Читать книгу The Digitally Divided Self: Relinquishing our Awareness to the Internet - Ivo Ph.D. Quartiroli - Страница 31

There are tools and technology that have been employed to develop authentic human qualities. Chogyam Trungpa (1999), an adventurous Buddhist teacher who grew up in Tibet, recalls being attracted by Western life, thinking that Westerners must be very wise. When he was a boy he received a watch and took it completely apart to see how it worked. Though he tried to reassemble it, it would not run. When he was later given a clock that chimed, he took that apart as well. He compared the parts of both, laying them out side by side. Seeing the mistakes he had made with the watch, he was able to put both back together and, having cleaned them, they worked better than before. He was quite proud. Having no concept of factories, he was very impressed with the discipline and patience required, based on all those little screws that somebody had made by hand. When he came to the West he met the makers of the machines that do wondrous things. He found that there was not much wisdom in the West, though there was lots of knowledge.

His attitude toward tools was as much an inner as an outer perception. Can the aspects of technology – like precision, perseverance and patience – be matched both in the manufacturing and internally? Are tools just a way to “get something done” and to extend our power? Or can they be applied for developing our inner qualities? Through tools, do we need to arrive as fast as possible at a result, without our actual presence and full attention? Or can we use them as instruments for training our souls?

Children use tools in a playful way, without needing to arrive anywhere. Often they discard what they build, for it is the activity of building that they enjoy. In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a practice of creating elaborate mandalas of colored sand. Once completed, sometimes after months of patient work, the mandala is swept away.

A very simple tool, like a small knife for carving ornaments out of wood, can be used with different attitudes. We could start with a design and a plan and look forward to finishing it as soon as possible. We might swear when we don’t achieve the shape we envisioned, or be proud when we reach our goal. We could also start with no plan, simply feeling the contact with the wood and the tool, let the design flow according to the moment, integrating our “mistakes” into a novel design. We might consciously discover new skills with our hands, observe where the idea to do a certain thing comes from, look at the different feelings that occur during the carving – our joy, flow, frustration, and silence. In this way, we can develop attention, patience, awareness, and the ability to let go of plans and accept the ever-changing flow of life.

Technology in our culture is intended to give us more power, extension, and possibilities. The emphasis is on what we can do with certain tools, not on how we do it nor how a specific tool connects us with our inner states. The ego takes charge – after all, that is its job.

For the ego, every repetitive task after a while tends to become unconscious, and attention fades. The ego-mind craves novelties and is easily bored. Once automated, we are no longer there with our presence, attention and participation – since the task is outsourced to the machine. The ego wants goals and power.

The artificial intelligence scientist Marvin Minsky, talking about a new project at MIT at the end of 2009, pointed to the fact that his iPhone can download thousands of different applications, instantly allowing it to perform new functions. Why not do the same with the brain? “I would like to be able to download the ability to juggle. There’s nothing more boring than learning to juggle” (quoted in Chandler, 2009).

Minsky believed we can separate the ability to juggle from the inner transformation which occurs in learning to juggle. Knowledge, in Descartes’s style, is seen as something “pure,” removed from our subjective participation and the involvement of our body-mind. If we see knowledge as something which can be represented digitally, then we should be able to download it into our neurophysiology, as we do with software in a computer. This is what Kurzweil and others are forecasting.

When we don’t give importance to our activities as instruments for growth, nor feel “presence” in our actions, then we want to automate everything that can be automated, including activities which could be helpful for the growth of our soul. The concern shifts from how boring or how useful an activity it is, to how it can shape our soul through the presence we give to that task. In Zen monasteries, even the most repetitive tasks – like cleaning rice and sweeping walkways –are used as a path for awareness. But the ego wants goals – and wants to reach them fast.

The use of tools has been advocated even by spiritual paths such as Zen. One of the classic books on Zen illustrates the path of soul realization through mastering archery:

The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull’s-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious[ness] is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of the art (Herrigel, 1953).

This description sounds puzzling. The archer, who is supposed to have reached a high level of awareness, “ceases to be conscious of himself.” He enters a “state of unconscious[ness] . . . completely empty and rid of the self” and becomes one with the instrument. This looks more like the monkey who mistook the pliers for his hands.

But there are fundamental differences between forgetting ourself in an external tool and letting go of our ego while mastering a tool in a sacred way. As with the media, we abandon ourself prematurely; we let go of the presence and the connection with our body and inner happenings. Our mind becomes filled with information, but we lack the one-pointed attention necessary for mastering an inner discipline. The Zen archer goes through a long practice of turning his awareness inside. His mind becomes empty till he can let go of his ego and hit the center in a state of no-mind.

The external target to hit with the arrow is a metaphor for the inner one. The bow and arrow in Zen are tools that act as a bridge to our inner self, not to an external goal. When we reach that center through Zen, we no longer identify ourself with the tool nor the goal – and not even with our ego. With Zen archery our mind becomes completely empty – thus we can connect with everything. With IT we fill our mind till it becomes completely cluttered.