Technology – Meditations of Neilus Aurelius

As I sit looking out of my kitchen window, the Indian summer of the afternoon has melded into the autumn chill of evening. A scent of bark wafts in through the kitchen door. I have just laid bark and wood chips over the soil in the garden borders to hopefully prevent my perennial struggle with weeds in the year ahead!

I am thinking about something Roman, which Marcus Aurelius would have used every day and something modern which we may use every day. A tablet.

You may say to yourself I do not possess a tablet myself or I pad or whatever. But is not the mobile phone a mini-tablet? We are able to make notes on it after all as well as emails and messages. I could write my meditation on it if I so wished.

This has come to my mind because a week or so ago my mobile phone was stolen. I hasten to add that I wasn’t mugged. I wasn’t alone either. I had a friend with me. We were eating outside a restaurant in Central London. My phone was taken by a beggar woman from my table. It was beside my plate and the woman used the distracting tactic of trying to grab a slice of pizza from my plate. I didn’t notice it had gone till a while later. More fool me for leaving it on display as a temptation for someone less fortunate than myself.

My friend was very helpful and called the phone company for me and the assistant arranged for my phone to be blocked. Two days later I had a new phone and thanks to that most nebulous yet essential of devices, the Cloud, everything from my stolen phone appeared as if by magic on my new one. And then all was well with the world again!

Aside from the shock of the theft and being annoyed and upset, I immediately felt rather disorientated. This feeling of being lost lasted until a new phone was in my hands. I became a bundle of nerves at times. My nerves didn’t settle until my emails and apps etc were up and running again on my phone. Even though, in the interim of only two days, I was able to use my I pad and laptop to write, send emails and texts and explore the internet. And being old-fashioned, I still have a landline too to communicate with the outside world.

This situation has made me ask myself why am I so dependent on a smart phone for my health and wellbeing? For it is dependency. I mainly do my banking on my phone, for instance, and the app provides a security code if I want to access my account on my laptop. Although my bank is a telephone bank and I could have done business that way if necessary. I have the NHS app too which has my medical records on it and I can use it to order a repeat prescription. Again, I could always call the surgery if I needed a repeat prescription on my landline, like in the old days (only a year or so ago!). So, I do not absolutely need my mobile phone, but life is getting that way!

Of course, the ability to communicate with others in such a variety of ways and so quickly on a mobile phone is a wonderful asset to have. Not to mention, taking photos, playing music, watching TV, keeping up with the news, making purchases, finding directions etc. You may be reading this meditation on your mobile phone. And, of course, they were so useful in lockdown for video calls with loved ones.

I remember watching a TV programme, around 30 years ago now, about the joys of the personal computer. Mobile phones were mentioned in the discussion. They were in their infancy then and looked like a brick against the ear – not much different from a military walkie-talkie! Someone suggested that eventually a hand- held computer will be developed. And here we are!

My worry is that not only have we become dependent on mobile phones for so many things now, but that this dependency has accelerated rapidly in the last few years. So much of our lives is now conducted on that mini-tablet in our hands. I also remember that when I was as a child, television broadcasting was promoted as a window onto the world in the corner of your living room. Now the world is in our hand – or rather the virtual world.

Did we ask for this dependency? No of course not. No-one asks to be dependent on anyone or anything. It somehow just happens slowly and stealthily. And with dependency comes addiction, if we are not careful. At the very least, the mobile phone can be a distraction, stopping us from fully concentrating or focusing on the task in hand. In fact, the phone becomes the task in hand instead unless we have the personal discipline to switch it off for a while or at least switch it to silent mode. Then perhaps true personal fulfillment will come to us, instead of the empty promises of personal fulfillment pedaled by social media.

Dear me, Marcus will be upset. I had intended to share with you my recent visit to Rome. I will save it until my next meditation.

Ave atque Vale – until the next blog.

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Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

As I sit here with a candle before me as usual, I am not gazing at its flame but at the darkness in the room that surrounds it. One of the advantages of using an I Pad to write is that it has an illuminated screen so I am able to compose this meditation without the benefit of an electric light above or beside me. Indeed, I hardly need a candle at all to see the keyboard.

Marcus, of course, all those centuries ago, would have had to resort to candles or oil lamps to write his own meditations. His own tablet would not have been lit from within as mine is! I am sure that, like me, he must have gazed into the darkness between writing down his sentences. Perhaps the darkness helped him to get his own thoughts together too. Alternately gazing at the candle flame and at the gloom, at the light and at the darkness, he was able to shape his thoughts into sentences.

One thing is certain: he would have been far more aware of the dark than we are. We never need to be completely in the dark with electric lights everywhere and TV and computer screens beaming at us, not to mention the little screens forever in our hand. With all these sources of light, we hardly notice the passage of the night hours at all unless we are unable to sleep for some reason. But Marcus would have been more aware of the night hours, the hours of darkness.

Perhaps he wrote because he slept little. I read in Mary Beard’s recent book about Rome, that the city’s inhabitants slept little at all, because of fear of fire and violence outside their dark and flimsy wooden dwellings. Perhaps Marcus’ legionaries enjoyed being free of that fretful city fear as they camped out in the stillness of the fields and plains, in those moments when they were far from the lurking enemy.

It is humbling to sit in the dark. It reminds us of our place in the universe, in the cosmic order of things; that there is a vast immensity beyond our own paltry private world of nagging individual concerns. Looking up into the night sky, especially in the summer when we can sit in the warmth of the evening to gaze up at the stars, can help us to appreciate this. But sitting in a room in the dark can bring this home to us too.

Technology in its myriad forms has, I think, made us proud and arrogant as if we are in total control and lords of creation and of course we are not in total control. News of a natural disaster is enough to remind of this. And our slapdash intermittent control of creation has resulted in disastrous results for our fragile and vulnerable Eco systems, which we are now only too aware of.

We are most aware of the dark in the wintertime because it creeps in suddenly during the late afternoon and is still there when we wake up in the morning. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Christmas is so wonderful: it is a season of light, of cheer, of conviviality; of bright lights and comforting company against the ever-encroaching dark. For we do all have that primal fear of the dark inside us. You only have to walk down a country lane with no street lights at night or across an open field in the dark to experience a twinge of that primal fear; to share that gut feeling those Roman city dwellers must have had at times. Especially if you are unable to get a signal on your phone!

A few days ago there was another attack by a lone terrorist in the London Bridge area. Darkness has suddenly crept into our lives again accompanied by that primal fear. Except it was the darkness within that terrorist’s soul that took over him and then his victims and so us. Darkness is always with us.

The future of our country is in the balance with an election looming and the ever-present uncertainty caused by Brexit. We are walking towards the future in the dark. But then we always are walking towards the future in the dark. We really do not know what is around the corner. Perhaps part of our anxiety or annoyance about this is because technology, as I mentioned earlier, surreptitiously makes us believe we have all knowledge at our fingertips, that we are omniscient, all knowing. Therefore we should know everything about the future and certainly the media and politicians want us to believe their version of it. But we need to remember that we are in the dark and to accept the dark and cherish what light we have.

I am now sitting in a room away from home. I am staying overnight in my old Oxford college, Pembroke. My room overlooks the chapel quad. It is one of my favourite views so I am so pleased that I have been allocated this room. It is night and very dark in the quad as I look out of the window but there are lamps shining in brackets from the walls.The walls were a biscuit brown in the winter sunshine when I arrived, but now they are a pale grey, not eerie but welcoming. From the darkness in my room, those lamps look so comforting, especially the one immediately opposite me, lighting the stairway to the Hall. It is no longer a lamp but a beacon in the gloom.

That is what we are called to be: beacons in the gloom, comforting each other and hopefully guiding each other. That is what the two young victims of the London Bridge attack, Jack and Saskia, were. They were beacons in the gloom; working on a prison rehabilitation programme to create a little light in the darkness of the lives of others. They were what the poet W.H.Auden would call ‘affirming flames’.

Darkness and light are incompatible. I am reminded of a quote in my first meditation over a year ago. It is by St Francis of Assisi: ‘All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light from one candle.’

Let us believe this in our dark times and like, Jack and Saskia, be affirming flames.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail. Just add your e mail to ‘Follow’ as it pops up!
And please do pass on the blog address to others who may be interested.
A selection of previous meditations is also available in audio form as ‘Meditations of Neiulus Aurelius’ ASMR on YouTube.
I would also value any feedback on nzolad53@gmail.com or my Facebook page or Twitter.
Many thanks
Neilus Aurelius