Okay, this made me laugh.
I have mentioned before that I have a Twitter
account. The majority of the people I follow write jokes. I do not follow people who use it to discuss
the mundane day-to-day of their lives (Oh, boy, I just love milk) or who use it
to push an agenda (You must send money today to protect the planet against the
ever increasing scourge of people wearing plaids and checks at the same time)
or people who simply use it as a way to self-promote (I will be selling my hand
woven raffia iPhone covers at the supermarket parking lot this Saturday).
Recently I clicked on the follow button for the Dalai Lama. He doesn’t talk about the tasty mustard seed
dressing he had at dinner last night, ask for money to buy more robes for
disadvantaged monks or peddle his mountain top tours. He says things that promote kindness and
reinforce the ideas that we need to be nice to each other. I like that.
Here’s the part that made me laugh. Twitter sends me e-mails suggesting people I
might want to follow based on who I already follow. The e-mail I got after choosing to follow the
Dalai Lama said “Here are accounts similar to who you followed. Similar to the Dalai Lama… The Onion.” The Onion is an organization dedicated to
silly. It creates fake news for the
purpose of entertainment and has very little concern about offending
people. So, on the one hand we have a
man who has dedicated his life to spiritual enlightenment for himself and as
many others as he can possibly reach and on the other hand we have a group of
people who like writing stories with as many double entendres as humanly
possible. Yeah, that connection makes
total sense.
Now let’s examine the idea that the Dalai Lama has a
Twitter account. The Dalai Lama is
thought to be the reincarnation of a series of spiritual leaders who have
chosen to be reborn in order to enlighten others. The Dalai Lama is the highest
lama of Tibetan Buddhism and the highest goal of Tibetan Buddhism is to achieve
Buddhahood, or a state of perfect enlightenment. This perfect enlightenment means one is freed
from all mental obstructions, one attains a state of continuous bliss attached
simultaneously with the knowledge of emptiness, and all limitations to help
other living things are removed. That is
perfect for Twitter.
Let’s look at the perfect enlightenment one
component at a time. One is freed from
all mental obstructions. Have you spent
much time on Twitter? Or any part of the
internet? Mental is not what it excels
at so mental obstructions would not be present. One attains a state of
continuous bliss attached to the knowledge of emptiness. Happiness brought about by emptiness may be a
better definition of the internet than a global system of interconnected
computer networks. Finally, all
limitations to help other living things are removed. The internet is pretty magic.
Sounds to me like Twitter was created to facilitate
the Dalai Lama’s mission statement: end
suffering in 140 characters or less.
The e-mail from the Twitter minions brought to mind
something else about the internet world.
Just how many people know stuff about me? The Twitter guys know who I follow. The iTunes guys know what music I buy. The Google guys know what I don’t know. The Wikipedia guys know I am gullible enough
to believe the Wikipedia guys (see the previous paragraph comprised of Dalai
Lama facts).
Now I lead a preternaturally uneventful life and my
deepest darkest secrets include the guilty pleasure of eating food designed for
eight-year-olds. (Froot Loops, they’re
not just for breakfast anymore.) Also,
the fact I listen to entirely too many showtunes for a fifty-year-old, happily
married, father of three in western Kansas.
(Yes, I even have stuff from Glee on my iPod. Is there a support group for this?) So the
fact chunks of my life are open to those living in the cyber-world doesn’t
scare me all the much. Really, anyone
who hacks into my internet browser history would be asleep in the first ten
minutes. After the third story about
Jeff Withey’s prowess blocking shots and the fifth blog entry from a guy who
wrote for television comedies back in the 80s they might not just doze off,
they might start contemplating a fork in their own eye to spice things up a
bit.
Christopher
Pyle truly does believe that spreading kindness is important and hopes to end
prejudice especially against grown men who listen to Julie Andrews and Brian
Stokes Mitchell, on purpose. He can be
mocked at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
