machines + society
Mako Shen | Feb 1, 2020
Before the essay, here are the recall questions from last month:
What are the components of conscious experience?
What is an ontology and why does it matter?
The Internet is Facilitating an Intense New Wave of Buddhist Spirituality
Despite the notable drift of Buddhism in the West, there is a robust community of dedicated meditators that has been greatly facilitated by the Internet.
In North America, the earliest visible focus on Buddhism came from 19th Century writers like Emerson, who “regarded Hinduism and Buddhism as anticipations of an ideal Transcendentalism”, and Thoreau, who translated the Lotus sutra into French. Yet it was only after World War II, following the disenchantment of the beatniks and hippies, that Buddhism became mainstream.
From Wikipedia:
Those Westerners disaffected with the materialistic values of consumer culture and traditional Christianity (such as the beat generation and later the hippies), as well as those interested a more sober altered state of consciousness or psychedelic experience, were drawn to eastern religions like Buddhism during this period (this is known as the "Zen Boom"). Influential literary figures include the American writers Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity) and Gary Snyder as well as the British writer Alan Watts (The Way of Zen).
As with most movements that gain critical mass, Buddhism in the West became commodified, packaged, and profitable. ‘Mindfulness meditation’ became an industry, ushered into the mainstream by seemingly well-intentioned individuals like Alan Watts and Tara Brach. Over the last couple decades, we started to hear yoga moms talk about reading Mindful Parenting, Mindful Eating, and The Mindful Brain. At work, business consultants started hawking mindfulness training to improve employee productivity.
These practices probably do reduce a lot of stress, and create more productive employees as a result. But they are far from what Siddhartha Gautama had envisioned when he delivered what became the Sattipatthana Sutta. The point of meditation, as articulated in the sutta, is to cultivate enough stable attention to see through the mental projections that cause us to suffer unnecessarily. From this angle, the vast majority of contemporary mindfulness practice is misconstrued; books like Stress Less, Accomplish More: Meditation for Extraordinary Performance are using the techniques of meditation and mindfulness towards a goal that is truly the opposite of what the Siddhartha had originally intended.
My worry with the mindfulness coaches flying to teach business executives meditation at the World Economic Forum, or Oprah Winfrey endorsing mindfulness meditation, is not about the corruption of Buddhism— the Buddha famously instructed his followers to use whatever means are most useful for their ends— but rather that people never experience the potential insights and subsequent benefits from spiritual progress. The analyst at Goldman Sachs can hardly realize the cycle of destructive longing when she is meditating for ten minutes between meetings with clients. Meditation, used in the wrong way, can actively hinder progress.
(Note: when I say ‘spiritual progress’, I am mostly referring to the fairly concrete map of spiritual progress with distinct stages that is outlined in a number of different Therevada texts.)
Yet I’m feeling increasingly reassured: there is a strong and growing community of determined practitioners distributed across the internet.
There is the subreddit r/streamentry, with a small but regular discussion on questions such as the difficulties around the Fruition and Cessation stages in the progress of spiritual insight. The discussion is often well-informed and highly encouraging. The Dharma Overground, however ugly its UI, is an adjacent forum filled with thousands of posts ranging from detailed discussion of Bipolar Disorder and the cycles of insight to toxic evangalism.
There has also been the proliferation of high quality (often free) ebooks on practical spiritual practice. Daniel Ingram, the meditator and medical practitioner who began The Dharma Overground, freely released a book on a ‘hardcore dharma’ path to insight. Another fellow by the name of Kenneth Folk has a comparable book viewable through hyperlinks on his website. Perhaps the most innovative is Mark Lippman’s ‘meditation protocol’, which is hosted entirely on Github, the software hosting platform, in a few large text files. I should also throw in the excellent David Chapman with his accessible yet highly insightful website Vividess (who also has a tantric Buddhist vampire novel).
Meanwhile, Frank Yang, a bodybuilder-filmmaker-musician turned serious meditator, has been releasing dozens of videos about what he has learned through thousands of hours of meditation. He certainly cultivates a spectacle, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t find his videos highly informative.
I’ve barely skimmed the surface of this whole nerdy universe around insight practice.
Thirty years ago, the best you could find about spiritual progress in the Buddhist tradition was probably a few books by Alan Watts and some of his contemporaries. I have nothing against Alan Watts, disregarding his tumultuous personal life, but his writing was informed by a very particular angle on Buddhism and rarely focused on actionable technique.
Where there was Watts, there is now a community of thousands of meditators you can find online. The qualitative difference is obvious when you read something like Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are side by side with John Yates’ more recent The Mind Illuminated. While Kabat-Zinn has been an effective evangelist for the movement, Yates provides a wonderfully concrete path with details like ‘start counting breaths at the out-breath, rather than the natural in-breath’ (paraphrased). This close attention to detail is now common, and the vocabulary around meditative practice has grown more sophisticated as a result.
It may well be that the number of people embarking on a serious path of spiritual progression is greater than ever has been. How did this happen?
Two major factors come to mind. The first is a side effect of growing popularity, and the second is a consequence of technology.
As movements become more popular, they can become in many ways more dilute and commodified, but there is also often an intensification. The ends of the distribution gain more followers. One example of this is the show Adventure Time, which originally aired on Cartoon Network in a daytime kids slot, but became such a success that someone started an academic journal on ‘Adventure Time research, commentary, and analysis’. This niche-obsession phenomenon partly explains the more recent intensity in the meditation community. But still there’s the question of timing: Buddhism has been on the rise in the West for a while— why is there such large growth now?
The disaggregating effect of the Internet explains a lot. By enabling content to be directly accessed by people, the internet has allowed stronger preferences to form tight niche communities.
In the pre-internet days of the newspaper and TV, everyone had less than a dozen platforms to choose from, and a TV producer of an old show like Gilligan’s Island would have the same compensation from 100 lukewarm fans as from 100 diehard fans. Now someone with three thousand paying fans can make over $300k a year by regularly making videos about their favorite whiskies. In massively disaggregating content supply, the Internet has allowed the preferences of fans to make a huge difference. This is the essence of Kevin Kelly’s ‘1,000 True Fans’ hypothesis; if you can make something that 1,000 people will pay $100 for, you can live comfortably off your creation.
The ‘1,000 True Fans’ hypothesis operates at the level of attention just as much as money. Online communities like r/streamentry, The Dharma Overground, and even Frank Yang’s YouTube channel, all require careful attention. It’s only because the participants are so passionate about these topics that such places online have flourished.
What is the future of the meditation community?
Kenneth Folk, another person who published a detailed online book on spiritual insight, draws an analogy with the personal fitness revolution. Just as Jack Lalanne’s jumping jacks on daytime TV inspired a generation of working out, we will come to realize the importance of contemplative fitness. “Years from now, we will look back and chuckle at how unsophisticated we were in our understanding of meditation and its benefits way back in the opening years of the 21st century.” It’s certainly a bold prediction, but why not?
📰 Assorted Links 📰
Music as a technology of the self (paper). “Music provides respondents with a scaffolding for self-constitution. Focus on specific uses of music and individuals' experiences of musical culture illuminates some of the mechanisms through which music provides organizing materials of subjectivity.”
I’ve been contemplating poetry, and music, as a way of preserving the memories of our ancestors. Emily Wilson talks about this beautifully in the introduction of her superb translation of The Odyssey: “[i]n Greek mythology, Memory (Mnemosyne), is said to be the mother of the Muses, because poetry, music, and story-telling are all imagined as modes by which people remember the times before they were born.” This reminds me: I think great introductions can be as good as the book itself. I have been perusing more introductions of books. Another that I really do like is the Kaufman’s edition of I and Thou.
How Open Philanthropy evaluates a study. This is the best resource I’ve come across on how to actually critically read scientific papers. I remember being pretty disappointed after a certain famous Econometrics professor was unable to tell me how to critically read a paper (“you just have to understand the field better”). This is the page I wish he had known about and showed me.
Hedy Lamarr. Known perhaps best for her MGM films in the 1930’s: “She appeared in 30 films over a 28-year career, and co-invented an early version of frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication for torpedo guidance.” An astounding life.
Elliott Smith on Freaks. "There's a bunch of Elvis Costello records that made all the difference between feeling like a total freak and feeling like ... only a freak. A freak among other freaks." From the excellent Blank on Blank, which animates audio recordings with fascinating people. The David Foster Wallace short is also worth watching.
The criterion of embarrassment: “an account likely to be embarrassing to its author is presumed to be true as the author would have no reason to invent an account which might embarrass him.” Zeynep Tufekci on how the criterion of embarrassment led to her early commentary on the development of the pandemic.
🎧 Music 🎧
Van Morrison — Autumn Song.
Jorja Smith — By Any Means. Bop of the month.
万能青年旅店 — 山雀. I love the surprising twist at the end of the melody. Chinese folk rock.
Os Tincoãs — Lamento às águas. Somehow this Brazilian rhythm sounds Hawaiian to me.