We have outsourced our arithmetic to calculators, our grammar to spellcheck and our memory to google. This trend towards outsourcing can accelerate the atrophy of our brain if we become habituated to evading all intellectually challenging engagements.

Worse still, it can lend an outward orientationto our thinking that disconnects us from our inner essence. The more we let silicon gadgets do information processing for us and the more they do it well – often better than us, the more we tend to trust them. And the more we trust such gadgets, the more we subconsciously extrapolate their capacities beyond their legitimate jurisdiction. Consequently, we let gadgets process not only our information, but also our emotion. And the silicon media can act as readymadetools for those who want to dominate and direct our emotions: the ad agencies. Through the patterns of light and sound that they play out on silicon gadgets, we can get run over by unlimited material desires: “I want this – and that – and that too… ad infinitum.” Cumulatively, such desires take our thinking deeper and deeper into illusion, further and further away from the awareness of who we actually are and what we really need.

That’s why, the more we outsource aspects of our thinking process, the more we need to consciously take out time tokeep the core of our thinking with us. That core is the awareness of our actual identity (we are souls) and our real necessity (love for Krishna which alone can offer us eternal happiness). Scriptural study offers us potent and poignant reminders of thesechangeless core truths of life. The Bhagavad-gita (4.35) assures us that when we assimilate spiritual knowledge, we will stay safely beyond the reach of illusion.

Bhagavad Gita Chapter 04 Text 35

“Having obtained real knowledge from a self-realized soul, you will never fall again into such illusion, for by this knowledge you will see that all living beings are but part of the Supreme, or, in other words, that they are Mine.”