Bless the Phone

Ross Simonini on ritual, attention, and transforming the profane into a site of quiet wonder.

PAN IV, 2023, by Ross Simonini

Last year, I developed the unexpected habit of blessing my phone. I now do this ritual any time I answer a call, send a text, or enter the drooling state of the scroll. I do it even if I’m not feeling particularly grateful for my device, because blessing isn’t a way of worshipping technology—what many people are already, unknowingly doing—but the opposite: a method for transforming a false icon into a portal of possibility.

I do not make a habit of blessing many things in my life, nor do I have a clear definition of the word bless, which I think of intuitively, unrelated to any specific spiritual doctrine. For me, a blessing is a concentrated feeling, an intensified internal attention. When I do it, I’m not asking for anything or hoping for an outcome; I’m just opening a space in my mind that, in my daily life, stays closed. After years of experimenting with many varieties of meditation and prayer, this is my best explanation of the phenomenon. To explain it under further scrutiny would betray its central mystery, which I don’t want to do, because mystery is the nectar of my life. The important thing is, I know a blessing when I feel it, and it feels good.

In the case of the phone, I began to notice that it had become a source of fiery, negative intensity in the world around me, and when I decided to quell this feeling, my natural response was a blessing. Some of this intensity came from within me, in the form of compulsion. It’s a feeling I’ve endured with many things: food, people, and art—none of which are inherently corrupt, all of which can be addictive, and any of which might seem like a natural recipient of a blessing.

But that was just the fingernail of the problem. Most of the conflict with this technology came from my community. Wherever I went, people cursed their phones. It was seeming fashionable to feel angsty about screen technology, even if you and everyone you knew used it constantly. I think people feel obligated to complain, as if it were their small, futile resistance to the phone’s tyranny over our lives.

Amongst my milieu, the phone became a villain, the leading culprit for asocial behavior, bullying, stupidity, depression, ADHD, totalitarianism, cancer, and climate change. In an interview on the Louisiana channel, the artist Cecily Brown said, “The phone is obviously the death of art and culture.”

This is the Promethean tale of the evil phone, and while it contains validity, I am bored of it. For one thing, it’s worth noting that this story is told most emphatically by people who have lived two lives: before and after phones. We who have seen across that divide are profoundly aware of our new phone reality. The past and future wrestle inside of us, and we can hardly stand it.

Those born later—the native-phone generations—will likely let go of this struggle. When I was young, my parents wrung their hands over my TV time, believing its screen would melt my eyes and brain. Before that, electricity, radio, cars and books all inspired similar debates. Before that, Plato believed writing would destroy our minds—now it is the standard measure of academic intelligence. Civilization was flawed long before any of these technologies and it will continue to be long after they are obsolete.

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But for a moment, imagine the phone is irredeemably evil. It’s been corrupted by corporations and governments. It’s eroding away our thoughts, feelings, desires, and human connection. Humanity’s downfall is in our pocket. If these dangers are all true, then a blessing seems more necessary than ever. Turning a blind eye to such an enormous threat and defenestrating the phone—this would be an act of fear and cowardice.

Of course, I too feel some disgust and unease about the smartphone, but where I used to complain, I now harness these feelings in my blessing. As Matthew said in the Bible, “Bless those that curse you, do good to those that hate you.” For real change, we must find the sacred inside of the phone’s darkness. This is how we become a more mindful steward of our technology.

Consider the philosophy of Tantra, a word that translates to “technology.” In Tantric Hinduism, all the traditional sins—sex, red meat, alcohol, morbidity—become tools for connecting to God. Instead of avoiding sex, bring such a high quality of attention to the act that it becomes prayer. Instead of abstaining from alcohol and drugs, imbibe intoxicants until you master their slippery ways. Instead of ignoring death, live in a graveyard and drink from the skull of a corpse, as is practiced by the monastic order of the Aghori.

If the phone is now a symbol for the profane, it is also a profound site of the sacred. The act of real power is to transform it into something that can support us. The crucifix was once a symbol for pain and wickedness, but the Christians turned it into an engine for divinity. Praying to the crucifix is not an endorsement of torture or cross-makers, but an act of love. Every path leads to grace when you walk it correctly.

My Whole Entiled World performance, 2018, Forestville, CA.

When I bless my phone, I take a brief moment of pause before my mind drops into cellular fixation. I begin by opening up what I want to feel—gratitude, empathy—and I just stay with it for a moment. Then I remind myself of this object’s miraculous capabilities, complicated potential, and even the dubious radiation it emits. Now, I keep a folded swatch of electromagnetic-blocking faraday fabric in my bag, placed between my body and the phone, as a sign that I acknowledge and respect its volatile energy.

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Yet, with all its threats in mind, I have still decided that the phone improves my life more than it impairs it. I’m not getting rid of it, and when I look around, it seems that most of the detractors have come to the same conclusion.

Still, the story of the sinful phone now lives in my blood, forever keeping me weary and vigilant against its charisma. This might be a good thing, but in what ways has the guilty weight of this narrative prevented me from using my phone well?

What happens when we refer to the phone as an extension of ourselves while simultaneously condemning it? After all, this is the device that I use to speak to my favorite people, to look at pictures of my daughter, to make and orchestrate various forms of art—all the things I care most about in life. Worse yet, if we believe the phone as a site of all the monstrosities in culture—social media, news headlines, porn—do we all turn more monstrous when we enter its blue-lit space? The way dark, sordid bars give people permission to do what broad daylight does not.

We spend hours stroking our phones, showing them the kind of attention that babies and pets usually receive. In moments of suffering, we are thankful for whatever relief they give us, through a meme or message or music. We crave this kind of intimate phone time. It puts our mind into the standby state of beta, which is as necessary as delta (sleep), gamma (insight), theta (meditation) or alpha (daydream).

Yet many categorize this time as distraction, which is one of the greatest sins in neoliberal capitalism, where a human’s value is defined by our productivity. Personally, I need distraction. As an artist, I discover inspiration through aimlessly following pleasure. Of course, I have experienced acedia, lost in the apathy of unfocused exploration, but mostly, distraction has served me well.

As a child I used the encyclopedia for this purpose, and my parents encouraged my hours of turning pages. Despite Plato, they believed the book to be a beneficial technology. But now, the same activity on our phone—clicking through the hyperlinks of Wikipedia—is perceived as a waste of time. Flipping through dusty crates in an old record store is a romantic way to spend an afternoon, but discovering the strange, unheard corners of Spotify is culturally vapid.

I’m saying all of this not to defend the phone, nor to encourage phone use—especially not for children—but to point out the ways in which our narrative of the phone colors all its activities, regardless of what they might be.

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I began blessing my phone in the fall, and in the winter, I lost my home, my art studio and everything I owned in the Los Angeles fires. I evacuated my house with an armload of objects, one of which was my phone, and in many ways, it saved me.

Over the following months, the amount of generosity and kindness that poured through that device was, next to my family, the greatest source of love in my life. Of course, it wasn’t the phone loving me, it was the people—and yet, I cannot think of a real-world analog for the mobile’s flavor of human connection. In the pits of my post-fire darkness, I would have been exhausted by a queue of well-wishers at my doorstep; but receiving texts, emails, and calls was the ideal form of passive communication for that moment. I could respond at the lugubrious pace of disaster recovery, without licking a stamp or even looking presentable.

I do believe that blessing my phone made some of this possible. It allowed me to scrape away a little plaque of phone sin and perceive the support I needed in a time of despair. Because of that, I now have palpable experiences I can call upon to uphold my ritual.

Since then, the feelings in my blessing are deeper and easier to access. The whole process has become increasingly natural, almost reflexive. Sometimes, I’m not even aware I’m doing it. Over time, perhaps the phone (or any object of a blessing) becomes irrelevant and my habit becomes an orientation toward the world. That sounds like a nice outcome.

So far, this practice has helped to keep me in a state of astonishment with the phone. As someone who lived in pre-phone reality, I still regard this device as some kind of bizarre magic, and I’d like to hold onto that disbelief. Any one of us is lucky to own what billions of people cannot. We are wielders of power and we should hold ourselves accountable for using it well.

The Buddhists emphasize that we live through right action, right speech, and right view. These values are not just for easy days, but are most useful in the times of overwhelm or mundanity. If we find ourselves thoughtless and reactive with our devices in hand, then we are in a ripe state for contemplation. If the phone is our new window into reality, then through it we can revere everything.