A Review of Mediated: How the Media Shape Your World by Thomas de Zengotita.

This is a scintillating, exhilarating ride of a book. If you’re interested in blogging, or any aspect of the media, new or mainstream, you shouldn’t miss it. The author is an academic in New York with a PhD in anthropology. He began his career as a Method actor.

In the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas — which was not included in the New Testament by the politicians of the Roman Empire for being too mystical — Jesus says, “Become a disciple of your own mind”. That was probably the last time anything so Buddhist appeared in official Christian literature.

Although Zengotita doesn’t use it, the saying applies very well to his book, providing the subtext beneath (as Shakespeare might have put it), “All the world’s a stage, and we are merely players”.

Zengotita begins in November 1963, when he was a student Method actor in New York. One day, a teacher entered the room and said, “President Kennedy’s been shot.” Then left.

The students took it for an exercise and started rolling their eyes, lifting their arms to heaven, keening and wailing and, presumably gnashing their teeth. As actors do. Thirty minutes later the teacher entered again. “The President just died.”

There was a stunned silence as the students realized it was really true. Then they started writhing on the floor and weeping and groaning all over again.

Zengotita draws the conclusion that this was new to our culture : extreme emotional reactions to the death of someone we didn’t know and had never met — except in the media.

He believes we have now reached the stage where we are totally immersed in media images which “mediate” all our reactions, feelings and belief systems. Instead of confronting reality directly, as Thomas’s Jesus urges us to do, we are just corks bobbing about on the choppy waters of mass media, which permeates us and drowns out our own perceptions.

This mediation has become all but total and has massive implications for the way we live. Marshall Mcluhan’s “The Medium is the Message” was only the half of it. How else would we tolerate the suffocating injunctions of “political correctness” were it not for the almost total power of the media to project it into the mass mind, and therefore our own.

Psychological contagions are every bit as destructive as pathogenic epidemics. In the 1930s, Fascism spread like wildfire around the world, leading to yet another world war. It was the counter-culture to another psychic contagion, Marxism, which all but became a religion : the Radiant Way. We had been warned.

Norman Mailer puts it well, “As Mcluhan presented us with the realization that modernism was coming to an end, so Zengotita has a great deal to say about the saturation of post-modernism in our existence today.”

The death of Princess Diana, with its worldwide Mexican wave of shock, was a typical example of this phenomenon in action. So was the very recent hubbub over the grisly end of the croc-baiter, Steve Irwin. These are not rational reactions. They show us as mediated characters, receiving our grief second-hand.

The world and life as a performance has become the norm. We are now used to seeing everything through the lenses of others. We’ve become part of a World Mind, instead of using our own. In the face of this, what can be done?

We can become a disciple of our own mind. Zengotita’s wonderful book makes a solid contribution to our belated understanding of this eerie phenomenon.

A Life of Dogen by John M Evans. Part of the Zen Masters Series.

The sixth and final part of the life of Zen Master Bankei is now up on our Spiritual Nirvana site. To catch up with the serial go here.

We are continuing this series with a master whose name looms large in Zen history. It is the aristocratic priest, Dogen (1200-1253), renowned for introducing the Soto Zen school into Japan. His philosophic writings on Being-Time are said to foreshadow the work of Einstein and quantum physics.

He was a master of words as well as Zen and one of the greatest writers in all Buddhism. Although little known now outside a small circle of Zen scholars, his legacy has lived on, especially in the West through Shunryu Suzuki, a recent Abbot at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Start reading here

I’ve just heard that Douglas Harding died last night. Anyone who follows the outer edge of spiritual philosophy — as I do — will know Douglas as The Man With No Head, after a famous book he wrote ages ago.

It’s a strange concept and takes a bit of work to get your head around, so to speak. But a moment’s insight indicates that everyone has a head except us. We appear to look out from one, but we can’t actually see it. We seem to be floating in a void slightly above a headless body.

That was the basis of Douglas’s thesis and teaching method over at headless.org.

Even stranger to tell is that I got this news from Dave Winer’s site, Scripting News. In a million years I would never have guessed that he would be into the extended mind and headlessness. But you can never know with these Californian types. Even the intellectuals have the second sight down there it seems. It could be a whole new career for him when he finally retires from developing Web 2.0 stuff. Let’s hope so. Dave Winer without a head would be a real spectacle.

Our commiserations to all Douglas Harding’s supporters.

If you’re interested in practical paths to Enlightenment, you should head over to our Spiritual Nirvana site, where a new series on Zen masters is kicking off with Bankei, a 17th-century master who, in his day, enjoyed the status of a rock star.

We’ll be serializing biographies of the major, early masters by John M Evans — yours truly — over the next few weeks, each in six or so parts. The first three on Bankei are up, so go and take a look.

I was going to say, “Not to be missed”, but then remembered I wrote it, so I’ll make do with “Catch it if you can”.

Start reading here.