Everything we do is interacting with a computer, a voicemail, an email, a message that takes you around and around and then you get disconnected.  Kids have problems with reading.  Why?  Because they know that reading is not the real thing. 

Well there’s nothing more essential than healing connection and there’s nothing more absent in today’s world than healing connection.  Everything we do is interacting with a computer, a voicemail, an email, a message that takes you around and around and then you get disconnected.  Kids have problems with reading.  Why?  Because they know that reading is not the real thing.  Reading is telling you a story about something that occurs in life, that’s a real thing, but it’s not the real thing.   It’s virtual.  And you’re expected to take those words, those tiny little words that are crammed together in a small space that you’re looking at thirteen to sixteen inches away and your eyes are not designed to do that to begin with, and so immediately just holding attention near for long periods of time without taking a breather to look off in the distance is extremely stressful.  You stop breathing, you stop blinking, you hold your breath, your muscles get tight, your brain gets tight.  Everything just constricts but the main thing is the child knows it isn’t real.  So what are we yearning for, connection.  What are we yearning for, the same connection we had when the infant first comes out of their mommy and has that first connection.  Because when that connection occurs something inside says ahh, thank God, I’m home.  Whenever we connect with another real human being we are yearning for that, our life people talk about soul mates and partners. 

Our whole life is a yearning for that connection, that authentic, unconditional caring-ness.  When that is not present we want to leave, we want to run away.  We have great difficulty with that.  And that’s not to say that people won’t enjoy reading, some people love to spend their time, they are designed, if you will, more within that sphere.  But what I’m saying is the human connection is so essential.  We’d die without it.  We’d develop retarded without it.  Yet it is so lacking.  We are busy becoming successful at everything except life.  One of the things that I do in my spare time is I give my time as a mediator to help people learn the art of listening, to communicate with each other, how to have a more peaceful life than they’re having.  And I’ve always said, you know what, we have these core subjects that we give children in school which are required by the State and Federal government for them to be able to pass certain tests, standardized tests, so that we can say that we’ve done our job. 

Of course most of that you never use in your life.  What you use in your life are the things that are not taught.  I’ve always felt it would be beautiful when children entered school and before parents had children, what they should take some sort of real time course work on conflict resolution, on communicating, on listening, but in a real way that we had a chance to practice so that it became us.  It wasn’t a skill, it was who we are and who we were.  And I thought every year in school, that same course, just like reading or arithmetic, the same course would be taken to the next level and to the next level and to the next level so that when these young adults came out of school into the real world they had real skills.  They had a real skill of being able to communicate and to listen and to resolve maybe with more fluidity some of those difficult moments in life because I don’t care how awoken someone is, you are not going to avoid the pain that you have from the loss of a loved one or from something heavy dropping on your foot.  No one’s going to leave this lifetime without getting depressed, without having anxiety, without worrying.  That’s just part of it.  I don’t care what happens, there’s no one enlightened enough that they don’t experience these things.  So how to flow, if you will to use that word, with some of these continual changes in life which are our nautilus equipment.