So in case you were wondering if this blog had gone the way of M. Night Shyamalan's last several movies, let me hasten to assure you it's not so. Firstly, you probably missed this controversial post. Secondly, I started a new job in June, and it's been quite the adjustment. It's hard to explain what I actually do, but I can tell you what it's like. It's like being the navigator on the Starship Enterprise. The captain tells me where we're going, and I calculate the heading to get us there so that we don't go right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, because that would end our little trip real quick, wouldn't it? Then I run down to Engineering and make sure the engines are pointed the correct direction, and I talk to the cook to make sure we have enough provisions, and I see the fuel guy to make sure we have enough fuel, and I talk to the guys who line up the, I dunno, space fins, to make sure the space fins are lined up properly, and then I go back and tell the captain we're ready and then he or she says, "Engage." Yeah. That's what it's like. So there have been some extra hours and there have been lots of meetings and for the most part when I come home from work, I fall asleep on the sofa in front of the re-imagined "Perry Mason." Don't ask me what's going on. I have no idea.
In my spare moments, though, I've been thinking about the concept of duality. The guys down at the CERN high speed supercollider have apparently created antimatter, at least for a few nanoseconds. Turns out if you have a particle, you can also have an anti-particle, which is like the polar opposite of a particle. No, I don't know what the polar opposite of a particle would look like, but it's pretty cool, no? If the particle and the anti-particle run into each other, they either explode, releasing energy, or cease to exist, which should be impossible. (Matter is neither created nor destroyed and all that.) And while the implications for physics are positively mind-boggling, the implications for philosophy are even greater. For example, is there an anti-Elvis? (Yes. Michael J. Fox is the anti-Elvis.) Is there an anti-Trump? (Yes. Beto O'Rourke is the anti-Trump.) How about an antiChrist? Well, that one's been kicked around a lot over the millenia, but I'm of the opinion that if there's a God, the physical manifestation of all things good, there must also be a Devil, the physical manifestation of all things bad. Good thing I don't believe in either one, because that'd be pretty scary.
All of this leads to a question much dearer to my heart. Is there such a thing as an anti-Buddha?
Yes.
People, the cell phone is the anti-Buddha.
Yes, your cell phone. My cell phone. Every cell phone. Do you know our cell phones are more powerful than all the computers that steered Apollo 11 combined? They do amazing things that even Star Trek didn't imagine (though it did imagine a communicator that you could activate by hitting yourself in the chest--I guess that's pretty cool.) And cell phones are the anti-Buddha. Seriously, it's hard to imagine anything less Buddhist-y than a cell phone.
Think about what Buddhists do. We meditate, we practice mindfulness, we cultivate certain states of mind like happiness and compassion and selflessness. Cell phones basically unwind all that. They're bright and shiny and full of nifty graphics. They're an endless distraction. Even when you're not looking at them, they chime at you wanting your attention: Look at me! Look at me! They present an endless parade of news, mostly bad, and invite you not only to comment on it but to get into public spats with other commentors. Spend half an hour on a cell phone and you're practically guaranteed to be less happy, distracted, anxious and wanting to hide under a rock until the world ends, which it's obviously going to do any second.
Yes, you can also use your cell phone for Positive Things. You can keep up with your family and friends, communicate with your work peeps, give donations to charity with PayPal and gently encourage your elected officials to do the right thing. But people don't. They use their cell phones to compare themselves to other people, get into arguments, work themselves into a state of despair about Current Events and just in general make themselves really unhappy. I include myself in that assessment; since Yahoo quit allowing commentary, I quit going there, because if I can't post provocative responses to articles and get other people mad at me, what's the point? (Yes, I was somewhat of a troll on Yahoo. Thankfully the sun has since come up and I've frozen in place.)
Now that we have cell phones, though, I don't see people giving them up in large numbers. They've kind of become ubiquitous to our landscape. We expect them to be around, too. I've seen a number of movies where the plot actually depended on the existence of cell phones, and it's kind of funny to watch a movie or TV show made in, like, the late 80s or early 90s and think how different the outcome would have been if the characters had had cell phones. So nobody's probably going to get rid of theirs. I'm not getting rid of mine; I need it for work, but of course everybody says they need their cell phones for work. So the challenge, then, is to change how we use cell phones. To put it bluntly, we need to use them instead of letting them use us.
We have had some practice with this. If you own a car, you're probably familiar. You can own a car, or you can let a car own you. If you bought, say, a Maserati to show off to your neighbors or because you thought you had to, you can barely afford your payments, your insurance is through the roof, your car requires frequent and expensive maintenance and you lose sleep at night pondering what you're going to do about the damn car, then you don't own it. It owns you. If, on the other hand, you have a cheap, reliable car that's paid for, the insurance is a nominal amount, maintenance is occasional and not very expensive, and it gets you where you need to go when you need to go there, then you own the car. It feels much better to own a car than to be owned by one. I've never had a Maserati, but I don't think I'd enjoy the experience if I did.
(Sammy Hagar, though, who is practically a billionaire, owns several race cars and apparently enjoys them very much. So, you know, circumstances differ for each of us.)
Back to cell phones, though. How do we go about owning a cell phone, instead of being owned by one? Well, I hate to suggest this, but I think we need to start by strictly limiting or even no longer using social media apps. I hate to suggest this because I am a Twitter fiend. I love Twitter. Millions of humans gathered in one place tossing off pithy one-liners about their lives and how to navigate this crazy world we live in. I follow something like 500 people and they all feel like good friends. But, I spend way too much time on there, and inevitably some bad-news issue comes up that everyone starts commenting on and I read the attached articles and stuff and my old friend, chronic anxiety, rears its ugly head.
I used to spend a lot of time on Facebook, too, but I've pretty much stopped. Well, actually for the last I don't know how many months I've stopped altogether because when I went from Old Cell Phone to New Cell Phone, I somehow lost my password and I haven't been able to get on there. Which sucks, in a way, because the only reason I was still going on there was to keep track of my cousins and their kids and now I've kind of lost track. But on the other hand, I didn't have access to Facebook during the whole election drama, the January 6 fiasco or any of the happy-go-lucky days that followed. (Hey, did anyone else realize that January 6 is Epiphany on the Christian calendar? That's the day the wise guys showed up to Bethlehem and acknowledged the Christ child as a newborn king. Which seems significant in a way. Hmm.) Facebook is, I say without hesitation, a political sewer. Unless, of course, you keep your friend list to your cousins and their kids, and unfriend anybody who wants to drag you into the political sewage. So I really don't miss it that much. I could, reasonably speaking, also drop Twitter. But I hope I don't have to do that. I hope we can come to some sane and moderate usage of Twitter---thirty minutes a day, let's say--that means I don't have to drop it altogether.
Then there are the news apps. As much as I'm for moderation and not total abstinence, the news apps have to go. For one thing, I'm not supposed to be watching the news. Doctor's orders. And while I interpreted that literally and quit watching local news, I'm pretty sure Doc meant all news, from all sources. Anyway, I get plenty of news from Twitter. If you follow the right people on Twitter, you will get not just a good idea of the prevailing issues of the day, you'll get the news before the news people even do. For example, I am hearing about the fall of Kabul as it is happening. from people who are actually there. (And in case nobody knows that Kabul has fallen to the Taliban, it has. Just FYI.) Now, if Twitter is a source of news, that's another really good argument to get rid of it. But again, moderation versus abstinence, if that's possible. If it works. We shall see.
Now I have to tell you something witheringly ironic. I have a meditation app on my cell phone. Yes, on my cell phone, the anti-Buddha, there is a meditation app. And I love my meditation app. I'm not getting rid of it. But I need to get rid of the scrolling through the latest news and the Twitter updates and so forth and so on before I log into it. (Does anybody else have this happen? You pick up your cell phone to do a particular thing and it makes a chimey noise or something pops up so you go see what it is and 30 minutes later you put down your cell phone, having completely forgotten why you picked it up in the first place? This happens to me a lot. Annoyingly, it often happens at work.) The meditation app is Important. Everything else, somewhat less so. Because the everything else unwinds all the time I spend on the meditation app. Probably as effectively as alcohol, if not more so. And by the way, if someone tells you that he/she believes that he/she is addicted to his/her cell phone, believe him/her. It's totally possible. It's even likely, in some instances.
So that's the story of the anti-Buddha, the cell phone. If Shakyamuni were a modern man, he'd be sitting under the bodhi tree chasing enlightenment and Mara would walk up to him and hand him a cell phone. Hopefully, Shakyamuni would grab the cell phone and throw it to the ground, whereupon it would turn into a lotus. I hope so. What scares me is that he might pick up the phone instead and log into Twitter. Cheers, all.
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