Yes, the internet is booming. But is that good news or bad news? Many
of us fear that life online will reduce us to virtual human beings –
isolated, dehumanized adjuncts to machines – or that e-commerce will
inspire yet another wave of consumerism. Others, like philosopher and
cultural historian Jean Houston, see the internet as a place where a new
species intelligence is being born.
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As my hands fly over the keyboard, the sunlight streaming
through the window washes out the words on the computer screen but lingers
for a minute on my hands. A memory rises of other sunlit hands. They
belonged to a man I used to call Mr. Tayer, whom years later I discovered
to be the great Jesuit paleontologist and mystic, Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin. He lived several blocks from me, and when I was in my mid-teens
and he in his 70s, we took walks together occasionally with my fox terrier
Champ in New York’s Central Park.
I mention Teilhard here because, in the last few
years,
he has become the patron saint of a bevy of Internet theoreticians. I am
remembering a time when Mr. Tayer lifted his hands with their long fingers
up to the sun and spoke in his interesting French accent about what he
called “the noosphere.” For a moment, the light seemed to make his hands
translucent. With his hands sweeping across the sky, he told me that the
Earth had grown itself a new skin that encircled the planet. This new skin
-the noosphere- was a vast thinking membrane and would one day be “the
living unity of a single tissue that would contain all of our thoughts,
our dreams, and even our experiences.” It would be Mind at Large, the
weaving of the consciousness of the planet, fueled by human awareness and
quickening the human evolutionary journey.
“When will this be? I asked him, already anxious to find
some Know-It-All place I could go to for help with my high school term
papers.
He told me that it was already in place and had been
since human beings became self-conscious. But in my lifetime, perhaps,
this living membrane would grow in density and complexity, activating the
human species to greater consciousness and responsiveness. His words
became strange, grand, as luminous and illusive as the sun rays that
seemed to provoke his reflections. He spoke of the immense and growing
edifice of matter and ideas, of the phosphorescence of thought and the
irresistible tide of intelligence and spirit that was bringing about a
change of such planetary magnitude. He spoke of "noogenesis" the evolution
of a new layer of life that was above the biosphere of Earth’s living
systems.
“But what about the trees and the rocks and the
animals?”
I asked, worriedly looking at Champ. “Aren’t they important anymore?
He answered that they were as important as ever, but were
now incorporated into and crowned by the noosphere. They and we were all
part of a cosmic evolutionary movement that was moving us toward
metamorphosis into a whole new form. As this metamorphosis continued, we
would leave our littleness behind. He spoke of the new electrical
connections – radio, television and these new room-sized computers – as
the outer forms of this inner change.
What seemed arcane speculation in the 1950s we now
recognize to have been a prophetic vision of the globe-circling web of
electronic information. The Net’s high tech communion is spaceless and not
bound by the usual categories of time. One can hook in from anywhere – a
cafe in Paris, a basement in Beijing, 35,000 feet up flying over the
Arctic, a boat in the Aegean, a cab in Kansas City. The Net makes one
ubiquitous, allowing rapid travels through all of the known, as well as
many of the unknown worlds. It is the matrix within which cultures meet
and propagate in new fusions and peoples exchange their social DNA at a
remarkable rate. From this mating, a whole new species is being born.
Teilhard’s speculations in the 1950s were prescient to be
sure, but the idea that a web of energy links all that is can be traced
back further still. Almost two millennia ago, the second-century Buddhist
Avatamska Sutra contains a mystical vision of the ultimate energetic net.
As I have paraphrased the original: “In the heaven of Indra there is said
to be a network of pearls, so arranged that if you look at one you see all
the others reflected in it, and if you move in to any part of it, you set
off the sound of bells that ring through every part of the network,
through every part of reality. In the same way, each person, each object
in the world, is not merely itself, but involves every other person and
object and, in fact, on one level is every other person and object.”
The World Wide Web is a present-day incarnation of
Indra’s Net, a metascape of electrons, holographic in character, and, like
its metaphysical parent, an interdependent matrix, the One and the many in
an infinite dance.
Loosening the boundaries
Perceiving the
interconnectedness of all beings during spiritual practice loosens the
boundaries of one’s reality to prepare for the realization of one’s place
in the cosmic dance. Traveling the energetic byways of the Internet leads
to a similar stretching and loosening of the membranes that traditionally
divide cultures, languages, sciences, religions, nations, races. Every
time we log on, we participate in the creation of the global mind field.
The planet is becoming self-conscious in all its parts through ourselves.
Electronic circuitry has so wired the planet that within a few years, just
about everything that the human race is doing or has ever thought about
will be available at our fingertips, our hands at play on the keyboard
enabling the human spirit to come at us in resonance waves.
Moreover, the Internet is remaking human culture. In the
fourth millennium BC, sophisticated cultures grew up along the great
rivers – the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Yangtse, the Ganges. Today, a
new and very complex culture is growing up along the Internet’s great
river of electronic information. The Net world is a second universe, a
kingdom in our midst, with sights and sounds, landscapes and
knowledge-scapes, markets and amusements, romances and resources – many of
which have never before been seen on Earth. It burgeons forth, this global
Village of villages, gaining each hour more and more inhabitants, who live
and move and have their being in a world which is nowhere and yet
everywhere.
We who inhabit the Internet’s virtual outposts are fast
evolving into new kinds of beings, our neural system and sensory receptors
extended through space and time. Psychologies that have endured for
millennia are passing away in a few hundred months. In response, the human
psyche itself is expanding – even, I believe, being remade. This dance of
metamorphosis is reciprocal; the Internet is changing us, even as we
refine the technology that extends its reach.
Shadows loom large of course. The embodiment and
broadcasting of private images across the Internet has allowed for
monsters to get out there, private deviance to have an audience, obscenity
to flourish. The old-fashioned vices, electronically amplified, have never
had it so good. Porn is ever present, e-gambling holds millions in thrall,
and many ordinary folk lose their savings to the addictions of electronic
commerce, cyber malls and auctions for things they never knew they wanted
until they popped up like sirens on the Net.
Despite its shadows, the Internet nevertheless is our
most promising road to transcendence. We are today in the early stage of
being able to assume avatars. In Hindu thought, an avatar is a god or god
force who has downloaded into a human body and consciousness in space and
time. Thus, Prince Rama in the great Indian epic The Ramayana is the
avatar of the creator god Vishnu, and his wife, Princess Sita, is the
avatar of Vishnu’s wife, Lakshmi, the goddess of abundance. In
cyberspace,
an avatar allows us to take on and be seen on the screen wearing a virtual
body: Merlin or Wonder Woman, Queen Elizabeth or Joan of Arc, a creature
with a thousand eyes or a fish with the head of a monkey. Such virtual
identities are closer to impersonation than to incarnation, yet some
people come to identify so closely with the avatar they wear that it
becomes an extension of their human personality, allowing them to express
feelings and points of view in poignant ways. A scientist who in actual
life comes across as a “tough cookie” in the laboratory in the avatar
world might wear an Earth head to express the powerful love she feels for
all Gaia’s creatures. The avatars of cyberspace allow us to try on the
diversity which we contain and to interact with other avatars in virtual
landscapes which bring the dreamworld onto the screen as a catalyst for
the psychology of polyphrenia. With the help of the Internet, our inner
palate will widen even as our outer experiences reflect the greater range
of cultures and peoples we encounter at work, in our communities, and in
our own families.
In times past people would wear the masks of the gods on
ritual occasions. Then would they act as if they had a god’s abilities and
powers. Cyberspace has given us the opportunity to imitate our ancient
brothers and sisters. We are learning to take on archetypal identities and
experience the world in more powerful ways. We are growing a more fluid
personal psychology, and with the input of the Internet, changing the way
we think of ourselves.
As our new body-mind evolves, everything else is
changing, too: our body image, how we think and use language, our
relationships and our sense of community, the ways we work and create,
even our view of the nature of reality itself. The Internet promises to
bring about as great an evolutionary change as occurred when people
stopped depending on the meandering of the hunt and settled down to
agriculture and civilization.
Among the best of the new forms the Net is engendering
are the virtual communities that the Net seems to spawn with a natural
genius. Virtual communities, according to Howard Rheingold, are “social
aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on … public
discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of
personal relationships in cyberspace.”
What is growing in this medium? Teaching-learning
communities of every sort – people communicating with each other and
discovering that the more you talk to others, the more they become worth
talking to. Whereas in actual life, you probably do not ordinarily
converse at length with the fireman, the policeman, the baker, or the
librarian, on the Net you not only talk to them, you become friends.
Villages of friends of all ages are emerging.
Amity is the name of the game, people serving each
other,
not only in engaged discourse, but often as angels of information. I find
that even though I’m a compulsive reader of books in many areas, just the
ideas I need for my research are more readily available from my friends in
the virtual communities of which I am a member. Speeding across the
electrons from the COSMOGEN list, for example, comes up-to-the-minute
information on the epic of evolution and the inroads of complexity theory.
Surfing the Net immerses us in the making of
realities,
but with the added advantage of an immense workshop of coartists. One
introduces a theme, then traces and develops it further, finds balances
and counterpoints, contradictions and paradoxes, and finally, when the
tension is greatest and mind is at the end of its tether, it all resolves
– a net friend in Finland, a cyber-buddy in Moscow, a forgotten text
uploaded from Madras, and with a grand crescendo, molto allegro the piece
is transformed. Another wrinkle has been added to the Mind of the Maker.
Under this stimulus, then as now, psyche
grows. The
imaginal realms of inner space proliferate and spill over into the outer
world into a renaissance of growth in science, art, music, literature,
technology, education, governance and, above all, vision.
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