The age of the Enlightenment was characterised by the phrase of Descartes ‘I think therefore I am’. We are in an age of the supremacy of the mind. But the mind is fighting back: depression, anxiety, suicide, break down, dementia, and Alzheimers all are symptoms of minds saying, enough, no more. In a reflection on what the internet is doing to our brain the author Nicholas Carr says, what the(inter)net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.
I don’t know about you, but I used to be able to remember phone numbers, now I hardly remember my own. My brain is often numb with the amount of information I have to take in and ironically, as a result, I am less able to remember anything! Maybe the catch phrase for our time therefore is ‘I’m numb therefore I am’. There are a lot of advantages to our age but putting weight on one aspect of our humanity to the neglect of other important aspects of our being cannot be good for us. Though the mind and knowledge may be of great importance today, the soul and her accompanying wisdom are of more importance than ever. The two things that are being displaced more and more in daily life are conversation and contemplation: both are the doorways to wisdom. More often than not, to get the attention of another, and often our significant other, we have to distract them from their distractions.
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking. – Richard Rohr