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Available for over a year

24 hours without mobile data was enough to send many people’s lives into disarray earlier this week. It affected their ability to work, access health services, their relationships and even London transport. Some were left with nothing to do other than just be, which actually sounds rather attractive to me. Anyway......The mounting anecdotal evidence of the impact it had on people, brought into clear view how dependant we have become on something that was originally created to enable us and give us more freedom. There’s little doubt that modern progressive society seeks to invent and create in order to make us more independent and increase our happiness quotient. The ability to be and do anything and everything we want to, at any time is appealing to many. According to Hindu texts freedom is part of the nature of the soul, but this type of freedom is quite different to the current commonly held outward looking ideas around freedom. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna spends a large proportion of time discussing a spiritual model of the self and in particular the qualities of the soul. One term he uses to describe our spiritual self is Sarva-gatah or all pervading, which if we look at how we live now, correlates with how, as society we are developing a greater desire to be everywhere at all times and much of our tech is designed to enable us to do this. But the experience of connecting with our spiritual or inner sense of freedom, independence and being present is very different in that it is available to everyone and it doesn’t have to be interrupted by external factors which aren’t always under our control. Whilst we may have access to every kind of facility to fulfil our desires it’s our relationship to them that determines whether they give us freedom or not. I think that when our sense of identity and existence is tied very heavily into the world outside, including technology then we risk the danger of becoming dependant on these things. I believe cultivating a deeper sense of self can allow us to experience a freedom that is truly independent and could protect us from being enslaved by our own creations.