Long before the Santa Clara Valley at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay was paved over and made into the industrial area known as Silicon Valley, it was one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world.  Oranges, lemons, grapefruit, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, and red and white grapes grew there in abundance.

Every year great storms would wash over the region from out of the North Pacific and drop their winter rains.

And the following summer that rain would yield orange juice, lemonade, peach nectar, cherry jam, prune juice, and chardonnay and cabernet wines.

This is indeed a marvelous world that a common rain can produce such an abundance of beverages in a single growing season. In the same way, one source yields Christianity, Wicca, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Shintoism and beliefs-yet-to-be.

Defining what the source is, of course, has led to a lot of division as learned men have debated and gone to war over the question of whether orange juice or lemonade is the beverage of truth (rather than a beverage of choice).

Nature is showing us a much more fascinating source than thought before.  It may not be an elderly gentleman sitting on a marble throne, but self-evidently there is a source: existence exists.

(If I capitalize source, someone will put on a white robe with a purple sash and claim to speak for The Source.  And generally people who claim to speak for the source are furthest from it.)

It is fitting to pay attention to the source – not claiming to understand it, but simply taking time, from time to time, to be in awe of existence.  And aloud or silently, in stillness or motion, by standing, kneeling or sitting, it is appropriate to ponder the improbability of existence at all.

When we do this, the angularity of our limbs is less important than the straightness of our hearts.  The Lakota Sioux pray that, at the time of death, they will approach the Great Spirit with clean hands and straight eyes. Prayer is simplicity itself.  Batteries are not required, and we can still drive and operate heavy machinery afterwards.

The word technology refers to anything of human design, whether a wheel, a vase or a microprocessor.  And it also includes spoken and written language (poetry, drama, song, prayer), and even body language (bowing, shaking hands, meditation, tai chi, yoga, chi gong). 

So just as we use our hands and brains to manipulate the external, natural world, there evolved over time a huge body of spiritual technology to leverage the inner universe: the soul, spirit, anima, pneuma, atman, rhuah.

Does prayer or meditation work?  If every atom in the cosmos balances on a razor’s edge, and can go any way at any point in time – in short, if God really does play dice with the universe, as Einstein feared – how can it hurt to blow on the dice?

St. Benedict of Nursia who established the monastic order in the 6^th Century that kept alive law, medicine, scholarship and devotion through the Dark Ages, observed that the Latin word for prayer (ora) is contained the word for work (labora). Life itself is a prayer if we consider breath, respiration, the ultimate prayer.   Breathing is essential to our existence; it’s how we share our inner world with the outer world, and vice versa.

It’s no coincidence that most the world’s names for the source contain the ‘ah’ sound of a deep breath: Yähweh, Äbba, Alläh, Täo, Brähma, (äh-)Om, Nirväna, Bäal, Äshera, Sophiä, Athenä, Amäretsu, Äpollo, Rä. Breathe in composure; breathe out compassion; be in connection. This is the Way, the Path, the Tao home.

The silent meditation of a Buddhist is similar to the spoken Rosary – In-hale Mary, full of grace; ex-hale Mary, Mother of God. Repeat that fifty times and you either fall asleep or enter an altered state of awareness.

The source is like a cosmic onion.  When we think we have it sussed out, life experience peels back another layer and we find there is still further to go.  That is how the child’s notion of God the-candyman-in-the-sky gives way in time to the mystic’s still center.

Where does energy get its energy?  And where does it go? Those questions give life its point and poignancy.  Poignancy because we make so bold as to think our three pounds of grey matter, one-half light-second in diameter, can fathom a universe approximately 17x10²² miles in diameter.  And that’s assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that this is the only universe.

Children see with a freshness and acuity that most of us lose over the years. A five year old can watch for an hour as a centipede makes its way across a twig, and his very observation is a prayer of mindfulness and awe.  As for the centipede, his crawl is a prayer of survival.

Most adults would consider such an hour as wasted, but what do we know? We are afflicted with the film of familiarity; we’ve seen it all before; what else can you show me?  And one reason the child’s exuberance confounds the world weariness of the mature is our exhaustion at the amount of effort we expend every day trying to separate measurable reality from meaningful reality, even as such false divisions confound our life experience.

The 200 or so great cathedrals built in Europe during the late Middle Ages represent the best work of a society that combined leading edge technology (the gothic arch was once avant-garde), with appreciation of life’s labyrinthine journey in the universe (as it understood the universe then).

And the monastic frame of mind established in the west 1400 years ago was popularized again in the industrial age by, among others, Christian monks Thomas Merton and Brother David Steindl-Rast ; and Buddhist monks the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hahn; as well as by Brother Wayne Teasdale, a monk seeking the mystical in the mundane.

If it seems odd to refer to monks in a discussion on technology, it’s because monks in all traditions practice mindfulness or intentionality.  That is, they cultivating a keen awareness of what a given situation is, and what will result from acting on it now.   It’s that frame of mind we need to rediscover.  Our tool use has consequences, and being a release of energy those consequences extend to the edge of the universe.

Simple, complete awareness of this-here-now - mindfulness - is the end point of all scholarship, all research, all wisdom traditions.

So much is present to us all the time, yet we miss so much by looking ahead to The Next Bit Thing. Among the most poignant lines in American literature is spoken by young Emily, granted the gift of returning to visit her home one last time before going to the grave, to the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town:

Emily

So all that was going on and I never noticed.  Wait! One more look... Good-by world. Good-by Grover’s Corners…. Mama and Papa.  Good-by to clocks ticking… and mama’s sunflowers.  And food and coffee.  And new-ironed dresses and hot baths… And sleeping and waking up.  Oh, earth you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?

Stage Manager

No… The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.

And now physicists too.

It’s hard to be fully mindful, especially in a society determined to anesthetize us into mindless frenzies of consumption. The omni-presence of stress, speed and self-involvement makes it very difficult to feel like sharing (rather than dumping on) family, friends and co-workers.

Most of us can’t drop out and go off-grid or retreat to a hermitage, but we do have a body of spiritual technologies that helped people in the past achieve a composed state of mind.

(Consider these words by 20^th Century Zen Master, Shunryu Suzuki.  “When you are practicing meditation, do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let it go out. It will not stay long. When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything. It appears as if something comes from outside your mind, but actually it is only the waves of your mind, and if you are not bothered by the waves, gradually they will become calmer and calmer…

“Actually water always has waves. Waves are the practice of the water. To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one… When you understand your mind in this way, you have some security in your feeling. As your mind does not expect anything from outside, it is always filled. A mind with waves in it is not a disturbed mind, but actually an amplified one.”)

The best time and place to develop these technologies this is ‘off-line,’ away from the stressful situations so it can be called upon when needed.  Waiting for the crisis to hit is the worst time to start climbing the learning curve. (See Full Catastrophe Living: Using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain and illness, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Delta Books, New York, 1990).

Keep in mind that even monks call it a practice. Nobody gets it right all the time, or even most of the time.  Players get into the Baseball Hall of Fame with a .400 batting average.  That means that six at-bats out of ten, the player walked back to the dugout. Getting it right 40 percent gets you in the Hall of Fame.

(A 10^th Century Benedictine monk, St. Romauld, spoke of the frustrations of his practice:  “Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms — never leave it… And if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up; hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more… Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God.”)

Sometimes it’s simply enough to hang in there, and appreciate yourself just for surviving. Two minutes a day may be all it takes at first.  John Lennon, who seemed to have it all – wealth, talent, acclaim – had to admit, probably from experience, that “Life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans.”

If you find traditional approaches don’t work, develop your own. What’s important is to find something that works for you, not blind obedience to someone else’s formula. I’ve been around engineers so long I’ve begun to think like them: if something works, great; if not, do a workaround, a Plan B. The goal is not to add another rote regime to a stress-filled day.  The goal is to pull back from the noise at least some part of each day or week to listen to the signal of our life’s meaning.  Like the Sabbath, the techniques are here for us, not we for the techniques.

If St. Benedict was right, even work (labora) contains prayer (ora) when it is mindfully undertaken.  The craftsman may recognize that before the inhabitant of cubeland see it, but it’s there. Meditating on the mundane may be a good place to start. (See Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Tichnor & Fields, 1993)

And if it’s not possible to achieve this in your present job, consider alternatives. (See The Reinvention of Work; A new vision of livelihood for our time by Matthew Fox, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1994)

Three mundane meditations:

The miracle of existence: At the age of four months an infant begins to notice her fist. She stares in fascination at this object ‘out there’ as she discovers she can move it at will; and so begins the urge to act upon the world. Yet the leap from that primal, instinctual gesture to becoming a concert pianist or master builder is trivial compared to the journey that child made in the past 13 months – the immeasurable leap from nonexistence to living awareness.

The coherence of existence: To understand something, we take it apart and look at the pieces: physicists smash atoms and biologists dissect frogs. And at the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, Isaac Newton conducted one of the great dissections in history – he took light apart.

He allowed a thin beam of sunlight to enter a darkened room, then put a glass prism in the path of the light in order to see what it was made of.  The white light fractured into the different wave frequencies that make up sunlight.  He created a rainbow.

Then he undertook a further experiment.  He put a second prism in the path of the rainbow, and brought all the colors back together again to create coherent, white light.

His finding: sunlight that passes through a first prism breaks into a rainbow, and when it passes through a second prism it reforms as sunlight.

Coherence is embedded in the very nature of nature.  With the big bang, the source - the singularity, or the reality behind it - began expanding, evolving, experimenting.  However much the original energy field fractured to become roses, hummingbirds and the inhabitants on the planet Zorg, it’s still fundamentally the same thing.

The web of existence: On the surface, nature is ‘red in tooth and claw;’ life is ‘nasty, short and brutish;’ we battle endlessly for ‘survival of the fittest.’ And those are fair observations as far as they go.  But the natural sciences are now telling us that it goes further.  Nature balances opposites and harmonizes tensions. It embodies the middle path, moderation, the Golden Mean.

Mother Nature may care more for the species than the individual, but at least she cares. This dynamic planet can break our hearts with its earthquakes, volcanoes, cyclones and tsunamis, but it’s the mark of a living planet. Mars and our moon are very stable.  And lifeless.

And this may be the model for the most necessary prayer of our time: to find the middle path between tumult and negligence – to find the practice of nonviolence social action.

Most of our institutions were set up on the archaic model of us vs. them. Religions, nations and businesses differentiate themselves from competitors.  Even if, as in the case of so much partisan politics today, it means the common good is sacrificed to factionalism.

Most of our institutions, and much traditional science, mimic the first prism, fragmenting the basic coherence.  They are exhausted and exhausting, and many no longer serve any purpose other than self-perpetuation.  When color has lost its color; with what will it be colored?  We are at ground zero, needing to re-think our institutions to perform the work of the second prism, returning coherence.

Our institutions fail because they model archaic notion of nature, that each is separate from all. But we can’t use that excuse any more: nature now cries out that it is coherent, organic, integrated, all-in-all, holographic.

So many institutions today are like dinosaurs, behemoths lumbering around in search of a cozy tar pit to settle into.  But even as the old terrible lizards were dying out, furry little critters – puny mammals - were scurrying at their feet, about to take over the world.  Likewise, people of hope are beginning to design the technology of things-yet-to-be.

There is no future to the course we, and our technology, are currently on. Ultimately, cool stuff and smart weapons are death: of the sprit as well as the body. We cannot keep hurting ourselves and others, the land and water we're made of, with this divinely sanctioned, for-profit, nationalistic wedge-shaped fervor laying waste to all in its path.

Our foreign affairs are violent.  Our entertainment is violent.  Our streets and highways are violent.  Our treatment of the land is violent.  Even our healing practices are violent, such as those used to treat cancer: steel, radiation and poison.  Every marketing message we get is meant to violate our sense of well-being.

And it will get even worse as resources become ever more scarce.  We see what is happening now with oil; pretty soon with water; someday even with clean air.  For all our technical ingenuity, we’ve built our civilization on waste.  And we’re wasting ourselves and our descendants in the process.

We need urgently to set ourselves and our technology on a path that is non-wasteful and non-violent.  In other words, set ourselves in the path of moderation.  The Buddha, The Christ, Gandhi, Walensa, King, Mandela figured it out and so can we: some for all, not all for some.

These were ordinary people who responded to extraordinary circumstances extraordinarily.  Our circumstances today are no less extraordinary.  Our way out is to pursue the Golden Mean with extraordinary determination.

The arc of our present technology, enabling fewer and fewer to possess more and more, is unsustainable.  But we can’t turn back from what we know to return to some pre-Industrial condition.  And though a new Path, Way, Tao is opening up before us, its outlines are still barely discernable. Maybe it will come to us in a meditative state, or during a data Sabbath or while driving to work.  Maybe it will be a reinvigoration of the golden nuggets of antiquity: be kind to yourself by living moderately (Golden Mean), and be kind to others by treating them as you’d wish to be treated (Golden Rule; see Chapter 10).

Our institutions won’t compel us, or even help us, in this.  In fact, it goes against their combined vested interests: promoting endless consumption of dwindling resources which require preemptive wars which in turn require religious zeal to motivate young soldiers to risk their lives for other men’s profit.

The great myth of our generation was that we’d get inside the institutions and reform them from there. In fact, our institutions (the systems we’ve created) are conscious enough to see us as a threat to their perfect workings because of the ways we can muck things up, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.  The computer HAL tried to kill Dave in Kubrick’s 2001 not out of fear or greed or envy, but because HAL saw Dave as a threat to HAL’s perfect working.

We are at war with our institutions, or rather they with us. Our government ‘of the people’ makes perpetual war and calls it the roadmap to peace.  In an effort to avoid the appearance of scandal, church institutions behave scandalously.  Our financial markets are rigged against outsiders.  And our universities are run by bankers, loaning money to kids who’ll spend a career paying it off.

Is it possible to rebel without bloodshed? The French and American Revolutions were violent.  But the English (Industrial) revolution wasn’t and it’s instructive to see why it wasn’t.

Religious non-conformists in 18^th Century England (people not affiliated with the Church of England) could not own land or go to university (which excluded them from careers in law, medicine or statecraft).  So the elders in these communities started their own schools. And they decided that all classes would be in English, not Latin and Greek as at Oxford and Cambridge. And the course content would be of a practical, not theoretical, nature.

So while the English aristocrats and the well educated continued to gaze at each other in mutual admiration, the outsiders took to new technologies, like steam engines, railroads and carding machines, and they revolutionized the world.  Whatever we may think of the Industrial Revolution now with benefit of hindsight, it’s still true that those old non-conformists saw a chance to change their condition; and did so – non-violently.

It’s up to us, as individuals and small communities, to create a new portfolio of physical and moral technology, that will enable us to live with moderation, balance, empathy

How?  We can start by withdrawing on a regular basis from the hypnotic marketing machine, and when we return observe dispassionately how images massage, manipulate and mold our perceptions.

We can also reclaim silence and mindfulness, at least for some fraction of the day. Like all revolutions, all disruptive technologies, all punctuated equilibriums, change comes from the bottom up, never from the top down.  Along with that, we can connect…

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect...