Spirit and the Virtual World

On the face of it, the spirit world and the Virtual Adept perspective couldn't be more at odds. What does shamans dancing around with sticks talking to disembodied ghosts have to do with computed reality?

Thankfully, not everything is as it seems. To a VA, the spirit world is just like any other world - the manifested array of data. In fact, many spirit realms hold and display data better than the "real" one. While the VA tools and the Dreamspeaker tools are quite different, the realities on the other side of the tools is quite amenable to both.

Consider. The material world is a concrete mirror of the spirit world. Changes in the material influence the spiritual, and vice versa. The spirit world it complicated, ambiguous, and messy, while things in the material world are a bit more concrete.

Ambiguous and messy on one side...
Apparently clear on the other...
Interacting representations of data...


Does anyone else get the sense that the material world is reality's graphic user interface (GUI)? The platform designed to make things appear simpler than they are so everyone can play with code?

Recognizing this multiple representation is required for advanced reality hacking. Some of my VA brothers call the Gauntlet a firewall. I say that's crap. Firewall between what? Set up by what purpose. For my part, the Gauntlet is nothing more than learning how to program in MS-DOS when you could just rely on the easier interface.

Now, I've argued elsewhere that there is no foundation on which all other reality is set, so I don't want to slip into that here. I don't want to claim that the spirit world is the real one and the material one is simply predicated on it. It isn't.

But I will boldly assert without hesitation that the coding possibilities are broader when working the the Umbra. In the material world, perfect circles are impossible. In the Umbra, plenty of ideals exist exactly as their paradoxical natures suggest. This opens up radical computing options, as there are so many more forms of data infrastructure. Just as many VAs prefer coding without GUIs, I prefer to code in the spirit world. There are more geometries, more codes, more recursion, more ciphers, more fractals, more sets...

Besides, the Digital Web is hella cool. In addition to hacking Technocratic databases using glowing motorcycles and light disks, the Digital Web is just a hop away from the Astral Plane, the Dreaming, and the Horizons themselves.

So dance around your fires, shaman dude. It turns out your hallucinogenic ayahuasca was just your way of crashing your GUI and booting up your command-line interface (CLI). I think I'll call them DOSpeakers from now on.