Standing infinity

I celebrated my 8th rez day anniversary by dancing naked. :D

And did you realize that the number 8 is like the infinity symbol standing on one end?

Maybe there's something of infinity in this rez day anniversary. I'm past the 7-year itch, if there's such a thing about being a virtual world resident.

I spend less time as Opal now, and less time inworld in general. But my heart is still in there. My loves are still there. It's still the place I yearn for when I get homesick. Sure, most of the places are different now, but there's still a certain ambience about virtual reality.

And because August always seems to start a new life for me, maybe the coming year would be something different. After my experience in Utherverse, I've had a paradigm shift, similar to the paradigm shift about the global community that I've had when I first joined SL. This time, the shift I experienced is about the universality of virtual worlds.

During my conversation with Knightman in Utherverse, I was surprised at how strongly he was attached to UV, just as I am very attached to Second Life. UV is home to him, just as SL is to me. I realized that, in the end, the place we call our virtual "home" has nothing to do with the technology or the avatar or what the place looks like. It has to do with the relationships that bind us to it.

In the end, these different virtual world grids are just villages, colonies, and tribes of humans, separated by differences in technology, just as villages, colonies, and tribes are separated in the real world by distances.

In the end, we are all humans behind the avatars -- a soul touching another soul.

A spiritual moment in SL

I went to the Basilica Cardinale Cathedral to take some on-location pictures of the bridal gown from the WedEx'09 fashion show.

When I got there, there was a sermon going on. I wasn't sure if it was for real, or if it was roleplay. The priest is Recaredo Zebendein. At first I wondered if he was a bot, then he stood up from the pulpit, went up to the altar, then back to the pulpit. Then I looked up his profile and it said that he's "a friar of the dominican order". If it were roleplay, he would not specify the order he belongs to. In a roleplay, that detail doesn't matter.

One other person knelt in the front, wearing a brown monk's robe and holding a rosary. He was listening to the sermon.

There was something about the scene, that made me pause. In fact, it gave me a slight shiver. It wasn't the visual aspect of the cathedral; I've been there before. It was a certain ambience, for lack of a better word. A certain energy around the two men. There was a solemnness that I hadn't witnessed in SL before.

The friar was typing in Spanish, but he had a translator on. He was speaking about the work of paradise.

In the end, he gave us a verse to reflect on and it was about the tree of knowledge of good and evil which Adam and Eve were not supposed to eat from.

Then something clicked, like a synapses forming between two concepts. The knowledge of good and evil is the Buddhist concept of duality. That is the "original sin" -- duality.

You know that sense that there's a message in circumstances around you? The tingly feeling when synchronicity was at work? I had that feeling. And I have a feeling that there's a deeper message behind that "duality" click. A more personal message. I just haven't figured it out yet.

It's just strange. I've experienced spiritual moments like this in real life, but this is the first time I've felt it in SL.

I think my SL just crossed another threshold.

An epiphany

I can be so dense sometimes. Some days, it takes me several minutes before I get someone's witty remark. In this case, it took me several hours. And it wasn't the remark that was so witty, but the delivery of the message was. In fact, the remark wasn't even the message.

You miss subtle things like that when you're busy. And it's only when your mind relaxes that it suddenly clicks. And -- boom! -- there you are, grinning to yourself like an idiot. And, it's even more embarrassing when you're grinning to yourself in public, like in the middle of a serious discussion over a late lunch with a friend.

And so you have to make an excuse about remembering a joke, but then they want to hear the joke, which puts you in a greater predicament because it wasn't really a joke. And besides, something witty doesn't really stand on its own outside the context it was originally delivered in.

I realize that lots of things probably go whoosh right over my head. Probably more so recently. But, hey, I eventually decode the smoke signals. :D

/me hums, "... is keeping all my secrets safe tonight ..."

Pavlov's windchime

On my second day in SL, I went searching for land. I read about the First Land Program and did a search. The first few ones I saw were flat featureless rectangles in the middle of a prairie. I kept looking. Then I realized that the search results changed once in a while. So, I kept clicking the Search button.

Then I found it.

It is a small irregular plot on a hillside set against the northern edge of Aglia, with trees all around it. A few meters below are train tracks. Once in a while, I'd hear birds, crickets, and windchimes. I don't know where the sounds come from, but I suspect that it comes from a small cube hanging from my neighbor's tree. I bought the land that day. Then, I stayed there for some time, walking the boundaries, planning where I would put things.

All weekend long, I built a deck, a glass house, and a gazebo. It was my sanctuary. Somehow, when I am there, my mind quiets down but becomes acutely alert, like being in deep meditation.

Well, I didn't realize what effect it really had on my mind until this morning in real life. I was in that zone between sleep and wakefulness, when I heard a windchime through my bedroom window. Then, all of a sudden, like Pavlov's dogs, my mind goes into that meditation mode -- quiet, but acutely alert.

[Pant, pant, pant,... drool,... ;-) ]