The Ends of the Earth

Everyone you touch, even just once, remains part of you.

Everyone you see, in the briefest glance, you see forever more.

The glory of cyberspace is choice; you can choose who you are, who you meet, and where you play. But you can not choose what others say, what others do. And these choices become part of you, pass the boundary between your self and another, work their way into you and become inseparable from what you are. We are all the product of ourselves, and we are all the children of each other.

We can - and should - make brave statements about our rights - our human rights - in cyberspace. But first among these laws is love; how else can we all live together? For our coming together is inevitable, begun when the first human spoke the first word, and placed her thought into someone else’s mind, her heart into someone else’s breast.

We speak ever more rapidly; "speed equals light". Not with one voice, or a thousand, or a million, but a billion, all here, right now, voices in a collective head that looses its own sharp boundaries between this and that, between I and thou.

Communities identify themselves by what they hold in common, but define themselves by what they reject in unison. Where do we draw the lines that divide us, the breaks that make us individual? How much of what I am is because of what you are? How much of what you do comes from what I have done? Every identification is a rejection, every boundary a breaking away from the absolute unity which constitutes all of us.

Draw tight those strings of rejection, those lines of force, and unloose the plagues of racism, of homophobia, xenophobia, the flame wars that have raged uncontrolled since the advent of the Age of the Dominators. But release and receive; let water find its own course, let these lines find their natural play on the landscape of our souls, and we discover - after all the campaigns and tirades and pogroms and censorious slaughters - ourselves, unbound, contain the universe.

The cell is the universe within, and Mother Gaia the universe without. And who among us can draw the line that separates these two? We breathe, we grow, and spread our vitality up to the very edges of the stars, both within our self-created world of ones and nones, and outside, to the smiling eyes of all the ones who you will touch, and remain part of, forever.

At the End of History, we lose ourselves and gain our self. All these lines that divide are just so much play, the hide-and-seek of divinity. Remove the boundaries and see all as it really is: infinite. Embrace the Earth, for thou art that.

Be in yourself. You are the universe.

Good night.

Santa Monica
9 January 1998