The Noosphere and Cyberspace 3 by Beatrix Murrell Human creativity could also be benefited by the future promise of virtual reality. Rheingold believes that new art forms will be developed out of the experiential side of virtual reality. Future artists will paint the "silence with the kind of possibilities only artists can show us." Above all, in cyberspace, we will be able to create new kinds of experience! Human interaction, human communication, could be unbelievably enhanced by the future world of cyberspace. Laurel has posited that users of virtual reality could create models of interactive fantasy. Their virtual world could be likened to a stage where interactive magic could be created artificially. This interactive magic could optimize the "frequency and range of significance in human choice-making." Interactivity could become a threshold phenomenon, providing new worlds of action and reaction, which could assist the human agent to design new, creative interactive systems. More practically, Rheingold believes that "virtual reality as a communications medium" could benefit an array of human institutions. They could range from the global economy to communications-based industries to entire cultures. Futuristic thinking on cyberspace, as illustrated in science fiction, takes the potential of virtual reality, of cyberspace, even farther into the reaches of our imagination. Vernor Vinge, in his book TRUE NAMES, has his hero descending into the "Other Plane." The hero, using electronic and computer equipment in addition to intense mental concentration, moves into an enlarged communal virtual universe. (It is a world, as Gibson noted, of consensual hallucination.) This cyber-universe of Vinge's includes everything from social clubs to criminal organizations that use this plane of being "for their own purely pragmatic and opportunistic reasons." Depictions of cyberspace in science fiction have alluded mainly to swashbuckling virtual adventures, bordering upon or entering into criminality. Human participation, whether in the real world or a virtual world, seeminly always contains the elements for abuse. On the other hand we have already cited the virtual opportunity in cyberspace for intelligence amplification, for more wise action and decisions, and for human creativity. It is within the confines of this more positive arena that we need to look more closely at the prospects of cyberspace advancing contemplative consciousness and forthwith the inner development of the noosphere. But first, we need to look at contemplative consciousness in relation to the concept of virtual reality. Rheingold, while duscussing the inner world of the human mind, rightly points out that the illusions we build around this mystery are virtual worlds! Humans have been engaged in these helpmate, sometimes almost utilitarian virtual worlds since the rise of history. Indeed, an evolutionary sequence of such virtual worlds is quite detectable. Rheingold observed that Cro-Magnon men of Europe left a virtual world for all to see: the caves at Lascaux in France. Selected novice-candidates, so paleontologists speculate, were specially positioned...by their toolmaker shamans...inside the caves. Suddenly the darkness was illuminated by torches and lamps, and they were startled by the visions of supernatural figures on the cave's ceilings. They were overwhelmed by painted human figures, symbols, and animals. Modern scientists believe these young primitive Europeans were frightened into another plane of understanding. Techological secrets were passed on. Paleontologists suggest that the young tribesmens' psyches were sensitized, by this virtual world at Lascaux, to reframe their minds to grasp the secrets of fire and metal and the connections between seeds and stars. They were inwardly transformed into the "first paleolithic agriculturist/technologists." Rheingold presents yet another such example of a virtual world used by primitive men: the kiva ceremony of the North American Hopi and Pueblo tribes. The ceremony invoked altered states of consciousness and invoked an "explicit map of human origins and goals, theatrical and symbolic rituals, and hard information about a technology necessary to sustain a new way of life for the culture. In this case, that technology made possible the cultivation of corn." Rheingold considered, too, that the ancient Greeks engaged in the virtual world of the Eleusinian Mysteries. An initiation process, this virtual world was designed to awake the initiate to a more firm, inner understanding of the balance between life and death. It involved a descent into the underworld--symbolic for the inner, unconscious world--and ultimately transformation into a new spiritual life in which the body was only a mortal vehicle. As previously discussed, there are the virtual worlds of inner religious experience. Contemplative consciousness, in medieval times and even into our contemporary experience, is translated into the Divinity Within. Through prayer and meditation we can attune outselves to a divine presence, to the inner vision, to open the doors of perception. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, believed that inwardness, via this virtual world, "the real sense of our own existence...is now revealed in a central intuition." Even modern cognitive theorists, like Daniel Dennett, compare human consciousness to an "evolved virtual machine." He argues that the "brain's virtual machine composes the shifting representation of an individual's self." Dennett believes that the self is a virtual composition that provides the individual a means for survival in this world. During our modern period, psychologists have gained considerable insight into the meaning and development of consciousness. Many psychological researchers now believe that the task of the human mind is to create *more and more consciousness.* And the contemporary evaluation of consciousness is that connection of knowing with, " "seeing with" and "other." Premier psychologists, such as Edward Edinger, have accepted the reality of an inner "knowing one," i.e., the Greater Self.   --Proceed with Noosphere & Cyberspace (4)-- copyright Beatrix Murrell 1998  Spiritech UK Godware Return to Spiritech UK Home