I’ve seen this several times. This is a common perception of what meditation is about: emptying the mind (cue Christian panic about the Devil entering). Certain 禅/Chán/Zen approaches do speak of the empty mind, but the guiding doctrine for this is not nothingness but the idea that form is not exclusive of emptiness and emptiness is not exclusive of form (色即是空，空即是色). Today the buzzword is mindfulness. Mindfulness requires and is nourished by concentration, but it is not reducible to concentration. It’s more like the appropriate use of concentration to ardently observe and clearly comprehend the conditionality of psychosomatic processes and the ethical implications of how we relate them in condition and effect. On its own, concentration can gather attention one pointedly as deep absorption. This can allow consciousness to be suffused with feelings of joy or bliss, or to abide in the seeming voidness of infinite space. When it is action-oriented it can allow for the performing of acts without the perception of a doer behind the deed, as was the objective in WWII Japanese Zen militarism, or more recently, the Norwegian mass murdering terrorist Anders Breivik’s claim that he found meditation helpful (this non-dualistic performativity also enacts selfless giving, merit-making, and service).
But to go with the tech-geek theme here, if it is neither about the interpretation or discursivity of representations nor the deleting of representational content, how might mindfulness of the media be cultivated in our digital environment framed and mirrored by screens gesturing touch gesturing screens gesturing touch…?
spacetimemattering 