harmful ingrained mental models. An avatar-based three-dimensional virtual world has the potential to enhance and support visualization practice through a rich sensory environment. Although the images surrounding a deity in a thangka is painted in a two-dimensional form, the iconic representation is merely a mnemonic device to support what is ideally a deeply imagined three-dimensional visualization. I think that creating a virtual thangka with all of its rich detail would be an invaluable aid in visualization practice. I don't have the building chops at this time to pull that off, but would love to hear from interested builders and artists. As a matter of fact, I think I'm going to create a two-dimension avatar thangka for my next post on this topic. Should be an interesting journey!
. Posted by Botgirl Questi at 10:45AM (-07:00)
Digital Shamanism: The Psychological Dimension of the Transworlders... Tuesday, May 11, 2010 Most of us tend to ignore the deeper dimensions of being that hide beneath our mundane states of mind. It struck me today that the idea of "Transworlders" not only applies to movement between virtual worlds, but also to travel through inner worlds and states of consciousness. And even to what might be thought of as "digital shamanism." There is an essential mystery at the heart of life, awareness and identity. Although to our habitual state of perception we live in an atomic, isolated and disconnected universe, if we look more deeply, the entire world and everything in it can be viewed as what Thich Nhat Hanh calls a web of interbeing: “If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-“ with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be.
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