Sandalwood is considered the epitome of excellence, imparting fragrance even to the axe that cuts it.

The Hindu Vedas

Sandalwood

Are you good at what you do? Or are you just good at appearing to be good at what you do? Those who fall into the former category are the Sandalwoods of this world. Those who fall into the latter category are good at what they do (or appear to be anyway) in only very specific circumstances.

In most disciplines, generally speaking, we have control over both the context in which our work is encountered and by whom. If we lack the skill to solve the problem laid out to us then it is possible for us to manipulate the context, and thus the problem, into one which we do know how to solve. Or failing that maybe we can borrow someone else’s solution, tweak it a little and attempt to ensure that none of the original problem solver’s fans see what you’ve done. It all comes down to our ability to authentically respond to the utterly unique nuances of an individual problem. What differentiates the master from the amateur is that the master can conjure, seemingly from nowhere, a response that is as unique as the problem, perfectly matching, without shortage or excess, the precise nature of the question posed to them. The amateur however, struggles and must fall back on mere mannerisms, clichés and set-pieces.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being an amateur, it is a most worthy stage to find oneself, the concern is those that habit this phase yet claim, whether implicitly or explicitly, to be otherwise. The work of a master is a joy to behold, it oozes confidence, it invites scrutiny at every turn, no detail has been left unaccounted for. To achieve such a level of mastery one’s skill must have been truly taken to heart, to have saturated every facet of one’s life. Such a person spares not a single thought for how their solution might be criticised by others, because they know it is self-consistent in every aspect.

If you have expended any of your energy on the appearance of your solution — rather than on the core of the solution itself — then you will inevitably squirm and whine when faced with critical scrutiny; the inherent contradiction in it will be exposed and there is truly nothing uglier. However when the axe of scrutiny slices at the work of true skill then there is nothing to fear, not a single aspect of its nature could ever reveal discrepancy. In fact the deeper the axe penetrates, the sweeter the scent of integrity that wafts through the air.

Real-life Human Beings

I’m not against the whole Web 2.0 bandwagon, in fact I quite like the term and what it stands for. Let me just distil one feature of this widely recognised paradigm shift; namely the relocation of the web’s centre of gravity from the privileged elite of rich and clever developers to the everyman of good, honest and humble users. Facebook, Wikipedia, Blogs, Youtube, Twitter; it’s all about the users creating that which we find most engaging and valuable on the Net. Now the interesting thing here is that complimentary to this user-centered shift there’s been a simultaneous increase in the authenticity of the Net as a genuine medium of expression — we can date, make friends, lose friends, chat, hate, laugh and cry all the more easily because we can express ourselves all the more easily, warts and all. However, there’s something historical — and perhaps internally cultural — about the Net that encourages a re-imagination of our identities; think alter egos, exotic username handles, fantasy worlds and such like.

So whereas you hear a lot about the Net becoming more and more a social phenomenon, you hear very little about the Net as a bastion of the benefits of being involved in a society. In fact, more often you hear the opposite; parents complaining that their children don’t spend enough time with real children, for example. I would like to think however, that this is not so much a symptom of the Net itself, but more a reflection of the human desire to appear in the best possible light. The Net, more than any other medium, allows us to control both the context of how we are perceived and who perceives us and many of us choose to take advantage of this fact. Which I believe means we can choose otherwise.

Instead of re-inventing ourselves in cyberspace we are allowed to just be ourselves, to be real-life human beings. We don’t need to hide or censor anything. In fact, on the Net honesty is recognised as a valuable currency  just as much as it is everywhere else. The deciding factor isn’t so much the medium or the context through which we choose to express ourselves but the intention that we cultivate within our own inner worlds. We have a choice to actually be a likeable person, rather than just appear to be a likeable person. This is a personal and universal choice and one that applies unconditionally, no matter the context.

The idea came about as a progression of the many long and fascinating discussions that we’ve had over the years. Having met at university, where we were both studying Religious Studies, our conversations have always had a most enjoyable mixture of intellectualising balanced by experiential reflections. It struck us that, though we never come to an ‘answer’, we always have fun trying and never seem to run out of new topics and fresh perspectives. In this way I compared it to jamming with musical instruments and in this spirit we’ve decided to release some of our ’sessions’ to see if anyone else finds them interesting.

Walter Ong and Jack Goody argue that even the technologies of orality and literacy dramatically effected the way humans thought and lived. Perhaps obviously the very fact of structured language and speech provides unprecedented and powerful tools for the transmission of knowledge, even before writing, memory served as a worthy vehicle for trans-cultural and trans-temporal communication. Then with literacy we have books — artifacts that, I think, uncoincidentally play pivotal roles in all the major world religions. And penultimately we have the printing press, let me quote Clay Shirky from his inspiring TED talk, Institutions Versus Collaboration,

“The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was [...] an organising political force, to the Treaty of Westphalia when we finally knew what the new unit was, the nation state.”

Essentially what Shirky is saying is that the printing press was central to the precedent of governance that separated church from state and provided the religious freedoms that so many of us take for granted today. Therefore here we have, not only an evolution in the character of religion, but also in the organisational principles within which most of the world’s  nations are contained.

Of course, this is a very brief overview of our media epochs, but you get the picture. Hopefully this might have perked your interest for a sight of religion’s and the Internet’s crossing of paths.  However, for myself, being in the process of forging a career from making websites and thus entrusting my very livelihood to the Internet, articles like Cyberpilgrimage: A Study of Authenticity, Presence and Meaning in Online Pilgrimage Experiences by fellow alumni and friend from Lampeter University Connie Hill-Smith, doubly prick my ears.

One of the first issues that Connie (it’s just too weird referring to a friend by their surname!) tackles in her article is the lack of scholarship, and perhaps even reluctance, pertaining to pilgrimage’s relationship with the Internet. In fact the article’s remit is very much an attempt at an initial step towards counteracting any inertia that might, as Connie fears, “undermine serious engagement with the subject and indeed, with the Internet as a religiously experiential, and not just expressive, medium”. Her first, and perhaps most important appeal, is towards the idea of pilgrimage as metaphor; an already accepted notion that ‘real’, physical pilgrimage is as much about an internal journey as an external one. If the classical stages of pilgrimage; getting there, arriving and returning, each posses a corresponding internal state of mind then we can begin to see how carefully thought out and creative multimedia experiences like Youth For Christ’s Online Labyrinth might offer something of the sacred journey.

This internalisation of pilgrimage’s centre of gravity really gets me thinking about how we commonly perceive the average user interacting with the Internet, therefore; the solitary viewer locked into a transfixed embrace with a keyboard and screen. Is this image actually accurate? Because if one considers the recent data from the International Telecommunications Union, then the answer is very much no, as the number of mobile devices capable of connecting to the Internet surpassed the number of desktop devices in mid 2008. Which raises the tantilising prospect of also being able to appeal to the externalisation of the Internet as well as the internalisation of pilgrimage as a means of highlighting the common ground that is cyberpilgrimage.

An example. Earlier this year comedian Eddie Izzard undertook 43 marathons in 51 days circumnavigating the British Isles, raising over £300, 000 for the charity Sports Relief. With his iPhone strapped to his shoulder for the duration, he shared his adventure using Twitter; keeping the world (including me) constantly up to date with 140 character tweets, pictures, video and GPS co-ordinates such as this. Apart from being deeply inspired by Eddie’s sincere effort, dedication and fitness, the experience was for me surprisingly participatory. Being a full time web developer means spending much of my time hooked up to the Internet and so I was able to watch his progress as it happened. But I wasn’t just participating in Eddie’s run, but equally in the community of thousands that were also following his fortunes. For every tweet of Eddie’s there’d be many more in response, so that one very much felt included in a multi-directional conversation, reminisent in both feedback and also in pace of the real face to face world.  When Eddie mentioned the name of a village he was passing through or uploaded a worthy panoramic, there’d always be someone that said ‘I know that place!’, or ‘that’s where I live’. People would come out to meet him waving banners and even jog a while with him. Everyday was different, sometimes he’d find it really hard and tweet pictures of his blisters, whilst other days were easier, perhaps some charismatic celebrity had been running with him that day.

If you’re thinking, “but that’s not a bonafide pilgrimage”, I would for a start disagree, but also point you to similar interactions carried out on the more archetypal pilgrimage of the Camino De Santiago by Damian Corrigan or Christina Santos. What’s apparent here, I hope, is the way in which, by virtue of the Internet, an unarguably external journey, whilst remaining essentially true to its original form, is tangibly evolved into something new. Significantly, allowing a loosening of the common understanding of how we interact with the Internet, returns the possibilities of using existing pilgrimage theories and frameworks, such as communitas and liminality, without substantial alterations. And so now the really interesting question is; does Twitter enhance the pilgrim’s experience or dilute it? But I think that’s a discussion for anther time.

Going back to the more conventional view of Internet usage there are two more concepts in Connie’s article that intrigue me; co-location and physicalisation. Co-location is essentially the circumstance of being aware that one is doing something at the same time as someone else yet in a separate location, clearly this is pertinent to such activities as ritual and worship. Physicalisation is the making physical of otherwise abstract words, thoughts, pictures and so on, for example if you tweet a prayer to @theKotel, he will print it out and place it on the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Both concepts work towards highlighting the ability of the Internet to effect a more palpable sense of presence, that one is not merely interacting with an inert machine but that the machine is actually facilitating real engagement with the real world and real people. This ‘real engagement’ strikes me as being very similar in description to the principles of the so-called Web2.0. Roughly speaking Web2.0 refers to the user-centred shift that has occurred in recent years following the ‘Dotcom Bubble’ — Internet content is increasingly social (think Facebook, MySpace and Twitter) and increasingly user-created (think Youtube, Wikipedia and Blogs). Where social corresponds to co-location and user-created corresponds to physicalisation.

Though not directly related to pilgrimage, a remarkable and romantic example of the possibilities opened up by Web2.0 comes from the photo sharing site Flickr. On the 21st of January 2009, Michael David Murphy asked members of Flickr whether they had, by some stroke of coincedence, managed to capture an image of him proposing to his fiancée amongst the crowds of the inauguration ceremony of Barack Obama. Quite incredibly some days later Flickr user egoody had indeed caught the moment on camera and had posted the shot on the site. Now this is quite an unusual achievement for a Web2.0 site, I wouldn’t want to give the impression otherwise, but what I want to bring to attention is how the previously mentioned factors of co-location and physicalisation work together with a subject matter as sensitive and as worthy of dignity as anything sacred.

When you consider the prominence of Web2.0 sites and the accompanying shift that their approach is bringing to the Internet as a whole, you can see how concepts such as co-location and physicalisation are becoming more and more fundamental ingredients rather than occasional edge cases. And as such we can see how the Internet is increasingly becoming a place towards which people are entrusting more of that which they consider most precious. This coupled with the Mobile Internet and ubiquitous connection provides a convincing argument for the significance that the Internet might play in pilgrimage and religious affairs as a whole.

Which reminds me that the future isn’t always where you think it is, I’ll end with Clay Shirky again;

“Meet Up is a service founded so that users can find people in their local area who share their interests and affinities and actually have real world meetings offline in a cafe or a pub or what have you. When Scott Heiferman founded Meet Up he thought it would be used by trainspotters or cat-fanciers, classic affinity groups; the inventors don’t know what their invention is. Number one group on Meet Up right now? Most chapters, in most cities with the most active members? Stay at home moms. In the suburbanised, dual income United States stay at home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local small scale neighborhoods. So they’re reinventing it using these tools. Meet Up is the platform but the value here is the social infrastructure. If you want to know what technology is going to change the world don’t pay attention to 13 year old boys, pay attention to young mothers, because they haven’t got an ounce of support for technology that does not materially make their lives better. This is so much more important than XBox but it’s a lot less glitzy. I think this is a revolution.”

It’s currently priced at £7.09, but post and packaging comes to about £4, so it’s yours for about £11. I don’t make any profit from that, it’s all printing costs to Lulu and posting costs to Royal Mail, but the plus side is that it’s available to the world and I don’t have to take care of any admin (taking payments, sticking it in an envelope, etc).

I never knew how much time and effort went into making a book, of course the actual writing is a significant task, but then the editing, re-editing, notes, bibliography, typesetting, cover/art work and all the rest of it has taken me just as much time. All in all, from when I jotted down the first word to its availability on the intertubes, over three years have passed. And it’s only a moderately sized book, maybe 16,000  words, that’s 80 or so pages.

So what’s it about? Well, there’s a nice little description on the back cover which you can read on Lulu.com, but basically it’s a collection of six essays exploring spiritual and philosophical topics often pitched from an autobiographical perspective — so no computer programming I’m afraid! The idea to write a collection of essays, rather than the more typical, series of chapters, was influenced by a few things; firstly I think the fact that, only months previously, I had completed a degree, played a part, but I was also inspired by the ostensibly narrative-less structure of The Faith To Doubt by Stephen Batchelor and the series of collected essays by Chris Arthur (Irish Nocturnes, Irish Willow and Irish Elegies), the acclaimed writer who also happened to be one of tutors.

And is it any good? Well you’ll have to find out for yourself!

OK, so I don’t pretend to have the answer, but I do know that it is here, that it came about somehow, apparently out of nothing, and confidently seems to be hanging around for a while longer! It’s in everything, the stars, computers, people, feelings, words, food, you name it, it’s there. But it’s not really a thing though in itself, not like a misty substance that infuses everything, in fact, despite its ubiquity, it seems utterly unfindable and ungraspable – frustratingly so.

To be honest, it’s rather a lot to take in, it’s size, variety, mysteriousness and it’s rather unfriendly promise to remove me from it at some unspecified point in the future. Yet, by that same token, I also find myself sometimes feeling rather exhilarated and privileged to be part of such a huge and unique adventure!