What is wrong with a knife?
If that knife was used for murdering someone, what is the fault of this knife?
For example, phones, to me, this digital platform is a blessing as well as a curse.
There was a time in my village, prior to the 1980s, where there were no TVs.
What used to happen then?
People in the evening will come together, have some bhajan kirtan, they will
sing, they will have drama, they will have all sorts of things together.
They will cook together sometimes, they will eat together sometimes.
Now that has become a dream.
Even within a house, brother is not able to see brother, because they are so busy.
Not only...
in each bedroom, they will have their own TV, children will demand
their own TV, their own privacy.
You know today, children are more in danger in their own house than on the
street; surfing takes them to uncharted, dangerous territories they don’t know.
It might feel very enjoyable in the beginning, but it catches them, see,
and now what happens to a child’s brain?
If you see a child’s brain under EEG while watching TV or cartoons, or these
youngsters surfing, playing games - the frontal part of the brain doesn’t
react much, and this is the part of the brain which we utilize in thinking.
Thinking is now relegated, it doesn’t work.
So once you are playing this Solitaire game or some other game - what happens there?
It goes on, your mind is not being utilized there.
You are moving with the characters of the cartoons, or characters in the movie.
I challenge many youngsters today, that you look at the Google
news, you go through them...
and I asked them what was the first news you read.
No one can
tell me.
They don’t even understand the dangers of it because they don’t want to know it, you see.
What happened?
I tell you one joke, you know one person was drinking very heavily, and
one newspaper came up with the, like you guys, single page, the side effects
and the dangers of drinking alcohol.
The wife was very happy.
“At least now my husband will read this page and will benefit from it.” The husband
quickly glances through it, and then assures his wife, “Kal se bandh kar denge;
I will stop it from tomorrow.” And what he does, he stops the newspaper, “I don’t
want this newspaper to come to my house”.
That is what we are doing, see.
They know the side effects of digital media, they can’t control themselves.
“I will not visit such sites which tells me that digital platform is bad”.
I am not saying the digital platform is bad.
Moderate use for your knowledge, for your information, is good
enough, more than that is abuse.
You know Greeks, many people don’t understand how and why they disappeared
from this planet - great Greek civilization.
There was a fancier fashion for eating in shiny stuff, shiny vessels.
Those days the shiny vessels were coated with lead, and it is this lead
poisoning that destroyed the whole population, a very simple thing.
Today’s youth will pay the big price.
Why blame youth?
Everybody, whoever is abusing this media...
phones, I mean it has become your kidney kind of an organ or a lung kind of an
organ without which you cannot live.
Even when you are going to sleep, they put it under the pillow.
What for?
See, I was visiting one of our satsanghis [meditation practitioners].
He has a very hi-fi scientific lab, he was interested in studying my blood sample
and, you know, trying to find out what they can do and intervene, and I said,
“Nothing is wrong with me”, but they said, “No, we want to study your blood pattern”.
I said, '' Okay, let us”, and they put me through various tests
which are not normal these days.
There is some Russian technologies involved in it and very, very high and, I say, it’s
a futuristic thing, and then one small thing they were doing which is common
to take a blood sample and study the red blood cells, how they colonize on a slide.
So they put this microscope over the slide, which was an electronic microscope, and
it was connected to the computer screen.
I could see the movements of these red blood cells; it formed colonies.
And, suppose, if you had sickle cell anemia, it will form a particular type of colony.
If you had gout, it will form another type of colony; if you had cancer,
it will form another colony; if you had an asthmatic condition….
because these RBCs behave differently under different disease states.
Then my curiosity arose, and I asked that person, “How would WBC behave?”
So he showed me WBC [white blood cells] because it was already 10-15 minutes
into this watching or maybe even more.
They became standstill, they were not moving on the slide.
So he said, “They are not moving, they are just static at the moment.”
He said, “Why don’t you bring the phone?
Turn on your phone and keep it near the slide”.
You know, they woke up from their static sleepy state, they
started moving frantically.
Now why….
what conveyed this message to these white blood cells to wake up?
The danger they perceived, right, once they felt threatened, they
started moving to capture the danger, because WBC’s job is to capture the
danger and get it out of the system.
So I noticed that they woke up from nowhere.
Suppose this danger continues and they are not able to pick that physical
danger they usually pick, this is radiation, how are they going to pick the
radiation and move it out of the system?
So they will order more and more WBCs to be manufactured, and
one day you will get leukemia.
Leukemia is where there is uncontrolled WBCs proliferation
and many diseases like that, see.
One of my friends, you know, he uses his earphones, he had the phone in his pocket and
since he was an NRI, they have long meetings - hour, two-hour-long meetings and he walks
around this ashram, phone in his pocket.
Do you know what happened after an hour-long conversation?
On his thigh, he had a red patch, an iPhone patch like this, a rectangle one see.
I say, “You still don’t want to abandon this phone, why do you
want to keep it on your body?
Or keep a bag, put the phone in the bag, and have the headphones.” Doesn’t matter...
at least reduced to some extent.
Use it
only when you must, otherwise why you are playing around with it?
Very dangerous, and especially people who keep phones, you know, directly
attached to the body here or to the heart.
It is going to affect your heart for sure.
And more and more cases of reproductive aberrations,
reproductive diseases are there today.
More and more men with lesser and lesser sperm or weaker
sperms are the direct results.
One is a laptop, you keep it on your lap, those radiations affect your
testicles; similarly, women also.
So it has a far-reaching impact on our health.
Use it, of course, but use it wisely.
So this mechanization is not bad, as long as you know when to
use it and when not to use it.