Prana in cyberspace?

A summary of:
Zaleski, J. (1997). The Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology Is Changing Our Spiritual Lives. HarperEdge: New York.
Reflections part 1 - Prana

Zaleski makes this interesting, highly questionably claim:

“Prana is a Sanskrit word sometimes translated as ‘life force,’ sometimes as ‘breath.’ It is equivalent to the Chinese concept of chi, and somewhat to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of spirit. In all the major religious traditions, this force is seen as manifesting through the physical body of the human being. This view has profound implications for spiritual work in cyberspace, where the body is absent” (34).

What’s bizarre about this is that Zaleski seems to think that physicality is a necessity of spirituality… whereas most would probably say that the spiritual is fundamentally non-physical. (While I think this is a crude reductionism, take this opinion, for example: “[John Perry Barlow] But I also think that anytime you’ve got a large number of people going somewhere they can’t take their bodies, you are engaged in spiritual activity. It’s that simple” (51).) And for Zaleski, this physicality poses a particular problem to technology if we are hoping to have some kind of spiritual experience. He uses the example of an early Skype-like technology: “It seems like it’s leading toward the point where it won’t be much different than me sitting in front of you an talking like this, except for the lack of prana” (43).

I think Zaleski’s sticking point with this is that he doesn’t think it is possible for ritual sacraments, like Holy Communion, to be performed online. In response to Zaleski’s questions on the matter, John Perry Barlow responds, “If you don’t have the grounding in the wine, the physical manifestation, I can see where they would think that there’s no potential for that holy voltage between the physical symbol and the spiritual reality” (35). But we have to ask ourselves what exactly he thinks is missing (he does not clarify that well). If it is the possibility for transformation, this is clearly not true. Buddhist interviewee John Daido Loori responds, “‘That being the case, …we’d have to say there’s no chi, which is what we’d [Buddhists] call it – breath, life – there’s no chi in a work of art. And I don’t buy that for a second. I feel that art can be transformative, has been transformative’” (166).

It also seems that sometimes what Zaleski thinks is missing is the full-body engagement, the kind that would be associated with “flow” (233). In that case, we might do well to ask whether we really see any kind of spiritual difference between a computer game and a wii game, if the latter involves our whole body. I would say not.

Zaleski also defines the missing element this way: “The break with the body in cyberspace is most apparent when meeting other people through live, text-mediated chat, as in IRC or the chat rooms of AOL. The prana, the subtle energies, are lost. The incarnate being, the human being, behind the words can only be imagined, just as the reader of these words can only imagine the writer. What fills the space left by the absent prana is self-projection” (233). This, too, seems bizarre, and I guess it really depends on what you mean by ‘subtle energies’, or ‘self-projection’. As one interviewee was quoted saying, “‘I totally disagree that there’s no prana in cyberspace. That’s like saying you have to lose your humanity because you’re using a different form of communication” (253).

Zaleski softens his argument only slightly with this admission: “I believe that [prana] does break in cyberspace, limiting the medium’s potential for spiritual work in communities as well as on the individual level. But limit does not mean negate, and spiritual work, which calls upon us to accept others, to love them as ourselves, does take place in virtual communities” (254). If this is the case, then the goal is to strengthen the connections between individuals, within communities, to enhance the prana. The problem (as I will go into more depth about in further posts on Zaleski) is that cyberspace produces broad experiences, but not deep ones; so the design challenge would be to focus on creating deeper bonds between people (another way to say this is increasing strong ties, rather than weak ones).

This discussion of prana raises other interesting questions. What do we think is exchanged in a spiritual experience, for example? One interviewee, Sheikh Hisham Muhammad Kabbani, responded: “Because you know that always spirituality is high-tech. Spirituality is a kind of energy transmission from human beings to each other, if we are able to receive it, because human beings are receivers and transmitters at the same time” (61). This is fascinating, mostly because it clearly only makes sense in our modern scientific paradigm. You wouldn’t hear someone describe it like this 200 years ago, would you?

Another question this has made me consider is what I think is happening in a spiritual process. John Perry Barlow said, “So much of what the spiritual process is about is sliding up and down between those two poles of the physical and the immaterial” (35). Where does practice come into this? Some see practice as essential to spiritual growth (perhaps this is a separate question in itself?).

And this has also been helpful for helping me think about what kind of spiritual change I would like to realize in technology. Two separate ideas were raised by this book. The first is inspired by this quote from Loori: “So, how do you use them in a way that nourishes? Cyberspace is here to stay. How can we use it to nourish” (167)? That is a fabulous description of the kind of spirituality I’m aiming at. It should nourish us, nourish our souls, be, as I said, ‘soul-satisfying’.

The other idea is very different, in that it aims at the foundations of the construction. Loori said this: “Sacredness is something that’s earned through time. Kyoto is sacred. Jerusalem is sacred. Rome is sacred. Stonehenge is sacred. These are sacred places because of what has been put into them” (173). Given this, how can we design sacredness into cyberspace? Is it possible to design it in such a way as to make people treat is as sacred? Pesce, for example, tried something like this:“[Pesce] The idea was [in blessing the Internet], inasmuch as possible, to sanctify cyberspace. If we don’t bless our creations, they dehumanize us” (262). There is a big difference, however, in blessing something that is not inherently sacred, and designing something to be sacred.

The truth is that cyberspace represents tremendous opportunity, precisely because it is unbounded and emerging. It is not anything, beyond what we say it is. For example: “‘Cyberspace is a field that has been created where there is an absence of obstructions,’ explained Thomas E. Miller to me…. Miller is a Namgyal Monastery official and the man who conceived of the blessing [different from above]. ‘That’s the way cyberspace was designed. Which creates the potential for something to arise. And the nature of what will arise there is dependent upon the motivations of the people that use it’” (280). In that case, why would we ever say that we could not create an internet that allows for prana?