Breathe, You Are Online

home page for Plum Village

At the Unitarian Fellowship last week the speaker mentioned Thich Nhat Hanh and his 14 mindfulness trainings. She said that these 14 trainings were online, and so I looked them up. The trainings form the basis for several Buddhist monastic communities based on the teachings of Hanh, such as Plum Village in France and Deer Park Monastery in California. I was curious whether this monastic order emphasizing spiritual practice had a significant Internet presence. The Plum Village site is sophisticated, but it’s hardly groundbreaking in terms of communicating spiritual values. You could characterize the use of the Internet in these sites (also include Community of Mindful Living) as information heavy and also conveying a sense of peace through natural imagery. It would seem that a living community is necessary for mindfulness training. Eventually one must find a community for real growth in this tradition.

The Internet is a lot of things to a lot of people, but it doesn’t appear to be effective at creating what we might call spiritual communities. If we were to place the Internet among the various aspects of modern life, it would be associated with our frenetic pace of life and pursuit of “goodies.” The site that best captures the Internet ethic would have to be Lifehacker. There’s a way in which attention to spiritual life would mean turning off the Internet for quiet and peace.. in the way one might need to turn off the television. This will change, I think, because the Internet, unlike television, is able to deliver classic forms of spiritual exercises.

I’ve been returning to Epictetus recently, and in book 1.1 I saw this conclusion:

These are the lessons that philosophers ought to rehearse, these they ought to write down daily, in these they ought to exercise themselves.

Living well didn’t mean reading huge volumes of abstruse knowledge, but keeping a few principles and illustrative stories in front of one’s consciousness. This can be seen in the many “handbooks” or digests put out by these philosophers (see Epictetus’ Enchiridion). So it’s not the case that spiritual practice is a book culture vs. Internet culture kind of contrast. Spiritual practice of the type developed by the Stoics could flourish in a medium such as the Internet that allows for quick aphoristic statements and visually communicated stories. An online environment could be developed that aimed to remind a person of the central principles. I can even see an iphone app devoted to constant pinging of the mind about Stoic wisdom.

Look further at that Epictetus quotation above. Practitioners should “write down daily” the lessons. That sounds to me something like a recommendation to keep a blog. The goal is to take the principle and rehearse in the mind the application of the principle to some event. This is just another strategy for getting the mind fully engaged with the teachings. This would be a different way of thinking about a blog: not as a means of communication and links, but as a means of self-training. And Stoics would be thrilled at the idea of a community of people thinking about life and reinforcing each other’s commitment. Even Twitter with its constant NOW could be just another path to spiritual practice and mindfulness.

So that’s something I’m waiting for. I want to see a spiritual community that does not simply disseminate information about itself online, but tries to use online platforms as spiritual exercise. The community building potential of the Internet is near infinite, and someday perhaps Plum Village will not be a community in France but a virtual community of people living all over the world who seek to live better and know wisdom. The 14 mindfulness trainings will find a form that allows them to be repeated and memorized and commented upon as people lead their lives.

I liked stumbling onto this YouTube fan of Epictetus. This is why I love the Internet.