Are we becoming addicted to the external world?

Joe Dispenza was one of my favorite characters in the movie What the Bleep. Today I read an article by him in the February issue of Science of Mind magazine called Contemplate Change. He talks about how our technological advances are encouraging people to become addicted to the external world and homogenized communities. Yesterday at work I compared a new version of a collaboration tool to Facebook, and someone observed that Facebook is a very addictive social networking site. I haven’t logged on to Facebook for months, and only signed up because it seemed more adult than MySpace. I am somewhat curious about what it is that draws people to those places, but this quote at the end of Dr. Dispenza’s article is brilliant:

The art of self-reflection is dying in a technological culture saturating us with so much information that we become addicted to the external world, and we rely on the outer conditions to stimulate our own thinking. How free are we? Most are lost without the thrill of entertainment, text messaging, phone calls, and the Internet. To make the time to meditate, to remind ourselves of new ways to live independent of the external world, to plan our future, to mentally rehearse the behaviors we want to change, and to think about new ways of being will surely set us apart from our predictable genetic destiny.

Dr. Joe is going to lead a workshop in Madrid next month called “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.” That is kind of what we’ve been doing with our monthly challenges – this month the challenge has been no coffee. Such a simple thing, not drinking a hot aromatic beverage every morning and trying to become mentally alert all on my own. So much more difficult to break the habit of thinking yourself…and if we are constantly distracted by the urgent but unimportant lure of the external world we may miss the messages from the Universe calling us to be our true Self.