Entering the stream

Do you really need to be reading this? Do I really need to be writing this? The answer to both of these questions is probably “no”.

But that isn’t going to stop either of us, because this is what we do online: a compulsive snippety-awareness, attention unfolding only so far as the next link or click. Another tab opened, another Google search, the mind enchanted at finding an environment that so beautifully mirrors its papañca-nature, but also somewhat aghast at being allowed to aimlessly get-away-with-it once again.

Stating this concern in the brave new world of Wisdom 2.0 and the Buddhasphere feels a bit passé. Did not Joan Halifax (The Only Roshi On The Panel) recently declare at the annual hoedown of technology and meditation that “buddhism is the essence of social networking” – an unofficial blessing if there ever was one for Facebook, Twitter, and all the proliferation of thoughts, half-thoughts, and demi-thoughts that these media so skilfully convey? Do we not have various articles from the twitterati offering us mindful ways to indulge in our daily papañca-fix? Is the brain itself not wired up like the Internet: a vastly interconnected network of feedback loops, swooshing information around like currents rather than fish?

And yet, perhaps because I have only recently entered the social media stream in terms of helping establish London Insight’s new Facebook and Twitter page, I still end up asking myself the somewhat un-hip question: “Is not all of this activity fundamentally incompatible with the intention to cultivate a more settled, peaceful, non-proliferating mind?”

David Loy, in an essay entitled "Consciousness Commodified" points out three ways in which our precious attention is being squeezed in a manner that wasn’t a problem for previous Buddhist cultures and practitioners: 1) The fragmentation of attention: “unremitting connectivity” pulling attention in various directions at once, 2) The commodification of attention: i.e. advertising, and 3) The control of attention: “weapons of mass distraction” like TV, video games and the Internet.

I’m interested in exploring the middle ground between switching off, and staying (scatteredly) on. Care to offer some tips?