In the cacophony of clicks, clatter, bells, and whistles that is social media, the art of conversation has been reduced to drive-by comments—swift, reckless, and as enriching as a fast-food binge, and usually as enjoyable as a carjacking. Our keyboards and smartphones are battlegrounds where restraint meets impulse, and, sadly, impulse often wins. Yet, in this era of digital verbosity, the Buddhist eightfold path offers an antidote to this affliction—a call to right speech remains ever relevant.

Right speech, one of the ethical imperatives of Buddhism, isn’t about censorship; it’s about intention, awareness, and the karmic ripple effect of words. Imagine if, before spewing a half-baked retort based on a headline skimmed with one eye on the television, we paused, breathed, and considered the weight of our words and the comment we felt mindlessly compelled to spew from our smartphones. Right speech isn’t an archaic muzzle but a revolutionary act of freedom from the knee-jerk need to be part of the noise, to throw your single penny into a fountain overflowing with coins.

Scroll through any comment section and you’ll witness a battleground of unbridled tongues (or fingers, in this case). Each comment is often more about the commenter’s eagerness to speak than any meaningful engagement with the article, and often telling others more about themselves than they realize. The endless stream of terse comments is mostly worthless idle chatter. (Did you read the article, Karen?) It’s as if the act of commenting is an end in and of itself—a noisy echo chamber where listening and understanding are casualties trampled underfoot by the rush to be heard and seen. 

Although it would fall under the warning against idle chatter, I’m not talking about your “So cute!” comment on Aunt Janet’s 400th picture of her cat’s lazy eye. The internet needs more lazy-eyed cat pictures and Aunt Janets. And in those instances, social media is working as it should—connecting us to family and friends scattered across a busy, noisy, and often harsh world.  

The drive to voice our opinion that I’m referencing, even when it’s half-formed, clashes with our Buddhist contemplative tradition, which teaches that every action—including speech—should arise from a place of awareness. What would happen if we treated every comment as if it were a pebble dropped in water, its ripples reaching far and wide? The same could be said for every social media post, but that is a whole other psychological rabbit hole.

Restraint as rebellion, attention as an act of revolution.

The precepts built around the teaching of right speech are not simply a means to shackle the unruly but a way to unchain ourselves from our basest impulses. By connecting with this moral imperative, we learn to choose words that enlighten, engage, and encourage. Our words may even ignite emotions in others or trouble them deeply, but they should come from a clear sense of awareness and intention. This isn’t control; it’s liberation—a path to awakened interaction that can turn the comment section from a ridiculous romper room of Pavlovian responses into a space for introspective dialogue that furthers the dharma (I can dream).

For those brave minds willing to swim against the rough rapids of hasty and, let’s say it—worthless—commenting, here’s a radical proposal: read the article. Fully. Reflect. Then—if you must—leave a comment that contributes, that respects the silent work of reading, and that honors the exchange of ideas. This is right speech for the digital age—restraint as rebellion, attention as an act of revolution.

The comment section is a microcosm of the world. It can be a wasteland of worthless words or a refuge of thoughtful exchange. By applying right speech, we can choose the latter. We can choose to be part of a solution that reveres silence as much as speaking, that values reflection over reaction, and that places understanding at the heart of communication. Or choose the wasteland of hungry ghosts wandering in a state of self-inflicted ignorance. Choice is the key operative here.

So the next time you’re about to launch into a comment, pause. Think. Reflect. Your words have power. Use them wisely and intentionally. This is right speech. Each moment, each action is a great sutra unfolding before us, teaching the dharma. Your digital footprint reveals the path you’re on, one comment at a time. And be careful! The author might be lurking and waiting to pounce—and you don’t want to be that Chad they call out with the burn, “Did you even read the article?”

The post Read Me! appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“Landed is about connection,” says Sagar Bhatt, creator of the new “mindful audio” app Landed. The app departs from other social media apps in that there’s no feed, no photos or videos, and no texting element. Rather, Landed connects users one-on-one via audio messages. Each week, on Sunday, users are prompted to share three things they were grateful for in the last week, and, if they want, to share a challenging experience. A few days later, they’ll receive an audio message from their randomly assigned match for the week, and then the matched pair can exchange audio for the rest of the week. At the end of each week, all records of the conversation disappear. Bhatt likened the temporary exchange to a “kind conversation with someone next to you on a plane.” 

We first connected with Bhatt last summer, when the app was in beta testing. Landed recently became available in the app store, so Tricycle sent some questions to Bhatt about Landed’s launch, user feedback, and the ephemeral nature of the app. 

Messaging apps are said to be more conducive to happiness than “feed” apps that deliver us a list of other people’s posts. How did you conceive of Landed, and what were you trying to avoid in its construction? I really had no intention of getting into tech. I was a comedian and mindfulness teacher in NYC, and, sometime during COVID, I had the idea while exchanging voice notes with a friend. I think quarantine allowed me to pursue threads of curiosity I normally wouldn’t. 

The concept was a slow experience that felt like a contrast to the endless scrolling in other apps. Certain elements evolved, but exchanging voice notes with a different match each week (and nothing else!) was the center from the beginning. I always liked voice notes because they felt personal, but you can do them on your own time. 

The gratitude portion came later. So did matching with a stranger. There’s great research about the benefits of talking to strangers, but it makes some people anxious. Starting the connection with gratitude warms up the whole enterprise. 

A customer service executive whose mantra is to let customers choose their channel—phone, email, text, in-person—said, “Everyone chooses text.” How has the response to audio messaging been? Overall, it’s been positive. For this format, voice makes sense. I agree text is better for efficiency, but Landed is about connection. The pauses, the whimsical asides, the inflection—that’s the point. Hearing a voice lends an immediate feeling of intimacy that some users value even more than the words. Someone told me that an audio message also feels intentional. He liked knowing someone took the time to record it.

That said, some people just aren’t going to like voice, which is fine. Landed isn’t for everyone.  

What about the response to the gratitude component? Has there been any skepticism? Folks with some familiarity take to it well. It helps that there’s so much research about the benefits of gratitude. But the most moving feedback I’ve received speaks to gratitude’s power as connective tissue. Several people have now mentioned how special it feels to listen to another human reflect on the things that bring them joy, comfort, and appreciation. It’s quite intimate and without pretense. 

Some people are skeptical, and I used to be one of them. I used to think gratitude was just a superficial self-help thing and not the real work. Over time, I began to understand that gratitude isn’t meant to push away discomfort but rather to help center us as we navigate it. In a way, gratitude brings us closer to the truth rather than further away, since there are so many small aspects of good fortune we tend to overlook (Two bites into lunch, I’m thinking about dinner). I try to include this in the messaging, and I also encourage people to be as specific and grounded as possible when noting their gratitude. 

Lastly, there’s the issue of gratitude feeling like homework. I’m fine with this too. Do some homework! It’s our preoccupation with the shiny and stimulating that led me to make Landed in the first place. Meditation can feel like homework too, but there is a deeper reward that emerges over time. 

What feedback have users of Landed given? What adjustments, if any, have you made since launch? If something is confusing, misleading, or overlooked, we fix that. Other feedback is more complex to negotiate, because certain elements being a turnoff isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Some people want the app to do more—maybe they want multiple matches, a text or picture component, or something else that would make it more engaging. The work here isn’t to change those things but to better communicate the purpose and values of the app, and then being OK with losing people. For example, our submission window opens every Sunday. So if you download Landed on a Wednesday, you have to wait four days to use it. If you can’t wait four days, farewell (with metta). 

Having a core user base that values the constraints helps me hold steady for now. Being 40 helps too. I no longer have this knee-jerk response to manipulate everything for max approval.

Part of the pitch of Landed is its ephemeral nature. But have you or users come across anything you would like to save? Reflecting on a nice walk opens up more real-time appreciation for the next walk. I think that’s the part that stays with you. 

With the matches, it’s harder to pin down what remains, but one user mentioned that even though her match disappears each week, she’s now more in touch with the part of her that is nurtured by human contact. 

More tangibly, some people do want to save their matches. Doing so could quickly make Landed another platform where we feel behind due to too many threads, so I’m holding off. 

What have been some of the challenges so far? Landed has many qualities. It’s minimalist, mindful, audio-only, you connect with a total stranger, you cultivate gratitude, it’s ephemeral. From a user perspective, it’s all a pretty singular experience, thankfully. But from a promotional standpoint, I sometimes don’t know where to start.

The other challenge is it’s self-funded, and I am not wealthy.  

Your business isn’t data harvesting or monetizing, but what have you learned about Landed users? Mindfulness practitioners have taken to this format the best.

⧫

Learn more about Landed here. 

The post A Nontoxic Social Media Experience appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A literary novelist, I find it amusing how my college students regard my practice of writing first drafts by hand as practically Victorian, as if I insist on also writing by candlelight when I could just switch on a desk lamp. Writing into spiral notebooks has been part of my creative process since I was 9 years old, and I don’t expect it to change now that I’m in my 50s. Not to mention Victorian novelists have had a huge influence on my work.

The Victorians didn’t have Twitter, but if they did, I bet Dickens would have, like me, hopped onto the platform as soon as he heard about it. Many of us who write about culture, politics, etc. found that you got wind of things faster there than anywhere. Regardless of political leanings, the people who observed via Twitter what was happening in America in the lead-up to the 2016 election were the ones not surprised that Trump won. That was the beauty of it: being exposed to a diversity of ideas, including ones that were shocking, racist, homophobic, and untrue. Being able to watch, in real time, the idolatrous worship of Donald Trump by evangelicals revealed much more of an inside peek into a certain demographic than any article in a newspaper could. And yet, the platform still aligned with my social justice leanings, especially when it provided people who often had no access to other tools a network by which to organize on the ground. The Arab Spring might not have happened without Twitter.

Then along came Elon Musk and the site became something else, entirely.

Buddhists know life is change. Tech likes to brag about “the singularity,” i.e., tech, especially artificial intelligence, skipping normal stages in nature and growing maybe even faster than the human ability to comprehend (and regulate) it. Adapting to fast-changing technology is necessary, but for someone whose creative process is adamantly low-tech, it is also a constant dilemma. What’s most important to me is hearing the still, small voice of the story, and it’s covered by the thinnest and brittlest of membranes, easily crackable by outside influences.  

When I decided to become a writer at age 9, I don’t think it was coincidental that I had also, despite growing up in a devoutly Christian household, started meditating and following Buddhist practice (even though I didn’t have the vocabulary to call it that). And, though sometimes an impatient person, I accept that art can’t be rushed. (My recently released novel took eighteen years to write.) Probably living in both worlds helped give me perspective: I enjoyed a childhood devoid of computers (where social media was two paper cups with a string stretched between them). I lived the messiness of Wite-out and was overjoyed by the first word-processing programs. But my tech use is selective and deliberate: I use older models of hardware and software that have fewer bells and whistles and visual distractions. I also use social media–blocking software. 

Yet social media like Twitter, when used mindfully, can enhance life—and work—and at one time, it did for me. 

One thing I particularly enjoyed about Twitter was how it provided writers from normally underrepresented populations—BIPOC, people who don’t live in New York City, people who are not related to the old money that populates much of top editorial tiers—access as a virtual ladder into, as writer Erin Sommers wrote in the Atlantic, the “walled garden” of publishing. 

While art is art, selling it so the artist can create a life is of course a business. A painter friend told me that many visual artists, including he, who work in large wall-size murals, are now creating work with the eye first to look good on Instagram. As shocking as it is to have technology impinge on practice like that, he said many artists liked the trade-off of a wider potential audience. Similarly, the platform has helped expand my audience, especially when I started writing essays. An op-ed I wrote about North Korea for the New York Times op-ed section occupied its “most read” list three days in a row, in its digital form, largely because people were sharing it on Twitter, plus it gave it longevity; three days after something comes out in a newspaper usually means it’s sitting under the cat food dish or in recycling, but my essay was not only being read, years later I still hear about it. 

Further, the platform’s functionality that allowed “live” tweeting, when everyone is on at the same time and tweeting to one another, organized by various hashtags embedded in the tweets, was a unique and powerful way to create a virtual town square. This hearkened back, ironically, to my childhood in the Midwest, where everyone watched the same news, saw the same huge events (the moon landing, Nixon’s impeachment, Dynasty’s cliffhanger finale), and talked about it the next day in the aisles of the Red Owl supermarket. My dim childhood memories of Walter Mondale’s 1984 campaign, using the Wendy’s ad’s “Where’s the beef” to call out Gary Hart’s thin policy proposals, gave way to live tweeting Biden out-yelling Trump when he said, “Shut up, man!” during the most recent presidential debate.  The singularity! 

But speaking of Trump, his ascension as a persona on Twitter was the first sign of how an unregulated version of the platform could be harmful to society. Instead of showing the kind of restraint and care expected of the highest office in the land, @POTUS and his minions, like Pompeo, the Secretary of State, tweeted “China virus” to millions of followers, immediately igniting hate that resulted in lethal violence against Asian Americans. Fake followers, a.k.a. “bots,” made Trump look more popular than he was, and could be programmed to tweet support or opposition to skew what was taken to be public opinion, or even to determine what kind of issues were deemed important, which affected the news, and even which ones affected the government itself. It was dismaying to watch friends arguing with what I was sure were bots scripted to spout racist ideology. It reminded me of Toni Morrison’s quote, “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” 

Was I being distracted from my work? During “Trump Twitter,” no matter what I wrote, there would be an automatic swarm of bots and actual racists and misogynists screaming at me about COVID-19 or being “a Marxist professor”—a miasma of hate so thick I would stop looking at replies altogether. And instead of the cute “fail whale” of early Twitter, when glitches happened on the operating system, circa 2016 a few times my entire feed switched over to Cyrillic, similar to how on Facebook, a glitch would expose endless lines of code—the guts of the soulless algorithms that I was paying so much time and attention to. 

People complain the nation is driven by people becoming radicalized after falling into loops of indoctrination; has anyone considered maybe that’s the point?

I became increasingly uncomfortable seeing harm potentiated, e.g.,  COVID-19 misinformation that undoubtedly killed Americans and attenuated the pandemic. Or the January 6 riot that had innocent, hardworking Georgia election workers fleeing for their lives. Communications platforms are woefully Wild West–type spaces, but there are federal laws governing hate speech and incitement of violence, and Twitter has its own terms of use, which, when they finally decided to enforce them, permanently suspended Trump for, among other things, spreading lies about the election and stirring up violence against the American government. 

Musk, after his acquisition, lost no time passing on a homophobic lie that turned the attack that had targeted the former Speaker of the House and injured her elderly husband instead into an encounter with a male prostitute. It seemed overnight Twitter became a toxic space generating more toxicity. He also wanted to single-handedly bring Trump back to the platform, as if it weren’t already bad enough.

Reader, I bailed. I deliberately violated a Musk mandate and got “permanently suspended,” same as Trump. If there’s a greater crime than attempting a coup, it’s changing your verified account’s name to “Elon Musk.” Musk was actually happy to have people even being able to buy blue “verified” badges and impersonate any person or company they wanted, but this self-styled “freedom” of speech is null and void if that name is Elon Musk. After more than a decade on the platform, and having amassed thousands of followers and that verified blue check, I decided to yank away my ladder to the walled garden. I knew it would take a hard stop both to execute and to give me clarity, versus hemming and hawing over the best way to delete my account. 

As I (Elon Musk Official) waited, I occupied Twitter with new eyes, noting how social media platforms have moved away from chronological feeds to algorithms that invisibly pick and choose “content.” TikTok literally aggregates a “for you page” (FYP). As much as the endless bits scrolling by seem random, or related to the people we follow, it’s more like an algorithmic funnel squeezing out lines of data given what we willingly provide. While doomscrolling in front of a screen, we are forming opinions, worldviews, and prejudices while being invisibly shaped by someone else’s (i.e., the person who created the algorithm) opinions, worldviews, and prejudices. People complain the nation is driven by people becoming radicalized after falling into loops of indoctrination; has anyone considered maybe that’s the point? Twitter is always suggesting “who to follow,” but based on what? Wisely, if you notice, @DalaiLama is one of the few accounts that has millions of followers but follows 0. 

How strange it was, maybe two weeks after I changed my account name to Elon Musk Official, to see “account not found”—as if I never existed on the platform. And also that some employee, or even Musk himself, was combing through even smaller accounts like mine.

After “death by Elon,” I wondered if there would be a withdrawal or a mourning period. When I write, I have developed a bad habit of toggling away to “check” Twitter (as if there were any consequences for missing something!). Suddenly there was no Twitter to check. I just stopped doing it. It was that easy. Testing myself by going to Twitter.com, now unplugged from the streams of my personal data, bored and confused rather than tempted me. Without the siren song of my personal algorithm dancing before my eyes, I was faced with an unorganized homepage, and suggestions of “who to follow,” which used to lead me to interesting or provocative thinkers, but now only two generic accounts: Elon Musk and The President. And seeing @ElonMusk listed before @POTUS resulted in my slamming down the lid of my laptop with a laugh. 

Reader, I wrote! I scribbled in notebooks. I wrote essays on my laptop without once toggling away (admittedly, I used to have software that would block Twitter for me, and save me from myself when I had immutable deadlines). Occasionally, I’d have pangs, thinking of how the loneliness of the long-distance writer could be assuaged by a few minutes of random conversation on Twitter or even working my brain a bit by cruising #econtwitter or #medtwitter.  In the three-dimensional world, I met people who exclaimed, “I follow you on Twitter! I love what you have to say!” and I thought about my audience, the “platform” of numbers that publishers take very seriously. Then I took my emotional temperature: I wasn’t too sad. Maybe I regretted not being able to say goodbye, but at least I did leave up my shingle:

But isn’t that going to be terrible for your career???? was asked at my Saturday night writing group after my private Twitter Armageddon. One writer even said they fantasized about having a blue check and had appealed and applied repeatedly to (old) Twitter to get one. But it made me realize that maybe Musk had been right to some degree when he called blue-check holders losers who put too much of their identity into a check. It made me wonder how much of my inner life and minutes of my time I did indeed lose merely being too wedded to the idea of being a “notable” person on Twitter.

And most notable in my real life (IRL) is reclaiming my time. It’s a lot. Not just the time on Twitter but also the time I spent framing tweets in my head. When that time might be better used jotting down thoughts in my notebook for potential writing ideas, to put it back into my creative bank rather than letting a for-profit platform have it for free. 

Giving up Twitter also gave me my reading life back. If writing comes from my heart and brain, reading is the respiratory system that catches the oxygen that keeps it all going. My day had been so fragmented that often, instead of sitting down to read, I’d fill five- or ten-minute gaps with tweeting and scrolling through articles I found on Twitter—fragments that, in aggregate, were pushing out reading time. I’m not talking about scrolling, but deep reading. Stanford University Center for Teaching and Learning defines it as reading that “uses higher-order cognitive skills such as the ability to analyze, synthesize, solve problems and reflect on preexisting knowledge.” When you read this way, you are building on everything you’ve read before, making connections. Deep reading isn’t just for writers; it’s for anyone who wants to live a rich life.

Digital reading is reading, but scrolling and other elements encourage scattered attention—hyperlinks, ads blinking in the corners. 

My current published novel is 450 pages (down from more than 800 when it was sold). That’s a lot of words, themes, and characters to keep track of. Reviewers have praised its complex, time-traveling, five-part structure, but intuiting and building this structure isn’t possible in a brain trained to go whichever way the digital winds blow. I remember bolting upright in the middle of the night, seized with anxiety that I couldn’t hold my 850-page novel in my head all at once. And I do think this anxiety was a subconscious protest of the erosion of my attention. But it’s also notable that the 850-page draft was completed before Twitter. I can’t help wondering what would have happened if I’d started it after I was so busy on Twitter. Would the pull of cat videos and shaking my virtual fist at Trump have drained motivation from the tough and delicate process of building the infrastructure of a first draft?  

Further, to me, creativity is a closed system. To talk about it with someone releases energy, but also removes it from the system. I don’t create art for any other reason except that the urge to express myself has built up a pressure point where it’s worse not to. As novelist Thomas Mann has famously pointed out, a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. Creating can be frustrating and painful, and if there is any sort of motivation, “I have to” is the primary one for me, and, I suspect, others. Twitter often provided too easy an out from the actual work of creation. 

Deep reading isn’t just for writers; it’s for anyone who wants to live a rich life.

I also found myself losing taste for all social media, going back to old pre-internet observant patterns, like staring at a succulent on my desk. For a science article, I underwent a procedure called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which trains the brain in healthy focus, similar to brain activity seen in Buddhist monks, but of course speeded up and requiring no effort other than sitting in the chair (one CEO who indulged in this $12,000 treatment gleefully explained it to me as “meditation for lazy people”). Most people who were paying for the treatment wanted to pep up their slowing brains while controlling anxiety. They were almost all corporate people and one infamous actor, all male, and the corporate types told me they were trying this to “remain competitive” in a youth market. But me? My baseline qualitative EEG revealed that I already had fast-moving alpha waves met by slow, deep pools of coolness (the average American brain is dominated by “hot” and “fast” waves, which equals  anxiety), and the scientist chuckled in wonder, telling me that with such little room for improvement, it was unlikely I’d feel any effects for the purposes of my piece.

My first brain-boosting treatment went through lunchtime, so on the way home I stopped at a health food store for a package of Greek dolmas, a favorite easy-to-eat snack. Eating back at the apartment, I had a moment where the taste of the grape leaf, the grainy texture of the seasoned rice, and heady scent of the olive oil melded with the slant of sun coming in the apartment window to put me in an almost druglike ten seconds of transcendence. Then the dolmas went back to tasting, well, like they always do. I couldn’t tell if this was my imagination, but I reported it to the TMS doctor-scientist who said, yes, this effect was called “sharpening”: a subtle but noticeable change in intensity of sensory input, much like being on a microdose of psilocybin mushrooms. Previous to TMS,  things like shrooms or LSD or repetitive physical movements like whirling dervishes, or long, slow meditation were one of the few ways people could reach this kind of religious ecstasy. 

As Twitter recedes in my mental map of priorities, I can look over the landscape of my online life with some objectivity. During the 2016 and 2020 election season, I was posting five or more times a day, especially if I was outraged, clicking on links as frantically as a pigeon in a Skinner box. I also noted that when I was writing or thinking through tough things, I tweeted a lot. I probably told myself I was salubriously blowing off steam, filling up interstitial pieces of time in my day in a positive way, i.e., building up my self-brand (I cringe watching myself write these words). But it’s undeniable that a day when I spent a lot of time on Twitter, whether I was excited that Marisa Tomei followed me, or angry at the newest Trump malarkey, left me feeling depleted. Not tired in the way one does after a productive day of work. More like deficient, as if I hadn’t had enough time to read that day, too much of my psyche and cognitive capacity sucked into 140-word tweets. Instead of sitting with my thoughts, I had let them be carried away in whatever flotsam and jetsam that was enraging or engaging everyone that day. I noticed that instead of facing whatever was bothering me, especially if it was inchoate, unprocessed, I would doomscroll and get mad at Trump. 

It’s been a month now. Do I miss it? Not really. Does it miss me? Of course not: it’s software.  Will my career suffer for it? I guess it depends on what you call my career.  

However: I’ve read four long novels, when normally I can barely manage a novel a month. My internet time dropped so precipitously my phone’s algorithm sent me a worried notice. I felt OK again getting “lost” in a book, as one should. I’ve finished three 3,000-word essays (four including this one), when, with my normal schedule as a parent and a college professor, this is four times my usual. Yes, I am writing more. 

Previously, I felt it a kind of duty to tweet out my resistance to social injustice, hypocrisy, and the manipulations of late-stage capitalism. But I am realizing I was manipulated, too. I am a professional writer. So why was I giving away hours of my writing to a corporation run by a megalomaniac who is using the platform to amplify antisocial messages? As digital technology experts have pointed out, the internet has grown, but in the absence of “algorithmic governance,” there’s no central authority regulating or keeping tabs on what algorithms are doing to us. 

Buddhism helps us see that all things are interconnected. Twitter in its current state is tearing away at those connections. Musk’s irresponsibility and incompetence (including losing, through his terrible management, key staff responsible for user security and compliance) have made the platform unsafe. Friends report that shocking hate tweets on the new “freedom of speech according to Musk” platform have proliferated like mushrooms. The tech world has us brainwashed that “disruption” is progress, but no, often it’s just chaos. 

Early computer scientist John von Neumann (born János Lajos) was the first to use the word “singularity” in the context of technology, especially artificial intelligence, in the 1950s. Tech people subsequently view singularity as rocketing us into some kind of Jetsons-like future—not unlike half of Elon Musk’s aspirational ideas—or curing all diseases so people (rich people at least) will live forever. Who needs Darwinism when you can have your brain electromagnetically sharpened for $12K?  However, natural selection takes generations to create adaptive traits, and it leans toward improving survival, while artificial intelligence has no mandate to work to improve human life.  Similarly, working on my book, even just a little bit each day, creates progress over time. Being on Twitter looks the same—but no matter how long I sit on Twitter, I’ll never have a finished book at the end of it.

♦

Listen to Marie Myung-Ok Lee discussing her book,The Evening Hero, here on Tricycle Talks.

The post The Incredible Lightness of Quitting Twitter appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Imagine a social media platform that had nothing to do with status or performance. One that you didn’t mindlessly check more than you check in with yourself, and one that didn’t leave you self-critical or angry at the world every time you signed off. A new app called Landed, currently in beta-testing, aims to achieve just that. 

Landed connects users one-on-one via a specific and limited course of action: sending audio messages back and forth. The first message is always a response to the prompt, “Name three things you were grateful for in the last week.” Users are also given the option to share a challenging experience. They log in on Sunday and have until Monday at 8 p.m. in their local time zone to submit their message. On Tuesday, they’ll receive an audio message from their randomly assigned match for the week. After that, the matched pair can act like digital penpals, sending voice messages back and forth for the rest of the week, if they choose. On Sunday, all records of the conversation disappear. 

“It’s a little bit Buddhist in the way that you’re not holding on to this person for any type of future relationship. Nor do you have a past with this person,” says Sagar Bhatt, the app’s creator. Bhatt likens the exchange to a conversation between two people on a plane—a temporary relationship that usually ends upon arrival. Many studies have concluded that talking to strangers can be good for one’s well-being; Landed taps into that but takes things one step further by removing as many distractions as possible.

Without any visuals such as buttons or the option to follow someone, the app is intended to foster attention and personal connection. Bhatt didn’t necessarily set out to launch a mindfulness app, but in its own way, Landed kind of is one. Landed is also, importantly, an app for practicing gratitude. 

“A true gratitude practice, when done skillfully, brings you closer to the truth, rather than further away from it, because we tend to have a negativity bias,” Bhatt explains. “Our view of our own well-being often dwells on envy, resentment, everything we don’t have, and everything that’s going wrong. We often overlook the very basic things that are nourishing us.”

Gratitude is also an effective way to connect.

“If left to our own devices, we don’t always know how to talk to each other,” Bhatt says. The hope is that Landed’s simple instructions to focus on gratitude, combined with the absence of other features, will cut through any pretense and give users a more direct path of contact with one another.

As Bhatt puts it, “You’re not getting someone’s opinion, you’re not getting someone’s take on the news, you’re not getting someone’s performance.” 

Bhatt, who isn’t a developer but a comedian by trade, happens to know something about performance. But when he started opening up to audiences on stage and exploring some of his own anxiety and self-defeating impulses, as he says, he became increasingly interested in moving away from performing and closer to deepening his internal exploration. A mindfulness practitioner for ten years at that point, he decided to do a teacher training program with the Interdependence Project in New York City. In January 2021, he launched a podcast called The Anxiety Lab about how mindfulness and Buddhist wisdom can help relieve anxiety, and during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he started cooking up the idea for Landed. It’s his “latest exploration of ideas,” as he puts it.

A fan of audio messages as a medium, Bhatt prefers voice notes to text messages and is known to send the former back and forth with friends. “I always feel like there’s so much more of me that the person is receiving than if I’m just sending a text. It’s the pauses, the awkwardness, the subtleties, the stumbling around—that’s when you’re really contacting someone’s humaneness.”

When he conceived of an app that would send voice messages back and forth between individuals, he tried out his idea by sending anonymous messages from one friend to another. “The response was electric,” he recalls. Next, he thought about starting with a gratitude prompt, and he’s been Beta-testing his app ever since. 

I tried out Landed last week, and as someone who admittedly resists conversations with strangers, I wasn’t sure how I’d respond. On Sunday, when I answered the prompt, I was grateful, as it were, to be held accountable for a gratitude practice I’ve always aspired to maintain. When I listened to my match’s audio message on Tuesday, I was surprised to find so much value in hearing someone else’s list. It was an unexpected level I hadn’t really considered ahead of time, but it was an immediate mood booster and made me feel grateful all over again. When my match followed up with another message, I didn’t respond right away. I didn’t want to. But over the course of the day I felt more and more intrigued and gave it a go. I may not continue to converse with matches, but I’m already looking forward to sharing and receiving messages of gratitude next week. The continued conversation is a bonus option, and maybe I’ll feel more talkative next week. But the initial recitation and receival of gratitude is enough; it’s quite powerful on its own. 

It was liberating and even a little disorienting to try a social or messaging app that doesn’t measure anything or incentivize the construction of a self-image. “The Buddhist teaching that clinging to the self causes suffering is so apparent in most social media dynamics, where we get to present a false self to another person, then believe our false self,” Bhatt says. That Landed manages to avoid that reification of the self while simultaneously fostering personal connection is a feat. It’s one for which users, like my match for the week, who made a point of saying as much, will be grateful.

The post Landed, a New Social Media App Based on Gratitude, Fosters Personal Connection appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For a video to inspire a pause in the doomscroll, it has to be pretty powerful—eye-catching at a minimum and unique enough to convince the inundated viewer that among the millions of videos available on any given platform, this one is not to be missed. Yuki Kawae, a designer with no formal filming or video editing experience, and an aversion to social media at that, has cracked the code with his beautiful Zen garden videos. Just ask his 459,000 Instagram followers and 48,000 YouTube followers. After sharing his first video in November 2019, Kawae has amassed an impressive and mesmerizing library of meditative videos that have been as helpful for his own wellbeing as he hopes they are for other people. Tricycle caught up with the self-taught video artist to learn more about the inspiration behind his Zen gardens and the process behind them. 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Yuki Kawae (@yukikawae)

When did you start building Zen gardens? And why? In the fall of 2019, even before the pandemic, the notion of “you should be doing this” or “you should have this” was getting too overwhelming. I felt that the world was getting more noisy with social media, who went where, who has what, and what one “must” do to “succeed.” In today’s world, the idea of what ideal success looks like is inserted into our daily lives whether we like it or not. I was overthinking everything and my mind was clouded with thoughts because many of the expectations—like buying a home—were hard to achieve.  

In the midst of all this, I realized that when I was watering or pruning our house plants, my mind was clear and I had no other thoughts but to take care of the plants. That’s when I started dreaming of having a Zen garden. A house plant is just an object in a room, yet it can bring such calmness. I thought that being immersed in a garden would be a quite a different experience.

Although I would have loved to make a garden, housing prices in the San Francisco Bay Area are quite crazy. We don’t have a home or a yard yet. I don’t like to wait so I made a small coffee table-sized Zen garden. That was the starting point of everything. 

It was a blessing in disguise to lack something I desired because I was able to find something else that was as rewarding—perhaps even more so. I quickly understood that focusing on the movement made my mind clear. If I am thinking about other things, I mess up the pattern. And it is not so much the end product that is important; it is the process that led me to experience the clear mindedness. 

Sand patterns are temporary, just like many things in life. Also, having a purpose to make something is also a meditative process, which I believe can be achieved by many things such as music, exercise, and cooking. 

Your videos are mesmerizing. Do you have a background in filmmaking? Not at all, I don’t have a background in filmmaking. Everything is self-taught. The first camera I started with was given to me by a friend. It was a very old DSLR, but it still worked great. I learned how to use the camera by asking friends or researching online. I taught myself how to film and edit. 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Yuki Kawae (@yukikawae)

Do you have a Buddhist practice or connection to Buddhism? Yes, or at least I like to believe so. Growing up in the countryside of Kyoto, Japan, I experienced Buddhism embedded in everyday culture even though we didn’t talk about religion much. I truly enjoy all the philosophy I learn from Buddhism and apply it when reflecting back on my childhood and also in approaching my current situation in life. However, I do like learning from all religions. Every religion has some nice wisdom to learn from. 

It is quite amazing how the mind and body can do what only thoughts can’t. By physically working on movement you come up with a solution that you might never have thought of.

It’s difficult to tell from the videos themselves. How big are your Zen gardens? Do you use the same one or do you have a collection? The very first one (the smallest one) was one foot by two feet. Then I made one that was two feet by seven feet. Then we had to move, and that dimension didn’t fit into the new apartment, so I built another one that is three feet by five feet. 

Where did you learn the art of building Zen gardens? This is also self-taught. For the garden boxes I just use a handsaw, nails, and glue. But the rakes are a little bit more complicated. They’re also handmade but each has its own concept. Some are meant to explore a geometry pattern, whereas others are more about texture or even sound. All the patterns are found through exploring the options and revising the rakes to create a composition that feels completed. I don’t reference books or people. But I focus on math and I do accurate measurements to make sure the patterns and composition work well. I hand-make everything. 

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Yuki Kawae (@yukikawae)

What inspires each design? Sometimes it is very geometry-driven, whereas others are more about calming movements. For example, I am very interested in the number 108. Chants and ceremonial gongs are repeated 108 times, mala or prayer beads are in rows of 108, and I believe more philosophies reference this number. What is interesting to me is that the number is not only important in religion but also in geometry. If you divide a circle into 108 pieces, and if you create a perfect triangle within the same circle, the three points equally divide the 108 pieces. In other words, if you divide a circle in multiples of the three, triangle points lay exactly on those divisions. 

This is where I started the “hexagon studies” series on my Instagram page. A design that references a hexagon always works itself out in a cycle. It’s hard to describe but you can find the “Geometry Study – Hexagon” series on my page. The pattern always closes itself. 

Another reason I find geometry so interesting is that we currently live in such an opinionated world. There are so many opinions that separate groups, religions, politics, countries etc. 

However, no one can argue with geometry because geometry is an absolute honest truth. A circle is a circle and there is nothing more or less. I hope that people see that we can agree on something and that that can lead to peaceful solutions.

 

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Yuki Kawae (@yukikawae)

Do you always post the first take? I usually practice casually, kind of like taking a stroll or walk. Sometimes I have a concept, sometimes I’m just really playing around. Then something usually emerges. It is quite amazing how the mind and body can do what only thoughts can’t. By physically working on movement you come up with a solution that you might never have thought of. Then I modify the rake according to the revision and I fix the composition and steps. Once I feel it is good, I film. Sometimes it only needs a first take. But sometimes it needs five. If I keep messing up more than five, there is something that needs to be reworked or doesn’t work, and I just move on to another pattern or concept. 

Do you work on Zen gardens full time or is this a side project for you? This is just a hobby! Because I found social media to be noisy and overwhelming, I just wanted my page to be a visual meditation and nothing else. So I don’t do ads or sponsorships. My full time job is as a designer. Zen garden practice is just for my own wellbeing. 

Lastly, I just want to add that I am glad to hear people find my videos helpful in the midst of world news. I tend to stress quite a lot and am an over thinker, so I can empathize how stress can affect everyone’s mindset. I am just glad that these can help even a little bit. 

The post These Mesmerizing Zen Garden Videos Offer a Calming Antidote to Your Doomscrolling appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What are you attending to at this very moment? What—or who—were you attending to before this? Perhaps more importantly, what was the quality of your attention? Were you fully aware and present, or partially distracted and disengaged?

These are the types of contemplative questions I ask students in my Asian religions course. Contemplative pedagogy incorporates stillness, silence, mindfulness, attention, reflection, and self-inquiry into teaching and learning, helping students build their attention, deepen their levels of introspection, and strengthen their sense of connection. Although some instructors incorporate contemplative practices directly from religious traditions, because I teach at a public university, I’ve designed what I call “analogous activities,” which are similar to religious practices, but secular and relatively simple to perform. 

My students practice social rituals when they’re learning about Confucianism; stillness and sitting in nature when learning about the Daoist practices of “fasting the mind;” social media fasts when learning about Hindu ascetic practices; singing when learning about Sikh devotional hymns; mindfulness when learning about Buddhist meditation; and nonviolent communication when learning about Jainism. They intentionally engage in the analogous activity for several days, journal about how it affects them and their relationships with others, and write a reflection that brings their experience into dialogue with their understanding of the respective tradition. My research has shown that engaging in such activities develops my students’ moral attention because it disrupts their fixation on themselves and heightens their awareness of others. Most students observe that their relationships with other people improve, and they identify digital technologies as impediments to their interpersonal interactions. 

Continuous Partial Attention

Technology allows for constant access to a variety of media through a range of digital devices, and this impacts the way some students manage their attention. They tend toward “continuous partial attention,” a phrase coined by tech writer Linda Stone that describes the process of paying simultaneous attention to numerous sources of information, but on a superficial level. Continuous partial attention is motivated by the desire to continuously connect and be connected in an effort not to miss anything. As Stone says, “It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior, and it involves an artificial sense of constant crisis.” Continuous partial attention can also impede my students’ ability to perform tasks requiring undivided attention.

This continuous partial attention—and resulting tendency to be less attentive to the people surrounding them—poses considerable obstacles to my students’ capacity for moral attention, or perceiving people, environments, and situations in all of their complexity and particularity. French political thinker, social activist, and essayist Simone Weil called moral attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” In Waiting for God, a collection of essays published after her death, Weil writes, “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object…Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” Moral attention involves suspending our thoughts so that we can actively receive something or someone else. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum has emphasized, moral attention requires that one be “finely aware and richly responsible.” She writes, “We live amid bewildering complexities. Obtuseness and refusal of vision are our besetting vices. Responsible lucidity can be wrestled from that darkness only by painful vigilant effort, the intense scrutiny of particulars. Our highest and hardest task is to make ourselves people ‘on whom nothing is lost.’” In other words, moral attention requires considerable effort and concentration on the particularity of people and situations—something that continuous partial attention undermines. By disrupting their habitual engagement with digital devices, analogous activities allow my students to develop their capacity for moral attention.

Social Rituals

The social ritual activity instructs students to intentionally perform five social rituals for one week, including opening doors for others or letting them into traffic, saying please and thank you, and looking people in the eyes when they talk to them. Although most social rituals come naturally to students, they have admitted having difficulty and experiencing discomfort when maintaining eye contact with other people because it requires concentration and focus. Reflecting on their experience, however, they report feeling a greater sense of transparency and presence—a feeling that became particularly palpable for students who committed to not using their phones while conversing with others. Several students have admitted that although it was initially difficult to not look at their phones, it got easier. When they provided their full attention to the other person by making eye contact, they were showing respect through their nonverbal behavior. One student identified it as a “generational concern.” “Whether users are scrolling through social media or texting friends, cell phones have a tendency to be an intruder during face-to-face conversation.” Burying her cell phone in her bag, she noted how she found herself engaging in deeper conversation, but also admitted feeling annoyed when the other person checked her phone. She was not alone—dozens of students admitted feeling disappointed when others failed to similarly observe such social rituals.

Students often discuss the adverse impact that digital devices have on their interactions with other people. After performing the “social rituals” one student wrote, “It is easy to assume that by communicating through my phone, I am participating in a community. However, the more direct relationship to the world is to the people physically around me, and I owe them the respect that such friendship deserves.” Some students realized that they previously prioritized those in their online networks rather than people around them. Some went further and identified their phones as obstacles for interpersonal relationships. As one student wrote, “I wasn’t as zoned in on my phone and actually interacted with others more than I normally would.” Another student remarked, “By giving my full attention, I realized that this strengthens relationships and can create greater harmony.” In this way, they brought their experience into dialogue with Confucian notions of humaneness and harmony, and recognized the ethical impact of attention. They identified digital distraction as endemic to those of their generation. “I noticed that most people hold doors open for people or say please and thank you, but not many people really pay attention to their friends when they have a conversation,” another student wrote. “They are usually multitasking by talking to friends and checking social media on their phones.” 

Stillness

The stillness activity challenges my students’ tendency to be busy, productive, and constantly connected. As students learn about Daoist traditions, they engage in non-purposeful action—sitting quietly in nature or otherwise being still—for at least thirty minutes a day for a week. They reflect on their experience, including the impact it had on themselves and the responses they noted from others. Students choose various ways to engage in stillness such as sitting at the beach watching the ocean, sitting on the balconies of their apartment, swinging in a hammock, or sitting and drinking tea. Almost all of the students say they thought it would be an easy practice, but instead they find it incredibly challenging. 

For many students, the experience of solitude is novel: “It was like thirty minutes of just being with myself uninterrupted by anything. I’m alone a lot, but there’s always some sort of device distracting me,” one student wrote after trying this practice. Many noticed that their habitual instinct was to reach for their phone when they were alone. As one student wrote, “I sat there for a solid minute before I automatically reached for my phone. . . I found one of the hardest struggles was to be disconnected from the world of the internet. After this, I have become conscious of the amount of time that I am constantly connected to my phone and to the latest buzzes constantly changing my thinking and what I am doing.” They acknowledge their tendency to disrupt what they are doing in order to check text messages and notifications on their phone, and how their minds resisted not doing anything. As one student remarked, “As millennials, we need to be constantly stimulated by the next entertaining thing—silence and ‘doing nothing’ are boring. . . Doing nothing has proven to do a lot more than worrying and stressing about the minuscule and trivial parts of life.” 

Although they struggle on the first day, most students eventually appreciate the value of stillness and how it gives them a broader perspective on their lives. One student wrote, “My mind was in complete control, and it had my full, undivided attention, which is a very unique experience.” Instead of being partially aware, the student appreciated how stillness allowed for complete and undivided attention.

Social Media Fasting

Students become especially aware of the distractions of digital devices when they engage in a social media fast, during which they avoid logging into social media or browsing the internet. Often students resort to deleting social media apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook from their phones, and even after deleting them they still find themselves reaching for their phones to look for updates. They describe feeling disconnected from their peers because they can’t “check in” to restaurants through Facebook or upload pictures of their meals to Instagram, and they struggle with constant cravings to be informed of what others are doing. Recalling the overwhelming and over-stimulating effects of continuous partial attention, students describe feeling anxious when withdrawing from social media. They remark how novel it is to make “actual jokes and laugh at things that people are saying in front of me” as opposed to scrolling through funny videos on Facebook. They describe the exercise as a process of de- and re-habituation. 

Many students also find it novel that they can decide whether or not to engage with social media. When they reflect on their experience, they often bring it into dialogue with Hindu ascetic ideals of discipline, self-control, and taming the ego. They describe the social media fast as an opportunity to gain back the control that social media had over them.

Many students admit to an “obsessive relationship with social media” and struggling with various types of discomfort and anxiety during the social media fast, especially the “fear of missing out,” known as FOMO, which captures the “artificial sense of constant crisis” that Stone associates with excessive continuous partial attention. Downtime is usually spent checking the latest Instagram pictures, Facebook posts, or Twitter updates, and the social media fast heightens students’ awareness of a dependency on their digital devices. As one student remarked, “I found it especially hard when waiting for class to start because I wasn’t sure what to do and I just felt very awkward and uncomfortable. It amazed me how much [I], as well as recent generations, rely on technology. [We] are constantly glued to our phones and computers instead of actually interacting with people.” 

Another student, who described initially experiencing great FOMO after a social media fast, wrote, “By not being nearly as tied down by my smartphone or laptop all day, I was able to experience reality in entirely different ways, whether it was asking friends in face-to-face communication what social events were going on later that day or using words instead of texts to communicate with people.” The student disciplined his desires, refocused his attention to people around him, and discovered a new way of engaging with the world.

Paying Attention 

It’s clear that the analogous activities encourage the development of moral attention, allowing students to suspend thought and forget themselves, to actively receive others, to care for the particulars of others, and to increase their sensory concentration, all of which constitute crucial elements of moral attention. One student wrote after a social ritual activity, “During the course of this exercise, I was more aware of my surroundings. I was able to be mindful of my actions and how they are perceived by others.” Many students have found that the stillness activity heightened their sense of hearing, which shifted their focus away from themselves and their own thoughts. One student described how she became keenly aware of birds chirping, the wind blowing, and people laughing, and wrote, “This was a little hard for me, only because when you yourself are so quiet, the noises that surround you become extremely loud and noticeable.” Another student wrote, “One can begin to see the world for what it is, rather than overanalyzing and worrying about everything.” 

Another wrote, “I was able to pay attention to little things within the environment like ants crawling on the bench and squirrels running up trees.” Another student wrote, “Watching the raindrops striking the pavement and the wind shaking the trees, I thought of myself as a squirrel or some other animal jumping between the rapidly swaying branches and quickly falling raindrops. I saw other people pass from time to time, and I thought about what lives they may have been living, and what it would be like to be them.” 

Paying attention to the details—the wind, rain, and squirrels—led the student to consider the perspectives and experiences of others. This was echoed in yet another student who wrote, “This practice has made me realize that there are different ways of seeing and reacting to things. It really emphasized, to me, that there are different ways of thinking; intellectual and rational thinking is not always right or the best.” When students allowed their minds to wander more freely, they discovered greater care and concern for others.

In all these ways, the so-called analogous activities prompt students to suspend thought, become receptive, and focus their attention on others. They challenge conventional thinking and, perhaps more importantly, conventional habits tied to digital devices that can impinge on moral attention. 

From a Buddhist perspective, such activities are important because they reveal the true nature of reality. They lay bare the three characteristics of existence: no-self, suffering, and impermanence. When we suspend thoughts that ordinarily lead us to fixate on ourselves, and instead become receptive and attuned to others and our surroundings, we become more sensitive to universal experiences of suffering and change. As Weil writes, “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing. . . It is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this.” 

♦

This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.

The post How to Hone Moral Attention—and Why It’s So Important   appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Since 2013, Diego Perez has posted his poetry on his Instagram account—no fancy fonts, filters, or images of the Buddha, just simple black type on a white background. Perez, 34, better known by his pen name, Yung Pueblo (“young people”), was born in Ecuador and grew up in Boston. He began practicing Vipassana meditation as taught by S. N. Goenka shortly after graduating from college and getting clean from drugs and alcohol. His writing career—and viral poems—soon followed.

Tricycle recently spoke with Perez about his new book, Clarity and Connection, his pandemic practice, the challenge of connecting in a divisive era, the limitations of social media, and what comes next for him.

Tell me about your writing process for Clarity and Connection. How did you settle on the themes of relationships and self-awareness? The process for this book was very slow, very intentional. I’ve been slowly writing since I released my last book [Inward] in 2018. And then in 2020 when the pandemic started, I was like “Oh, I should have one of the main focuses of this book be relationships.” It felt like a natural jumping-off point from Inward, which was about individual personal transformation. This book is about what happens when you spend time getting to know and love yourself and about finding a practice: what a lot of people end up experiencing is a little more clarity. I found that to be the case in my own experience, as well as in that of my peers who meditate, go to therapy, or practice other forms of introspection. And through that clarity, our connections become deeper with friends and family and in intimate relationships. I try to express that bridge between inner work and outward harmony.

Can you talk a little bit about your writer’s voice and what sources you draw on in addition to Buddhism and your own experience? That’s it—it’s really just from direct experience, observations I’m making, and my Vipassana meditation practice. I have a lot of respect for Western psychology, but that’s just not my strong point. Oftentimes, what I end up writing other people can relate to because they are also struggling with anxiety or sadness or going through a serious transformation.

“The book is about what happens when you spend time getting to know and love yourself.”

There’s a lot of emphasis right now—and often for good reason—on what makes us different, what divides us. It’s really powerful and refreshing to read about the universal themes and emotions that unite us. Totally. I was raised in activist circles in Boston, and I started pretty young. So from around age 15 to 26, with a four-year break for college, I spent all my time immersed in different organizations that are doing amazing work. I got to witness people coming together around a common cause and saw how that can lead to actual, material change. But my own issues were not being resolved by being a part of groups. I did feel how good it was to serve other people, but ultimately the roots of my own mental tension were not being dealt with. I still had a lot of sadness and anxiety inside me. It wasn’t until I started meditating and dealing with these things that I saw the importance of individual transformation for building global peace.

Humanity is very young: that’s why I chose the name Yung Pueblo as a pen name, because there are these simple, fundamental things we were taught as children—like cleaning up after ourselves, not harming, telling the truth, and being kind—that we haven’t mastered as a collective. If we’re able to build up our self-love and know ourselves more, the likelihood of our causing harm to other people decreases. I took the approach that if I’m growing and gaining a lot from getting to know myself, I can write about it, and maybe it will help inspire others on their journey as well.

You have 1.3 million Instagram followers, and a lot of people come to hear you speak. It doesn’t seem to be a stretch that some might consider you a teacher. How does that sit with you? I definitely don’t see myself as a teacher. I think of myself as an explorer; I’m on this journey just like everybody else. What I hope to create is reflective material that can help people build their own self-awareness. And I benefit so much from being a student. The people I look up to as teachers, they’ve meditated for, like, fifty years and are so incredibly advanced and humble—their lights shine so brightly.

Instagram is kind of your bread and butter. I noticed there were some mentions of social media throughout your book, and there’s a poem I love that starts with “Let’s stop treating each other like machines.” Are you thinking about the limitations of social media and what comes next? I think about that often. We’ll see what the life spans of these platforms are and how they evolve. I try to be really careful with social media, and I notice the way it tries to turn you into a machine. And it’s not just social media: it’s our whole system of email, texting, and all these new forms of communication [that encourage us to] be as productive as possible. But every moment of interaction consumes energy, and it’s actually pretty exhausting. If all your friends and workmates have access to you, they all expect you to respond immediately. Are you going to have time for yourself?

I do, however, have to spend time on social media, and when I do, I set my timer for an hour and a half. My favorite thing is handing over my phone when I go on retreat so I can get unplugged and focus on meditating.

You’ve said you spend a lot of time on retreat. How has that changed with COVID? I spend more time in retreats! We [a few of the Goenka centers in the US including the one nearest Perez in Massachusetts] ended up building bubbles like the NBA and holding really small retreats, about 40 people or less. Everyone would get tested before they went in, and then we’d be on lockdown. We still wore masks and followed social distancing. And it worked great. So I was able to do a few courses during the pandemic.

And your personal practice? Vipassana for an hour and then about five minutes of metta in the morning and the evening. And I’ve been doing that for about six years now. When I first started meditating, I would get a lot of benefit from going on retreat; my mind felt a lot less dense. I had more emotional flexibility, and I could just feel what was happening inside me without trying to run away from it. But the big change came when I started meditating daily.

So what’s next? I love the idea of structural compassion—that we should be scaling up the compassion we express as individuals or in small groups. It’s something I address at the end of [Clarity and Connection] and want to build into more of my writing.

What I’m seeing is a really quiet but powerful movement of people figuring out how to heal themselves. And as people move through this process of healing, more of their real human nature is going to come forward, and there will be not only more love but also deeper creativity to look at old problems, make more compassionate solutions, and support communities.

***

Below, Perez reads two poems from Clarity and Connection.

The post Finding Clarity and Connection appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The amount and speed of information coming out about COVID-19 are mind-numbing. While some of us may be glued to our TV or Twitter feeds in a state of anxiety and terror, others may have chosen to check out completely. The thing I still find fascinating about the novel coronavirus is the fact that the entire globe is affected—none of us is an outsider. Yet since this crisis began, I’ve wondered if there is a better, and perhaps more Buddhist, way to consume the news. 

I was twelve years old on 9/11. In the weeks following that day, I learned that of the 2,977 people who died, 50 were from my hometown of Manhasset, a small hamlet on Long Island. While the grown-ups around me navigated the mourning and economic fallout, I traversed my own muddy swamp: the middle school cafeteria, which I found to be a remarkably effective petri dish for culturing misinformation, not unlike today’s social media. It took me years to understand why anyone thought that Indian people like me had anything to do with the attacks. 

I learned to keep my mouth shut most of the time, but some questions in me couldn’t be silenced. I wondered, for example, why people do the things they do in times of crisis. Why respond with anger when you’re actually frightened? Why ignore reality when it could benefit from your assistance? Why hide when what you really want is to connect? 

As a teenager, I began practicing Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism with my family. As an adult, I entered into a career in journalism, which gave me another set of tools to seek answers. Journalism taught me to sort fact from fiction—a skill that has come in handy in the last few months. In seeking to be more discerning in how I read the news, I put together a handful of guidelines, inspired by my Buddhist mentor, Daisaku Ikeda, the leader of Soka Gakkai International (SGI)—and by the things I’ve learned from working in the 21st century news world. 

First, I offer this prescription: be mindful of your news consumption. Nearly two decades after my experience in the middle school cafeteria, 2020’s global coronavirus pandemic has filled the internet and airwaves with exchanges of misinformation and blame, both driven by fear of the unknown. But this time, I have Buddhism—and my mature, adult brain—to rely on as I navigate these murky waters. 

Probably the most useful bit of advice I can offer may sound like the most simplistic: confirm your intentions before you check the news. My intentions are based on my Buddhist values—I often turn to Ikeda’s writings on “global citizenship,” which can be defined as a genuine concern and effort to establish peace in the world. I believe that to truly practice global citizenship, our interconnectedness should be a consideration in all of our actions. 

These days, I like to think of consuming the news like consuming food. Just as we ought to be mindful about what, how much, and at what times of day we eat food, we can be mindful about which news sources we turn to, and when and how often we turn to them. We can establish a media diet based on clear intentions—for instance, to stay up to date on efforts to flatten our nation’s curve, to inform ourselves of important precautions—instead of overeating or getting stuck in a “filter bubble,” or at the whims of pre-determined algorithms. We must also aim to seek out news sources that are wholesome in content, committed to ethical journalistic standards and fact-checking. 

I also set limits for what (and when) I consume. To avoid getting sucked into reading endlessly about things that cannot yet be confirmed, I decide beforehand how long I’m going to be reading or watching. Before I start looking for articles, I identify specific questions I’m looking for the answers to—such as to what extent should I socially isolate, where can I buy such and such—so that I know where to look and when I can stop. For more general news updates, I try to stick with 1-3 news reputable news sources and check them in the morning and evening—but no more. Instead of constantly refreshing the breaking news feed, I spend more time consulting sources that involve deeper thinking, like podcasts, videos, and essays. 

In order to understand how different communities have been affected, I try to consult local sources in addition to bigger news websites. This means I search for reporting from the communities around me. These sources tend to offer more than just reporting, too—they also show me how I can help, providing information on how local food banks and neighborhood groups are collecting and sharing resources despite social distancing. 

Still, it’s good to burst your news bubble. While staying local is important, it’s also necessary to evaluate American news media by comparing it with foreign outlets. For me, this means seeking out dependable international sources to add to my media diet. Overall, I try to make sure that I am reading something local—something immediately relevant to me, my close friends, and family; something national; and something international. 

I also follow the leaders in their respective fields: I want to stay up to date on the latest knowledge and precautions so I can be a source of sound information for the people around me. So I subscribe to updates from my relevant local authorities and follow experts I trust, such as economists, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and scientists who are modeling the outbreak, or journalists who are doing thoughtful reporting. To this end, I regularly update my social feeds with people and sources I find helpful and unfollow anyone too unhelpful. I check these once a day and no more. Likewise, I try to compile resources for my own social media followers by sharing things I find useful or encouraging.

These values provide a compass to navigate my way through misinformation, and an anchor when I’m confronted with dizzying amounts of information. The media can be as overwhelming as a middle school cafeteria—but it’s not all bad. “Buddhism teaches that both good and evil are potentialities that exist in all people,” Ikeda has said. “Compassion consists in the sustained and courageous effort to seek out the good in any person, whoever they may be, however they may behave. It means striving, through sustained engagement, to cultivate the positive qualities in oneself and in others.” Reliable news (and learning how to read it) can actually do more than bring us information about the environment in which we live—it can offer us clues about how to become positive actors in our communities.

The post A Wholesome Media Diet appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—these sites and other social media platforms can be emotional minefields, and they eat up far more time than many of us are OK with. Although the Buddha didn’t offer guidance on how to act mindfully on Facebook, he did outline five practices that can help us disengage from the compelling trains of thought that often dominate our use of social media. In this video, Bodhipaksa shows how these practices can help us to take control of our online impulses.

Bodhipaksa is a Buddhist author and teacher who was born in Scotland but now lives in New Hampshire. He is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order and the author of This Difficult Thing of Being Human: The Art of Self-Compassion and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddha!: What Fake Buddha Quotes Can Teach Us About Buddhism. When not debunking Fake Buddha Quotes, he runs Wildmind (www.wildmind.org), a leading online meditation resource.

Learn more about Bodhipaksa in our Visiting Teacher profile.

The post Digital Detox: Reclaim Your Mind From Social Media Addiction appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

About 500 years ago, the French writer Montaigne wrote, “I consider myself an average man, except for the fact that I consider myself an average man.” I suspect there may be a little false modesty there, considering that Montaigne is credited with inventing the essay as a literary genre, but the main point is that he seems to have sensed something that psychologists have now documented extensively: the average person thinks they’re better than average. They think they contribute more to team efforts than the average person, they think they’re more morally upstanding than the average person, and so on.

This bias can also operate at the group level. We may think we are more upstanding than another person, or we may think that our sports team is more upstanding or commits fewer penalties. We may think our political party is right and the other one is wrong—that our nation is right and the other is wrong. The bias is the same, whether it’s operating at the individual level or the group level.

Related: The State of Mindful Resistance

Now you may ask, how do we hang on to these beliefs when they are at odds with reality? The answer is that we don’t really face the evidence—at least we don’t let all of the evidence into our brains equally. We tend to notice and retain evidence that’s consistent with our views, and we tend to either not notice or reject evidence that doesn’t support our views. This is called confirmation bias, and it’s one of the most important cognitive biases because it sustains the other cognitive biases. It’s a key part of the dynamic that lets us hold on to beliefs that are at odds with reality.

The Buddha seems to have had a sense for the way this operates. In the following quote attributed to the Buddha, he talks about the evidence presented by the senses and how a man might come to be sure that he is superior to his rivals. He said:

The senses’ evidence,
and works, inspire such scorn
for others, and such smug
conviction he is right,
that all his rivals rank
as ‘sorry, brainless fools.’
—Culaviyuha Sutta (SN 4.12; trans. Sir Robert Chalmers)

There’s an understanding here that our senses—our perceptual machinery—filter evidence to sustain a false view of reality. So the question arises: Is there anything we can do about confirmation biases? Is there any kind of adjustment we can make to see reality more clearly? For starters, we can try to understand exactly how confirmation bias works.

Here, Western psychology is catching up, in a sense, with a theme that has been a part of Buddhist psychology for a long time. For a long time in Western psychology and philosophy, cognition and affect—thoughts and perceptions on one hand, and our feelings on the other—were in two separate compartments. The standard metaphor, which comes from Plato’s Symposium, was the chariot and the chariot rider. The chariot rider is the rational mind, and the horses are the emotions. The rational mind sits there in its own compartment and decides whether it’s up to the job of controlling these things like rage, jealousy, and lust, and if it’s up to it, it pulls on the reins. There is interaction between the two compartments in this model, but they remain separate: reason is back here, feeling is up there. The battle between them is very much a case of conscious activity. But it turns out that the relationship between thoughts and feelings is more complicated than that; feelings influence our thoughts and perceptions in very subtle ways, and we are not conscious of much of this influence. Becoming conscious of it actually takes practice and discipline.

A good place to look for the way we often aren’t aware of the influence of our feelings is in social media. If you use social media, you’ve probably been in a situation where you’re deciding whether to share something or not. Suppose that what you’re thinking about sharing is something that either reflects favorably on your ideological tribe or unfavorably on the other, opposing ideological tribe. If you stop before you share and pay attention to your feelings, you may notice that the decision to share isn’t just a decision—it’s not purely cognitive. It feels good to share information that shows that some policy you favor is right or that some politician you champion has done something good. The decision to share that kind of information is an affective act, to some extent.

Sometimes the sequence of feelings is a little more complicated than what I’ve just described. For example, a politician you don’t like has done something horrible, and you are so outraged that you want to share this news. You probably will do that unless you are reflecting on the feelings of rage, or even hatred, that are giving rise to this impulse. If you do pause and reflect, then you are empowered to decide whether the feeling that’s driving you to do this should be trusted. You may stop and ask yourself, do I know for sure that this is true? Or, do I fully understand the context in which this apparently abhorrent act was committed? Is it really responsible to share this before I’ve investigated? If you pause and reflect in that moment, you can decide whether the feeling in this case is a good guide.

I encourage you to try to be mindful in situations like this, but it may not be easy. Mindfulness, like a lot of things, takes practice. If you have a regular meditation practice, it’ll probably be easier to comport yourself in this way on social media, especially if you didn’t skip that morning’s session.

Another thing I want to emphasize is that mindfulness is about more than just mindfulness of feelings. If you look at the ancient Buddhist text called the Satipatthana Sutta, it talks about being mindful of feelings, of thoughts, of perceptions, of bodily sensations, and so on. It’s an instruction about meditative, contemplative exercises that make you very broadly aware of the things in your environment. This awareness lets you have a clearer view of, and more control over, the machinery of your mind and your behavior.

Now suppose you don’t exercise restraint on social media. Suppose you tweet something of a tribal nature. You will have a second opportunity to observe the role that feelings play here, because you will probably notice that you hope you will be retweeted by members of your tribe—and if you’re not, you may feel anxious about it. Was it not a good tweet? Does your tribe not like it? And if they do massively retweet it, you may feel gratification. These feelings are all very common when we’re using social media, and they are a major driver of the tribal dynamic. The things that people are incentivized to do in order to raise their stature within their own tribe end up increasing the antipathy between tribes. The things that you’ll get the most positive feedback for in your own tribe are often the things that are going to drive the other tribe the craziest. This behavior creates a feedback loop where people in both tribes try to elevate their stature among their ideological brethren while deepening the divide between the two ideological groups. That’s one reason I would encourage you to behave responsibly on social media.

Related: Why Buddhism is True (And Why You Can Blame Natural Selection for Your Suffering)

Now, I want to emphasize, being accepted or appreciated by your group can be a great feeling with no downside. One of the finest moments in life is when you’ve made some of the key contributions to your team, and it’s deeply appreciated.  I wouldn’t encourage you to avoid what you can think of as tribal acceptance in all contexts, but I would encourage you to ask yourself, what are the consequences of elevating your stature within a group in a particular way? And if it is to just deepen a divide to no good end, that’s the case when mindfulness can come in handy.

Another side effect of trying to please your group or your tribe on social media is that it can lead to a kind of turbulence: wanting to be liked and feeling disheartened if you weren’t widely shared or retweeted. It’s a little bit of a rollercoaster, even leaving aside the implications for the tribal divide and exacerbating tensions among competing groups. You may just find that being a little less aggressive on social media can be more conducive to equanimity.

We began this exploration by introducing confirmation bias, which undergirds many other cognitive biases that in turn exacerbate the problem of tribalism. But as we’ve seen, cognitive bias is, in a way, a misnomer since affect plays such an important role in sustaining and activating the bias. And while modern psychology is still catching up with this particular dimension of Buddhist thought, mindfulness meditation—which is connected to some of the deepest and most radical ideas in Buddhist philosophy—can offer us a practical tool for dealing with the problem of confirmation bias and transforming the way we think about others and about ourselves.

♦

This is an excerpt from Beyond Tribalism: How Mindfulness Can Save the World, a six-week online course with Robert Wright, the bestselling author of Why Buddhism Is True. Robert Wright investigates the problem of tribalism through the lens of Buddhist philosophy and evolutionary psychology, while showing how mindfulness can make us happier and less reactive—and just might save the world. Watch a preview lesson at learn.tricycle.org.

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