Creation
I’ve been deeply moved watching Jordan Hall in discussion with John Vervaeke on what is needed to transcend the deep political polarities afflicting us in the current meaning crisis.
Their insights have made me realize that a kind of cognitive narrowing occurs on social media platforms as a result of mindlessly scrolling and actually keeps us out of relationship with what is real and sacred.
As a creator, this creates a dilemma for me, as I want to be active on social media but I also recognize that mindlessly consuming information is not healthy.
In the coming days and months I will be trying to curtail the amount of time I consume information on social media and replace that time with more creation and creativity.
Consider that in the creation myth portrayed in the book of Genesis, God creates 6 days a week and rests on the 7th. (Here, the term ‘myth’ does not mean ‘false’ but comes from the same word that ‘mystery’ and ‘mystic’ stems from, denoting a narrative that, if engaged with, results in spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect.)
First of all, that’s a shit ton of creativity. 6 days?? No wonder God rested. But also, there’s never a scripture that suggests God was just consuming things. I talked about this recently with a friend during Shabbat. I started to think, what might it mean to deliberately create more than I consumed and how might my relationship to social media be transformed as a result.
The answer to this remains to be seen but I will start tinkering with the question soon. More to come…
Beautiful. Love it! And yet, there's an additional layer to this problem that I've been struggling with: My creative processes (writing for public viewing, uploading to youtube) are themselves the content feeds for others. So, to abstain from consumption in favor of creation nevertheless perpetuates consumption for someone else. The key (that I've not yet managed to integrate) is to disentangle any attachments to one's content being consumed. To not feed the beast. To publish for the sacred sake of sharing, not for reception / validation / content feedback. And here I am, writing a comment on your post, and the hypocrisy is complete. The nature of the digital medium makes this problem so slippery!
Excellent points. I've noticed that Twitter has been adding more and more individual posts to people I follow: likes, replies, retweets, etc. I want to choose what to read by reading threads, not individual posts.Also adding posts from people I have not chosen to follow... My Twitter feed is 10 times longer than it needs to be, and I don't see any way to modify it.