Nomad Codes

Mysteries.
    And the spirit never stopped tugging inside me, but exactly what that spirit was became more and more difficult to explain. The cultural trends I tracked spoke to spiritual needs unsatisfied by the secular technoscientific world of late capitalism, but they hardly touched my own aches. What called me was something more intuited than described, more experienced than codified, more wagered than known. Books fed it, but those wonderful word-machines weren’t enough, and most spiritual groups I checked out seemed plagued with the mystical equivalent of office politics. I grew to suspect paths that depended on powerful teachers or an unleashed imagination, for those strategies often seemed to play off, in a different key, the same obsession with fantasy and celebrity that undergirds the so-called “society of the spectacle.”
    Like a lot of over-educated people, I became attracted to Buddhism for the simple reason that it seemed to emphasize practice over belief. In other words, I could follow the bare-bones recipe of following the breath with the experimental attitude one approaches any intriguing technology—or drug, for that matter. The first Zen priest I met was a crazed Texan with a bad back who described himself as a “Zen failure.” As we talked, the topic turned to UFOs, and he showed me a videotape of Darryl Anka channeling an intriguing and rather amusing extraterrestrial being named Bashar. Six months later I met a monk at a Tibetan monastery in the Indian state of Karnataka, a diamond-eyed American man who had been practicing solidly in the Gelugpa tradition for twenty years. We talked about Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, and he showed off the laptop he used to prepare for the intense philosophical debates his monastery was hosting that month, an event he likened to a Buddhist Olympics. Returning to the States, I hooked up with my first serious meditation teacher, a Zen lesbian who taught multimedia at New York University. Then I met Taizan Maizumi Roshi, a diminutive Japanese monk who, rumor has it, may have partly inspired the Star Wars character Yoda. Definitely my kind of path.
    So that’s how I wound up staring at a wall on a mountain above San Berdoo, with a warm belly, aching knees, and an internal monologue that oscillated between a relaxed embrace of the passing present and a feverish spew of memes. As the days passed, I no longer paid much attention to the internal play-by-play, and my inner sportscaster gradually faded like the sound of a transistor radio carried away down the beach. Cresting into one particular heartbeat one particular afternoon, I felt myself expand and dissolve. There was no longer a world “out there” that sent me information that I processed “in here.” Events simply occurred within a shimmering and bountiful field of lazy and luxurious becoming. A stomach rumble, a bird call, a flash of intense warmth in a knee, a warm breeze—they were like notes in an atmospheric symphony, organically related but freed from the linear rule of melody or the steady beat of clock time.
    Kindergarten satoris like this disappear faster than skywriting. But my experience that day helped me realize that meditation, which many outsiders see as an ascetic disengagement from reality or at best a kind of relaxation exercise, can actually bloom into an awareness of the world far more crisp and, dare I say, information-rich than our usual murky and multitasking consciousness can allow. Though I don’t believe that my zazen did a damn thing for the kids in Bosnia or the stressed ecosystems that fringe LA, I began to see that sitting practice can not only affirm the “binding” with things and beings that lies at the core of religion, but can train and nurture one of the most vital and highly prized commodities of our time: attention.
    This lesson really hit home when I descended from the mountain a few days later. I still felt a serene balance, as if a gently whirling gyroscope was centered in my belly. But from the moment I slouched into the SIGGRAPH convention, it was clear that the center was not going to hold. At least 35,000 people had traveled to the downtown heart of LA’s glittering strip-mall void to attend the event: company reps and computer geeks, Hollywood schmoozers and goateed digital hipsters, and hundreds of civilians who coughed up big bucks just to ogle the tech. And there was lots of tech to ogle: hundreds of games, software packages, virtual reality