Virtual environments and their healing potentials (E)

From a spiritual perspective (at least mine...), we are eternal beings making vast array of physical experiences, in various time frames, dimensions, and parallel realities, all of this simultaneously. Some call that different lifetimes. The key point here is simultaneity: the various time frames (lifetimes) are like different areas of experience of the soul. They are connected, fundamentally interlaced. What happens in one scene affect all other scenes, in and out of time.

Our souls interact in various theaters of experience, physicality being one of these theaters. The more intense the experiences, the richest the learning for all aspects involved.

Biochemical nature of reality
When we create an image of an event in our mind, the brain does NOT make the difference between the image and the actual event. A good example is sexual fantasy. The body is flooded with the same endorphins if we imagine a sexual intercourse or if we do it physically. The same goes for any trauma, grief, joy, bliss. The key point is that we are spirit imagining a physical experience, and then manifesting it. Yet the manifestation is optional. The experience and its endocrinian effects are the same in imagination or in physicality. Same rush of adrenaline, seratonin or other endorphins, these catalysators of the feelings of being alive in a body...
Same experience, then, and ... it all happens in the mind.

Imagination never leaves the mind

In a world saturated with obligations, conditions and prohibition of all sorts (understand Real World, whatever that means...), in a society governed by penitentiary set of rules, it is difficult to really go through the experiences one needs to achieve in order to expand consciousness and become spiritually free. We are constantly inhibited, persecuted, brought back into the illusion of official normality. Hence the numerous life times needed to learn the simplest of things: being essentially all one and only one Mind, what you do to others you do to yourself...

So in our societies, we have several fuses to prevent the explosion of these unattended and socially unspeakable impulses and deep needs of freedom. The movies and video games hitting the market today are a good illustration of these fuses - kill-kill-fuck-fuck.... It does help to keep the global unattended emotions and impulses at a “reasonable” level, where they will not threaten the consensus of comfort and so-called respectability.

Yet these impulses, desires and fundamental needs of freedom - (our real nature we are trying to own back) are all images issued from the mind, experienced in the mind and remaining in the mind, until they are transcended and transformed into wisdom - awakening.

Could virtual environments have healing potentials?
The main reason for accepting social programmation - I should say castration of our creative and free nature – is simply survival, physical, emotional or social survival. If you don’t behave, you are left aside if you are lucky, banned or killed if you are not.
However, if there is no danger of loosing your life or your reputation, if the worse that can happen is having to create a new account, opportunities emerge to experience new, outrageous or undreamed aspects of yourself with much, much more freedom and easiness. Nothing new here, you will say... and I agree.
However, the implication of this new medium of relationships and experiences may be underestimated... Nothing leaves the mind, right? All experiences are of the mind, by the mind, between aspects of the mind... So the experiences made in virtual environments are as valuable as the physical ones...
Virtual environments provide fields of experimentation, just like any other framework of incarnation... These virtual frameworks are as valid as any other for solving issues, testing behaviors, sharing love...
It produces the same rewards than any other framework.
In this sense, virtual environments or what they will become in the future may be a unsuspected booster for our collective evolution, not to mention the obvious business potential that is gradually being recognized.

New synaptic connections in the global brain
One more aspect of these new virtual environments must be mentioned. The rapid development of the technologies of information - that started to explode in the early 20st century - has had a tremendous impact in our societies. It is just the beginning. The telephone and the airplane have transformed our our world profoundly. Then internet has boosted even more this transformation, adding a layer of immediacy and freedom to human interactions. This alone has transformed our world irremediably.

With Second Life and the other emerging 3D environments, a medium emerges that can carry emotions, feelings and yes - intuitions, in an even more immediate way. People are in presence of each other. It is real. This new mode of interaction may transform human interactions profoundly.

There is a striking analogy between the development of intelligence in the human brain and the development of the global intelligence of mankind: it amounts to the number of synaptic connections. In the brain, synaptic connections occur with new understandings, behaviors of insights. In the global mind of mankind, new platforms of consciousness occur with the increase of new “synaptic connections”, new connections between aspects of mankind. Internet is already demonstrating the impact of this phenomenon.
Virtual environments takes the process to a new level and dimension, allowing a deeper connection between the parts of mankind, unhampered by the social convention that keep us locked into the past patterns.

A pinch of prospective
Mankind is presently in a dead end. It is only a dead end caused by our present images and experiences of what is commonly decided to be real (authorities, nationalisms, religions, ideas of self, etc.). There is a way out of the doom days ahead, which implies a redefinition of our images of reality. This can be done safely and and very rapidly in virtual environments like Second Life.
There are many challenges ahead. In the context of this reflexion, let’s hope that the population of virtual communities will grow rapidly enough and will be composed of enough free spirits to allow this new set of values to become the norm, before the barochial businesses could corrupt this new potential.

Alain-Yan Mohr (aka Adalbert Singh)