A TRINITARIAN VIRTUAL REALITY

So now I come to another flash point in my saga of the unwritten thesis: the meaning of “virtual.” My interpretation of the “virtual” was that it is the internal, conditional, and revisable construct of the world that a person carries inside them as a “map.” My advisor, who was -- after all -- on the faculty of a theological school, wanted me to admit that there WAS a reality and that it was GOD and that it was knowable through faith. I wouldn’t. To me the reality was that the concept of God is unknowable -- all we have to go on is the map because there is no permanent terrain.

However, the map can be redrawn and we can realize the distortions innate to the kind of map, for instance the mercator system which allows maps to be flat instead of round or even something so simple as printing the map of Montana small enough to get it on the same-sized page as the other states. As my sister-out-law remarked, the distances are very much longer than one expects after relying on a map of, say, Oregon.

This is a Shaman versus Trickster issue. Shaman stays put. Trickster explores the map and points out where it's wrong. They are two kinds of “virtual reality.”

I proposed that an “operating set” of maps would include three separate sheets of horizontal narrative time: the first would tell one’s story of what one thought was reality, through which consciousness travels and illuminates only so far as the headlight can reach. Underground, inaccessible to consciousness, runs a scientifically verifiable, documentable account of where the train has tracked. That doesn’t mean it’s real.

Then behind the train, high above, trails a long stream of smoke (This is a “steampunk” metaphor with a wood-fired locomotive. You could make something of taking on wood and water.) The vapor writhes, disappears in wind, changes width -- is generally always transforming, because memory is like that. But what we remember is what gives us the energy to go forward through life. Some people only keep the good stuff -- that makes them “run out of steam.” Some people only keep the bad stuff -- that could cause the boiler to explode.

Metaphors are great fun. A novelist tries to record the steam trail. A poet might choose a momentary word picture of a huge machine screaming through rain or snow. I’m particularly fond of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi story of a time-wormhole that allows a knight in armor to confront a Victorian railroad engine.

The point is that what one does, what one thinks one has done, and what one thinks will happen in the future are ALL “virtual,” constructs created by method and experience -- so far as it has been recorded and one chooses to allow into consciousness. If life has offered nothing but darkness and punishment, one’s hopes of finding love and fulfillment seem dim. And yet, because of the human ability to imagine what is not actually present or even necessarily rationally possible -- like God or a color greener than green or infinity -- people can suffer to the brink of extinction, all the while envisioning another better life.

These three virtual streams can be totally revised. “A stranger comes to town.” Everything changes. A little kid at the parade says, “That emperor is wearing no clothes!” Everything changes. But mostly the changes are subtle and no one notices.

This is in opposition to what many people think of as religion, which they have been taught is dogmatic, invariant, carved in stone. If things change, they panic. Commentators have been remarking that the people who are currently going ballistic over government health care, not recognizing that Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration have been around for decades, are really reacting to a culture that is shifting too quickly for them. Suddenly they’re out of work, their house is financially underwater, they’re told their kid got A’s that didn’t mean anything, and their car is destroying the planet. The people down the block don’t look like the people who used to live there and they may speak a foreign language. Like two-year-olds, citizens are staging tantrums of protest. They don’t know anything about the “real” world -- they’ve been living in the virtual world in their heads. But don’t blame them: there IS no real world. The real illusion is that things wouldn’t change.

Ideally, artists, novelists and ministers would have been gently pointing out the changes all along. But instead the radio and the prosperity churches have encouraged the idea that there’s One Right Way and Only One. My Netflix “movie” for the last few days has been “Battlestar Galactica” the Reimagined Version. It’s a tale about the future that mostly pivots around the difference between humans and machines with the machines taking the One Right Way point of view and even talking about God and the need to surrender to him.

Before the several years of episodes were shot, there was a “spine” with certain basic plot points established ahead of time. The actual stories were written as scripts some months in advance, and in fact this series tried to think about making them “actual” on a set quite a while ahead of time so that the people who create the illusions could develop them without hurrying. This helped the level of detail and coherence that makes it seem real.

In the commentary the producers remarked about two contrasting directors that they used. (Each episode is directed by someone different, though a director might be employed more than once.) Both directors were very successful, but in opposite ways. One did a lot of preparation with storyboards that guided each shot, extensive notes, a detailed and unvarying script. The other director started with the same materials, but was very open to suggestion at the moment of shooting, so that if someone had a sudden inspiration, a clever ad lib, or a fortuitous accident, he could swing with it -- build it in. The producers said that the results were equally good, but put the emphasis on slightly different aspects of the story.

Youngsters now are fully aware of “avatars” and “sim cities” and the possibility of parallel universes so that quite different versions of reality may be proceeding in different galaxies at the same time. I would not have much difficulty defining “virtual” for them. They don’t feel the same need to pin everything down. Despite their literally close relationships with wearable electronic devices, they are not machines.