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Hi, I'm Alex Kotowski and this is the Digital Human for the documentary on the BBC World Service, first broadcast on BBC Radio four, but specially curated for you, Sacred asks if our use of technology can help explain what is sacred to us.

This is my dad's old Olympus Omertà camera. It's a traditional SLR, everything's mechanical in it. And it is it is an artifact of my childhood.

When he died a few years ago, there was a lot of things in the house that I thought, oh, should I keep this? Should I have this?

This reminds me of him. But there was no question in my mind that I was going to keep this camera because this camera represents everything about my time with him.

Dad was a voracious amateur photographer.

He left me several boxes of packed pictures of me growing up through the ages. It's for that reason that I can't give this camera up. There's too much of me in the lens. There's too much of him looking through the viewfinder.

And I don't want to give it up because I'm afraid that I'll lose something intangible about myself and about my dad.

How much of my dad actually is in this camera and how much of me actually is in this lens on today's digital human?

We ask, what is it that makes an object sacred and how does it keep connections alive even when the person is long gone? Follow the digital human on hashtag human. I am of the here and Nazi Kahu tribes of North Island of New Zealand. Deirdre Brown is professor of architecture at the University of Auckland. My great grandmother's great grandfather was a runner theater or chief known as the party, and he was a paramount chief in the northern part of New Zealand and the early part of the 19th century.

And he was one of the first Maori chiefs to engage with Europeans through trade, which eventually led to him taking a voyage to Australia and meeting the governor of New South Wales.

Phillip Goodlooking and Phillip Goodlooking allowed him to stay in his house at Parramatta and Sydney and went power. He was leaving. After some weeks of stay there, he was presented with a silver medal that Goodley King had struck by his wife's jula to present to him to acknowledge the great friendship that they developed and also the trade between them.

Several years later, tappa. He and his people were attacked. The medal was stolen. But more than 100 years after that, in 2014, it turned up at an auction house in Australia.

We managed to get the medal back through the museum's purchasing it from Sotheby's. But by the stage, the stories had built around the middle had already had stories associated with it concerning to party and the fact that it had been owned by tuppeny, and that as a consequence of this, some of the parties, Modie or Lifeforce, had become part of the middle. And the middle almost became the person, and indeed, by the time the middle arrived back in Altiero, New Zealand, for many of us, it was a representation of the past.

And so we treated it as if it was the party. And we underwent a formal process of welcoming the middle back to New Zealand. We used a process called Cowey Mattey, which is normally done with a photograph, but in this case, done with the middle where you treat the object or the tongue as if it was a person. So it was brought back as if it was a representation, in fact, had embodied the party onto our ancestral lands with the blessings of the museums that had purchased it.

And when we think of this middle, which has now gone on to be exhibited all around the country, we always treat it as the person to party. Members of our family always accompany it as it travels around the country. It is addressed as if it is a person that is addressed, as if it is the party, and we shot the utmost respect. Sacred is something that is set apart and to be sacred or for something to be sacred, it connects us to something bigger than ourselves.

This is Brett Robinson.

He is the director of communications for the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.

For me, I think of where I grew up in Pittsburgh, in western Pennsylvania, my childhood home where memory lives.

And any time I go back there and visit, I have that experience of not just nostalgia, but connecting with my deceased father, for example, where, you know, he raised me there, he and my mother.

And so in that sense, the place evokes something quite special and I would say sacred.

I also recall having an experience in my front yard in my childhood home of kind of laying in the grass as an eight year old and looking up at the stars and having this sense of oneness that the most distant star was no further from me than the blade of grass next to me.

And so this sense of connection and oneness. And so that place has a very sacred significance for me.

An object does not have to be significant to anybody other than yourself to remind you of who you are and where you come from.

It grounds you in your own tribe, which is why dad's camera is still sacred to me. My childhood was captured by its lens. It feels like a little piece of me is inside, but equally, a little piece of dad is still looking through the viewfinder too.

So the idea that a camera can take an image of a person, it's not just a device for representation and it also refers to the person standing behind the camera. So the camera itself embodies this idea of of looking at it is almost like the person's eyes. So the camera becomes the person. You know, over time when the person is gone, the camera remains with all these memories of this device that looked upon someone and was in essence their eyes and can still be used to look out and to other views and capture other ways of seeing to but refer back to the original user.

So when you talk about the tongue, that is the camera. For me as a Maori person, I get the sense it's, you know, if I may, that it's got the Maori or Lifeforce of the dead associated with it. And all the times that it was used to take images of events that now all of those experiences, all of those places, all of those people become part of the camera story. And what elevates it from just being a device that takes images to being a real town or treasure because of all these memories, places and people that it represents.

Robin Finn is a writer who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and her three teenage children. About nine months before my mother died, she fell and she only had one good eye that she could really see out of, and she had a terrible injury to that eye and she basically went blind. But when she went blind and she could no longer face time, she couldn't see you. She couldn't read all the things she loved to do were really no longer accessible for her.

So her phone became her gateway to the world and to talking to all the people that she loved. So her phone became really, really important to her as she became blind. Robin's mom would phone her 10 times a day and leave messages, and that meant that they were able to share time together in the last months of her mother's life. So when it came to the part about going through the house, Robin gravitated towards the phone, which had been a lifeline now in grief.

The phone is a treasure.

My mom's phone is a purple leather phone case and I keep it next to my bed in my nightstand.

And when I really miss my mother, I mean, I can see my mother's hand so clearly in my mind, in her colored fingernails. And I can picture this phone sitting in her lap. I can picture her hands around it. I can picture her holding it. I mean, she loved her phone and she loved talking to people. And so I keep the phone next to my bed. And sometimes when I really feel sad, I just take it out and hold it.

And it's just I know that she held it so often and she loved it. She loved being connected to everyone. And it makes me feel connected to her by holding her phone. And for sure, to me, her phone is a sacred object and I will never get rid of it. I will probably keep her iPhone in my night table next to my bed forever. It just makes me feel close to her and it makes me feel connected to her.

For many people, we imagine ourselves as being made up of our tinana body. Why do our or our everlasting spirit and our Modie or our life force endure? Everlasting spirit, of course, goes on after you passed on because your body is returned to the ground. But you Maudy is your life force and it's something that you have to protect at all costs. When photography first came to Altiero, New Zealand people were quite concerned that the photographs were perhaps taking part of the Maudy because it was such such a direct representation of them.

But in a positive light, you, Modie, can be transferred to Tomoe or is associated with you. There could be jewellery. You might even be a photograph of you. It could be a piece of clothing, something associated with you. And by taking on your Modie becomes a representation of you and can be treated like a person. I can hardly think of an object she used on quite a daily basis that she held in her slender fingers as much as that phone.

So it's true that we have such an intimate relationship with our phone that when the person is gone and the phone remains, it just becomes something that is precious, at least it has for me. I'm Alex Kotowski, and you are listening to the Digital Human for the documentary on the BBC World Service. It feels extremely new to impose life force onto a mobile phone, but why not? Why does the sacred object need to be a metal or a stone or a crystal?

David Gallo Acky is a Royal Society research fellow who runs the Intangible Realities Lab at the University of Bristol, and he thinks that something doesn't even need to be physical to be considered sacred.

One of the things about virtual reality that's really interesting, if you've experienced it, is I think it's perhaps the closest experience that we have available to us right now in the universe of experiences where we can interact with objects whose essences are purely energetic.

If you put a VR headset on or if you've watched someone wearing one, you'll see them moving things, grabbing things, manipulating things in this world.

And it just looks like they're grasping at the air. But actually, from their perspective inside that world, there are objects in these different places, although these are not material objects, these are simulated computational objects. And as such, they do have an essential existence. But that existence is not material. It's purely energetic. They're effectively like light objects.

The things that my dad took photos of, the stuff that he saw through the viewfinder of his omertà are still inside the camera, even if it's just a shadow or shade or some kind of electronic impulse.

Just as Robin's mom's essence of reaching out to her kids is still inside the phone. For me, what's really interesting, I guess, with my background in computational physics, is that not only is that a sort of deep idea in various wisdom and mystical traditions, but also it's a view that's completely in line with the insights of modern physics. We know that matter and energy are objects that exist on a continuum, and that matter can change form into energy and energy can change form into matter.

Einstein has a very famous equation which says equals EMC squared, which represents, you know, how much matter can be converted into energy and vice versa. The physicist David Boehme has a very famous statement, which I think is beautiful, where he said that all of matter is actually frozen light. And so this was a I think, a really beautiful encapsulation of this idea that energy and matter do exists in this continuum thing and that what you imagine is sort of material reality, which you get used to in your sort of day to day practice.

Your materialism kind of gets more and more entrenched for a lot of us.

There is another way of looking at things. It's not often intuitive for us because we often, I think, tend to default into a sort of materialist way of looking at things where we think of ourselves as separate from other things and other things as separate from us. And we imagine that they kind of have their own trajectory and we have a separate trajectory. And that's kind of a very classical Newtonian way of of looking at objects as being separate and occasionally interacting.

Whereas when you imagine things as sort of having an intrinsic energetic luminosity that are radiant all the time, what that means is they're perpetually intermingling and perpetually interacting all the time and influencing one another in this sort of interdependent matrix of existence.

Look, it sounds metaphysical and possibly a little wacky to some people, but why not holding onto a camera or an iPhone or even accompanying a medal around New Zealand presupposes that the person's existence does continue, just like putting up a blue plaque on a red brick wall that says George Orwell was born here.

We make things sacred. We make them of historical and personal significance all the time, and we use them to communicate with the life force that remains inside.

After my mom died, I just felt so lonely and I missed her so much and I was so desperate to feel connected to her, and so I decided to call her.

And when I heard her voice and her voice mail, it made me feel so comforted. And I just started to leave her messages.

Hi, Mommy. Mommy, I'm just calling because I missed you so much and I just gave you these voicemails. I'm crazy. Sometimes I like to act like you will call me back and I could just ask you about your day, but I wanted to tell you the horror that is wearing all of your clothes, wearing your dad's pajama bottoms and this other little shirt of yours, I think you would just love it. That's it. I love you.

Bye.

The messages became me telling her things about my day. Me telling her things about her grandchildren that she would have loved to know or just little bits of gossip or things that were happening in the world that I would have talked about with her. Had she been alive, but somehow being able to reach her, I felt like it was this portal and that somehow I was able to reach her wherever she was through my messages. And I even kind of envisioned it like through the cosmos, that this voice mail would get to my mother and she would hear it.

And I would tell her about the new color just painted my wall or that my daughter was wearing my father's pajama bottoms, being used to having this phone mediated relationship. My mother was gone, but the phone mediated relationship continued. It does feel sacred to me. All it takes is like a little suspension of belief. You know, like, yes, you know, that person is gone. But there's always this feeling like, well, maybe they're hearing this.

I mean, it's a fantastical thought, but one never knows. You know, maybe it's making its way across the cosmos. Who knows?

David Glowacki, again, I really love the fact that this woman is sending voicemails to her mom.

I think it highlights a link between how more ancient technologies have been utilized to leave an energetic imprint on the world. We did an art installation a few years ago in Bhutan. We did a digital art installation. This is a project where you could sort of look into an energetic mirror and see an energetic representation of yourself. Right. Not the material that you normally see when you look in a mirror, but this sort of more ethereal, nonlocal, energetic representation of yourself.

And we were doing that as part of this arts festival in Britain. And in the same square, one of our team members that was helping deliver the project engaged with a man in the square who is printing prayer flags. So you've probably seen like these multicolored prayer flags that exist. The idea was that you placed the prayers on the flag and then you hang them up in the natural environment. And then as the elements take their toll, right. As the wind rattles them, as the rain soaks them, as the dies slowly dissipate and they lose their colour, that's actually represents the energetic force of prayer going out into the world mediated by the physical elements.

And I just feel like the idea of leaving voicemails because of this belief that this will find its way out into the energetic matrix of everything is very aligned with a much more ancient practice. And I think actually like it's like a more modern, maybe accessible interpretation of the Tibetan prayer flag idea. I'm Peggy. You may call me Peggy, but my Chinese name is that they call me Peggy lives in eastern China, and every year she and her family travel to their home village to take part in a ritual called the Tomb Sweeping Festival.

Other spiritual practices do something similar. There's DIA de los Muertos in Central and South America, All Souls Day in the European Catholic tradition. It's a day when families go to a loved one's grave or to an altar and clean it up, or they lay candles or flowers or other offerings.

It's a really nice ritual that tells the dead that they hold a sacred place in the memories of the living in Chinese language comes sweeping.

They is called a tin ming. And these two characters literally means purity and brightness and signify Winter's final demise in Chinese art. The time around the tomb sweeping days usually depicted with clear mountains and streams, growing willows and the red peach blossoms, very beautiful scenery. The customs of Tom sweeping both a long history of more than 1000 years from Pong vanished.

Peggy is also a researcher who studies Chinese customs. So when she goes to visit the cemetery, she is also keeping an eye out to see how the traditions have evolved every year.

Me and my mother, my father, we go to the tomb of my grandpa and grandma and do this thing. So we offer food and yes, flowers.

And actually last year my mom burned the paper iPhone to my grandma to hope, like she will call us through our dreams and speak to us. Yes. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only ever change form, the essential energy of your loved one is not gone. It's simply taking a different form. It's not that you've gone.

It's just that your atoms and molecules and the forces that bound them have transmuted into a different form and are embedded in the environment in a different way. But they're still with you. And so this again, I think is one of these deep insights that is a really beautiful touch point for mystical practice on the one hand, and modern science on the other hand.

I think it is a way to express our missing of the dead, our loved ones. That was why, I think why my mom burned paper my phone to my grandmother in our Chinese idea. We think if you miss someone, the dead one, then he or she will come to your dream and to speak to you. And we can meet seeing our dream because any way we miss her. Right.

You know. Oh. I remember being shocked when I first saw actual paper, mobile phones and laptops and tablets for sale for funerals and to sleeping, when I was visiting Taiwan about a decade ago, I felt totally out of place.

They were too new. It was kind of crude until, of course, I realized that these are symbols like for Peggy and for her family.

They help maintain a connection, just like leaving a note on the wall of a Facebook memorial site.

Objects do not need to be physical to be sacred. Brett Robinson, again, one of the ways I think that technology plays into the idea of sacredness is that it gives us a sense that we can transcend our natures, that we have certain limitations as human beings, and those limitations can be transcended by these very powerful tools, whether they're tools for memory, like the computer or for travel, like the spaceship, all these modes by which we seek to escape our own physical and human limitations.

That aspect of technology, I think, is what drives it so closely to religious ideals or ideas, because religion, of course, is a means by which we believe or many believe that human nature, our physical bodies are mortal bodies are transcended by the soul. Anything can be a sacred object. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Even if that thing might be ugliest then or even if it doesn't even exist anywhere except the energetic pulses of the digital world.

Computers are really memory machines, and we're archiving our daily lives on social media and other places in real time. And so we are building that universal memory archive for ourselves, but really for others, too. When you think about how much we post, that's public and so on. But I think it's significant because the television era that we came out of into the Internet era was a different grammar orientation.

It was towards fantasy and imagination. And television was very much about appealing to our imaginations and telling us stories and creating fantasies, especially through advertising. You know, if you buy this, you'll become like this and this sort of thing and the digital world and Internet technology is really blowing that up and transforming our perception into a more memory based perception. And I think we're going to see increasingly more religious expression as a result, because I think what we've just been talking about with regard to memory and sacredness, memory evokes a sense of sacredness.

And so to the extent that the Internet is doing the same and playing on that interior faculty of ours of memory and connecting to some very deep things, both individually and culturally, I think it awakens a religious sensibility that may not have been there in the age of television. So it'll be interesting to watch that. Thank you for listening to the digital human for the documentary on the BBC World Service, it was presented by me, Alex Kotowski and produced by Kate Bisel.

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