DEITIES, SOFTWARE, ADDRESS (TALKING ABOUT 3 YEAR RETREAT, #5)

"As long as some poets and thinkers and filmmakers write or make films also if not exclusively for angels, it is inaccurate to say that no angels exist -- indeed angels exist more as addressees of poetry, thinking, and filmmaking than as addressees of the exoteric prayers of religious people."
     -- Jalal Toufic

Having grown up in the West, where the established worldview says 'its just us and the animals, beneath an endless black sky', the ontologies of Tibetan Buddhism are breathtaking. The notion of 'deity' in all its various manifestations is one of the most philosophically challenging concepts I have ever had to deal with. Deities out ahead; deities in the subtle channels of one's nervous system; one's own self as a deity. Deities as operating system and instant download and para-architecture. The spaciousness of the mind as deity; one's deepest fears as deity.

For three years my interactions with people will be kept to a minimum, but each day I will be spending hours in the company of what I like to call The Invisibles. The Tibetan tradition says it is through ritual conduct that one has relationships with deities. Recitational speech, visualisations, mudra - these are the ritualised forms of speaking, seeing and acting that enable us to be in the presence of The Invisibles. That enable us to re-presence ourselves.

"The unseen and arrived is interlaced with the seen and the delayed, the blur is precisely this oscillation between 'what is' but does not yet have a name, and 'what might become' because we can give it a name in advance of its arrival."

That quote is from "The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty", a massive treatise detailing the arrival of planetary-scale computing. Computers - with all their speed and frictionlessness, their shape-shifting plenitude and their super-quiet sidestepping of the 'off' button - are probably the nearest thing that secular culture has to 'deity'. Three years of talking to computing's fairy godmother is going to make the return in 2021 very interesting.

THE TWO SOLITUDES (TALKING ABOUT 3 YEAR RETREAT, #4 )

"You're so quiet you're almost 
                               tomorrow"  
   -- Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds

I'm trying to imagine the door closing behind me. I feel it as an act of immense kindness. No anxiety at all. When it begins, so do I. What might be a little heartbreaking are the goodbyes across the next five months, beneath skies with too many stars, and no horse.

I remember reading, a long time ago in this room, a brief biography of a Korean Zen monk. It talked about a three year retreat he undertook, the first six months of which were confession and purification practices. But such was his sense of joy after six months of those practices that he decided to dedicate the whole three years to them. And as I sat there reading, something deep inside me shifted its coordinates very quietly, very precisely, triggering the GPS system that is my unconscious. I knew where I was going. And I knew that even if I forgot about it entirely for years at a time (and I did) I would still get there, eventually. That equation - of solitude and confession and purification equaling sheer joy - was now safe inside me, a living thing almost, locked into place by something as simple and untraceable as a brief moment of reading permeated by faith.

But there's a second level of solitude that extends beyond the confines of the three years of retreat. After the physical solitude comes a biographical one. It involves letting go of any sense whatsoever of 'becoming' someone - of becoming someone special, either in one's own eyes or in the eyes of others. How to come back out in 2021, 'with no direction home, a complete unknown, like a rolling stone...' -- that's the real challenge.

FUNDRAISING (TALKING ABOUT 3 YEAR RETREAT, #3)

Our Tibetan lamas say that doing the three year retreat in the West, where there is no established tradition for it, is much more powerful than doing it in Asia where it is already an established tradition. But doing it in the West is expensive. And the kind of person who is willing to do a three year retreat is generally not the kind of person who has 21,000 pounds at their disposal! But equally, there are many people out there who deeply believe in the goodness of such a retreat but who don't personally have the freedom or confidence to undertake one, yet would love to support such a project. So the natural next step is to try and bring these two groups together.

Here's the link to my page on a crowdfunding site for Buddhist projects. I have five months to raise 21,000 pounds.

http://www.theofferingbowl.com/petitions/558

And just to be clear: you can support this fundraising project simply by wishing it well. Or mentioning it to others who may be able to help. It doesn't have to be financial. Wishing it well is actually a very powerful contribution.

I've managed to live most of the last 9 years back in the West living on alms. I've stood outside supermarkets in the UK on hundreds of occasions and never gone hungry. In fact alms round practice has been one of the most joyful experiences of my life as a monk. The hitch-hiking to and from towns, the meditative high of just standing still for hours on the high street, the difference between receiving seven pounds or eleven, or thirty, the return to the forest with a bag full of food, the 'no direction home' tenderness of the whole thing. So it feels strange - painful, actually - to suddenly be required to act in a different mode, raising three years worth of support rather than just what I need for the next few days. Especially when most of the people I know personally are people without much money.

But the group in Germany who are hosting the retreat keep telling me not to worry, to just trust in the karma of the situation. And I remember, many years ago, smiling as I read an account of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh talking to his trustees in America, describing his extravagant vision of a new California ashram. After five minutes of descriptions of luxury accomodation blocks, swimming pools and shrines one of the trustees politely asked 'And where is the money going to come from for all this?" Rajneesh replied, with only the tiniest pause, "Well, from wherever it happens to be right now!"  And without even a single Rolls Royce on my wish-list, that's how I feel too - it will come from wherever it happens to be right now. My job is to prepare myself for the cosmonaut role, to step into the deep unknown as confidently as I can when all the conditions are in place, the catalyst for turning specific concrete acts of kindness - twenty one thousand pounds worth of kindness - into a three-year project of immeasurable goodness. And it's a scary role, actually. But that's my job.

"BUT ... WHY?" (TALKING ABOUT 3 YEAR RETREAT, #2)

"But why? What do you hope to get out of it?" This is a question I hear a lot, and perhaps the hardest to answer because it is loaded with preconceptions that simply don't apply. A three year retreat is not a career step. Its not even a strategy. Its more like birdsong. Or the timeless look in a horse's eye, the beautiful quiet horse that carries the fierce Tibetan protector deity Palden Lhamo as she rides through a river of blood beneath a starless sky. That horse has no agenda and neither do I. The spirit of three year retreat just looked me in the eye and I said yes. That horse is timeless, graceful and present. I only wish I could be likewise.

I believe - I imagine - that human beings are machines for creating works of art, and that the best works of art are nameless and invisible. For the world to be completely, blessedly itself, it has to befriend the nameless and the invisible. The world, plus the work of art, equals the world. For me, three year retreat is training in that spirit. Only by befriending the nameless and the invisible will I truly be able to meet everyone everywhere. "With diamond-clear intention instill faith everywhere. With mirror-like wisdom stabilise all chaotic minds."

In the passage that follows and which brings this post to an end, a passage from the illimitable pen of Roberto Bolano, for 'work of art' read 'this precious human life', for 'translation' read 'the Tibetan tradition', let 'the attic' be the 21st century and 'the kid' be Shenyen (or you, if you want to come with me), and let one of those battered pages be 'three year retreat', and you will sense what I mean, I'm sure. And for now let the Nightingale just be the Nightingale..

"How to recognise a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarisers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings, not a ploughed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest itself, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale."

THE PRACTICES (TALKING ABOUT 3 YEAR RETREAT, #1)

Our lives are mostly invisible, and deeply connected, but somehow our lives seem bereft of this knowledge.

So the first year consists of practices (the “ngondros”) to purify this impoverishment: expressing one's commitment and openness to the (invisible, present, surrounding) buddhas through recitation of prayers, visualisation of buddha lands, prostrations, etc. Confession and purification of one’s negative karma accrued since beginningless time. Offering visualised Mandala universes to the buddhas on behalf of all wandering beings. Expression of one’s commitment to become a buddha as the best way to repay the kindness of all mother-like sentient beings throughout all those lives.

Then begins a cycle of practices to stabilise, concentrate and open the mind through more meditative practices (the ngondros themselves are quite meditative and focussing, but they are primarily energising and cleansing). These include practices aimed at transcending one’s deeply ingrained delusional tendency to see oneself and the world as ordinary.

The final year is quite specialised tantric work whose aim is to accelerate the attainment of buddhahood: working on the subtle body, dream yoga, emptiness meditations, techniques to transfer consciousness to a pure land at death, to remain conscious during the dying and post-death state, among other things.
I’ll unpack some of this in greater detail over the coming months. And if there are any specific questions, just ask. I’m happy to talk about it.

AFTER THE FALL: THE CONSERVATION OF TULLIO LOMBARDO'S ADAM

"Burying things in a first glove of words, a second pocket of writing, a third screen of printed matter, a thousand names..."

         -- Michael Serres, 'Biogea' 

A friend sends me URLs that she has 'orphaned' from their seamless one-click digital environment. She writes them by hand: scrawled in semi-legible pencil on the back of a 20 baht note, or neatly penned in gold ink on glass and then photographed. She draws the outline of a Fra Angelico painting and writes one around the angel's halo, or finger-draws them over photos of darkened rooms that come to me via Instagram.

And then, slowly typing these unclickable unpronouncable URLs into the address bar, I am reminded once again of something that our digital culture ís straining to forget: that there are many, many different ways to approach things, and that love and attention have their own unique velocities.

And I find myself watching things like this:

This beautiful short video documenting the reconstruction of a shattered sculpture unintentionally yet effortlessly seeps outside its immediate concerns, leaving me thinking about robotics, slow time, extreme medical intervention, dance, crime scene investigation, and even William Gibson's Bobby Chombo (the 'Spook Country' GPS geek who chalks out a grid of metre-wide squares on his warehouse floor and refuses to sleep in the same space twice...)

And the vimeo one? Well that isnt too difficult to type in yourself, is it...?

HOUSEKEEPING (HULME, 1990)

"We thought to engage in a very old-fashioned gesture, or one so modern as to still be, like music, in its infancy.  We acted according to a new complex mathematics, one dependent upon the tiniest initial tweaks..."

    -- Richard Powers.

“We laughed, but as little as we could, because we knew it was a solemn thing to burn a house down.”

    -- Marilyyne Robinson

In a dream 30 years ago an angel taught me the secret of photography. She said there are two essential rules: be sure to find the correct distance and always stay as close to the ground as possible.

And for a while I lived inside the wider ambience of those instructions. I turned my home into a soft-logic laboratory, an architectural equivalent of what in India is called ‘frugal engineering’. I had no furniture. The floors were covered with small sculptures and the debris of a nomadic intelligence (books and photocopied fragments, beautiful letters from my friends in Japan). I remember how the act of constantly stepping over things slowed me down and changed the rhythm of my thinking, making it more nuanced, attentive. I remember a Korean zen monk talking about the importance of ritual: he said, when you do something every day your manners become pure, your face shines. 

I remember photographing the books lying on the floor, the corners of rooms that had been ‘softened’ by small piles of cotton wool, subtitled tv images, the radiator in my bedroom. I made audio tapes with seventy minutes of silence wrapped around three or four songs. I understood that the object-world was about to start talking, and that we humans were about to stop doing so, out of a sense of balance, or harmony, or relief. I remember reading Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping” during those years. And when I re-read it recently I was amazed to see how much it has influenced my subsequent life. 

I remember waking up one morning with a small poem in my head, a tiny thing no bigger than an address on an envelope: "The young Tibetan monk comes west. He will walk through the whole of Western civilization as if it were snow." But isn't that what all poetry aspires to - being an address on an envelope? Anyway, I got the message and I started walking towards the address, towards my future self, beyond the limits of my imagination and rationale.

Suddenly thirty years pass.

But even now I dream of living in similar experimental spaces: a house with wi-fi but no running water, or running water but no internal doors. A three year solitary retreat - with webcam and ambient OS. Those Hulme years, electrified, reincarnated.

BUDDHAFIELD TALK

"Opinions Are Non Contemporary" (37 minutes)

A talk about confession, robots, Je Tsongkapa, walking towards China, and more...

RECEPTION (LETTER-BEINGS AND TIME)

"Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot 

prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it."

 -- Roland Barthes

"As an allegory rather than a utopia, an allusion rather than 

an illusion, desire was for a whole generation a guiding 

star. Today it is merely an observation satellite." 

-- Jean Baudrillard

10:17 pm. I receive a  text saying "document arriving in ten minutes #letterbeingsandtime"

She doesn't need to sign her name: our devices do that for us now. And our names are now our addresses. We exist as locations, not as histories. We appear as messages, as quieter and quieter messages, appearing and dísappearing like moments of weather inside the Times Square of our crowded and cool devices. Messages like snow, or the 21st century equivalent of snow, coded for anonymity and distance and endless love.

And then, ten minutes later, these arrive:

Gazing at the images in the darkness I find myself thinking about the notion of 'reception'. There's a passage in "Godel, Escher, Bach" where Hofstadter talks about how messages have to not only contain their message content but also a little bit of meta-message that announces the presence of a message. He talks about Bach records being sent out into space with the hope of some alien civilisation receiving them. Will they be able to recognise the 'envelopes' of satellite craft and metal box and LP record? Will they recognise the grooves as containing 'music'? Will they đeduce 'record player' and 'violin' and 'reverberation' and 'emotion'? And finally, will they get the message?

He also goes on to wonder whether a meteorite crashing into the craft, obliterating it in a moment, may be a way of playing Bach, of 'receiving the message' of Bach...

Sometimes I feel like that meteorite and sometimes I feel like Bach, or a museum of musical instruments, or some kid's first ever record player, or a museum on fire in the night of all nights, or a video of that conflagration found on Kafka's phone and destined for Felice but never sent. Sometimes I feel like the message and sometimes I feel like the envelope.

I picture her texting, standing by the window of her studio (where her phone lives, on the windowledge, safe from the surrounding chaos), and a line from a Richard Powers novel comes back to me: "her face was like someone texting a lover." Its not an infatuation, its just something I'm thinking, something to do with light. Faces and light. The human eye perceives less than one millionth of one percent of the electromagnetic spectrum - yet here we are: texting, visualising, painting, remembering, a communicative array somewhere between golden telepathy and meteorite crash. We're at home in the darkness. Its amazing.

HAND-SET AND GRETEL

"The tree that springs up again, the locusts that devour the crops, 

the cancer that beats others at its own game, the mullahs who dissolve the 

Persian empire, the Zionists who loosen the hold of the mullahs, the concrete 

in the power station that cracks, the acrylic blues that consume other 

pigments, the lion that does not follow the predictions of the oracle..." 

 -- Bruno Latour

"On Mushashi Plain / the voice of a deer / is one inch long."

-- Basho

She's just finished painting for the day. Conversation begins as she cleans brushes and I finish assembling a playlist for her on Youtube. We talk about envelopes and clothes and platforms of anonymity, The vastness of the envelope, the length of a sleeve, the voice of Basho's deer, ghosts without watches or pens, voice recognition software and voice pretend-not-to-recognise software, CVs that fit on the back of a postcard, self-confidence and stillness, smiles that explain everything. We talk about anonymity as ornament: eloquent, disciplined, intentional, restrained. And anonymity as maze, as lost voice and disinheritance.

She asks me ìf there are any book titles I envy, that I wish could've been mine. I mention two: 'Operation Wandering Soul," and an essay by Helene Cixous entitled 'Letter-Beings and Time.'

We talk about languages, all the possible languages. The enchanted ruins of old grammars and etymologies  The prosaic formality of book titles compared to the fractured chaos of DJ playlists. The illusory distances between Jane Austen and Twitter and the literature-to-come, Hansel and Gretel in the age of google maps. Fairy tales told by maths professors. 

(more of his cartoons can be found here)

She tells me about a disappointing date she went on recently. 'We met, but we đidn't meet each other and we đidn't meet the unknown.'

She asks me for an image of passion, something from the world of a buddhist monk. "'Walking through fields of snow I counted the snowflakes.' - that's close to what I mean by passion. I mean a true feeling, poised within íts unrepeatability, yet graceful and modest. Neither limited nor reckless. But most of all freedom from compulsion. Deep sadness - with thanks. That's passion."

"I'm listening, attentive, I'm translating, I'm advancing in the 

scaled-down meaning ... the ascent goes from the hell of noise to 

the smaller and smaller paradise of the said."

 - Michael Serres, "Biogea"

I tell her about John Cage's recollections of D T Suzuki, the Japanese zen teacher at Columbia University in the sixties. He used to teach with the window open in the summer and the classroom looked out over the runways of La Guardia airport. Whenever a plane took off or landed the roar of the engines would drown out hís words. But he never paused or raised his voice. He just continued with his lecture regardless, allowing some of íts content to be erased in this way. One time he mentioned some zen master 'who lived in the 8th or 9th century... or maybe the 10th... or perhaps the 11th, or 12th...'

I tell her about a remark by the American writer Marilynne Robinson that I can't get out of my head at the moment, about humanity's "odd capacity for destitution." She gives me one of her special smiles - a lighthouse beam from the cliff-edge of rash decisions - that says 'I know, I know,...but don't forget your breadcrumb map...'

(THEY NEVER REALLY STOPPED BUT) THERE THEY ARE

"As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go.  We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future -- the night of time.  If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are...  There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said."

- John Ashbery

Watching thís video I know I'll be coming back to this world again and again. I cant believe that such loneliness and speechlessness and cuteness can exist without eternity as one of its ingredients. So I know I'll be back: as silent witness, as over-eager commentator, and as goofball performer,.. I will be there. You try too

HIGH-SPEED-SUPER-SLOW

I try not to watch this video too often, in case its cybernetic otherworldly beauty starts to fade.

But really, if I could talk to you like this, if I could disappear into the high-speed-super-slow while miraculously protecting the desire to communicate, I would send you video-letters like this...

KAFKA'S PHONE

‘In the duel between yourself and the world, act as second to the world.”

--  Franz Kafka

“Those writing great private journals in the last century (i.e. the 20th) did not do so to know who they were, but kept them to know what they were turning into, in which unforeseeable direction catastrophe was taking them.”

--  Enrique Vila-Matas

I’m walking with the Vietnamese nuns in the evening coolness, They are telling me about how much they miss Hanoi, I say I miss Hanoi too and they laugh - they know I’ve never been there. They are trying to practice their English in between birdsong clusters from their native tongue. And I can’t say much. I have to stay within their tiny vocabulary. I feel kind of alone, but surrounded by love. The story of my life.

And then, walking beside me, is Kafka, engrossed in his mobile phone, sending text messages to Felice in the old-new language.

I want to send you an impossible video: of the nuns’ sing-song voices and shining faces and Kafka’s otherworldly silence and hís shining mobile phone. A beautiful, raggedy yet carefully edited two minute video that just about stays within all those borders so respected by Bolano: the borders of dreams, the misty borders of love and indifference, the borders of courage and fear, the golden borders of ethics.

And I would like to send it to you through the post, inside a smartphone designed by Kafka. Just the phone itself, alone in a box, without any letter of convoluted explanation, without any “hi there” or “I hope you like it." Just the device, like a halo without an angel, a device all alone, alone like Kafka, like each of Kafka’s stories. I dream more and more of living in such an explanation-less world. Opinions, explanations, addresses, histories - they’re all on the verge of disappearing.

Describing Rembrandt's last self-portrait, Genet expresses the feeling that 'it seems to be saying "I shall be so intelligent that even the wild animals will recognise my goodness."' I'm imagining a world, post-Facebook, post-Apple-Amazon-Microsoft, in which our devices - and therefore ourselves - behave like Rembrandt and Vermeer and Kafka and Jane Austen. I will arrive there - you try too.

DEATH POEM

when I die I wont let language get in my way

    

I'll switch off the lights In the aquarium of my dictionary

but I will always be thankful for the years spent walking the beaches

 gazing into the ocean of possible sentences

                                                                             (photo by Jerry Gordon)

ARCHITECTURE / THIRD / SEVENTH

We were talking about how a handful of words can fish a single video out of an ocean of millions and place it right at the top of the list of search results. About how Googling is a new form of 'address'. Location is no longer ascertainable through a fixed language protocol but through an exercise in lateral thinking where precision combines with a kind of 'scattergun' delivery. Location was now a dream-language.

We wanted to live like this: to live like an address, like these new addresses. To be precise and specific, coded and silent. To be hidden and lost and recollectable and findable. We wanted people not to know we existed, not to even think about us, yet be findable by anyone anywhere when the right time came.

We were talking like this, as I was looking for this video:



The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

INSECT CHORUSES / THE LITERATURE TO COME

“Through weakness or anxiety, to be serious or for effectiveness, we no longer know how, we are no longer capable of speaking in any but disjointed terms, in special, specialised, specious discourses, as physicists or politicians, as historians or pious believers, through equations, poems or prayers, as scientists or those in love, in bad French or exact algebra. None of these discourses can or wants to rejoin the other, to encounter it, recognise it… We claim to hold colloquia, but we speak there in these dislocated terms.”

     -- Michel Serres “Biogea”

"Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth and charm."
    -- Roberto Bolano "The Savage Detectives"


We were talking in her studio, alone together, wrapped in a hundred voices whose volumes have been turned down to almost zero, voices which, consequently, can be heard but not recorded. Something akin to the voices of insects, of tiny insects with revolutionary aspirations or a taste for opera. Insect choruses.

We were talking about imaginary unknowns: about cinema and cinema's 'little sister', about Bach and 'Bach squared'.

We talk about how Dante would send his poems into the world to go and greet his beloved, with instructions 'to talk to no-one except virtuous ladies along the way'. We talk about encryption, about how 'the door to the invisible has to be visible', about Godel and Claude Shannon, about encryption and love and secrecy, and semi-secrecy, and quarter- and sixteenth-secrecy. All the homeopathic secrecies that allow us to think we understand things.

We talk about reading a story first thing in the morning and then listening for every accidental quotation throughout the day.

We talk about the literature to come. About words with shadows and ambience. Words with data structures forming protective umbrellas over them. Words without dictionary definitions, that operate instead as handles and switches, as security clearance for other, noisier words. Words which gather like shoals of post-grammatical fish coded for music, tonality and absolute rhythm, inside pages that resemble lakeside ripples, or mobius strips, or icebergs.

That's how certain nights go in her studio, imagining the voices of a new Jane Austen, a new Emily Dickinson.

23 CANDLES

I'm riding the bus
between
rice paddies
and pachinko parlors.
their surfaces
shine like diamonds
powdered by
nuclear suns.
outside my window,
a heavy hauling-truck
rumbles past
and i effortlessly visualize
it plowing through
the thin skin of this side
of the bus, and each of us
in this line of seats
softly breaking
into colored smokes,
like 23 candles
beneath a few breaths.
conversely, i feel no
confidence to imagine
what the woman
on her cellphone
on the sidewalk
is talking about.


(poem and images by Jerry Gordon)

 

THERE ARE THINGS IN LIFE WE CANT DESIGN - TALK AT SDGC14 STOCKHOLM

Like everyone else speaking at the conference I was asked to begin my talk with an image showing what 'quality of life' meant to me. But I don't have a camera, so I decided to just use the opening slide of my talk. But i must admit, after seeing the various homely, friendly slides presented yesterday, I began to wonder how my one would look - because its a bit weird in comparison to those other slides! But as I began to look deeply into the image it began to be quite revealing.

The right side of the opening slide contains a photo of me at my friend's house, and in this picture she used an app which bleached the photo so it looks like I'm kind of disappearing, and actually that it what I'm trying to do: I'm trying to disappear into a 2500 year-old Buddhist tradition while staying in touch with my own 21st century Western culture.

And on the left is Vajrasattva and consort, who represents or symbolises the purifying power of the Buddha's enlightenment. This is one of my meditation practices. And I love the fact that this image is so radiant and clear. That what I am disappearing into is clearer and brighter than what I am coming out of.

So you can see that I'm reading a book in the photo. Whenever I have money I buy books. I love reading and I read all kinds of stuff. The memory of a map-making monk has to contain all kinds of oblique and wonderful things. And now I have a kindle, so I'm no longer limited to carrying just one or two books - electronic culture and homelessless go so well together! And I wanted to have fragments of that reading in the slides today. So I asked myself what would be a good quote to share with designers? And immediately I thought of this passage from William Gibson's "Spook Country":

Wouldn't you love to have a design brief like this? No explanations, no goals cited, no budgetary cap, absolute priority in any queue...? That's the kind of the space I live in as a Buddhist monk. Of course, I have my vows to live within, and my life is very limited in terms of money and devices and those kinds of things. But psychologically... no explanations, no goals...

The rest of the slides I wont be talking about - they will just accompany me, a kind of ambient voice, representing the angelology of words. An expression of ambient intimacy. And you don't have to understand these images, you just have to stand under them for a few moments.

So... the theme of my talk here is "There Are Things In Life We Cannot Design". And to lead into this let me tell you two stories.

The first one takes place in Tokyo in 1923. A huge earthquake has just devastated the city killing more than 100,000 people. And in the days immediately after the disaster a ten year old boy decides to take his six year old younger brother by the hand and lead him through the destroyed city, forcing him to witness the entire disaster: dead bodies floating in the river, traumatised survivors sitting motionless in the ruins. We don't know why he did this.

Later in life the elder brother sinks into a deep depression and eventually commits suicide. But the six year old, little Akira, grows up to become one of the greatest film makers in the history of cinema: Kurasawa Akira.

The second story concerns a zen master I had the wonderful experience of studying with in Japan in 2005. His name is Harada Sensei and he has been teaching quietly at the same monastery in Obama, Japan, for sixty years. The story I want to share with you today concerns another disaster: Japan's imminent collapse in the closing months of World War 2. Its 1945 and Harada-san is just a kid; he's seen so many people sacrifice their lives in the war and now he feels its his turn. He's 20 years old and he just wants to help his country. Those were the words he used in a talk one evening at the monastery: 'i just wanted to help my country'. The army and navy were more or less finished, as indeed was the airforce. All that remained were the kamikaze squads. So he volunteers to become a kamikaze pilot. That's a suicide bomber in our world, yes? We think of them simply as psychopaths. But I cant stop hearing the gentleness in his words: 'I just wanted to help my country...'

One of the students at the monastery had a copy of a photo of Harada-san and two fellow pilots having their last cup of Japanese sake before flying to their deaths. You should see their uniforms: they're just bits of rags sewn together - the poverty and desperation of the whole situation is obvious.

And then, one hour before he is due to fly, the war ends. Japan announces her surrender. He came so close to death and then it was taken away from him. (You can read his own teaching on this experience and how it permeated his thinking and future direction here.) But the experience was not in vain. After the war he met a zen master in Tokyo who invited him to train under his guidance. "I can see you've sacrificed your life once already and it didn't work. Now give it to me. Train at my temple and I promise you you will have a deep awakening within three years." He accepted, and a few years later he had his breakthrough. And for the past sixty years he has been teaching in his little temple on the north coast of Japan.

What is the purpose of these two stories? I want to say that there are things in life that you simply cannot design. I mean, if I asked you to design a filmmaker or a zen master how many of you would dare to include an earthquake or a war in your proposal? The obvious solution would be to build a film school, say, and that's fine as far as it goes but it doesn't touch the whole situation.

I remember a teacher of mine talking about life in a traditional Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Some of the monks commit to a 20+ year-long course of study. In the beginning they study things like Buddhist logic and epistemology, how the mind works, the rules governing a monk's life, things like that. And then, I'm not sure when exactly, maybe around year six, they start to really focus on the wisdom teachings, on prajnaparamita and madhyamaka philosophy. These are the teachings that can end suffering forever. You can't escape from samsara on the basis of ethics alone, or through the power of a concentrated state of mind in itself: you have to have wisdom. These teachings will be the basis for developing the mind of a Buddha. They are very, very precious. And before they start they take a break from their studies. Some of the monks go into retreat for six months, perform purification practices, make vast visualised offerings to create the spiritual energy in the mind necessary to have realisations. They make vast aspirational prayers just to be able to understand what they are about to study.

I don't know of a single university in the UK where the students pray just to be able to understand what they are about to study. In our modern scientific-materialist cultures we have this kind of abstract 'democratic' understanding of knowledge. We feel, basically, that we can understand anything and that all we have to do is receive the information. The acquisition of knowledge is imagined as a neutral and 'flattened' experience. "I'm here and my mind is functioning and I can basically understand anything. Just give me the information."

This is not how Buddhism understands the mind. The idea of - and I like to use a medieval spelling of the word to protect it, to return it to its lost world of meanings - of 'virtu' has (sic) virtually disappeared from our cognitive vocabulary. We have no idea that there are levels of consciousness and increasing subtleties of mind, and that working on the mind's radiance - its virtu and clarity and inner state of being - is just as important as the content of what that mind is trying to understand. We have no idea that the approach to knowledge contains ethical and ritual dimensions.

If we are going to talk seriously about quality of life, we have to have two things in place: we have to understand how reality works and we have to have an understanding of what a human being is capable of, what it can aspire to. If we don't understand these two things clearly and completely, in all their existential vastness, all attempts to end the sufferings of beings will ultimately fail. They may succeed within temporary and limited contexts but ultimately they will fail.

These two things have to embrace the entire existential context: what is visible and invisible and what is simply beyond the present limits of my imagination and rationale. In Buddhism we aren't just aspiring to make our little place in life more comfortable - we are aspiring and training to become the kind of being who no longer has to experience this kind of body: a body which has zero tolerance for pain, which is destined to grow old, sicken and die. My design brief as a Buddhist monk is to end suffering forever. For everyone, everywhere.

I'm running out of time now so I will leave you with one last slide, and I will leave it for you to decide for yourself just how seriously I would like you to take this suggestion. But again, when I first read it my inner radar went very quiet and affirmed the deep relevance of this remark and I sensed a wildness and an accuracy in its words. Here it is:

I would love you all to consider what it would mean to just say no to ... everything. To free yourself from the limitations of the world you operate in, the endless demands to perform, to meet deadlines, to find solutions to problems over and over again. I would like you to at least imagine, as a kind of ritual action that you perform occasionally, saying no everything you are entrapped by: the need to succeed, to have a career, to be accepted, to be understood (even by yourself).

There is something quietly nihilistic in being so blindly positive, of moving ever forwards with an invisible glass wall in front of you: namely,  a limited - even delusional - sense of what reality is. And there is something liberating and purifying in being willing to stay in the space of not-knowing for as long as it takes.  I can imagine the pressures you are under just to ... continue ... and I live with gratitude in the world(s) you design. But I really hope you get the chance to just ... do nothing, be nothing. Thank you.

The following link is to a collection of photos and sketchbook responses to my talk put together by the conference organisers, plus a video clip:
   http://conferences.service-design-network.org/sdgc14/things-life-cant-design/

HATSUNE MIKU: JAPAN'S FIRST HOLOGRAM POPSTAR

When I first saw this video (back in 2010) and saw Hatsune Miku appear on stage from her little black box I felt the world shifting its parameters. And then the song started and i heard a 4 minute description of the next 200 years, a song of straight prophesy and teasing ambiguity, of playfulness and arrogance and love, in lyrics that got stranger and stranger ..."Someday, on the hundred-thousandth birthday of my children, when you see them, for celebrating it, I thank you..."  Imagine "Terminator 12" as a kid's anime movie written by Julia Kristeva...

It is well known that photography is no longer considered a reliable source of evidence in a court of law, but soon reality itself may be considered unreliable.  We are not only moving into 'the robotic moment' (as Sherry Turkle calls it in her consistently engaging book entitled "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Other") but into a generalised post-human mish mash of technologies, platforms, protocols and speeds.

But reality doesn't have to be believable - it just has to be imaginable.  Reality is a reference point not a destination. A map, not the territory.

A lot fell into place for me recently when I dropped the burden of 'believing' in Buddhism and decided to simply imagine it instead.  Belief tends to have an agonistic dimension to it: "do I or do I not believe in ... karma?... rebirth?...my lama as a buddha?..."  We feel compelled to decide one way or another on a question that is actually outside our capacity to answer.  And we always believe too soon - we come to a 'conclusion' we haven't earned, and our world subtly closes down a little as a result.  Instead of remaining in the space of not-knowing (which is a beautiful, sacred place to be) we turn not-knowing into a fake knowing and the resulting turbulence affects everyone around us.

These days I simply 'imagine' Buddhism. I do my practices as naturally as I brush my teeth or watch the football.  I have faith in these practices, in the teachers who gave them to me and in the tradition that carried them to me through the centuries.  It is faith based on 30 years quiet engagement with the world of Buddhism.  It is not certain knowledge - it is faith, trust.  A kind of perfume radiating out of consistent experience.

After all, Buddhism isn't about the agonistics of belief as dogma, nor is it a collection of truth statements in an abstract world of philosophy.  It is about engaging with practices whose 'reality' is judged on a pragmatic quality: their ability to end suffering.  Of course, I am presenting this somewhat simplistically.  There is always an element of belief in our experience.  But so long as belief is recognised as belief and not as fact then the integrity of one's experience is protected.

I look forward to meeting Hatsune Miku's 'children' and celebrating their hundred-thousandth birthday with them.  I will arrive there - you try too.

THE ERA OF OVERPRODUCTION

We were talking in her studio, about living in The Era Of Overproduction.  I tell her about a guy who had been working on a computer program that would write 'new' Bach pieces. He'd finally got the program to a point where he was personally satisfied with it, so he hit 'start' before going to lunch one afternoon.  When he came back there were 4000 new Bach pieces on his laptop.  At CERN (the centre for nuclear research in Switzerland) there are experiments which generate 5000 encyclopedias of data per second.  It's said that every minute there's 32 hours of new footage uploaded to Youtube...

We talked about the impossibility of having anything remotely resembling an 'overview' of world literature or world cinema these days.  We sensed the presence of unbelievably perfect books in distant languages that would never be translated and which we would never read. Of beautiful articles on topics we had never consciously formulated even in our wildest reveries, in magazines that would go bust after a few issues without us ever hearing even their names.

We liked living in this world.  We liked the poverty and the richness of it.  But mainly the richness.  And at the same time we felt some strange tremor in our conscience urging us to .. to live in it more accurately ...

She's reading James Gleick's "Chaos". I see her highlights on the pages. I've just got time to share a few of  them with you but then I have to go...

At the national laboratory some physicists learned that their newest colleague was experimenting with 26 hour days, which meant that his waking schedule would slowly roll in and out of phase with theirs.  This bordered on strange, even in the Theoretical Division.

These scientists had experience with brilliance and with eccentricity.  They were hard to surprise.  But MItchell Feigenbaum was an unusual case.  He had exactly one published article to his name, and he was working on nothing that seemed to have any particular promise.  His hair was a ragged mane,

When he worked, he worked obsessively.  When he could not work, he walked and thought, day or night, and night was best of all.  The twenty four hour day seemed too constraining.  Nevertheless, his experiment in quasiperiodicity came to an end when he decided he could no longer bear waking to the setting sun, as had to happen every few days.

He thought about clouds, watching them from airplane windows (until his scientific travel privileges were officially suspended on grounds of overuse) or from the hiking trails of his laboratory.

Of course, the entire effort is to put oneself
Outside the ordinary range
Of what is called statistics.