Social Meditation

A Much Needed Upgrade for the Networked Age

Jan 19, 2023

“Static territories, rigid boundaries, linear trajectories, flat surfaces, and unitary individuals, all the basic components of the world of yesterday need to be recast. In order to truly deal with the challenges of our age, we will need to learn how to think, act, experiment, learn, value, and perhaps even dream networkedly.” – Christopher Vitale, Networkologies

Meditation–in the modern era–has been practiced, largely, as an individual affair. Yet in the early days of the Internet many are beginning to realize that the Network, not the Individual, is a better orienting model for who we are. Digital natives, in particular, intuitively understand that their identities change as the networks they engage with change. At the same time, they’re far less likely to be attracted to traditional religious identities, which are often (correctly) perceived as being monolithic & rigid.

As part of the cultural & religious research conducted through the Sacred Design Lab, researchers concluded that even while there is an accelerating movement away from traditional religious institutions & identities, these same folks continue to seek out ways of belonging in community, engaging in personal transformation, finding accountability, and in seeking out “something more.”

“Secular communities increasingly fulfill religious functions and new religious communities barely resemble their institutional forebears. Meanwhile, 3,500 churches close each year. To organized religions in crisis, our report issues a challenge: How might they transform to meet a rising generation?” – Casper tel Kuile & Angie Thurston, “Something More”

Buddhist Geeks–an organization that I co-founded–was one of the “innovative communities from across faith traditions” featured in this Sacred Design Lab report. We were featured because we understand that conservation and adaptation are both necessary for the arising of genuine spiritual innovation.

Making Meditation Social

Social Meditation arose out of the Theravada Buddhist tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, inspired directly by his Mental Noting method. In 2010, after decades of training in this tradition–including on 3 years of silent retreat practice in Burma & Malaysia–an American yogi named Kenneth Folk developed what he called “Social Meditation.” It started when he began exploring new ways of teaching the Mental Noting method to students over Skype, including by doing it together with his students aloud. Kenneth called this new technique “social noting,” and although his move seems obvious, in retrospect, there was a good reason that no one, prior to him, had tried this. Kenneth had to break both the taboo of silence and the taboo of individuality, two strong cultural forces within Buddhist Modernism, in order to develop this approach. In other words, he had to both conserve & adapt.

I will claim that the ramifications of Kenneth’s simple innovation are nothing less than mind melting. Social Meditation is a paradigmatic upgrade for the networked age, in the following ways:

Social Meditation is a pedagogical breakthrough over traditional teaching methods, because the practice is externalized, rather than being hidden. New practitioners get to hear practices modeled aloud by experienced practitioners, and can receive more helpful feedback on how they’re doing, since their practice is out in the open for everyone to hear & see.
Social Meditation brings the traditional benefits of a Solo Meditation into relationships and into the depths of one’s social conditioning. In these practices Introspection gives way to Interspection, or “that which is characterized by examination of the thoughts and feelings among and between us.”
Social Meditation is backward compatible with Solo Meditation, because once you learn how to do a technique out loud with others, you can also do it out-loud by yourself, or you can verbalize it internally. Social meditation is a true upgrade, because it teaches you how to meditate on your own, whereas solo meditation does not offer one a clear understanding of how to meditate with others.
Social Meditation practices consistently generate a particular type of non-dual experience, in which the normally solid boundary lines between self & others, dissolves into a radical experience of shared connection & presence.
Social Meditation lends itself to a distributed peer-to-peer model of learning that’s native to the Internet. Contrast this with the Guided Meditation format, which is akin to the One-to-Many Broadcast Model of newspapers, television, & radio.
Social Meditation is expandable, modular, & evolvable. The basic move of meditating out loud with others can be done with many other techniques, as we have already demonstrated with practices like Social Breath Counting and Social Metta. And it has ended up becoming quite a modular practice, in that more complex practices are often formed out of more elementary instructions. As such, we have an evolving, modular, & expandable corpus of practice.
Social Meditation is compatible with both Secular and Religious contexts, because while inspired by the Buddhist wisdom tradition, at its foundation, it’s a human-engineered psychotechnology that utilizes common characteristics of human experience–especially language–that seriously pre-date our axial age religions.
Social Meditation is open source. Kenneth and all subsequent collaborators have agreed to release their innovations as free cultural works.

An Open-Source Psychotechnology

Professor John Vervaeke–in his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series–defines a psychotechnology as “a standardized way of doing information processing that improves and enhances your cognition by linking brains together.” Think of the development of human language, of shamanic rituals such as synchronized dancing & drumming, or the practices of Social Meditation, as examples of psychotechnologies.

“Open Source promotes universal access via an open-source or free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint.” (Wikipedia, 2022)

We believe that the potential positive impact of any psychotechnology depends on its ability to be suitably adapted to its environment. In other words, to reach others where they are. Most original innovations are quickly privatized. But imagine if Tim Berners-Lee hadn’t shared the original code underlying the World Wide Web, or if the Buddha hadn’t offered his teachings freely? Neither the Internet nor Buddhism could exist without an open source attitude, a willingness to openly share what is good.