Having seen the latest episode of Charmed, I found it to contain an
experience that I've had happen to me at a number of times in my life,
many of them on the Internet of all places.
That experience was empathic connection.
Before I had any real religion or spirituality - and before I had any
understanding of the mystical or the occult - I started experiencing
the feelings of certain people as though they were my own. In some
cases those feelings totally overwhelmed me and put me in the world
that the people involved experienced. Before I got involved in Reiki or
knew what it was or how it was experienced, someone told me that she
was sending me Reiki energy - and the next day I felt surrounded by an
inexpressible heat; a heat that warmed me and gave me energy. One time
I experienced someone's anguish so immediately that I, with the lights
turned off, started putting the thoughts and feelings I was getting on
paper - and came up with a poem that carried that person's voice. I
would feel someone's spirit calling in distress, and then she would
call in distress. I would wake up at odd hours of the night with the
feeling of someone around me - after she and I had stopped
corresponding - and I would turn on the computer, and there would she
be, after having abandoned those particular channels for months. I
was communicating with someone and feeling pains in my stomach, after
which she told me that she had constant stomach pains.
It seems to me that the Internet is a medium that makes such things
more common among its readers. Through a mechanism I don't quite
understand, it appears that the voice of the person carries along with
the message that the person is seeking to transmit - and rather than
only getting the written message, the reader also get the mindset of
the person behind it. And rather than simply transmitting the expressed
thought, the poster transmits an entire mindset. If this mindset is
hostile, it stays in the mind and heart of the reader until he either
refutes it rationally or does some other things - I won't tell you
which things - to clear himself of its debris. If it is informative,
or friendly, or useful, then it becomes possible to use it for good.
I had more such experiences than I care to put a finger upon, both on
the Internet and elsewhere. But the prevalence of such experiences on
the Internet leads me to believe that there are special forces at play.
It's almost as though the Internet is a mechanized consciousness; a
kind of information supersewer that taps into the trends and chaos and
pattern and instinct of the people in the society and reshapes the
social consciousness according to people's arguments and beliefs and
insight and psychic entities.
It is also a medium in which it becomes possible for people to
encounter those to whom they are close mentally or ideologically. A
person comes in ****ning a kind of light - and those who need it come to
it. Along with them of course come the beneficiaries of social
entrapment, confusion and misery - and these come and attack those who
have something new, useful or beneficial to say.
I know someone who believes that society is an actual psychic entity -
a voice, composed of various lies and entrapments and snares, that
essentially keeps people in slavery inside their heads. I had a strong
empathic connection with this person as well, and when I would read his
work it was almost precisely the answer to my questions, corrections of
things I was doing wrong and guides for what I was going through. He
would speak to general audience, but what I was getting was
communication that precisely addressed my concerns - concerns I had at
the time - with precision exceeding chance by millions of factors, even
though I told him nothing at all about what was taking place in my life
at the time. There are two possible explanations for this: One, what I
was working with was something that resonated in the "collective
consciousness" that he was studying; and two, that he was picking up on
what was in my mind and addressed it as though it was a part of the
collective consciousness when it was only what was going on in my mind.
Tim Leary was quite gung-ho about the Internet. He referred to it as
the LSD of 1990s. While much of what I have been encountering on the
Internet was of the worst, and not the best, of humanity - while I've
been seeing all over the place extremely low-level behavior and hideous
attitudes and beliefs and personalities, both from the Right and from
the Left, instead of consciousness expansion - he was right about one
thing: It does make possible very close and very immediate interaction
with people - both people with whom one would rather communicate and
ones with whom one would rather not. It is certainly true that the
Internet brings people closer. This makes possible both the best and
the worst. And in impressing upon people who've never had spiritual
experiences the immediate presence of people's psyches, it goes a long
way to combat the ignorance that many people - especially many of the
tekkie types attracted to the Internet - possess about such things as
empathy and spiritual contact.
Ilya Shambat.
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