It’s blog day, the first weekend of the month and it’s spring. Even though it still feels like winter, there is comfort in seeing the daffodils bloom and the trees full of blossoms.

Trusting spring will occur, announced by plants doing the ‘right’ thing – is an emotionally stabilising phenomenon.

Following on from last months blog I’m still playing with ideas around trust. I’m thinking about trust as another oxytocin production indicator. How trust is assessed, if you like, is by our ability to be absolutely in the moment, not jumping ahead or sliding into the past. Appreciation of beauty in the moment, is one way of doing this. In effect when we do this, we are trusting ourselves to feel the warmth of love – this feeds our soul and potienally provides one of those moments of exhilaration that defines a spiritual encounter.

These moments are often found whilst we are participating in our personal rituals, or self-soothing practises, as David Schnarch would say.

When I think about this I start to ponder how completely interwoven trust and love are. Fear, I believe, is the destroyer of love and trust. As we become more fearful we seem to have a strange disconnect happening.

This is a work in progress, but somehow, despite fear putting doubt over our every day safety we seem to be able to trust strangers. Is this new or is it just a sort of rebranding?

Back to technology and it’s impact.

It feels weird that we can be so fearful that we can’t let our kids walk to school (they might get kidnapped/raped/bullied) or venture outside to enjoy a moment in the sun (might get skin cancer) and yet we can put our credit card details into the computer and send them off to who knows where; trusting that all will be well. Surprisingly, in the main it is. I find it such a wonder when something I’ve booked on the other side of the earth, works.

The question for me is how come we can trust in a way that is disconnected and yet struggle to trust our local community.

In the past, I had hypothesised that with the absence of formalised religion we lost the mechanism that regulated our ’emotional stabilising rituals’. Religion enhanced trust with the belief that ‘ god loves you and will take care of you’. Hence the resultant battles for who has the ‘right god’.

Now I’m wondering if in essence nothing has changed, we have just moved from the rituals of traditional religion to the rituals of the Internet – our new religion – whether it’s the great advisor Google, gaming or social media.  The Internet is the ‘new god’ and many of our rituals are now built around it. So in a sense we have a continuous, not as I previously thought, discontinuous process.

If this rings true for people we could define our addiction to technology as just a new religious practise. No wonder we’re all hooked. I would love your comments.

 P.S. I was interested to note when I was doing a spelling and grammar check for this piece ‘word’ wanted all the internet related terms in capitals but didn’t worry about god!