The Daily Drool

Silicon Yogi

I write this from the card table in my parents’ house on St. John in the
U.S. Virgin Islands. “Tuesdays with Morrie” sits beside me, a half
day’s read but fuel for many months’ reflection. It is an account of
the author’s interviews with his greatest teacher as the latter lays
dying and eager to share a few last tidbits of wisdom. I have just read
this book on the heels of “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” Thomas
Friedman’s compelling treatise on globalization. The juxtaposition of
pace is what strikes me now – the ever accelerating speed of
technological innovation and geopolitical change versus the ruminations
on compassion and forgiveness that grace the lips of a dying professor.

This contrast brings me back to an experience I have been remiss in
sharing with my electronic travel companions: driving with my father
through the magnificent canyons of northwestern Arizona on September
11th. For two days I danced between tears for the beauty of the road
before us and tears of anguish for the turmoil in New York. As isolated
as we felt on those highways from the people we loved, we were grateful
to feel so safe in nature’s embrace, with no looping television images
of collapsing buildings to plague our minds. God bless NPR.

Life in Boulder over the past few months has continued this sense of
surreal peace. Although I have a taken a job teaching kindergarten and
deal with my share of chaos in the classroom, I have grown happily
accustomed to the smiles on people’s faces and the quiet mountains that
surround me. I make an effort to keep up with the news. But often I
feel that my closest tie to Afghanistan is my students’ desire to build
a mega-robot that will find Bin Laden (after it defeats Digimon, of
course).

The truth is that I enjoy seeing the world through the lens of these
five-year old children. They are working so hard to make sense of the
voices around them, barraged with conflicting ideals and images of right
life. One of the boys’ mothers owns a New Age shop in Boulder that
sells incense, world music, crystals, fountains, and books on yoga. Yet
his own obsessions are with Dragon Ball Z, Zoids, and Batman Beyond, the
rambunctious and violent cartoons that fill The Cartoon Network’s
prime-time lineup. My co-teacher and I just want him to channel any of
these interests into a desire to build, learn, and communicate. I saw
my eleven-year old nephew Nick sitting in a similar storm here two days
ago as he struggled to install a bloody 3D shooting game on his computer
while I taught yoga to the rest of the family and his father nagged him
to get his homework done.

In thinking about what age I would most like to teach I have been
searching for some magical “collision point” between the innocence of
childhood and the frenzy of postmodern culture. Perhaps it is when they
learn to read on their own, surf the net on their own, install their own
software, or travel away from their parents. Perhaps it is when people
become financially independent. Such a privileged point, a point of
greatest leverage for the teacher, proves elusive and hopeless to find.

We are all engaged in a struggle to define who we are amid a cacophony
of people telling us what they want us to watch, study, buy, and be. At
every stage in our lives we face a unique set of challenges and
influences. The role of a great teacher, one so elegantly lived by
Morrie Schwartz, is to meet people where they are and help them find
their true self without pulling, molding, or pushing them down any path.
Of these I’ve been fortunate to have not only one but several – my
father, David Rea, Harvard Knowles, George Forman, and my gurus in
India.

In thinking about how to best play this role for others, a new phrase
came to light last night: “21st Century Yoga.” Yoga is designed to be a
universal system of holistic education, a process that helps one tap
into the divine energy within through intellectual inquiry, altruistic
acts, devotional practice, and the meditation and physical exercises
that have been popularized in the west. There is a great emphasis on
unity and harmony between the mind, body, and spirit. My question is
this: how is the process of this harmonization affected by the
integration of our minds with the information appliances we have begun
to integrate into our lives? Perhaps I am peculiarly enthusiastic
about technology, but I definitely see my computer as an extension of my
mind. I even run a piece of software called “PersonalBrain” that allows
me to visually map concepts, web pages, and files on my computer so that
it stores information more similarly to my biological brain. Microsoft
Outlook, with all of its tools for “personal information management” has
become a prosthetic of my memory and my communicative voice. I believe
there is a “yoga” for the new cybernetic self that emerges, a discipline
of insight into the way we organize our thoughts and our data, a
discipline of manipulating the boundaries of ego as we immerse ourselves
in virtual and interconnected worlds. In the corporate world, this
discipline overlaps with the nascent trend of “knowledge management,”
but the latter falls short.

To be a silicon yogi, one would have to master the tools of information
and knowledge management and learn how to so deeply integrate them into
one’s habits and life that we would cease to know where the brain stops
and the chip begins. One would teach others about the tools and
possibilities, when to use the machine and when NOT to use the machine
as a mental prosthetic. The greatest wisdom will lie in the knowledge
of when to step away from the silicon. And I believe one would develop
the software and interfaces further to facilitate people’s harmonious
use of technology for personal growth. It is to push myself in these
directions that I am currently applying to graduate programs in
educational technology at several schools of education (Stanford,
Harvard, Berkeley, and Northwestern). Exciting research and design are
afoot, but I have yet to see great efforts to develop practice and
discipline.

Ultimately the junction of the “Lexus” (technology, globalization, high
speed) and the Olive Tree (roots, spirit, community) lies in the mind,
and in the mind’s relationship with its tools. Forging the balance is
the key to our survival and continued evolution. I hope I can be of
help.