The Neo-Upanishad as a new source code, a manual of digital ontology
13 May 2001
by Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta
We grew up hearing many kinds of stories. Stories of wise animals and stupid gods, arrogant kings and generous subjects, magical machines and speaking trees.
We grew up hearing the story of the wise man called Yagnavalkya and a wise woman called Gargi.
And their conversation is a section in the Upanishads - texts which started out life as being interesting and elegant conversations in places where those in retreat from the world could gather (not unlike some chat rooms on the Internet today), and ended up dead as part of a formal philosophical canon in later Hinduism.
Both Yagnavalkya and Gargi were philosophers, natural philosophers, and while it was considered odd that Gargi, forgetting her 'woman' self should argue about the nature of 'being' itself, she did.
And in this argument Gargi asks of Yagnavalkya again and again, so what is the web on which the world is woven.
This fragment of the Upanishads, the sit-here-and-listen parable of secret wisdom, is here re-configured for the third millennium of the Common Era. This Neo-Upanishad is a new source code, a manual of digital ontology, a map of how we might come to be.
Imagine a new Brhadaranyaka Section (The Debate at the Crossroads of the Great Forest of Cultural Code) where sit two re-configured avatars, gendered male and female, named Gargi Vacaknavi (The maker of new codes) and Yagnavalkya (Keeper of the sacrificial flame of pure code).
What we want to say is like the small, unfinished conversation between two people who once allegedly occupied finite, distinct bodies - one male, one female.
Yagnavalkya talks of how man invented self, and so brought about other. He speaks of how self, purusha, atman, Brahman,consciousness, mind pursues other, prakriti, speech, body, form and how she (other) changes her shape, re-writing her operating instructions, every time he (self) makes a new programme, a new release version of her.
He encrypts, she decodes. She is software, a virus, free to roam and pirate herself, he stays hardwired, logged out and locked into himself. He pursues her, pins her, wins her, she runs away into the jungle of code again. He seeks her out yet again, and in the middle of his endless postulation of the real self and the self that is virtual, the other, her-self, he says to her: Gargi, silver tongued, chat room diva, endless whisperer, cyborg siren, look - the two of us are like two halves of a block, hardware and software, one and zero, man and machine, and between us dangles the web of the world.
The World Wide Web. The mesh made of strings of code. Cyberia.
Then Gargi Vacaknavi began to question him, "Yagnavalkya", she said, "tell me - since this whole world is woven back and forth on strings of knowledge, threads of code, what then is the net of code and knowledge woven on. Where on the map is Cyberia?"
Y: "Knowledge and code are woven back and forth on the minds that made the code, on the accumulated electricity of millennia that went into the making of thoughts, that was written down, encrypted, encoded, streamed into machines, read and learnt and transmitted and taught and downloaded".
G: "And on what was that woven on, that mesh of thought, how did that get fabricated?"
Y: "On the little fissures where wealth and meanings, both of which we call 'artha', in Sanskrit, gather between keystrokes".
G: "And where did money and meaning come from?"
Y: "From the worlds of hands weaving back and forth, from the intermittent movement of eyes, both awake and rapidly dreaming, from neo-cortical storms, and from the stream of blood, within and without".
G: "And what moves these joints, works these muscles and tendons, what makes this flow and ebb and stream?"
At this point Yagnavalkya told her, "Don't ask so many questions, Gargi, or your head will shatter apart! You are asking too many questions about that (the deity) of which it is forbidden to ask too many questions. So, Gargi, don't ask so many questions"
It is said then that "Thereupon, Gargi fell silent".
This conversation arises from a recognition that cyberspace has suddenly posed strange and new questions even within those of us who live at it's farthest frontier, for whom connectivity and access to computers, and to the space they create between them, is not an easy dial-up option. We share computers, and e-mail accounts, and navigate the private spaces that we have created within our computer. We come from a situation where the scarcity of computers, the cussedness of phone lines, the fluctuating voltage and the simultaneous rush to be on a machine so as not to be rudderless in the world demands that several people share the same machine. At one time we were seventeen people logging on with the same ID. We are not mere cyborgs; we are evolving constellations of cyborgs. This makes for a proximity that is not unlike looking into each other's cupboards, and closets, catching the whiff of intimate traces of thought and feeling. This has made us look at each other and at ourselves in a new way. We, as a man, and as a woman, are beginning to ask of each other the question "What is the ground we stand on?" What are the conscious and unconscious flows of sensory and extra-sensory data between our bodies and minds, and within our common machines that shape our changing - neither binary nor unitary - natures.
II Two clusters of images for two kinds of migration.
A person steps off a train into a city of fourteen million people, looking for the comfort and the freedom of anonymity, wary of loneliness and the scrutiny of unwelcome surveillance.
A person finds a patch of wall in a shantytown, off a busy street and builds a shelter with tin and packing cases, begins a new neighbourhood, changes the map of the city.
A person clocks into a factory, makes up a new name and invents a new self, fills in forms saying: single, childless, temporary worker, migrant, no permanent address... A person switches on a computer, logs on and toys with a new password. She is looking for the comfort and freedom of anonymity and is wary of loneliness and the scrutiny of unwelcome surveillance. She builds herself a shelter, calls it a website; she begins a new neighbourhood, calls it an online discussion forum, she changes the map, she clocks in at work, and a new day begins at the virtual sweatshop.
In a sense, all those who venture out into cyberspace for the first time are stepping out of a train into a new metropolis. They are looking for the freedom of anonymity, wary of surveillance, building shelters and neighbourhoods, clocking in, changing the map. Given that the Internet began as a playground for men in suits, lab coats and uniforms, all others - women and men without suits, lab coats and uniforms, and just about anyone else who is not a part of a networked transatlantic matrix, someone who lives in time zones and meridians on the outer reaches of cyberia, is really a recent immigrant.
It is the malediction of many migrants in the real world that in the new destination they are too often forced to become exiles or indentured into the workforce, where the act of leaving becomes a gesture poised on the thin line between free will and despair. Many of us too may have left the everyday battles for survival, dignity and recognition somewherein order to chart a new continent of being, and the world. But when looking back from cyberspace into the everyday, what are the relationships between 'virtual' and real 'selves' that we now see and seek?
Is the virtual self of the on-line person only an avatar, a multiplied polymorphous an
