Nomad Codes

VR’s goal of psychic immersion. But when it came to the primal scene of UFO abduction lore, the piece became all too compelling. “I” lay on a surgical table in a flying saucer, and a group of impassive Grays leaned over me with buzzing surgical drills in their spidery hands. I shivered as their tools descended toward me, even though I do not usually fear psychic surgery at the hands of cartoons.
    Perhaps what spooked me was the sense that this VR “experience” symbolized the secret dream of contemporary media: to invade and rewrite consciousness itself. It drove home how insane technological culture has become. Unmoored from folkways, grasping after figments, addicted to the novelty and tyrannical demands of our hyperactive society, we drift in overdrive. Amidst all the distracting noise and fury, the hoary old questions of the human condition—Who are we? Why are we here? How do we face others? How do we face the grave?—sound distant and muffled, like fuzzy conundrums we have learned to set aside for more compulsive and profitable queries. Unless we open up clearings within the space-time of our lives, unless we take media fasts and dare to wander off the grid, such questions may never arise in all their implacable awe.
    And so we try to recover our attention, and draw it back towards embodied experience, towards real earth and the mindful now. We hear a lot about ordinary enlightenment today, about embracing our own equivalent of chopping wood and carrying water. This desire for authenticity, for reality and the natural, is also part of our popular culture, packaged and marketed in New Age catalogs and the shelves of beauty salons and health food chain stores. The fact is, we don’t really live in a world of chopping wood and carrying water anymore. The processes that we call, variously, globalization, the information age, postmodernism, and the biotech revolution are now the backdrop of seeking, and they perhaps need to be drawn into the foreground. The fact that you can buy CDs of Siberian shamans or score a paperback copy of secret Dzogchen manuals by aiming your Web browser at Amazon.com is only a trivial symptom of a far more tumultuous transformation in the world spirit.
    Some fear that the relentless growth of global capitalism will dash whatever hopes we have of creating a sustainable future on the surface of this bleeding and tottering globe. Others fear that the new world order will lead to insidious forms of media surveillance and social control. And even if we dodge this multinational 1984 , we still have to face Brave New World , and its specter of rampant genetic engineering, happy pills, and an entertainment culture of soulless simulations. So how does one embrace spiritual practice in a world of digital capitalism, commodified DNA, psychopharmacology, and a steady stream of information about a planet falling apart at the seams? Though nostalgic and even “reactionary” sentiments have their place in a world intoxicated by novelty, I do not believe that a romantic retreat into old religious myths or Luddite primitivism is the answer. Though pockets of the gone world persist, there are no “traditions” that have not been marked by the peculiar dynamics of our time—not Tibetan Buddhism, not esoteric Christianity, not Native ways.
    Slowly, tentatively, a “network spirituality” suggests itself from the midst of yearning and confusion, a multi-faceted path that might humanely and intelligently navigate the technological house of mirrors without losing the resonance of ancient ways or the ability to slice through the venality and delusion that court human life. Against the specter of new and renewed fundamentalism, freethinking seekers both inside and outside the world’s religious traditions are trying to cut and paste a wealth of teachings, techniques, images, and rites into a path grounded enough to walk upon. The mix-and-match spirituality derided by traditionalists is only the surface of a far more supple and dynamic synthesis in the making, one that demands a form of being we have only begun to intuit: open-ended and integral, embodied and viridian-green. This path is a matrix of paths, with no map provided at the onset, and no collective goal beyond the tenacity and grace of our step.
    Such a networked path opens up an ecumenical space far more radical than New Age fantasies of global unity or the bland interfaith chats between liberal monotheists. We log onto this emerging