Overthinking the Interwebs

"Mythology creep" is a big issue for me. I spend most of my time fostering a massive internal mythology, and this process is largely flavored by my current environment and activities; the world around me seeps into my brain's deeper mechanics and the mythology-of-the-day paces itself by this rhythm. These days I work a lot with media; my job is really just the ongoing process of funneling media, diverting it off the main reservoir and redirecting it along a series of more focused streams and riverbeds. This means that I spend about eight work-hours a day in front of a computer, in addition to two or three hours of computer-based personal activities (including my twelve-step therapeutic regimen). So when I tell you that technology has played a prominent role in the mythology the last few years, you'll understand the emphasis with which I use the word 'prominent.'

Right now I just want to talk about how the internet figures in to the whole thing. Like most of my thematic obsessions, its tied directly to The Common Theme - the Swedenborgian concept of a viscerally graspable underlying spiritual reality. I hate trying to articulate the concept itself, because its exactly the sort of thing that language is really bad at, but here goes. The gist of the matter is that my thoughts are never coming directly from the physical world - that's obvious, I can't see them or taste them. I can however choose to do stuff in the physical world, and these actions will inevitably direct my thoughts down a certain path (diverting them off the main reservoir and down a series of more focused streams and riverbeds). I can also choose to focus on certain thoughts, or recall something lodged in recent memory, and what I dwell on is going to greatly affect my mood. There's a mechanism at work here, between the choices I make and the thoughts that I have (and vice versa), and the 'underlying spiritual reality' concept is just one description of how that mechanism might work. A description which I happen to think is true. While I'm walking down the street in Omaha, having a hypothetical argument with someone in my head who rubbed me the wrong way, my 'spirit' is simultaneously wandering amongst a society of hateful spirits, and it's their thoughts, their love of resentment, that is fueling my current mental fuming in Nebraska. I'm actually in hell in that moment, and in that moment hell is inside me.

I like to use this example to encapsulate the whole thing: when I was more of a teenager, every once in a while I would find myself in a conversation about the occult. Someone has a ghost story that happened to their uncle, and that reminds someone else of the actual haunted house they heard about where a dozen people or more have seen the same apparition of the dead woman in the floral spring dress. This goes on past dark, and at some point there's a discernible change in the room's atmosphere. Ghosts stop being this weird intellectual thing and become more of a remote possibility, and at any rate people are now looking over their shoulder every five seconds and will likely have a harder time going to sleep that night. I like to think about the spiritual reality mechanism here - that people have been talking about evil creepy spirits, and suddenly it feels like they're all around. Because, on a spiritual level, they are all around - they've been invited in, and are whispering gross nothings into everybody's ears.

So, the Internet. I was going to talk about that.

The thing with the Internet is that it provides (for me) a really conveniently excellent model of this spiritual reality business. Or, for that matter, the collective unconscious. In both cases, you've got this huge nebulous ocean of seemingly infinite possibilities. You can't index it or track its size, and yet to fish anything out requires only the will to do so (and a quick Google search). In one moment you could not have ever been aware that something even exists, and in the next you're presented with reams of information about it, web portals devoted to its preservation and forums to its discussion and encouragement. You can check something out once and leave it forever, or you can then adopt it as part of your regular internet routine, becoming an entrenched member of its community. And like the spiritual world, doing so requires very little more than simply the sheer act of curiosity. My internet browsing experiences are very much like this, and sometimes, depending on my mood, I end up in some pretty weird places.

Just to needlessly bring the two worlds together, I like to picture that some websites actually are hosted by ethereal servers in the spiritual world, that there are little pockets of hell with demons learning javascript and pumping out Flash ads.

I keep coming back to the idea that modern psychology is defined by the computer, which provided a mainstream analogy for component-based neurology to gain traction (different brain clusters process information differently, much like a CPU, RAM and hard drive, etc.) Before computers we were stuck explaining everything with tubes and steam, and had no use for things like the prefrontal cortex or limbic system. Does the Internet help explain the spiritual world in a similar way? Maybe it just confuses the issue. In my mythology the Internet always serves as a physical analogy to the invisible web of influences that connect humanity, but I might just be weird like that.