Escape is the avoidance of feelings through diversion. The avoidance is literally the backbone of all entertainment, liquor, marijuana, and workaholics.

Social media is one of the greatest forms of escapism out there; Instagram, cruising through pictures, Facebook, reading posts.

Watching movies, television, and everything else.

Escapism, avoidance of inner awareness, is a socially accepted mechanism. It’s easy to avoid our inner selves and keep our feelings by emerging by an endless variety of pursuits out there in the world, many of which eventually become addictions as our dependency on them grows.

How many of you are addicted to Facebook? You wake up in the morning and you read other peoples’ posts.

How many times a day are you seen scrolling through Instagram.

Or Snapchat, or anything else.

Instead of connecting to another person, you prefer to remain unconscious.

When you’re out and about, the minute you feel another person’s presence in front of you, and instead of connecting with them, you’d rather escape into your own little world so immediately you look at your phone, even though all you’re looking at is the screen. It doesn’t matter, it allows you to stay unconscious.

Just take a look and observe how people flick on the television set the second they enter the room, and watch how they kind of get into a trance as they stare at the programs that are on TV. Data is being poured into them, people are terrified every single day to face themselves. They literally dread being alone.

Thus, there is this constant activity, the endless socializing, talking, texting, reading, music playing, working, traveling sightseeing, shopping, overeating, gambling, movie going, drug using cocktail party, Facebooking, social media, Instagram…

And so much more. Many of the mechanisms of escape are stressful and ineffective. Each of them requires more energy than the other as you swipe, and type, and you look, you start losing awareness around you. There’s a loss of creativity, there’s a loss of interest of others, there’s a halting of every type of spiritual growth imaginable. And eventually, it leads to mental illness because you’re actually going crazy.

We believe as a modern culture that we have all these wonderful ways to escape because it’s actually protecting us from what? What is all this escape protecting us from?

The Facebook, the tweeting, the Instagramming, the Snapchatting.

The television watching, the posting, the reading of memes, the watching videos on Youtube.

What is all this doing? It’s leaving us in an emotional isolation. We really have the inability to truly love and trust somebody else because if you think about it, the time in life when you’re about to walk by a stranger, you tend to look at your phone.

My friend Oby and I were at One on Friday night.

This girl kept looking at me and smiling.

I smiled back at her.

And yet, when it came down to walking by me, the minute she knew that she’d have to get near me and by me, she immediately looked into her phone so she could escape, because she had the inability to really connect because people are so afraid of the outcome. They’re so afraid.

From the tweeting, to the partying, to the socializing, to the drug use, to the alcohol use, to the overeating, to everything: If we actually took the time to just be, to just allow, and to just have that connection with human beings, what we’re going to experience is something far greater than we’ve ever experienced before. We’re actually going to experience love, the connection between two human beings. We’ve become love avoidant in our society today. We avoid love because we avoid intimacy because we’re so terrified of so many things. about this.