To paraphrase author Pete Egoscue, technology can open up window. However, if we mistake what we see (through that window) as the whole picture, we can end up treating effects, rather than causes.
Perhaps we would have wowed our ancestors with something like an X-ray. However, we risk placing our energy into treating the bone, while ignoring the musculoskeletal imbalances that led to the problem (brought by the same way of modern way of life that produced the x-ray.)
We approach systems, as though they were machines, made of parts. We remove gall bladders and remove and replace other parts too (from a body that is full of complex, intricate relationships.)
That said, the origin of most problems can be simple, provided we zoom out and widen our view. We then ask what radical drifts have been made... from good posture and muscular balance... from diet... from our personal and social support networks. We ask what has removed us from our, baseline, energetic, system as a whole.
Our way of life tends to be misaligned with proper functioning. To treat the symptoms that follow, we latch on to the "little old lady who swallowed a spider" method of treating disease. One day, a person wakes up with a t-rex in their belly, and realizes they were better off not eating the spider.
The same obviously applies to the earth, as a working system. A youth crew I worked with (in partnership with a local watershed council) was tasked with carrying dead salmon carcasses into the woods. We placed them upstream... where the salmon runs began.
Why? Because a strong relationship had been established between the trees and the fish. This relationship had been disrupted by the damming of salmon runs. Nutrients, provided by salmon, returning home to die in the stream, had been removed, altering the local habit/ecology. Ideally, this relationship would have be restored by removal of the dams.
How strange and otherworldly it was to artificially (attempt to) remedy the situation, carrying fish (that no doubt died by strange means,) provided by the Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Modern technology can be mistaken as broader intelligence. In other words, you can build an elaborate castle--but what if that castle is built without sound structural support & the whole thing is, essentially, standing on quicksand?
We make elaborate moves, while ignoring the broader game... a finely choreographed dance on thin ice. We tinker around with a very intricate and intelligent system that, often, we simply don't understand.
We then mistake our amazing ability, to open a little window into it, as, not only as a complete understanding of it--but as a right to modify it. Can we even effectively (and accurately) peer into that window (with our limited field/spectrum of vision?)
Just because we can reach into the quantum world, doesn't mean we should set off a bomb, and just because we can genetically modify foods (to withstand more toxic pesticides,) doesn't mean we should. Just because we can move an overloaded and compromised body part doesn't mean we should.
We may find ourselves so busy fighting disease that we forget to regard dis-ease as a message (from our out of balanced systems, personal and collective.) Likewise, when we remove aspects of the whole, we sometimes deaden our own senses with the resulting concentrates... sugar, drugs, information, and intense amounts of time in unhealthy, foreign postures.
We get closer and closer in to our fixation... but further from the whole system, which often is sending signals (through pain and other indicators) that we should pay attention to... rather than nullify... and, therefore, we delve further into our imbalances.
Sadly, all of the pink dye, produced, in efforts to raise breast cancer, may have effects itself. I'm also reminded of high school fund raisers... girl scout cookies with hydrogenated oils. We help one cause and hurt another.
This isn't to be critical, though I suppose it is. It makes sense to, as they say, go upstream to see what's going on, rather than simply pulling dead bodies out of the river.
That said, if we have a broader, holistic understanding of working systems, or at least recognize (and respect) the potential interrelationships therein, we can more carefully apply technology... not as something superior, but as something (shrunk down to size) to cautiously aid that broader, intelligent system... which often only needs our help, because we messed with it in the first place.
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