No, not THAT web. The REAL web.

Three times this week I awoke with a strong impression of particular people, all of them important to me, all of them distant. I hadn't heard from any of them in a long time. In each case, the sense of their presence was unmistakable, persistent. And significant email from each was waiting on the server.

Now, consciousness weaves a deceptive web, and the way we interpret events in our lives is subjective. The weight of events in our histories is determined by our emotional filters. How we pattern or tell our stories always involves choices, making each of us an artist of our own lives.

So I know skeptics will suggest that fleeting impressions of distant friends bob in and out of consciousness all the time like oracular readings in a magic eight ball and only the waiting email made me remember those impressions. And all one can say is, yes, I understand what you are saying, and I am saying that this was not like that at all. These were distinctively strong impressions that made me think, even before I booted up, "I wonder if ..." and the waiting email finished the sentence with relevant details.

More than knowing, this is knowing in a way that we know that we know. Knowing that we know empowers us to get behind what we know and ride the slipstream.

The beliefs or consensus realities of communities constrain how we think. That's why "outsiders," free from institutional and organizational constraints, can be valuable. Who we invite into our lives does make a difference. They either affirm and validate our strengths and disclose new possibilities or limit and narrow our options.

Years ago, when I worked in the Episcopal Church, I offered a workshop called "The Invisible World" about the deeper dimensions of consciousness. It was intended to disclose to people who lived on land, as it were, that most of the planet was covered by water. With the right diving equipment, we could become as comfortable in the ocean as on the beach. But you had to know there was water, then something under the water, then want to see it, then learn how to dive.

I asked people in small groups to disclose some of their liminal experiences. The newsprint was soon covered with instances of every kind of boundary experience imaginable. When the members of the group looked into that mirror of its collective self and realized that all their unusual experience was ordinary, they realized how they had limited themselves.

Without reminders, we forget who we are and of what we are capable. When we remember, it discloses the possibility of a different kind of life, life as a game that is three dimensional, four dimensional, more dimensional than that. We develop an intuitive sense of which currents are worthy of following into the depths.

That our government conducted a program for several decades in remote viewing (anomalous cognition, a kind of clairvoyance), is now well known. According to Joe McMoneagle, one of the more successful remote viewers, the process of learning to trust images that arrived so lightly in the depths of a meditative state was subtle and complex. There were plenty of misses as well as hits because the symbolic filter that interprets unconscious knowledge weaves a tapestry that is always congruent with our beliefs and keeps our egos in control. Learning how to filter that filter through a different filter altogether adds a new dimension to our understanding.

The government was interested in remote viewing because of its practical value. All intelligence must be cross-correlated and understood in terms of intentions, meanings, the Bigger Picture, so results of RV alone were never trusted, any more than a single intercepted message tells the whole tale. Because competitive intelligence and counter-intelligence are necessary to compete in a global knowledge economy, some corporations are experimenting in remote viewing. Naturally, our consensus reality inhibits open discussion of even the possibility.

New ideas migrate from the edge to the center. The doctor who first discussed battered child syndrome says that when he first spoke openly about it, he was greeted by silence. No one asked questions. Out in the hallway, however, a physician would say, you know, I did see symptoms like those just the other day....

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Now we "all know" there's such a thing as "battered child syndrome" and we know how we know it.

I have had the same experience giving talks about UFO phenomena to educated professionals. Someone often hangs back and waits to share a secret of which he acts almost ashamed, what happened one night when he and other fighter pilots were scrambled after a radar target or what someone confided in the middle of the night at some remote outpost in Viet Nam.

When we enter the real web, the nodes that represent others glow according to their power in our lives. We follow vectors of energy in the medium of our collective consciousness, navigating as if in a mist irradiated intermittently by sudden sun. Symbols link to symbols which suddenly symbolize something beyond the power of symbols to say.

When we see through symbols on our monitors into the consciousness manipulating pixels into luminous images, we maneuver in a web of which the Internet is merely an emblem. The nexus is unmistakable. But this is an experience into which we can allow ourselves to settle or be led, not something that can be taught. Teaching in this domain is only a way of drawing pictures that depict the edge of the ocean and invite us to wade into the surf. Once we know there is a coastline, then we can choose to dive.... and one day know what it means to sink and sit lightly on the reef, breathing in and breathing out, chasing nothing, letting everything in the sea that is wondrous and strange come to us.

January 2 1999