by Erik Davis
Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.1
For the Hua-yen philosophers, Indra’s holographic net symbolized the mutual identity and mutually interpenetrating nature of all phenomena. That is, in its static aspect, everything in the universe ultimately boils down to everything else; but in its dynamic aspect, the universe is an interdependent network of insubstantial agents that are constantly affecting and being affected by other agents. “Thus each individual is at once the cause for the whole and is caused by the whole, and what is called existence is a vast body made up of an infinity of individuals all sustaining each other and defining each other.”2 The net of Indra preserves the fluctuating multiplicity of reality while acknowledging its ultimately nondual nature, always beyond and in between subject and object, self and other.
All this is a bit dizzying, but the contemporary Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh brings Indra’s net down to earth, or rather, down to a simple piece of paper. If you look at the paper with the eyes of a poet, Hanh says, you will realize that it contains within it all the elements that the paper itself depends upon; on its milky surface you will see clouds, forests, sunshine, loggers. “And if you look more deeply, with the eyes of a bodhisattva, with the eyes of those who are awake, you see not only the cloud and the sunshine in it, but that everything is here: the wheat that became the bread for the logger to eat, the logger’s father—everything is in this sheet of paper.”3 The universe is a self-organizing network of infinite relationship, a symphony of interdependent becoming—and all of it can be accessed through the polished jewel-screen of a single awakened mind.
As we suggested in an earlier chapter, there is more than a little cybernetics implied in the Buddhist view of mutual interdependence. As Joanna Macy argues, both cybernetic systems theory and Buddhist philosophy can be said to characterize the world as a nonlinear dance of mutually modulating feedback loops. This “chaosmos” does not proceed from a first cause or the divine word of a creator, but endlessly combines and recombines forms and forces into a perpetual collage of creation and decay. Indra’s net is an image of totality, but unlike Teilhard’s vision of the Omega point, this holism does not depend upon some apocalyptic moment of future synthesis. In the Hua-yen view, reality is already a totally interdependent matrix, and this unity does not and cannot cancel out difference, the blooming multiplicities that compose each individual event.
As both the Asian scholar Edward Conze and the Zen master Robert Baker Aitken have pointed out, Buddhism’s quest for awakening, for realizing Indra’s net, can be seen as a path of gnosis, of the saving knowledge of the self. But because this self is not separate from the totality of the real, it can be saved only by being seen through, like a jewel polished until it becomes translucent, or a pair of sunglasses, or a mind that breaks through the desiccated concepts that always seek to order and stratify the chaosmos. In this sense, the practice of meditation, which is of course a whole garden shed of practices that various contemplative traditions honed with an unparalleled sophistication, is the ultimate gnostic technology. Often caricatured as narcissistic navel gazing or ascetic withdrawal, the meditation path that leads to Indra’s net actually winds up affirming the immanent networks of material, social, and mental forces that constantly breed our interdependent world. Once the Buddha opened his deep-space dharma eye, he did not climb mountaintops to gaze longingly into the heavens; he touched the earth in the shadow of a tree. The drama of phenomenal existence, with its quasars, frogs, and fiber-optic cables, is impossible to separate from transcendent reality.
One does not need to head east to catch wind of this visionary rumor. In the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in Nag Hammadi’s cache of gnostic memes, Jesus’ followers ask him when the messianic kingdom will come. “It will not come by watching for it,” Jesus says. “It will not be said, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘Look, there it is.’ Rather, the father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”4 How does one see this kingdom, at once otherworldly and immanent? Beats me, but many Buddhists say that you can do worse than to practice mindfulness, a term that encompasses a variety of techniques for cultivating attention. Mindfulness is a techne, neither a philosophy nor a passive trance but an active practice of probing and witnessing experience. The practice begins when we sharpen our awareness of the moment-to-moment flux of thought and sensation as it weaves itself through the warp and woof of body and mind. Slowly, we may begin to see how much of our reality can be traced to delusional projections, cultural programming, or the repetition of mechanical habits of categorization, emotional fixation, and greed. We begin, ever so slightly, to decondition ourselves, and another world begins to emerge, a world that is nonetheless basic and familiar: a world always on the fly, a self-organizing network of flows and events drawn through the shuttle of the passing present. By helping us become intimate with this endless brocade, mindfulness cultivates a kind of mobile center that can pliably and creatively interact with the morphing demands of a perpetually decentered world.
Whether or not such gnostic technology can pilot one to the nondual shores of the Buddhaverse, mindfulness practice does have some pretty nifty side effects along the way. As many have pointed out, the currency of the Net is attention, an insight that holds true as well for the expanding empire of signs, data, and virtualities of which the Net is both part and paragon. Mindfulness cultivates and sharpens attention, clarifying the often largely automatic process wherein we “choose” to notice, to react, to link, to pass on by. The more intelligent and crisp attention becomes, the less susceptible one grows to mechanical habits and programmed phantasms, not to mention the dangerous attractors that lurk, as they always have, in virtual space, waiting to draw our bodyminds into downward spirals. The contemporary rise of attention deficit disorder, a condition seemingly linked to the ubiquity of media nets, only underscores how much we need to treat attention as a craft, at once a skill to be learned and a vessel in flight. But the name of this chronic syndrome also contains a clue. For it is precisely disorder that we need to learn to pay attention to, because in that turbulence lies our own future manifold. The mind is an instrument, and we practice scales so that we may begin to improvise with spontaneous grace.
As you might expect, Western Buddhists nursing the digital dharma can hardly avoid making the punning leap between Indra’s net and the Internet, another cunning artifice whose dynamic mesh of mind and photons takes the form of a nonlinear, hyperlinked, many-to-many matrix. For some, the formal resemblance between the Hua-yen vision and our planetary trellis of fiber-optic cables, routers, microwaves, screens, chips, and servers suggests that, in a symbolic sense at least, we may now be hardwiring a network of connections that reflects the nondual interdependence of all reality. At the same time, of course, the digital Overmind also reflects the anger, delusion, and greed that Buddhists claim drive the miseries of human existence. An immense digital gizmo populated by human minds cannot magically cause those minds to transcend their shuttered worldviews, to lighten their compulsions or assuage their fear and loathing. Without turning to face our own terminal screens, without sharpening critical wisdom and cultivating compassion, the Internet may only become a new brand of bondage.
The
net of Indra works its real magic by dissolving our habitual tendencies to divide the world into separate and autonomous zones: inside and out, self and other, online and off-, machines and nature. So the next time you peer into the open window of a Web browser, you might ask yourself: where does “the network” end? Does it cease with the virtual words, images, and minds of the Internet, or with the silicon-electronic matrix of computing devices, or with the electrical grid that powers the show with energies extracted from waterflow and toxic atom? Perhaps the network extends further—to the Jacquard looms and American war machines that loosed the historical dynamic that eventually stuck a magic toxic tablet in your hands, to the billionfold packet-switching meshwork of human neurons that shape and submit to information space, to the capital flows that animate the quick hands of young Filipinas who wire up semiconductors for dollars a day. As you contemplate these widening networks, they may alter the granularity and elasticity of the self that senses them, as well as changing the resilience and tenderness of the threads binding that self to the mutant edge of matter and history. I suspect there is no end to such links, and that this immanent infinity, with its impossible ethical call, makes up the real World Wide Web.
Tough-minded readers may find this interdependent vision of mystic materialism a bit of a stretch, but it’s important to note that something quite like the net of Indra also pops up in the metaphysics of Leibniz, one of the supreme philosophers of Enlightenment rationalism. Leibniz’s researches into symbolic logic, calculating machines, and binary numbers (whose invention he credited to the Chinese sages behind the I Ching) helped lay the groundwork for today’s digital computers. Leibniz also dreamed of arithmetizing the totality of human thought, a dream touched with more than a little techno-utopianism. By inventing a set of common symbols that could represent the workings of the mind, he thought he could, in principle, calculate the solution to all the problems that beset the fractious Europe of his day—economic, political, and metaphysical.
Leibniz insisted on the intimate relationship between human minds and logical machines, and he followed Descartes in holding that the activity of animal and human bodies was basically no different from the tickings of a clocklike automaton. But Leibniz was not a pure mechanist; not unlike the Hua-yen philosophers, he believed that the cosmos boiled down to the relationships that form between different nodes of perception—i.e., souls. In his Monadology, Leibniz described the universe as a vast matrix of these individual perceptual units, which he called “monads.” Unlike the jewels in the net of Indra, monads are ultimately solitary and permanent entities—as souls, they have “no windows.” But the monads do carry within themselves representations of the entire universe, representations that are mediated and coordinated by the big monad known as God. For Leibniz, God ensures that communication and truth are possible because he maintains what amounts to an immense logical apparatus of perception.
Leibniz’s pious rationalism was destined to be skewered on the twin post-Enlightenment prongs of skepticism and positivism, but according to the cyberspace philosopher Michael Heim, the monadology nonetheless foreshadows the incorporeal matrix of the Internet, just as Leibniz’s research into symbolic logic and binary notation anticipates digital microprocessors. Certainly online surfers can relate with the stance of the monad: though plugged into a “universal” network of servers, we stare into our terminal screens as solitary individuals, hoping that the logic of the network will ensure that our perceptions accord and our messages make it through. But the monadology also reminds us that, while the Internet may be described as a totalizing logical machine that amplifies the organic computers in our skulls, our phenomenological experience of both these calculating devices can never be entirely reduced to mechanist explanations. In his Monadology, Leibniz makes this point with a thought experiment:
Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain Perception.5
For Leibniz, even if the mind machine is treated as a virtual machine that we can hack to bits, we will still not uncover the gear of our own awareness. We may construct testable explanations for consciousness, but we will never reduce the sprightly play of the mind in the world—a play that both Leibniz and the Hua-yen philosophers would argue unfolds as a collective network of perception.
As the archetype of the network comes to infiltrate contemporary conceptions of brains, ecology, and technology, monads and jewel nets arise in the realm of virtual possibility. Of course there are problems with such monumental metaphysical systems. Indra’s net, for example, is a firmly holistic vision, and there are always holes in holism. Ecologists and network architects would be the first to point out that, while everything is ultimately connected to everything else, some things are definitely more connected than others. The Hua-yen vision is essentially static as well; although it allows for the dynamic interplay of individual agents, it does not make much room for the dynamic and developmental contradictions that characterize much of history, natural and human alike. As an image, the net is a webwork wafting in space rather than an arrow of turbulent time, a closed hologram rather than an irreversible and open chain of mutation. An infinite lattice of interdependence does not express the complex surprises that our expanding cosmos so generously spits out—a failing that should particularly concern human beings, who balance some of the most complex and surprising objects in the universe atop their towering spines.
Are such evolutionary surprises evidence of cosmic progress, or are they simply wayward mutations? Today it is mighty hard to swallow grand tales of teleology and universal goals; with postmodernists to the left of us and hard-core Darwinists to the right, the evolutionary perfectionism of a Teilhard goes down like tepid Theosophy. Nonetheless, our global civilization continues to bank on the revolutionary promise of progressive technological change, a quintessentially modern perspective that may nonetheless draw from deeper springs. In essence, the notion of historical evolution is a quest narrative. Before Joachim of Fiore loosed the myth of progress into the bloodstream of the Christian West, men told tales of a hero, with a thousand and one faces, restlessly seeking a redemptive goal: the golden fleece, the elixir of immortality, the holy grail. Whether taking form as Gilgamesh, a Round Table knight, or Ulysses, the man of many devices, the hero plunges ever forward, riding his vector of yearning, though his linear track often leads him into the traps and cul-de-sacs of an ensnaring nature he must constantly resist. Salvation is not within but ahead: a finger of land on the distant edge of the sea, an unearthly silver light piercing the forest gloom.
I suspect that one of the reasons that the story of technological progress continues to hold such power is that it literalizes a quest myth we can no longer take seriously in ourselves. Machines articulate and define themselves against the messiness of organic nature, a world whose laws and limits they both exploit and conquer through control, manipulation, and speed. As David Noble has shown, the Western image of technological progress draws from profoundly Christian notions of dominion and millennialist perfectionism. The errant knight of medieval lore has morphed into a machine-man, his grail now the Singularity that visionary engineers claim lies just over the horizon, a blazing point of technological convergence in which machines, and possibly ourselves, will finally master the rules of the known.
If the relentless vector of technological development embodies a heroic narrative of power, mastery, and self-definition, what does it mean that this ultimately phallic quest now finds itself in a chaotic postmodern techno-jungle characterized by the massive and impossibly tangled intersection of networks? The networks that have come to dominate so many technological, scientific, and cultural discourses and practices—social systems, communication webs, cognitive neural nets, i
nterlinked computers, parallel processors, complex institutional frameworks, transnational circuits of production and trade—are not linear vectors or stable expressions of control. They are complex weavings, crisscrossed webworks, complex fabrics of unpredictable and semiautonomous threads. The network is a matrix, a womb, the mother-matter that spawns us all, and the matrix was always wired. Despite its biological roots, the word itself now denotes a host of technological tools and practices: a metal mold or die; a binding substance, like cement in concrete, or the principal metal in an alloy; a plate used for casting typefaces; a rectangular grid of mathematical quantities treated as a single algebraic entity; and, of course, the dense pattern of connections that link up computer systems (as well as science fictions about those systems). The matrix forms the context for emergence; it is the medium, the motherboard, through which events, objects, and new linkages are grown.
Obviously, today’s technological matrices cannot simply be characterized as “feminine” spaces or the rebirth of Dame Nature’s modus operandi. Such systems are perfectly capable of sustaining linear goals of individual aggrandizement, hierarchical control, and patriarchal power plays—not to mention war. Nonetheless, if we allow ourselves a sip or two of zeitgeist liqueur, it seems hardly coincidental that the network becomes a dominant technological archetype at the same time that society hosts the rise of environmental activism, deep ecology, Gaia hypotheses, and goddess religion, to say nothing of the extraordinary success of modern feminism, which has unleashed women in the workplace and generated a sustained critique of the oppressive social arrangements that for so long sustained the West’s pretensions of enlightened progress.
In her book Zeros + Ones, Sadie Plant unlocks the secret history of women and machines, brilliantly rewriting the history of digital technology as a cyberfeminist yarn: “neither metaphorical nor literal, but quite simply material, a gathering of threads that twist and turn through the history of computing, technology, the sciences and arts.”6 Taking inspiration from the ancient female labor of the loom, Plant’s book is a crazy quilt of history and postmodern futurism that shuttles between witches and telephone operators, textile production and online sexuality. She gives particular pride of place to Ada Lovelace, the razor-sharp daughter of the poet Lord Byron. In the mid-1800s, Lovelace became the world’s first computer programmer when she analyzed and described the computational possibilities of Charles Babbage’s never-completed Analytical Engine, a gadget that Lovelace claimed “weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”7 The history of technologies, it seems, spills us onto an unexpected shore: not the world of Odysseus and his many devices, but of Penelope at her loom, biding her time, weaving and unweaving an endless cloth to undermine the stratagems of men.