#Ted talks the art of stillness how to#
#Ted talks the art of stillness software#

Many in Silicon Valley observe an вЂњInternet SabbathвЂќ every week, during which they turn off most of their devices from, say, Friday night to Monday morning, if only to regather the sense of proportion and direction theyвЂ™ll need for when they go back online. But I was struck by how often Gopi, the founder of the Yogler program, spoke of how easy it was, day or night, to go into a conference room and close his eyes. Every company has its own chief evangelists, eager to share their illuminations.

#Ted talks the art of stillness software#

But what impressed me even more were the two people who greeted me as I waited for my digital ID: the Chief Evangelist for Google+, as his business card would have it, a bright-eyed, visibly spirited young soul from India who was setting up a вЂњYoglerвЂќ program whereby the many Googlers who practice yoga could actually be trained to teach it and the seasoned software engineer beside him who ran a celebrated and popular seven-week program called вЂњSearch Inside Yourself,вЂќ whose curriculum had shown more than a thousand Googlers the quantifiable, scientific evidence that meditation could lead not just to clearer thinking and better health but to emotional intelligence.ДЄ self-selecting pair, no doubt these were the kind of guys who wanted to hear about the Dalai Lama. The very people, in short, who have worked to speed up the world are the same ones most sensitive to the virtue of slowing down. One day I visited GoogleвЂ™s headquarters to give a talk on the Dalai Lama book IвЂ™d completed and, like most visitors, was much impressed by the trampolines, the indoor tree houses, and the workers at the time enjoying a fifth of their working hours free, letting their minds wander off leash to where inspiration might be hiding.As I travel the world, one of the greatest surprises I have encountered has been that the people who seem wisest about the necessity of placing limits on the newest technologies are, often, precisely the ones who helped develop those technologies, which have bulldozed over so many of the limits of old.

ItвЂ™s only by stepping farther back and standing still that we can begin to see what that canvas (which is our life) really means, and to take in the larger picture. ItвЂ™s easy to feel as if weвЂ™re standing two inches away from a huge canvas thatвЂ™s noisy and crowded and changing with every microsecond. Put another way, the ability to gather information, which used to be so crucial, is now far less important than the ability to sift through it.

#Ted talks the art of stillness how to#

The one thing technology doesnвЂ™t provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes - which means weвЂ™re never caught up with our lives.ДЄnd the more facts come streaming in on us, the less time we have to process any one of them. Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Anyone reading it will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. The amount of data humanity will collect while youвЂ™re reading The Art of Stillness is five times greater than the amount that exists in the entire Library of Congress.

Yet the days of Pascal and even Admiral Byrd seem positively tranquil by todayвЂ™s standards. Byrd spent nearly five months alone in a shack in the Antarctic, in temperatures that sank to 70 degrees below zero, he emerged convinced that вЂњHalf the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.вЂќ Or, as they sometimes say around Kyoto, вЂњDonвЂ™t just do something. вЂњAll the unhappiness of men,вЂќ the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously noted, вЂњarises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.вЂќ After Admiral Richard E. The idea of going nowhere is as universal as the law of gravity thatвЂ™s why wise souls from every tradition have spoken of it. Pico Iyer makes the case, in this meditative excerpt from his new TED Book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere One seductive solution: A secular sabbath. As technology accelerates our lives, many of us feel an urgent need to slow down.