Second Life also has a dreamlike quality, partly due to the fact that you can fly in SL, and flying is often associated with flying while lucid dreaming. And in dreams the bodies and forms are as illusory as in Second Life, but also as emotionally real as in waking life. But the brain neuroplasticity example shows that my sense of the reality of my arm in “Real Life” is also illusory!  And then Second Life has further twists, such as the default viewpoint, which is slightly above and behind my avatar – slightly out-of-body.

Add to this Analog Sundays – this is something my wife and I have started doing: no computers on Sundays. That’s also a really interesting, different experience: Third Life? My “Real Life” is actually a mixture of analog and on-line life, so going analog-only for a whole day is a sensory experience in itself.

This is fertile ground for awareness practices such as that of Illusory Body (one of the Six Yogas of Naropa). And reminiscent of the butterfly dream of Chuang-Tzu, where he couldn’t tell if he was Chuang-Tzu dreaming of a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of Chuang-Tzu. My first, inadvertent experience of lucid dreaming took this form, with the terrifying experience of really not knowing whether I was actually awake or had woken into yet another dream.

The consolation, of course, is the Buckaroo Banzai saying, wherever you go, there you are (although Thomas à Kempis said it in 1440, as have many Buddhists in just so many words over the last 2500 years). Identity: as Bucky Fuller said, I seem to be a verb.

A year ago I blogged Social Presencing Theater, as described by Otto Scharmer:

A new social art form I called Social Presencing Theater that stages media events and productions to connect different communities and their transformational stories by blending action research, theater, contemplative practices, intentional silence, generative dialogue, and open space.

The closest thing I can think of to this is the Indonesian shadow puppet play (Wayang Kulit). In the early 1970′s I was fortunate to be able to participate in such an all-night performance at the World Music College in Oakland, California. Behind the screen was the puppeteer, casting shadows with the puppets, singing and voicing stories from the Ramayana, interspersed with jokes and comments about current politics. The gamelan held a space of short and long-cycle rhythms, bursts of action within the long now. The participants – men, women, children – wandered around both sides of the screen, as well as through a food court for drinks, tasties, and Krakatoa Kretek smokes. The mythical intersected the present, the one illuminating the other.

In our world TV and computer screens also project colored shadows, but usually with little interplay of the news with the mythic. Bill Moyers is an exception, though still in the realm of talking heads.

But this is what the world needs. For example, Zero Emissions Day is coming September 21st – basically, turn off the energy consumption, and go analog. What if people took the opportunity to meet each other, in local groups, eat, talk, and perhaps celebrate in various ways, including theater – and then fed that back to the web, the global play?

Spread the meme!

According to Stephen Zarlenga, Director of the American Monetary Institute, “Loans were made in seed grains, animals, and tools to farmers. Since one grain of seed could generate a plant with over 100 new grain seeds, after the harvest farmers could easily repay the grain with ‘interest’ in grain.” However, what will an ounce of silver give rise to? Once interest was applied to money, debate and confusion arose that has continued to this very day. One of the central issues of this debate was how much interest should be applied.

Two observations arise from this. First, the conventional interest meme values scarcity: when money enters the system, there is only so much of it, and the interest due on repayment of the money needs to come from the existing money pool, which means that it becomes scarcer in one part so that it can be more plentiful in another. A graph of distribution of net interest transfers across ten income categories in Germany makes this visible.

There’s a net transfer of interest from the poor and middle classes to the wealthiest income brackets, and “This transfer of wealth occurs independently of the cleverness or industriousness of the participants—a classical argument presented to justify differences in income.”

Elsewhere Lietaer has noted that money is not value neutral – it has profound effects on society. The flip side of that is that money has enormous leverage for social change – but this is rarely understood or taken advantage of.

The second observation is that on the web, giving or sharing information does not remove it from the giver. Tina Turner once said that she did not like computer music tools because all computers are good at is copying. How profoundly true! So an item on the web is like that seed that can give rise to more seeds, and not just not disappear but, to the extent that it stays connected to its children, be enriched by the info ecosystem, web mycelium, that is generated. This is close to Buckminster Fuller‘s definition of wealth as forward days of survival. I don’t fully grok this, but re-visioning and re-implementing money’s mediation of wealth seems to be part of our exploration of web society.