Sixth-Level Digital Dharma: Seeing Deeper, Seeing Wider

In my book, Digital Dharma, I look at the seven core spiritual communications challenges encoded by the different technologies of the Infosphere, and relate them to the "stages of consciousness" described by the world's esoteric traditions, the work of philosophers such as Ken Wilber, and the "spiral dynamics" model of Don Beck, Christopher Cowan, and Claire Graves. This excerpt looks at our current fascination with "coded reality," and connects it to the work of the esoteric third eye (at the sixth chakra) and the technologies of digital compression.

The core personal metaphor of sixth-level digital dharma is "deep seeing" - moving from focusing on what's in front of us to expanding our vision to take in the big picture of reality. This level of awareness, often realized through intense spiritual practices (and sometimes via equally intense psychedelics or spontaneous breakthrough situations) is awareness apart from the thinking mind. It involves processing the data from the outer world in full consciousness that one is in fact data processing.

Sixth-level thinking is by its nature holographic, holding all levels of the greater information- and energy-filled "meta-universe" in awareness and appreciation; it is free to see deeper, to tune across the whole range of consciousness. [1] This level of digital dharma is about learning to communicate beyond the surface forms, to connect soul-to-soul. In energy yoga, this communications transponder is centered at the "third-eye," the organ of visual, psychic and intuitive perception. Its element is light, and its task is to open our imagination to an expanded awareness that sees through (what Sri Aurobindo calls) "the eye of complete union."[2]

From this place, the old habitual mindset no longer satisfies; all levels of reality, all ways of seeing the world, are open for fearless exploration: experience is all there is. Co-creation and collaboration are this level's social organizing principles. Out in the day-to-day world, one's dharma is to become a "systems seer," seeing and respecting every individual's and every culture's belief system, freely and compassionately interacting across all beliefs and psychological languages.[3]

Sixth level digital dharma requires one to widen reception channels, to take in more frequencies, to consider other "truths" than those one is most attached to. This is the practice of "turning" from the limited data of the ego-self to something much bigger. On an inner spiritual level, Buddhism calls the sixth-level realm of perception Dharmadhatu - the realm of all dharmas, where all possible past, present and future realities coexist, where what we call "darkness" and "light" are united once again, a state of peace where emptiness and the arising of form are in balance; where to see one object is to see all objects. Or in poet William Blake's words: "to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower."[4]

In this state of awareness, commonplace things radiate their essence. The eye is opened to the cosmic, but grounded in compassion. It decodes all incoming signals and discerns which ones to act upon, knowing all the time (as yoga philosophy tells us) that there is always more than one story to believe, recognizing that all the stories of the manifest world with its attributes, functions and relationship are but maya - fleeting illusions of concreteness in time and space which are essentially false.[5] Sixth-level awareness sees beyond the body into the cells and the DNA; it sees not only the individual frames of each "life story cartoon," but the "cels" that created the projector, screen, theatre and audience as well!

The mystic's eye sees beyond superficial appearance and personal characteristics, beyond habitual concepts, to the true self in the other, to what the Hindus call Advaita, the true state of non-duality, to the underlying light of pure (Brahman) consciousness, which "modulates" all reality. It understands intuitively what Marshall McLuhan told us fifty-plus years ago: pay attention to the underlying medium, and do not get hung up on each of the specific messages.

When the mind is prematurely opened to sixth-level awareness but not grounded in the lower centers, when the filtering systems of fifth-level dharma are not fully developed, the nervous system cannot handle the shock of seeing beyond the veil. For some, the result may be false insights and delusional "messages" from God. More often we simply get lost in our own knotty ego projections, the mind's palace of mirrors.[6] At its worst, this is a place where nothing can be trusted, where, like the nightmare worlds of Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report created by science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick, "dreams are real, and reality turns out to be a dream."[7] I believe that our interconnected, packet-based web technologies have indeed thrown us beyond the veil, whether we are prepared or not. Sixth-level digital dharma requires us to embrace the "all seeing," all-spectrum, quality of the divine.[8] Our only other choice is to turn away into a deconstructed universe, where nothing seems to exist but cleverness and special effects.

The Infosphere's sixth-level technologies are our megapixel cameras, camcorders and photo cellphones, our DVD players and HDTV receivers. All of these tools are based on the digital encoding and manipulation of what we think we see. They all openly rely on illusion: on the creation of digital sound and image files that trick the brain into creating more than what has actually been delivered to the retina and eardrum. Just as we use digital editing software to crop and zoom, choose a point of view, change colors, contrast and brightness, routinely adjusting the "reality" of our digitized experience, our media challenges us to explore our point of view, to look wider and deeper, to focus on the once-hidden details of our visual field - and metaphorically, on the shadows, the blurred lines and comfortable concepts that have heretofore defined our personal reality.[9]

Random-access technologies invite audiences to actively play with the unfolding of the traditional storyline. DVDs allow the viewer to experiment with temporal order - adding a second dimension to the linear story flow by skipping forward or back, jumping to alternative shots, or watching the same story with a different soundtrack. No longer a passive receiver, one can interrupt, request more information, read the script, interview the performers, listen to the director's commentary, and try out different endings.[10]

High Definition Television (HDTV) brings into our homes panoramic wide-screen images of incredible resolution and clarity. Its image signals contain double the scanning lines, ten times the pixels, and a viewing field one-third wider than the old analog TV screen. Viewers are freed from the restraint of the close-up and overt (fourth-level) emotional cuing. Information comes from the perimeter as well as the center of the picture. There is more to see, and the viewer is now responsible for deciding what parts of the screen to focus on. The cinematic "2-shot" - two characters, two voices, two actions - is back on the hi-def screen, returning diversity and ambiguity to the TV image. Wide-angle shots reveal not just the batter on plate, but the entire field of action. New cameras under development promise an immersive 360-degree high-resolution "elective cinema" experience, allowing the viewer to focus on the hundreds of concurrent "inadvertent dramas" happening all around her.[11]

Along with the main digital video transmission, a "datacast" subset of the HDTV signal can deliver Web content, multimedia email, and even control signals to your home thermostat. Within the veritable sea of digital sound, text and image data streams is a critical "PSIP" ("Program and System Information Protocol) code to decipher them all and route the picture to the screen, the data to the computer, and the DolbyTM 5.1 audio to your surround sound system. Without the correct decoding signal, all this data can be received, but not processed.

The importance of having the correct signal to unravel the abundant "data stream of reality" is the underlying truth of sixth-level dharma wisdom. This is reflected in our contemporary cultural fascination with codes - DaVinci or Matrix, genetic or security, and in the digital media tools of our age. The technologies of digital compression that reduce our music and video files to smaller and smaller sizes all use hyper-fast signal processors to convert "real world" analog images (or in the case of audio, the sound) into numeric computer codes. These codes are in turn reduced in complexity, and sent on to control the manufacturing of an "acceptable proxy" of the original captured image. Digital "instruction-set" transmission is much more efficient and error-free than analog representation. Sending the recipe, not the cake, is what makes language more efficient than grunts and growls, written alphabets better than pictograms, and DNA able to perpetuate every living species.[12]

Digital encoding and compression is actually how the brain processes what we "see." The visual world is so complex that storing even tiny fractions of the changing image would overwhelm even the vast storage system of the brain. Instead, it discards most of the information and relies on its own version of pattern encoding, converting analog images to a limited set of mathematical wave-pattern representations (called Fourier transforms) to tap memory and build its picture of the world.[13] The visual image we see, says Howard Bloom, "is the product of slicing, dicing, coding, compression, long-distance transmission, and neural guesswork:

"Cells in the retina scrap 75 percent of the light which pours in through the lens of the eye... they fiddle with the contrast, tamper with the sense of space, and report not the location of what we're watching, but where the retinal cells calculate it soon will be... Adding insult to injury, the eye crushes the information it's already fuddled, compacting the landslide of data from 125 million neurons down to a code able to squeeze through a cable -- the optic nerve -- a mere 1 million neurons in size. On the way to the brain, the constricted stream stops briefly in the thalamus, where it is mixed, matched and modified with the flow of input from the ears, muscles, fingertips, and even sensors indicating the tilt and trajectory of the head, hands, legs, and torso."[14]

As evolutionary psychologist and meme expert Susan Blackmore tells us, when we look out a window, we may have the impression of a beautifully rich visual image, but in fact we're beholding only a compressed piece of the whole. "All our brains are holding is a little piece of the central image, a very rough sketch of the rest, and the ability to respond quickly to change and look again when necessary."[15] PBS technology guru Robert Cringely agrees:

"So the retina makes an estimate of a visual scene or image based upon evolutionary knowledge of the statistical structure of natural scenes. The retina then estimates the likely error in that original estimate. Each of these functions is embodied in a specific segment of the retinal architecture. The retina then transmits to the rest of the brain what can be described as a real-time, 2-dimensional map of the likely error or uncertainty of the original estimate. ...What we 'see' isn't the scene itself so much as an error map of the scene. We map the cliffs and potholes then paint the rest of the scene in our minds from stored image data."[16]

Science is showing us that we are pre-wired for recognizing certain objects; that what we "see" is based as much on past habits of seeing as it is on the new data coming into our eyes - that much of what we see is really fake!

"Ninety-nine percent of reality has nothing to do with vision, in fact nothing to do with anything, any of the thoughts running through our minds. Ninety-nine percent of the reason we want to live rather than die has nothing to do with what we tell ourselves makes us happy. Ninety-nine percent is simply here, with no perspective from which to view it, no surfaces by which to identify it, no language to reveal it to itself."[17]

Digitally compressed audio MP3s, video Web streams, DVDs and HDTV all work on the same principle of analog to digital conversion, statistical compression and inference. New audio and video data are compared to the data already received and decoded, and only the changes are passed on - everything else is based on our "perceptual expectations" and stored "algorithms of importance." In fact, the experience of "reality" is always a half-second behind -- the time it takes for our inner decoder to grind away and produce its facsimile of truth -- the latency time our visual consciousness. [18] Blackmore argues that our experience of "self" (the "selfplex") is itself the result, not the cause, of our need to send and receive meme snippets of coded ideas.[19]

Sixth-level digital dharma asks us to recognize that we are always processing codes of consensual reality, and pay attention to where we put our attention. Doing practices that open one to this stage of awareness is a form of "esoteric signal decompression," allowing one to look beneath surface identities to decode richer and subtler dimensions. Without preloaded (habitual) coding schemes, the fully aware brain takes in each new signal with fresh wonder as a sacred surprise; each sensory stimulus is decoded in the immediacy of the Now, without reference to old memory patterns. At its best, unclouded sixth-level vision brings one closer to experiencing the unity of creation, seeing the underlying continuity and hearing the hidden harmonies behind humanity's often painful apparent differences.

For the vast majority of us, full sixth-level seeing remains a distant goal. Opening to all incoming data can drive one to terror; and focusing too much on one slice of perception can lead to the "oh, wow" stupor that is the butt of all the pot smoker jokes. Without a strong grounding at the lower levels, and good "truth filters" at the fifth chakra, the esoteric eye can be overwhelmed. When closed in self-defense, it refuses to accept conflicting information or complex memories, and focuses on black or white answers. This is the challenge put in front of us by our digital technologies. For, as Erik Davis observes, "the logic of (today's digital) technology has become invisible -- literally occult. Without the code, you're mystified. And nobody has all the codes anymore."[20]

The light and the shadow of sixth-level communications dharma are reflected in our popular arts. The works of Phillip K. Dick, the aforementioned science fiction writer of the 1950's, are today's hottest Hollywood action movie properties, while Neal Stephenson's historical novels about codes, viruses and "the hacker grail" have made him, according to a review in the New York Times, "a cult figure among the digerati."[21] Mastering the codes of consensual reality is the hacker's power in the immensely popular thrillers of the Matrix series. The popular Da Vinci Code, with its clues and messages hidden in artwork, gravestones and classical poetry, parallels the surreptitious appearance of "virtual products" and corporate logos in TV programs. The 2004-5 series, "Joan of Arcadia" disguises God as "a stranger on the bus." On another show, TV detectives get help from a medium who hears crime victims from "the other side." CSI distills the truth from microscopic DNA crime scene evidence. While in many mosques, churches and temples, fundamentalists offer simple solutions to today's complex problems by offering up their simple interpretations of esoteric verses. In the political domain, arguments over what "encodes" sexual identity have spilled over into battles over state Constitutional amendments.

While a closed sixth chakra refuses complexity and vainly hangs on to the "one magic code" that will make sense of the world's complexity, a "blown-open" one no longer tries to ground the flow of information it receives into a coherent narrative; every new image becomes, in novelist Alan Lightman's words, "a disembodied nothingness," floating weightless in a sea of "digital emptiness."[22] For some, ungrounded media saturation has led to cults and magic. Many others have found themselves lost between physical and virtual realities, adrift in a world of Grand Theft: Auto and Mortal Kombat.[23] Combining high-definition video image quality, surround sound and full interactivity with the experience of deeper and deeper sixth-level "realities," - and the sweet lure of the energies of sexuality and power, marketplace forces have made the video game industry into a thirty-one billion-dollar global business ($10 billion in the United States), supporting over 175 million players in the U.S. alone.

Most of us however find ourselves between these two extremes, trying to make sense of our sixth-level media environment, trying to see more, to see wider and to see deeper in a world where everything is in the process of being digitized, where our entire culture will be delivered to our living rooms and our pocket devices, our cars and our computers, our eyes and ears, as strings of one's and zero's. Notwithstanding the popular image of compulsive teens hooked on violent video games (the "Grand Theft Auto" series of games has sold more than 21 million copies since 2001), or the rise of "professional gamers" who play in public competitions for large cash prizes, the real videogame mega-hits are virtual sports leagues and online social simulation games such as SimCity. While the former ranks are filled with adult men, these latter games are massively popular with both boys and girls, who can create entire worlds: agricultural villages, vast industrial mega-cities, high-tech edge-cites or small pedestrian-friendly communities. The "Sims" series of games - which took the world-creating project into the neighborhood and kitchen - has sold three times as many copies as the Grand Theft franchise, generating over $1.6 billion in sales since its initial release in 2000.

A growing segment of the game market is devoted to positive social change: many of them addressing real world problems - from Palestine to the former Serbia. The second most popular downloaded simulation game of 2005 was called Food Force. According to the U.N. World Food Program, "the game contains six different missions for children 8-13 years old, who are faced with a number of realistic challenges. In a race against time, they must feed thousands of people in the fictitious island of Sheylan; they pilot helicopters while looking out for hungry people; negotiate with armed rebels blocking a food convoy; and use food aid to help rebuild communities."[24]

These open-ended games work, according to author Steven Johnson, not just because they foster playing with possibilities, but also because they tap into the human spirit's sixth-level desire to see more. You want to build the building "not because it's there, but rather because it's not there, or not there yet." [25] Online multi-player simulation games, played simultaneously by thousands, invite players to try out new roles and alter egos, to become parts of "communities of practice," and experience novel ways of thinking - and other realities - that print can only describe. New virtual worlds are being created, populated and socially activated, not by monopolistic game companies, but by communities of users. If you sign off and return a few days later, you may find that someone has build a house next door or dammed the river above your town. Young and old alike are attracted to the camaraderie and friendship of these online worlds and can even experience grief when their network of affiliation collapses. Natural language interactive dramas are on the drawing boards, promising, in the words of one designer interviewed for the Atlantic magazine, "games (that) will be as personal to you as your dreams, and as emotionally deep and meaningful to you as your dreams."[26]

Our contemporary hunger for "seeing" has been reflected in the multi-year debate over repairing the Hubble Telescope, and more closer to home, in the explosion of Internet webcams - surveillance cameras, "nature cams," "traffic cams," and, for exhibitionists, "voyeur cams." Patrick DiJusto, a New York Times reporter found over 10,000 web-linked cameras, "showing everything from bedrooms and living rooms to coin-operated laundries and shoe stores to plasma reactors and mountain ranges."[27] Beyond seeing more is the challenge of seeing deeper. We are creating technologies that remind us not only to take in the wider view of life, but also to dig below, and up beyond, the surface pixels that seem to make up our day-to-day reality.

Long-zoom consciousness - reflected by our digital capability to "zoom out" from the scale of DNA through Google Earth's satellite maps to the enormity of the cosmos - is emerging as contemporary culture's defining way of seeing. It has created a new view of space - interconnected and multi-layered - that is as disruptive to our old ways of seeing as the earlier revolutions of Newton and Einstein.[28] Deeper-seeing is the core metaphor of sixth-level digital dharma; it encapsulates the wisdom taught by contemporary philosophers of consciousness and by the esoteric practices of many ancient traditions. It is from this "big picture" place of compassion, beyond the world of form, that one can watch the consensual codes of the "causal realm" unfold and become "real" in the ever-forming Now. From this viewpoint, our world is not a Matrix-like evil dream, but a constantly redefined universal Wikpedia - the sum total of our belief systems. In a few years our analog television sets will go dark unless we upgrade them to receive the new digital transmissions. I believe that this technology shift out in the Infosphere is also suggesting that it is now time for us to switch to a higher-definition way of seeing.

Living in Full Sixth-level Teleconsciousness

I have suggested that the Infosphere provides us with a set of metaphors to make sense of seeing with the unfiltered eye, demonstrating in silicon chips how we create our consensual "stories" through patterns of prediction based on limited data. Our sixth-level challenge is to see beyond preconceived appearances to the creative causes behind the curtain; to change our "spiritual operating system;" discarding the embedded habitual "reference frames" that keep us from seeing with ever-fresh eyes, fully experiencing the unfolding of the ever-present moment.[29]

Fifth-level digital technologies gave us a place to experiment with the "truth" - taking on different personalities, trying on different roles in the drama of life. Sixth-level awareness challenges one to step back and see the play itself as a constructed event. Every time one puts a CDROM or DVD into a playback device, one can remember that life itself is an encoded story; every time one manipulates the virtual reality of a videogame or immersive digital experience, one can step back and ask how our own everyday reality is being manipulated.

The brain already has in place the mechanisms for recognizing our "story codes." Whether from psychoactive substances, meditation, fasting or prayer, it can be stimulated to release chemicals that suspend short-term memory and dampen the background mental chatter, bringing one into the deep present moment where all creativity begins.[30] For most of us however, meditation is a less dangerous (and more socially-acceptable) path to sixth-level seeing. From this place, one's intuition can tune into and decode the metaphors of the subconscious, the messages of dreams and the universal truths of great art.[30] With practice, it can also "hear" the voices of one's personal spiritual guides, and guide one back home to the seat of the Soul. All "magnetic" spiritual healing is based on sixth-level "energetic code repair" - changing by the Higher Self's intention and the power of the Universal Spirit, one's psychological belief systems, wounds and pain held in the emotional energy field, one's attachment to the story of past-life karma, or of the codes controlling physical health.

Choosing to receive Spirit's blessing and healing the pain of the past is a commitment to changing our perspective, to unlearning the compression scheme that decodes our experiences. Neil Douglas-Klotz, in The Sufi Book of Life, suggests that two of the 99 Arabic names of God, Al-Ghafur (the Forgiver) and Al-Afuw (the Pardoner), are such affirmations: inviting us to burn off, and in the second case, to blow away (the resulting ashes of) old impressions, clearing the dust on the surface of our heart. I recently learned another name Al-Tawwab, the Beckoner of our Return, and its affirmation, Ya-Tawwab, to repent and to return to an all-forgiving Spirit, to "turn away" from the old stuck beliefs, to forgive others and one's self; in effect, to replace an old decoding scheme with a better one. These practices are an invitation to "cleanse the buffer," to release the "cleverness" of the ego, and return to one's true nature, one's "original face." This is the uncluttered state, according to spiritual teacher Stephen Levine, of boundless mind, "before it became conditioned, socialized, prejudiced, terrified."[32]

Meditation is, in effect, a process of observing the instruction codes of reality without processing them into thoughts, emotions and suffering. We can choose whether to engage or to just observe the flow. We have the power to decide whether to identify with the stories of life experience, or be the silent observer of the codes. Our gullible consciousness responds to any software we put into it. A discerning awareness of our "programming" can take us out of our self-imposed prison of limitation. In the Vedic story of the Upanishads we are introduced to two birds of the same name: "beautiful of wing, friends and comrades," clinging to a common tree. "One eats the sweet fruit, the other regards him and eats not."[33]

Sixth-level dharma is about deciding if we want to identify with ego and its attachment to the fruits of externally-modulated local reality: the worldly dichotomies of pleasure and pain, success and failure, good and evil; or if we want to move to the silent observer place of full decompressed awareness, watching, as if on a video monitor, the multiple levels of reality unfold before our eyes. Using our big picture zoom, we can practice expanding our field of awareness until all subjective understanding gives way to the universal Source, the quiet center where the underlying spirit of the universe is all there is. From this place it is easy to imagine unselfishly (and without attachment to either outcome or being special in any way) observing, then taking in, the black programs of human suffering and replacing them with a newly encoded "lighter" version for all of humanity.[34]

From this stance of loving observation, one can become, in Sri Aurobindo's words, more than "a laborer in a thought factory, but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of being." With access to all potential codes, one is free to choose a more loving and less fear-based life story from the library of Creation, to "repair one's karma," and following one's deepest aspirations, jump to a higher track of spiritual service in this round of incarnation.[35]

[1] Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions (2004), p.140. On Critics, Integral Institute, My Recent Writing, and Other Matters of Little Consequence: A Shambhala Interview with Ken Wilber, excerpted at http://www.ki-net.co.uk/spiraldynamics_wilber.html; see also Wilber (2000a), n. 114. Neuroscience is discovering that the brain has its own receptors for "seeing deeper." "Anandamide" (triggered by drugs such as marijuana, chanting, meditation and religious bliss) has the effect of slowing the processing of peripheral data, allowing one to dive fully into the "now" of the moment, and the purity of the object (or in Buddhism, the "non-object") of contemplation. See also, Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World, New York: Random House (2001), 147-168.

[2] Satprem, Sri Aurobindo, or The Adventure of Consciousness, New York: Institute for Evolutionary Research (1984), p.168, 66. Anodea Judith, Waking the Global Heart, Santa Rosa: Elite Books (2006), chart on p. 214.

[3] Anodea Judith, Eastern Body Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to Self, Berkeley: Celestial Arts (1996), p.358; Anodea Judith and Selene Vega, The Sevenfold Journey: Reclaiming Mind, Body and Spirit through the Chakras, Freedom CA: The Crossing Press (1993), p.225. Ambika Wauters, Chakras and their Archetypes: Uniting Energy Awareness and Spiritual Growth, Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press Wauters (1997), p.137. Mathew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Lessons for Transforming Evil in Soul and Society, New York: Harmony Books (1999), p.301. Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change, Oxford: Blackwell (1996) p.277.

[4] On Dharmadatu, see Dr. Yutang Lin's essay at http://www.angelfire.com/realm/bodhisattva/dharmadhatu.html. Augeries of Innocence by William Blake (1803). Online version at http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/blake/to_see_world.html.

[5] This focus on the "essence" of the mundane is discussed by Pollan, 147; see also Ken Wilber, (2000), p.60; and Laszlo (2004), p.141.

[6] Ibid. 219. Ken Wilber, The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development, Wheaton, IL: Quest Books (1980), p.154.

[7] Paul Verhoeven, Director of Total Recall, a film based on a Philip K. Dick short story, quoted in Frank Rose, "The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick, Wired Magazine, December, 2003. Dick was the author of the short stories adapted for such films as Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), and Minority Report (2002).

[8] Al-Basir! - one of the "99 Names of God" in the Muslim tradition. Neil Douglas-Klotz, The Sufi Book of Life, New York: Penguin Compass (2005), p.72.

[9] This "creative" process is of course perfectly acceptable with home movies and snapshots, but not in science. Some professional journals have discovered "enhanced" illustrations in research manuscripts. In a few fraudulent cases, new elements were added or conflicting images removed. See, Nicholas Wade, "It May Look Authentic; Here's How to Tell It Isn't," New York Times, January 24, 2006; D1.

[10] The DVD Comes of Age," New York Times Arts and Leisure Section, August 17, 2003. AR1. Elvis Mitchell calls Marti Scorsese's comments on the Criterion Collection's laser disk of "Taxi Driver", more than a commentary. "(It) isn't just an interview; it's a master class, with an intoxicating wealth of raw data and insight into his perspective." "Everyone's a Film Geek Now," New York Times Arts and Leisure Section, August 17, 2003. AR1.

[11] Nick Paumgarten, "Bad-Ass Camera," New Yorker, August 21, 2006. 26.

[12] Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, New York: Oxford University (1999), p.213. See her website at: http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Books/Meme%20Machine/mmsynop.html

[13] Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, New York: Harper Collins (1991), p.27. Lynn McTaggart, The Field, New York: HarperCollins (2002), cites the work of Karl Pribham to build a mathematical model of perception based upon Fourier transformations, the same "cosine quantization" tools used in today's video compression standards. Loosely speaking, the Fourier transform decomposes an analog function into a continuous spectrum of its frequency components.

[14] Howard Bloom, The Global Brain, New York: Wiley (2000), p.66.

[15] Blackmore (1999), p.216.

[16] Robert X. Cringely, TV Oaxaca, July 1, 2004, in "I, Cringely" website: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2004/pulpit_20040701_000817.html; on "pre-wiring" to recognize sexual images and celebrities, see New York Times Magazine, December 11, 2005, 82.

[17] Richard Grossinger, On the Integration of Nature: Post 9/11 Biopolitical Notes, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books (2005), p.190.

[18] In fact, your experience of "reality" is always a half-second behind -- the latency time it takes for your inner decoder to process and produce its facsimile of "truth" in visual awareness. For a discussion of back-dating" reality, see Rita Carter, Consciousness, London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, (2003), p. 31.

[19] The "selfplex," she argues, has evolved to support our role as communicating beings, spreading bits of ideas -- memes -- into the Infosphere. "The selfplex is successful not because it is true or good or beautiful; not because it helps our genes; nor because it makes us happy. It is successful because the memes that get inside it persuade us to work for their propagation." Blackmore (1999), p. 234.

[20] Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information, New York: Harmony Books (1998), p.181.

[21] "The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick, Wired Magazine. Edward Rothstein, "Pursuing the 17th-Century Origins of the Hacker's Grail," New York Times, September 20, 2003. A17. See also, Davis (1998), p.273-4.

[22] Alan Lightman, Reunion, New York: Pantheon (2003), reviewed in the NY Times Book Review, July 27, 2003. p. 6.

[23] William Irwin Thompson, Coming into Being, New York: St. Martin's (1996), p.194.

[24] Clive Thompson, "VIDEO GAMES; Saving The World, One Video Game At a Time," New York Times, July 23, 2006. Accessed at NYT Archive, http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F60B12FA3D5B0C708EDDAE0894DE404482 (8/21/06): U.N. news release at http://www.food-force.com/downloads/one-million-players.doc. The game itself can be found at http://www.food-force.com/.

[25] Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You, New York: Riverhead Books (2005), p. 37.

[26] On the psychological space of multiplayer game domains, see Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, New York: W.W. Norton (1999), p.235-252, and Videogames and the Future of Leaning," a paper by David Williamson Shaffer, Kurt R. Squire, Richard Halverson, James P. Gee, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory, http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/gappspaper1.pdf. J. D. Lasica, in Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, Hoboken NJ: John Wiley and Sons (2005), describes Second Life as a game that lets people express their personalities and display their creativity (in) "a rich, diverse landscape filled with interesting characters, whimsical domains, and cool getaways" (p. 244). The decision in late 2005 to "revamp" the popular online multiplayer simulation game Star Wars Galaxies into more of a shoot-em-up experience (to attract younger players), left most of its 200,000 adult participants in great despair over the loss of both relationships and communities that they might have spent many hundreds of hours constructing. See, Seth Schiesel, "For Online Star Wars Game, It's Revenge of the Fans," New York Times, December 10, 2005. C1. On the future of games, see Jonathan Rauch, "Sex, Lies, and Videogames," The Atlantic, November, 2006, 76.

[27] "NASA Says Hubble Repair Mission Is a Go," AP Report at the Houston Chronicle website, October 31 2006; http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/science/4301525.html; "On the Net, Unseen Eyes," New York Times, Circuits Section, February 24, 2005, E1] reports on the number of unmonitored Webcams, including those found in a middle school locker room, that can be accessed with a simple Google search.

[28] Steven Johnson, "The Long Zoom," New York Times Magazine, October 8, 2006. 50. On disruptions to ways of "seeing" space, see Wertheim (1999) and Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions of Space, Time & Light, New York: William Morrow (1991).

[29] Judith and Vega (1993), p.226.

[30] Pollan (at p.170) describes the brain chemistry of transcendence. Physicist Amit Goswami, argues that once the brain's habitual decoding buffer is cleared, we have a new choice, whether to let our ego-identity act on external stimuli, or in the gap between receiving incoming data and deciding to "decode" it, we can make the "quantum leap" necessary to transform our inner consciousness. Amit Goswami (with Richard Reed and Maggie Goswami), The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World, Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher (1993), p.234.

[31] Wauters (1997), p.138.

[32] Neil Douglas-Klotz, The Sufi Book of Life, New York: Penguin Compass (2005), p.92, p.226. On a Sufi interpretation of Al-Tawwab, see: http://wahiduddin.net/words/99_pages/tawwab_80.htm. Our true face is in Buddhism called "Original Mind." Stephen Levine, Turning Toward the Mystery, New York: HarperCollins, 2002, p.57.

[33] Rig Veda, I.164.20, cited in Satprem (1984), p.44.

[34] On pulling out the to larger field, see Goswami (1993), p.237. Replacing dark rays of suffering with light is at the heart of the Buddhist "Tonglen" breathing meditation. See, http://www.quietmountain.org/links/teachings/tonglen.htm and http://www.beliefnet.com/story/4/story_425_1.html

[35] Satprem (1984), p.50. Pir Vilayat Inayat Kahn, Toward the One, New York: Harper Colophon (1974) warns (at p.155, 159) that at death "you will be removed to whatever plane corresponds to your aspirations." His suggestion: aspire for the highest plane!