Nomad Codes

with drugs, sex, food, and unconventional social structures, and their protocols and inconclusive results still dominate the spiritual scene. We came of age as they gradually turned away from the heady dreams of Enlightenment, chemically induced or otherwise, and moved towards everyday responsibility, sobriety, and the practices that support a mindful but ordinary life. Our own turn towards autobiography reflects this legacy as well, but it also expresses, I hope, a tiny bit of spiritual wisdom often lost in the absurdities and revolutionary excesses of the counterculture: that we are not just children of the moment, but of history, and especially of the biological and social forces that shape and constrain our bodies, our perceptions, and the still infinite potential that lies shrouded within the hooded self.
    But again, we start with where we are, or rather where we have been, which in this particular case means a tent in the mountains of Southern California. The portable alarm clock chirped to life at 3:30 a.m., finding me in an all-too-familiar state: disoriented and in the dark. Tugging on loose black pants and yanking a long-sleeve pullover over an Aphex Twin T-shirt, I staggered out of my tent into a night filled with stars and satellites. It took a moment before I recalled my exact coordinates: east of Los Angeles, in the San Bernadino mountains, on the grounds of the Zen Mountain Monastery. It was deep summer, in the middle of 1995, and I had just driven down from San Francisco for sesshin, a week-long silent retreat consisting largely of interminable hours of zazen. Barely half an hour after rising, with a blast of coffee in my gut, I was at it again: sitting with my legs scissored in the half-lotus position, eyes hazily gazing at a blank wall, my mind gradually settling into the breath that filled and fled my belly like the air in a bellows.
    A week later I would hurtle down the mountain into the heart of Los Angeles to attend SIGGRAPH, a huge industry convention devoted to the latest advances in computer graphics: video games, animation, web technologies, virtual reality. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that at the Mountain Center—in fact, I was trying not to think about much at all. The monastery’s strict regimen gave me a rare opportunity to tune out the details, distractions, and seductive chimeras of our yammering information age, the glut of signals and noise that I, like so many folks today, navigate for bread and butter—and sometimes, it must be admitted, for a sense of self as well.
    For people habituated to media, its abrupt and total absence can be both refreshing and alarming. Cult “deprogrammers” (notice the technological metaphor) warn that authoritarian religious groups severely restrict or eliminate access to information from the outside world in order to inculcate their world view in new recruits. While a number of sects have certainly abused such tactics, the deeper implication of these warnings is that today’s barrage of media is healthy and normal, and that the stream of images, ads and information that saturate our world is not already infested with vivid and manipulative seductions, with cargo cults of consumerism, greed, and celebrity worship.
    In any case, I felt a brief media fast would do no harm. In fact, I hoped it would allow me to do some de-programming of my own. Our ordinary stream of consciousness flows from deeply ingrained habits: cultural, biological, karmic. Practice partly consists of creating the space for these tics and knots to gently deconstruct themselves, until the whole constricted sense of “I” begins to loosen like an old sweater.
    But sitting there hour after hour, sensing my body settle into a relaxed immobility and my brain trance out on its own babble, all I encountered was a tumultuous buzz of restless chatter—what sages have dubbed the “monkey mind,” but which I rapidly came to think of as“ TV mind.” I was amazed how much media clogged the pipes: Led Zeppelin songs, Simpsons episodes, Wallace Stevens poems I read in college, the most recent reports from the latest distant war. Though I occasionally channel-surfed into moments of pregnant stillness, I spent far more time realizing what anyone who feels lonely or anxious and instinctively flips on the television knows: media is much easier to process than a moment of unvarnished experience.
    A number of channels were showing “The Erik Davis Story,” though most of the