Nomad Codes

others can be generated through webs, black magicians worshipped the spider of their own egos. The greatest ngHolo necromancers would clandestinely seed webs in the Jewel-net in order to “catch” the eye of other adepts, who would slowly become bound in an immense pattern they believed to be a new revelation. These webs would capture the victims in a paranoid spell. Many such victims went mad or become so convinced of having discovered the ultimate pattern that they would be ostracized from the collective. Jewel-net healers would often attempt to free such individuals by binding them in “devotional webs,” patterns of compassionate paranoia that “kill the spider.”

    The horseman is poised as he flies through the night.
    Found on many prayer wheels, saddles and shrines, this slogan contains both an exoteric and esoteric meaning. Esoterically, it refers to the astounding Virtual art of high-speed equestrian tantric sex. Exoterically, it refers to the quality of balance needed to properly navigate the Jewel-net: the subtle contrast between the knowledge you accumulate and your beginner’s mind before the new. Given the encyclopedic density of the net, the Virtuals obviously put great emphasis on the proper gathering, organizing, and storage of termas . But as the masters say, The greater your store, the slower your flight. The greatest net nomads are as naive as they are wise, know when to jettison information, and avoid the hoarding of knowledge for its own sake. The “web” here also symbolizes the spider-nests that grow around stored or hidden containers. By compassionately sharing this wealth, you unbind yourself from the sticky burdens of knowledge.

    Crack the dawn!
    As in the English phrase, ngHolo’s Indo-Chinese dialect contains the image of the dawn as a “crack” or “break.” The peasants believe this crack is real—that a day literally ossifies over its twenty-fourhour period, ultimately trapping the earth inside the shell of night. The shell is then ruptured by the rising sun. The Virtuals play with this image to emphasize both the violent and nurturing aspects of “always waking up.” On the one hand, perpetual gnosis constantly rends the dreamlike illusion—or more exactly, the tentative construction—of whatever plateau you are on. On the other hand, such gnosis pervades the mind with the empty but pregnant possibility of the glowing morning sky.
    Some compare perpetual gnosis to a chick breaking through an endless series of nested eggs. While this image of gnosis as a movement through a cosmic collection of Chinese boxes may remind Westerners of the “existential” interpretation of Sisyphus, the Virtuals saw it as the supreme affirmation of perpetual nomadism. Crack the dawn! not only continually grounds the lucidity of gnosis in the present moment, but it also cuts against the mind’s tendency to make gnosis a goal. Even cosmic knowledge must be rent if it devolves into a web. The nomad knows that there is no ultimate escape, for liberation is achieved only in the act of flight.
    1994

INNER SPACE

MEDITATING IN SENSURROUND

    It would be nice to begin the journey with who we are. But “who we are” is a house of mirrors, a tangled knot, a great and terrible Oz that in the final analysis may consist of nothing more than, well, nothing. The self, I am afraid, may be more of an onion than a fruit, and “who we are” is the skin we shed.
    So instead we start, as the Yankee Tibetan Pema Chodron suggests, from where we are—which is another way of saying where we’ve been. It is no accident that so much spiritual writing these days is autobiographical and confessional. When it comes to spirituality, that amorphous and easily misheard inner call, we have come to trust experience, however mundane and confused, more than belief systems or philosophical reflection. Practice, along with the mutations in subjectivity that practice brings, is our primary tool. But this tool warps the hand that holds it, and that warp is our story.
    For my generation, born in the 1960s, the turn towards practice and personal experience in matters of the spirit is part of our heritage, not just as Americans, who have always fetishized exploration and know-how, but as kids who ride the spiritual wake of the baby boomers. In their desire to crack open the nut of spirit and eat the meat within, the’60s generation raided the world storehouse of mystical techniques. They experimented with spirit, along