You want to see someone in a cosmic and existential state of panic? Look at folks when the battery indicator light on their cellphones turns red. Its not merely a look of an appliance, a thing, running out of juice. It is the panicked look of a human being concerned about crossing over to the realm of non-existence.

Oh my God No text? No Facebook? Who will know I am alive?

I spent a lot of my time around 18-25 year-old people in classrooms, in coffee shops, in bookstores, in libraries. Much of our time is spent in university spaces, some with beautiful tall windows with magnificent views of quads. If you watch these young people closely, as I do, youll see that when they walk into a room they scan the room.

No, they are not looking for the best views. They are not looking for the most comfortable chairs. They are looking for a place to plug in, to charge. Time and again, they pick the place to charge their appliances over recharging their own souls.

This is where we are as a human species. We crave intimacy, and yet we confuse intimacy with technological connectedness. We have more ways of keeping in touch, and yet seem to have less and less meaningful things to say to one another. We are lonely, deeply lonely. So many of us crave community and intimacy, and are looking for it in all the wrong places.

On one hand, there is the 50 Shades of Gray nonsense and a 97 billion dollar porn industry having sucked so much of intimacy out of sexuality and sensuality. We have far too many of our men obsessed with cartoonish sexual gratifications. We pay a price for this obsession: this demeaning attitude that looks at women as objects to be possessed rather than autonomous human beings. The other casualty for both women and men is intimacy, foregoing the opportunity to establish real relationships based on vulnerability, communication, trust, and honesty.

On the other hand, we have our devices that seem to be never more than an arms length away. We have Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and a hundred other ways of staying connected. As long as our phones are beeping and ringing, we feel assured that someone, somewhere, likes us. We want to be liked, we need to be loved, but we are all too often unwilling to risk the vulnerability to establish real meaningful intimate relationships.

One-third of us would choose our electronic devices over being intimate with our partners. Whats wrong with us?

We used to look at movies like The Matrix and Monsters Inc. that show machines sucking energy from humans as a metaphor of our anxiety about technology. Its not a metaphor any longer.

HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche connects with HH Dagchen Sakya Rinpoche.

The rest is here:

Omid Safi: Less iPhone spirituality, more recharging our hearts' batteries