We create mini-dramas accidentally in the virtual world of Second Life, reflexively, instinctively. This is why people so often report that Second Life has changed their real life radically. Sociologists are even studying virtual worlds now for this reason.

Second Life has given me a powerful voice that I now use in first life. We have a very convenient stage for revealing the inner mysteries of the human soul here if only we had the necessary perception and awareness, consciousness, “awake-ness.” People remain disempowered because they “don’t like drama.” They convince themselves that real life is nothing like Second Life, and that people really aren’t like this, that it’s all just pretend. How can you pretend to be something that doesn’t exist?

Don’t we do that all the time? Yes, but no “authorities.”

So, what is it that brings us together in the Second Life virtual world? Is it simply because we “like it”? We come together as communities always have, because the “spirit” of the community existed even before the individuals “remembered” it. We are called by our own natures to gather around a greater nature. One that can strengthen each of us more than any individual effort could.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We can each of us use the vision that draws us here to understand our world away from these events. We can base our decision not on our habits but on the feeling of presence and meaning in the world, that seems to live in the world, and behind the surface we feel we know, what we call “real life.” We share the world behind the world. We divide the apparent world up in shares. Which seems to give us the better chance of survival?

Share the world. In the pursuit of choice, we fail to choose anything. We select from the choices made apparent to us. In the pursuit of free will we fail to will anything, and exercise our freedom acquiring “free” things, and convince ourselves we were clever in doing so.

The science I mentioned earlier, that says we have no free will, it does say something important that we can use. We don’t have free will as it is popularly thought of, but we do have free won’t. Another way of saying that is we have the power of focus. We can direct our focus as we deem right, as we feel is appropriate. Your attention cannot be meaningfully removed from the world. If you try, you just wind up subscribing to those ideas that were spoken of earlier, and those ideas were authored in such a way as to make the individual “reasonable”, pliable, please-able. It’s said that you can’t please everyone, and indeed that’s true. They don’t have to please everyone. They just have to please the politicians, the celebrities, the corporate moguls.

Please the TV commercials and local news! And indeed, the pablum trickles down, and we are left to survive on the scraps.

I think “Hermit-hood” is feeling better every day! Do you feel no call to ever go out into the world?

Of course! I go into the “larger world” whenever I choose to go there. What are you describing as hermit-hood?

My great freedom is that I do not have to go there when I choose NOT to. Ah, you have established some measure of independence then?

A single life, a plot of land that no one else wants and freedom to choose what I think, what I do, what I believe, whom I associate with. One must find some independence before fostering meaningful interdependence.

My life IS wonderful! Does the world not speak to you?

Every day. Tell us about that? Every moment, actually. The problem with compassion, for me, is that I cannot utterly dismiss my experience of the world. You hear clearly what others may only hear behind a wall of social noise.

Not so much a problem as a predicament like having no skin on. You are skyclad rather than robed in the raiment of the mystic as it’s been said.

So being a hermit is also a sort of defensive maneuver against my own sensitivities.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~