Our Social Networking World—How Connected Are We?

• I turned on the television last week and sitting on the panel for “So You Think You Can Dance” is a guy I took dance class with from 12^thgrade through college.
• I read an article in the NY Times about a woman I know wrote a deliciously new novel.
• I dated Patricia Heaton a couple times when I was 23.
• Every night when I watch Anderson Cooper, I think about hanging out with him in Nashville while he was here on a job. And, yes, he is a great kisser. 
• The Voice of "The Little Mermaid" was my best friend in NYC
• Holly Hunter was an acquaintance at Carnegie Mellon
• I went to TPAC to see Dolly Parton’s musical and the director of the show also took that same dance class with me and Rob Marshall in high school.
• I watched the final show of “Grey’s Anatomy” last year and someone I had a huge crush on in college was a doctor.

            I turn my head daily and someone is colliding with me from my past via life, television, media, or some kind of social networking. 

            How close are we these days compared to the times even when I was 20 and we had no cell phones and computers? In my lifetime I have seen the speed up and movement together of people from all over the world in just, perhaps 15 years. What is coming from all of this?

            Nothing and no one feels disconnected from me. When the World Trade Center was being attacked, I felt it as if I were there. Michael, my partner then, had worked in a building that was adjacent to and connected to the Towers just a year before. It, too, collapsed in the attack. What coerced us to move from here to there in time so he wasn’t harmed?

            I wrote in my journal, (many of you may have read this before as I documented it once already) that I had a dream. In the dream I was trapped in a building in NYC in the stairwell. Many were rushing down the stairs. We looked out of the window and saw that a plane had crashed into the building. A loud voice said in the dream, “Leave New York!”

            Though I don’t remember that dream being the deciding factor or even talking about the dream to Michael, because I thought it was just a dream. We moved anyway. But it was two years later, when we broke up, that I reread my journals and saw that I had been given the information before it even happened. Perhaps, somewhere in my mind, I knew I had to move because of the dream. This is yet, another connection to social consciousness we all must have, if we believe in such things.

            You know that when I think of someone, or you write a note to someone, they often send back a letter that says, “I was just thinking of you.”

            How do you think that is possible without some sort of ephemeral social consciousness? I believe that the outer sources of social connection are just mirroring our inner source now. Just as a thought or an idea becomes something material, this social networking is an outer mirror of what has been for thousands of years in the spiritual world. What we have always been able to do via spirituality, suddenly we are now being able to do in the physical.

            A few years ago I thought of a dear friend, I feared had passed on, because I had lost complete touch with him after I moved from New York the first time at 26. It wasn’t like him to disconnect. Twenty years later, I put his name in a search engine, (it was a name like John Smith) and 500,000 results came up. I tried to think of any way I could make the search smaller.

            I began to add things like his middle initial and what he may be doing and where he was from originally. Soon the results were down to 1000. I looked through 25 pages of results and there was his picture on the 25^th page. He was teaching Music History at Escuola Di Musica in Italy.

            There was no contact information for him. So, I wrote a note in my best Italian to the music department explaining that I was a good friend who had lost contact with my friend. Soon, I got a letter back that said Tim would be calling me that day, and he was very excited to hear from me. We talked for three hours and ran up a $300 phone bill. That was sharing the minutes. But I didn’t care.

            I felt as if I had found a beautiful lost friend that I never imagined I would find. This is as a result of our computer world. I have had similar experiences like that in my life with other friends since Facebook has come out. What a delight to hear from people who have changed their names and find you, when you couldn’t find them, (Mr. Langdon). 

            So, just how connected are we? As Ernest Holmes says, “God in me is unified with God in all. And this one is now… connecting us to health, prosperity, love, and joy.” And God’s maybe connecting us to each other in a vast and permanent way to prepare us for something greater than we can imagine.

            I believe this to be so. So, don’t be thinking any bad thoughts about me, ya hear?