People buy iPhones to be universally connected and have a ton of cool functions and features at their fingertips. But as Rev. Heng Sure once said, everything we create in silicon already exists in carbon. I’d add that the silicon technology is a poor facsimile at best.
So how exactly do you tap into the wonderful carbon technology you carry around with you all the time?
Meditation is a phenomenal tool to do just that.
Here are five areas where meditation beats an iPhone.
1. Connectivity
The truth is that you can’t really connect to anyone else unless you’re in touch with yourself. The iPhone allows and encourages you to be marginally present when physically absent, and marginally absent when physically present.
Meditation gets you back in touch with yourself and helps you be present. Period. Sometimes meditators are so present, they’re even present when absent! And that makes their ability to connect way beyond what the iPhone allows!
2. Social Networking
Let’s face it: Twitter is often mostly random bits of irrelevant thought that you cursorily follow from people you don’t always know. That Facebook’s popularity surpasses porn suggests that there is certainly something sexual about its magic, as 400+ million people compete for collecting more friends and appearing to have the most fun while waiting for the next ‘serendipitous’ connection.
Behind their popularity is the myth that quantity makes up for quality.
How many of your Facebook friends could you call in a jam at 3am? How many tweets will you ponder longer than a 160 character attention-span?
The truth is that quality is what counts, and meditation eases the disease of a random mind to add increased quality and relevance to ‘mental tweets’. Random thoughts get slowly recycled into the mental soil, fertilizing the thoughts worth nurturing as attention stabilizes and intensifies. The growing relief felt from all the chaos sloshing around in your head starts building sympathy for other people’s struggles. You yourself start becoming a person willing to dash to the rescue at 3am, or just helping to make people around you a little bit happier, and that starts earning you deeper friends willing to respond in kind.
Suddenly you’re having real fun wherever you are, with no time left to tweet about it, snap pictures for facebook, or passively stalk other people’s lives. Birds of a feather flock together, so you’re soon surrounded by like-minded people, paving the path for serendipitous connections that give you goosebumps in ways that connecting to your 2nd-grade-best-friend or unrequited-secret-lover-from-prom on facebook never can.
3. Features and Functionality
Is the iPhone’s 2-megapixel camera not enough for you? How about the 324-megapixel equivalent of the human eye? Not enough storage on your iPhone for those kinds of pictures? Nobody knows a good way to calculate the storage of the human brain, but credible guesses say it can hold 1 to 1000 terabytes of information. Can’t remember that much, you say? Meditation improves memory, reverses memory loss, and delays or prevents Alzheimer’s and dementia. How about GPS? Meditation really grounds you and helps you figure out where you’re at and where you’re headed. What about apps and games? Meditation starts unlocking the games you play best and opening you up to more productive applications.
When 3G turns to 4G or 6F or whatever is next, your smart iPhone gets closer to becoming e-waste, full of toxic chemicals that California consider to be hazardous waste. Be sure to recycle it when you’re done playing, and remind the other kids to do so too.
Meanwhile, meditation doesn’t add to your footprint on the planet, but might just soften it. There isn’t much research on this, but a lot of anecdotal evidence that shows that you’ll start feeling the need for fewer material things. And that’s great for the planet!
5. Cost
After all your fancy data plans and minutes, you can spend $5 or more a day on your iPhone. Meditation is free, barring what you pay to learn or attend a course. If you decide to try Vipassana, a past student who benefited will pay for your course! And if you’re serious about practicing, meditation starts paying you, as all of that focus makes you more productive, creative, insightful, and energetic. I’d call that a fantastic investment in any economic climate 🙂
In short, meditation is an unparalleled technology that surpasses the iPhone by leaps and bounds. In fairness, any technology simply amplifies the will you place behind it, and its possible to use things like iPhone, Twitter, and Facebook while minimizing their downsides just like its possible to misuse meditation.
Yet playing with our silicon technology seems to have a much more slippery slope than figuring out our carbon technology, and that will keep me away from iPhones for a while.
Sold!
Rahul, so true!!! Thank you for this! 🙂 Very well written!!!!
Phenomenal post! You remain ensconced in my happy memories and warm inspiring moments shared. Love to Asha 🙂
Good stuff!
* This article was read from an iPhone 😉
BAAM! hermano Rahul! 🙂
Following Birju’s path, I just twitted it and posted it on my FB status… 😉
AND, I’m going to read Vinoba and sit for a while… being in receptive silence is the DNA of the kindness (r)evlution.
See you on the cushion! 😉
Awesome post Rahul! Thanks for distilling your thoughts in this clear and compelling article. Time to hit the cushion 🙂
Birju: hilarious.
Rahul: wise! kosher. will share on our wednesdays in dc meditation board!
Word!
Lol. so true, so true. thanks for the entry. 🙂
Rahul:
This is a smart, clever, interesting comparison of two enabling tools currently undergoing a run of hip, faddish acceptance in the popular imagination. (Meditation, it must be said, has enjoyed a several-millennium longer run than the iPhone. Its persistence and longevity is itself strong evidence in favor of your thesis. Still, one suspects that it went through periods where, as with the second generation Macs, the only users were esoteric freaks who could only find “software” — to piggyback on your extended technology metaphor — at the spiritual equivalent of garage sales.)
Like so many things, meditation and iPhones are useful tools in the hands of skilled, purposeful people. Hospital physicians, for example, are able to carry comprehensive pharmaceutical reference material in their pockets with the iPhone as they visit patient bedsides; and thoughtful practitioners of self-exploration are able to dig deeper with meditation. And yet, both are supremely annoying in the hands of poseurs.
The nice thing about both meditation and the iPhone is that both are genuinely good tools; it’s hard to really criticize either. They generally work as advertised, have real utility, and create a nice user experience. Even with this appreciation, I have never found either to be so compelling as to harbor any desire to incorporate them into my life. Unfortunately, this doesn’t insulate me from having to endure endless proselytizing chatter from fans of both at just about any social occasion. Frankly, it’s getting to the point that I like to imagine a world where neither meditation or iPhones existed. It seems a shame when the excellence and fascination of a thing are overwhelmed by the ubiquity and banality of the hype.
In our consumer society, it seems impossible to have a product without constant advertising. Where commercialism establishes both our memes and the tropes, way to much private conversation has transformed into viral advocacy and promotion. Steve Jobs will, of course, be thrilled that his customers have turned into his advertisers. But are serious devotees of meditation really comfortable having their treasured practice shilled like this? Seems so.
MBJ
MBJ
You raise a good point in your usual delightful, insightful way.
As a recipient of so much proselytizing chatter for both the iPhone and meditation, I’m sure it would be a relief to silence the buzz around either. My post was aimed at muzzling at least half our common harassers in a light-hearted way more than anything else. Even the comparison I make establishes a false choice between the options, especially when considering how many iPhone-using meditators commented on the post.
As for shilling meditation on the attention-deficited internet, its a little bit like putting a helmet on a narcoleptic: its bound to be awkward, doesn’t really solve the problem, but might just stop a head crackin’. While I wasn’t really trying to be much of a serious meditation monger, I’m not that uncomfortable with the legitimate clunky-ness of it all 🙂
I do agree that serious conversations about meditation are best kept private, but if anything around this post could be considered to have turned into viral advocacy and promotion, its something on the scale of a cold sore on a smallpox patient. Its public only in the way that a conversation in the corner of a room at a loud party is: virtually private because so few people care to quiet down and listen!
So insightful, thanks!
I miss our conversations about blogging and blogging about conversations.
In case others can’t tell, that last comment was meant to be read in a Manchester accent 🙂
Fantastic!!!! Like others, I’ve added this to my google reader. 🙂 Mariette
I understand the message…..and agree with your response to MBJ in a Manchester acccent. You have ot experience it to know it!