Now: A Kit for Digital Mindfulness

Roger Whitson, Washington State University

(Published on November 18, 2019)

Introduction

A few days before the 2016 election, meditation teacher Jeffrey Warren published a blog post that included a meditation session on managing the stress created by the divisiveness of the season. In the session, Warren’s voice describes the events occurring in the first half of Charles and Ray Eames’s film Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, in which “every 10 seconds the camera pans back a larger distance, until the earth is lost and we end up way out on the edges of the galaxy” (see fig. 1). By linking the film with a meditation geared towards overcoming divisiveness, Warren suggests that this outward movement paralleled the mental space opened up by mindfulness. “The theory about meditation is it can help us get space around . . . tough emotions and, in turn, make better—saner—responses,” Warren said. Powers of Ten mirrors meditation in yet another way. By focusing on space instead of time, the film suggests that each zoom of the camera outward occurs in the same moment of time. Warren reminds us that “here on the verge of the US election with so much at stake, it can be helpful to remember that while things are very serious, things are also complete and beautiful in themselves. And if we pan back [sic] the camera far enough, we can get this perspective."

Figure 1. Charles and Ray Eames, directors Powers of Ten—a Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero. Pyramid Films, 1978.

This kit is organized around two meditations, both with the goal of constructing a non-dualistic perspective on the relationship among mindfulness and technology. I call this non-dualistic perspective “digital mindfulness.” In meditation teacher Daniel Ingram’s words, non-duality practices have to do “with eliminating or seeing through the sense that there is a fundamentally separate or continuous center-point, agent, watcher, doer, perceiver, subject, observer or similar entity.” By taking a non-dualistic perspective, mindfulness calls attention to the interconnection of our mind with everything else in the Universe. In the context of technology, non-duality means not seeing a division between our experiences as human beings and our connection to technology.  Both experiences exist in an interdependent continuum with other ecologies and actors that construct our world. For instance, while social media has acted as a source of great anxiety for many people since the 2016 election, a non-dualistic perspective would embrace that anxiety as a window to a broader vision of reality. One goal of digital mindfulness practices, then, is not to eliminate technology in our lives but to change our relationship with it.[1] The more experience we have with anxiety, the more opportunities we have to gain insight from our troubles. 

A second purpose of this kit is to compare non-dualistic experiences of technology and time from mindfulness practice to media archaeological accounts of time-criticality. Wolfgang Ernst characterizes time-criticality as “processes [that] are first and foremost dedicated to analyzing the specific ways of processing time that were and are introduced into culture through techno-mathematical media” (4). Such processes are discrete, not continuous, and divide time into smaller and smaller units for the purpose of computational manipulation. Examples include not only the recording and replay of sound files but also the small temporal differences needed to generate a digital image algorithmically on a raster grid and the so-called “real time” transmission of video files.[2] The contrast between a sense of interconnection produced through mindfulness and the ever-granular division of “nows” into time-critical processes produces an enormous amount of anxiety on social media. Such is the essence of asynchronous conversation: responses that are too quick for genuine reflection, yet also too slow to be embedded in the numberless revisions and nuances involved in face-to-face conversations. Tied between two conceptions of time, we yearn for connection and yet are always reminded of our separateness—while we also search for more boundaries and are constantly reminded of having none. In the words of Jonathan Crary, while private groups proliferate on Facebook and strictly reinforce in- and out-group divisions, human life in general is inscribed “into duration without breaks, defined by a principle of continuous functioning. It is a time that no longer passes, beyond clock time” (8).

As part of an issue on “Critical Making and Executable Kits,” it might be strange to see a largely narrative-driven piece on digital mindfulness. In our overview of the issue, Helen Burgess and I stress the connection of our work with multimodal composition and critical making—particularly in terms of a DIY (“do-it-yourself”) focus on “various kinds of executable processes and their critical frameworks.” The consciousness hacking movement, led by Mike Siegel, also stresses “DIY” and the use of digital devices when exploring mindfulness. In an article in Wired, Siegel says, “I saw spiritual attainment and I thought, ‘That does not need to be religious. That can be scientific’” (Gray). Analogously, adopting mindfulness techniques need not be either religious or scientific; instead, mindfulness can be conceptualized as a set of phenomenological practices that remake the mind as they transform neurological pathways. It is in the sense of considering the mind itself as a “kit” that I offer these reflections.[3] Such a gesture recalls Jussi Parikka’s argument that we move media archaeological analysis beyond the simple exploration of devices towards questions of media and technological descent. According to Parikka, these analyses of descent operate in a similar manner to how Jonathan Crary “mapped the relation of attention to new regimes of work and [the] capitalist consumption of media cultural objects” (37). The kit as an object of research can be unpackaged to reveal entangled histories of technological, ecological, and biological descent. Digital mindfulness, in this sense, treats the mind as a kit to be unpackaged for the purpose of greater understanding and relief of suffering. Digital devices, for their part, are already revealing the cybernetic entangled lines of technological and biological descent by reshaping our consciousness in ways that have intensified our anxiety and hacked the rational decision-making processes essential to democratic political systems. What might it mean to gain a critical framework of the processes occurring to our sense of selfhood on social media with the intention of changing our relationship with our minds and our technologies? The following exercises collectively unlock the mind as a kit for these kinds of explorations.

First Meditation: How to See the Cosmos

First, to remind ourselves of a more mindful approach to time and space, let’s engage with Warren’s Powers of Ten meditation. The following is a paraphrased transcript of a guided meditation audio file that Warren offers on his website. I’ve added a few reflections, particularly the work of Nicholas Mirzeoff, Rob Burbea, Mingyur Rinpoche, and Joseph Goldstein, and some curiosities about media studies and emptiness practice. You may want to engage with this meditation by reading my instructions, by listening to Warren’s description on the audio mediation he developed for the podcast 10% Happier, by watching the original Eames video, or by doing some combination of all three.

One final note: all of the activities in this kit should be understood as suggestions rather than imperatives. Guided meditations are experiments to be approached with curiosity rather than striving to follow a script. Much of the following instructions include paraphrases of Warren’s instructions in his audio file (see fig. 2).

Figure 2. Jeff Warren and Dan Harris. “Guided Meditation: Election Stress (Powers of Ten),” 10% Happier with Dan Harris, 31 October 2016.

Step 1: Get a sense of your body in space. As you sit, feel your feet on the floor, your hands on your hips, and your seat on your chair or cushion. There is no correct way to sit during meditation. In fact, I recline while meditating. The important thing is that you are able to be relaxed while also focused enough to prevent dozing off during practice. Do not think of body or space in the abstract; rather, consider this space you currently habit, and explore what it means to be this body that you inhabit.

Step 2: Take a few deep breaths. Stretch out the spine as you inhale; relax as you exhale. Just as meditation is a balance between focus and relaxation, you can replicate this sensibility in your body by emphasizing posture and relaxation at the same time. You might feel sturdy, rooted in the Earth, but also open, able to receive and navigate what arises.

Step 3: Attune yourself with sounds. Instructors often suggest, at this point, focusing on sounds. Sounds are great to use as an object of meditation because, though we often get annoyed at a dog barking, the majority of that feeling takes place in our minds and our bodies—the reaction is not because of the sound itself. Is there a way to detach our cultural experiences of a sound from the physiological experience of sound waves hitting the ear? As Joseph Goldstein says, distractions can be made into objects of meditation. Listing the example of feeling hungry while meditating, Goldstein describes the process of transforming the sensation from a distraction into an object of meditation: “[s]o we feel the hunger, and then we go from attention to the breath or attention on the body—to opening to the sensation of hunger. And we might make a soft mental note, ‘hunger. Hunger.’ So we’re including that very experience into meditation practice rather than seeing it as a distraction from meditation.’”

Step 4: Notice your room. Zoom out your awareness like a camera, and notice the room you are sitting in. Your body is in one part of this space, but the room also includes inanimate objects, technologies, even perhaps animals, plants, and insects. Experience the space on top of you, below you, to each of your sides. 

Step 5: Notice the earth. Warren says that this step is more difficult than the previous; like the Eames film, you’ll want to zoom out again and look at the planet, much like the famous photograph Blue Marble. As Nicholas Mirzeoff says in How to See the World, “[w]e can ‘recognize’ the Earth from Blue Marble, but only the three-man crew of Apollo 17 has ever actually seen this view, with the Earth fully illuminated, and no one has seen it since 1972” (8). Even so, zooming out and seeing the earth as a whole in front of us, even if it takes imagination, encourages a change in perspective. Warren calls the movement “almost proprioceptive, kinesthetic, you can feel it in your vestibular system.” As we combine these impossible images and sensations, we are transforming our relationship with the imagination we use all the time to structure our experiences of the world. Warren continues. “The concentration part of this meditation comes from trying to hold this perspective,” he says, “this lush, full perspective. The Earth. And far below, the distant roar of traffic, voices, geese honking—these make their way across the sky. All the Earth drama.” Warren mentions the space created by holding this scene in your attention; yet, Mirzeoff notes that such a vision only actually appeared once to the Apollo 17 crew. All of the other images made of the Earth are composites assembled from thousands of satellite photos or at least shrouded in darkness since the Sun isn’t directly behind the Earth. Warren’s perspective emphasizes space and wholeness. Mirzeoff’s perspective focuses on particularity and assemblages. This distinction will prove important as we reflect on the exercise.

Step 6: Notice the cosmos. Warren reminds us that in the Eames film, the camera never freezes. “The whole Milky Way is ahead of us, faster and faster, wider and wider, the angle of our view. Till we come to a place where we imagine that the whole universe is in our view . . . What does it feel like to take this kind of perspective?” Of course, there is no one answer to this question. Warren’s meditation encourages us to simply be curious about the feeling of the exercise. When we communicate on social media, we can often feel backed into a corner, trapped by one response bubble after another on a person’s feed. But, at the same time, in different corners of the cosmos, so much more is happening. 

First Reflection: Visualizing
Inexperienced meditators often report difficulty with visualization, particularly if they have not worked with such tools before. Yet, visualization is a central part of our cognitive processes. Andy Clark posits a model of cognition that sees the mind as a Bayesian prediction machine, and imagination acts, in that model, as a fundamental part of the mind’s makeup:[4] “Creatures . . . endowed [with such probabilistic cognitive capacities] have a structured grip on their worlds: a grip that consists not in the symbolic encoding of quasi-linguistic ‘concepts’ but in the entangled mass of multiscale probabilistic expectations used to predict the incoming sensory signal” (107-8). Francisco Varela et al. further describe this grip as “not optimal” but “simply viable” and “directed toward something that is missing: on the one hand, there is always a next step for the system in its perpetually guided action; and on the other hand, the actions of the system are always directed toward situations that have yet to become actual” (205). There is no representation of the world as it is in our minds; rather, cognition is a process of prediction, imagination, and coupling that is trying to fill in an emptiness that is an inherent aspect of all existence. We sense something is missing, and rather than recognize that nothing has inherent existence, our ego strives to enact a world that is whole, complete, and meaningful. [5] Rob Burbea has gone so far as to suggest that the oft-repeated refrain that meditation reveals the world “as it is” is actually wrong, but practice reveals the “emptiness of things”: “things are inconstant, in flux, in process, or even that, inspected more closely, phenomena are seen to be arising and passing with breathtaking rapidity and that we construct a solidity of continuity where in reality there is none.” Tibetian master Mingyur Rinpoche stresses that the Tibetian word for emptiness “tongpa-nyi” emphasizes its sense of possibility and that a closer translation might be “inconceivable” or “unnameable”: “when Buddhists talk about emptiness, we don’t mean nothingness, but rather an unlimited potential for anything to appear, change, or disappear” (59).

Visualization turns our attention towards the processes enacting and fabricating a world. What happened to those Apollo 17 astronauts when they saw the earth as a giant marble in space? How might that experience have impacted their cognitive processes? Warren’s meditation emphasized the earth as a “wholeness,” a sense that connections on earth translated into a broader perspective that could counteract the comparatively small political problems on its surface. Yet, it is perhaps Mirzeoff’s sense of the emptiness of the world, with its mixture of politics, assemblages, policing, and possibility that is closer to how we enact such a world. “[W]e assemble a world-view that is consistent with what we know and have already experienced,” Mirzeoff contends: “There are institutions that try to shape that view, which the French historian Jacques Ranciere calls ‘the police version of history,’ meaning that we are told to ‘move on, there’s nothing to see here’” (11). By not looking, we fill that void with something else—entertainment, work, addiction—ignoring the suffering by not confronting the violence we see and compounding our own suffering in the process. As Ronald Purser points out, mindfulness meditations can induce a “stoic self-pacification” in which “living in harmony with the world means accepting capitalism as a given. No radical critique or vision of social change is needed” (25-6). What institutions or technologies enable the views of wholeness given to us in Warren’s meditation particularly in light of the fascist and racist policies that have subsequently emerged from Donald Trump’s administration or the decades of neoliberal policies that have limited our understanding of freedom to the individual and the marketplace? How are we to understand the processes by which we’re asked to zoom out of, or move on from, our political environment? Such processes are reminiscent of the emptiness of enacting a world, but they may also reveal how different experiences of emptiness can themselves be politically mediated by the particular ideologies of individualism, capitalism, and neoliberalism.

Meditation 2: How to Notice Now

As a way to start deepening our curiosity of a more technical conception of “now,” let us move onto a second meditation. Whereas the first meditation focused on a thought-experiment that was largely written by Jeffrey Warren and inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’s film Powers of Ten, this second experiment is inspired by Wolfgang Ernst’s concept of time-criticality. Time-criticality is the technological demarcation of time by digital devices, such as the electricity passed intermittently through a quartz oscillator to create uniform seconds in digital clocks or computer timing mechanisms.  According to Ernst, time-critical devices measure time in units below the perception threshold of human phenomenology, and thus put into relief “the specific ways of processing time that were and are introduced into culture through techno-mathematical media” as well as enable scholars to explore the phenomenological and social consequences of such technological interventions (Chronopoetics 4).[6] The “now” in mindfulness practice can be understood as an imaginative unfolding of what seems to be the largely restricted experience of individuality out into the world, the solar system, and the cosmos. Yet, we’ve also seen how this unfolding can turn in on itself and reveal the emptiness of that same “now” as it is composed of assemblages of social actors – both human and non-human – and with particular social and political ideologies. This kit relies upon the repair manuals found in the websites iFixit and Repairs Universe. iFixit is a “free repair manual,” giving reviews and advice for how to tear apart and repair electronic devices. Repairs Universe, on the other hand, advertises “DIY repairs – made easy.” Ernst’s thought and the practices of iFixit and Repairs Universe guide us into a much smaller realm—one constructed by the manufactured regularity of microprocessors.

Step 1: Notice your smartphone. John Yates makes a distinction between attention and peripheral awareness in mindfulness practice. The former, he says, is activated “[w]henever we focus . . . on something [and] it dominates our conscious experience” (19). The latter, on the other hand, is often comprised of background experiences in our peripheral vision. Focusing attention requires effort and therefore often stresses us more than simply being generally aware or softly focused upon what we see in front of us.

Noticing our smartphone would seem to entail attention instead of awareness. Most mindfulness instructors, in fact, are very suspicious of technologies like smartphones and social media, since they heighten our struggles with attention and addiction. Catherine Price says that smartphones “are designed to addict us” but overall suggests “becoming conscious of how and why you use your phone—and recognizing that your phone is manipulating how and why you use it” (3). I go one step further by following Joseph Goldstein’s method and suggesting that we make an object of distraction—our smartphone—into an object of meditation. Susan Pollack describes a great meditation based on the work of psychologist Mark Epstein that asks people to be present with the annoying sounds and notifications that distract us. But we will be taking an approach that recognizes the materiality and social institutions embedded in our smartphones.

Step 2: Notice what makes up your smartphone. iFixit has a number of “teardowns,” in which they take various devices apart. Here is one of them featuring the iPhone X (see fig. 3).

Figure 3. iFixit Video. “iPhone X Teardown and Analysis!” 3 November 2017

You may want to take apart your own smartphone. The website Repairs Universe features a number of useful “Take Apart Repair Guides,” with specific instructions for taking apart and repairing smartphones. For instance, their repair guide for the iPhone 5c suggests using a suction cup to gently raise the display screen after unscrewing it, and operating a pair of tweezers to free the speaker assembly (iPhone 5c).  Note, though that both iFixit and Repairs Universe emphasize repair as a moral value. iFixit, for instance, says “[l]et’s fix the world, one device at a time.” Mindfulness, by contrast, emphasizes the emptiness of all phenomena. By all means repair is an important value — one that Bethany Nowviskie and Steven Jackson have identified with an ecological approach to the digital humanities that emphasizes a “now” associated with the longue durée of geological and material change.[7] On the other hand, is it possible to engage in acts of repair while also being mindful of emptiness? As you discover the various components making up your smartphone, either by viewing the iFixit video or by taking apart your own smartphone, start to become curious about what these components are and where they come from. Notice, also, the material emptiness of the iPhone—lacking its components it, like everything else, is no longer a magical, programmable, device but an empty (plastic) shell. 

Step 3: Notice the microprocessor. Friedrich Kittler has said that all software, and all computing, “come down to absolutely local string manipulations, that is, I’m afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences.” Take a moment and consider one of the microprocessors in your smartphone. Apple advertises the iPhone X as having an A11 Bionic processor (see Figure 4). The processor features a reduced instruction set computer (RISC), an architecture that requires less clock cycles per instruction for programs to deliver commands.

Figure 4. Henriok. Illustration of the Apple A11 System-on-a-Chip. 25 Aug. 2017. 

Step 4: Notice electricity and time. Clock cycles are defined as the amount of time registered between “two pulses of an oscillator” within microprocessors. For instance, a “4GHz processor performs 4,000,000,000 clock cycles per second” (User7876385). In the case of the A11 bionic processor, the chip has two high-performance and four high-efficiency cores that can be used simultaneously. The high-performance cores have 2.53GHz clock speeds and the low-performance cores have 1.42GHz  (Apple). How might we imagine the electricity oscillating in discrete pulses that are quicker than two billion cycles per second? Imagine the rapidity of that flicker shooting back and forth. We may not actually be able to see these pulses, but those billions upon billions of flickers help to create the images, the sounds, and the processes we see simulated on our smartphones right “now.”

Step 5: Notice now. The previous meditation asked us to envision all of the things happening at the same moment. This meditation is a little more challenging, since it asks us to inhabit the emptiness of the moment. Can we imagine an Eames office film titled Powers of Ten that instead of leading us into the microscopic dimensions of space, explored the microtemporal dimensions of computer processing? Liam Cole Young explains Ernst’s use of time-criticality in his introduction to Ernst’s Sonic Time Machines: “the temporal flow of techno-cultural data streams comes to be comprised of discrete, operative units and processes that escape human perception” (Sonic 13). These streams “escape” human perception because they are clocked as occurring more quickly than the physiological processes of our senses can register them. In computers, these discrete pulses seem like flows because we cannot perceive these pulses, much less the spaces between them. But what would the spaces between these pulses look like if we could perceive them?

Second Reflection: Deconstructing Time
Time-critique gives us a fascinating opportunity to consider the emptiness of the time that we have been exploring in this set of meditations. For Ernst, critique refers to its etymological roots as “a cut in a continuum” or “an act of discretion, discontinuation” and adds that “human perception is hardly capable of consciously registering the smallest slices of time as discrete events; instead cognitive time awareness calculates with intervals” (Chronopoetics 8). Douglas Rushkoff states it in a less precise way, but in the process, he describes the difficulties that time-critique raises for human beings. “By marrying our time-based bodies and minds to technologies that are biased against time altogether,” Rushkoff claims, “we end up divorcing ourselves from the rhythms, cycles, and continuity on which we depend for coherence” (22). Suffering and difficulty emerge from this contradiction, as it no doubt did when people left their labor in the fields during the Industrial Revolution and started counting their working days with clocks. Ecological rhythms are exchanged for mechanical ones. 

Yet, what happens if we let go of this dependence on continuity and coherence or became curious about other ways of experiencing time? In a technical context, Wolfgang Ernst’s work continues the project of the deconstruction of time that Jacques Derrida explored in “Ouisa and Grammé: Note on a Note from Being and Time.” Derrida’s work explores “the hidden passageway that makes the problem of presence communicate with the problem of the written trace” (34). Derrida’s article concerns the difficulty of conceptualizing time in a way that does not privilege the metaphysics of presence, or temporality as organized around a series of “nows.” Such conceptualizations undergo deconstruction when considering how “now” is used to delimit and articulate the ongoing flow of time. Derrida demonstrates this deconstruction in close readings of Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, and Henri Bergson. If time is a continuous flow, any attempts to de-limit such a flow to a series of “nows” would risk misunderstanding the essence of time as a continuity. Yet without such limits, time cannot be thought at all. “It is in the extent to which time requires limits, nows analogous to points,” Derrida argues, “and in the extent to which the limits are always accidents and potentialities, that time cannot be made perfectly mathematical, that time’s mathematization has limits, and remains, as concerns its essence, accidental” (61).  In other words, far from constructing a non-metaphysical sense of time, Derrida shows how the presence (ouisa) of the metaphysical now is undercut by the points, lines, and other recording instruments that de-limit or make time available to our understanding (grammé). For Derrida “[t]he concept of time, in all its aspects, belongs to metaphysics, and it names the domination of presence” (63).  

Ernst sees Derrida’s deconstruction of time as operationalized in time-critical media. Our experience of digital simulation is possible because of the operationalization of a mathematical concept of time that is algorithmically processed and made the object of computational functionality. As an example, Ernst cites the recording of tracks in digital sound and their impact on the Heideggerian problem of aesthesis: in which presence is constructed by a phenomenological process of revealing and concealing. Digital sound tracks are recordings, but the information that is stored on magnetic tape is binary code—not the indexical impression of sound waves as in analog recordings. Binary code is reassembled algorithmically to produce sound. Digital sound tracks are delimitations of temporal sound waves, yet the information made available in the process of recording such delimitations is meant to be read and executed by computers and not experienced directly by human beings. This occurs because “in technical-operative media . . . minimal time thresholds remain below the human perceptual threshold” (Chronopoetics 11). These thresholds cited by Ernst are points of information inscribed so quickly that human beings cannot perceive the end of one microtemporal “now” and the beginning of another. Operationally, the point becomes a line. Derrida points out the numerous problems with how the points of “now” are constructed in the metaphysical concept of time. Ernst shows that, because of these impossibilities, temporality is operationalized in time-critical media by endlessly dividing “now” into smaller and smaller units that become more and more indistinguishable with that which is instantaneous. 

Meditation teacher Rob Burbea puts another spin on the time-critical now as described by Derrida and Ernst, deconstructing the notion that time is one or many:

If this, or any, moment really has inherent existence, it has to be one or many. If it is one, then either it is divisible into a beginning, middle, and end, or it is not. If it is divisible, then that one moment is not in fact one but three moments. The beginning must come before the middle and the end, and so it is really a different moment in time. But if the moment cannot be divided, it must be nonexistent, infinitely small. Without any differentiation between beginning and end, it would be impossible to arrange such singular moments in order of time, of happening.

Burbea’s reflection suggests that our conceptions of time occur both in terms of flowing and in terms of discrete individual moments, yet our experience and our questioning negates both senses of time.

While Wolfgang Ernst seems to favor the discrete sense of time, since he frequently emphasizes the digital aspects of computing, he too recognizes that these discrete processes veil a much larger broader understanding of time:

The temporality of mathematics lies not in the realm of ideas, but rather in the worldliness of its media-technical operations—whether in the form of the ‘intermediate storage’ of interim results in the registries of the central processing unit (CPU) of an electronic computer or in the classic form of the mathematical gesture on paper (and between them the overwriting sequences of the Turing machine on a tape loop).  (Chronopoetics 78)

We see how the temporality of mathematics is realized not only in computer processing but also in the storage of values in different materials. These different forms of storage represent the “intermediates” constructing the material infrastructure of computing as it contributes to the laptops, smartphones, games, and social media platforms we use today. The microtemporal processing of electrical pulses is also dependent upon a material and historical infrastructure of values that are stored in human memory, in clay tablets, in intermediate values of CPUs, and even in the buffers of internet relays. This broader spectrum of time is what Jussi Parikka calls a “geology of media,” or, “the connections of media technologies, their materiality, hardware, and energy, with the geophysical nature: nature affords and bears the weight of media culture, from metals and minerals to its waste load” (viii). Copying and pasting, copying and pasting, over and over again—one theory after another, one machine dismantled—the same part standardized and used in a machine that is understood as “newer.” Media archaeology moves through these vast, ignored, ahistorical, yet temporal and processual, interconnections. There is no single solution, like those we sometimes see manifested in the metaphysical domain of our screens or in the price points of the newest smartphone, but rather there are numberless microtemporal pulses flowing through rare metals chemically extracted from rock that formed over millenia.

An Emptiness of Media

Mindfulness practices have traditionally been seen as helping people see “reality as it is,” yet what does “as it is” mean? As we saw above, emptiness practices see it at the heart of all phenomena—no phenomenon has inherent existence. This questioning of inherent existence is also central to more recent work in media archaeology. John Durham Peters, for instance, sees media as “vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible” (2). Media are communications technologies, tools, vessels, environments, bodies, and minds. If media studies teaches us, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, that “all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed”; emptiness practices allow us to invert that sense of extension (90). Human selves are composed of senses; thoughts and emotions are primarily constructed by bodily sensations. All of these parts of us, like all bodies, arise and pass away.

A theory of emptiness, I suggest, is also a media theory. Emptiness is often interpreted as the teaching that all phenomena are interrelated or that nothing can exist on its own. While emptiness is not exhausted in the concept of interrelation, it can be described partly in this manner. Interrelation can teach us that all events are — in reality — connected to one another, while the ego overwrites our experience of reality to imagine beings as separately acting upon the world. Likewise, one of the most difficult lessons from media studies is the notion that human individuality is mediated through its interaction with various environments, histories, and technologies.

Yet, emptiness and media include more than interrelationality. Such an understanding can itself be reified into an intellectual concept instead of actually experienced. “When there is insight,” Burbea proclaims, “we know that how and what we see are not simply givens, but are the colourable and malleable, magical, material of empty appearances.” Ideas can be conceptualized, but experiences of emptiness are felt in the marrow. Waking up doesn’t happen by reading about media studies or mindfulness practices. It occurs when we are here now—when anxious chatter is stilled, our stories cease, reality opens up, and as William Blake famously described in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, our senses discover “the infinite in every thing” (38).