Engineering The Nature Out Of Humanity

Staying human in an increasingly inhuman world.

As the technologies continue to make their way into more and more aspects of our lives, our biggest challenge becomes, how do we continue to recognize and honor real human needs? 

How do we stay human? 

Such a strange thing to say, or even think about. Of course we’re human. What else could we be? Well we could, we actually are, becoming lesser and lesser versions of who and what a human being can be. Sadly, the examples continue to mount.

Our basic needs for sleep, downtime, sharing a meal, time spent in nature and more have all been hijacked by the endless parade of shows, Youtube videos, social media, and gaming.

Our children’s truest developmental needs for face to face contact, exploration of the environment, movement, and creative time have been commandeered by the digital babysitters.

We exist physically in the same house with our loved ones while we spend increasing amounts of time separate from one another; preferring to hunch over our screen companions instead.

And our Western physicians are losing their diagnostic skills; choosing to use the technologies as the modern day diagnostician rather than to observe, listen to, and collaborate with the person who sits before them as a way to come to an educated medical opinion.

Believing machines superior over human-to-human contact and healing.

Basic human needs, the ones that keep us alive and keep us healthy, the very ones that define the human experience, are being engineered out of us at great cost.

Many of us no longer have any idea what those needs are, or how to satisfy them. No longer connecting to what feels good, right, natural in our own bodies, leaves us opting instead for what distorts, undermines, and confuses. And then, at a great loss for what to do, we look outside of ourselves.

With all of the technological insertions into our lives, how will we know not only who and what we are, but as importantly, what we need?

This is such an enormous question to even ask. Maybe that is why so many of us don’t. Maybe that is why it feels easier to hand ourselves over to the technologies.

God knows the screens will never demand an answer to that question. Nor will they provide us with a healthy answer. Despite what we have been conditioned to believe, the technologies are not the great white savior.

This is nowhere more evident than with our very own bodies. The very thing that makes us human.

The only way we can be here, be in relationship, and know how to care for not only ourselves and others, but for the very body of the earth Herself. It is the ground out of which we exist. The only place we can inhabit to discern what is real and true, and what is not. 

Without an authentic and present connection to the body based on basic, directly experienced biological Truths and needs of the body, we are lost.

To be in a body is to experience Life.

It is to know our wholeness. And our brokenness. It is a doorway into Self-discovery. A portal that takes us from the mundane to the lofty. 

To be in a body is to know yourself intimately. It is to be confused and scared, gain clarity, and do it all over again. It is to endure and to remain committed. It is to be sovereign and to surrender to Something More in a world mesmerized with the material accomplishments of man.

It is to walk a unique path that Graces you with compassion, patience, wisdom, and tolerance.

And it is to find your courage while claiming personal responsibility for your own health. This is the gesture we need from you right now. An agreement with yourself to do some growing up.

To know that you cannot outsource your health to another. Nor to the technology du jour.

This is a big task. And a necessary one. Every single issue we face in the world has its origins in each one of us and how it is that we are showing up.

Every single way we are hurting as a species can be found within the fears, imbalances, and abdications of personal responsibility living within each of us.

This is the good news. This is the fix for all that you see around you. This is where you can weigh in and help change what must be changed.

Begin Within.

Begin with one simple question and observation: “Beyond anything outside of me, what am I feeling in this moment?” This is not a thought. It is not based on outer expectations. It is you, being in you, while feeling and sensing what is there.

This is a lifetime practice, and it is your way into the direct experience of the Truth of being alive. Something that can only happen by being in your body while claiming full and total responsibility for what you do with it.