“Get on the train – hardly any words are exchanged between people anymore. Our minds are tethered to a tiny screen – digital connection has replaced the human bond. If you casually greet a passer-by – a once-obvious way of affirming the human bond with no other intention – you will immediately sense the problem and, possibly, an unpleasant reaction in return (an unspoken question of: “What does this idiot want of me?”).”
Not that I don’t gratefully celebrate his way of understanding, articulating, and warning, of the totalitarian tendencies emerging from the increasingly disembodied culture we are more and more enmeshed in, but I, personally, have found that it’s actually quite simple to connect with passersby. The key: a truly open heart. As you walk by the Other, for one split second (or more) when you look up, into the Other’s eyes, when you instantly penetrate the eyes to the soul, then the Other wakes up! For that one split second (or more), his or her soul, enlivened by that singular unexpected opportunity, breaks the entire face into a heart-felt smile.
All this assumes that the Other is NOT on his cell phone when he walks by. A big assumption. Around here, somewhere between 50% and 75% are on their phones when walking. Hint: It helps to walk with a dog. For some unknown? reason, the presence of a (naturally open-hearted, innocent) dog can break the habitual isolation, and serve easily as intermediary between one human and another.
Besides walking with a dog, the key, obviously, is this: the person who connects with the Other, whether stranger or familiar, must him or herself be attuned to, and moving from, the soul. Our souls, while individual, are also, as Desmet very well knows and speaks of, though without using that word, all enmeshed in, portions of, the larger unified consciousness that interpenetrates and enlivens the whole.
“In real conversations, people’s bodies constantly resonate with each other. The facial and body muscles of the listener contract in the same way as those of the speaker, and the same areas of the brain are activated. When people speak with each other, they form a supra-organism on a psychic and subtle-physical level. They are connected by a psychic membrane that imperceptibly transmits the most subtle emotions from one person to another. In this way a kind of spontaneous empathy occurs in the interlocutor (unless the ego structure is extremely developed, as in psychopathy).”
He’s right, the body is key: the coalescence, the harmonics, of our bodies, attuned with one another, without our even realizing it, move and have their being as one. Which is why personal contact is so much more satisfying than digital.
What animates the body? The soul. One’s personal portion of life’s primal expression.
Digital Depression and Lonely Masses