Bruce Eisner's Writings: How a Psychonaut Became a Cybernaut Part 2

Part 2 of 2

Creating a Virtual Global Community
Last week I spoke with Ram Dass, the popular elder of the psychedelic and spiritual movements, whose lectures and books, including Be Here Now, The Only Dance There Is, and the Psychedelic Experience (co-authored with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner). I told him about Island Group's activities, how we wanted create an experimental community based on the psychedelic vision. I expressed my hope that Island Group actually find an island or a piece of one elsewhere -- to co-create an experimental culture -- a meme that might spread. I also told him the story of how I helped spin Island's Web.

Ram Dass told me:. "I don't know if I'd want to live with a bunch of other people. But I really like your Island Web. I think that it could become a virtual community linking up people interested in spirit and psychedelics. You know, I lecture all over the world, and whatever city I go to, I find people who are part of our family."

Ram Dass went on, "The great thing about Island Web is that it can hook all these people up, so they can see that they are not just a few isolated being have woken up but are but part of a world-wide community that they can communicate with through cyberspace. It's reminds me of the novel Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse. In that novel, a group of people, each on their own path, who people banded together for a journey to the East -- not a physical journey but a journey of the mind."

Indeed, Howard Reingold, editor of the Whole Earth Millennium Catalog describes in his book Virtual Communities,. how on-line services like the Point Foundation's The Well were the beginnings of these new communities. He defines them: "Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace"

Cyberspace, originally a term coined by William Gibson's in his science-fiction novel Neuromancer, is used to describe a conceptual space where words, human relationships, data, wealth, and power are manifested using the power of as a global communication device. In Neuromancer, people would literally plug their brains into the global network Gibson that called the Net and navigate through virtual reality databases made up of raw information.

Timothy Leary, self-described "cheerleader for change" has spent the past 15 years pointing out the importance that cyberspace will have to our species and its future evolution. He calls the pioneers of cyberspace "The New Breed" in his recent book Chaos and Cyberculture. Leary also was one of the first popular thinkers to write and talk about virtual reality. Virtual Reality (VR) allows us to experience the cybernetic world of the computer through simulation of one or more senses rather than just with screen, keyboard and mouse. As is true about many technologies, VR began with the military as a way to train pilots through simulation of bombing runs or aircraft battles.

Virtual reality evolved into a real-life reality much sooner than boldest prophets would have predicted, A Virtual Reality Markup language is now being standardized as a feature built into Netscapes and other Web browsers as well as plug-in modules -- able to give he first primitive three-dimensional views of cyberspace. This fall, low cost goggles will begin to be marketed, allowing for even more realistic three-dimension simulations. The world of VR that seemed so fantastic to many a few years ago is getting ready for Prime Time.

The Future of Cyberspace
The entire millennium that's about to ring down it's curtain -- the last 1000 years -- can be seen as a playing out of the split between the religious, mystical and spiritual on one hand and the rational and scientific on the other. As the millennium began, we found ourselves gripped in a Dark Age in which religion in the form of iron fisted institution along with codified superstition, led humans into mass misery. The Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment -- taking the form of science and rationalism -- rose to challenge this gloomy fate. The two forces have existed in perpetual struggle and conflict throughout the rest of the millennium -- until just recently.

It was psychedelics which provided what the alchemists had long sought --a philosopher's stone that would provide the bridge between matter and spirit. A stone that would heal the Cartesian split and show us humans first hand that we are not mere ghosts inhabiting a machine.

This remystification of science is best seen in what is considered to be the most scientific of sciences -- physics. Recent works by Fritzjoff Capra, Fred Allen Wolf and Nick Herbert have demonstrated that some of the most mystical ideas of eastern religion now seen plausible from the most modern of physical models: relativity and quantum physics. Similarly in mathematics, chaos theory has given us a view of a chaotic universe which has an underlying order that can be described by new fractal equations.

French mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness. He called the noosphere. Similarly, biologists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in 1972 showed a fresh way of a way of looking at the entire world as one living organism, one consciousness-- "Gaia." As the Millennium draws to a close and we step across the threshold into the next, the coming of the World Wide Web and the vast cyberspace that lies beyond make these bold forecasts by mystic and scientist real.

GenerationX's favorite journalist Doug Rushkoff gives this new planetary consciousness an unlikely new name in his 1994 book, Cyberia. He tells us that this new Cyberia is a much nicer place than its physical location sound alike. "Cyberia is the place a businessman goes to when involved in a phone conversation, the place a Shamanic Warrior goes to when traveling out of the body, the place an 'acid house' dancer goes to when experiencing the bliss of techno-acid trance. Cyberia is a place alluded to by the mystical teachings of every religion, the theoretical tangents of every science, and the wildest speculations of the imagination. Now, however, unlike any other time in history, Cyberia is thought to be within our reach. The technological strides of our postmodern culture, coupled with the rebirth of ancient spiritual ideas, have convinced a growing number of people that Cyberia is the dimensional plane in which humanity will soon find itself."

Leave it to Beat philosopher Alan Watts, author Joyous Cosmology and one of the most popular philosophers of our time, for the last word.. In The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are Watts echoed the prediction that we would evolve a planetary nervous system based on technology which would unify us into a kind of global world brain in 1966! Looking toward the future, he said:." All information will come in by super-realistic television and other electronic devices yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body -- -even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual-an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences ... to coalesce into a single bio-electronic body.

But Watts challenged those who would be skeptical of this then-farfetched possibility y, "If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our bodies. We have already done it!"

Bringing It All Back Home
The World Wide Web that I discovered a couple of years ago has changed dramatically. The small, spread-about towns and villages of that time have been replaced by huge Web cities made up of store fronts put that put up small businesses seeking the glow of the "cutting edge" that Web existence can give them, as well as huge Internet skyscrapers and malls, representing multinational corporations and major retail businesses.

When I entered the Web in early 1994, I found an eclectic group of ex-hippies and cyberpunks and entrepreneurs and hackers, who were experimenting with this new and still relatively inexpensive medium. Now the Web is going mainstream, and the old trails and pathways carved by us early pioneers are sometimes hard to see beneath the new fast four lanes of the Information Superhighway.

But the Web has something for everyone, and in that lies a potential that will survive the politicians and corporate elite's attempts to domesticate it. The Web is not a mass medium, it is a medium that empowers individuals. Each of us can now have access to precisely the information we want. Anyone can publish their own web site, broadcast their own videos and music, put out their message for the world to hear and see. The multinational corporations will build the infrastructure for their Information Superhighway with their megabucks. But it is you and I who will drive our digital sportsers down the fast lane of the Infobaun.

For those of you who want some of the ideals that Island Group expresses, I invite you to join us and help keep Island's Web expanding. Visit our library, read our Island Views Electro-Zine, talk with others around the world, shop at our Marketplace, gain insight into Huxley's vision, and find a starting place, using our page of starting Links to Elsewhere for your exploration of mind-expanding ideas, both modern and ancient. If you like, become part of our Web team and help us keep putting out our message of hope.

Whether you read about it or actually begun exploring the Web, you can't escape the conclusion that a new burst of freedom and joy -- a burst similar to that which occurred during the great change in American history in the 'Sixties -- has reemerged in a new and more virulent form. It appears in the rise of the youth movements at raves and Deadhead revivals. It shines from the covers of multitudes of new books about the taboo psychedelics that have suddenly shown up in bookstores. These along with the flood of books and magazines about the Internet and even the Internet Underground. And of course, it unfolds in the ever changing Web itself.

This time, the revolution is international rather than national, integrated into the established order rather than underground and counterculture, embracing a new and enlightened technology rather than rejecting all technology. It's a revolution in human consciousness and communication that promises to link all of us into that Global Village that Marshall McLuhan once predicted.