If we view lived time as lines of movement with beginnings . . ... ..

.        .    .    .  .

... .. . .

     . .

                and endings.. .

   . ..   . .

. .. .. . .       ..

  .   . .     .         .

we can, by joining up the dots, see the lines that characterise particular lived experiences. Such as those of humans, dogs, flowers, thoughts, suns, table legs, and rainbows. Life itself would then consist of a great big mess of tangled lines, the statistics of which would probably reveal a lot of concentric circles. In a way, a circle is a shorthand for life itself. The beginning ends by returning to its source, the body decomposes in the mud, the sun sets to rise again.

Viewing history as an entanglement of lived experiences, we might see it as an arc, without a discernible beginning or end, intersecting our horizon at both corners of our eyes. A great galaxy of lines of flight shooting across the night sky. Looking at our place within this arc we would see a coalescing of lines turning round on themselves, biting their own tale off to disappear in a firework of circles, large and small, marking the death of a friend, the ending of a language, a life form, a way of being.

It is our lot, it seems, to live through a time of endings.

In such a time, it is difficult to know what to feel and it is even harder to relate to the spectacle of political charade, cut-throat capitalism, reality-show news casts, immiserating poverty and ecological blighting which jumps at us from screens in private and public places. It's difficult to know what is real. Words lose their feel, their character, their... taste. What does culture mean without the Aka-Bo language, the Eurasian Auroch, the Mbuti song? What does community mean without the tribe, the family, place or religion?

Is there anything that really connects us?

In a recent post, Tony Dias asks:

"What does community mean? We are physically isolated. The much touted networking age and its tools have not panned out, except to produce a new generation of billionaires on the backs of our free “content.”

Carving out virtual communities is as chimerical as any attempt to find “Virgin Territory” in our physical world, searching for a place to act with an unfettered agency.

Neither space exists."

In the general flutter of information, our voices drown and our attention is stolen away. While I do think online networks can achieve substance once they begin making connections that reverberate and manifest in offline firstlife, the idea of virtual communities as chimerical does not seem far off the mark. Perhaps better: virtual communities are fictional.

This is a thought which is at once bitter – it detracts 'realness' from my virtual relations, and alluring – I can avoid or lose aspects of my past, become a character of my own writing. It is in many ways a similar condition to the age old story of the explorer (which in the quote above exploits this anonymity in order to act with impunity) or to the contemporary cosmopolitan who has left her geographical community and thereby becomes someone else. Perhaps someone more.

The problem appears as one of lack of place – palpable ecologies replete with sensual features and reciprocating beings – to which we can anchor our cultural identities and achieve a sense of belonging. A pivotal question becomes: Can we find anchor points for our virtual lives that connect to our lived experience in firstlife? How do we avoid that our virtual characters disappear in the void of a commodified internet? How do we create sincere and tangible connections with virtual strangers in the fiction we are creating?

Tony continues in his usual, enigmatic style:

"What else is possible?

...

It’s all religion. Behavior rests on belief. All belief resides within a realm approached through a religious impulse, the arena of our hunger for meaning. No matter how it is expressed.

Religion is the “place” where meaning resides.

Where we hold meaning.

...

The space within which the religious impulse lives… Let’s call it the Theosphere – credit freely and thankfully given to JMG [John Michael Greer].

This sphere, a field. Within a Sheldrakean/Bohmian physics our universe is comprised of fields. In the way the Cubist Moment defined the canvas as a field.

A field is a particular form of place. Fields exist in an interpenetrating reality. They share location and transcend it. They are particular and hold all possibility. Everything implicated within an implicate order. In this cosmography there is no chaos, only orders we have insufficient perspectives to understand, to perceive their coherence.

...

What if we recognize that the space we crave is a space we can only find in community?

That the only clear space for community lies within the Theosphere.

A community lives as an expression of belief."

Rather than treating belief with the scepticism of the overly reductive, materialist mindset, this is an invitation to investigate how belief enfolds everything that is cognised (even by the overly reductive, materialist mindset). Seeing belief as a place which, due to its implication in the very nature of social life, transcends locality and reproduction (physical and economic), this is a possible anchor for our identities and belonging.

A community lives as an expression of belief. This reminded me of something Alastair McIntosh has written in Soil and Soul about Celtic spirituality and the bardic way of life:

"The issue, I think, is not whether Celtic spirituality ever existed, but the fact that a living spirituality connecting, soil, soul and society manifestly can and does exist. This is community in that word's most holistic sense. As Professor Meek himself wrote in an outstanding anthology of the nineteenth-century Gaelic bardic tradition, 'The poets' aims can be focused in on one word - "community"'. It is precisely to this 'Celtic's sense of community that the casualties of globalisation, which is to say many people in the modern world, turn for a bit of vision, hope and nourishment. Far from feeling threatened by this attention, the modern Celtic world could perhaps look on it as a continuation of an ancient tradition".

The Irish bards, as travelling shamans and performers, held together society and social order by providing a 'poetic map' of social and geographic relations, writes Alastair McIntosh. Thereby, they partook in creating what McIntosh calls 'the community of the soul'. This is a community where we can connect with and retrieve the unity of existence:

"Whatever our religion or lack of one, we need spaces where we can take rest, compose and compost our inner stuff, and become more deeply present to the aliveness of life. We need to keep one eye to the ground and the other to the stars. We need to remember that when we loose our wildness in creativity, it is God-the-Goddess – or call it Christ, Allah or Krishna or the Tao – that pours forth. It does so from within, as a never-ending river".

This, it seems to me, is a similar insight to seeing community as 'an expression of belief' – and it locates that community in the ongoing stream of life itself. In this way, community is not just an Ummah of believers. Community is expressed as participation in the order of life itself, as a movement that resonates with what Tim Ingold describes in Being Alive as "the unfolding of a continuous and ever-evolving field of relations within which beings of all kinds are generated and held in place".

Perhaps this is how the Theosphere can be an oasis for community. This is an oasis which cannot be 'carved out', defined or colonised. It can be 'grasped' only by participation, which is to say that it is not known through propositional knowledge.

In this light, the task of this 'networking age' is not so much forging (virtual) communities as it is finding roles for each of us within the wider community of life. (It is not a little perplexing that we should as living creatures be making such a statement.) This is the mark which should focus our aims.

And this points to something that has been settling on me over the last years: the 'virtual vs. real life' distinction obscures more than it helps. When I get frustrated with the pull on my attention that social media exerts, I sometimes want to 'leave', to go offline for good. But being offline does not solve the issue pertaining to my attention: a scatter-brain is the same whether it is online or offline. It is not the internet per se that is the problem and acting as if it was would be a grave mistake. Virtuality vs. real life only goes on to divide our already fragmented existence into yet another set of domains to which we can fix our tired notions of right and wrong.

Perhaps it would be more helpful to think of the problem as occurring along two gradients, one of amplification and one of fiction. The 'gradient of amplification' is a measure for how much faster we 'move', how much more information we process, how many more people we connect with. This is a quantitative measure which is sometimes inversely related to quality – like when a higher speed and amount of information means that less settles in the mind.

The 'gradient of fiction' tells us something about how far into fantasy we allow our online presence to take us. At the one end, here sits my firstlife me, inescapably Jeppe in appearance, texture, and speech. At the other end appears a smorgasbord of phantasms, a cloakroom packed with all the props and costumes needed to create a desired personality. This is a qualitative measure which says something about the realisability of my ideas, hopes and dreams.

Lacking a place to anchor my virtual character and relationships, I can proceed along the gradient of fiction to imagine all sorts of plots and scenarios involving my 'unfettered agency' amplified via memetic social networks. The further along the gradients of fiction and amplification I move, the more problematic it becomes to align my fiction with firstlife. I suspect this may be a major source of delusion regarding the internet: we cannot pin our hopes too far out along the gradient of fiction. It doesn't yield.

In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist observes that "[i]magining something, watching someone else do something, and doing it ourselves share important neural foundations … [imagination] is not a neutral projection of images on a screen. We need to be careful of our imagination, since what we imagine is in a sense what we are and who we become". Could it be that anchoring the imagination in the Theosphere is a way of finding a place for our (online and offline) fictions within the community of life or, indeed, the soul?

Maybe this could be a way to re-integrate abstracted meanings and notions into the 'continuous and ever-evolving field of relations' which gave rise to them in the first place and of which they are inextricably part? Maybe this would help align fiction and firstlife, create coherence between our actions and the wider field of relations which comprise our lifeworlds?

David Abram ends his seminal work The Spell of the Sensuous with an observation that: “Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are “true” or “false”, but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth”. In this perspective, the Theosphere is more than just another abstraction or concept, it be an expression of true or right relationship. One which could prove invaluable in navigating the difficult issues we face as connected, online, people surfing along the gradients of amplification and fiction.

This could help us overcome isolation and find our own place in the wider community of life as storytellers, makers, growers, carers, inventors, poets, artists, designers, activists, smallholders, teachers, scholars, herbalists or whatever role it is we find to hold us in place in the ever-evolving field of relations. It might shift our gaze outwards to the seventh generation and instil a sense of home which is larger than our immediate locality but more tactile and sensuous than fiction.

Rather than seeing history suspended before us as arching lines of flight we would perhaps then look around us and see it from within, connect with the terrible sadness, mourn the many circles lost and begin moving differently so that new lines can begin and the dance of life continue.