According to Wikipedia
“The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age) is a period in human history characterized by the shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on information technology.”
It’s not a secret anymore, being in this technology age, that the human mind is getting stuffed and overloaded with information.
I certainly have had my fair share of information overload, it and with really how many forms of information that are in our lives.
Just take a look at the Internet and how it dominates a good amount of the human population.
Excuse me, did I say the Internet?
What I meant was the information superhighway or national information infrastructure, both synonyms of the Internet (or words that mean the same thing). The internet is just a technological form for information.
The amount of information at the tip of your fingers is exponentially higher than it’s ever been and if that isn’t enough, the speed of formation will never again be slower than the speed at which it’s growing at this time.
The speed of information is growing at exponential rates as it moves into the future.
When I say the tip of your fingers, what I mean, for example is a mobile that’s attached to just about every mobile owner’s hands.
This photo illustrates this perfectly.
Photo Credit: Steve Cutts
Not only is information at the tip of your fingers, but it’s in your face just about everywhere you, go like this restaurant for example….
Unless you had a blindfold and noise cancelling ear buds on, these TV’s would put information on your lap in the form of what you would see and hear.
How about Facebook?
There are only 2.2 billion monthly active users on Facebook only accounting for about 35% of the ENTIRE world population which takes into account countries without great or no access to the internet, and countries that even have access to Facebook, because governments like China don’t want their society involved with certain news or “information.”
Yes, that’s 2.2 billion people are exposed to a newsfeed of information, notifications, and trending world news for an average of about 50 minutes per user every day!
Information via the Internet also stems into blogs, emails, all forms of social media, messaging applications, the thousands of applications in general, and the hundreds and thousands of websites that somehow end up on your browser.
You know with the hundred tabs open, laugh out loud. (We are all guilty of it)
Information is far from just limited to technology though, you still have every human interaction, communication, you have your schooling from K-12, college, the co-workers, bosses, customers at your job and everything else in between.
It’s no wonder why….
1 in every 13 people in this world suffer from anxiety, from stress and from being overwhelmed.
But let’s pause for a second, because it’s not the information itself that’s causing you the anxiety, stress and of being overwhelmed.
It’s the false identification of who you take yourself to be, which for a good portion of the world is with the mind.
The false identification with the very thing (Mind) that is soaking up ALL of this information like a vacuum and (without realizing it) trapping you inside of this information.
It is the mind itself that is a storage bank for all information, and unless you take a break from the mind and from thought then the information age will run your life and you will have internal pain as a result.
This isn’t so much as about taking a break from absorbing information, which is just about impossible in this world with tons of different sources of information.
It’s about taking a break from the very mind that’s absorbing it all, the natural result is that by taking a break from the mind your taking a break from information as well.
What taking a break from the mind means is that by paying attention to the gaps between your thoughts, from mind dominance and obsessive thinking. Taking a break from mind will allow you, as the great Bruce Lee once said….
“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own”
And according to James Ray
“The subconscious mind has no ability to censor or reject information.”
This means the part of your mind that is on autopilot is going to be affected in some way, shape, form or fashion with the information that goes through it.
Every piece of information has wired your brain and is rewiring it with every next piece of info.
So then, if your subconscious cannot reject information, how do we absorb what is useful, and reject what is not?
This is not about being free from information, just about being a slave to it and that what is required is disidentifying who you are with thought.
The mind and thoughts are what are interpreting all the information going through you, once you disidentify who you are with thought, then you can make the foundation of your life from constantly thinking to paying attention to what observes thought neutrally, which is the gap between your thoughts.
The state of non-thinking is also known as the arising state of conscious presence.
The conscious presence (the gap between your thoughts) is what allows you to take a break from overloads of information.
Remember…
#1. Absorb what is useful
Living in this physical world we need information. Without being informed we would never have learned to walk, read, write, run, communicate and everything else necessary to survive.
This is the conscious choice into observing what you need to pay attention to for survival and whatever else of your choosing.
#2. Discard what is not
Then you have what would be the conscious choice of what NOT to pay attention to.
This means that with conscious presence or non-thinking you can then have the ability to direct your thoughts where you may.
Say, for example, you have been identified with the mind for most of your life, and your focus has been on drinking alcohol every day, doing drugs, overeating, binge watching TV or any specific addiction or abuse that’s been harming you.
Then from conscious presence you can go FROM THIS MOMENT and ONLY THIS MOMENT choose a different direction in your life.
But you only have the ability to choose with the way that neutral awareness will let you.
You can only start a direction in your life through this present moment, but that is by being conscious of this present moment, without the conscious part you cannot choose.
The more often you choose to be conscious of this present moment, the more the harmful habits that you have had will dissolve without requiring an effort from the mind to do so.
#3. Add what is uniquely your own
If you are being run by the information, by what the mind consumes, your uniqueness will be blinded from this information.
Adding what is uniquely your own means you are willing to experiment in this physical world, you are willing to fail to experience this world in many different ways and to have heightened experiences.
If you are slave to your mind, if you are a slave to information then it is the information that is choosing your lifestyle for you.
It will then choose your emotional pain, anxiety and stress for you without your understanding why.
If, however, you have the capacity to let go of always thinking, to let go of the slavery the mind has to information, you can choose to live a unique lifestyle that ONLY you can live.
