WE LIVE IN a technological age overrun with fragmentation and isolation, because our preoccupation with everything mechanical has divorced us from the Whole of Life. There is nothing wrong with technology or the digital gifts of our age. But technology is inert. And just as water fills a hole because of gravity, existence will rush to fill us and overwhelm us if we don’t meet the outer world with an inner life. So, if not committed to inhabiting our inwardness and developing a set of inner values, the characteristics of technology—moving too fast, being in more than one place at a time, never standing still, multitasking, and being insular—will become our inner values by default.
Sidetracked by values we assume rather than choose, dreams never get built and ruins never get rebuilt, as our lives meander from their initiations of transformation. Exiled by our inexorable will imposing itself everywhere, the Mystery itself must hover in the sky like a lonely god cut loose from a culture that no longer believes in mystery. To such an ancient force, we must seem like erratic ants that never stand still. And what we do to each other when lost is carving a face in the Earth that those more caring than we will have to read.
For centuries, since the pernicious building of the Tower of Babel, we’ve been miseducated toward valuing things over people. And our obsession with living a successful life over an embodied life blocks us from the strength love can give us. The Hindu philosopher and teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) said:
Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love success and not what we are doing. The result has become more important than the action. You know, it is good … to be kind without a name.… You are just a creative human being living anonymously, and in that there is richness and great beauty.
We might better learn from fish, who travel in schools quite naturally. For the true aim of schooling is to move through the deep, along with others, by taking what is essential through our gills. When we’re authentic to our own nature, to our own questions, to our own experience, we travel together quite naturally. It’s our authenticity that keeps us together, side by side. While our refusal to be authentic, out of fear or pain, is what alienates us until we feel that life is random and that we are alone.
Eventually, we’re called to meet outer with inner, to love what we do more than what we achieve, and to travel with those who are authentic, even when we’re clumsy and awkward. So never let what you believe in be snuffed because people around you don’t seem to understand. There are many ways to remedy the chaotic forces in our world.
Every time you’re kind to a stranger and help another up, every time you speak your truth and listen to another, you are keeping the fire of humanity lit. This is the lineage that has kept the world going through times of great disturbance. Being true to what you care about and standing up for those less fortunate will always make a difference.
Existence will rush to fill us and overwhelm us if we don’t meet the outer world with an inner life.