iMonk | October 2004

Soquel, California — Thursday, October 21st

Peripheral attachments

How did we ever manage our lives, and what did we do with our time before the age of the personal computer?

I broke the hinge on my Macintosh laptop computer (a PowerBook G4) four months ago, while I was in Calcutta, and fortunately (there are no reliable Apple service centers in India) I was able to kludge the hinge on backwards so that I was able to continue using it. An inelegant solution, admittedly, but one that worked. "I'll get it fixed properly when I get back to California," I thought.

I don't know what I would have done if I had been unable to fix the hinge. I was on my way to Russia at the time, and without my laptop, how would I continue with the iMonk blog? Of course, as regular readers know, I did not get to Russia, but it was still three months before I returned to the United States...

But when I returned to Soquel, I put off taking the computer in for repairs for weeks and weeks. I always had some excuse: I'm working on my next blog; I am behind with my email correspondence; I haven't backed up all my data yet...

I realized that as long as the computer was working, I would keep making excuses; I was reluctant to get it repaired because I was reluctant to be without it for a week. What would I do without my laptop computer? How would I live?

Akinchan Swami — ha ha! Some akinchan I am! How long could I keep using the yukta vairagya excuse for all my toys? You can give up everything and still be attached to a wooden spoon, what to speak of a computer.

As we make progress in Krishna consciousness — as our consciousness progresses from the gross to the subtle — the variety and the lure of maya (illusion) also becomes more and more subtle. You can give up your job, your home, your possessions, your family, and still be attached to some little, inconsequential thing.

I took my computer, along with the warranty, to the good folks at the Apple store. They not only replaced the hinge, but the computer screen as well — and all within two days!

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Layout by iMonk — October 21st 2004.