The Budhist monk who
got addicted to his phone.
review of Sing me a Song
by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
reposted from Spirituality and Practice
Sing me a Song is a profound, stirring, and often disturbing picture of the manifold ways in which today's technology -- computers, the Internet, smart phones, video games -- is creating a mediated landscape that deeply affects our spiritual, emotional, and social lives.
Bhutan, a small country in the Himalayans between India and China, is best known as having set a goal of Gross National Happiness instead of Gross National Product, and for many years, new technologies were not welcome. That all changed in 1999 when King Jigme Wangchuck approved the use of the Internet and other new services throughout the country. Soon nearly everybody had a cell phone, including farmers and monks.
Thomas Balmes (Babies) is a French film director whose deft and insightful 2013 film Happiness introduced us to Peyangi, an eight-year-old boy training to be a monk in a remote monastery in Laya. He is a simple, playful, and curious lad who shows us the disciplines and duties of a young monk in the Tibetan tradition.
For Sing Me a Song, Balmes serves as both director and cinematographer. This documentary is set ten years later when Peyangi and his fellow monks have had their lives transformed by access to the Internet, wifi, and cell phone service. In one of the most startling scenes in the film, the director shoots a picture of the monks in a circle reciting the traditional chants as their bowed heads are looking at their cell phones.
Peyangki and his monk friends are very much taken with the multiple seductions of the digital world. They are tired of the repetitious world of study, chanting, meditation, and obedience. When the discipline master tells Peyangki it is time for him to get serious about studying and not playing on his mobile phone so much, viewers will sense that this is not going to happen. Using the "We Chat" app, he finds a "girlfriend" who sings songs for him and inquires regularly about what he is doing. They talk about meeting up, even though she lives in the city of Thimphu and is considering going to Kuwait to make more money as a bar singer.
Most disconcerting is the monks' fascination with video games which water the seeds of violence within them. In the market, they buy plastic guns and play "World War" in the forests around the monastery. One scene in the city shows a group of boys in monk's gowns waiting outside a storefront. When it opens they flock into a video arcade and are soon blasting landscapes and killing enemies in the games.
Peyangki makes some decisions that lead him to tell his friend that "I'm too far from the Buddha now." What will he do? The director gives us visual signs near the end of the documentary that reveal his answer.
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Screened at the AFI Docs Film Festival on June 21, 2020. The documentary is streaming as of January 1, 2021, on iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, VUDU, Google Play, Youtube, Microsoft & Vimeo, and some US cable networks.
Participant Media, 06/20
DVD/Streaming Documentary
Bhutan, a small country in the Himalayans between India and China, is best known as having set a goal of Gross National Happiness instead of Gross National Product, and for many years, new technologies were not welcome. That all changed in 1999 when King Jigme Wangchuck approved the use of the Internet and other new services throughout the country. Soon nearly everybody had a cell phone, including farmers and monks.
Thomas Balmes (Babies) is a French film director whose deft and insightful 2013 film Happiness introduced us to Peyangi, an eight-year-old boy training to be a monk in a remote monastery in Laya. He is a simple, playful, and curious lad who shows us the disciplines and duties of a young monk in the Tibetan tradition.
For Sing Me a Song, Balmes serves as both director and cinematographer. This documentary is set ten years later when Peyangi and his fellow monks have had their lives transformed by access to the Internet, wifi, and cell phone service. In one of the most startling scenes in the film, the director shoots a picture of the monks in a circle reciting the traditional chants as their bowed heads are looking at their cell phones.
Peyangki and his monk friends are very much taken with the multiple seductions of the digital world. They are tired of the repetitious world of study, chanting, meditation, and obedience. When the discipline master tells Peyangki it is time for him to get serious about studying and not playing on his mobile phone so much, viewers will sense that this is not going to happen. Using the "We Chat" app, he finds a "girlfriend" who sings songs for him and inquires regularly about what he is doing. They talk about meeting up, even though she lives in the city of Thimphu and is considering going to Kuwait to make more money as a bar singer.
Most disconcerting is the monks' fascination with video games which water the seeds of violence within them. In the market, they buy plastic guns and play "World War" in the forests around the monastery. One scene in the city shows a group of boys in monk's gowns waiting outside a storefront. When it opens they flock into a video arcade and are soon blasting landscapes and killing enemies in the games.
Peyangki makes some decisions that lead him to tell his friend that "I'm too far from the Buddha now." What will he do? The director gives us visual signs near the end of the documentary that reveal his answer.
--------------
Screened at the AFI Docs Film Festival on June 21, 2020. The documentary is streaming as of January 1, 2021, on iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, VUDU, Google Play, Youtube, Microsoft & Vimeo, and some US cable networks.
Participant Media, 06/20
DVD/Streaming Documentary
excerpts from an interview
with the director
The teachers, too, were addicted to screens.From what I saw, all the teachers in the monasteries were as addicted to screens as the younger generations. In the evenings, sometimes I met with the head of the monastery, and I would see him with two iPhones, one iPad, and a computer, using all four screens at the same time. From what I observed, everybody has some kind of addiction. The use of screens changed him.But the reality of becoming a teenager in combination with the use of screens [changed him]. [In Bhutan,] they went from nothing, no screens, to, in a few months, watching 15 hours of American wrestling and porn a day. They don’t have the slightest notion of the potential negative effects of going from nothing to becoming the biggest users of screens in all of Asia. In Europe, we had TV first, and then the internet, and then mobile phones. Bhutan, they got everything all at the same time. |
The innocence was lost.I have to say that when I came back to shoot Sing Me a Song, the first thing I observed was this scene of the young monks in the monastery, praying and playing [on their phones] at the same time. And I felt most of them had their brains turned off. The innocence that was there earlier, when shooting Happiness, that was lost. I, too, am addicted.Also, I think I’m the worst person when speaking about being addicted to these kinds of tools. I’ve ended up in my career with two or three mobile phones in my pocket, one for private, one for work, one for when I am abroad. So, this isn’t something I look at from a distance. Even with my family, not a day goes by where I’m not experiencing some conflict with one of my kids on this issue. It’s a daily endless battle. And how do you deal with it when homework is being done on the internet? Like my kids, everyone on Earth is spending 13 hours a day on screens. And I don’t have the slightest clue on how to solve it. There is not a single country that has the right solution. |
Interview with Thomas Balmès by Sanjna N. Singh
Tricycle, JAN 13, 2021
Distracted by Digital Connections
The Shadow Side of Screen Culture
Since the second half of the XX century, much of our lives has migrated in some way to the screen. We live surrounded by screens, TVs, cinema, smartphones, tablets, computer screens, game consoles, digital photography; this has impacted us and thus have developed a transforming relationship with the world that surrounds us.
JC Gaal
As the story about the Buddhist monk who got addicted to his phone makes clear, screen culture is changing many people around the world in at least three ways: (1) by reducing our capacities to be present to the physical world around us, including other people; (2) by revealing to us so many "worlds" that our capacities for focussed attention are depleted; and (3) by tempting us to abandon our own ideals in the interests of being more and more connected. We fall into a lifestyle of perpetual distraction.
At the same time screen culture can change us in more positive ways, namely by opening up forms of positive connection we might otherwise lack. We can meet other people, learn about the world around us, and be inspired by the many forms of art and music that come to us through screens. Again, see the story of the monk.
One thing is clear: for most people around the world the emergence of screen culture is irreversible. There is no turning back. Into any foreseeble future we are both beneficiaries and victims of digital technologies.
And where is wholeness in this? Of course everything hinges on what is meant by wholeness. For my part, I turn to Spirituality and Practice for help. The spiritual alphabet developed by its founders, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, is, for me, an excellent and unparalleled presentation of the many forms of embodied wisdom and emotional intelligence -- the qualities of heart and mind -- that enliven a spiritually awakened life. Here they are: click on each for a description.
attention - beauty - being present - compassion - connections - devotion - enthusiasm - faith
forgiveness - grace - gratitude - hope - hospitality - imagination - joy - justice - kindness - listening
love - meaning - nurturing - openness - peace - play - questing - reverence - shadow - silence
teachers - transformation - unity - vision - wonder - x, the mystery - yearning - you - zeal
And where is God in all of this? Here, too, definitions matter. For those of us in the open and relational (process) world, God is the unity of the universe, understood as an ongoing life, with consciousness and compassion, who is present in each and every living being as a lure to wholeness. This presence within each of us, but more than all of us, is the Spirit. In our time, it seems to me, the Spirit inwardly beckons us to get perspective on both the positive and negative effects on screen culture and to develop practices that minimize the negative while maximizing the positive. These practices can include a daily practice of mindful meditation in the absence of screens and periods of fasting from screens altogether. An example of the latter would be putting away the cell phone and the laptop for a day or two once a week, spending time in palpable presence of other people and the natural world. Of course, as Bruce Epperly shows in God Online, we can find the sacred with help from screens, too. And yet, as the film below suggests, at least to me, we can lose God through screens as well. The need is to find a third way, within and beyond screen culture.
- Jay McDaniel, February 11, 2020