Nicholas Collins

Temples Without Walls:Digital Darshan and Mediated Community at New Raman Reti

The Alachua ISKCON Temple at New Raman Reti, the largest Hare Krishna community in America, is situated in the countrysideNorth of Gainesville, surrounded by 127 acres of farmland and animals, as well as a large kitchen, gurukulam school, and other community buildings. Founded in 1977, part of the bourgeoning Hare Krishna movement in the United States during the second halfof the twentieth century, New Raman Reti cultivates a visible presence on the nearby University of Florida campus and in the greater community through public service projects and free lunch services. Its membership includes many Indian-Americans as well as individuals of various ethnicities and ages, though student presence is certainly noticeable, as it is in Gainesville generally. Like most in the contemporary “global village,” New Raman Reti has an identity that is essentially translocal- a composite form tracing a tapestry of relationships and influencesto numerous diverse sources around time and space, many of which are heavily mediated in on form or another. Nowhere is this more apparent than the temple’s conspicuous online media presence, where a host of images of ornately decorated deities grace the temple’s Facebook banner-image and photo-albums. On the temple’s website, live video streams and intimate digital photographic images of Krishna and Radha provide always-available daily darshan. With respect to ISKCON and Vaiśnava philosophical doctrine more generally, there is justification for the religiousefficacy of such mediated practices. In her article describing Vaiśnava “cyber-puja,” Nicole Karapanagiotis argues that “for

devotees, since Vishnu is both everywhere and everything, there is nothing – ipso facto – that precludes him from being manifest (and available for worship) in cyber-space…In fact, as one devotee noted, since Vishnu is everywhere and everything, worshipof anything (and any form of him, including a cyberform)is invariably worship of Vishnu himself.” (Karapanagiotis, 181) A quite recent phenomenon, and contentious in some Hindu organizations, practices such as digital darshan and “cyber-puja”constitute a paradoxical situation whereby iconographic images ofreligious identity and praxis inhabit a symbolic interior landscape mirroring that of individual consciousness. Having become digitized and miniaturized to palm-sized dimensions (metaphorically epitomized in the handheld internet-capable “smartphone”), the omniscient and all-pervasive divine is unexceptional in the internet-environment, where the governing metaphor is the hyperlink, a form whose “sheer quantity quickly becomes effectively infinite,” generating innumerable “options for meaning and knowledge ensuing from such myriad collisions, montage-like.” (Levinson 1997, 139) When any Word or image can function as a portal to an infinity of other worlds, as though they were contained within, the conceptual model of the avatar asa discrete embodiment of universality and infinite potentiality becomes merely one of many functionally similar distributed nodesin a shifting ground of information flow.

Yet New Raman Reti, by emphasizing its project of establishing an organic permaculture system of farming, where animal, plant, and ecosystem relationships are oriented toward mutual interdependent flourishing in the shared environment, the temple also represents itself as the organically embodied center of the New Raman Reti community, both online and off. In the schizophrenic or “dividual” present where individuals inhabit numerous mediated environments, understanding themselves in the mixed metaphorical terms encountered therein, coherence of religious understanding and self-identity requires the interrelating of these terms. “The individual’s autonomy is not absolute,” remarks Steven Hoover of the current state of media-user relationships, “in that there are a range of things that might qualify as “religious” or “spiritual,” those limits set to

an extent by received categories of what defines “the religious”…authority (residing in) not the nature or content of the symbols but the power and authority…to define and determine meanings.” (Hoover, 33) The presence of the “temple” in the online and offline worlds provides multiple points of reference for various mediated forms of identity, conveying religiously meaningful images in statuesque and digital modes of embodiment, and which may serve to stabilize and symbolically reify coherence of communal identity. The sense of user as content, self directed control of the occlusive gaze combined with devotional gaze, is enhanced by the internet medium as an accessory or cyborgian appendage. (David Morgan)

Iconography and images of deities have an established presence in Hinduism, and this has only increased in ubiquity with mass-production and digitization. In the mediated American landscape dominated by brands, logos, and advertising, however unwanted and invasive, our sensibilities are similarly massaged by well-constructed images of power and desire- for fame, wealth,status, and autonomous individuality- couched in collective termsof mediated imagery. Speaking of the impact of the colossally successful Ramayan television series that first aired in 1987, Phil Lutgendorf is quoted by Julius Lipner as remarking: “the emphasis was squarely on “seeing” its characters. Not “seeing” inthe quick-cut, distracted fashion in which modern Western audiences take in their heroes and heroines, but drinking in and entering into visual communion with epic characters. To most viewers, “Ramayan” was a feast of darśan.” (Lipner,336) A similarfeast, or perhaps a buffet, of darshan is provided by the deitiesof the Alachua temple- Sri Radha Shyamasundara, Sri Krishna Balarama, and Sri Gaura Nitai- which appear physically in the form of statues whoseornamentation and dress are changed periodically for festivals and rituals, symbolically reflecting different aspects of the principle deities, and further reflected in the form of additional smaller deity-statues with distinct, yet not entirely fixed, personalities, placed in pairs in front of the larger deity-statues. These larger figures are arranged laterally in three pairs and hierarchically with the smaller deities positioned at successive levels of height below. They inhabit a

raised stage that extends back into the wall on one side of the main room. Additionally, a large statue of Swami Prabhupada, who founded ISKCON in the U.S. in 1960 and whose disciples founded the Alachua temple, sits in a meditative repose in the center of the room, as a representation of the human figure connecting the Hare Krishna community to the divine lineage he is considered to embody.

Prabhupada Statue

On the temple’s website and Facebook profile pages, these deities also maintain a representational presence, as they are translated into digital images available to all seekers and (web)surfers alike. In the images available on the sites, a fragmentary account of the deities’ (as representationally embodied in statues) life-history can be viewed, to the extent that digital photography has captured it. On the temple’s Facebook page, the deities are seen appearing at various festivals and events, surrounded by crowds of devotees as well aslay public, sometimes the central objects of such festivals and at other times, co-spectators for other temple-sponsored performances. In this, the deities media presence is quite similar to the many others who construct Facebook profiles and upload photographs of themselves both as an aggregative life-history and as an ongoing series of updates and new images taken from (mostly non-mediated) life. Additionally, the deities’ online presence, like that of many technology-savvy individuals, maintains a constant link to their actual phenomenological present state. Just as wireless 4G internet networks enable the

digital environment to accompany individuals wherever they roam, through the constant stream of updates and messages, the New Raman Reti deities are always ready and available in their electronically mediated forms to provide darshan in the present moment, whenever and wherever it might be. Through live video streams and daily-updated images, the sense of communion with thedeity is portrayed as being authentic and unique to the present, able to evade the sense of simulacrum or loss of power sometimes associated with the ever-receding digital past obsolesced by therapid influx of novelty. Images can evoke the power of memory andprovide a sense of continuity and community, but in an environment entirely composed of images (within a total interplayincluding all other forms of media) as a collective externalized memory, authenticity and value cannot be reliably located apart from creative dynamic interaction taking place between user and content. “We might say,” notes Paul Levinson in Digital McLuhan, “that not only are prior media the content of the Internet, but so too is the human user who, unlike the consumer of other mass media, creates content online with almost every use.” (Levinson, 39) This notion of “user as content” was first suggested by mediatheorist Marshall McLuhan to describe the characteristically interactive nature of electronic media technology, which engages the user in the moment and demands some sort of response. What potential possibilities for communication and shared moments of experience might inhere in such moments?

The ISKCON Alachua Facebook Profile

Particularly, with regard to the interaction with online deities, is it possible to fulfill religious obligations and

commitments as well as experience a sense of meaningfulness and connection to the same extent as is possible in the offline world? Considering the phenomenon of “cyber-puja,” Heinz Scheifinger makes the case that the particularly essential statusof the darshan experience as a form of religious practice in Hinduism allows it to function in isolation from the more complexand sequential ritual steps involved in a complete temple puja ceremony. “Darshan…is so crucial that, although it forms part of a puja, it can also be a religious practice in its own right which requires no further rites… Darshan provides the link between the fully embodied traditional puja experience and the online puja experience.” (Scheifinger , 210) Darshan requires onlythe visual engagement of the viewer with the image, and its centrality and essential quality is the practical corollary to the centrality of the deities themselves with regard to the IKSCON community. Bhakti, religious devotion, aims to engage the deity in an reciprocal relationship and experience the divine lilaand grace inherent in its actions. In darshan, this engagement takes the form of an interactive moment of mutual visual recognition, one which “implies both beholding the deity and being seen by the deity, an exchange…through the eyes.” (Scheifinger, 210) “Sacred images,” notes David Morgan, “mediate the sacred and viewers, embodying access to it in acts of imploring, touching, kissing, hearing, reviling, and fearing- allpropelled by the deeply felt assumption that the transcendent other will respond accordingly… An image is not an essence, but an activity, a historically evolving process that emerges as a configuration … a way of fixing the transient.” (Morgan, L3021) IKSCON in particular has developed a significant internet networkof communities around the world, coordinating events and streaming festival footage on websites such as www.Mayapur.tv andKrishna.com. New Raman Reti broadcasts temple ceremonies, performances, and lectures on the latter site, and also takes part in a Preach-via-Skype program.

On the “IKSCON News” website, Radha Mohan Das credits the organization’s embrace of internet technology to its ability to effectively translate through media various aspects of its religious praxis, fundamentally oriented toward connecting to Krishna. She states that “because of the emphasis on darshan in front of our beautiful shrines, the vibrancy and color of our festivals, profound philosophy, emphasis on sound vibration, there are many who have a connection with Krishna who are not close to the institution,” and cites the group’s “belief that nearly anything can be ‘used in Krishna’s service,” as well as its large youth population as being consistent with the idea of mediation. (Das) Offering a definition of this idea and its religious significance, David Morgan states:

“Mediation, as the term is currently used by scholars of media and religion, means something thoroughly concrete: the way in which media are integral aspects of religious practice. Mediation designates a form of religious practice that does not simply instrumentalize media artifacts, but materialize belief as a practice. Media are how believers cancel the distance between themselves andthe world. This bears directly on the way in which media are enchanted. It involves a kind of alchemy or transmutation of one thing into another. Mediation is an embodied process that might be understood to be as corporeal in its own way as eating. Mediation as consumption means that what one consumes becomes part of oneself.” (Morgan, 3097) (emphasis mine)

This descriptions offers itself to various interpretations. It suggests that connection through media as a religious act has validity and does involve, in a very real sense, an interaction-withthe environment as such, where one has causal and influential creative power with respect to the community. On the other hand, it could be taken as an intensely individualized plurality of assertions competing for the claim to centrality, each One compelled to consume All others. In order for mediation to function as a successful platform for communal and individual interrelation in an inherently plural (despite many objections) human religious environment, the dynamic effects and potentials inherent in forms of media themselves must be recognized and carefully negotiated, and even here some measure of meaningful boundary and temporal separation may be required. After trying unsuccessfully to locate a Hindu Punjabi community in a particular area of North London, Dhooleka S. Raj posits the idea of community as being “constituted ‘in moments,’ during particular times of worship such as festivals, but not in any constant way.. rather than being a fixed element of social life, a fluid concept, coalescing and dissipating in interaction with arange of factors.” (Reddy and Zavos, 253) Such periodic contact is decidedly not the character of internet technology, which permeates the everyday experience of contemporary life for those exposed to it. This might heighten the importance of a physical temple as a definitional center of religious community, and this is much the way in which the temple seems to have functioned, however consistently, for New Raman Reti. The temple unites the Alachua Hare Krishna community, but it also separates and demarcates in physical terms, a visible identity apart from the culture of mediated mass-age(s), a status reflected in its proximal position vis-à-vis the city of Gainesville and the collective institutions of culture present there, symbolized in part by the significant University presence. In a contrasting account given by Leslie Orr while studying the religious environment of medieval Tamil Nadu, she concludes that, rather than confirming conventional classificatory relationships and religious hierarchies such as those of “little” and “great” traditions or firmly maintained distinctions between sects and

within pantheons, her research indicates a contrary state of affairs. Orr states, “I would like to suggest that for quite a number of those medieval worshippers there was not only an indefinite-ness in terms of notions of coherence within and adherence to a Saiva, Vaisnava, or Jain "system" or community buta general disregard for these categories, despite the fact that the contemporary sectarian literature exerted itself considerablyto make these demarcations clear.´(Orr, 11) The association between private identity and textual literacy has been significantly identified by McLuhan, among others, who noted further that, with the introduction of the printing press, this divisive tendency of literacy to demarcate the boundaries of a private individual self was considerably exacerbated by virtue ofits widespread democratization.

But what does a picture communicate to its viewer apart fromthe content? Photography is understood by McLuhan as being similar to print in having an affinity for classification, but itis qualified in that “the photograph is just as useful for collective, as for individual, postures and gestures, whereas written and printed language is biased toward the private and individual posture.” “The readiest way to grasp the meaning of the photograph,” McLuhan continues,” is in its creating a world of accelerated transience…It wipes out our national frontiers andcultural barriers, and involves us in The Family of Man, regardless of any particular point of view.” (McLuhan, 218) This account certainly evokes a degree of resonance with the present, where we are brought into contact with opinions and cultural perspectives differing from our own in a calculated, yet decidedly haphazard environment of mediated images and ideologies. What is the message conveyed by these images which appear not only out of original contexts, but also in forms mediated by a dizzying dynamic infrastructure of digital code, networked technological systems, computer screens, light waves, eye-ball retinas, and neurobiology, with all but (arguably) the last functioning as an externalized representation of actual momentary experience. McLuhan, more than forty years ago, described the nascent electronic environment as being capable of conveying variable but significantly powerful senses of

meaningfulness, whereby its content, by virtue of sheer enormity and malleability, acquires a mythic quality. Levinson comments, “When McLuhan says that the electronic age is “mythic”… he is using myth in its sense of conveying information on a richer level, one which resonates (a favorite McLuhan term, because it is an acoustic metaphor) with fundamental truths that may not be as available to commonplace, work-a-day scrutiny.” (Levinson 1999,160) Levinson cites as evidence of mythicized cultural content the media coverage surrounding the sinking of the Titanicthat led to its enshrined status in the popular imagination (ritually reenacted more recently by James Cameron’s 1997 film). In a retrieval of the mytheme evident in Greek hubris, the epic narrative reappearing in the popular imagination functions as a sort of canonical metaform which generates fragmented individual narratives conveying various aspects or interpretations of the original event. “By the end of the twentieth century, more than 35 films and 100 books had told and retold the Titanic’s story.” (Levinson 1999, 162)

Though not necessarily self-conscious of this mythic character, the case of the Titanic as an event appearing and reappearing in the public consciousness in variously mediated forms and narrative interpretations might be seen to parallel in structure the more contemporary, and much more powerful in its resonant effects, reception and interpretive fragmentation of theRamayan TV serial by Hindus in India. The mediated version in this case obviously recreates a well-recognized mythic narrative,whose complexities of character have been magnified exponentiallyby individual interpretation at the vertical-diachronic and horizontal-synchronic senses. These many versions represent many instances of creative response to novel environmental conditions,appearing in many cases through other forms of culture, which is synonymous in McLuhan’s view with other media-environments and the content contained therein. Regarding the serialized Ramayan, Julius Lipner states, “there is every reason to say, on the basisof current reports and broadcasting policy, that the production of both epics was conceived as a fundamentally nonsectarian religio-cultural experience, intended to standardize a sense of national identity and integration in the context of India’s

potentially explosive multifaith population, and that large segments of the target audiences perceived it as such.” (Lipner, 332) Having earlier cited Ram Mohan Roy’s universalist and monotheistic refashioning of Hinduism in the early 19th century, views which were published and distributed through then-new printmedia, as having “introduced a tendency toward homogenization in the Westernized elite’s interpretation of Hinduism,” Lipner suggests its connection to the later homogenizing intentions of India’s national media program. (Lipner, 326) “Apparently, a common response,” notes Lipner, “ was to identify more or less, in accordance with their life circumstances, with particular characters or situations in the serials… In consequence a new dimension of “standardized Hindu identity seemed to be generated.” (Lipner, 334) The act of viewing the serial was itself regarded to be a form of darsan, with associated devotional emphasis and sentiment. Phil Lutgendorf describes the extent of the religious significance placed on the weekly broadcast, stating that, “trains were delayed when passengers refused to leave the platform until a broadcast was over.” (Lutgendorf, 137) He goes on to describe the “devotional activities that developed around the weekly auspicious sight (darsan) of the epic characters,” where, along with narrative tradition, a garlanded and sandalwood paste-decorated TV set, conch shells, purificatory bathing, and fasting framed the physically-and-electronically mediated ritual experience. Other television sets were set up on “make shift alters sanctified withcow dung and Ganges water, worshipped with flowers and incense, and watched by crowds of hundreds.” (Lutgendorf, 137) These practices bear a resemblance to the digital puja alters in the swaminarayan temple described by (Heidelberg article), where thecomputer is similarly decorated, and while potentially millions might view the online website media, they mostly do so alone rather than in a physically visible community of devotees. The situation encountered in digital darshan, online puja, or any other digitally-mediated form of religious dialogue is further complicated by the multiple and simultaneously present forms in which content may be interacted with in the digital environment, including within itself both the historical aggregate of media technologies (speech, image, print/text, music, video) as well as

evolving hybrid forms of new media (Twitter, Facebook, temple websites- with hyperlinks to national organizations) and concomitant new possibilities for religious interaction and community or, conversely, contested sites of power which many areeager to size on by various means for their own agendas.

The extension of self out into the temple without walls, to adapt McLuhan’s phrase “classroom without walls,” is in a subtly powerful sense, a disembodied individuality potentially omnipresent regardless of the webpage(s) currently open on one’s browser. This means that even in digital darshan one is not shielded from email and text notifications, popups, and innumerable other distractions fostered by habit and circumstance. However, in encountering a deity conceived as a manifestation of the divine All, present everywhere (as is the case in IKSCON and many popular interpretations of sanatana dharmagenerally) through internet technology, a curious correlation of representational identity seems to be suggested. “The computer,” states McLuhan, “promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The next logical step wouldseem to be, not to translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness.” (McLuhan, 96) The cliché, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” is brought into a new significance when these pictures have become symbolic of particular conceptions of divinity developed over millennia in fragmented and periodically recombinant forms, and subsequently, in the digital age, when they are all simultaneously and interactively present in a still relatively uncharted digital environment, having been uploaded from various peripheries to what McLuhan called the “center without margins.” (McLuhan, 104) An image is not an essence, but an activity, a historically evolving process that emerges as a configuration of forces, predispositions, and practices. In such an environment, a physical center such as a temple might have a more crucial significance for one’s sense of religious community, even while time spent at the temple is no longer the dominant locus of experience, such as is the case in the recent history of the ISKCON organization broadly, characterized by a “shift from ‘fulltime’ involvement in the intense life of the temple to ‘part

time’ engagement with the temple institution - from core to periphery as it were.” (Reddy and Zavos, 253) This could be said to accurately describe a large range of contemporary individual experience, in which the most recognizable center is often a distributed one, and images, ornately constructed, vie for statusin the individual-collective consciousness of digitized self-mediation. “People are attracted to common culture media of various kinds,” remarks Steven Hoover, “and at the same time the media marketplace provides media products in trajectories that direct interest and combine interests and values according to” the question, “Are audiences for religion or spirituality unique?” (Hoover, 43)

This paper as a McLuhan Tetrad presented through twitter (“Tweetrad”): https://twitter.com/McLuhanTetrad

Sources:

Reddy, Deepa and Zavos, John, “Temple Publics: Religious Institutions and the Construction of Contemporary Hindu Communities” International Journal of Hindu Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, Special Issue: Temple Publics—Religious Institutions and the Construction of Contemporary Hindu Communities (December 2009), pp. 241-260

Scheifinger, Heinz, “Hindu Embodiment on the Internet,” Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 4.1 (2010)

Orr, Leslie, “Identity and Divinity: Boundary-Crossing Goddesses in Medieval South India,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 73, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 9-43

Levinson, Paul, The Soft Edge: a natural history and future of the information revolution, Routledge Press 1997

Levinson, Paul, Digital McLuhan: a guide to the information millennium, Routledge, 1999

Lipner, Julius, “A Remaking of Hinduism?” in Religion and Media, edited by Hent De Vries and Samuel Weber, Stanford University Press, 2001

McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, London andNew York (pdf)

Morgan, David, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Kindle edition)

Hoover, Steven, “Audiences: Religion, Spirituality, and the ‘Common Culture,’” in Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture, edited by David Morgan, Routledge 2008

Karapanagiotis, Nicole, “Vaishnava Cyber-Pūjā: Problems of Purityand Novel Ritual Solutions,” Aesthetics and Dimensions of the Senses, Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 4.1

Mohan Das, Radha, “ISKCON and the Internet,” on ISKCON News (website), Jan. 14, 2011. http://news.iskcon.org/iskcon-and-the-internet,2400/

Alachua Hare Krishna Temple website, http://alachuatemple.com/

Alachua ISKCON Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/alachuatemple