An Instagram-sized videoette excerpt from the recent video, “Trauma, ZEN, and the Storehouse Consciousness”.

It’s really impossible to understand what Instagram is, what mentality it really comes from and to what point it is designed in this way? I’m totally stumped. Hi joined it two or three years ago after being urged and hectored relentlessly some of my students, who claimed that I must put dharma teachings there because that is where all of the eyeballs are nowadays.

But I just don’t “get“ — and quite possibly simply do not want to admit – – that something so universally viewed is centered completely on the most fleeting, ephemeral experience of this truncated attention span, this image-only superficiality, this lack of anything that penetrates any deeper than the outer surface of your cornea: a color, a figure, a pose, a dish of some thing, a facial expression, an exotic locale.

It does exert a very powerful suctioning force. Whenever I have participated in it several times in a week to attempt to use it for spreading teachings consistently (my students tell me that the algorithm there only respects and spreads your works when it notices consistent engagement), there is this feeling that you have been latched onto by a vast sucking lamprey.

I am really starting to believe that my inability to comprehend this is not because of any difficulty. It might simply be my deep-seated resistance to knowing that I would need to give up a better part of hope for humanity in order to really see what is going on with this device. ”Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.“ More and more, that just seems to be the portal of resignation and utter defeat that I resist allowing myself being willingly dragged into for this necessary evil.

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