Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0711281056350.16227@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Bondage of Existence
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:56:47 -0500 (EST)
Bondage of Existence We were talking about Second Life this evening and I realized something, that no matter how much you critique the application/site, you talk about events there - and events as if they're happening in the 'real world.' What other environment generates such a self-created ongoing diegetic? Things falling from the sky, people griefing others, people wandering around, creating and destroying, talking and talking, maybe making a liv- ing. SL plays the 'real world,' of course however defined. And that is its strength - semantics and content moving among ordinary subjectivities. "There exists not one being who is unenlightened from the awakening to his own nature By their very intrinsic nature the beings in hell, ghosts, animals, gods, titans, men and even worms and so on in the dung, are eternally blissful, for they do not merely experience the pleasure of the gods and the titans." (Hevajra Tantra, trans. Farrow and Menon.) http://www.alansondheim.org/holdme.mp4