By Richard Thieme

Defining the Challenge: The ‘Study’ of ‘Sacred Texts’ in the Digital Era

The single quotation marks around ‘study’ and ‘sacred texts’ signify that the words inside them no longer mean what they used to mean. The symbols and images of religious experience are no longer fixed in print but are now flowing. They feel less like objective artifacts ‘out there’ and more like pieces of thin ice in a moving river, dissolving and forming again and again. The context that defines our thoughts and actions is itself being redefined by the distribution of digital information through networks, and we humans too are being transformed into nodes in that network. As Marvin Minsky said, individual human beings are brains in bottles, like stand-alone desktop computers disconnected from the network.

The study of a sacred text is analogous to a community of people gathering around a fire, drawing on the energies of the flames. The words of the sacred text turn to flame, becoming fire and light that define a community and disclose possibilities for the future. The sacred text is a transformational engine that discloses, discovers, and creates an image of who we are now in relationship to a potential state, the discovery of which is simultaneously the discovery that we are not in that state. Thus, our interaction with the sacred text immediately creates a bridge of images and symbols that span from our present state to that future state. Of course, there is no ‘future’ state; both states are always present here and now.

The encounter of individuals in a community with a sacred text is analogous to space shuttles docking at a space station. We come together in momentary groups, exchange energy and information, and then move on. In a digital world, however, the space station is made up of pixels (light, energy, or information), and is given form by our collective will and intention. To think of the morphing forms of communities in this way makes sense in the current context of frequent, rapid transitions. We live between images that made sense in the past (the mental artifacts of formerly shared consensus realities) and those arriving faster and faster from the horizon of the future. We used to derive our liveliest metaphors from books, printing, and publishing—metaphors such as “turning over a new leaf,” “her life is only a footnote,” and “beginning a new chapter.” Now we derive our liveliest metaphors from life in the network, distributed computing, and technologies of information and communication. To speak of morphing, interfacing, rebooting, multi-tasking, or crashing is to articulate our shared life with metaphors derived from a shared experience of networked computing.

That is happening to the study of sacred texts as well. The study of sacred texts is a specialized subset of the study of all texts, with its own vocabulary and goals. But the word “study” is not adequate to describe what we do when we read linked documents on a monitor and explore them hypertextually. “Text” does not describe very well what we experience when we interact with an iconic flow of information in an immersive virtual experience. Those are last year’s words for last year’s experience. We virtual voyagers, exploring dimensions of the human soul that did not previously exist, need to invent new words to describe our new experiences.

A More Literal Description of the Problem

The process of interacting with hyperlinked sacred symbols changes who we think we were before we left the shore and began our voyage of discovery.

The digital world, in conjunction with other technologies, is recontextualizing what it means to be a human being. Inevitably the quest for a sacred dimension of life, and how we articulate that quest, will be redefined as well.

The energy of transformation always derives from a perception of difference, from a critical distinction that discloses a new possibility. The difference is defined metaphorically as a future state that will never be attained; if wholeness or completion were achieved, we would disappear and become something else entirely. Hence, images of ourselves as perfected at the climax of time are carrots after which we always trot. Because Judeo-Christian belief defines spiritual growth as a spiral rather than a circle, these images are not exactly Sisyphus rolling his boulder uphill, but they resemble Sisyphus once we admit that within the constrained domain of human civilization and its inadequate measures of time (in mere centuries rather than billions of years), there is no measurable moral progress.

To speak of ‘sacred text’ is to identify ourselves as Print People, post-Gutenberg pilgrims voyaging through vast typographic seas. The sphere of consciousness inhabited by our collective field of subjectivity is bounded by the way printed text has taught us to see and perceive. Our brains and the symbols it manipulates seem to have co-evolved, hands and tools together, so to speak, and we cannot escape that feedback loop. Our field of subjectivity, then, is a horizon defined by our genetic heritage, but we can see clearly that we were formed in the image of language that was spoken, then written, then printed, only because we can now manipulate symbols digitally. We do not speak language so much as language speaks us, and today the language speaking us is digital. So we have left the shores of Print Culture forever and can return to that now-imaginary world only through a digital simulation of print culture, just as Print People could enter into oral cultures only in and through their experience as Print People, understanding oral cultures in ways that people in them could not.

Here is an analogy: When I moved to Hawaii I believed there was such a thing as Hawaiian culture. But I learned that Hawaiian culture ended in 1780 when Captain Cook sailed into Kailakakua Bay.

Over the next century, the invaders did everything they could to dismantle that culture, in particular using Christianity to replace the framework for thinking, feeling, and being of the indigenous people. With the birth of various consciousness movements in the sixties (among African-Americans, women, etc.), Hawaiian culture was also reborn, but in the only way it could be reborn—in images of itself generated by the invaders over several generations and given back to remnants of the Hawaiian people who reconstructed themselves and their culture as seen by the Other. The taxonomic manner of understanding other cultures axiomatic to anthropology, although alien to Hawaiian oral culture, became the means of Hawaiians appropriating their own transformed identity from texts of the invaders that their ancestors could never have read.

It is not necessary to attend a staged luau as a tourist to witness ‘Hawaiians’ acting as the now-dominant culture expects and teaches them to act.

Hawaiians who refuse to act like ‘Hawaiians’ for tourists and insist on thinking of themselves as ‘real Hawaiians’ are playing roles in another’s script to just as great a degree. The prisoners and the guards are the same people. Touristic space is a nested set of images of self and identity, images in a hall of mirrors. But it always begins with an image in the eye or mind of the Other.

In the same way, the Digital World is an ongoing voyage into seas of transformation (Print People becoming Digital People), which we see as a process because the digital world teaches us that processes are primary. We see now that the sense of fixity derived from texts was temporary. The Digital World is characterized by verbs, not nouns.

Instead of determining a single objective and heading for it in a straight line, we see multiple possible outcomes because computers organize options into multiple outcomes fanned like playing cards in our hands. Quantum reality is replacing Newtonian physics as ‘common sense.’

What Came Before and What’s Coming Now

After this process has continued for a while, Digital People will no longer interact with images of (i.e., ‘worship’) gods-in-Print or follow print-text religious founders, such as Martin Luther or Joseph Smith. Digital People will interact with digital images of gods-in-Pixels and with whatever animatrons, bots, simulants, or replicants represent religious founders or leaders in a world in which all information is dynamic and distributed, gathered and integrated on the fly. Digital ‘beings’ will emerge from chaotic waters just as textual beings such as Luther emerged in the historical memory of a textual people. (I intentionally use the word “god” with a small “g” to mean the hundreds of images of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other “gods” to which we still refer anachronistically as “God.” The gods we can name never mean the God we cannot name.)

Luther and Joseph Smith are not the only ones to exist in the labyrinthine verbal structure of historical memory. Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tzu are also ‘textual beings’ who were translated from flesh-and-blood historical beings into mythical beings, first through stories, then through writing. Every major religious founder emerged in historical time when writing was redefining the field of subjectivity of humanity. The names of the gods worshiped for thousands of years in oral cultures either vanished or were translated into writing, just as written manuscripts were translated into printed text to remain viable.

Handwritten texts might exist in museums as objects of aesthetic or historical interest, but they no longer gather adherents around them. The words on those beautiful archaic pages no longer turn to flame.
All gods being worshiped today, such as all the founders of today’s major religions, emerged in history as ‘textual beings,’ known in and through text.

They ‘mean’ for us the way text means. Inevitably, transfigured, digitized images of those former gods, as well as new, exclusively digital gods, will be born. For the moment, however, we do not know their names. Or if we do, we do not yet know the significance of their names. None has yet emerged as a frontrunner in the twenty-first century religious marketplace.

The study of ‘sacred texts,’ then, will evolve into interaction with digital images aggregated in flexible groupings (hypertext rather than text) according to (1) the design of the enabling technology itself and (2) the design of the symbol-manipulating minds that engage with the technology. The exact contours of those interactions are difficult for us to define, given our predominant experience with, for example, Bible study groups in which individuals hold cheap portable books in their hands that are defined by the boundaries of their covers and that are read aloud together or silently to oneself. Such groups would have been as unthinkable to denizens of oral cultures or writing cultures in which literacy was closely held by priests and aristocrats as dynamic Internet culture was only a few years ago.

Hackers as Paradigms of Digital Humanity

My work with several generations of technophiles (what we used to call “hackers” before the word was hijacked by the media and used to mean criminal hackers only) has revealed how a generation now in their thirties engaged in a reflexive dialogue with the computer technology that created them as they created it. But the next hacker generation, now in its teens, has always known a digital world, and has always lived inside a network of distributed information and processes. The electronic games they play are more ‘real’ than the games they replaced. Their online gaming communities are more ‘real’ than town-hall meetings. Their digital selves are more real than the print-text selves they displaced. For example, a father and his young son often visited an online dinosaur museum that was physically located only a few miles from their home.

One day they were disappointed after visiting the actual museum. As they left, the son told his father he had enjoyed the visit, but “I like the real one better.”

In the study of sacred text, which is the ‘real one’?

The one that emerged when we developed the capacity to live inside the domain of speech and convinced ourselves that it was reality itself? The one that emerged when writing became ubiquitous, an event that Plato believed meant the end of civilization? Or the one that emerged during the Renaissance and Reformation, after movable type was invented?

Those periods define nested levels of identity and self, and the self is once again transcending itself and spawning new ways of being human. As digital symbols, icons, and glyphs replace printed images, everything—including our deepest experience of religious truth, our modalities of spirituality, and our religious community life—is being transformed.

Naturally the meaning of processes like “redemption” and “salvation” will be transformed, too. We see that the gods we worshiped were conceived in the image of written symbols. We see that when the introduction of the printing press translated the names of those gods into print, Christianity, for example, experienced the widespread division of its several gods (Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, etc.) into hundreds of gods, each at the center of a community that defined itself by subtle distinctions from neighboring communities.

These differences did not and could not exist before the medium of print enabled them to be created or discovered.

Deliverables

Identity, a coherent self, images of ongoing transformation of self or community (spirituality) and world (historical/mythic narrative), and processes and tools for transformation are some of the ‘deliverables’ of religions. They are delivered in and through communities defined by their sacred symbols. These deliverables are not delivered once and for all, however. Those religions that claim to do so are whistling in the dark. New identities are difficult to sustain, or else the community would not need to meet so frequently to reinforce them. Transformation is a hoop that hands must keep rolling.

The study of ‘sacred text’ is the willing participation in the process by which identity, self, and templates for future possibilities are created and discovered for individuals and communities. Words like “free individual with rights” and “intellectual property” designate concepts that emerged post-print. Something of those notions will likely persist in the digital era, but who we are and, more importantly, who we think we are, will never be the same. A collective sense of religious identity, like that which is axiomatic to the Hebrew Scriptures, will likely be reborn, but this time through symbols that will be moving targets.

Reflecting on the study of sacred text in a digital era is like entering the mirror-world of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, in which the dreamer dreamed of a dreamer dreaming the dream. Which one dreamed it? Which was the dreamed? The symbol-using brain that believed itself to be an “I”? Or the symbols of that “I” in the brain? Or the symbols in the larger brain of the hive mind? Deliverables presume an identity determined by boundaries around giver and receiver. But how do we play chess when the board itself is disappearing?

Interactive, Modular, and Fluid

In contrast to the field of subjectivity that we shared in the past, the digital world is more highly interactive, modular, and fluid. Because our lives are shaped and changed by the technologies with which we interact—context creating content or perhaps context becoming content—our lives and how we think of ourselves are also becoming highly interactive, modular, and fluid.

Let us not underestimate the extent of the changes we are facing. The advent of a digital era will turn currently established religions on their collective ears. It has happened before, and it will again. The critical question is, will the collective identities of those religions persist in a recognizable form that includes and transcends the forms that came before, or will there be such a disconnect that when we look into the digital mirror, the face we see does not even resemble who or what we used to see?

That question confronts individuals as well as religions, societies, and civilizations. Our longer life spans are segmented into a greater number of identifiable developmental phases. The word “adolescence” did not exist prior to the invention of the printing press; adolescence has come to mean the postponement of adulthood into another decade while individuals are socialized as literate adults. As recently as Daniel J. Levinson’s 1978 book, The Season’s of a Man’s Lives (which identified developmental stages of American males into their fifties), the author could only sketch vaguely the stages beyond the sixties, which he called “old age.”

As longevity is extended, we will have to learn how to integrate a dozen stages of adult life in a modular fashion, using a memory storage device that augments our biological memory in a way that does not violate the sense of a unified, persistent self that integrates all the stages— if, that is, we decide that the continuity and persistence of a seemingly single self is still valuable. Some biological models picture complex organisms like ourselves as colonies or hives. Perhaps that model will be deemed more appropriate when people live two hundred years or more and the pieces of memory that persist are mix-and-match, plug-and-play modules.

That our lives have already become modular in every department testifies to the impact of multiple technologies. Only a few decades ago, people had a single stable religious identity, a single career, a single marriage. Today we change careers, religions, marriages, and even identities, by design and intention, and we try to teach our children skills that will help them manage modular lives rather than pick a single course and stick with it.

It is not uncommon when one changes one of these modules—a religion, a career, a spouse—that one also changes communities and ‘starts over.’ That way we can create the new persona appropriate to our new self-construct without interference from people who cling to memories of our other stages.

We dock, as it were, at different space stations, according to our needs, often ones with different sets of values. That is why so many religions are so highly competitive, offering constructions of reality and templates of sanctioned behavior (both secular and religious) in a fiercely contested marketplace. In this context, the study of sacred text means the use of sacred texts to reinforce the subset of religious life that each institution is offering its members. In the future digital world, these religious contexts may well evolve in simulated form first, like complex models of spacecraft or weather systems, and we will try on digital religions for size and see how our personas during particular life stages fit them. (Today we call that “shopping for a church.”) If we feel ‘at home’ and the religion fits our current stage of life, we call it ‘true.’

One way of studying scripture is to choose stories which archetypally illuminate a critical passage or transitional episode in the lives of the faithful. The passages of scripture typically chosen by a lectionary in liturgical churches are images of healing, deliverance, and transformation. The preacher ‘reads the space’ of the congregation in light of his or her deeper intuitive knowledge of the body and illuminates possibilities using those passages much like a Tarot deck reader uses archetypal images to illuminate an insight into the life of the person for whom they are doing a reading.

The lectionary does the shuffling, and the word-pictures of deliverance, healing, and transformation provide the images.

Extrapolating on the distributed interactivity enabled by the Internet, sermons will likely be more interactive and fluid. Because the online conversation continues 24/7 and can deliver insight, consolation, or encouragement when it is most needed, the choice of when to offer access to sacred space will be customer driven, just as Roman Catholics now have the option of attending a Saturday service. The socioeconomic context has always determined the fit of sacred time and space with societal time and space. The choice of a one-day-in-seven kind of Sabbath was equally determined by the technologies of the time and the nature of work and community life.

The fragmentation and relativism of ‘truth’ itself in a distributed postmodern world, the difficulty in reaching consensus, and the toleration of multiple thought-worlds will stretch the capacity of religious structures to tolerate ambiguity and complexity.

That it means to be redeemed or saved will be transformed in both the from- and to- sides of the equation. The human condition of sinfulness will be understood differently, as will transfigured or redeemed humanity, individually and collectively.

Doctrine always follows facts the way ethics follows the power to act that is liberated by new technologies (e.g., in sexuality and child-bearing).

This will test all religions, but Christianity will be the hardest hit. Christianity claims to be exclusively true, and however that claim is nuanced to take into account the sensitivities of others in a pluralistic world, it still comes down to this: Either Jesus is the ONLY way, truth, and life, or Jesus is ONE way, ONE dimension of a larger Truth, and ONE path to life—one that works well enough for Christians but is still one path among many. The pressures of the digital world will continue to transform formerly exclusive paths into preferences. Those who need to be right and define being right by others being wrong will be flummoxed.

This means that the transformational energies of this period will turn into a real fire storm when they encounter formerly inviolable core proclamations. If Christianity is to embrace and be transformed by those energies, it will necessarily become something other than what it has been or at least what it has been thought to be. (We always save ourselves by saying that Truth is eternal and that we were merely mistaken about what it was). Either Jesus of Nazareth will take his place as an image of possibility among other viable images, or he will be the King of the universe without peers.

The history of Judaism is instructive for Christians pondering options. Jews today are either Jews by identity, behavior, or both. Some Jews believe themselves to be Jews and live their lives from core Jewish identities but are not observant. Still, their destiny is to live life as a Jew, because identity is destiny. But when identity itself is in question and is no longer correlated with observable behaviors, the primary mode of social control is absent from the community. When claimed identities and explicit behaviors that proclaim identities are intentional choices, how will we know who or what we are?

American Jews today feel a threat of annihilation not so much from marching jackboots as from radical assimilation. That threat faces Christians and others as well, but many are not aware of it yet. They live inside the Kafkaesque world of “The Great Wall of China,” a narrative that describes how the word has gone out from the emperor to the entire kingdom, but has not been heard by those who live on the edges. That word today is that the God fashioned in the image of the structures of prior minds, cultures, and civilization is, as Nietzsche said, dead. Of course, Nietzsche was not talking about the Creator of everything when he claimed that “God is dead.” As a linguist, he knew that to speak of “God” was to be a prisoner of linguistic structures. He meant the social construction of God, the glass house in which Christendom lived while it threw stones.

It is difficult to remember that the God of our sacred texts is not the glass but the stones. In order to be transformed, one must move through a zone of annihilation in which everything one believes oneself to be is called into question. This is as true for individuals losing the fact of individuality to an electronic collective as it is for societal structures and nation states, the boundaries of which are dissolving into a single global political and economic system.

To talk about the study of sacred text, then, raises important questions. What is the nature of humanity in the digital era? How will the symbols constitutive of human and cultural identity be different in the digital era? Who will we think we are?

Identity

In the first Christian communities, first Jews and then Gentiles brought their current identities to the scriptures and to the Christian community to be transformed. But all we can know at the outset of the journey of transformation is a possibility, glimpsed dimly from inside our current way of thinking and perceiving. From within the old paradigm, we can never predict the new paradigm. The genuinely new is predictable only after it has appeared.

The six seasons of the Christian year are six segments of a spiral of ongoing transformation, derived from the extended Christian narrative and transformed into time-calibrated rituals. The segments also define the transformational journeys of non-Christian spiritualities, but in those other contexts they are correlated with other stories, other symbols. In all cases, however, the rituals are mnemonic devices used by the community as portable bridges, easily carried and always at hand when we need them. Then we are tutored by the community in how to turn those memories into useful spiritual tools. The calendar of the Christian year is derived from a sacred text, then translated into other media based on drama and ritual. That process will happen too in the digital world.

Our identities derive from a complex interplay of genetic and cultural factors. We can only become what we can potentially become by virtue of our genetic heritage, which offers up possibilities of selfhood and identity to be framed in cultural forms.

Genetic engineering is an opportunity to self-direct human evolution so that the genetic determination is itself turned into a cultural decision.

One interesting discovery of genetic research is that qualities we thought to be subjective, such as the capacity to feel awe and wonder, a tendency toward mysticism, or a generosity of spirit, all seem to cluster around certain genes. Not to oversimplify, but it is likely that the genetic and chemical basis of religious experience and emotions such as awe and wonder will be identified and pre-set or manufactured. Then we will have to answer difficult questions about how many mystics we really want to have in the population.

Given the fact that in our society so many people use chemicals to adjust levels of well-being, anxiety, and depression, this trend of genetic engineering will advance a few more steps. We may be able to determine who and how many people we will want to interact with sacred symbols at all. We may want to retain a select group of sociopaths to fill occupational niches like Army Rangers, intelligence agents, or corporate lawyers. We may also want to make available religious experience in a modular fashion, letting someone “jack in” to the symbols and use processes or chemicals to enhance their capacity to have a meaningful experience and alter their subjective states.

Of course, that’s pretty much what we do now, isn’t it? Religious experience in an organizational context is designed as a mood-altering experience, often using primordial rituals, music, and drama to enhance our feeling of having a meaningful experience and to bind us to one another and the institution. The difference in how that process is conducted in the digital world will be one of degree, not kind.

Historical Antecedents

In the 1470s William Caxton introduced the printing press to England. Questions of identity were immediately raised. One needed to choose a dialect in which to print, which then imprinted that dialect’s way of thinking on a people who, Caxton realized, were no longer certain who they were.

Walter Ong identified one religious consequence of the printing press: the process of self-examination prior to confession during which the self examines itself in scrupulous detail, then says what it sees to another person, did not widely exist prior to the printing press. All technologies of information and communication, Ong said, initially distance the self from itself and from others. The printing press helped the English language explode from thousands to more than a million words, just as the colors on an artist’s palette increase exponentially the artist’s ability to express subtleties that did not previously exist. The newly created self feels isolated for a time as the technology creates appropriate ways for that self to connect once again with itself and other selves.

No one thought the telephone was a device for personal communication when it was invented. The telephone reproduced a simulation of the human voice so imperfectly and unnaturally that people did not want to use it except as a form of telegraph. A few generations later, we say, “Don’t send an email—call me. I want to talk to a real person.”

Once the technology and the simulations it delivers have been so internalized that we experience the simulation as a ‘real person,’ we become like fish in water, unaware of the water in which we are always swimming. New technologies are noticeable only by contrast with the world to which we have grown accustomed. Then the technology itself becomes the means for bridging the greater distance and creating genuine communion among those more subtle, more complex selves that subsequently emerge.

One cannot fly a stealth fighter with a propeller or run Windows 98 on an IBM XT. We also cannot put new wine into old wineskins, only no one knows what that means anymore. We do know what it means to use an obsolete operating system, though. When spiritual leaders insist on clinging to old metaphors that are no longer understood, they are binding the people to themselves by mystification, the keys of kingdom safely tucked into their privileged pockets. However, when we use current metaphors, drawn from the everyday language of the people (as Jesus himself once did with the wineskins metaphor), we subvert the monopoly power of an organizational framework that has become synonymous with archaic images and behaviors. As digital technologies transform Print People into new kinds of human beings, sacred text will become sacred digital interaction and the study of the scriptures will become a distributed process, blurring the distinction between humans and their wearable and implanted information machines. The dreamer and the dream will exist in a new relationship to one another. Genetic engineering and pharmaceutical advances will help us breed those new beings.

Cyborg Time

The dilemma of whether or not a single unifying self can persist over an increasing number of segments of life is a problem that will be solved by humans who will be enhanced by augmented memory and cognition and new kinds of sensory extensions. And we cannot discuss the impact of technologies of communication and information without at least mentioning the impact of genetic engineering on identity, self, and community. Like the replicants in the movie Bladerunner, whose manufacture blurred the distinction between manufacturing and breeding, we will see increased ambivalence toward memory-based identity. Our expertise in genetic engineering will enable us to be fitted with wearables and implants that make communication instantaneous, multi-level, and unconscious. The boundaries between us will at times be nearly invisible. Just as replicants were given manufactured memories borrowed from others’ lives, the real memories of individuals will be indistinguishable from false ones.

Of course, memory is creative, not a passive recording of what passes, and our biographies are personal mythic histories, how we want our lives to have been rather than how they were. Biography, like history, is a symbolic narrative designed to sustain the chosen identity of the present. Religions too are based on mythic memories and symbolic narratives.

The Christian world has split into those who can stand knowing that the memory of the Christ-event is a symbolic event and those who insist that the scriptures are a historical record. The latter viewpoint supports a rigid structure which admits neither dialogue nor flexibility. Whichever viewpoint comes to dominate the Christian future, the nature of the memory at the heart of Christian proclamation will be revised, because, as Bladerunner reminds us, memory is malleable and therefore never wholly trustworthy.

Cyborgs are blends of humans and machines. We are already cyborgs in rudimentary ways, with our pacemakers, implants of chemical catalysts for essential biological processes, transdermal patches, synthetic hips and hands and hearts, contact lenses, vision scopes that bypass the eyes of the blind and plug directly into the brain, and neural avionics that socket the optic nerve with fiber optic cables so that fighter pilots can fire weapons merely by thinking. Indeed, it’s already cyborg time, and as we engineer ourselves to accept more readily transplants and artificial devices, we will become more and more cyborg. Our cyborg selves will exist embedded in ubiquitous wireless real time networks, with chips in everything—furniture and appliances, automobiles and airplanes, houses and offices—and above all, chips in us. We do not merely use computers; we are becoming computers, nodes in a ubiquitous network.

Try making a large purchase for cash and see what happens. Only your digital self with its digital markers for identity and authentication can trade in the digital marketplace. ‘Real’ currency in the digital economy is digital. In the same way, only the digital self that uses the right metaphors for, say, inclusion in or exclusion from a redemptive religious network will have constant and immediate access to the energizing, mood-altering scenarios of renewal and transformation made available by the network.

Online passwords to the communities that mediate religious experience will resemble “recommends” by Mormon bishops permitting adherents to enter a temple. This is analogous to the delivery systems of medicines, drugs, and chemicals used to enhance emotional well-being and cognitive ability available through the network. The network, in other words, will be self-referential and will maintain equilibrium, not only of individual bodies, but of the network itself, of which we will be but a part. We will interact with sacred digital scenarios as online gamers today participate in communities of tens of thousands in real time. Those scenarios will be an important part of the self-regulating mechanisms of the entire network, i.e., the trans-planetary society into which we are evolving.

Religious rituals have always used dramatic techniques. Once they become virtual simulations, using scent, sound, images, and tactile feedback to integrate distributed individuals into a unified experience, we can ‘run’ those rituals whenever we need them. Those who control the technology will be high priests. ‘Services’ will be available anytime online, and because we will participate in them through complex and sophisticated avatars or online personas, which may well evolve independent and intelligent behaviors of their own, our ‘spiritual companions’ will always be available. We will ‘call them’ whenever we want to experience ‘real people’ and they will always show up.

The technology world calls them “early adopters,” those people out on the edge who make first use of new applications. Nietzsche called “original thinkers” those who see new realities just moments before others do and give them names. The nose of the snake gets to the mouse first, but the whole snake eats the mouse. If we are part of human society, participation in this digital transformation into cyborg humanity is unavoidable.

We will still have simulated experiences of prior times, of course, the equivalent of reading historical novels today or visiting a recreated nineteenth-century village, but we will know that the actors are in costume and that we, too, are actors in costume. But then, what else are Christmas oratorios, Purim pageants, or liturgical dramas, but historical simulations?

Religious claims to universal truth will both intensify and diminish. They will diminish as we are recontextualized in a situation that continuously reminds us that the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. But they will intensify because those with their hands on the levers of power in organized religion often use anxiety and fear as glue for communities. Those communities use rigid rules to maintain order. The more rigid the structures, the more obvious the pathology for both individuals and organizations.

Every age picks and chooses the “books of the Bible” or the scenarios that speak most powerfully to it. The potency of the stories is a function of their relevance to our current context. The Gospels were written, redacted, and juxtaposed with each other (which changed their meaning by placing them in new contexts) by communities articulating comprehensive visions. Which stories will lend themselves to digital interaction and which will diminish?

More Questions than Answers

The history of the study of sacred text is also a history of control over the interpretation of the text, the maintenance of boundaries as a safeguard of power. That control requires a stable environment, so that the decisions of the elders will matter and so that social and psychological escape hatches are not available to individuals who choose to contradict traditional teachings. Otherwise shunning has no effect. That control is lost in distributed networks.

Who can enforce rulings when alternative communities are readily available, and anyone can invent another by going online, sowing seeds, and pruning what grows, while plowing under what withers? What kinds of consensus will establish canonical texts, or will there be any consensus, just as today we draw our own conclusions about sacred texts? The person in the street does not care what a hierarchy says if it cannot enforce its decisions with physical coercion. In the absence of an invisible fence, the dogs run wild.

Digital Mystics

The imaginative reader may by now have begun to ponder the meaning of mysticism in the climate I am describing. The distributed network is a concrete manifestation of the unity of all things, the connectedness perceived in the past as a transcendent vision seen by those whose genetics inclined them to dream dreams and see visions.

Mystics do not see a different reality, but they see the wiring inside the wireless circuits. Mystics see structures of information and energy as it flows, a self-luminous tangle that can only be described using metaphors and symbols. Paradox is the language of the unconscious, which is why, like riddles or jokes, either we get what mystics say or we do not. Either mystical insights make all the difference in the world, enabling us to recontextualize everything, or they sound like snake oil.

Digital mystics are everywhere these days, searching for the words to give voice to their experience. Those who live life as nodes in a network cannot help but notice that they are enmeshed in a complex system of energy and information. The computer network becomes an image of the larger network, the planetary civilization, and even the galaxy, all the way out to the edges of the universe. We see that everything is part of one vast system of energy and information. Information is the form of energy. Information and energy, which look like two things, are aspects of a single thing, the way light is both particle and wave. The words “Let there be light!” give form to the potential of energy or perhaps make energy intelligible.

The digital world is a projection that lets us see ourselves seeing ourselves. For example, the other day I made a speech during which I moved in front of a huge video screen on the platform. The audience watched the ‘real’ me through the camera as I pointed to an image of myself pointing to an image of myself pointing to an image of myself, ad infinitum. “That,” I said, “is the digital world.” When I moved to the front of the platform, the audience divided—half looking at my digital image to the right, half to the left. This division changed my job description from a speaker engaging with an audience to a wizard creating a digital image with which the audience could engage. In fact, I am doing much the same thing now, whether you read these words in digital-made print or in pixels.

Now, these sentiments clearly tend more toward the tenor of the Gospel of John than to the hard truth of crucifixion at the end of the Gospel of Mark. The balance between the two ends of the spectrum will be as important to preserve in the digital world as it was when narratives were interlaced in leaves of printed text. But the aesthetics of the online experience will not be the aesthetics that have characterized our experience of reading. We do not yet have a vocabulary to speak about the aesthetic experience of online interaction. The narratives that report online mystical experience (e.g., the sudden socketing of minds through telepathic portals as they feel each other through the wires, answered prayers or healings, or synchronous flows of words of deeply felt feelings) are scattered now in diverse Web servers and email archives. They are not yet filtered through a digitally informed imagination into the momentary stasis of a ‘sacred text,’ nor are they collected into edifying cycles of music, words, and images for a digital generation.

The Twilight Zone

Let’s add to this rudimentary sketch the fact of trans-planetary culture and the inevitable encounter with multiple civilizations. It is not a question of whether ‘they’ come here or ‘we’ go there. Once the interface of our species with others becomes more conscious, we will see that there is no here or there to come from or go to. The distinction between ‘alien’ and ‘earthling’ will blur as the distinction between, say, Albanian and Greek, has blurred, and for similar reasons. Identity is a function of boundaries, and when boundaries dissolve, a new identity emerges that includes and transcends the identity that is then seen to have been the politically and economically determined structure of a prior time. When we first encounter other societies or civilizations, our initial shock at the differences of others pushes us into a self-transcendent space and forces us to realize that consciousness in its many forms is just one thing, one dimension of space and time in a universe that is becoming self-conscious. On the other side of the annihilation of an earth-bound identity, we will locate ourselves in a more complex matrix of universal self-awareness.

Throughout world history, the encounter of one people with another has often resulted in the assimilation of the technologically inferior society into the technologically superior one, but that has been in part because of the massive physical presence the superior civilization has been able to muster. A scout ship or an expedition, like Lewis and Clark’s, can absorb another civilization only if a massive presence follows. But contact can nevertheless radically impact the way the impacted society sees itself in the universal scheme of things, including how it uses selected sacred texts.

Hawaiian society, for example, began to dissolve the minute the explorers came off the ships. Their sacred stories were discovered to be interlaced with the entire fabric of their society, and when that began to unravel, the sacred stories dimmed and lost their numinous glow.

During times of radical transition, such as encounters between different civilizations, we tend to favor apocalyptic texts that provide symbols and images that can mediate our anxieties and that can make sense on a cosmic scale out of what we previously believed to be nonsensical. Only open-ended symbols (like the cross) that insist that the dissolution of our structures of meaning is itself a meaningful event can help us through the darkness of seeming meaninglessness that attends the end of our illusions. As we voyage to distant planets and come to terms with our status in the universe as toddlers coming down the steps of their house for the first time, rather than as Alpha Primates at the top of the food chain, images of the end-time will help earth civilizations keep their sanity and balance. Sooner or later things will stabilize again at a different level of equilibrium. We will then become aware of ourselves (or OurSelf) as an extended network or system of self-conscious nodes in a more conscious matrix, self-invented in ways we can only dimly glimpse now. How will we recontextualize images of a swarthy, uncompromising, street-smart rabbi, who several thousand years earlier lent his life to the creative memory of an emergent civilization, and who was fixed in archetypal images of self-transcendence just when that civilization could frame those memories in written words? Will we still value Bronze Age images of humanity as existentially relevant to our quest?

The Future is Behind Us

Any discussion of the future is speculative, of course, particularly since the future is a choice of one of several possibilities that we have constructed from the way information flows and organizes itself in distributed systems. Science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling, acknowledged in a private conversation that his own horizon for the future has come down to five years, more or less, as science fiction as a genre has shifted from technological speculation about the distant future to near-term issues of identity and self. The right-brain dreaming of a left-brain society dreams less of the physical landscapes of the fortieth century and more of sociological, even epistemological, contours of current interior landscapes.

Still, some likely scenarios do emerge, based on this cursory discussion of genetic engineering, the realization that we are becoming a trans-planetary civilization, and the emergence of a ubiquitous, embedded network with augmented cognition, memory, and senses. Cyborg humankind, in this imaginary scenario, is indistinguishable from its augmentations and machinery, except to the degree that the seeing self retains a feeling of autonomy and self-will, still feeling itself to be a self. That capacity will be an intentional choice, as we take the reins of evolution into our own hands. We may choose to retain the illusion of freedom because it serves our species so well. The field of human subjectivity that animates the human species will experience itself as selecting and directing its own evolution, even if the laboratory evidence indicates that this also is an illusion, a necessary fiction embedded in genetic code.

Cyborg humanity will be indistinguishable from its inventions and replicants. The power of projection will be used to glue feelings of respect, even affection, onto our own creations, much as we value dogs as companions and breed them for that purpose. The distinctions between property and persons will blur. Parts of humans, including memory modules and chemically catalyzed and activated behaviors, will be interchangeable, as well as our ‘artificial’ parts, a distinction that will also blur until it disappears. Not only will we grow hearts, lungs, and kidneys in laboratories and in other animals, we will grow memory banks and neural functions using processes that will come to us first through war, entertainment and child’s play, and sexual fantasy.

This field of subjectivity will be a network of extended self-consciousness, aware of itself as a collective with a collective memory and multiple modes of nodal operation. Long-term memory storage devices will augment innate memories. and, once we master the creation of memory clusters to cushion the impact of longevity, what we call “repression” or “forgetting” will be a conscious decision, the way societies remember or choose to forget historical experiences now. Disciplines that have already converged (such as public relations, advertising, and marketing; intelligence, counter-intelligence, and disinformation; mass media and entertainment) will cycle down from the top level (images, symbols, and media) to the level of perception. Percepts as well as concepts will be manufactured and delivered in support of a previously chosen consensus. That is, not only how we think about what we see but what we think we see in the first place will be designed. The quest for truth and justice in a designed world will itself be a simulation of the quest for truth and justice.

We will choose which memory modules are valuable as distractions (an extended romantic narrative can neutralize people as effectively as professional sports) or as useful tools (if a 150-year-old man were alive today, what memories from the Civil War or the spread of the railroads would be of survival value?). We will answer these questions as we answer all questions, through trial and error, which will of course raise ethical questions as to what to do with our mistakes.

The nodes in the network will be discrete human beings who have lost much of the notion of being an ‘individual’ and will look upon our time (when they visit virtual memory museums) as an era of lonely isolation in which the illusion of individuality enabled some successes but at the high cost of the security, community, and stability that, as in Brave New World, they will value more highly. Because the interchangeability of parts and processes as one ages through a century or two of modular life will erode the sense of the “I” that Christians believe is saved or redeemed, planetary consciousness might skew toward Buddhism, which is a good default choice during times of radical transition. Why?

Because Buddhism purports to describe “what is so” without reference to teleology or ultimate purposes, i.e., to what Christians call “God.” So Buddhism provides a convenient receptacle for dealing with prolonged transitioning by relating what are obviously the passing scenes of a moving narrative to a non-self that survives the extinction of the illusory self. When it becomes obvious that the contents of mentation are illusory, it helps that one of those concepts is the notion that all is illusion, including the self that thinks about such things.

Perhaps that metaphorical framework will further recontextualize Christianity in Buddhist terms. Perhaps the ancient Jewish and Christian belief in reincarnation, always a best-seller, will turn Buddhist/Christians toward the scriptural assertions (“Some say Elijah . . . ”) that reinforce such a contextual shift.

The boundaries around what twentieth-century humans call “the Canon” will continue to dissolve, accelerating a process already begun by print publishing over the last several hundred years. The rapid evolution of interactive scenarios with spiritual content will push more power to decide toward the nodes. People will pick and choose which paths to follow and will use archetypal symbols that correlate best with the needs of the moment. But then, this is merely extrapolating the present into the future, isn’t it?

The ‘study of sacred text’ will look like a collective consciousness choosing to distribute aspects of itself around archetypal symbols, themselves in flux, that resonate in terms of then-contemporary experience. We will step into or out of the virtual immersive experience at will or what will seem like “at will.” We will accept being conditioned to choose those moments of renewal and experience them as we have bred and manufactured ourselves to experience them, much as Brave New World suggests. Deltas will be glad they are Deltas.

Alphas will be glad they are Alphas.

A Digital Parable

All great truth, said George Bernard Shaw, begins as blasphemy. And here are my words in a different poetic form, a parable that searches for that great truth.

Islands in the Clickstream

A sacred canopy of shared belief used to soar above our heads like a large umbrella, keeping us warm and dry as the contradictory data of real life beat down.

A canopy doesn’t have to be sacred—any canopy will do—but because our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it is such an important part of our stance toward life, a canopy always has a sacred component. What we believe determines how we act.

No model of reality contains everything. Life is larger than our models of it. All we need is an umbrella that is ‘good enough’ to manage the odd drops by keeping them irrelevant. As long as our model of reality makes enough sense of the world to let us act, we hold to our beliefs.

But there is an awful lot of rain these days, forty days of rain, more than forty days, and it keeps on raining.
Our trans-planetary network of computers is a rain-making machine that—finally!—works. There is no snake oil this time, no flim-flam man. It’s really coming down out there. More and more data just doesn’t fit. Our umbrella has more than a few holes in it, and the water is trickling through.

At first we act as if we don’t notice. The real experience of our lives contradicts what we say about life. When we hear ourselves speak, we sometimes sound like someone else, someone we used to be or someone we’re overhearing. If we refuse to believe our experience and believe our beliefs instead, we get a headache, a very, very bad headache. We crawl into bed or pop a Prozac, but we keep getting wetter and wetter.

Alas! we’re all too human—stubborn, blind as umbrellas, frightened out of our shivering skins—so we still insist that we’re not wet. We hold the handle of the umbrella more and more tightly, telling ourselves and everyone else how dry we are and what an excellent umbrella we have found. Others politely suppress giggles and move on.

It’s so easy to see holes in someone else’s umbrella.
Finally the umbrella is so battered that we can no longer deny what everyone else has seen for a long time, that we’re holding nothing but shreds of wet black cloth on a skeletal metal frame and we’re soaked to the skin.

We all want to stay dry, but one legacy of living in the twentieth century is that no canopy spans us all. We join organizations to experience the momentary consolation of agreement, but we can’t live there.

Life today is like living in a village of grass huts in which everyone has a radio tuned to a different station. However high we turn the volume, we can’t shut out the other songs.

I recently spoke about “The Stock Market, UFOs, and Religious Experience” to an investment conference. The speech distinguished between things we think we see out there and things we really see. It was about the psychology of projection and the psychology of investment.

I noted that in the United States and, increasingly, in the world, an attitude of respect for other religious traditions creates a good deal of tension. We both have to believe in our own belief system and acknowledge that others are entitled to contrary views. Entertaining mutually exclusive truths simultaneously in our minds is difficult. We’re not even always sure which is the umbrella and which is the rain.

We will try to surrender our freedom to those selling cheap umbrellas, but we cannot avoid our destiny: we are each responsible for inventing ourselves, for creating our own lives. There is no high ground on which to hide.

Our calling is made more difficult by the digital world. The digital world consists of simulations, models so compelling that we mistake them for reality. Sometimes the digital symbols refer only to other symbols, what Baudrillard called simulacra, simulations of simulations, copies with no originals. All those simulations are umbrellas, and all those simulations are rain.

Nietzsche saw it coming at the end of the last century. It’s what he meant when he said “God is dead.” He wasn’t talking about the creator of the universe, but about the gods in our heads, the cultural artifacts that we invent. He saw that our sacred canopy had shredded and the rains were pouring down.

Prophets are people who get wet and start sneezing before everybody else. We try to quarantine them, but reality is a cold it is impossible not to catch.

As did speech, writing, and printed text, electronic media are transforming what it means to be human and what kinds of gods we are likely to worship.

Gods,” that was, not God. God is always God, and God is with us, out here in the rain, getting wet.

In the digital world, Nietzsche’s questions are more urgent than ever. Never mind that he asked them long ago. Civilizations take lots of bullets and walk dead for a long time before they fall.

Some treat the digital world as if it is an umbrella, as if simulations can be more than an umbrella, as if they can be stitched together into an ark. And who can blame them? Who does not want to be warm and dry? But the words “warm and dry” will not keep us warm and dry, nor will digital simulations of 3-D umbrellas dancing and singing on the screen. The digital world is water, a rising tide, a tsunami impacting our consciousness with revolutionary force, leveling our villages, sweeping away our shrines and altars, sweeping everything out to sea.
What games, asked Nietzsche, what festivals shall we now invent? Indeed, my friends. And what games shall we simulate? What games shall we play? What games shall we dare to believe? (Thieme)

Works Cited

Levinson, Daniel J.
1979 The Seasons of a Man’s Life. New York: Ballentine Books.

Minsky, Marvin.
1985 The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Ong, Walter J.
1982 Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.

Thieme, Richard.
1997 Islands in the Clickstream. [electronic newsletter] November 14, 1997
copyright American Bible Society 1999-2004. All rights reserved.

This essay is included in ”New Paradigms for Bible Study: The Bible in the Third Millenium,” Robert M. Fowler, Edith Blumhofer, and Fernando F. Segovia, Editors. T&T Clark International, New York: 2004.

By Richard Thieme

National Catholic Reporter, February 11, 2005

I am a middle-age man who grew to maturity in a world of text, immersed in a typographic sea. I read endlessly and began writing stories as a teen.

When I tried to find a market for those stories, I turned to a standard reference, Writer’s Market, to locate magazines. Now, that sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it’s not. That book, the Writer’s Market, was itself a textual artifact that clearly defined my horizons of possibility. I internalized the information in it — markets in North America, markets to which I could send stories typed on paper by mail — as the limits of my vision.

Flash forward to the early ’90s, when I wrote an article for Wired Magazine about the impact of the Internet. They printed 500 words and gave back 4,500. I sat in front of my word processor, hooked up to a telephone modem, wondering where I could send an article using those extra words.

Then the light bulb went on. Duh. I could use the Internet to find markets for my article about the Internet.

I surfed the nascent Web and located magazines in South Africa, England and Australia. I offered articles by e-mail and within a week had contracts and had become a writer with a global presence.

Now, this is the point: That light bulb would never have gone on, I would never have discovered possibilities that shattered my old vision and disclosed those new horizons, had I not engaged with the technology and allowed it to disclose those possibilities. The technology itself over time restructured my beliefs.

That sounds obvious now, 10 years later, but then it was revolutionary. The breakthrough came when I realized that I was using the new technology like the old technology, as if a word processor were a typewriter, as if new wine could be squeezed into old wineskins. After I had engaged with the medium for a time, the information implicit in the transaction itself broke through to my conscious mind and I had an epiphany.

That’s what technologies are doing, too, to our notions of spirituality, our religious and spiritual practices and the organizational structures of our religions.

When we find ourselves blessed or cursed to live in a period of a genuine transformation — not just a time of accelerated change, but a time of elemental restructuring — it is hard to speak about the implications of that restructuring for our most cherished religious traditions, symbols and beliefs because they feel like skin on the bone and changes in them feel like a threat to our very being rather than an evolutionary necessity.

But transformations will happen, and afterward, when the skin is gone but the bone stays, when our essential selves and spiritual commitments stay, only then will we see that God is still God and cannot be equated to the image of God or idea about God to which we became so inordinately attached.

In this brief exploration of the impact of information and communication technologies on religious life, I hope to distinguish skin and bone.

The impact of these transforming technologies on our identities cannot be overstated. In turn, our identities — who we think we are when we don’t even think about it — determine what we believe we are capable of being and doing. Identity is destiny, and our technologies, by defining those identities, frame the parameters of our lives, disclose our horizons.

How does this happen? The way Ernest Hemingway said we go bankrupt — gradually, then suddenly. We never see what’s obvious until it is unavoidable. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto and told the world where to find it, astronomers searched through old photographic plates to look for the coordinates of Pluto’s orbit. Sure enough, there the planet was and there it always had been, right in front of their eyes. But no one saw it because they didn’t know where to look.

The foundations of our religious traditions are undergoing a profound transformation, but we are still using word processors as if they are typewriters.

New era in communication

This is the fourth great era of the Technology of the Word, as theologian Jesuit Fr. Walter Ong calls it. The first was the era of speech and the co-evolution of tongue, larynx, pharynx and brain, which enabled us to create that first “virtual space,” something like the one we are inhabiting as I write and you read these words. The creation of linguistic symbols, and the creation of a meaningful universe from those symbols, in which we then live as if it is real, made us humans.

Speaking humans lived in oral cultures for thousands of years, populating a vast unknown prehistory that existed before writing. When writing emerged, everything from oral cultures either disappeared or found itself translated into written form.

We know that religious images, artifacts and rituals were part of oral cultures, but we only know those images and words that were translated into written symbols. That may sound obvious, but the implications are important. It is not coincidental that the persons associated with the world’s major religions as we currently define them — Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Abraham, Moses, Muhammad and all the others — emerged into human consciousness through the written word, which transformed our ancestors, and the internalized images of self and God formed as they engaged with written text. In every instance, a flesh-and-blood human being was transformed through writing into a “textual being,” a being with whom or which we engage in and through the text. Theology implicitly became hermeneutics, the study of how texts mean, because interaction with written texts forms an image distinctive to the technology that created the text.

It is also no coincidence that world religions like our “majors” ceased to emerge once the era of writing passed, except as subsets of prior religions.

When the printing press with movable type was invented, another revolution took place. The unique historical person Martin Luther may have been essential to the Reformation, but the being we call “Luther” is a print-text being mediated by type, just as Jesus is a textual being mediated initially by writing. But print text and the changes to which it contributed, including the Renaissance, generated a different sense of self and, once again, different notions of God. The fractal-like replication of Catholicism in the image of Protestantism was a prototype for how hundreds of additional denominations or religions would be generated, an inevitable consequence of the power printed text gave to people to recreate themselves. The Reformation is literally unimaginable prior to the emergence of the printing press, and those who used it to print the Bible, like Gutenberg himself, had no idea what a revolution had begun. Gutenberg would have been horrified to know what he had spawned. When he first printed the Bible, however, only 2 percent of Europe’s population could read, so it would have been impossible to forecast religious practices based on people reading silently to themselves and learning thereby a method of personal interpretation that was as alien to the prior culture as the notion of an individual with rights, intellectual property or all of the other emergent properties of the Renaissance that are now being challenged by electronic communication.

In the same way that “individuals” with “individual rights” were an emergent property of technological change, “a personal relationship with God” became possible only after an “individual” could think of himself/herself and God as distinct beings, neither mediated by a community. Paradoxically, biblical literalism emerged relatively recently and the “original text” to which it claims to be loyal is one interpretation among many that developed centuries after the fact.

William Caxton brought the printing press to the British Isles in the 1470s. When he looked back in his 60s on several decades of profound change, he wrote that he could barely recognize the landscape of his youth, so radically had it been altered. But he was not speaking only of moors and downs, he was speaking of the interior landscape and the transformation of identity through which he had lived.

On a fundamental level, the choice of a dialect with which to print helped determine an “English” identity rather than identities based on smaller populations, each speaking a distinct language that they did not see as a dialect. They experienced themselves as a single people with regional dialects only when a supra-identity defined by a nation-state had emerged.

In the same way, according to Marshall McLuhan, Catholics and Protestants would never have seen themselves as a single tradition before television created ecumenism, just as the word “Judeo-Christian” did not exist before the second half of the 20th century.

Beyond the nation-state

A nation-state, like a global religious organization, is defined by a boundary drawn around a more complex unit that organizes political, economic and social life at a higher level of abstraction. Nation-states emerged after the Renaissance in part as a consequence of the print-text revolution because society demanded organizational structures appropriate to a higher level of complexity. The speed of the flow of information is a primary determinant of the organizational level of a society or civilization. The transformational engine of electronic communication is now challenging national boundaries, but we do not yet have names for the fluid, modular way of life with rapidly morphing identities that is replacing a prior way of being.

Think of time-lapse photography on fast-forward and think of nation-states, religions, everything changing in relationship to the technologies that generate and sustain them. The England of the preceding paragraphs is now part of “Europe,” passports are no longer examined at borders that are more than porous, and most of Europe uses the Euro instead of a national currency.

The fourth iteration of the Technology of the Word, electronic communication in all forms, began with the telegraph, the first time human communication moved faster than people (or their animals and artifacts) could move. It continued with radio, television, wired and wireless transmission and now the Internet, the most recent iteration and the one most in the forefront of our awareness.

Langdon Winner, a professor of political science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, studies the political and social implications of technological change. This is what Winner said about the impact of technology on people and society:

To invent a new technology requires that society also invent the kinds of people who will use it; older practices, relationships and ways of defining people’s identities fall by the wayside and new practices, relationships and identities take root. In case after case, the move to computerize and digitize means many preexisting cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid, losing their former shape as they are retailored for computerized expression.

When we translate his insights into implications for religious organizations and images of identity, human self and God, we see that this radical restructuring must profoundly impact who we think we are, how we imagine God and how we define our experience of ultimate meaning. “Reading the Bible” does not port or translate to an experience of immersion in an iconic flow of information in a virtual environment. The latter experience is generating dimensions of the human soul that did not previously exist, and when we try to say what we see, what we experience ourselves to be, we will need to invent a new vocabulary.

Pioneers of the spirit, as Nietzsche noted, are those who see first what is coming over the horizon and give it a name that the rest of us then use as if they created what in fact they merely discovered. It was impossible to predict precisely how the encounter of Greek and Hebrew worlds would create Christianity because it was unthinkable inside both of the prior paradigms.

In a more mundane way, when the U.S. government wanted to encourage people to fly on airplanes then subsidized by the government for delivering mail, it needed to change the word “aeronaut,” which designated the bold, courageous pioneers who were willing to fly. They needed a word into which everyone could project his or her identity and came up with “passenger,” a word we now use unselfconsciously to refer to an activity we take for granted. In the same way, astronauts going into space will be replaced by space tourists and travelers, and Christians, Jews, Buddhists and all the others will find new names for the new spiritual modalities and religious structures we are generating in networks and electronic webs.

The digital era

Let’s call them DPs (digital people, as opposed to print-text people). DPs will interact less and less frequently with images of print-text gods (that is, worship) and more and more often with images of gods-in-pixels in a world in which information is dynamic and distributed, gathered, integrated and recreated on the fly. As digital symbols, icons and glyphs replace printed images, the meaning of processes like “redemption” and “salvation,” now locked into nouns that imply a static state, will be transformed, too. Process theology will inevitably gain momentum because it will describe a cosmic structure congruent with our daily experience of this ceaseless flow. We recreate ourselves in and through the forms and structures of our technologies; the digital world is interactive, modular and fluid, so inevitably our lives and how we think of ourselves are becoming interactive, modular and fluid, too.

Think of the common spiritual practice of “journaling,” for example. Journaling began when people like James Boswell participated in the discovery and creation of a different kind of sensibility and self by using pen and paper to bring it into being. Today, bloggers engage in a web of self-discovery that older generations dismiss as shallow, but the collective self they are co-creating is in fact appropriate to the technology. When William Harvey described the circulation of blood, it is a historical fact that no physician over 40 ever accepted his theory. In religious life, too, new revelations are accepted one funeral at a time, but along a much longer timeline. Generations must pass away before the new sun can rise and shine.

In more mundane aspects of our lives, however, this impact cannot be avoided. Aspects of our lives that used to be unthinkably accepted as fixed by tradition, for example, have become modules in a self-generated persona or trajectory for which we are increasingly required to accept responsibility. Teaching children to learn how to learn is more important than teaching children stuff. Teaching children how to assemble themselves in an ongoing way is more important than teaching them how to live in a fixed and rigid way in a context that refuses to remain stable and thereby undermines that very fixity.

We used to be born into a religion, for example, and now we change religions and “shop for churches.” We used to stay married, but more and more people divorce and remarry. We used to choose a vocation and stay with it, but now we expect to have several careers in a lifetime. In every dimension of our lives, that which we took for granted as divinely ordained was in fact determined by an unvarying context for our lives, and it is that very context that our technologies undermine and transform. Then new contents inevitably flow into the new contours generated by a new context.

Changing face of Christianity

So the question is not will new technologies, and specifically digital ones, turn religious, political and economic structures on their collective ears, but will our identities persist in a recognizable form that includes and transcends the forms that came before? Or will there be such a disconnect that when we look into the digital mirror, the face we see does not resemble the one we used to see?

Just as many Jews and Christians look differently on their shared symbols and traditions, with Jews emphasizing the differences that make them distinct and Christians emphasizing the shared heritage that links them, new religious organizations and institutions will include and transcend our current structures according to those inside them but will constitute an unacceptably radical shift for those in the older structures.

I once identified the MOOs and MUSHes emerging in primitive cyberspace (multiplayer online games originally created in text) as the brackish tidewaters where new spiritual life was likely to emerge. Their descendents, multi-player online gaming communities like Everquest with hundreds of thousands of participants, have fulfilled my predictions. Spirituality and religious quests permeate those gaming environments and usually draw on various Neo-Pagan spiritualities that seem to be prevalent in hacker communities — yes, hackers often have a deep interest in spirituality, but it is usually expressed through nontraditional religions such as Wicca. Games include spells, rites, rituals, incantations and numerous religious classes of avatars like monks, spiritual warriors and warlocks. Asian disciplines, too, are mined for the spiritual implications of martial arts. Although Catholic traditions would work equally well, the flavor of exotic martial arts and the dissemination of its forms through movies (when was the last time you saw Christian warriors portrayed positively in a movie?) appeals more to young people than an Ignatian retreat or Benedictine discipline.

The implications of this article are not trivial. We are moving together, like it or not, through a zone of annihilation that challenges all of the ways we hold ourselves as human beings and possibilities for action in the world. The transformational energies of our time will become a firestorm when core proclamations about our beliefs begin to smoke and burn.

If Christianity is to embrace and be transformed by those energies, it will necessarily become something other than what it has been or at least what it has been thought to be. Perhaps claims to exclusivity and universality will survive the fire, but perhaps not. Perhaps those claims will both intensify and diminish, intensify because some can’t help but cling to the past and diminish because we are all nevertheless being re-contextualized in a way that will remind us unceasingly that the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. We can make this passage with sanity only if we know and have confidence that God is God and will defend Godself and cannot perish, while everything in this life, including our ideas about God, is transitory and passing.

By Richard Thieme

William Gibson’s Neuromancer is known to many because of one word, “cyberspace,” a fulcrum of a word around which a whole new world has coalesced. Equally memorable, though, is an image of the cyberjunkie Case jacking into the Dixie Flatline for the first time.

The Flatline, a.k.a. McCoy Pauley, is a firmware construct, a set of instructions arranged in a memory bank, giving the dead man’s memories sequence and form. The construct simulates a gestalt, Pauley’s personality and knowledge, molded into a shape something like the potato-shaped universe described by Einstein — finite but unbounded. The horizons of the Flatline’s world are fixed, but inside that world, the friendly ghost seems as limitless as a live human being. The Dixie Flatline is a persona fixed in a silicon chip in a way that lets Case interact with his wisdom.

I imagine Case in his loft at twilight, slotting a ROM chip into a socket in his skull for a direct feed from his dead hero.

That image fuels my expectations when I jack in to the World Wide Web. Alas, my dreams are too big for the current Web to address.

New technologies take a long time to teach us how to use them. When the telephone was invented, it was thought a way to call ahead to the next town to say a telegram was coming. The motion picture camera was used to film stage plays. As we used those technologies, entering into a symbiotic relationship with them, they taught us how to extend our senses.

Now we’re trying to extend our minds and brains throughout the Net. Extensions of our brains, nodes by the millions in a web of glowing filaments, the Net is a mirror of our hive brain. Participating in it takes us to another level of corporate consciousness. So the Net ought to feed back to us reflexive knowledge about the trip itself. We ought to encounter our hive brain in a way that lets us recognize ourselves, included in something bigger that is at the same time reduced to symbols that enable us to see our new selves.

Ought to. Right. But what in fact do we find when we explore the mind/brain in cyberspace?

There’s a lot of snake oil out there, more ore than gold. Caveat emptor. Let the netsurfer beware. If you meet the Dixie Flatline at a web site, slip him a virus. It isn’t the real McCoy.

Patience is a requisite when you enter cyberspace hoping to interact with constructs promising to blow your mind, train your brain, or simply enhance your health.

It’s a shame, really: if ever there’s a natural fit, it’s cyberspace and our hunger for growing our minds and training our brains. Our minds expand naturally into the shimmering non-space of the Net. The glowing screen seduces us into a night that never ends. I stay up way too late, following luminous breadcrumbs through the forest, but often I’m disappointed.

Maybe I’m jaded. My eyes have been trained by fractals, after all, cycling through millions of colors, kaleidoscopes of unimaginable complexity. I want the same rush, the same insight into the nature of things, when I click from site to site searching for wisdom.

Books are fine; books are good; but when I’m on the Web, I don’t want books. I want interaction. I don’t want to keep hitting home pages selling herbs and dubious kinds of healing, hawking new age postures and potions for body and soul. But nine times out of ten, that’s what I get.

H. L. Mencken said no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence (or was it the taste?) of the American public. For America, read “world.” When they’re selling symbolic constructs – promises of better health, wisdom, or transformation – it’s easy to sell the menu as if it’s the meal.

Typical of sites offering guidance in meditation is FISU, the Foundation for International Spiritual Unfoldment (http://www.cityscape.co.uk/users/ea80/fisu.htm). Typical too is their blend of true and even obvious statements about the benefits of meditation (“most meditators agree there is an overall improvement in health”) with claims that can’t possibly be true unless the site’s webmasters are literally gods. Like Transcendental Meditation and its “customized” mantras, FISU markets a generic product masquerading as a set of techniques tailored to each individual’s “unique vibrations.”

Generic information can be packaged as unique and life- changing because it is keyed in to “arcane secrets of the Masters.” The claims would be more believable if the interactive potential of the Net was used for a demonstration. Instead, most of these sites are electronic billboards selling products.

Cognitech Corporation

(http://www.interstar.com/health/cognitech.html) offers Brainware, a technology that promises greater mind/body control, reduction in stress, increased energy, better concentration, improved business performance, enhanced memory and learning, etc. — all this from something that sits on your head like a squid, its lights flickering and blinking. (They do warn off epileptics — the device might trigger a seizure). The squid costs a mere US$340 plus postage.

There’s a broad pattern to these virtual presentations:

It begins with information or real research into what helps people feel better or take more responsibility for their own well-being. Often the decision to take responsibility and do something – anything – mobilizes our resources and gives us energy and hope. So far so good.

Some of this information is linked to the ancient wisdom of hallowed traditions. Yoga sites abound, offering journals, archives, and pathways to classes, workshops, and products (tapes, books, “meditation pillows”). Spirit-WWW offers links to all sorts of alternative paths, such as theosophy, lightwork, extraterrestrials, channelings. Their Yoga Paths page (http://www.94.20.164.5/spirit/yoga/overview.html) takes you to the teachings of myriads of gurus.

Who has the right to teach the techniques and philosophy of Vedic Yoga? Hard to say. Credentials are not easy to come by at these sites. Instead we are clued in by a new exotic name that our teacher, once an ordinary bloke, is now an enlightened master. The home page of Robert Green was renamed when his Guru Swami Shyam named him Amarnaath (http://www.hookup.net/~greenr/). He offers selected words of wisdom and a catalog of products.

If the ancient wisdom is truly ancient, there will be a living breathing connection between masters and disciples, long lines of adepts who hand on their teaching and practice. Genuine teachers will gladly provide mundane details like bios, credentials, and references. It pays to check them out.

Other “traditional” movements play the “exotic” card. The more primitive and esoteric the tradition, the more potent it promises to be. Check out the Tribe of Love (http://www.turnpike.net/metro/tribo/) whose goal is nothing less than “an international cultural revolution … a humanistic transformation by giving access to a higher quality of being/consciousness.” Their promo piece invokes rites of transformation, Reichian psychotherapeutic techniques, modern management techniques like reengineering, and shamanism to provide access to Tropical Bioenergetics, in turn based on the even more esoteric BioTantra.

Does it work? Evaluating these cosmic claims is like putting together an investment portfolio or raising children. By the time you have the data you need, it’s too late to change what you’re doing. So keep an open mind. Suspend both belief and disbelief. Doubt everything. In the long run, the truth will out.

Information is easier to provide than creative interaction. The information may be sound, but it’s often converted into a model of the universe or cosmololgy. Then something that is in fact helpful is subtly turned into an invitation to make a commitment to a belief system or cultic community. In carnival terms, the WWW site tries to “turn the tip,” i.e. turn the crowd attracted by the free show — fire-eating or sword-swallowing — into paying customers inside the tent.

WWW-Spirit, for example, offers links to the World of Dolphins. Alien Cultures. and Healing Ways. At “Dolphins,” Birgit Klein shares her experience channeling messages from dolphins. Telepathic connections open up to spiritual experiences which in turn are opportunities to heal not only the individual but the entire planet. The same is true if you follow the link to Lightworks and read accounts of starseeds and walk-ins (varieties of extraterrestrials disguised as earthlings, here for cosmic purposes). Telepathic communication begins with practical advice, leads to a spiritual connection, and ultimately discloses a new belief system. Visitors are invited to revise their version of reality accordingly.

What’s going on here? Channelings from discarnate entities, visitors from the Pleiades, and whales and dolphins all teach the same or similar content. It’s always “sandbox stuff:” be nice to each other, preserve the environment, don’t hit.

In domains that traffic in symbolic constructs, such as healing, meditation, and spirituality, anybody can say anything they please and no-one can contradict them. In fact, whether the mediating structures are angels, dead ancestors, dolphins, discarnate beings, or extraterrestrials, something beneficial often happens. The mediating structures, it seems, simply have to be “good enough” to get helpful truths and tools to people who need them. The efficacy of the practice is not contingent on the absolute truth of the belief system with which it is fused.

In short: take what you need and leave the rest.

Most sites provide lists of benefits. Buy this book, watch this video, wear this squid, and all these good things will happen.

The Real Life Shark Cartilage Information Exchange proclaims the value of shark cartilage in treating everything from cancer and AIDS to psoriasis (http://www.electriciti.com/~reallife/).

After the benefits come testimonials – quotes from individuals whose lives have been changed. The standard “conversion formula” — this is how it was, this is what happened, this is how it is now — is followed.

A final click of the mouse will take you to an ordering form. Have your credit card ready.

Used judiciously, resources on the Net can help you sort all this out. The Meditation Information Network (http://minet.org/newsgroup/) has plenty of critical reflection on programs associated with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The articles on Deepak Chopra alone are worth the price of connect-time. They reveal the mixed motives behind the promises of healers who in fact are businessmen making a great deal of money. In Hawaii it was said of the missionaries who came in 1820, “They came to do good and they did well.”

The wisdom of the ages is consistent with what you already know. There’s little new under the sun. The Self-Help and Psychology Magazine (http://www.well.com/user/selfhelp/) has a page of twelve suggestions for taking care of yourself. They’re simple, they’re basic, and they make sense (“learn to say no,” “change jobs if you’re miserable at work,” and “avoid comparing yourself with others.”)

So if practical wisdom is plain common-sense, and a mystic is just someone who found out what’s so, why go into cyberspace at all?

Because wisdom is always mediated through communities. Good health is a function of connecting with others in positive ways and taking responsibility for one’s own life. Isolation is ubiquitous today. The Net is often criticized for increasing isolation, but it’s a bad rap. Every transformation of the technology of the Word, from writing to the printing press, increases our distance from one another but simultaneously makes available the means for connecting at deeper levels. The Net separates us and also mediates new opportunities for intimacy and community. Connecting with each other and hearing what others say is in itself healing and therapeutic. Then it’s up to us to act.

Good health doesn’t come from knowing what to do. It comes from doing what works. But remember, as you pursue the truth that sets you free: if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

By Richard Thieme

This formal theological essay was originally written in 1988. It was quite dated when published by the Anglican Theological Review in 1993.

The transition from a culture created by the technology of print to one created by electronic processing of information is an occasion of excitement and great opportunity as well as a time of confusion, resistance, and pain. We can imagine that the same ambivalence characterized the transitions from orality to literacy and from literacy to print. Anxious efforts to retain the thinking habits of the past — an inevitable reaction to both the form and content of the artifacts of the new culture — are futile. We are well on our way toward feeling, thinking, and perceiving in new ways.

This transition is marked by polemics against the new technology written by polemicists using that same technology to state their case. The arguments Plato raised against writing – that it inappropriately externalized an internal process, that our memories would be weakened or destroyed, and that the written text was unnatural because it was unresponsive and could not engage in real dialogue – were disseminated through writing.1 In 1477, one Hieronomo Squarciafico sounded the alarm that the growing abundance of books was making people less studious, destroying the mind, and weakening the memory — and he did it in a book.2 Similar arguments against the use of computers are written on word processors and sent to publishers on floppy disks or via modem and marketed worldwide through computerized industries. We use the highest forms of technology available to critique the effects already wrought by that technology.

The emergence of a new domain of knowing and being threatens the very foundations of society because our modalities of perceiving, knowing, and communicating are not incidental to our identities; on the contrary, within the context of a particular culture, they form our identities. They are axiomatic to our self-conscious experience of ourselves and give us possibilities for being which are so much a part of ourselves that we can not see them. Writing does more than “raise the consciousness” of an oral culture; it transforms it. Plato was empowered by the technology of writing to make radically new distinctions, including negative judgments about writing. The interiorization of the world of printed text formed the modern psyche in all its manifestations, and we are in the process now of being recreated by the world of electronic technology.

It follows that religious experience, as one domain of human consciousness, and the modalities of spirituality which nurture and sustain it, are being transformed as well. I will indicate some of the possibilities for spiritual development and religious experience engendered by the emerging electronic culture and note some sources of inevitable resistance. Many people fear computers. Employees often must be gently introduced to new technology because of resistance to using the medium. Computer jokes — beginning with the days of “do not fold spindle or mutilate” — are one index of the depth of the threat posed by the technology. Because computers, like Rorschach tests, elicit projections from users, our conversation about computers is an image of our new selves.

One of the shrillest cries of alarm came early on from a pioneer of artificial intelligence, Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT. Weizenbaum created a simple program called ELIZA, which used an elementary natural language interface to create the illusion that the computer was engaged in meaningful conversation with the user. ELIZA mimics a Rogerian therapist, that is, one who follows the Carl Rogers model by feeding back to the client restatements of his own feelings without interpretation, so the client can direct the therapeutic process. As a caricature of such a therapist, ELIZA restated sentences as questions by swapping pronouns and reversing verb tense, made understanding responses such as “I see,” and referred to prior statements by responding to key words like “mother” by scripting, “You mentioned your family – tell me more about them.”

Initial users of ELIZA projected onto the program a persona with which they subsequently engaged as if they were in a private conversation with a therapist. Weizenbaum was shocked when users asked him to leave the room so they could have more privacy. He endeavored to warn us against exaggerating the powers of computer programs in such unrealistic ways. While he did correct some unrealistic claims being made for artificial intelligence, I am more interested in the intensity of his own anxiety, which drove him to warn us at book length of the dangers of a medium he himself had helped to create.3

Both Weizenbaum and his excited users were responding to the power of the computer to engage users in a way that is deep and transforming. Users project a gestalt or persona onto their experience of using a program which both reveals themselves and creates a new dimension of consciousness of which they immediately become aware. The exploration of this new dimension, with its disclosure of horizon after horizon of meaning and possibility, generates excitement analogous to that experienced by someone learning to read.

Weizenbaum’s anxiety was elicited by a real phenomena, the creation of a new domain of consciousness which had not previously existed. But there is another source of anxiety as well: the apparent encroachment of a computer program on the domain of the sacred. Psychotherapy is one context among many in which the sacred becomes real in our society. The psychotherapist, one contemporary analogue of the shaman, mediates separate realities and assists in the integration of the contents of both. To a machine that had functioned in the “cold” domains of mathematics, science, economics and business, or statistical branches of the social sciences, was suddenly imputed powers of prescience and healing. Weizenbaum’s reaction was out of proportion to the phenomena he described unless it is understood in this broader context. As computers expand the domain of religious experience, mediating in new ways the transformative power of sacred symbols, this anxiety is likely to become even more intense.

Artificial intelligence threatens us with its promise to replicate not aspects of our intelligence but us in concatenations of silicon and plastic. Computers, however, are not sentient beings, but physical symbol systems4 more comparable to other processes which have technologized the word — speech, writing, and print — than to living persons. Computers are indifferent to the content of the symbols they manipulate, but we are not. When they operate in the domain of spirituality and religion, they are more threatening than when they crunch numbers or search a database.

Absolute authority will no doubt be claimed for some computer programs in the same way that we once cried, “But the book says …” in an effort to settle a dispute. The medium of print carried with it the illusion of self-validation by virtue of its form and not its contents, and the same will be true for computer programs. This simply means that a critical and reflective sensibility is as necessary to the task of interacting with computer programs as to reading books.

ELIZA, of course, does not function like a real therapist. Programs like ELIZA can more realistically be compared to workbooks than to human beings. A smart workbook, its interactive capacity enabling the user to sort through feelings about current issues, ELIZA in its most elementary form was still a valuable tool. The value was provided by the intentionality of the user, who reacted in good faith to a series of prompts and therefore derived value from the program. The synergistic relationship between the user and the possibilities disclosed by the program generated the power of the transaction. Something similar happens when “users” use journals, as in Ira Progoff’s Journaling Workshops, to explore themselves. Computer interaction simply defines a different kind of “psychic space” as a possibility into which to grow.

The willingness of users to operate within the narrow parameters defined by the program made ELIZA useful within its limitations. Some users, of course, took great delight in sabotaging the program. It was easy to figure out ELIZA and make it say silly things. I believe the need to make ELIZA respond in inappropriate ways is related to the degree to which the program mimics human intelligence or a human personality, making it threatening. A program so easily outwitted, we seem to be saying, can not be so smart after all. Perhaps the hacker’s delight in crashing programs stems in part from the need to outsmart a medium that frightens even the Doctors Frankenstein who have invented the technology.

Weizenbaum was taken aback by the users’ desire for privacy. Privacy as we understand it did not exist before writing. It did not exist in an oral culture because the particular interior world one enters when writing or reading silently to oneself did not exist. The diary, a book that invites confidences, creating for the user a deepening sense of self as he or she discloses and discovers latent or potential thoughts and feelings, is a relatively recent invention. Children given diaries behave very much as ELIZA-users behaved because the diary, although inviting a less intense response, is also a projective medium — a “special friend” (“Dear Diary …”) in which one confides, keeping one’s secrets safe under lock and key. The diary could be said to elicit the consciousness one discovers as one uses it, as a journal elicits the contents of a psyche illuminated by the light of conscience during self-examination. ELIZA and the more complex, more intentional spiritual guides that will be its descendants will call into being a kind of consciousness the contours of which we do not yet know how to describe.

What might some of these spiritual guides be like? An interactive program might facilitate self-examination or guide periods of contemplation with text or visual images during an extended Ignatian retreat. Expert systems might assist in identifying salient issues in ethical dilemmas. Twelve Step spirituality can be facilitated step by step by a Spiritual Companion. Spiritual Companions and interactive Bible studies might incorporate users’ responses, integrating data so that subsequent lessons can be illuminated by what the program has learned.

One form of Bible study might derive from the similar processes that underlie two seemingly disparate experiences: readings with Tarot cards and preaching from the cycle of biblical readings in the three-year lectionary in liturgical churches.

A Tarot card reading consists of a random sort (shuffling) of a collection of archetypal images, of which some are then selected and juxtaposed in a proscribed pattern. The archetypal symbols resonate deeply with the psyches of the reader and the seeker, calling forth from the latter memories, feelings, and associations which it is the task of the reader to discern. The point of departure for sermons during the Eucharist are lessons from the Scriptures which rotate on a three-year cycle. The lectionary also “shuffles” readings through the church year. My own preparation for preaching consists of allowing the three lessons (juxtaposed in a predetermined pattern) to resonate with my own psyche and the feelings and experiences of parishioners with whom I interact during the week, resulting in a “reading” of the meaning of the archetypal images for the corporate personality of the parish. Intuition is required in both cases in order to discern the possibilities latent within the symbols for a particular person or community. Some Bible studies also choose or sort selected passages on which participants in a group reflect. The study is an opportunity to discern the emotional and spiritual dimensions of their lives insofar as they are illuminated by the archetypal stories from the scriptures. The dynamics of all three processes — the card reading, the preacher preparing to preach, and the bible study — are similar, although different images will of course yield different contents. Computers are uniquely suited to provide the basic material for such an enterprise.

A computer program might connect Biblical narratives in a variety of meaningful patterns — chronological or historical, metaphorical (patterns of words or root-words, allusions or images) or thematic/theological. Even a random search would generate clusters of meaningful patterns, surprising and delighting us (the serendipity factor of computer searches) as well as leading to new insights. Of course, intentionally woven webs of metaphors or stories using Hyper-text, their complexity, balance, and comprehensiveness coming from the combinatory or integrative power of the imagination of the poet/programmer, would be a magnitude of power greater than a random search. A randomly-generated meaningful construct would still have to be identified and selected, like Hamlet in the billionth monkey’s typewriter or the one good poem among millions produced by poetry-writing programs plugging pre-selected words into syntactical slots. The process by which parts of the whole are unified harmoniously — irony, association, dramatic revelation of human character or God’s plan — is still a task for human imagination.

The evolution of human consciousness is marked by growth in our ability to attend to our various selves. 5 The self we observe has become increasingly distant from the seeing self, but the distance is transcended by virtue of new opportunities for intimacy. We can know ourselves, others, and God only because we have first become aware of our distance from ourselves, others, and God. The flawed self at the heart of all symbolism of evil is a felix culpa, an occasion of communion at a deeper level.

By separating the knower from the thing known, writing enabled an increasingly articulate capacity for introspection without which Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam would not have been possible. 6 The impact of print on religious experience was equally profound. By making possible small portable Bibles which could be read silently to oneself, a radically new experience of the scriptures was made available by the new technology.

The Reformation is unimaginable without print, but a new kind of Catholic spirituality was engendered as well. Print ushered in a greater focus on lengthy examination of one’s conscience and more frequent confessions. 7 In the twentieth century, traditional forms of spirituality, including self-examination and confession, have fallen into disuse. The “death of God” as a cultural phenomenon earlier in this century signalled the disintegration of traditional forms of spirituality and the primacy of a secular paradigm for the social construction of reality. Fifty years ago, however, at the depths of the Great Depression, one model of spiritual regeneration emerged which spoke a secular language that twentieth century human beings could understand.

The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous shatters the isolation of the practicing addict and discloses a means of integrating the fractured self. I will discuss the Twelve Steps in some detail because (1) they are a generic paradigm of spiritual regeneration — a paradigm of paradigms — which addresses not only addiction but other kinds of “sinful” behavior, (2) they illustrate recursion as a principle of spiritual renewal, and (3) the Twelve Steps can be readily adapted as a powerful means of computer-assisted spiritual direction.

The Twelve Steps are:

(1) We admitted that we were powerless over [alcohol] [death] [sin] [etc.] and that our lives had become unmanageable.

(2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

(3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

(4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

(5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

(6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

(7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

(8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

(9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

(10) Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

(11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

(12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to [those who still suffer], and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Many persons other than the chemically dependent have used them as a guide to recovery, recognizing that the process engendered by the twelve steps follows the basic principles of ascetical theology for the regeneration of the alienated self. To speak of dysfunctional or addicted families has become a way of speaking about all of us. It is the modern idiom into which original sin and all its consequences has been translated. Dr. Gerald May in Addiction and Grace identifies dozens of so-called addictions including ice cream and art, work and golf, status and responsibility. 8 He is speaking, in effect, of any and all behaviors used to escape from the reality of the here-and-now and a real relationship with ourselves and others, including God. Hence an addiction is any idol to which we turn inordinately to escape the pain or perplexity of life. This is a way of saying that original sin denotes the condition of alienation in which we all find ourselves, and our lives embody various futile ways we try to escape that reality. “Consciousness is a disease,” Unamuno says, referring to the divided consciousness of fallen humanity, and our compulsive rituals are efforts to relieve its symptoms. 9 When we have exhausted ourselves emotionally and spiritually, and we see how we have made our lives unworkable, we become more willing to surrender our self-defeating behaviors and turn to God — however we understand God. The Twelve Steps are a translation into the vernacular of what it looks like to “turn to God.” Practicing the principles embodied in the steps raises the spiritually dead self to new life.

Our private rituals are often amusing to others because so much meaning and power has been projected onto such obviously impotent gods. We turn again and again to alcohol or bigger cars, drugs or gambling, prostitutes or excessive work, doughnuts or “intimate” relationships. Anything in creation can become an idol or fetish if given a priority in our lives out of proportion to its true value. Because we return in vain to the same ritualized behaviors, our sinfulness is recursive.

Recursion is a mathematical term referring to a cyclical or repetitive process generated by a set of rules which repeats itself indefinitely until a specified condition is met. Recursion differs from iteration or simple repitition, however, in that earlier rules are called or invoked by subsequent rules as part of the process. A rule, in effect, invokes itself. Iteration resembles a circle, recursion a spiral.

“Use scotch to feel better” might be the only rule in an alcoholic’s program. (IF [uneasy] [anxious] [frightened] [angry] [etc.]: THEN use scotch.) When you are content, the “stop rule” might read, put down the bottle. (IF [peace] [well-being] [confidence] [etc.]: THEN stop.) Because peace is achieved only intermittently if at all, the rule will repeat: use scotch. Even while one is drinking scotch, the rule [use scotch] can be invoked. The rule becomes internalized to such a degree that over time it alters the program: (IF [anything] THEN [use scotch]). 10 The alcoholic can not stop. The power to choose has been lost.

Spirituality is also recursive, however. So are computer languages and computer programs. So are the Twelve Steps.

The Twelve Steps are recursive because as we progress up the spiral of spiritual growth, prior steps are often called or invoked. The first step, for example, may be invoked as part of the ongoing process at any level. We are always in a process of recovery — we are never recovered — so there is always farther to go. Long after the primary behavior has ceased, the flaws from which it issued — anger, resentment, or pride, for example — continue to generate behavior over which we are powerless and to which we must in turn apply the twelve steps, if we are not to regress. We are always powerless over our flawed selves, so we will continue to experience the consequences of self-defeating behaviors. We are not Sisyphus, however, pushing the rock of our lives up the same hill again and again, because we are growing spiritually, and we know from our own experience that our movement resembles a rising spiral more than an eternally recurring circle. We do make progress; we arrive at the same choices again and again, but at a progressively more profound level of awareness and spiritual depth. We do experience greater freedom, peace, and wholeness. The specific practices of surrender, self-examination and confession, and repentance, and sustaining this process through daily surrender, daily self-examination and confession, and daily repentance, become a lifelong discipline, a new recursive structure within ourselves which we use in order to respond to life. Now the program reads: IF [uneasy] [anxious] [etc.] THEN [use scotch] OR [call someone] OR [go to a meeting] OR [write down your feelings] OR [pray] OR [meditate] OR [etc.] The power to choose more acceptable alternatives is restored.

Like the double helix that contains our genetic program, the declining spiral of the practicing addict — the unregenerate man — is mirrored by the ascending spiral of the recovering addict. The person in recovery is no longer conformed to the fallen self, but is in a process of being transformed by the renewal of the self. The power of recursion enables this to take place through the practice of a very few rules. Those rules, applied recursively to all of the circumstances of our lives, result in an infinite variety of spiritual pathways, all manifestations of a single paradigm.

In The Recursive Universe, William Poundstone analyzes a computer program, “Life,” to show that a universe of replicating dots, manifesting extraordinary variety and complexity, can be generated by a few very simple rules applied recursively. He suggests that recursion is the means by which everything — from the evolution of galaxies to the forms of life on our planet — have been generated. Recursion allows a great deal to be done with very few rules. 11

The Twelve Steps are a paradigm of paradigms which are encoded in the narratives and rituals constitutive of the major religions of the western world. The sequence of events in the story of Moses and the Exodus, for example, or the Christ-event of the New Testament, manifest this process. The six seasons of the church year, the movement of the Eucharistic liturgy, the Passover Seder, all recapitulate the same spiritual journey. The Exodus-event or the Christ-event are forms or patterns for our lives.

Knowing this is not enough, however; the steps must be applied in order to work. The twelve steps engender an attitude of openness, willingness, and humility. Participation in a ritualized re-enactment of the twelve-steps — the Eucharist, for example–may alleviate anxiety for a moment, but in the long run will only deepen the isolation of the individual by reinforcing pride and self-righteousness, unless the transformative power of the ritual is internalized and acted upon. In the same way, studying and understanding the Biblical narratives, without allowing them to transform one’s life, will only sustain one in the illusion that one knows what is needed for salvation and is saved by that knowledge. That belief, which inflates the ego, is at the heart of all Gnostic heresies in their many historical manifestations. Practicing the steps deflates the ego and returns us to our proper place in the scheme of things. That practice must take place in community because disclosing ourselves to others results in a face-to-face encounter with ourselves and with God: to practice the steps in isolation reinforces the self-deception which isolated us in the first place.

Computers are well adapted to support twelve-step spirituality through interactive programs. The capacity to backtrack recursively through rules and to branch and loop generates pathways almost as numerous and complex as our own journeys. A computer program to facilitate the reality of surrender, self-examination and confession, repentance, and the sustaining practices of prayer and meditation might move through each step in detail, returning the user to prior steps as new insights into one’s life evolve. In comparison with the flexibility and exploratory power of such a program, a book is fixed and rigid, as limited as a typewriter in comparison with a word processor.

Spiritual Companion might begin by exploring the meaning of “surrender” with a multiplicity of resources — readings, meditations, testimonies — as well as an ELIZA-like reflexive examination of the areas in which one needs to surrender. Self examination could be coached with examples and suggestions based on likely scenarios from others with the same presenting problems. The ten commandments, the seven deadly sins, or some other schema are good points of departure for self-analysis, or the seeker might prefer a biographical approach: the program could prompt for memories on the basis of relationships or phases of one’s life. Self-examination would generate data from which one’s flaws could be identified as well as the pattern of behavior which has been self-defeating. When the time comes to identify those one has hurt in order to make amends, the database will have material ready at hand to facilitate that process.

A personality inventory like the Myers-Briggs might assist seekers in understanding how they perceive the world and suggest styles of prayer and meditation appropriate to their personalities. The Bible Study could be used to choose passages that address concerns of the moment, as a Gideon Bible provides a topical index. Testimonies, affirmations, inspirational writings, one’s own private notes could all be cross-referenced to Biblical passages.

Inevitably computer programs and the computer itself will provide metaphors for the spiritual journey of the self. The vocabulary of the electronic world is making its way into our everyday life. We forget that phrases like the “Word made flesh” or “written in the book of life” are metaphors generated by prior technologies of the word. New metaphors — the world as computer program, for example, our destinies latent in recursive code hardwired into its very molecules — will evolve over time.