I am told that the Japanese word "rikutsuppoi" means "an idea or position smacking of such a high degree of logic that it ignores reality."

Granted, too little logic is a dangerous thing. During times of change like ours, when the connections between the stabilizing matrix of our world views and our daily experience are torn like weak ligaments, we can drop into a black hole of confusion and project patterns onto the universe that aren't really there.

A professor once found a diary in a secondhand book shop in London that was written in code. He pored over the arcane marks until he cracked the code and translated the text. A fascinating world emerged, full of details of court intrigue and daily life. When he published his findings, colleagues asked for a look and discovered that it wasn't code at all. The diary had been written in English but the ink had dried and cracked over the years, and the desperate professor had projected all that rich content onto the meaningless squiggles.

An intriguing phenomenon plagued code breakers during World War II as well. When they came up against a code they couldn't crack, some of the codebreakers cracked instead. They doodled instead of dithering and drew pictures of the implacable enemy they believed had created the unbreakable code. The pictures were usually warrior women, armored goddesses like Wonder Woman, unknowable, aloof.

The kink of code-breaking aside, something similar happens in the midst of religious experience, when the rational mind is overwhelmed and from the depths of our souls there emerges an image of a being beyond comprehension who we believe created the uncrackable code of life on earth.

When logic breaks, strange things happen. It is an unfortunate fact that those who torture others to extract information or to conduct state terrorism, know there is a point they must avoid, when pain overwhelms the capacity of the conscious mind to cope or make sense of what is happening. After that break-point, the victim looks out at their torturer through eyes blazing with gratitude, having dropped into a place in their souls that is deeper than pain, deeper than life itself.

Next time you find yourself in an art museum with portraits of saints by El Greco, look at the expression in the eyes of the blissful martyrs.

So ... during times of radical transition, when the way we construct reality just doesn't fit our experience, there is a tendency to fall into all sorts of irrational belief -- conspiracies, sidebar spiritualities that promise easy salvation, and extraterrestrial plots to kidnap our neighbors.

We surrender the light of logic to our peril. Yet ... we humans are more than logic machines. Supra-rational or trans-rational experience is not identical to irrational. The former includes and transcends our rational faculties, illuminating a larger life that we have filtered out.

Synchronicity is Carl Jung's word for events that connect in a way that befuddles simple notions of causality. All spiritual traditions have words or practices designed to remind us that the bulk of the iceberg of life is well below the surface.

Yesterday the telephone rang at the end of a long work day. I had worked mostly alone and was feeling ... strangely becalmed, at the end of a trajectory I had been following, unsure of the next move.

The caller was Ralph Blum, a man I had never met. He had received one of my "Islands in the Clickstream" columns by email from a colleague and called to talk about it. We discovered many things in common, moving from life history to spirituality to competitive business intelligence and computer security. I mentioned that I was speaking at Pump Con, a computer hackers convention, this weekend, and added that I believed that Odin was one god of the hackers (Odin had hung, cold and alone in a windswept tree for nine days and nights, sacrificing himself in order to seize the knowledge of the runes). Ralph said he had written "The Book of Runes," and as we spoke he "cast my runes." He said, "Interesting. The same one has come up twice. That's unusual.

"Your life is at a poise point, the moment when a system has fulfilled the momentum of a particular direction. You're waiting now for a new direction to emerge.

"Don't miss the richness of this time," he added. "Waiting can be a splendid experience."

There is a time before the beginning, when new possibilities are ripening, what Hebrew scriptures mean by "brooding over the darkness of the deep" like a mother hen, what Christian scriptures mean by "the fullness of time."

That call, coming from nowhere, was the right thing at the right time. We can trace the steps, how his friend had received the column from a friend and sent it on, but all of those pieces won't add up to one.

Was it only a coincidence that he received a column and acted on impulse and called? An unconscious response to the subtext of my words? An intuitive apprehension of feelings in my voice? Or was it what it seemed, a glimpse of the connections among all things, usually hidden by the veil of the mundane?

Ninety-eight per cent of the Internet is invisible, operating sight-unseen "out there" in the world. That means it is also sight-unseen "in here" as well, in the collective mind and unconscious that we have become by virtue of interaction in the digital world. Our hive mind is the unified consciousness of humankind learning to observe itself in digital symbols like Indra's jewels, nodes of a net that each reflect the entire web.

Beware of too little and too much logic. The Net is a moving map of the human mind like a mobile over a baby's crib. Through its worm holes we slip now and then like quicksilver to experience the necessity of connection, the illusion of solitude, the gregariousness of the wired world.

October 31 1997