Even before smart phones and the Internet, we had many ways to distract our selves. Now that's compounded by a factor of trillions.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how, throughout history, people have found distractions, and with modern technology, the options have multiplied exponentially.
Jon Kabat-Zinn points out that distractions have always existed, but with the advent of technology such as smartphones and the Internet, the ways to divert our attention have increased dramatically. This suggests that while we have more connections and opportunities to engage, we also face greater challenges in maintaining focus and mindfulness in our daily lives.
In practice
Using this quote in a keynote speech about the impact of technology on mental health.
Once you have established yourself as a center of love and kindness radiating throughout your being, which amounts to a cradling of yourself in loving kindness and acceptance, you can dwell here indefinitely, drinking at this fount, bathing it in, renewing yourself, nourishing yourself, enlivening yourself. This can be a profoundly healing practice for body and soul.
One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that's been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection.
Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us.
Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.
The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.
In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are same. So if youβre not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, youβre not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.
It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo should be developing new technologies to bypass government sensors and barriers to the Internet; but instead, they agreed to guard the gates themselves.
A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw.
It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.
I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.
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