WWW ...... What Went Wrong

Have you ever come across a time in your life when you felt lost without your phone? Have you ever come across a moment in your life when you felt lonely without your phone or addicted to the WORLD WIDE WEB? Is it world wide web or is it Who What Where, or World Wide Wow, or Wet Wild Wicked, or Whole Wide World, or Why Why World, or Wild Wild West. https://www.acronymfinder.com/WWW.html

There are many versions of the WWW in our life.

Let’s face it, we are addicted and we are stuck in the web. Like an insect, we are stuck in the web built by the spider and soon enough we will get eaten by the black widow spider. I got inspired to write about this from my Gurudev, Srila Prabhupad Prem Gopal Goswami. He recently mentioned this in his lecture. Gurudev mentions that WWW is actually 666 in Latin. This 666 is the number of a demon. It is completely demonizing our life. By his mercy I had realized this before, that the use of the internet is very addictive to say the least. It’s not only addictive but it takes our valuable time away from Lord Krishna. What we learn in our spiritual life is that we are a soul and we have an eternal relationship with the super soul. As we advance in our spiritual life we can get a sense of a voice speaking to us from within, our caitya guru or the supersoul. I find that we get less and less attuned to this voice the more we listen to the voices on the internet. We lose the heart to heart connection within and start trusting the internet with various degrees of answers given to us by Google Maharaj. Especially when it comes to health and disease we are very quick to believe what’s written in some article we researched rather than tune into that voice within and get the answers.

Another point to consider is sense gratification. We are warned many a times in the scriptures about sense enjoyment and remaining content with what we have, not to be greedy, and to practice patience. In being engaged with the web master WWW we not only want instant gratification but we engage all our senses in useless sense enjoyment. Our mental faculties start wanting more and more. It becomes an addictive process wanting more and more of the feel-good hormones, dopamine. We check to see how many likes we got on social media, how many happy faces which make us happy and how many sad faces to make us sad. Our emotions are being hacked by the use of the internet. Our scriptures tell us to control the false ego and the internet encourages us to get more likes by promoting our social media articles, so we can feel more important.

A spider makes a web sometimes sticky to trap its prey and sometimes it camouflages itself and waits for a vibration of the web to then catch its prey. Then they make small holes in the prey’s body and vomit their digestive juices into their body sucking out the muscles and internal organs of the prey. We get similarly stuck in this sticky web and as soon as we type something in the search engine we start getting further trapped by advertisements which make holes in our brains to suck out any self-control we may have left. For example if you search for a handbag, you will get an array of choices of handbags for the next few days, every time you open the search engine. It’s like a bait set to trap the fish in the net.

I’m sure all this sounds very familiar to most people reading. We have to realize that it’s not only hacking our brains but our physical bodies are getting more sedentary, and possibly more injured or damaged mainly in our hands, spine, eyes and nervous system. Young adults world wide are facing a lot of mental and physical health issues due to this.

One characteristic of pure devotees is that they never waste a single moment and always engage in the service of Sri Radha Krishna. We can learn and realize how valuable our time is. Time cannot be bought back. Not a single moment can be purchased by millions of dollars. Krishna says that He is time in the Bhagavad Gita.

Bg 11.32

śrī-bhagavān uvāca
kālo ’smi loka-kṣaya-kṛt pravṛddho
lokān samāhartum iha pravṛttaḥ
ṛte ’pi tvāṁ na bhaviṣyanti sarve
ye ’vasthitāḥ praty-anīkeṣu yodhāḥ

The Supreme Personality of Godhead said: Time I am, the great destroyer of the worlds, and I have come here to destroy all people. With the exception of you [the Pāṇḍavas], all the soldiers here on both sides will be slain.

Time itself is destructive. Everything is destroyed in time. We get birth, death, old age and disease in time. The body has a clock which has its own time function along synced with the time of the planetary systems. So we must respect time and not waste it uselessly.

As you must be thinking that we all are reading this article and watching and hearing Hari katha from many devotees world wide due to this WWW. Then what is the problem? The problem is just self control and self discipline. A disciple is nothing without self discipline. Every yogi needs yamas and niyamas. One has to exercise control of what we are doing on the web and how much time we are spending on it. So if we are to achieve the goal of our lives, which is to develop prema bhakti and a loving service mood towards Guru and Gauranga, we must assert self discipline on ourselves. Else we cannot receive the mercy of the Lord and His pure devotees.

You make the choice….. we don’t want to be thinking at the end of our lives…. WHAT WENT WRONG !!

WITH WARM WISHES

Krishna Dasi

This weeks tunes are below .