Pueblo, Colorado. 1993.

When I graduated from high school, many years ago I realize now as I think back, I received my first computer as a gift, to prepare me for college. I suppose it was meant to serve as a glorified word processor to help me type papers, and maybe calculate the stray figure here and there, but I had much more planned for it than that. As soon as I could manage, I signed up for a computer account at the university I was planning to attend and started using it to dial into a server there and remotely run Unix programs that let me access the Internet. The programs for email, the Web, Usenet, and even Gopher, were all pretty crude and text-based, but it was still an eye opener to have such easy access to so much information, and I was soon enthralled.

At the time I was living at my aunt's house, so I had to restrict my use of the modem to late at night to keep from tying up the phone line for everyone else. It was during one of these late-night excursions into Internet weirdness that I started to think about the telepathy and parapsychology research fads of the seventies and how they had all come to naught. Those groovy efforts to develop and prove the ability to communicate mind-to-mind had all failed, but I wondered if the reason why might have been other than it appeared.

It was entirely possible, I reasoned, that the failure to demonstrate telepathy had been less the fault of an absence of extra-personal sensitivity, than the sheer enormity of the challenge of linking systems as complex as two human minds. Perhaps direct access to the mind of another was not possible because of the sheer boundlessness, the infinite mystery that is a human consciousness. Maybe those would-be hippie telepaths were just too ambitious in the goal of their efforts at mental communion. What if there were another entity available, less intricate than a solitary human brain, but still staggering in it's complexity and built for connection? What if the New Age were waiting for the advent of the Digital Age? In short, what if I could connect to the Internet with my mind?

Having no expertise in either extra-sensory perception or computer science, I decided that the only way to approach the matter would be through the use of my intuition. With this in mind I unplugged the telephone line from my modem and contemplated it for a few seconds before instinctively inserting it gently into my ear canal. The fit was just about perfect and, more importantly, it felt right, so I arranged myself comfortably in my chair and closed my eyes.

As I sat there, trying to empty my mind, the seven tones of the local number for the university server popped into my head, completely unbidden. Again, this felt so natural and appropriate that I went with it, repeating the number silently to myself like a rapid-fire mantra, over and over until I entered a sort of trance state. As my immersion in the trance deepened, I switched from repeating the tones in my mind to speaking them aloud. “Do-do, do-do, do-do-do” I repeated over and over, quietly at first, then with greater volume and intensity, as I swayed back and forth in time with the digits.

I knew that I ought to keep my voice down to avoid waking my cousin sleeping in the next room, but at that point it was as though another will had taken hold of me. Not only was I powerless to stop what was happening, but I was incapable of even willing myself to stop, as the entirety of my being was increasingly focused one-pointedly on the frantic dialing ritual that had me in its grip. Finally, when I thought I could bear no more, and my convulsive swaying threatened to throw me from my seat, a deafening sound that was not a sound exploded in my brain and my eyes opened wide. It was the digital scream of a dial-up connection.

Consciously, I had only a very rudimentary grasp of Unix commands, but I immediately found that my new state of communion with the Internet had unleashed a torrent of intuitive knowledge of operating systems and computer programs from deep within my unconscious, where the archetypes of computer and information science dwell. At a speed far greater than any man could type, I was taking part in the life of that vast, living network, as the text that was it's life blood washed over me and carried me along with it. I marveled at the wonders of images displayed inline with text. Live videos of remote locations thousands of miles away gave me added eyes into the physical world. Deep in the recesses of the alt newsgroups, I even found other ghosts in the system, visitors like myself that joined me in my exploration of that informational world.

Throughout all of this though, I maintained complete awareness of the immediate reality of my room around me. As I delved into the content of the Internet, I also paced back and forth in front of my desk. As I carried on multiple on-line conversations simultaneously, I also dug through my tape collection for just the right music for the situation. The physical world was simply overlaid with an electronic one that blended seamlessly, and neither appeared more real than the other.

From the beginning I suspected that the telephone cord in my ear was nothing more than a crutch. If I could learn to connect without it, I surmised, there would be nothing preventing me from staying like this all the time. Just then I had a dark premonition of a world in which the power to remain like this, always connected, was within the reach of everyone. I saw countless multitudes stumbling about in a sort of dazed distraction, unable to discern where one world left off and the other began. I saw the false promise of connection that this state offered lead the masses inexorably into isolation and despair. I saw, in an inexplicable yet foreboding vision, videos of cats.

This final vision put me into a state of panic and anger in the face of that fallen world to come. As I paced back and forth frantically in one world, I rampaged through the other. Server after server fell before my on-line fury, flame wars raged in my wake, and someone was pounding on the door to my room, telling me to quit jumping around and go to bed. When I finally strayed too far from the phone jack and the cord fell from my ear, I fell to the floor in a heap from the sudden shock of the disconnect.

When I came to I desperately tried to jam the cord back into place, nearly damaging my eardrum in the process, but it was too late. The connection was gone.

Coming down from my experience of oneness with the Internet was hard, but eventually I was able to ease back into the rhythms of the real world. Within six months the data flashbacks had mostly stopped, and one year later it was as though the whole thing had never happened, with one exception: I was never able to completely rid myself of the foreboding that accompanied my dark vision of perpetual connection. To this day I do not own a smart phone because of it, and you could not convince me to try on a Bluetooth earpiece for any price.

I still have more than my share of failings and limitations, but since those days I have worked toward opening myself to the world, and have seen my meager spirit begin to mature and expand in some small measure because of it. Recently I have even been wondering whether this modest spiritual advancement would have made a difference if I had attained it as a youth, before I had this defining experience with the Internet. Perhaps I might have had a more productive and serene integration with cyberspace, free of the darkness, if I could have only opened my heart to it, and not just my mind.

As I have grown more certain that this is the case, I have worked a new occasional practice into my routine. When the inspiration strikes me, I now take the statue of the Buddha down from his perch atop the Heart Sutra on the little altar in my apartment and carefully set it aside, along with the incense and other items. Then I create a new mandala there with my wireless router at its center and sit before it in quiet contemplation, trying to connect.