“Electronic Device Addiction” - by Hans Christian King
Spiritual Radio Show Transcription
GUIDANCE FOR YOUR LIFE Radio Show
with Hans Christian King www.HansKing.com
and Alfred Ricci www.AlfredRicci.com
Topic: Electronic Device Addiction
September 19, 2015
HANS:
Hi Everybody. Today’s topic is “Electronic Device Addiction.” I want to talk a little bit today, if I might, a little more about gadgets. We’ve been getting an awful lot of emails from people saying - a fair warning to everyone - when you’re using, I call them, the iPhone, but any subsequent product of that nature, when you’re continuing to use those on a daily basis, you begin to fracture the electromagnetic energy that you were born with. The vibrational field of the phone literally distracts you and pulls you more into your human-ness and away from the spirit of who you are.
ALFRED:
If I may translate… You get dragged into the dark side.
HANS:
Literally. I know people who simply go from one electronic device to the next, to the next, to the next, throughout their entire day. They can’t exist without having some electronic impulse into their consciousness.
ALFRED:
When does this become a problem? It becomes a problem when you substitute social life, social interaction with electronic interaction.
HANS:
I think that’s true, but I want to go to another place. I think it becomes a problem when you have to. Or you begin to feel out of sorts, if you don’t.
ALFRED:
Yes.
HANS:
Then you have like, people who drink too much... it does become a dependency. I have a client that came to my office the other day, everybody, and I’ve known her for a very long time and she gotten hooked on her iPhone, and every five minutes she pulled her iPhone out of her purse and looked to see if she got a message. And I finally had to stop the appointment and say, “Judy, honey, you’re distracting me.” She said, “I know, but I think I heard a vibration from the phone. It could be important.” Folks, how did we live when we actually had pay phones? The other day Alfred and I were actually somewhere...
ALFRED:
...at the airport.
HANS:
At the airport, where there was a bank of pay phones on the wall and we both looked at the pay phones and he looked at me and I looked at him and we went, "Wow!"
ALFRED:
So what is the issue with that spiritually speaking, where is the lesson?
HANS:
The lesson is it’s another addiction to keep you away from who you actually are.
ALFRED:
Okay, so that’s the first lesson.
HANS:
So it’s meant to distract you. Everything on television, everything on the radio, now on your computer, now at the gas station. I went to the gas station the other day to fill up my car and it wouldn’t give me the gas until I read an ad in the little box on the screen, and I had to answer the ad "yes or no" before it would give me the gas - which I’d already paid for.
ALFRED:
You all know what we think of media, mass media in general.
HANS:
And so we’re being led, like a bunch of lemmings, into using these gadgets that record our every move. We now know when people wake up, when they go to bed, what market they shop at, what bank they go to, and I noticed there has been a little bit of rebellion Alfred, from some the younger people now who are getting rid of their iPhones and who are coming off the Internet.
ALFRED:
Well that’s good actually, because the second lesson that we want to introduce to you is being in the now... is those phones really say something that could change my life, a message, something could come to me, which is why you’re constantly checking it, constantly using the Internet to search for something, instead of being in the moment. Instead of being social, instead of interacting with the person who’s in front of you, instead of paying full attention to where you are, who you’re with and what you’re doing. Instead, you’re looking to the other to the other side of the fence to see if the grass greener, did the green grass come in my home.
HANS:
While I was away from my phone did my life change and I don’t know it? Now back in my day folks, there was something called a pay phone, and if you needed to phone home you put a dime in and you dialed your house to see if everything was okay. In my day, we gathered around the TV to watch a particular program and then everybody got to comment on the program afterwards. It sounds like I’m reacting like an old guy.
ALFRED:
No, no, it’s a huge thing, especially with families. That’s one of the things my friend Dan pointed out, is that every single time he goes out in Los Angeles and sees a family, each member of the family pulls out their phone and doesn’t talk to one another. And Hans and I have seen this, also. It’s not just that we are worried about you being in the now, losing social skills, we’re also worried about family interaction... is because parents think an iPhone or an iPad is a good babysitter, but what are they giving up? They are giving up interaction with each other, communicating with each other, sharing with each other.
HANS:
The other night we went to this little barbeque place, and there was a very nice young couple who had two little daughters, beautiful children. And the minute they sat down, before they ordered, they said, “Let’s see Grandma. Let’s see if she’s sent a message. Let’s go see where were going to go tomorrow.” And they were indoctrinating their children, both the husband and the wife, into how important the cell phone really was.
Folks what we are losing is our ability to talk to each other. It’s so important. We now don’t sit down and write a card. Alfred calls it snail mail. I call it the polite way and the proper way to send notices. We used to send letters, we used to send cards, birthday cards. Now everything is quick, simple - here pay for it on the Internet, boom off it goes, you no longer have any responsibility. I want all of you to look at that and see if maybe you’ve become guilty of some of that.
ALFRED:
So just be aware of your personal energy. If you personal energy is frantic, scattered, fractured and you continue to go down the path of looking on the Internet, looking on your phone for whatever it is, but if this frantic energy doesn’t go away, then considering where you’re looking for what you need, it’s probably the wrong place. Probably less of your cell phone would be better to calm you down, to straighten out your energy. More social interaction, family interaction, personal socialization.
HANS:
You know I even know a client who, when they go to watch a movie with their family, actually has an iPad that they play a game on at the very same time they’re supposed to be watching a movie and think nothing of it. What I’m saying to everyone is - why not try to find a wonderful calm place in your life, where you take the cell phones, the iPads, any of the electronic devices, turn them off and put them in a drawer? I can hear everyone right now saying, “Oh what if somebody calls?” Well, what if? We survived without these devices for thousands of years. Maybe it’s time to sit down with your partner, your family, your friends, just to be there. The new thing I saw recently is that what is considered to be proper etiquette now is when someone comes into your house, they have to hand you their cellphone and turn it off and it’s put in the drawer by the front door and when you leave you’re given it back. Alfred, I think that’s a wonderful idea, don’t you?
ALFRED:
Creating boundaries. I think is a good lesson to consider is - what are your boundaries for your cell phone, for your gadgets? For example, I won’t put my work email on my iPhone. I won’t. I don’t care. You have to draw some boundaries when you are visiting people. Do you put your phone off? Do you take it off? Do you focus on the person that you’re focusing on - do you have down time? Or are you succumbing to the pressures of work or the pressures of twitter.
HANS:
You know, Alfred, you and I travel, and have you noticed that the minute the plane lands, the first thing everybody does is race for their iPhone? Turn their phones on?
ALFRED:
So what we’re trying to tell you in this lesson is: look at creating boundaries. This goes back to one of our basic basic lessons that we’ve been talking about is create space for nothing.
HANS:
Yes. It’s one of the first things I taught you.
ALFRED:
That was a hard lesson. Oh, my God.
HANS:
He fought me on that one. He said, “What do you mean nothing?” He had been taught that if you had nothing in your mind you were failing.
ALFRED:
There was something you could be doing.
HANS:
Something you could be doing.
ALFRED:
What does that sound like? Human-ness!
HANS:
This morning I went outside and I sat on a chair and I looked at the sunrise, and there were all these little birds around. We had gotten some bread and I was feeding these little birds and they were all coming up on the table. I was just talking to these birds and I realized that in that moment there was no place on earth that I would rather be. I was where I wanted to be and doing exactly what I wanted to do. How many of you can say that anymore? I shut my cellphone off. I don’t want to hear it. I’m not interested in who wants to get a hold of me at that moment because that moment belongs to me and my God and those birds. So think about what you’re doing, folks, and try to free yourself up a little bit from the compulsive behavior that causes you to have to consume your mind with all this technology.
ALFRED:
And that’s the spiritual path. It’s when you are not looking, you will find what you are looking for.
HANS:
Always.
ALFRED:
When you are looking, you are actively engaging your human-ness which separates you from that which you are looking for.
HANS:
You know what’s interesting, you had a heck of a time learning that from me and now you are teaching it.
ALFRED:
And now the joke is, in order to reach higher states of consciousness you need to separate from that which separates you. That’s part of my automatic writing class, again, to separate from that which separates you. In this lesson we’re telling you to separate from your gadget in order to create space for Spirit to enter your life. To be in nature, to be with other human beings, to socialize, to have family and friends.
HANS:
Exactly. You know, Alfred, I talked to one of our client friends today and he said to me, “I don’t know what I would do without my iPhone,” and I heard Spirit say, “ And that child, is your problem.”
ALFRED:
Exactly. That is the problem, because it is an addiction. If you’re looking for a high, there’s two ways. You can get your high by being addicted to substances, items, iPhones, gadgets, alcohol, whatever it is you’re addicted to.
HANS:
Anything that distracts you.
ALFRED:
To get your high and that is a human approach. Or you can get your high by letting go and surrendering and forming your relationship with that which is always around you. You can’t form that relationship if you have an addictive behavior to something, whatever that is, not just a substance but even an electronic device.
HANS:
You know Alfred, one of my long time clients has three boys and he couldn’t get them off all the gadgets at school and all these things and the mother used to say, “Well I can’t fight them, I might as well join them.” He hauled everybody down to Costa Rica, to a town called Ramon, and they don’t have any cellphones, they don’t have internet. The kids have learned to make friends and their whole lives have changed.
ALFRED:
So if you’re a parent and you’re looking for spiritual ways to raise your kids, it’s to teach them you may find what you’re looking for by disconnecting.
HANS:
So in other words, it goes back to the old teaching - less is more. Basically.
ALFRED:
Yes.
HANS:
The less occupied your mind is with objects, the more spiritual truth and value you’ll get.
I think we’ll go ahead and conclude the lesson for today.
September 19, 2015
HANS:
Hi Everybody. Today’s topic is “Electronic Device Addiction.” I want to talk a little bit today, if I might, a little more about gadgets. We’ve been getting an awful lot of emails from people saying - a fair warning to everyone - when you’re using, I call them, the iPhone, but any subsequent product of that nature, when you’re continuing to use those on a daily basis, you begin to fracture the electromagnetic energy that you were born with. The vibrational field of the phone literally distracts you and pulls you more into your human-ness and away from the spirit of who you are.
ALFRED:
If I may translate… You get dragged into the dark side.
HANS:
Literally. I know people who simply go from one electronic device to the next, to the next, to the next, throughout their entire day. They can’t exist without having some electronic impulse into their consciousness.
ALFRED:
When does this become a problem? It becomes a problem when you substitute social life, social interaction with electronic interaction.
HANS:
I think that’s true, but I want to go to another place. I think it becomes a problem when you have to. Or you begin to feel out of sorts, if you don’t.
ALFRED:
Yes.
HANS:
Then you have like, people who drink too much... it does become a dependency. I have a client that came to my office the other day, everybody, and I’ve known her for a very long time and she gotten hooked on her iPhone, and every five minutes she pulled her iPhone out of her purse and looked to see if she got a message. And I finally had to stop the appointment and say, “Judy, honey, you’re distracting me.” She said, “I know, but I think I heard a vibration from the phone. It could be important.” Folks, how did we live when we actually had pay phones? The other day Alfred and I were actually somewhere...
ALFRED:
...at the airport.
HANS:
At the airport, where there was a bank of pay phones on the wall and we both looked at the pay phones and he looked at me and I looked at him and we went, "Wow!"
ALFRED:
So what is the issue with that spiritually speaking, where is the lesson?
HANS:
The lesson is it’s another addiction to keep you away from who you actually are.
ALFRED:
Okay, so that’s the first lesson.
HANS:
So it’s meant to distract you. Everything on television, everything on the radio, now on your computer, now at the gas station. I went to the gas station the other day to fill up my car and it wouldn’t give me the gas until I read an ad in the little box on the screen, and I had to answer the ad "yes or no" before it would give me the gas - which I’d already paid for.
ALFRED:
You all know what we think of media, mass media in general.
HANS:
And so we’re being led, like a bunch of lemmings, into using these gadgets that record our every move. We now know when people wake up, when they go to bed, what market they shop at, what bank they go to, and I noticed there has been a little bit of rebellion Alfred, from some the younger people now who are getting rid of their iPhones and who are coming off the Internet.
ALFRED:
Well that’s good actually, because the second lesson that we want to introduce to you is being in the now... is those phones really say something that could change my life, a message, something could come to me, which is why you’re constantly checking it, constantly using the Internet to search for something, instead of being in the moment. Instead of being social, instead of interacting with the person who’s in front of you, instead of paying full attention to where you are, who you’re with and what you’re doing. Instead, you’re looking to the other to the other side of the fence to see if the grass greener, did the green grass come in my home.
HANS:
While I was away from my phone did my life change and I don’t know it? Now back in my day folks, there was something called a pay phone, and if you needed to phone home you put a dime in and you dialed your house to see if everything was okay. In my day, we gathered around the TV to watch a particular program and then everybody got to comment on the program afterwards. It sounds like I’m reacting like an old guy.
ALFRED:
No, no, it’s a huge thing, especially with families. That’s one of the things my friend Dan pointed out, is that every single time he goes out in Los Angeles and sees a family, each member of the family pulls out their phone and doesn’t talk to one another. And Hans and I have seen this, also. It’s not just that we are worried about you being in the now, losing social skills, we’re also worried about family interaction... is because parents think an iPhone or an iPad is a good babysitter, but what are they giving up? They are giving up interaction with each other, communicating with each other, sharing with each other.
HANS:
The other night we went to this little barbeque place, and there was a very nice young couple who had two little daughters, beautiful children. And the minute they sat down, before they ordered, they said, “Let’s see Grandma. Let’s see if she’s sent a message. Let’s go see where were going to go tomorrow.” And they were indoctrinating their children, both the husband and the wife, into how important the cell phone really was.
Folks what we are losing is our ability to talk to each other. It’s so important. We now don’t sit down and write a card. Alfred calls it snail mail. I call it the polite way and the proper way to send notices. We used to send letters, we used to send cards, birthday cards. Now everything is quick, simple - here pay for it on the Internet, boom off it goes, you no longer have any responsibility. I want all of you to look at that and see if maybe you’ve become guilty of some of that.
ALFRED:
So just be aware of your personal energy. If you personal energy is frantic, scattered, fractured and you continue to go down the path of looking on the Internet, looking on your phone for whatever it is, but if this frantic energy doesn’t go away, then considering where you’re looking for what you need, it’s probably the wrong place. Probably less of your cell phone would be better to calm you down, to straighten out your energy. More social interaction, family interaction, personal socialization.
HANS:
You know I even know a client who, when they go to watch a movie with their family, actually has an iPad that they play a game on at the very same time they’re supposed to be watching a movie and think nothing of it. What I’m saying to everyone is - why not try to find a wonderful calm place in your life, where you take the cell phones, the iPads, any of the electronic devices, turn them off and put them in a drawer? I can hear everyone right now saying, “Oh what if somebody calls?” Well, what if? We survived without these devices for thousands of years. Maybe it’s time to sit down with your partner, your family, your friends, just to be there. The new thing I saw recently is that what is considered to be proper etiquette now is when someone comes into your house, they have to hand you their cellphone and turn it off and it’s put in the drawer by the front door and when you leave you’re given it back. Alfred, I think that’s a wonderful idea, don’t you?
ALFRED:
Creating boundaries. I think is a good lesson to consider is - what are your boundaries for your cell phone, for your gadgets? For example, I won’t put my work email on my iPhone. I won’t. I don’t care. You have to draw some boundaries when you are visiting people. Do you put your phone off? Do you take it off? Do you focus on the person that you’re focusing on - do you have down time? Or are you succumbing to the pressures of work or the pressures of twitter.
HANS:
You know, Alfred, you and I travel, and have you noticed that the minute the plane lands, the first thing everybody does is race for their iPhone? Turn their phones on?
ALFRED:
So what we’re trying to tell you in this lesson is: look at creating boundaries. This goes back to one of our basic basic lessons that we’ve been talking about is create space for nothing.
HANS:
Yes. It’s one of the first things I taught you.
ALFRED:
That was a hard lesson. Oh, my God.
HANS:
He fought me on that one. He said, “What do you mean nothing?” He had been taught that if you had nothing in your mind you were failing.
ALFRED:
There was something you could be doing.
HANS:
Something you could be doing.
ALFRED:
What does that sound like? Human-ness!
HANS:
This morning I went outside and I sat on a chair and I looked at the sunrise, and there were all these little birds around. We had gotten some bread and I was feeding these little birds and they were all coming up on the table. I was just talking to these birds and I realized that in that moment there was no place on earth that I would rather be. I was where I wanted to be and doing exactly what I wanted to do. How many of you can say that anymore? I shut my cellphone off. I don’t want to hear it. I’m not interested in who wants to get a hold of me at that moment because that moment belongs to me and my God and those birds. So think about what you’re doing, folks, and try to free yourself up a little bit from the compulsive behavior that causes you to have to consume your mind with all this technology.
ALFRED:
And that’s the spiritual path. It’s when you are not looking, you will find what you are looking for.
HANS:
Always.
ALFRED:
When you are looking, you are actively engaging your human-ness which separates you from that which you are looking for.
HANS:
You know what’s interesting, you had a heck of a time learning that from me and now you are teaching it.
ALFRED:
And now the joke is, in order to reach higher states of consciousness you need to separate from that which separates you. That’s part of my automatic writing class, again, to separate from that which separates you. In this lesson we’re telling you to separate from your gadget in order to create space for Spirit to enter your life. To be in nature, to be with other human beings, to socialize, to have family and friends.
HANS:
Exactly. You know, Alfred, I talked to one of our client friends today and he said to me, “I don’t know what I would do without my iPhone,” and I heard Spirit say, “ And that child, is your problem.”
ALFRED:
Exactly. That is the problem, because it is an addiction. If you’re looking for a high, there’s two ways. You can get your high by being addicted to substances, items, iPhones, gadgets, alcohol, whatever it is you’re addicted to.
HANS:
Anything that distracts you.
ALFRED:
To get your high and that is a human approach. Or you can get your high by letting go and surrendering and forming your relationship with that which is always around you. You can’t form that relationship if you have an addictive behavior to something, whatever that is, not just a substance but even an electronic device.
HANS:
You know Alfred, one of my long time clients has three boys and he couldn’t get them off all the gadgets at school and all these things and the mother used to say, “Well I can’t fight them, I might as well join them.” He hauled everybody down to Costa Rica, to a town called Ramon, and they don’t have any cellphones, they don’t have internet. The kids have learned to make friends and their whole lives have changed.
ALFRED:
So if you’re a parent and you’re looking for spiritual ways to raise your kids, it’s to teach them you may find what you’re looking for by disconnecting.
HANS:
So in other words, it goes back to the old teaching - less is more. Basically.
ALFRED:
Yes.
HANS:
The less occupied your mind is with objects, the more spiritual truth and value you’ll get.
I think we’ll go ahead and conclude the lesson for today.
