I was driving home from teaching yoga one night, and the thought came to me, “Is our addiction to things like Twitter, Facebook and all the like, and the subsequent urge to completely annihilate our relationships with them, similar to the road the Buddha took before discovering The Middle Way?”
Almost every day, I come across someone’s proclamation to quit Twitter or Facebook, or both. Every other day, I’d read about the power of social media tools in connecting people and changing lives in small and big ways.
Once, in a workshop on Ayurveda and the Indian system of dosha, the teacher, Dr. Robert Svodoba, said emphatically, “We all have our addiction.” He didn’t mention tech toys or tools or any specific drugs. Everything is a drug, so long as we’re psychologically dependent on it. Or, as Pema Chodron would say, so long as we “bite the hook.”
History has shown that the pendulum always needs to swing to the extremes first. The Buddha had to starve himself to near death to find out that Happiness was found in neither hedonistic indulgences or self-mortification. So, I’m just thinking, are we going through this process collectively as a society? Am I as an individual? It sure feels like it.
The lute string must be tuned neither too tight nor too loose to produce a harmonious sound. – Wikipedia, The Middle Way
