SCREEN ADDICTION: How do we integrate the buzzing with the blessing?

I hear that Ben Fulford is now off on his annual three-week vacation, and that includes withdrawal from the internet.

Yesterday, I paused, to admire someone else (who?) in the public eye who has just taken off for a full month from all that.

Me? I’ve tried to go cold turkey for just a whole weekend! No luck. Tried a single 24-hour period. No luck again.

Tried to even NOT take my ipad to bed with me, NOT search for an teaching audio to lull me back to sleep when I wake up, at 12:45 am, or 2:00 am or 2:45 or 3:30. And sometimes all of those in a single night.

I know that my addiction to screens is perhaps even more pernicicious than was my addiction to cigarettes, which I finally did lick, over 40 years ago.

A.K. Reader: HOW I STOPPED SMOKING (for what it’s worth) 

And, by the way, I was justly proud of myself for doing so. For finally accomplishing something that I knew was bad for me. It meant my life could begin again, begin all over again. It meant that I was finally putting a solid foundation under myself as I moved forward in time, rather than continue to slip, slip, slip away, caught up in a pernicious habit that had me hooked, body, mind and soul.

But this . . . this is different. Screen addiction is something that one doesn’t just stop, cold turkey, unless one wants to secede from contemporary life, which I don’t, at least not yet. No. Screen addiction requires me to be conscious, every second of the fact that I am on-screen, and willing, at any second, to let it go.

But of course I notice that the brain gets into a certain buzzed and buzzing state when on screen. And then, on screen, I have my creative projects, like writing this post! And of course I notice, with awe and gratitude, that the internet, especially, hooks my own mental and emotional and spiritual being up to the entire human world, all of us buzzed and buzzing, not exactly what Teilhard de Chardin had envisaged with the noosphere, but the noosphere, nonetheless.

And yet, what are we doing here? We are, inside our buzzed and buzzing state, sharing information with each other, poking this way and that, our attention directed in ways we are either consciously or unconsciously aware of. Screen addiction is not just to the buzz, but to the info, or is it disinfo, misinfo, fake, on and on. You never know! It’s all a game! An enormous, fascinating game in which infinite players are called to create or mirror in infinite directions, while hooking up to each other’s creations and mirroring both — en masse, in small groups, and one to one. There is no end to it. Or to the perspectives we create to “make sense” of the info/disinfo. Except that, while we’re doing it, all the rest of our lives, sitting here at this table, not noticing that my small dog sitting below me is desperately wanting to be taken outside for a walk; or not paying attention to the fact that I know that if I just take myself up and go outside to mow the lawn, that this act of liberation from the computer will feel good, really good. That within ten minutes of release from screen buzz I will have reentered the sensuous world, hearing the insects and birds, feeling the caressing breeze, sensing my sneakered feet treading mole hills on the lawn, sensing my entire body at one with the task of pushing the push mower back and forth, back and forth, blades of green grass snipped in two until the next growth spurt calls me out again for this purpose.

This purpose, or a zillion others. For just as what opens to us via the screen world is infinite, so what opens to us via the natural world, just in this little Green Acres Village that we inhabit so faithfully and with so much pleasure, is also infinite.

For example, how do you like this tiny altar that Rebecca created? I just noticed it a few days ago.

Gazillions of tiny spaces, each one both a refuge and an opening . . .

. . . generating a complex, ever evolving sense of spaciousness, with endless opportunities for interspecies cooperation.

I do want to limit my screen time, and am still experimenting with ways to do so as a matter of course, effortlessly, via changes in routine. No screens after 9 p.m., for example; or Sunday is a day of rest; on and on, there are many ways I could continuously adjust my own inner/outer reality to better integrate the buzzing with the blessing.

Meanwhile, I’m on my way out now, to mow the lawn.

Connected to the Matrix: Americans Spend Most of their Waking Hours Staring at A Television or Computer Screen

About Ann Kreilkamp

PhD Philosophy, 1972. Rogue philosopher ever since.
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