Second Life or First Life?
A news in the German IT-newsletter Heise.de reported games developers are sure that in 2 years characters in computer games will have photo-realistic faces with authentic facial expressions, expressing emotions. These human-like characters should be difficult to distinguish from presentations of human beings. Ian Livingstone, from Eidos, the producer of the “Tomb Raider“- series even says: “We will be able to play with the emotions of the people – we can make them laugh or cry, we can make them sad.”
Digital life is more and more mingling with real life, the boundaries are getting more and more blurred: A whole parallel universe is developing on the platform Second Life, a virtual 3D internet world with over 3 million gamers. Here nearly everything is like in real life – shops, banks, enterprises – and above all entertainment: Chatting with friends, going to parties, creating your own fantastic outlook or surrounding – in a city or on an island of your own.
The virtual life is also a bonanza for making money or marketing. So it is no wonder that the “real” world is penetrating the virtual world with big enterprises like Mercedes or IBM opening branches there. Sweden has opened an “embassy” there and the big German media house Bild.T-Online is publishing an English second-life magazine called The AvaStar, reporting only about events in the virtual world, of course available only electronically. The title is a combination of the words “star” (and everyone in Second Live wants to be a star) and “avatar”, the virtual personality – and in spirituality an incarnation of the Divine.
The virtual second life reminds of the etheric plane or more subtle planes of “first life”, which you might contact in out-of-body experiences or about which people with near-death experiences report: After having shed the body and before passing on to higher planes the soul stays for a while in a world of subtle forms called kama-loka in Eastern wisdom, the world of desire-forms. You can get stuck there – very much like in the virtual world of electronic games. The headline of The AvaStar: “Newbies Lost in Grid Chaos – confused newbies suffer first day nightmares in Second Life” could very well refer to the experiences of a person arriving in the world of near-death experiences. Have a look at the Lunar Messenger on “Etheric Existence and Good Will“.
