Technology & Consciousness – 09.16.10

Student Question: Our relationship with technology has been novel in the past few centuries, but particularly in the last decades. And a friend of mine who was having knee surgery commented to me the other day how glad he was that he lives in the 21st century. Another person I encountered was captivated by her technology and what it can do. Does technology play a positive role because it seems that technology is also at the forefront of destroying the world?

“Well it’s the use of technology at the service of the ego rather than at the service of the Divine Self that is the problem,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And so it is actually the lack of the highest possible technology, because we have externalized everything, because we think of ourselves as machines that have created a technology in our own image, in the image of the ego, that involves internal combustion engines, because we’re all combusting, exploding inside from our own ego conflicts—all of this is mirrored in the external world. . . . So in every way now we have seen that we have passed our peak, and this culture is dying because we haven’t reached a high enough level of psycho-technology to transcend the ego.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.