With the advent of instant messaging applications we have created a true “global village” where we interact with each other regardless of distance. We share photos, videos, audios and everything. We are hyperconnected. Today, it is no longer acceptable not to give news when you are away, in business meetings or in leisure activities. Everyone who has a cell phone, for example, can communicate and interact minimally.
Social networks and instant messaging applications allow us to have as many friends as we want, including from various countries. Better than that, we can be closer to the friends we already have and to our relatives. Perhaps we can even get to know them better, because everyone’s life is increasingly exposed to those who have time to follow their profiles so well prepared. Also, being in person with someone is really a bit tiring, sometimes it becomes a nuisance. Without corporal contact, having to deal only with projections, coexistence sometimes becomes less problematic. And it seems so good that the idea of accessing ourselves virtually has a great attraction. Wouldn’t such a simplification be desirable in the relation with ourself? Quick, short, and practical messages would be a great tool for giving guidelines to our own being, since we often sin by excess of words and complications.
However, having a connection with ourself, as efficient as the one of the applications we use, is something that seems to be far beyond the reach of the human being. We are hypo-connected when we are ourselves. “Hypo”, the opposite of “hyper”, is less, less. That is, as we are connected 24 hours with the outside world, we forget more and more to connect with our inner world. We forget how to deal with our “profile”, we avoid (or do not want) the “add” in our own network of contacts: we do not think about the dialogue with ourselves .. As if lost in this virtual web, conditioned by its various mechanisms, we carry on searching for the way to accomplish more meaningful things, which satisfy our longing for something indefinite.
Every facebook notification is the promise of a saving novelty, a hope always renewed, but repeatedly frustrated. The hundreds of messages accumulated in WhatsApp groups, ranging from “Good morning” to explicit violence videos, give us a sense of how heavy the task of staying connected has become. It is a task that, paradoxically, costs us a lot of time, because if it is true that we do not need to wait for days and months to receive a reply from a correspondence, it is also true that today we “consume” and share useless information, in such a great volume that we do not account for reading and responding to everything. The instantaneous speed of connectivity and the amount of information we receive force superficial contact and trivialisation of meanings. With the speed of communications, instead of having more time, the information flow intensified. It is the myth of Sisyphus in his postmodern version.
Will technological development not have been able to get rid of the unpleasant task of pushing a stone up the mountain? The answer seems to be “no”. However, it would be unfair and naive to attribute to technological development the cause of our new evils. First, because they are new only in appearance and second, because the devices we use are just instruments or channels that lend themselves to the purposes we designate for them. The prison in which many of us find ourselves in respect to the “virtual world” does not differ essentially from our “real world” prison. This is an internal prison. We are prisoners of anxiety, insecurity, despair. In such a condition, we always experience the factors external to us as castrators of our freedom.
If something needs to be done to remedy the plight of the human being, the place to start must be himself. And here again there is nothing new. The need for an inner reformation has been stressed from the beginnings of our history in the various sacred scriptures we know and even in the great literary and philosophical works of humanity. The search for the missing link, the return home, the awakening to a familiar but forgotten truth – all these images refer to the yearning for the inner connection mentioned at the beginning. How far can we go to reach this connection? In order to have an answer to this question, just check where we have arrived at the current point of our journey. For it would not be unreasonable to stipulate that everything we have undertaken so far is the expression of this longing, though its object is indefinite for our consciousness.
If we are right to follow this path of reflection, then, looking at the marks of our past we are forced to conclude that the lack of inner connection has been a cause of great pain. The human being has shown that he does not know how to live divided. Perhaps what the scriptures mean when they speak of conquering death is precisely the elimination of the present split in our own being. Being connected to oneself is the same as breaking the fetters that bind us to our anguish, it means being aware of the purpose that gives direction to life and of the role we represent in it. Undoing the barriers that separate us from our essence, more than bringing us closer, unites us. It is through this union that our soul aspires with far more vigor than anything else. May we, then, elevate the hyper-connection that technology has brought us to a higher level, within ourselves, in order to dissolve everything that limits us and transform all that we are.
