear
about this): it's not going to
get
any better. The
nature
of tech isn't going anywhere. It's not going to go away. That's the
bad
news.
The good
news
is you and I possess within ourselves, at every
moment
of our lives,
under all
circumstances,
the
power
to
transform
the quality of our lives. That's
vintage Erhard.
And it's yours for the taking, no matter what kind of
house
you live in, be it a
castle,
a mansion, a
monastery,
a
Cowboy Cottage,
a hovel, or a
cave.
Some
people
will
get
this; many won't ... or
(speaking
for the diminishing
monastery
inductees ie the shortage of
monks)
some will
hear
the calling; many won't.
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