For many people an online identity through a website or social media is a tricky thing fraught with worry over popularity and social acceptance and it can take a lot of time and energy to create, track, and maintain. It can be a worldly trap.
Before monastic life, I created online sites and tools and developed standards for the Semantic Web. I had a sense of identity about my little role in the tech world and often felt tied up in stress (dukkha) through needing to maintain and improve my online identity.
As a monastic, the focus has been on understanding dukkha (stress, suffering, unsatisfactoriness…) and its roots in craving, clinging, and becoming and on abandoning those roots for the freedom found by the Buddha.
Now that I will be traveling, a number of people have asked for me to have a place online so they can see where I am and how monastic life develops through traveling. I aspire to do this from a place quite different from pre-monastic life.
Then, I cultivated a persona as an expert within my little piece of the tech world. Now, I hope to approach this as a space of humble investigation into what it is to stay connected by using technology without attaching to what is shared and how it is viewed, in other words, without creating and attaching to a fixed self-identity.
To keep monastic development central, this will not be a regularly scheduled blog. There will be stretches of time where I will be in retreat or otherwise offline. I look forward to connecting with you at the right times and in the right ways. It will be an ongoing exploration to see what that looks like.
May you and I be well focused on the Buddha’s teaching as we navigate the online, in-person and internal worlds, so that, together, we deepen our understanding of just what this creation of identity is all about. In learning to see clearly, may we let go of all grasping, clinging, and identity views.
May we be liberated. May we be free.