Funny how collectively we humans have this tendency to create technologies; then sometime down the road find it necessary to create new technologies as antidotes to the originals. Hmmm ....
Thanks to my friend Luke Iwabuchi for pointing me in the direction of Freedom - a new application that allows Mac users to disable networking (i.e. surfing the web) for up to eight hours at a time. "Freedom enforces freedom" - claims the website.
In the ancient history of October, Peggy Ornstein, via the New York Times Magazine, explored the question of whether voluntarily restricting choices enhances or curtails freedom. It's an interesting question -- and a nice essay; check it out. Ms. Ornstein draws on the mythology of the Sirens as an analogy for our relationship to the Internet:
Those mythical bird-women ... didn't seduce with beauty or carnality -- not with petty diversions -- but with the promise of unending knowledge. "Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens," they crooned to passing ships, vowing that any sailor who heeded their voices would emerge a "wiser man." That is precisely the draw of the Internet.
Strapped firmly to the mast, she is able to declare, for all who will hear:
... the promise is of infinite knowledge, but what's delivered is infinite information, and the two are hardly the same. In that sense, Homer may have been the original neuropsychologist: centuries after his death, brain studies show that true learning is largely an unconscious process. If we're inundated with data, our brains' synthesizing functions are overwhelmed by the effort to keep up. And the original purpose -- deeper knowledge of a subject -- is lost, as surely as the corpses surrounding Sirenum scopuli.
In western cultures, our notion of freedom is so often associated with the power of accumulation, expansion, increasing our options, having more. Yet spiritual practice is, at least in part, very much about voluntarily restricting our choices - choosing to discipline ourselves in certain ways - as a means of enhancing a kind of freedom quite different from our habitual ideas of what this is.
The freedom of wu wei, for instance, is a freedom born of the resolution of polarized states of mind -- which is likely to require a bit of conscious effort, which might feel like a "curtailing of freedom." Wu wei is expressed then as action which has a feeling of being complete from the very beginning. It arises not out of a need to "get something" to fill some perceived "lack"; but rather as spontaneous celebration of ever-unfolding fullness - of a continual flow of source-energy (the light of Tao) into and as the manifest world.
Expressing the energy of wu wei does not imply inert quietude, nor a Luddite's aversion to science and technology. It does, however, mean that we're less likely to be seduced by more-is-better, faster-is-better propoganda -- flowing forth in Siren or in cyber-voices.
So while I remain agnostic as to the benefits of the new Freedom technology, I heartily endorse engagement with spiritual forms whose curtailing of egoic freedom/bondage has the power to ferry us into utterly new Territory ....