Art by Phillip Ratner. Dr. Rabbi Moshe Dror continues to unpack the secrets in the Biblical texts
Ask yourself what does the word “journey” mean?
It comes from the Old French for a Day-journee. The amount of space that it takes to walk in one day.
Indeed you and I are on this quest as part of our being on the Hero’s Journey.
That “Day” has lasted for nearly 4,000 years and has been traveled by nearly half of the world population. If you add up all of the people who are members of the Abrahamic Religions: Jews, Christians, Moslems, Samaritans, Druze, Mandaeans, Rastafarians, and Baha’i – you will come up with about four billion people- roughly half of the world’s population.
Also consider that the “day” does not stay still in one place, rather it travels all around the globe as the earth moves around the sun-hence the globalization of the day—the journey.
So, what I want to do is to explore the expansion and re-interpreting of this one idea of Lech Lecha of Abraham as going into my and your:”authentic self”.
Abraham’s journey was in geographic space- in an external space, also he certainly was in an inner journey of interior space.
That is what makes up the Hero’s Journey in each of us as we are on our quest into our trans-modern world and cyberspace.
We dealt a bit with the correlation of the metaphors of sand and light-silicon and photonics in the blessing of God to Abraham after the binding of Isaac narrative.
We can see that there is a sort of progression from the first “thing” created, namely light and how the message of the Journey has enfolded over time.
Assuming that we start with light of day one-then we move to the light of day four –then to the stone /silicon of the tablets at Sinai- then to the papyrus of the ancient worlds-then to Parchment of the Torah scrolls over time- then to paper of the industrial world-then to the silicon of our electronic world –and now to the world based on light/ photonics.
So we have a vector of light>silicon>papyrus>parchment>silicon>light.
In a real way we are shifting from -light to light.
More yet. The Rabbis in the Talmud suggest “There are many lights in light”
(Talmud, Berachot, 52b).
Here are some of them that we will deal with in these blogs:
Reflected light
Emitted light
Era of light
Cathedrals of light
Continuous light (Lux Continua)
Surrounding light (Or Mekif)
Inner light (Or Penimi)
Physics of light
Metaphysics of light
Star light
Sun light
Others as well.
This journey will lead you and me through the Hero’s Journey as Cyber Pilgrims as we travel through Cyberspace and Cyberia.
As Nicholas Negroponte reminds us in his book “Being Digital” that “the information superhighway is about global movement of weightless bits at the speed of light” and how significant and important each individual is in this new culture. But it is not just the individual alone—it is the individual networked.
“In the post-information age, we often have an audience the size of one. Everything is made to order and information is extremely personalized…True personalization is now upon us.”
“The information superhighway may be mostly hype today, but it is an understatement about tomorrow. It will exist beyond people’s wildest predictions…we are not waiting for any invention. It is here. It is now.”
These ideas are also reflected in “Megatrends 2000” (Morrow, 1990) by John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene where they explore ten new directions for the 1990’s that are continuing now and into the foreseeable future. The next to last chapter 9 deals with “The Religious Revival of The Third Millennium”.
They suggest that” In turbulent times, in times of great change, people head for the two extremes:
Fundamentalism
And
Personal, Spiritual Experience” ( page 227).
They end the book with chapter 10 “The Triumph of the individual”.
“The great unifying theme at the conclusion of the 20th century is the triumph of the individual.”(page 298)
The triumph of the technologies of the individual networked.
