SUMMER FEAST FOR THE SOUL: Being Spiritual in the Age of the Cyborg

( sk8rrbol )

There is a message

on this blog,

on which I am consistent,

and it is a message about change

-- the dramatic change that I do feel we are all facing --

and an appropriate way to face it.

Humanity is changing so rapidly

right now,

we're going crazy.

Reality is shifting faster

than I can type this posting,

and faster

than you can read it.

Technology is overtaking us;

we can do with technology now things that

our bodies could not do in a lifetime;

we can use technology

to fix our bodies. 

We are living in the age of the cyborg.

( danpankraz )

Furthermore,
we are in
The Age of The Grid:

this is

a time when we can all be

in the same place, at the same time:

the same place,

(as long as we redefine "place"

as where we are in our minds)

at the same time.

Bottom line.

You know it and I know it.

People can play in Second Life

with folks on the other side of the world,

just as long as we agree to be there

at the same time;

people can blog about the problems they have

with their cars

as long as they agree to be on a car blog

at the same time;

people can do a number of things,

both licit and illicit,

with strangers,

all at the same time,

if we all agree to be here at the same time.

All you have to do is make sure you turn on your computer

at the same time I do, 

and I'm there,  as are you

along with

 several other hundreds of thousands of people

in the world.

Therefore,

the internet could be used

to unite humans

under one purpose--

All we'd have to do

is agree

to turn it on

and let it dictate where our mind is at

at the same time.

And humanity would be joined

in one spirit,

in whatever spirit

the people who commandeer the computers

put us in.

Isn't that funky?

Isn't that scary and wonderful?

This would be most wonderful if the spirit

we joined in were to be one

of cooperation and love.

This would also be wonderful if the spirit

we joined in were to be one

of spiritual growth and harmony.

Crazy right?

Well, here's a link to a group that is trying to do

precisely that:

I'm going to do it.

How about you?

Intercalation

On Centuries and Years. . . 

I continue to be boggled by the power of the internet to answer questions, and provide new answers, in a matter of seconds.  And so it is with what has happened tonight -- I was thinking about one topic that I've wanted to write about, that being the idea of the macrocosm/microcosm.  As with my other entries, I have something to say about that, in direct relation with what's going in the world these days.  So I started to do internet research which inevitably brought me to Wikipedia, where I was reading about events in the 20th and 21st Century, and I stumbled upon the idea that "The Twenty First Century was the first Century Leap Year since 1600." 

Now, this stymied me for a second, and I wondered if this meant that we were going to leap a century or so.  So I looked up century leap year - "a century leap year always starts on a Saturday, and the February 29th intercalation of such years is always a Tuesday."  And I moved from a concept I did not know to a word I did not know.

Intercalation.  It actually has two meanings, and the one that pops up more on the internet has to do with chemistry: "the reversible inclusion of a molecule (or group) between two other molecules (or groups)."  But it also has this meaning: "the insertion of a leap day, week, or month into some years to make the calendar follow the seasons or moon phases."

So intercalation is another technology associated with the management and measurement of time.  

In our current Western Gregorian calendar, the leap year serves to make up for the fact that it takes a little more than 365 days for the earth to circumnavigate the sun, but according to yet another internet source, adding a day every four years isn't quite enough. 

"In the Julian Calendar a year is a leap year if it is divisible by 4. In the Gregorian Calendar a year is a leap year if either (i) it is divisible by 4 but not by 100 or (ii) it is divisible by 400. In other words, a year which is divisible by 4 is a leap year unless it is divisible by 100 but not by 400 (in which case it is not a leap year). Thus the years 1600 and 2000 are leap years, but 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2100 are not."  (Peter Meyer, "The Julian and Gregorian Calendar")


And thus we have this extraordinary practice of getting everyone to add a day every four years, but obviously with some stipulations.  Of course, I always knew the logic behind this practice in some oblique way, but I have never thought of the terrific manipulation that goes on to get us all to agree on when, for instance, April 1 is.  

Fundamentally, every day of the year would and could be April 1, if we didn't insert days and sometimes even months, as the Julian calendar occasionally had to do, to make sure that April 1 lands roughly on the same day every year.

On Days. . . . 

Which gets me to thinking about what a day is - it is nothing but a period of time during which the sun is positioned in such a way as to be casting light in any given direction.  But it also has to do with the position of the planets in relation to the sun and the moon.  If there really is such a slippage between the names and numbers of days and the actual position of the earth as it takes its weary course,  than I find it hard to believe that every time we mark the particular day in September when I was reportedly born, this planet is actually passing the exact solar/lunar/stellar configuration it was in on that blessed day.

So why, ultimately, do we bother?  Why must we have dates and months and years, to count off the time?  


People who count off the time are generally entrapped in their current predicament, and anticipating release, like prisoners.  But what is the nature of the release?  We only find ourselves dumped into yet another term of bondage.  The only true release is death, and no one really wants that.

Life would be so much simpler, I suspect, if we just weren't paying attention.

 On 2012. . . . 

Now all this intersects with another thought I've had of late (yes, just because I've been silent here does not mean I haven't been thinking) that I'm certain a few thousand other folks have been having around that planet: did you notice how short March was this year?  

I know T.S. Eliot said that April is the cruelest month, but honestly, I often find March to be interminable.  But this year it just went by in a flash.   And it appears that we are hurtling headlong into Spring, after a fairly brutal winter.  (But yes, I have been on this planet long enough to know that April can be the cruelest month, and we may very well still be in for some pretty wicked weather.)  

Still, there are a number of factors that allow me to let the following thought cross my mind:

Wouldn't it be amusing and amazing if the earth was actually capable of turning around in its course, and start going in the opposite direction, and during the period of its turning, the days and the years actually began to turn around and get shorter? 

Now this rather extraordinary line of questioning is directly inspired by my interest and anxiety about the approaching year 2012.  I'm prone lately to take the theory that many of my more pragmatic friends take, that being that the entire 2012 hype is nothing but hype, and in 2013 we'll look back at it with the same amusement that we now look at Y2K.  That's my current preferred state of mind.

But at particular points in any given day or month, I am prone to think about the number of prophetic sources that share a similar interest in the year.  (If we are, after all, to take the accuracy of the year's numbering seriously.)   And whenever I think about that, my stomach drops, a little, the same way it might drop at the top of a steep hill on a roller coaster.  

The most interesting and compelling discussion, though, that gets me a little anxious about 2012 is the one about the change in the earth's magnetic polar shift.  Here's a quote from a website literally called "2012 Magnetic Pole Reversal", which claims that the sun's magnetic field shifts regularly; however,

"Earth’s magnetic field also flips, but with less regularity. Consecutive reversals are spaced 5 thousand years to 50 million years apart. The last reversal happened 740,000 years ago. Some researchers think our planet is overdue for another one, but nobody knows exactly when the next reversal might occur."

. . . . though many are projecting some time in 2012.


No one really knows what happens when the earth has a magnetic field flip - perhaps an ice age.  Perhaps, too, it could be a change or reversal of time itself.  It has crossed my mind that shifts in the length of the year are one symptom of an approaching magnetic shift.

The last thing I want to do is create paranoia.  I'm more fascinating by the idea of being one of the folks around to witness such an event.  But it might be quite the ride.  


Ultimately, for me, I find myself thinking about that message that I received, five years ago now, that I refer to a little earlier in this blog.  It is a message about a Coming, whether it be a First or a Second, of a Christ.  Of a Jesus.  And he will come as a Scholar in the Four Days of the Grid. Or the Fourth Age of the Grid.  It's hard for me to ignore the fact that the leap years and leap centuries have all revolved around the number four, and we are in a leap year century.

We are two years away from 2012 - a stunning fact, as the earth seems to be spinning faster, and the days grow shorter, and our means for measuring time become less and less accurate.  All the more reason to live in the moment.  And to treat each breath we take as sacred. 

Spring Equinox

 

As we whirl about on the wheel of the seasons, we mark time with our bodies, and with the earth.  And this is the natural way to measure time.  By cooperating with the sun, the earth, and the moon, we can tell the hours of the day.  Women can feel larger cycles within their bodies, far better than men can.  We know when our bodies are full, and ready to reproduce, and when they are barren.  And when our bodies leave the cycle of reproduction for good, we can feel the earth as it begins to pull us back to her.  

Women are humankind's natural time piece.  One might even argue that we started developing timepieces when men stopped listening to women.  But I won't argue that, not now, at least.  I'll just say it.

But it's not so hard to tell time by the cycle of the earth.  Men can do it, too.  Learning to live in the cycle of life is about as simple as learning to sing.  Studying singing means studying your body, finding all its echoing cavities, and then opening them up and letting the voice free.  You lose yourself to your voice, and your body becomes really just a wind instrument  When you're singing properly, it's the simplest thing in the world; it's like letting a clean, fresh spring of water rush through you. 

But yes, let's get back to time.  I woke up this morning at 11:00 am, because I stayed up so late last night.  And for an hour or so I panicked, feeling I'd lost half of my day.  I blamed it on technology, but in this case, the technology I'm blaming is not made of wires and springs, rather, it is a man-made technological mandate to spring our clocks forward earlier than usual. 

Just the act of springing our clocks forward is an unnatural separation between the human body and the actual rhythms of the day.  It's bad enough we have a clock.  Of course, we do spring it forward so we can take advantage of the natural cycle of the sun and the earth and give ourselves a longer work day.  But yes, there's a problem in that, too.

source1

 Timepieces were first developed around 3500 BC.  (No, I wasn't around then!)  They were developed to measure the length of a day. Round like the earth and the sun, they were keyed into that rhythmic cycle, and at that point in their development, there was no harm to be found in them.  A farmer came to recognize when on the dial he needed to do certain chores, when to go take a nap, when to begin preparing food.  I like to imagine that at that point in history, every moment of every day was sacred, which is why, perhaps, in English we call our first meal "break-fast" because it is literally that: it is a ritual that breaks the fasting imposed upon us by nighttime and sleep. 

Life that is bound with the cycle of the earth is inherently ritualistic.

 source

At what point did minutes and days and changes of seasons cease to be sacred?  At what point did humanity set the clocks forward so much so that it sent us all rushing through our days, ignoring the cues that the sun itself gives us about what time it really is?  I would dare say it happened before I was born:  the first spring-powered mechanism was created somewhere between 1500 and 1510; and in 1505 a guy named Peter Henlein designed the first portable timepiece at which point, every human being who could afford one became preoccupied with an object on a chain that he stored in his pocket, and not the sun itself. The minute hand was designed in 1577; so the entire time I've been alive, humans have been intimately aware of minutes and how quickly they pass.

And oh, how well I know how short, or how long, a minute can be.  Because of the strange circumstances that frame my life, time has become an obsession with me.  I've gone through different understandings of it, and I've read quite a bit about it.  There's some very nice sources on the web, in fact.  I put links under all my pictures so you can see where I stole them from.  The links up above actually should take you to some really nice articles about timepieces and time.  A book that I really have enjoyed, because it describes so well a key period in my life, is called The Culture of Time and Space, by Stephen Kern.  He does a very nice job of showing how the technological advances of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries did more to speed up time than any other historical era.  I would also say that each new technology that either helps us get our work done faster, or helps us get from one place to another more quickly has contributed to the speeding up of time.  One of the worst offenders in this equation is the timeclock itself: it put a price tag on time, and took masses of laborers out of the natural cycle of the earth and into the artifice of the workplace.  Working hourse became interminable, and leisure hours became too short.  Trains and boats and busses and cars transported us and our goods to far-off places, but once we got there, we had to watch the time carefully.  There are, after all, only so many hours in the day.

 

One of the biggest technological changes that I remember in my lifetime was the development of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884.  Just try to imagine the chaos that occurred, in little pockets all over the world, as people adjusted their watches and clocks to that one central time.  Such confusion!  The idea of being late didn't really exist before that; you just got to a place when you got there.  But if you wanted to catch the Paris train that arrived in Nice at 18:10, you had to set your clock by the new times, you had to get a train schedule, and you had to be at the station in good time.  Gradually people caught on, especially once radio came along, and we realized we could listen to a broadcast of someone singing from very far away if we had a radio and a clock. 

I was in Germany then, and sitting in a bar one night when it dawned on me that if it was 6:00 pm in Munich, it was 1:00 pm in New York.  "So where is it 6:00 am?" I asked the bartender.  He laughed at me and said "China."  I felt a strange shift inside myself as I imagined developing a flying machine fast enough to get me to China in twelve hours.  Judging by the buzz of an airplane overhead, I began to think it was really possible.

One of the reasons I like Stephen Kern's book is because he describes what I began to think about then.  I began to think that as technology makes it more possible for us to measure time more precisely and to travel from place to place faster, time itself will begin to speed up until it absolutely disappears.  In other words, when we can get to China in second, then perhaps time itself has become inconsequential.  I've been feeling this speeding up of time and space happening, for over one hundred years, until today.

That's why this internet is so interesting to me.  I can write these very words and press "post," and instantaneously, somone in China can read what I have just written.  Better yet, I can Skype my friend in Singapore, and hear her voice as if she's in the same room with me.  In fact, the only thing that keeps me from being able to fully be with her is my body.  As I talk with her through my computer, our minds and spirits are absolutely together, and our bodies, well, they seem peripheral. 

As this glorious first day of Spring comes to its end, my windows are open.  I can hear birds singing and dogs barking.  The air is crisp, and the dappled clouds are reflecting the light of the setting sun.  It feels almost like late Spring, or nearly Summer, and I know somewhere, someone is thinking how time is speeding up, and Armageddon is no doubt on the horizon.  And maybe it is.

Or maybe it's just that our perception of time has come absolutely full circle.  We're living in a time when, because of our technology, every moment can give us access to the whole world.  Time is imploding on us, and this has been brought on by the evolution of the technology that allows us to talk about time itself.  Time just isn't all that relevant anymore.  It's everywhere and nowhere.  (Follow this link to something called the Human Clock; shows people all over the world having fun with time and the internet!)

Of course, many say that Christ will come (again) at the end of time.  Considering what I'm saying, when will that be?  By my equation, (and of course by the words that came to me late one night) his arrival is imminent.  

Or perhaps, quite frankly, he's here right now.

Living Off The Grid

If you take the time to read my wordy first entries on this blog, you'll see the story of my Grid message.  Some might say it was just a dream, but if it was just a dream, it was a very odd one. For the sake of those readers (if there are any) who don't want to read my earliest ramblings, the message I received in a dream was this: Jesus will come as the scholar in the four days of the Grid.   I woke up and wrote it in my journal.  Alongside of that sentence, I also wrote: The Age of the Grid?  Then I went back to sleep, hoping for more news.  I got none.

Five and a half years ago, right after receiving that message, I did a Google search on the term "The Age of the Grid," and it yielded only a couple pages, and they all were about Grid Computing.  Today, a Google search on especially the phrase the "Age of the Grid" will yield pages and pages.  The idea of The Grid is cliche now, and there are now even people talking about living off the Grid.

I fully understand why someone might want to live off the Grid.  A London Times story online points out that this is part of a compulsion to avoid surveillance.  There's actually an entire website called Offgrid.com 

It strikes me as both odd and ominous that in the short period of time between my receiving my dream-message, and the present day, the idea of The Grid has gone from being a fairly rarified geek notion to being part of the daily lexicon.

I imagine that someone reading about this message would be alarmed, if only for my sanity.  Fundamentalist Christians might ask: "what should we do to prepare for the Coming of Jesus?"  My answer to that is simple:  act likes he's coming today.

And that gets to the true reason for this posting.  For me, the most compelling question is when?  When are the Four Days of the Grid?  What are the Ages of the Grid, and when is the Fourth?  It appears, quite clearly, that we are currently well beyond the First Age of the Grid, if in fact people are considering living off of it.

Those who seek to live off of it seek to avoid surveillance.  They seek to be spared the tyranny of an Orwellian nightmare.  And I understand that fully.  But my question right now is: at what cost?

Any technology is a tool, and tools can be used for both good and not-so-good ends.  As I have said elsewhere, just as a hammer extends the capacity, limits, and strength of the hand, computers and the internet (which is the DNA of The Grid) is that technology that extends the capacity, limits, and strength of the human mind.  I'm not the only person to make this claim. 

One can both kill and build with a hammer, and so too is the case with the internet, and computers. 

But just because someone can kill with a hammer (indeed, here is a most disturbing video of some young men in the Ukraine killing someone with a hammer and a screwdriver.  Please do not follow this link if you have a weak stomach. I could not watch the whole video) does that mean we should start "living off the hammer"?  No, I'll bet even people who are living off the grid have hammers.  They may even have guns, which are far more lethal extensions of the arm, and the hand, and the fist, then a hammer.

Indeed, even Jesus used a hammer, if we are to believe the stories we've been told about him.

This is why I am disturbed that people would opt to live off of the Grid, when it's very likely that the Grid has as much potential to build something good as a hammer does.  It all depends on how you use it.

At its most basic level, the strength of The Grid is its ability to create a mass, communal mind that can work very quickly and collaboratively to produce some kind of meaningful end.  What's at risk, of course, is individuality.  What is to gain is the survival of humanity.

Let's consider two cases, one where the Grid was used for evil ends, and one for good ends.

The first case has almost become a cliche, that being the horrible incidents of 9/11/2001.  It continues to intrigue and boggle my mind that a relatively small group of terrorists was able to do something that no nation has been capable of doing: attack the United States on their home turf.  And how was that group able to do that?  They used The Grid.  They used the internet, telephones, and any number of other technologies that allowed them to produce a collaborative effort that far extended any one individual's abilities.  And frighteningly, they succeeded.

They will continue to succeed.  The U.S. government's attempts to pursue individual terrorists, and to frisk innocent passengers en masse come no where near touching the apparatus that binds a breed of terrorist who really doesn't care about individual fame.  Lone Christmas day bombers, or single men trying to light their shoes are decoys, designed to keep our attention away from a plot far greater than the attack on the Twin Towers that is no doubt being planned as I type, and is using the same technology to disseminate its messages.  When or where the next true attack will occur, I really don't know.  I am, after all, just a slowly aging diva with an overactive mind.

Efforts have been made to use this same networking power for positive ends, but they're not always as successful.  Still, those efforts are kind of wonderful in their own ways, hinting at the power this technology can hold for us.  Consider this:  a few years ago, I heard the story of a missing computer scientist, a man named Jim Gray.  He had taken his sailboat out onto the Pacific, and disappeared.

According to Wikipedia, Jim Gray "was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation."  His colleagues decided to try to use the very technology he was so instrumental in developing to try to find him.  They initiated a search of the waters he was believed to be lost in, via the very accessible and user-friendly Amazon Mechanical Turk.  Again, I'll quote Wikipedia's definition of what the Mechanical Turk is:  "one of the suites of Amazon Web Services, a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do."

The keywords in this definition are "co-ordinate the use of human intelligence."  Yes, therein lies the power of The Grid.

For a few weeks, anyone with a little extra time who was willing to subscribe to the Mechanical Turk could search a sector of the sea, presented through images captured via satellite, for anything that looked like an overturned boat or debris, or perhaps the actual boat itself.  Detailed instructions were given on what to look for.  I know, because I did a few myself, hoping that I might be the one to spot a sail, or an overturned hull, or some other little clue of what happened to the missing man.

No one found Jim Gray.  But part of his legacy is that his final search attempted to utilize the combined strengths of multiple human minds in a way that his own research helped to make possible. 

This story is both beautiful and absolutely misguided.  I was fascinated by it, because it allowed me to become part of a project that was bigger than myself, and that, ultimately, had very little to do with me.  However, it was designed, ultimately, to serve one man, and - if I remember correctly - there may have been a reward to the individual who found the spot where Jim met his fate.  Lovely idea; however, this is not, in the end, how this tool should be used.  The internet is not designed for the benefit of any one individual.  It is the most perfectly democratic medium and technology.  And in a perfect democracy, all men and women are created equal, and work together for the communal good. 

And that is how the internet - The Grid - can be used positively.

If people with good intentions - intentions fueled by the true teachings of a man named Jesus - were to use this tool for humane ends, Jesus would come again, and he would come again as The Scholar - the communal mind of humankind. 

But as of right now, it's true, the only efforts that have truly used the power of The Grid to successful ends are terrorists, misguided governments, and big business.  And ultimately, they're all one in the same, and they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, anything like a Jesus.  It is really up to us - and that includes those poor misguided individuals fumbling around, trying to light fires "off the grid" who fundamentally do have good intentions.  Living off the grid must be done in ways that also maintain grid-based communal cooperation, especially if the true intent of the off-gridders is to maintain human life on the planet.

Planned Obsolescence

It makes only sense that Makropoulos should use a Macintosh.  The other day, I went to turn on my iBook G4, and was writing away when the screen went blank.

Now some might call this their trusty old friend, but honestly, it's only four years old.  When you've lived as long as I have, four years is equivalent of the amount of time it takes to squeeze a pimple.

I remember when I brought the thing: I was very proud and excited.  This world of computers has long struck me as a esthetically very functional, until I really started paying attention to Macs.  I mean, let's consider it, now: as I've said here already somewhere, and countless others have observed, every new advancement in technology has served to extend some part of the human body, and the computer is the extension of our brain.  We don't think much about what our brains look like; luckily they're stored within heads, which, for the most part, are pleasant to look at.  If we were to walk around with exposed brains, we would find a way to adorn them.   Of course, if our brains were exposed, they might even become yet another measure of our appeal, or even our sexual prowess, so we may find ways to make them look extraordinarily erotic.  Glitter, perhaps, or fishnet coverings.

But I digress.

Computers, as I say, are extensions of our brains; they are our brains made visible.  Until fairly recently, the only computer company that made any attempt to make the brain sexy was Macintosh.  So of course I had to have one.

When I got it, I had to pay over a period of time, a practice that makes me very uneasy.  I was raised in an era in which if you couldn't pay on the spot, or trade something for your desired object, then you couldn't have it.  The world was a much happier place then, and most people, for the most part, had what they needed and were happy with it.  But I paid for my Macintosh over a year's time.  The saleswoman said I could even do it over two year's time, and I just shook my head.  She continued: "and then you'll be getting another."  As if that was expected.

So I have stubbornly resisted the planned obsolescence of my iBook, until this morning.  Of course, in the meantime, I went and got another Mac - a Mac Mini, which I attached to my un-Mac TV, and than of course my iPod, and then my iPhone, not necessarily acquired in that order.  Macs are a bit like M&M's - you can't eat just one.

When the iBook took a dive, though, I began to come to terms with the fact it was literally built to do that.  Indeed, all really high technology is built to be obsolete, because designers who design high technology know that in a few years, they'll come up with a better model, and this one will be passe.  And whoever buys high technology will no doubt want to the newer one in a few years.  And I guess it's true; I do.

Strangely, the same day my Mac began to sputter, so too did a part of my body.  After all these centuries, I detect that there may be something in my body that is tiring, something that is longing to be part of a newer model.

It was not my legs, which are divine, nor was it my lips, which out lip the most botoxed of beauties.  It was not my breasts, which aren't too big, or too small; it was not my eyes, which still make men cry.  And it wasn't my hair, which is still a lovely golden shade, or my teeth, which have never seen a scrap of metal to straighten them.  No, these things are just as they have always been, to a point where they really bore me. 

No, it was nothing visible that gave me a reminder of the fact that perhaps even I would become obsolete.

It was my heart.  Such a poorly planned organ, with such a huge job.  It is the motor to the machine we all travel in.  And it is also the physical seat of our emotions, of our love.

To hold our love in such a fleshy thing is just absurd.  Because love is so large, and hearts are only tissue.

Planned obsolescence.

I look forward to seeing, and knowing, what the next better model will be for the human heart; the model that will be able to hold love, even through the most tumultuous times.  But even that will be designed with one eye towards the fact that there will be a better model, still, in four more years. 

I wonder if Apple will design it, that new heart.   Perhaps it will be a piece of technology, programmed to love on command.  And not remember, and not hurt.  That might be far more efficient than the current state of affairs.

For now, I'll start thinking about getting a new MacBook, though I really can't afford one right now.  Like this old heart, I'll see how long I can make the iBook endure.

I need it to work for me, a little while longer.

the days and the ages of the grid

Tonight I'd really like to talk about the Grid.

You see, when you receive a message like the one I received (see previous message), it's kind of difficult to ignore it. Yes, the part about Jesus coming again was sort of a mind blower - because it presupposes that he's been here once already. Definitely not good news for Jewish folk, if there's any validity to it. And the fact that he would come again "as the scholar" is also a titillating detail, as it might be able to help us identify him. But the part about the four days of the Grid intrigued me most, since that pins down when he's to arrive, so we can get ready. That is, if you put any credibility in my ability to prophecy.

But then again, I'm just a fictional character - I'm a slightly delirious character on the internet, sharing her musings with a vacuum. So this could all be flight of fancy, and most likely, it is.

Still, after hearing this message, I first researched the notion of The Grid, mostly because, that particular term was used very specifically in the message. I also know for certain that the voice spoke of the number four, and of the notion of "days." But I will confess, that when I wrote down the message as I woke out of my sleep the night I received it, I was baffled by the idea of Jesus coming in the four days of the Grid, or the fourth day of the Grid, which was the language that still rang in my head when I woke up. Because of that, I jotted down the word "age?" underneath the word "day", as I thought it might be possible that in the language of prophecy, a day could be translated very loosely. After all, we're told God created the world in seven days, aren't we? And that's pretty impossible, if you ask me.

Yes, when I do this kind of interpretation, I take everything as a sort of kaballist sign. Especially natural phenomena, and numbers, like the number four. In the tarot, the number four refers to building a foundation of some kind. So the fourth Age of the Grid would indicate that some sort of foundation has been produced by this time. Four is a very stable number, and it includes two doubles. Doubles mark harmony and balance of opposites. In the number 4, there is double harmony.

But what, I wondered, could be the Fourth Age of the Grid? And what the third, the second, and the first?

I researched grid computing for awhile, because I felt that the computer age, and the age of the internet, no doubt marked the First Age of the Grid. If that is true, than we have a while to go before Jesus shows up, since we're really just beginning to accept grid computing and the internet in a large scale way.

Or are we?

Even in Computer Science, we've moved rather rapidly out of the first age of grid computing, and may be into the second or even the third. So if the term is solidly grounded in computing, which seems to speed everything up, the fourth age may come more rapidly.

And if the term refers directly to computers and the internet, than perhaps the Fourth Age of the Grid will occur when everything has become digital. When we are all fully cyborgs, might I say.

I am not the first to make the observation that every advancement in technology has served to extend some limb or aspect of the human body. The wheel extends the leg; radio extends the ears and the voice; guns extends our arms (and our ability to throw something lethal effectively); the list goes on. And what of the computer?

It extends and imitates our mind. I was speaking to a good friend the other day who just happens to be a computer programmer, and he commented that the basic language of computers relies on pure logic, pure formula. That is a universal language, he kept insisting. So when we have all become automated, we all have access to a universal language. And that language, I would dare to say, would be the language of pure mind.

It would be pure logic. And it would be universally understood. So the language of the Fourth Age of the Grid would necessitate that the messiah be pure mind. The Scholar. Makes sense, eh? Jesus will come as the scholar then, because we will need a pure scholar to lead us into this age.

But then there's another thought I've had, and it's directly related to universal language. It may take a few entries to get this down.

What's troubling, yet exciting, about this Age we may be on the crest of, this Digital Age, is that it is one in which our physical bodies may be of very little value; we can be whatever we are on the web, and it would replace our physical handicaps and shortcomings. Sort of like me. Remember, I'm quite old. But I'm eternal on the internet. Always young; always feisty. I'm here for as long as digital data exists. Makropolis will even transcend my physical body. . . it will persist long after that physical body is gone. Therefore, Makropolis is a representation of what I would like to be - eternally young; however, she relies very heavily on previous representations to make her point.

However, Makropolis lives soley in the realm of digital representation. Which is a different realm from, say, an opera. Or a television show. Thus, the Fourth Age of the Grid constitutes a new age of representation, one in which actual authorship and identity is of minimal value. This Age was preceded by what Walter Benjamin called "Mechanical Representation," that being the ability to reproduced reality repetititively and multiply. This is an age where collaborative work is most effective; its media include photography, cinema, video, radio, television. Previous to that, the dominant representational mode was linear - ie: it could be understood in terms of a beginning, middle, and end. Furthermore, it had to be perceived that way. Mechanical Representation moved us into non-linear experience - ie, artists felt less and less inclined to present things in a chronological progression - time began to be recognized as having multiple dimensions. In the Age of Linear Representation, time was experienced as utterly chronological.

Linear Representation was ushered in with the onset of storytelling and writing. Both are media of narration, demanding that items be presented "in a line." Narrative is one type of linear organization. Other types include poetry and argument. The Age of Linear Representation began roughly whenever humans began placing more credibility on written and spoken words. The Age of Linear Representation, then, is roughly aligned to those periods that make sense of themselves through stories. Fundamentally, it is the Age of the Bible and other Holy Books.

This would mean the first age of the grid precedes that. What would it be called? Prehistoric, perhaps, but it might also be recognized as the first age during which humans felt a compulsion to look at the world and try to make sense of it, or preserve their impressions of it, by imitating it. This would be an age of mimicry and childish drawings - pre-Christian no doubt, not to mention pre-Judaic.

When humans were practicing simple mimicry, they were in early stages of evolution. Why, one wonders, did they decide to start drawing? They were like children, really. I think of Lacan and Freud here. According to Lacan, the first time we feel the compulsion to communicate is when we first recognize our own mirror image as both being us, yet being separate from us - ie: when we see ourselves reproduced. In that doubling of ourselves, we see ourselves as singular, alone, and incomplete. Feeling that loss, we try to reclaim it by reaching out, by creating society.

So we start communicating - thus, the first age of the artistic representation.

Each age of artistic representation has marked a new stage in the development of the mind. Yeah, I'm saying that while all the other technologies (wheels, trains, planes, guns, birth control pills) are an attempt to perfect some aspect of the body and the desires seated in the body, technologies linked with perfecting artistic representation are attempts to perfect how we extend the mind out beyond its limited physical dimension.

I am more expert in the Humanities than in other fields, so I will keep my examples largely in those fields; however, with my pedestrian knowledge of other fields, I would dare to say that in each of these Ages, the Sciences, Logic, and Mathematical knowledge also showed evolution. Indeed, those fields of intellectual study, which tend to be more closely associated with advancements in technology, also mark attempts to extend the mind beyond the physical dimension.

Therefore, each Age of the Grid marks stages in the development of our ability to represent the workings of the mind, and the reality of the mind. But don't forget - the Fourth Age of the Grid, the Digital Age, is seated in digital technology and is therefore global. It is also an intersection age - an age when Artistic Representation intersects with Scientific and Mathematical Representation - and all of these are attempts by humans to extend the mind beyond its physical borders.

Ironically, in some ways, the Fourth Age of the Grid brings us back to some of the features of the First Age of the Grid. Images become dominant in the digital age. Simple, clear messages about shared experiences have more saliency in a global medium than do complex messages about local phenomena. But in their simplicity, the messages that we extend across the globe about our shared experiences also become quite complex, because they acknowledge that we all experience simple life experiences colored by different life circumstances.

The Fourth Age of the Grid, then, demands that we all have a shared literacy. This shared literacy could be manipulated by a central power, if we let it. To keep us from being dominated by one world power, we all have a responsibility to develop our minds. We have a global responsibility to maintain the ethics of the media and develop a literacy grounded in empathy and compassion.

And if we could do that, as a world, well, it seems that we might lay the foundation for the potential of Jesus coming again. . . . . through ourselves.