Abstract

Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane, states that the sacred is that which ontologically founds the world. The sacred is the place for being, in its primary sense; all else is measured against it. This sacred space can be local and entirely personal, or global and hierarchical, but the essence remains. Space has vanished; we find ourselves,through instruments of mediation, together in the same room, looking at each other, occasionally revolted by what we see, occasionally aroused, and sometimes interested – the Circus Planet Earth, a tent with a T1, and a hundred million rings. All our sacred space is suddenly the same. The ego erodes; that figment of the Greek imagination, born when man as individual asserted the I of self over the I of species – and warred with himself ever since – will be gone inside a generation, lost to a growing hum of collective being. This collection is both rape and consummation; if we ignore the death of human ego, we will find our selves pierced by a thousand constructions that combine biomechanics and propaganda into forms of mediation which will leave us wholly as  receptacles for the being of others – Eros enslaved, ending as cyborg. There is another way; connection need not presuppose domination, or mediation, control. The ecology of souls, together behaving as one organism, has in its form the embedded understanding that each part is important, and none dominant. The center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. Pierre Teillard de Chardin called this nexus of connection noosphere; studies of connective mediation are equally studies in noospherics. The space of our connection is the ground of our being, the collective beyond we, the singular before I. The original Ontos can not be named, Tao before division, Nothing before Fool. Our final unity, in either form – or perhaps in a middle  which avoids the hegemony of either and creates a new assemblage of heavens and hells – is unspeakable now, for the Logos of our new aeon has yet to be uttered.

• Mark D. Pesce (USA) is an author, researcher, performer and cyberspace theorist. As one of the inventors of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) – which brings the World Wide Web into the third dimension – his work seeks to extend the noosphere into sensual and emotional domains of experience. He is the author of the recently published, “VRML: Browsing and Building in Cyberspace”.

Full text p.229-231