For me, writing at my Mac is flow, deep engagement, a kind of communion. It's a daily practice as grounding and important for me as meditation. Sure writing on paper works, but my computer offers me so much more: connections, mindful flow and at other times, mindless distraction and escape. It covers the spectrum.
Our devices are our personal portals into other places, providing transcendent opportunities, engagement and freedom from the limits of our physical reality for a while. No wonder we love our computers and phones as we do when they touch on accessing realms of experience previously left to spirituality - communion with the self and others in a non-physical environment. Technology opens doors to complete other worlds in which we can express ourselves, unlimited by time, distance, even appearance and other identifying human characteristics.
Technology is omnipresent in our world: Intriguing, addictive, magical, yet every day practical and increasingly unavoidable. How can we help adoring a forum like gaming where we can experience immortality and embody our most desired traits through our avatars. There are 'life-threatening' battles where we know there's no actual danger and there's always another chance to win if you're beaten. Then, as if the experience wasn't transcendent enough, there's the incomprehensible (for most of us), magnificent operating system in the background of all we do, that supports our many apps and programs - like a great unseen Deity of techno-joy and a hub of infinite wisdom.
It's not difficult to see how our relationship with technology teases spiritual longings in us, the longings for connection with the non-physical self within, with pure consciousness, with the non-physical part of others: The desire to experience ourselves as limitless, vast and immortal. While technology is bound to fall short in fulfilling those longings, it certainly contributes much to our lives. Perhaps the balance in our relationship with our tech is found in remembering it's created as enhancement to life, not meaning.
Engagement with our devices, however trance-like and 'wired-in' it feels at its most intense, has an underlying quality of 'doing mind' - a state of mind that is active, intellectually engaged, in-flow perhaps, but busy achieving. Meditation, communion, sacred union with the living allows us to shift into 'being mind', wherein the intellect can relax and give over to a higher knowing.
We live in times of awesome technology and the need for balance is no less that it has ever been - to find time for being in a life of increasingly exciting and entrancing doing. Amen.