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ur conversation this month engages Alan Klima’s new project, the Meditation Machine, with a particular focus on the status of images and visual media in meditation practice. Klima invites us to deterritorialize most consumerist versions of mindfulness—including mainstream uses of guided imagery, breathing, and other techniques that aim at bringing back the “wandering mind” through self-control. Klima insightfully notes that “thoughts don’t parade themselves in the subject-object relationship, like a visual object in space. The idea of a topography and a landscape [in mainstream meditation practice] often offers up thought as if we could or can be co-present with our thoughts, and inspect them, as a scientist looking at a test tube…. ” Trained as a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher (MBSR) at the University of Mass Medical School in the program run by Jon Kabat-Zinn and founder of the online platform the Meditation Forest, Klima openly talks about his transition from traditional monastic and monastic-style practice to a normal everyday life where his meditation practice is embedded in his life as a father, husband, teacher, writer, and academic. The conversation also draws parallels between filmmaking and meditation (e.g.. Maya Deren, Structural Cinema), as well as between philosophical inquiry and the ethics of the meditator, with a shared admiration for Spinoza’s Ethics. Indeed, inviting in the forces and things that compose and agree well with us is one of the vital tasks of meditation.
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lan Klima is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. His research concerns the formation of “global moralities” and their political effects as they are furthered in and through local and national communities. In particular, he is concerned with the local application of global moralities of finance, including ideas and practices of debt, reason, and haunting in Thailand since the currency crash of 1997. He is the author of The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand (Princeton University Press, 2002). His experimental documentary film Ghosts and Numbers concerns local money-lending, gambling, and other irregular financial instruments among small-time local organizations in Thailand, including spirit-mediumship and other religious phenomena connected with money. He is currently exploring what he calls “The Meditation Machine,” a social bio-feedback mechanism in which meditation practice is being reformulated in cultures of Biomedicine and Education.
CONVERSATION PODCAST AND MATERIALS