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.
