Imagine for a moment you are a member of a small band of Native people, quietly camped at the base of some hills alongside a stream. Before you to the east lies a long valley, with hills rising from its farthers end. One morning as you are out from the camp some three miles down the valley you notice two black specks over the hills to the East. As you continue your work, you occasionally watch the specks until you can make out that they are a pair of golden eagles, flying in lazy loops but steadily progressing your direction. You watch for a few minutes more, and the Eagles come closer and closer. You turn and begin to run, you run as fast as you can back to camp as a deep fear takes hold of your veins, turning them to ice and sending the cold tracing fingers of terror racing along your spine and across your shoulders.
Now, back to being your modern self, do you know why you were afraid when you saw the eagles? Do you know why you ran? Think about it.

You ran because the eagles were following something, very possibly a band of men from another tribe, or of soldiers, making for your camp for thievery, rape, murder or all of the above.
If you were you, as you are today, would you recognize such a sign? Would it mean anything to you, would you ignore it and be killed where you stood, or would you even notice the eagles to begin with?

This, the internet, worldwideweb, information-super-highway, whatever you want to call it, is the greatest resource for information that has ever been available in the history of our world. A hundred thousand times greater than the Library of Alexandria, more collected knowledge and learning than the Medici family could have ever hoped to command, that is the scope of the resource that is literally at your fingertips right now.
And it all means nothing if you are so disconnected from the really real world. Not the world on CNN.com, or news.google.com, not the world on CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, or CSPAN... not murder, drug dealers, politics or the latest SWAT standoff, but the real world. The world that is in the dirt and trees, the plants and animals, the earth upon which all this supposed grandeur and bullshit is built, and the things that happen on its surface.
We are like mold growing on the top of gelatin in a petri dish, thousands upon millions of teeming little bacteria, of all different shapes and sizes, tending to our rat-killing and doing what is natural to us... except for introduced variables.
Those introduced variables, like the internet, change how we do things and change the very things we do. Does this make them better? Not necessarily.
This awesome resource is nothing if you do not have the simple understanding to actually apply the things you can learn here. To understand anything, you must start at the mudball and work up. You cant ever really know anything until you do.
Euro-Western society has the nasty habit of regarding everything in a Dualistic manner. That is to say "we" look at everything as individual pieces, each one at least mostly free of the other, and not dependent on anything else with an implied hierarchy to things; Human beings are the single dominant species, we are our own unique critters, everything else is beneath us and ours for the taming, taking and killing. The land and the trees are a resource to be mined, turned into money or fuel, and used to further our desires and increase our creature comforts to ever-greater levels. Etc. Etc. Etc. There is God, there is Man, there is everything else God gave to man to do with as he wishes, and it can all be destroyed, raped or ignored one thing at a time, without any damage to the rest of it. This is, simply put, wrong.
You have to have a Monistic approach, because everything is truly part of the whole. Every thing, literally, is an interconnected, related, part of everything else. How can you successfully understand your fellow man, if such simple things as the movements of leaves in the wind are alien to you. How can you do anything, be anything, if you are completely disconnected from all that is the root and base of life... the dirt under your feet, the other presences on this mudball, the things that live, hunt, kill, die, decay and nourish everything else, including you.
You cannot. You can pretend to, you can live in your cubicle, in your car, in your shittily constructed (but every so elegant and expensive) home, and stare into a little blue screen all day... you can read everything ever written about a topic of interest, and talk about it like the worlds foremost expert - but it will all be a lie. And I know, I know, so many people live like this... they live until they die. However they live poorly. No amount of money, no amount of possessions, no amount of second-hand information, no amount of lying will ever replace or be more valuable than truly knowing one thing.
If you can come to truly know, for yourself from your own experiences through your own eyes and hands, one single thing, you will become far richer than most of the people on a daily basis.
This little box, a house full of books, a flickering television screen... none of those things will bring you to truly knowing anything.
How can you learn from others knowledge and teachings if you cant make the information a part of yourself? You cannot. If you dont know what the wind feels like on your skin, how can you understand a written description of it? You cannot. How can you know any god if your only exposure is through the words of another, through a book, inside a building built by others? You cannot.
If you cant grasp the simpler truths of life, you'll never grasp anything of importance.
One of my favorite quotes is from the book Shibumi, by Trevanian: "One must pass through knowledge, and arrive at simplicity". Well, one can start there too. Pay attention to the simplicity, become knowing of it, and come into knowledge... its a circle, one into another into one again. You can only understand, if you truly come to know it.

Or you can spend the rest of your life desperately clinging to the 9-to-5, the SUV and the minivan, the house in the suburbs, a good private school for the kids and a robust college fund, even if those things are merely dreams. When you are old and waiting to die, you will look back at your life and realize the horrible job, the illusions and delusions of "doing well", were all lies and that in the end you truly know nothing about nothing.
I find this idea horrible, more horrifying than any hell I can imagine. That will not be me.