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By Rabbi Dr. Moshe Dror

Again, I call on my media mentor Professor Neil Postman to relate to what he and in many ways, I, see as at least five things we need to know about technological Change.

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By Rabbi Dr. Moshe Dror

I had the great good fortune and privilege to study with one of the most significant Media commentators of our era-Professor Neil Postman. I studied with him for my PhD at New York University in the Media Ecology program that he originated and ran. I would like to put some of what I have been writing about in these blogs into some historic context. Some of the basic themes dealt with are derived from Postman’s classic book “Technopoly: Surrender of Culture to Technology”, New York, Vintage Books, 1993.  What Postman deals with is at least two decades old and during these 20 years or so there have been some modest and tentative changes in the classroom but not much in the churches and synagogues and the pews.

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By Rabbi Dr. Moshe Dror

We have seen that there is a vast literature and reservoir of ideas about the theme of “virtual space” in the Christian tradition, as was detailed by Margaret Wertheim in her masterful study ( see Cyber Or 28 and 29)on the Pearly Gates of Cyberspace.

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By Rabbi Dr. Moshe Dror,

Margaret Wertheim goes on to deal with the Bible on steroids and “Mansions in the Sky”. She suggests that “Transcendence, Immortality, and Resurrection-these are dreams beginning to awaken in the cyber-religious imagination.”
For a chapter by chapter synopsis of the book by Prof. Varadaraja Raman look at-
www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/2679/Default.aspx
Wertheim suggests that these visions of Cyber-immortality and cyber-resurrection are a repackaging of the classical Christian idea of the soul in digital form. This “cyber-Soul” is the part of what I am dealing with in relation to Cyber Or.
Wertheim relates to the Christian aspects of the soul. But it is obvious that every spiritual tradition has some ideas about what we translate as soul. Just for your amusement look at the “BrainyEncyclopedia” under “soul”. Also try Google and its 254 million hits on soul and of course a long article in Wikipedia.
In the Jewish tradition there are at least five (5) dimensions or levels, or gradations to what we call as “soul”:
Nefesh: The creature –the lower soul that relates to behavior and action.
Ruach-: Spirit- relates to the emotions.
Neshamah: Inner soul-relates to the mind and intelligence.
Chayah: the Living One-relates to the bridge between the first flash of conscious insight and its super-conscious origin.
Yechidah: single one- relates to the ultimate unity of the soul in God.
If one simply considers all of the various possible permutations and computations of these themes, you can easily see how rich and innovative the possibilities are.
In addition to the classical religions that we know about, we need to pay due respect to the mystic and mythic poesy of Pythagoras. He was a contemporary of Buddha in India, of Zoroaster in Persia, of Confucius and Lao-Tzu in China- the significant era that Karl Jaspers called the Axial Period of history. Pythagoras suggested that the essence of reality is not in matter-in the classical world the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water but rather in the immaterial magic of numbers. The soul was essentially mathematical. It was the soul’s ability to express things “Ratio-nally”-literally in terms of ratios.
So too what is downloaded into computers is in terms of numbers –Zero and One-:0-1. The language of cyberspace is made up of the binary 0-1.
Analogously, in the Jewish tradition, according to the Sefer Yetzirah_ Book of Creation, the oldest book of Kabbalah, the Jewish Mystical tradition… the world was created with number as well. It is also so obvious to see in India that the symbols of one and zero the lingam and yoni-the male and female are seen everywhere. More, if you look at the sacred Tree –the Tree of Life also associated with the space of Paradise and Eden, it is obvious that the form of the Tree of Life is modeled with “lines and circles=zeros and ones=lingam and Yoni. All part of the similar symbol systems of sacred geometry.
Thanks to Margaret Wertheim we can see that this cyber world of virtuality and is a modern version of an ancient set of systems in new formulations.
Rather than the emperor has no clothes, we now have a emperor with NEW clothes- NEW weaves, NEW texts, and NEW imaginings.

By Rabbi DR. Moshe Dror

The last Cyber Or 27 ended with the ideas of a Cyber Hymnal and Cyber Piyut. These are texts and we mentioned that Texts are derived from the Latin for Weave—so we are talking about cyber weaving and dealing with all sorts of virtual /augmented / immersive reality—all modern and all the new stuff of Cyberia.
Right?
Well think again.
Many cyber enthusiasts are relating to some sort of techno-religious sensibility and are convinced that cyberspace is some new sort of spiritual space.
Any of you who are reading these blogs of mine would love to read a wonderful and masterful book by Margaret Wertheim-“The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet” (Norton, New York, 1999). She traces the history of Western ideas about space and how these have been informed by cultural and especially religious themes. From Dante’s Inferno to The Internet of today, the West developed a dualistic conception about the body and soul which are seen as two distinct realms. Within this tradition, the immaterial has always been equated with the spiritual.
Margaret Wertheim is a science writer and commentator and deals with the relationships between science and religion.
Much of these comments are found and interpreted from her last chapters ((seven and eight) from her book.

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