Alexander Muir: Hello, friends, my name is Alexander, and I'm
very honoured to be talking to you today. HCI practice can
clearly be a force for good. But can it become a spiritual
practice? And if so, how? These are questions that are somewhat
taboo, that are not really touched on in the HCI
literature, and do not have a place yet in HCI textbooks.
There is HCI scholarship around tech and spirituality. But it
tends to focus more on how religious communities use
technology, or how technology can help engender a spiritual
experience. From what I've seen, though, almost nothing yet talks
about how the practitioner themselves has a spiritual
experience while engaged in the work. I feel though there's a
growing need to have straight talk about how our HCI practice
might connect us more deeply with who we are, so that we feel
more fully ourselves through our work. We all want to become more
warm hearted, more peaceful in our minds. And I think many of
us really want to feel the knots around our hearts loosening, but
may be concerned that the ways we might engage in the work end
up tightening these knots instead. There's an old saying,
"to understand someone is to love them, to love them is to
understand them". Well, in many ways, our job is to understand
people. And I put to you that that goes hand in hand with
loving them. So if we feel part of our mission of being a person
on this planet is to express more warm heartedness, more
compassion, to become more wise, in the deepe, still sense rather
than only in the intellectual sense. Perhaps we can find some
ways to work with HCI practice to support that. And that's the
theme of this paper. I've had to struggle with burnout and
depression like so many of us, I had to find a way to connect my
day job with my soul. From my teens, I followed a deep
interest in Hinduism, and have engaged in its meditational
practices. And I try to maintain my connection with my teachers
and friends in that area. In particular, there's a short but
very important and beautiful text called the Bhagavad Gītā,
that encapsulates the core teachings of what's called
Vedanta. The ideas and practices in it helped me so much through
burnout and depression, even at a time when my heart felt
completely shattered. It taught me something about how to float
in my life rather than sink and drown. And I still struggle. And
I think many of us struggle with compassion fatigue, with
overwhelm, and with anxiety. So what I share in the paper is my
best effort to describe, without adding any new interpretations,
what I've understood from my own teachers about the three main
ways that the Gita gives us on how to join together our
thoughts and emotions and actions, on one side, with that
which might be called in us the eternal, the absolute, the
deepest part of who we are, the truest part of who we are, who
we are beyond our limited identities. What we are when we
step outside of all pigeonholes. To bring these two together
through our work. Very briefly, these are the three main
approaches. Karma Yoga deals with selfless service, doing
good, unselfishly, it's called the path of action, and it will
be immediately recognisable as the heart of humanitarianism.
Bhakti Yoga is called the path of devotion. It's more emotional
in nature and deals with mood and feeling and intentionally
seeking out the beloved divine, even in the people in front of
us. Jnyana Yoga is called sometimes the path of knowledge,
or the path of inquiry. And it starts when our mind is still,
calm and awake. And it helps us understand directly how our own
mind colours the world we experience. All of these three
are incredibly deep. And again, I'm not a qualified teacher, but
just a student, sharing something which, from personal
experience, I can say, has real utility, and real applicability
to HCI practice, especially in the difficult moments.
Discussing religion and spirituality is complex, and
there are many socio-political issues that deserve attention.
But this paper focuses entirely on an appreciative
practice-centred view of how HCI practice can connect with the
three main Yogas in the Bhagavad Gītā. Thank you very much. My
warmest wishes to you. Bye for now.