Part of the problem with modern life is the speed at which everything moves. Fast food. Jet travel. High-speed internet service. Everything comes at us in a constant stream, a barrage of stimulus.
“Technology is a way of organizing the world so that we do not experience it.”—Max Frisch
Sometimes I think our ability to affect change in the world has moved beyond our ability to understand or control it.
Injecting human growth hormones into animals? Cloning animals for food? Why do we do this? They grow faster that way. It’s more “efficient” to “produce” animals this way. Andrew Kimbrell calls this ethics of technology “cold evil.”
Do we know what the hell we are doing? Do we care?
As Gandhi said: “there is more to life than increasing its speed.”
I’ve often felt out of place, confused, disconnected from the society I live in. As though I was born in the wrong century. Not that I am a Luddite, as some have accused me of being. I love change and growth. But at my own pace, not imposed upon me. I want to taste it, experience it, digest it.
I’m slow.
On their Inner Work Blog, Jerry Ruhl and Robert A. Johnson write about "Wisdom in Chaos and Confusion": “David Bohm, a brilliant theoretical physicist, in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, conceptualizes the universe as manifestation of what he calls the universal flux. Bohm asserts that everything is process and in process. There are no stable enduring phenomena. What appear to be solid objects are simply slower processes than the human process. We perceive these as static if we vibrate at a faster frequency, and we perceive these as chaotic if we move slower. Each has its own rhythmic vibratory rate, its own velocity. Faster processes are more ephemeral. Our experience of constancy is an illusion created by relative velocity.
How might you appear to a redwood tree? Like wind or rain, people might be perceived as fleeting and intangible. To hummingbirds we are sluggish and clumsy, almost tree-like in our movements.
Modern science explains that we do not see the swirl of atoms or the hectic race of galaxies — our narrow sensory perceptions trap us. We imagine the world to be semi-static and filled with enduring things. Yet the truth is more fluid. We are ripples in a flowing ocean of changing life. We are waves breaking against some mysterious shore.
Life is constantly in flux, yet in our culture confusion is generally held to be a mistake or even a pathology. Confusion is not inherently a problem to be solved. It reminds us that life is always in transition, that everything we think is permanent is actually only temporary.
To be confused is to be in the swirling midst of what is. A basic spiritual principle is learning to accept what is instead of insisting that life be a certain way.”
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