Zazen Blogido Fu

Posted on January 13, 2009
Filed Under Society and culture, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

In an ass-backwards sort of way, blogging has certain meditative qualities that can help you plod your way towards your own personal enlightenment. That’s what’s started to dawn on me. Deciding to rise (recently, and perhaps foolishly) to a challenge dare to grow my blog, I started to learn more about blogging in general. Here are some of the insights (dare I call them that?) I have gathered so far:

Truth, and analytics

There is nothing like the harsh light of day when you finally take a look at your webstats. I mean really take a look. The discovery that, as far as the world is concerned, your blog is not worth crossing the great cyber sidewalk to even spit on it… that discovery is worth its weight in gold.

As far as google analytics is concerned, this site is mainly a waste of its number-crunching time. (And as far as google itself is concerned, it has decided of late that this a pile of cack not worth indexing. I have the blessed joy of working my way out of the dreaded ’supplementals’… over the duration of the rest of my life probably, as some doomsayers would have me believe. And I believe not). [update DEC 2009]: Actually, google has been showing me love – for months now, as a matter of fact.

The point is, this is true of the vast majority of blogs. As with life, the multitudes are average people leading average lives, with shockingly few examples of stellar, influential lives led every century. What do we make of this fact? And does it colour our blogging strategies? It’s amazing how many people will slave away day and night to change this ‘unfair’ balance for a blog (or site) in their care, and yet become excruciatingly lazy when it comes to sliding the position of their own lives along a very similar, but human, continuum. There is sometimes even a hope to achieve the latter vicariously through the former. I know I’ve certainly been guilt of that…

So what’s going on? Several pundits have exclaimed that blogging is dead (which would explain perfecly why I’ve decided to take it up, wouldn’t it?! :) )… but other than it’s expressive and cathartic power, there are other reasons for carrying on, I think. I’ve learned, and will continue to learn, a lot through the exercise of owning and maintaining a blog.

The Law of Detachment

Unlike it’s intuitive cousin (the law of attraction), the law of detachment is fiendishly difficult to come to grips with. It’s multi-dimensional subtleties continuously evade the human mental abilities, so let’s deal with it in binary terms: What is it to care about your ranking, while not caring about your ranking? What is it to write intentionally, but with no intention at all? What is it to have focus, while being aimless at the same time? This zen-like balance is precisely what a personal blogger must cultivate (and who knows, maybe the same goes for professional/business bloggers too).

In exerting ourselves through blogging, it is the exertion itself that needs to engage us. And yet, and yet, it does not mean that we should be oblivious to outcomes. We should know what is happening with our blogs, and the direction things are going in, and take the opportunities that present themselves; even creating opportunities for ourselves, all the while being detached from the outcome.

Authenticity

Authenticity correlates with relevancy, as far as search engines are concerned (that, and originality). But here I am talking about a different type of authenticity. We blogging newbs are constantly told to ‘be ourselves’ and ’write about what we are passionate about’. These directives have a whiff of ‘vikalpa‘ about them, though.

The directive ‘be yourself’ is more constraining than it at first seems. You only think you are you, so that your digital ruminations present a facade nevertheless: it is the you that you think you are at the time of writing, not the you that you really are. (Which isn’t). Armed with a directive like ‘be yourself’, it is tempting to work too hard at being oneself, which leads to the conceptual hubris of deciding what that self is, or is about. So I think bloggers should unshackle themselves from this one. We are more recognizable when we express lots of impermanent, current selves, rather than a fixed, (pre-)determined self.

And as for ‘write about what you are passionate about’, this rings true… but isn’t it simpler to just say ‘write passionately’?

Washing the rice bowl

The koan where the zen master tells the student to ‘go and wash his rice bowl’ in response to a question about the meaning of enlightenment is famous because it redirects: away from conceptual understandings, and toward understandings that can be gained only through the practicalities of getting on with everyday life. And so for a blogger, the koanic equivalent of ‘washing your bowl’ is to write the next post, when it is time to write the next post (the oft-forgotten part of that koan is that the master deflects the original question by first asking, ‘have you finished your morning porridge?’. Presumably if the student had answered no, they would instead have been told to ‘go and finish eating, you cannot wash your bowl at this time.’).

In going through the motions of life – not dumbly, numbly or mindlessly – one is supposed to learn a lot about life. Through such simple and direct experience, one might even claim to have arrived at the ‘not-meaning’ of it all. So too with blogging, I think. It is tempting to ask the eternal questions: ‘How much money can you make?’ or ‘What does it take to be number one on technorati?’. It profits one more to get on with blogging, actually. Something about building up the long tail distribution of articles so that…

Zazen Blogido Fu

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