On Using Tools
Ready to learn a big secret? Humans use tools. Yup. Cars and cell phones and computers and shoes and pencils.
What? You knew that already? But did you know the rest of the secret? Here it is:
Every tool we use changes us.
This is simple enough to understand, but its implications run very deep. The secret is that we are following a doctrine of tool-use that we’ve never examined. We’ve been taught that tools make our lives easier and better, but no one ever told us that whenever we adopt a tool, the tool changes us – often in fundamental ways. In other words, each tool we adopt comes with both a benefit and a price. We’re told about the benefits, but the price is usually ‘under our radar’. The end effect is that we become products of our tool-using habits. Like clay shaped by a potter’s hands, our tools shape our minds, bodies, and hearts.
Tools Using Us
Most of us wear shoes (can’t stand them, myself). Not only is it culturally expected that we wear shoes, but we’re told that shoes protect our feet. Of course, once we start wearing them, the soles of our feet become soft and weak, and the skin of our feet, always enclosed in a hot, moist environment, becomes prone to fungus and infection. In fact, shoes affect our entire musculoskeletal system, since they alter the way in which our feet meet the ground and hence the way we walk and stand. Did anyone tell us this before we started our shoe-wearing habit? Of course not. We were just told to wear shoes.
Consider the internet. Today, if I have a question such as ‘When was the Great Wall of
Do you drive a car? How would your life be different if you walked or biked everywhere you went?
Every tool we use brings with it profound changes. Consider how your cell phone has changed you. Your use of a computer. The clothing you wear. Do you live in a house? Use electricity? How do these things alter ‘you’?
It becomes a remarkable educational experience if you stop in your day and notice what tools you are using in that very moment. Then consider how those tools change your body or mind. If you observe clearly enough, you may be shocked – it becomes obvious that we are not so much individuals as we are products of the tools we’ve adopted in our lives. Consider how your body and mind would change if you were dumped, naked, on an abandoned tropical island. Go ahead and imagine it for a moment. A week after your arrival, would you be the ‘same person’ you are today? Or would your body and mind go through some profound changes?
Language
Many tools are obvious. But other tools seem so fundamental to us that we don’t even notice they are there. Language is a great example. For most of us, language-use is almost thoughtless – we just open our mouths and words flow out. It seems necessary and natural to use language. But do we know what affect it has on our minds?
Consider that the language we are using here is one of division. The effect of any single word is to point out differences. A word ‘defines’ not by creating unity, but by dividing the thing it references from the rest of the world. The result? Whenever we utter a word, we are conditioning our minds into a philosophy of division. Consider how many times a day you talk (or read or write). Did you know that every time you use language, you are actively conditioning your mind to focus on the divisions of the world?
This mind-set is called dualism, and though it gives us many wondrous benefits, it brings with it heaps of trouble. The world, arguably, has no real divisions. When we divide it up with our language, we get into the trouble of trying to make all these divisions fit back together. When these divisions are conceptual instead of actual, it means that we begin living in a fantasy-world in our heads.
Noticing Living
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately . . .” said Thoreau. How miraculous a deliberate life is! When we are actively engaged in the process of living, life takes on a lucid simplicity that always amazes us with its beauty. But when we fail to notice how the tools we adopt create constant changes within us, we become products of our own blindness and delusion.
The point here is not that tools are bad, nor that we should stop using them. The point is simply that we benefit from using tools consciously — with an awareness of the way that any given tool affects our life as a whole.
All it takes is a commitment to slowing down and noticing. Usually we are running on an ever-faster hamster-wheel, without any real knowledge of why we’re running. What happens when we stop and look at our lives, and notice what’s going on?
The results are enlightening.
Explore posts in the same categories: Understanding Dualism
September 29th, 2008 at 8:08 am
Thanks Kenton.
You have a knack of being profoundly lucid in everything you write. Very nice way of telling us to be more aware.
September 29th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Kenton,
I’ve been walking around in my socks and shoes this morning, and I really really like my stealth-boots I bought off the internet for 50 dollars. (Think: Police/SWAT boots) They’re my favorite; very comfortable, sleek black, and highly protective of both my ankles and feet in general.
I just took off my socks and shoes.
Thanks.
September 29th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
I never thought about it like that - awesome!
Before we developed the tool of language, how did we communicate? (And when did language come about?)
Pre-language, we were part of the whole, the way a wave is part of the ocean?
Pre-language, was there ‘art’?
Is language what the Tree of Knowledge represented? So our ability to name things and talk about them heralded the “fall” of man?
If life “evolves”, what purpose does language serve in this evolution? Where can it take us, other than separating us from All that Is?
Can we even know the answers to such things? And do they even matter?
Hmmm….
September 30th, 2008 at 2:27 am
Hello Rahul!
Thank you so much for your compliment =)
Kenton
September 30th, 2008 at 2:30 am
Geoff –
I always enjoy your writing. And it wasn’t just ANY shoes you took off, either.
Bravo! =)
Sweetwater,
Kenton
September 30th, 2008 at 2:36 am
Wow kl — I laughed all the way through your comment, just because of the joyous profundity of your questions. Each of these questions could lead us into hours of consideration and wonder as we explored the thought of how language affects our entire lives and history. It’s particularly interesting to consider if language might be the Tree of Knowledge as you mentioned — that’s always seemed to me to be what the stories were describing.
Thanks for posing these thought-provoking questions. Hopefully they’ll stir some readers to consider their own answers.
Sweetwater,
Kenton
September 30th, 2008 at 8:15 am
Kenton,
Your reply makes me think of sitting around a fire under a clear summer’s night pondering the nature of life and sharing many laughs in the knowledge that the answers don’t matter at all… but they sure are fun to ponder.
Much joy
September 30th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Sounds positively lovely. =)
Kenton
October 29th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Dear Kenton,
as always, many thanks for your ever-lovely pointers!
Your mentioning on language deeply intrigue me, as kl’s wonderous questions. I’d love to team up with you guys in that cabin by the fire
I’ve got these ideas which I can’t really put together into a coherent model yet, but my inner modelometer tells me there’s something to them. I suspect that (dualistic) language, time and ego are all intimately intertwined; different manifestations of the same set of tools and the same set of (illusory) problems. I suspect that the whole deal with the exodus from Eden was an appropriate mental evolutionary response to a world which was becoming increasingly changing and confusing for early (post-neolithic or so) man. We moved from a world of tribal conciousness where language was magic in nature. Magic in the sense that there is no division between the key (like a word or thought) and the door (that which it refer to); to utter is to manifest. I’ve touched this frame of language in deeply personal conversations with close friends and rare and blessed occasions and these moments left us transformed forever.
Back on track; as the world changed and people from different tribes and cultures began to trade more and more, the world was becoming increasingly confusing and a need for some sort of structure arose. I suspect that linear time and the modern ego is a response to this need; with time, we are given a ‘thread’ upon which we can place memories and experiences, and with the separate self, we are given this point of reference by which we can measure things (to measure, one need a reference system and in a non-dual world, that’s hard to come by).
So linear time and the separate self were these ingenious tools which allowed us to see and measure the world and ourselves in completely new ways. With a separate, inner representation of an external world, we can work with this world in wholly new ways. We can make much more advanced predictions, for we can change the settings of this inner model of the world without, say, risking our lives doing so. Obviously, this has a great evolutionary value, hence why tribal cultures (although in many ways much more advanced than modern cultures) find it so hard to compete with those who has left the garden and acquired these awesome tools.
There’s this great collection of fictional short-texts written by Michael Chorost which deal with deep philosophical and metaphysical questions in a very different way. Several of these texts deal with language, such as “Writing under Erasure”: (http://deoxy.org/alephnull/erasure.htm) “The Lethal Text” (http://deoxy.org/alephnull/lethal.htm). Also, on the topic of the move from non-dual to a dual mind, you’ll surely appreciate “The Origin of Consciousness” (http://deoxy.org/alephnull/jaynes.htm).
As always, many thanks for your inspiration. I always let out a little Hooray! when I see a new blog entry from you in my reader!
Smiles,
-Magnus
October 31st, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Hello Magnus!
This could become a really great conversation around that fire. Too bad we’re not all in closer proximity on this planet =)
What you’ve outlined here is fascinating. Thanks for adding so much substance to the movement of this conversation. How this all began is an oft-posed and important question. We can only speculate, but I suspect your outline is very close to the way things unfolded. In considering these things, we get closer to understanding how we incorporated these models into our own lives — and in that understanding we become more aware of their workings. Bravo on a well-thought-out history of our current model-system!
Also, I thank you for the links. I’m excited to explore them.
Sweetwater,
Kenton