Culture Shock
Life without the internet
Sitting here during an intense thunderstorm. A crack of lightening so loud I thought it hit my house. Bang! Bam! I got up and stood in the other room trying to tell if anything was burning. No. What a relief. I returned to my laptop and discovered I no longer had internet. Over an hour on the phone with tech support. Reboot this, reset that, try this, try that. Nothing. It would be three days before help would arrive.
At first I did not know what to do with myself, as so many things no longer worked. No streaming movies or YouTube videos. No reading the news. No monitoring my security cameras. No commanding my virtual assistant to turn this on and that off or to remind me when the food I was cooking should be done. All of a sudden I was very conscious of how dependent I am on the internet and how useless files on a cloud are without it. What to do???
I decided to read a book! What a great idea! It has been so long since I read a book as I usually read digital content online instead. So let’s see, what should I read? How about The Yoga of Jesus: Teachings of Esoteric Christianity by Mauri Lehtovirta. It has an interesting-looking cover, so why not?
I started reading what turned out to be a three day spiritual journey. I got so much from this book. So many insights. So many topics that I can write about. Where to start? How about with my first bookmark?
There is a chapter titled The Sacred Universe. Here I read about how “science became trapped in the claws of a smothering mechanistic worldview,” beginning at the start of the eighteenth century. Here there was a major shift from a religious worldview to one based on science and scientific discovery. This seemed so meaningful. I highlighted the following paragraph.
“The transition into the contemporary technological worldview was the next logical step. Science was unable to provide spiritual wisdom, nor could it offer a nourishing antidote even for the dogmatic and petrified spirituality of the churches. As a result, the scientific-technological conception of the world helped create the materialistic-technological conception of humanity. Over the past few decades, this idea has turned us into visionless consumers and threatens to dash our existence into ruins through nuclear war or environmental destruction.”
Think about this the next time you are out walking in the woods enjoying the sight of butterflies and hummingbirds. Oh wait, you do go outdoors and enjoy what nature has to offer, right? Or only when the internet is no longer available?