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Social Media for yogis who prefer noble silence

(article is work in progress)

Why would yogis who prefer solitude and isolation need social media?

What appears at first to be a paradoxical question has a very straightforward motivation. It's a rare person in the world who is willing to devote their life to spiritual practice. They don't need or have any desire for social media to engage in the mundane and inane, spiritually useless discourse.

Just as fire can destroy or be extraordinarily useful, social media for a yogi can actually be a very useful tool, if one has the discipline and spiritual maturity to use it wisely.  Technology allows us to reach rare individuals who are normally unreachable. To access, share great ideas on practice, and get hints and tips without having to traverse the world looking for  awakened yogis dwelling in isolated mountain caves.

Yogis who are experienced and have something of value to share, we should keep a journal of our best ideas. Lessons that came through the school of hard knocks, trial and error. Big mistakes are often more instructive than just confirming a good technique worked as it claimed.  Many things were valuable gems passed on from asking experienced yogis and teachers in person, or reading their biographies. Things, incredibly helpful practical tips and details that the suttas don't talk about. May those who come after us avoid mistakes we've made and get a huge lift from valuable tips and techniques, things we wish we knew when we started this journey.


That said...

Despite the useful properties of social media to access information from nearly impossible to reach yogis, I'm of the opinion that the vast majority of aspiring spiritual yogis, considering pros and cons, would be much better off going off grid, cut off completely from social media and 99% of any media. Most people just don't have the spiritual maturity to handle certain tools, as useful as they can be.

strengths and weaknesses of various platforms:


reddit Buddhist forums:
* + seems to have the largest audience by numbers
* + dropping in cut and paste html preserves hyperlinks, some rich media content
* + upvoting/liking propagates popular topics to top of list

dhammawheel Buddhist forums:
* + very diverse categorization, many niches and specialized topics.
* - very diverse categorization, very cumbersome to cross post
* - poor search engine to find specific topic and even your own old posts.

twitter:
* + limits people to about 200 characters, forces people to choose words carefully with compact meaning.
* + good for broadcasting information in the form of links to content.

facebook:
* + most popular social media platform
* - invasive of privacy, data mining to profit off of your invaded privacy, logging on your photos, videos, etc.
* - poor interface for detailed discussion of length topics

blogger:
* + free service, comes with gmail and google account
* + doesn't clutter and defile your blog pages with advertisements (unless you choose their revenue sharing option)
* + WYSIWYG cut and paste html right into your blog post, preserves html formatting, hyperlinks, rich media,  works great for copy and paste of pali + english sutta formated html tables from lucid24.org.

Comments

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