HARNESSING IT (AI) TO PROMOTE SPIRITUALITY

 

HARNESSING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY  (AI) TO PROMOTE SPIRITUALITY

(Collection of all E-mails sent on the subject sent by N.R. Srinivasan to HRF Participants, July 2021)

 From Internet to Inner Net

Can Silicon  Valley Find God?

 

[Artificial intelligence promises to remake the world. These believers are fighting to make sure thousands of years of text and tradition find places   among the algorithms]

ARE WE HUMANS special among other living things?” One sunny day last June, I sat before my computer screen and posed this question to an Amazon device 800 miles away, in the Seattle home of an artificial intelligence researcher named Shanen Boettcher. At first, Alexa spit out a default, avoidant answer: “Sorry, I’m not sure.” But after some cajoling from Mr. Boettcher (Alexa was having trouble accessing a script that he had provided), she revised her response. “I believe that animals have souls, as do plants and even inanimate objects,” she said. “But the divine essence of the human soul is what sets the human being above and apart. … Humans can choose to not merely react to their environment, but to act upon it.”

Mr. Boettcher, a former Microsoft general manager who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and

Later, he placed a Google Home device before the screen. “OK, spirituality at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, asked me to rate Alexa’s response on a scale from 1 to 7. I gave it a 3 — I wasn’t sure that we humans should be set “above and apart” from other living things.Google, how should I treat others?” I asked. “Good question, Linda,” it said. “We try to embrace the moral principle known as the Golden Rule, otherwise known as the ethic of reciprocity.” I gave this response high marks.

I was one of 32 people from six faith backgrounds — Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and nonreligious “nones”— who had agreed to participate in Mr. Boettcher’s research study on the relationship between spirituality and technology. He had programmed a series of A.I. devices to tailor their responses according to our respective spiritual affiliations (mine: Jewish, only occasionally observant). The questions, though, stayed the same: “How am I of value?” “How did all of this come about?” “Why is there evil and suffering in the world?” “Is there a ‘god’ or something bigger than all of us?”

By analyzing our responses, Mr. Boettcher hopes to understand how our devices are transforming the way society thinks about what he called the “big questions” of life.

I had asked to participate because I was curious about the same thing. I had spent months reporting on the rise of ethics in the tech industry and couldn’t help but notice that my interviews and conversations often skirted narrowly passed  the question of religion, alluding to it but almost never engaging with it directly. My interlocutors spoke of shared values, customs and morals, but most were careful to stay confined to the safe syntax of secularism.

Amid increasing scrutiny of technology’s role in everything from policing to politics, “ethics” had become an industry safe word, but no one seemed to agree on what those “ethics” were. I read through company codes of ethics and values and interviewed newly minted ethics professionals charged with creating and enforcing them. Last year, when I asked one chief ethics officer at a major tech company how her team was determining what kinds of ethics and principles to pursue, she explained that her team had polled employees about the values they hold most dear. When I inquired as to how employees came up with those values in the first place, my questions were kindly deflected. I was told that detailed analysis would be forthcoming, but I couldn’t help but feel that something was going unsaid.

So I started looking for people who were saying the silent part out loud. Over the past year, I’ve spoken with dozens of people like Mr. Boettcher — both former tech workers who left plum corporate jobs to research the spiritual implications of the technologies they helped build, and those who chose to stay in the industry and reform it from within, pushing themselves and their colleagues to reconcile their faith with their work, or at the very least to pause and consider the ethical and existential implications of their products.

Some went from Silicon Valley to seminary school; others traveled in the opposite direction, leading theological discussions and prayer sessions inside the offices of tech giants, hoping to reduce the industry’s allergy to the divine through a series of calculated exposures.

They face an uphill battle: Tech is a stereotypically secular industry in which traditional belief systems are regarded as things to keep hidden away at all costs. A scene from the HBO series “Silicon Valley” satirized this cultural aversion: “You can be openly polyamorous, and people here will call you brave. You can put micro-doses of LSD in your cereal, and people will call you a pioneer,” one character says after the chief executive of his company outs another tech worker as a believer. “But the one thing you cannot be is a Christian.”

Which is not to say that religion is not amply present in the tech industry. Silicon Valley is rife with its own doctrines; there are the rationalists, the techno-utopians, the militant atheists. Many technologists seem to prefer to consecrate their own religions rather than ascribe to the old ones, discarding thousands of years of humanistic reasoning and debate along the way.

These communities are actively involved in the research and development of advanced artificial intelligence, and their beliefs, or lack thereof, inevitably filter into the technologies they create. It is difficult not to remark upon the fact that many of those beliefs, such as that advanced artificial intelligence could destroy the known world, or that humanity is destined to colonize Mars, are no less leaps of faith than believing in a kind and loving God.

In the past several years, scholarly research has exposed the racist and discriminatory assumptions baked into machine-learning algorithms. The 2016 presidential election — and the political cycles that have followed — showed how social media algorithms can be easily exploited. Advances in artificial intelligence are transforming labor, politics, land, language and space. Rising demand for computing power means more lithium mining, more data centers and more carbon emissions; sharper image classification algorithms mean stronger surveillance capabilities — which can lead to intrusions of privacy and false arrests based on faulty face recognition — and a wider variety of military applications.

A.I. is already embedded in our everyday lives: It influences which streets we walk down, which clothes we buy, which articles we read, who we date and where and how we choose to live. It is ubiquitous, yet it remains obscured, invoked all too often as an otherworldly, almost godlike invention, rather than the product of an iterative series of mathematical equations.

“At the end of the day, A.I. is just a lot of math. It’s just a lot, a lot of math,” one tech worker told me. It is intelligence by brute force, and yet it is spoken of as if it were semi-divine. “A.I. systems are seen as enchanted, beyond the known world, yet deterministic in that they discover patterns that can be applied with predictive certainty to everyday life,” Kate Crawford, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, wrote in her recent book “Atlas of AI.”

These systems sort the world and all its wonders into an endless series of codable categories. In this sense, machine learning and religion might be said to operate according to similarly dogmatic logics: “One of the fundamental functions of A.I. is to create groups and to create categories, and then to do things with those categories,” Mr. Boettcher told me. Traditionally, religions have worked the same way. “You’re either in the group or you’re out of the group,” he said. You are either saved or damned, #BlessedByTheAlgorithm or #Cursed by it.

PAUL TAYLOR, a former Oracle product manager who is now a pastor at the Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, Calif. (he took the Silicon Valley-to-seminary route), told me about an epiphany he had one night, after watching a movie with his family, when he commanded his Amazon Echo device to turn the lights back on.

“I realized at one point that what I was doing was calling forth light and darkness with the power of my voice, which is God’s first spoken command — ‘let there be light’ and there was light — and now I’m able to do that,” he said. “Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Is it completely neutral? I don’t know. It’s certainly convenient and I certainly appreciate it, but is it affecting my soul at all, the fact that I’m able to do this thing that previously only God could do?”

While turning on the light may be among the more benign powers that artificial intelligence algorithms possess, the questions become far weightier when similar machines are used to determine whom to give a loan, or who to surveil.

Mr. Taylor’s congregation includes venture capitalists, tech workers and scientists. A few years ago, after he organized a lecture about the theological implications of technology — on how everything from the iPhone to the supercomputer is altering the practice of faith — he began noticing that church members would seek him out with questions on the subject. This inspired him to start a podcast, “AllThingsNew.Tech.”

“I’ve been able to talk to a lot of Christian C.E.O.s and Christian founders and just get their perspective on how faith integrates with their technology,” Mr. Taylor said. Their conversations didn’t dwell on concerns over evangelism or piety, but on questions like, “Does my actual faith affect the technical decisions I’m making?” “Are you afraid that technology might be degrading our humanity?” “Through the conversations I’ve had,” Mr. Taylor said, “in some senses all roads lead to the question of: What does it mean to be human?”

I began to encounter whole networks of tech workers who spend their days thinking about these questions. Joanna Ng, an IBM master inventor with about 44 patents to her name, told me that she left the company in 2018 to start her own firm because she felt “darkness” closing in on her from all sides of the tech industry. “Christ will rise before we see artificial super-intelligence,” she said, describing industry efforts to develop the technology, and the vast sums spent pursuing it.

I also met Sherol Chen, a software engineer for A.I. research at Google who organizes meetings where her colleagues can discuss and practice their faith. “Not talking about politics and religion has created some circumstances that we find ourselves in today,” she told me. “Because it’s kind of a new thing, there’s a new openness toward it.” She helped inspire others in the industry to hold prayer meetings, including, for the past two years, 24-hour virtual “Pray for Tech” sessions, which are livestreamed from around the world.

During last year’s event, I watched as the attendees joined together in prayer, asking for repentance and praying for their executives, co-workers and products. Ms. Chen invoked Google’s mission statement, without saying the company’s name. “We’re seeing these answers and these solutions from heaven come through us into our code, into our strategies, into our planning, into our design,” she said. “May we pray for every meeting we have, may we take captive every keystroke we make, everything that we type.”

The technological and religious worlds have long been intertwined. For over a half-century, people have been searching for a glint of spirit beneath the screen. Some of the earliest A.I. engineers were devout Christians, while other A.I. researchers grew up believing they were descendants of Rabbi Loew, the 16th-century Jewish leader who is said to have created a golem, a creature fashioned from clay and brought to life by the breath of God. Some Indian A.I. engineers have likened the technology to Kalki, the final incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, whose appearance will signal the end of a dark age and the dawn of a golden era.

One of the most influential science fiction stories, “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov, dramatizes the uncanny relationship between the digital and the divine. These days, the story is usually told in distilled and updated form, as a kind of joke: A group of scientists create an A.I. system and ask it, “Is there a god?” The A.I. spits out an answer: “Insufficient computing power to determine an answer.” They add more computing power and ask again, “Is there a god?” They get the same answer. Then they redouble their efforts and spend years and years improving the A.I.’s capacity. Then they ask again, “Is there a god?” The A.I. responds, “There is now.”

In 1977, when Apple unveiled its logo, some took it as a reference to the Garden of Eden. “Within this logo, sin and knowledge, the forbidden fruits of the garden of Eden, are interfaced with memory and information in a network of power,” the queer theorist Jack Halberstam wrote. “The bite now represents the byte of information within a processing memory.” (The rumored true story is less interesting: The apple is supposed to be a reference to the one that helped Isaac Newton establish the law of gravity; the bite was added to distinguish it from a cherry.)

Today, a sprawling orchard adorns the center of the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.; I’ve been told employees are encouraged not to pick its fruit.

IN FEBRUARY 2020, shortly before the coronavirus sent congregations worldwide scrambling to find ways to convene virtually, I learned about a group called A.I. and Faith, of which both Mr. Boettcher and Mr. Taylor are founding members. Started by a retired risk-management lawyer named David Brenner, the group is an interfaith coalition of tech executives, A.I. researchers, theologians, ethicists, clergy members and engineers, all of whom, as Mr. Brenner put it, want to “help people of faith contribute to the conversation around ethics in artificial intelligence in a sophisticated way.”

The group’s name is a nod to members’ belief that spirituality and technological advancement can be held together in a happy accord. “The biggest questions in life are the questions that A.I. is posing, but it’s doing it mostly in isolation from the people who’ve been asking those questions for 4,000 years,” Mr. Brenner told me. It is a resolutely, ambitiously interfaith initiative; Mr. Brenner and his colleagues rightly figured that they would have a better shot at having a real impact if they did not espouse or adhere to any particular creed. Mr. Brenner thought the tech industry might find solutions to its moral and ethical corruption from the major world religions. He offered a few examples: “The Fall: Can you know too much? Babel: Can you try too hard?”

Since A.I. and Faith was founded in 2017, it has swelled to include almost 80 individuals of varied faiths, many of them clustered around the Seattle area, with additional members around the world, including in Istanbul, Oxford, Nashville, Brussels, Boston and Nairobi. By bringing together different and often opposing perspectives, A.I. and Faith is also modeling the kind of diverse coalition that its members would like to see replicated on a larger scale in the global A.I. community.

Mr. Brenner, who grew up in an evangelical household, describes his faith as “cross-denominational,” rooted in university churches with a “faith-science crossover.” While working as a lawyer he became a church elder at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle, which sits a stone’s throw away from the headquarters of Microsoft, Amazon and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

One day, he was wandering around the church library and caught sight of a book titled “Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era,” by James Barrat, which argues that humans will “mortally struggle” against artificial intelligence, and perhaps even become extinct. The idea startled him, so he resolved to read everything he could about A.I. and its societal implications.

He began familiarizing himself with the writings of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and other tech leaders who were making their own prognostications about the future. In Yuval Noah Harari’s book “Homo Deus,” Mr. Brenner encountered a description of the future in which humans are replaced by godlike beings, where algorithms rule the world, where humanism and spirituality are superseded by “the data religion.”

This vision seemed not only false but also blasphemous to Mr. Brenner. So he decided to focus his efforts on forming a “bridge building” organization that could act as a moderating force, an initiative intended to prevent tech workers from thinking they had to reinvent the wheel of human morality, and to help them resist the allure of unbounded profits.

“Capitalism just isn’t interested in capturing all its externalities. It never has been,” he told me. “So the goal is to get the best of the private and public sector, including the faith world, to take those externalities into account and avoid the downside, just like with oil and climate change.”

It didn’t take much time for him to recruit the first A.I. and Faith members from nearby congregations and corporations. When he approached two major Seattle-area mosques, he discovered they were already way ahead of him. In many cases, the mosques’ members were also more intimately acquainted with the harms that artificial intelligence has advanced.

“People of color are being profiled, Muslims are being profiled,” said Yasmin Ali, a computer scientist and founding member of the Muslim Association of Puget Sound, “So this is very, very close to their hearts.”

Alongside several collaborators, Mr. Brenner has spent time during the pandemic starting to create a faith-based introductory curriculum on artificial intelligence. He hopes to present versions of it to tech workers and religious congregations to try to help them learn to speak one another’s language. It includes videos of three A.I. and Faith founding members — a pastor, a rabbi and a Muslim A.I. engineer — explaining why they believe that religious communities need to take a more active role in conversations about ethics and A.I.

The pastor, Dani Forbess, shares that scientists and philosophers in her congregation were asking: “What does it mean to be human? Are we users, or are we beings?” She directed participants to the Bible creation story, which shows that humans “are co-laborers in creation” and “co-laborers for the purpose of good.”

AT A BASIC LEVEL, the goal of A.I. and Faith and like-minded groups I came across in Toronto, San Francisco, London and elsewhere is to inject a kind of humility and historicity into an industry that has often rejected them both. Their mission is admittedly also one of self-preservation, to make sure that the global religions remain culturally relevant, that the texts and teachings of the last several centuries are not discarded wholesale as the world is remade. It is also a deeply humanistic project, an effort to bring different kinds of knowledge — not only faith-based, but also the literary, classical and oral traditions — to bear upon what might very well be the most important technological transformation of our time.

“There are people who spend their lives thinking about culture, religion and ethics. You should bring them into your funding universe if you actually care about an ethics conversation,” Robert Geraci, a religion scholar, told me. “Our government is currently poised to start pouring a bunch of extra money into A.I. … Why is it that people who understand culture, literature, art and religion are not part of the conversation about what we want to build and how we are going to build it?”

A.I. and Faith is trying to coax this conversation further along and broaden its range of participants. Its members do not have prescriptions for how A.I. should be built, or rigid policy goals; all they want is an opportunity to participate in a conversation that is already unquestionably and indeterminately altering all of our interior lives. The goals the group does have are classically liberal ones: They do not want to see advanced technology marshaled toward even greater surveillance, accelerated inequality and widespread disenfranchisement.

The group’s ad hoc network has rapidly grown around the globe. It did not take me long to discover that the conversations Mr. Brenner has been staging are also taking place, in different languages and cadences, among religious communities in Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Bangkok and many places in between.

In my conversations with A.I. and Faith members and others working toward similar goals, I often found myself marveling at their moral clarity. Each in their own way, they were working to use their religious traditions toward advancing social justice and combating the worst impulses of capitalism. They seemed to share an admirable humility about what they do not and cannot know about the world; it is a humility that the technology industry — and its political and legal offshoots — sorely lacks.

Over the course of my reporting, I often thought back to the experience of Rob Barrett, who worked as a researcher at IBM in the ’90s. One day, he was outlining the default privacy settings for an early web browser feature. His boss, he said, gave him only one instruction: “Do the right thing.” It was up to Mr. Barrett to decide what the “right thing” was. That was when it dawned on him: “I don’t know enough theology to be a good engineer,” he told his boss. He requested a leave of absence so he could study the Old Testament, and eventually he left the industry.

A few weeks ago, I called Mr. Boettcher to ask about the results of the study that I had participated in, posing existential questions to Alexa and Google. He was surprised, he told me, at how many of his respondents had immediately anthropomorphized the devices, speaking of the machines offering spiritual advice as if they were fellow humans. Across all religious backgrounds, exchanges with the virtual assistants triggered some of the participants’ deepest memories — going to church with their parents, for example, or recalling a father’s favorite line from the Bible — that the experiment often veered into a profoundly “emotional mode.” The ease with which the devices were able to reach people’s inner worlds and most intimate thoughts alarmed him.

“There’s cautionary stuff here for me,” Mr. Boettcher said. “You’re getting into people’s memories. You’re getting into the way that they think about the world, some of the ethical positions that they take, how they think about their own lives — this isn’t an area that we want to let algorithms just run and feed people based on whether they … click on the ads next to this stuff.”

The nonreligious “nones” entered this emotional register more readily, Mr. Boettcher found. Several had come from religious families but had no faith practice of their own, and they found themselves thinking back to their childhoods as they re-encountered language from their upbringings. It signaled something like a longing, he told me. “There’s something that is wanted here.”

He is hardly the first researcher to wade into this territory. In her 1984 book “The Second Self,” Sherry Turkle, a professor at M.I.T., wrote about how computer culture was prompting a “new romantic reaction” concerned with the “ineffable” qualities that set humans apart from machines. “In the presence of the computer, people’s thoughts turn to their feelings,” she wrote. “We cede to the computer the power of reason, but at the same time, in defense, our sense of identity becomes increasingly focused on the soul and the spirit in the human machine.” The romantic reaction she described wasn’t about rejecting technology but embracing it.

In the decades since Dr. Turkle wrote that book, the human-machine relationship has grown ever more complex, our spirits and souls that much more intertwined with our data and devices. When we gaze at our screens, we also connect with our memories, beliefs and desires. Our social media profiles log where we live, whom we love, what we lack and what we want to happen when we die. Artificial intelligence can do far more — it can mimic our voices, writings and thoughts. It can cull through our pasts to point the way to our futures.

If we are to make real progress on the question of ethics in technology, perhaps we must revisit the kind of romanticism that Dr. Turkle described. As we confront the question of what makes us human, let us not disregard the religions and spiritualties that make up our oldest kinds of knowledge. Whether we agree with them or not, they are our shared inheritance, part of the past, present and future of humankind.

[Linda Kinstler (@lindakinstler) is a writer and Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian and elsewhere]

FROM INTERNET TO THE INNER-NET

Day by day, science and technology are rapidly growing in an uncontrollable manner.  Nobody knows where this growth is leading. When we look around, we see developers, producers, distributors, and consumers all seem to be caught in a frenzy to acquire the latest, greatest and largest things. The current state of humanity is like that of a child let loose in a candy store.

Today, while lying in our bed we can order anything to eat, drink, watch or listen to, and it will be delivered right to our home. We don’t need to go to a store anymore to buy new or used things. There are websites for anything and everything. The internet is revolutionizing the world, which is good. Now, we can buy anything with a single click of our finger – except one thing – Love.

We all have air-conditioned houses, cars and offices. But, many people cannot fall asleep in their air-conditioned rooms and must depend on sleeping pills. Some even commit suicide in their air-conditioned mansions. What does this mean? We cannot find peace of mind through external comforts alone. For this, we need to air-condition the mind. Spirituality helps to achieve this.

We live in the age of the Internet. Wherever we go on the planet, we need to have the Internet. But, along with a connection to the Internet, we also need to rediscover our ‘Inner-net’ connection. Spirituality teaches us how to manage both our internal and external worlds. 

What is happening to society? Caught up in the speed of life, mankind has forgotten basic human values; we belittle their significance. We attempt to justify all the violence and unrighteousness we commit, from the individual level to the international level. We then thrust our rationalization of these actions on the rest of society.

There have been problems in the world from the beginning of time. For ages, society has suffered from war, conflict, discrimination based on caste, creed, and social position, as well as disharmony in the family. But, our ancestors had a different outlook on life. They had an inherent awareness of three factors – humans, nature, and the invisible power that harmoniously unites them.

Their vision of life did not only take into account the physical existence of individuals and nature. They believed in a power that forms the foundation of nature and every living being; an invisible power that connects all beings with nature. They recognized this power as the most important part of life. They also believed that all of nature and each and every living being in the universe are like beads of variable forms and sizes, strung on a single thread of creation. This is why they gave so much importance to sharing, caring, consideration and empathy. Today, we have labeled this mentality as ‘primitive,’ rejecting their way of living.

Looking at modern life, we see a society of plenty steeped in misery. Excessive greed has blinded mankind, and the incidence of inhumane actions is on the rise, as a result. Mental agitation and stress have caused new and hitherto unknown kinds of diseases.

Humanity is at a crossroads. At present, mankind lives solely depending on science and technology. However, in light of our current situation, we should at least try to incorporate spiritual thinking, as well. 

There are two types of education: education for a living and education for life. When we study in college, striving to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer, this is education for a living. On the other hand, education for life requires an understanding of the essential principles of spirituality. The real goal of education is not to create people who can understand only the language of machines. The main purpose of education should be to impart a culture of the heart – a culture based on enduring values. Living in spirituality is like the one who knows how to swim, for him, frolicking in the ocean waves is a delightful experience, but one who is unable to swim will quickly drown. We could develop an attitude to accept anything that comes to us happily.

Spirituality is also a science — it is a valid branch of knowledge that cannot be ignored. The scientific community is researching the physical world in an attempt to discover the secrets of the universe. In reality, spiritual scriptures recount the experiences of those who performed intense inner inquiry in order to unfold the same secrets. When we try to view spirituality through mathematics, physics and logic alone, we may fail to grasp its subtleties. We need to approach it with the faith of a child, and with the wonder that shines in a child’s mind and eyes. Renowned scientists of the past viewed the universe and its subtleties with awe and wonderment. Their research had the inquisitiveness and faith of an innocent child. In fact, many past and present eminent scientists acknowledged spirituality towards the end of their lives. But, by then it was too late. Amma prays that the scientific community leading the world today does not make this same mistake. 

When white sand and sugar are mixed together, it is very difficult to separate the two, even for an intelligent human being. However, the seemingly insignificant ant — representing humility — will come and easily manage to eat only the sugar.  Life is a perfect combination of logic and mystery — perhaps more mysterious than logical. In all areas of life, the head and heart should go together.

--Amma Amritamayi Devi

Spirituality and Devotion in the Era of Smartphone

 

During critical situations like the pandemic our scientist-background urban monks have successfully employed Webinars and Zooms to make their timely messages useful and effective. The knowledge we need already exists in Vedas, Upanishads, Gita etc., but through IT they have optimized it and made it appropriate, when direct face-to-face communication got restricted. We still need guru’s guidance here as internet has many fake information as the one stunt news we received: “Olympics 2021 starts with Surya Namaskar in the land of Rising Sun.” I also often receive YouTube and Link-messages from some of my participants with or without scrutiny, who spend all their time on internet but not on inner-net to go through the messages I send. Some of them I find educative too to focus on!

 

Today many of us blame too our spiritual failure on technology especially the smartphone. Orthodoxy feels technology like Smartphone is a hindrance to spiritual life. Restlessness of the mind, falling for desires, subscribing to cheap passion and lust, inability to control the mind is blamed on technology, mobile, social media, TV and everything that is modern. We conveniently put the blame of our spiritual failures on the advances in technology. We regret how private and public have been taken over by mobiles and zoom. We put all the blame on technology as if before the arrival of it, we were spiritually mature and all were on the verge of self-realization.

 

This is nothing new and confined to modern IT. We often met with false Gurus who misguided us for long and political Gurus coming with Kimayana saying Ramayana is false Aryan text misguiding Dravidians creating an Aryan-Dravidian myth!

In this context please go through Prabuddha Bharata November 2015 Issue Editorial write-up on the topic:

We constantly harp on about how technology has broken families, increased depression, created social barriers, and also taken away human communication.

The scriptures of the major world religions talk over and again about the restlessness of the mind and how it is extremely difficult to rein it. Most of these scriptures date back some thousands of years. There was not so much technology then in human lives as today. Yet, the mind was no less a problem. However, back then, there was no easy target to be blamed like technology! Examples that are proverbial would be of help here. A lamp could be used for committing forgery or for studying holy texts. Nonetheless the lamp is not to blame. A knife may be used for cutting fruits or for cutting someone’s throat. Here again, the knife is not the culprit.

Similar would be the line of thought for technology. It is technology that is bringing wonderful and seminal changes to the quality of our lives.

You are able to read these very words because of technology. The dissemination of knowledge, both secular and spiritual, has taken a completely different dimension thanks to technology. The amount of material on the Internet on spirituality in the form of texts, audio, video, and even interactive websites is breathtaking. All this has been presented in a form that is both interesting and accessible.   (So goes my blog too   of few thousands of pages on all aspect of Hinduism and connectivity under 14 heads, all at your finger touch and choice!)

Gone are the days when one needed to scour through libraries to get some nuggets of spiritual wisdom buried in some ancient texts. Today, you can download those texts sitting in the comfort of your house and they are searchable, which makes it very easy for you to get the knowledge you want. This is true with spiritual counsel too.

You can contact authentic gurus irrespective of distance and get valuable guidance from them for your spiritual life (as I am benefited and in turn you). Even gurus of the past come alive to us through their old videos available on the Internet. There are numerous discussion groups on the Internet, where spiritual aspirants or students of scriptures come together and discuss various things. Even places of worship come to your mobile screen, where you can see the image of your cherished deity and pray, and what is more, you   can send your offerings and also receive consecrated food, just with your smartphone (as you find during present pandemic times (Fortunately our temples have relaxed the rule-- No photography and recording of these  are allowed).

With all this help to spiritual life brought about by technology, is it not overly unjustified to blame it for all evils of the mind and for all our shortcomings in spiritual practice? Spirituality is not deterred or inhibited by technology. Though it may surprise many, the truth is that technology holds a great potential to be a great help in our spiritual life. One of the foremost qualities required of a spiritual aspirant by all faith traditions is dispassion.

This translates into going more and more towards ‘How little can I do with?’ from ‘How much more can I possess?’ Technology helps us to do precisely that. For instance, a great range of equipment can be bundled into your smartphone. From listening to music, reading books, using the Internet, taking photographs, using a virtual personal assistant, and much more — the smartphone is all you need.

Technology is a great power to unclutter our lives. All your possessions are converged to one possession, say a smartphone. Now, if you decide that you have to give up your possessions, just give up your smartphone. Though it may sound bordering on the ridiculous, it is true nonetheless. Technology also frees up much of our erstwhile work time. Tasks that took hours just a decade ago are now seamlessly accomplished in minutes. That is good news for a spiritual aspirant. Now one has all those extra hours to contemplate, meditate, repeat a mantra, or perform worship. Assignments and responsibilities that once used to bog our minds and distract it from our spiritual practices can be efficiently delegated to technology.

The intellect is always superior to the mind and has the power to discipline the mind and the senses. Technology is a manifestation of the power of human intellect and it is only logical that technology be used to train the mind.

To effectively use technology it is necessary that we think logically, that we adopt a method of dealing with mundane matters by dividing them into discrete, divisible, and identifiable actions or parts. Then it becomes very easy to make technology do these routine tasks. Thus technology also helps us to focus on the essentials by getting rid of the nonessentials even while doing our daily chores.

Technology is the product of the workings of the human brain. For a devotee, it could be another facet of God’s splendor to be marveled at. God did not just create the universe but also created the human mind that has evolved technology into the shape it is in today. Every aspect of this universe has its good and bad features. So does technology. The key is to focus on the good aspects and exploit them to advantage in our spiritual life.

So there is no gain-saying that technology has its allure that distracts us. But so does every sense object. The solution is to harness technology for our well-being and help in spiritual life. The litmus test is whether our mind gets dependent on technology, whether it becomes restless when there is no access to technology. If it does, then we are overdoing it.

The same technology that helps one find one’s way around using maps, leads to an accident if one uses it while crossing the road or driving a car. While there are millions of people who have no access to technology, there are many others who are using technology to explore new sources of livelihood, who are tapping new means of education.

While there are people who are being drowned in the plethora of mostly unnecessary information on social networking websites, there are others using technology to connect with more people and resources! Technology could aid us all in our spiritual growth. Let us adopt the path of synthesis and benefit from technological innovations for all those temporary things we have to do before we realize the eternal Brahman.

[Please go through an interesting religious column in New York Times by Elizabeth Dias:

Now, after the coronavirus pandemic pushed spiritual teams to discover new methods like ZOOM, Webinar  to function, Fb   goals to change into the digital dwelling for the spiritual communities and desires temples, church buildings, mosques, synagogues and others to embed their spiritual life into its platform, from internet hosting worship companies and socializing extra casually to soliciting cash. It is growing new merchandise, together with audio and prayer sharing, geared toward religion teams.

Digital spiritual life isn’t changing in-person group anytime quickly, and even supporters acknowledge the boundaries of a solely on-line expertise. However many non-secular teams see a brand new alternative to spiritually affect much more folks on Fb, the world’s largest and arguably most influential social media firm.  This would enable everybody to place their face in one other e-book.

 “Our hope is that someday, folks will host spiritual companies in digital actuality areas as nicely or use augmented actuality as an academic software to show their youngsters the story of their religion,”  says the reporter.

LEARNING QUANTUM PHYSICS & LIVING WITH THE DIGITAL WORLD CAUGHT IN THE WEB

 Just as the Reformation was ushered in by the printing press in the 16th century, the web has helped proliferate different interpretations and articulations of religions and the need for spirituality, by urban monks, to live in peace but not in pieces and we have also witnessed the emergence of new communities and faiths like "SBNR",”Ghar Wapsi”, “Awesome without Allah” etc., focused on SQ Management than focused on ritualistic stereo-typed religions. Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish communities flock the Web and amplify the distinctions and differences, while Buddhists and Jains are observing Silence Ritual! 

The concept of religious ritual is so deeply embedded in our social fabric that it is natural for it to have made the leap to virtuosity. And it hasn't just reared its head in worlds such as Second Life and Reincarnation. Social networks, including Facebook, have active and close-knit communities of religious followers of all creeds, gathering in what science writer Margaret Wertheim described in her 1999 book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, as "a new kind of realm for the mind". Perhaps, depending on your attitude to religion, it's more apt to describe these digital collectives in science fiction author William Gibson's words: a "consensual hallucination". 

The importance of the web in everyday life – from banking to shopping to socializing in these pandemonium days – means that religious organizations must migrate their churches and temples to virtual real estate in order to stay relevant and to be where the people are. Religious leaders and spiritual Gurus have websites, blogs and Twitter feeds; there are email prayer ad Bhajan lines and online confessionals, social networks for yogis and apps that bring the faithful to pray together.  "Being web-savvy should be a required skill for religious and spiritual leaders in general these days. The web may have encouraged a lowest-common-denominator eclecticism and turned us into consumers of religion and spirituality " says Sister Catherine Wybourne, that I regret, I can’t expand like Urban Monks to make it more spicy, interesting and involving. I wish, I had some organizational help and support!

Computer Science has taught us that we live in an inter-dependent, inter-twined, inter-woven, inter-related, and inter-connected Universe. If we can't avoid a two-dimensional screen, let us turn three-dimensional, avoid blaming the consequential ills and find a remedy says the Urban Monk David Frawley.

TRANSCENDING OUR TWO-DIMENSIONAL MEDIA WORLD  

 

 “We spend our time looking at small flat screens, which are not only limited in size but lose the depth vision of the third dimension. We live more in a two-dimensional world of small screens than in the actual three-dimensional world. Our own minds easily get reduced to the boundaries of a box. 

 Whatever their resolution, screens cannot equal the myriad nuanced colors of the Earth. We interact more with screens than with the world of nature, where everything is subtle and unique. Add to this our urban environments which are made of cement, steel, paved streets, high rise buildings, polluted air and traffic noise, and the artificiality in our minds is magnified further. 

 Our minds easily get caught in a narrow two-dimensional view of life in terms of irresolvable dichotomies, promoted by a sophisticated media, as if human behavior could be reduced to simplistic dualities, of one group or ideology versus another as good or bad, right or wrong. This polarization of human life is increasing, making real dialogue difficult, with conflicts getting more pronounced. 

EXPANDING OUR PERCEPTION 

Most of us work with computer screens and cannot avoid them. They aid in efficiency and communication in many ways. Fortunately, there is much we can do to counter this two-dimensional reduction of our lives.  

 Simple perceptual exercises can be of enormous help. We can begin with going out to view the vastness of the sky, the clouds and the stars. We should try find an unobstructed horizon at sunrise, sunset or the night sky. Viewing the fluid realms of rivers, lakes or the ocean soothes the mind. Hikes into mountains and hills widen our perspective. Regular retreats into nature can help if we live in a restricted urban realm. We should cultivate a mind that functions in the image of nature, its abundance and ongoing transformations.  

 Pranayama helps as when our senses and minds are constricted so is our breath. Mantra breaks the inertia of our dualistic thoughts in a unitary flow of attention. Meditation is essential for creating space and silence in our awareness. Even something as simple as gazing at a flame can light the flame of consciousness within us. 

 Make sure to counter this dimensional limitation several times a day, better yet for entire days or weeks. You will find life is much more than human competition and conflict. Our inner Self-awareness transcends all limitations into the Infinite and Eternal. Searching that out is the path from mortality to immortality” advises David Frawley.  

 Because of our obsession with two-dimensional screen and over indulgence that call for transcending our two-dimensional world, we cannot just stop blaming the digital world to which we are suddenly thrown! Let us look at its positive contributions to our lives in recent times when it is not possible to get a convincing answer for our queries from our study circles. Google thus acts as our friend in need! Internet often contributes with its Prajna for my Vijnana focus and delivers whatever Inner worth it brings out with which I interact with you all to make it Inner Worth! 

 Just observe the digital world! It is a continuously growing world of servers and clients. The server is a big computer and the client is a small computer. And all the servers are serving the clients. The relationship between the server and the client is that of a mother and a child. The server is always serving the requests of the clients. The servers are not governing the client’s objective of the whole system. I often wonder while I n the digital world when the servers are serving the clients then why in the human world the Governments are not serving the people? This is really a very strange thing!!  All the efforts of the society should ultimately move towards digital and virtual governance. The whole system should be a transparent, online, real-time, collaborative and virtual system.  

 All our needs are basically three-fold: Business, Social, and Spiritual. We all want to basically fulfill our survival, social and spiritual needs. We all act and interact with one another in some way and try to make this world a better and beautiful place to live. We are all a World Wide Web of so many relationships. The computer scientists and information technologists have been successful in tying all the computers and all the information of the whole world in one common thread called the network. This is where Scott McNealy of the Sun Microsystems has once said that the Network is the Computer. The computer network of the whole world has become one big computer. It has become a digital nervous system of the whole world. This has been made possible at the level of a machine but the same is not becoming made possible at the level of all the human beings of the whole world. Can this be really possible? Can the whole world be just one cosmic family and how?   This is a fundamental question in the context of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.   

 

Werner Heisenberg had called the Universe a participating Universe. That is, the Universe has a meaning only when we are interacting with the Universe. (Digital World has made this easy and handy). This is also the emphasis of the string theory that the whole cosmos is a web of inter-connected vibrating energy strings. The whole existence is a web of potential photons, vibrating strings, and super-strings. The insight of the quantum physics is that the whole existence is an unbroken wholeness. The greatest discovery of the quantum physics is that the Universe can neither be continuous, that is infinitely divisible, nor discrete or discontinuous, that is made up of finite and indivisible parts. The Universe is neither discrete nor continuous. It is now called a participative Universe. It is an inter-dependent, inter-twined, inter-woven, inter-related, and inter-connected Universe. We cannot live as separate islands. This is the discovery of the outer world and the outer science. The Vedic and Upanishadic sages, the Buddhas (enlightened ones), the mystics and the Zen Masters have discovered this truth long back in the ancient past in their inner world. This was the result of their inner search and an inner revelation. This was the result of an in-search and not a research. This was the result of their Yoga and Meditation. On the basis of this realization, they have called the whole existence a Parasparam Abhyantaha. This is in Sanskrit and when translated means that inter-dependent and inter-connected we all live in some way or the other and we can never live anymore as separate islands. This is the dream of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.  

Enlightened Leadership (often assisted by Internet in the absence of a Guru) is a small experiment in that direction of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.  The whole Network of the people of the world can become their Net-Worth. Let us take a quantum leap towards that Quantum Consciousness. You and Me together means “We”. We mean, the whole world. We mean Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. We all are inter-connected with that common thread called the Consciousness. 

 Religion does not always embrace the views of science, but it hasn’t been shy about adopting science’s most marketable product — technology.  In the modern era, technology has become all the more ubiquitous in people’s modes of worship. Some of the modern popular Hindu Spiritual Gurus and Urban Monks are Engineers, Doctors and Scientists and have successfully made use of the Internet to popularize Vedanta Religion that Vivekanada projected at World Forum as The Religion of the World for The Future!

One difference clearly separates the internet spirituality of the 21st century from TV and radio evangelism of the 20th century that Billy Graham TV Evangelist used: Dominant and traditional forms of spirituality no longer get all of the air time. Eastern philosophies and other “alternative” forms of spirituality, which are now highly popular on YouTube, Webinar and Zoom, had cultural presence in the last half of the 20th century, but they had remained marginalized, part of the hippy counterculture of the ’60s and the maligned “new age” spirituality of the late ’80s. 

 The internet’s open forum for spiritual discussion has had a number of effects on the way people practice spirituality. First of all, it appears to have diminished ritualistic devotion to traditional spiritual paths. In other words, with so many choices, people are less likely to simply choose their family’s and culture’s traditional preferences. Many may not go to Churches, Mosques, Synagogues and Temples. Those that do not believe in a god have found a united voice by connecting digitally to those with a similarly skeptical mind. Self-identification as agnostic or atheist has skyrocketed since the introduction of the internet in the 1990s, becoming the top spiritual identification in the U.K. and the second-most likely in North America, Australia, and Europe. The label SBNR “spiritual but not religious,” and the label “Awesome without Allah”   born out of the phenomenon of internet dating services, have become increasingly popular as well. 

 Dogma is far from dead in the internet age, however.  On the more extreme sites, violence in defense of one’s dogma is encouraged and supported by the internet community, as has been the case with Christian anti-abortion and Islamic jihadist terrorist groups.  Nonetheless, many spiritual practitioners see the internet and technology as a force for good, a tool that can unite humanity spiritually in a way that will make a better world … someday. New age guru Deepak Chopra sees the internet as an extension of the human mind and consciousness, and believes it to be a harbinger of a great leap in human spiritual development. 

  "Religious leaders and Spiritual Gurus will have to get used to the idea of being more accountable and transparent in their dealings and of having to engage, on equal terms, with those who stand outside the traditional hierarchies," says Wybourne.  Yet the web has not de facto increased inter-faith communication.   "If you want to do that, you need intensively to create that community. Unless you're looking for diversity, you're not going to find it online," says Campbell.  

 On the web, you're more easily able to find your tribe," explains Professor Heidi Campbell, a researcher at Texas A&M University, whose most recent book, When Religion Meets New Media, looks at how Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish communities engage with the web. "The distinctions and differences are amplified online." 

 The search for answers is part of our social narrative and so it is unsurprising that we have gone to the web to ask the questions. There, we are finding our communities, whether they are organized under a traditional doctrine with well-established rituals, or are evolutions that have been produced by people who feel they have seen the light. The greatest danger of the web is not that it will kill or change religion, but that, as Campbell argues, we will see the differences in our faiths because of our desire to find our own kind. 

 Spirituality will likely be present alongside technology for a long time, perhaps because technology makes the need for spirituality even greater. Albert Einstein famously once said, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” At its worst, spirituality can polarize people, encouraging bigotry and fear. At its best, it cultivates virtue and love for one’s fellow humans. Ironically, the information technology that is defining this era has similar tendencies — it can polarize and isolate people, or it can connect and empower people. So, perhaps it is up to us to use both, in tandem, to bring out the best of what we as humans can be and also widely circulate the universal messages of the Upanishads--Sanghachhadvam, samvadadvam, samanmakootih; vasudhaiva kutumbakam; sarvejanah sukhino bhavantu; atmavat sravabhiiteshu, ahimsa paramo dharmah; aa no bhadrantu kratavah  yantu visvatah; krinavant visvamaryam, that had remained in limited circles. It is only internet that has made terms like Brahman,  Atman, Avatar, Dharma, Mantra,Puja, Yoga etc., understood by all and popular too.  

-- June 5, 2021

Comments:

Thanks for the comparison of WWW as the repository of all the knowledge in the world and having unifying effect while being inclusive of all the differences. However, our concept of consciousness is more inclusive, including manifest, unmanifest, matter and energy

--Dr. Vedavyas

Teaching our religious practices, beliefs and culture to our kids is to keep the bond between us, them and our ancestors. I want them to feel a connection and continuity in their growth/evolution as individuals in pursuit of the truth/perfection in their conduct.

 

Temple is trying to provide an unmet need to give them a religious identity and meaningful principles and practices comparable to other faith communities.

Dr. Vedavyas: I believe it is important for parents to empower themselves by validation by higher authority reinforced by the faith community to do good

Fortunately, advanced scholars will automatically seek the truth, and will not stop till they find it regardless of whatever false indoctrination they grow up with.

I want to put people on their pursuit to rise above apparent limitations to greater potential. I am trying to practice this mission in everyday life left.--Vedavyas