Life

Architecting Heaven: the action of writing one's ideal world into being

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

~William Stafford

Perhaps the most confusing aspect of being human is the experience of being alone. We want to connect with one another, to know one another, to be immersed in love with one another. And so we enter the Internet and spend truly huge amounts of time creating worlds to connect within. But for some, deep down,
there is an unsettling feeling that this entire experience in social networks is not meeting what we are looking for. And the question arises as to why this unsettling feeling persists.

Perhaps this feeling is about coming to terms with that moment no-one has mastered…the moment
of passing from flesh into mystery. The moment of physical death. A thousand philosophies speculate on the passage from physical life into the hereafter: from
becoming fodder for worms to reunion with friends and family in the lap of God. The reality is that we cannot avoid this day that eventually comes to us all. So
we keep strong and love those around us the best we can. I believe that humans are architecting spiritual realms via social networks. And I believe that this is what the massive growth of communication in today’s world is all about…a discovery of how to contend with the final doorway, a planning of how one would like “forever” to look like, a participation in a fantasy world that one can make real in a very short amount of time.

To say this again, more directly: The myriad groups and circles that now exist in the digital realm are really a spiritual creation as well. Perhaps we are at a point in history where community created in these digital-light realms precedes or presages the fabrication of such experience in the spiritual realm. Whether one believes in life after death or not, this possibility is here with us now: the bonding of “invisible” presences across the world through image, light and thought. We do this via our laptops and mobile devices every day. And perhaps this is a global training in how to do this with only our minds, only our hearts, only our feelings.

What a truly amazing experience these social networks can be! The experience: I can now see the invisible through my glowing screens. To be clear, I can see the faces and hear the voices of those who share a specific passion with me, who share a common dream with me, who also believe what I believe. Social networks are dream-maps. And it is via these dream maps that I can expand into all that I am meant to be. Giving oneself to one’s deepest passion and discovering a community of support for this has never been so easy, so simple and so satisfying. With one keyword entered into a search field, an individual can make a passage from loneliness into togetherness, from fear into love, from death into life. And that’s a major gift of this experience we are all sharing presently in these networks of light and life.

My conclusion is that humans are architecting their heavens every day via social networks. Humans are writing their ideal worlds into being within the Internet. When I find those who love what I love and share time and food and presence with them…I know, in that moment, that I will have experienced what I believe about the hereafter. These millions of digital circles are a massive proof of humanity’s core desire to be reunited. To find a specific Twitter list, a specific Facebook group, a specific LinkedIn group and to correspond with those who occupy this group…this is an image of humanity’s greatest aspiration: to find one’s people…and be with them, in the flesh, in the spirit, in the heart.

Follow your muses: a social journey from image to reality using the World Wide Mind

You are sitting on a couch in your living room. There is a feeling in your body, an image in your mind, a story germinating in your heart. And there is desire associated with that feeling, that image, that story. And fear also.

You formulate a question on how to expand that feeling, how to get into that image, how to live that story. You open up your laptop and go to Quora (http://www.quora.com). You type in your question related to this image, this story. And you get answers from global experts.

You decide to find more experts in this area. You go to Listorious (http://www.listorious.com) and type in words you associate with this story that is growing now. You find leading thinkers in Twitter related to those words. You find lists of people who are living that story.

You create a Twitter account (http://www.twitter.com). You follow all of those leaders. You listen to what they say.

You go to Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) and find those leaders and become friends with a few of them.

You sign up for Research.ly (http://www.research.ly) and begin interacting with a unique community built around your story.

An event where many of these new friends and leaders will be shows up via Twitter. You go sign up for the event at EventBrite (http://www.eventbrite.com/)

At the event, you see on Foursquare (http://www.foursquare.com) that two of your favorite influencers have checked in at a bar around the corner.

After several bottles of wine, you learn about a community of people these two are going to live with next year in 2012. It’s a community that fits your exact ethos, the story that has gone from being an image and a feeling to a reality. You book a ticket on your Kayak app (http://www.kayak.com).

While on the plane, you realize that you may need to fund your time away. You take the 11 hour flight to create a Kickstarter project (http://www.kickstarter.com) and when you land that night you upload it. Within 60 days you have received an ample sum towards producing a documentary film about the process you went through in discovering your dream via social networks.

At the premier of the film at an independent film festival, you meet the love of your life. Someone snaps a photo of the two of you and posts it to Instagram: (http://instagr.am/). A link to the film’s website is posted in a tweet with the photo. The story gets picked up and posted to the New York Times. The chairman of a transmedia entertainment company loves the story and the film is purchased as part of a global ad campaign for a major clothing brand to demonstrate the power of dreams. You are paid millions of dollars up front and receive healthy royalties for the life of the film.

Later, on a distant beach on a nameless island surrounded by loved ones, you smile and reflect on how effortless it all was.

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. ~Joseph Campbell

Resources: The World Wide Mind

Iridescence

There are times in life when you find something so iridescent that nothing else can compare. In such moments head directly into the experience of beauty, for these are rare times that heal the soul, renew the mind and bring levity to one’s life journey! ~ Nathaniel Hansen