Can you teach Traditional Knowledge via the Internet?

Can you teach ancient ways (Traditional Knowledge?) and heal people via the Internet?

Interview of Baba Rampuri in PlanetShifter Magazine

Personally, I feel that the disadvantages of the computer and Internet for mankind far outweigh the advantages. Nevertheless, it is the reality of our times and in many ways is defining our times, so we have as little choice to adapt to it, and adapt well to it, as we did to post-Gutenberg literacy. In the same way the printing press was the beginning of the end of Oral Tradition, i.e., Traditional Knowledge, the Internet will do the same for Literary Knowledge. Each time this kind of quantum change takes places, there is a contraction of Speech.

The Internet is not the place for traditional knowledge, but for information that very often lacks context. Traditional knowledge requires the sound and authority of a voice and its supporting chorus.

Healing, however, can be done at a distance, and I would imagine that the networking of social media could bring to healers those seeking their help, and possibly heal them. I have done some of this, and recognize that there are many unexploited resources on internet that could work very well.

I think we are going through a major change in Speech right at this moment, parallel with growth of Internet literacy. Twitterspeak, which for most people is a contracted language, can also be used as a compressed language. Patanjali, well known for his Yoga Sutras, composed in a highly compressed style of Sanskrit, millennia before zip files, allowing for decompression by his lineage and wisdom tradition. For others, they must be satisfied with interpretation. More than 2000 years after it was composed, several editions are in the top couple thousand best sellers on Amazon.

To try to do old things with this new medium is missing the point. Despite their loss of meaning, words have suddenly obtained great power for gaining audiences and giving power and authority to their articulators. The power and utility of the internet will continue to grow alongside our new Speech.

Deconstructing Yoga – India Retreat with Baba Rampuri

Our December retreat, “Deconstructing Yoga: Liberating Consciousness,” will take place at my dhuni in Goa from December 18-24. Twice daily, we will perform arati and puja in our small Temple next to the dhuni, with explanation and instruction for participants to do this later in their own homes. On Dattatreya Jayanti, Dec 24, we will have a Homa performed by Brahmin purohits, invoking Guru Dattatreya. I will teach the “protocols of knowledge” as a basis for tradition and sadhana.

2 Comments

troy harris says:
August 26, 2010 at 03:17
RE. "the auto-publishing online writer"
If we could speak in terms of "the auto-publishing online writer", certain hypothetical or exploratory trials could be drawn to bring us to an interesting new or (re)emerging definition that may plainly set apart both the work and the role of the traditional print-media writer from that of a writer, thinker or teacher who basically self-publishes online or in a word "blogs". Any attempt, then, to chronicle the ostensible rise of the online writer would probably be analogous or equally applicable to the digital scribe's historical precursor.
And so I pose the question. Is there be any difference at all?
I actually think there is. And to accentuate this distinction, I would classify the latter as an auto-publishing online writer and work from there. The essential practice of scribbling thoughts and referencing them remains intact. Differences arise, then, not from the means of intellectual production, but their means of distribution. What is more, the essential apparatuses that handle this are hardly more than the logical extension to the mechanicalization of visual/intellectual reproduction, comparable to the advent the movable type printing press (ca 1439) and later on the camera, each of which transformed the manner in which both the ideas and the products of an "industrial art" gained distribution in particular regard to a sheer volume increase or "graphic/intellectual/digital traffic".
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1. babarampuri says:
  August 26, 2010 at 09:50
  Thank you very much for your comment, Todd, as it merits a lot of discussion these days. I am not so sure we can separate "means of intellectual production" from "their means of distribution." The timing of Gutenberg's printing press, corresponded to a major change in European Speech, and therefore our approach to knowledge. One of the big changes that authors can see, over say the last 20 years, is that publishers have increasingly shifted the responsibility for marketing to authors. The job of editors at publishing houses has shifted from honing and polishing an author's work to fixing an author's work squarely in a genre, and in the publisher's idea of their market, and even within particular demographics. Speech, Herself, takes on a new identity, no longer concerned with connection with the things of the world, much less concerned with the ideas of man, but very concerned with volume and therefore reach. In a similar manner that a big editor might say, "the market for this genre requires short sentences," a digital self publisher may discover that merely by changing some of the words, some of the formatting, titling, even the style of writing can vastly influence the size , shape, and quality of the storyteller's audience. McLuhan's famous axiom still holds water, even as it seems naive in these times.
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