© 1992 Byron Belitsos
© 1992 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
The Jesus of Part IV of The Urantia Book will inspire many new Christologies in the next century. In one version, I believe, Christ Michael will appear as the “CyberChrist.” The concept of the CyberChrist is the form of Jesus most presentable to the direct descendants of the computer revolution — as the gospel gets restated for their generation. Prophetically speaking, the CyberChrist is the Christ of personal transfiguration as this is induced by advanced, computer-based media: the Jesus who sponsors cosmic religious experiences in a post-modern world. Hopefully, this Jesus can compete with the neo-pagan gods now filling the spiritual void of the sophisticated children of the computer age.
The word “CyberChrist” comes from Lawnmower Man, an oddly-titled new science fiction film. It is uttered, barely audibly, by Jobe, protagonist of the movie, awestruck by a series of electronic visions. Jobe is at the height of a religious euphoria induced by experiences in “cyberspace,” which are created for him by a revolutionary new computer technology known as “virtual reality.”
In my view, Lawnmower Man is highly prophetic on the future relation of media and spiritual values. This film warns us that the God of the future — a future which belongs to the new revelation-must be a God who not only inhabits the sacred space of Paradise and the inner space of worship, but also a new and artificial space of interior experience known as cyberspace. A theology of the CyberChrist would address this new interiority.
A science fiction horror plot built around the “educational” use of virtual reality (VR) technology is the main subject of Lawnmower Man. Stephen King is the author of the story. The plot portrays the first human subject (Jobe) to journey out to the far reaches of the mind-expanding capabilities of VR.
For background, we should say that VR is the next step beyond interactive multimedia computing and computer graphics. And it is a far step. VR equipment is complex but worth understanding. It includes: a “headmount,” which is a high-tech helmet that produces stereo sound and holds in place small TV screens that cover each eye, rather like miniature binoculars; a “rendering engine,” or, the software and hardware that generate stereoscopic full-motion computer-generated images to the video eye-pieces; head and body tracking equipment, for sensing the motion of the body parts so that the positioning of the computer images projected to the eyes coincides with bodily movements; and the “data glove” and “body suit,” or, slip-on coverings with multiple sensors that represent the hand or body within the cyberspace.
So what then is cyberspace? Gazing into the stereoscopic computer-generated images in the headmount gives the distinct illusion of being “inside” an artificial 3-D world. Like Walt Disney-style animation, the virtual worlds seen from inside the headmount are almost infinitely flexible, since they are created, in this case, by software designers. Just as thousands of videotapes can be rented today for playback on VCRs, thousands of VR disks will some day be available that will take the viewer inside artificial worlds of great variety and beauty.
Future VR entertainment programs will be as diverse as today’s computer or video arcade games, but permitting far more dramatic and real-life qualities of experience. Educational applications will also abound. VR programs could take users inside the Sistine Chapel, amidst the ruins of Hiroshima, or, on an exploration of the Parthenon.
VR tools and utilities are being created-3-D pull-down menus, if you will-that will allow users to create personalized virtual worlds. For example, create a space full of hundreds of red spheres extending out to infinity; under them place a black-and-white checkerboard floor; color the sky azure; now make the red spheres bounce in unison from floor to sky. Project your body into this scene and fly toward the nether horizon, navigating around the spheres. Now save this world to disk and return tomorrow to explore and alter it with a friend. Without doubt, new realms of imaginative freedom will unfold in cyberspace. But what role will spiritual values play in this new world?
Just as thousands of videotapes can be rented today for playback on VCRs, thousands of VR disks will some day be available that will take the viewer inside artificial worlds of great variety and beauty.
My first experience in a VR environment was two years ago in a lab at a California computer company. Since then, the clarity of presentation of objects in VR worlds has greatly improved, as designers master new techniques, and as equipment prices plummet. Actually, the pace of technological change has been stunning. VR objects now have all the formal and experiential qualities of real objects in natural space: shape, shading, perspective, movement, and color. Cyberspace technicians can also now create the illusion of sounds emanating from any location within the artificial space; others are making breakthroughs in creating the sense of touch using the sensors embedded in the body suit and data glove.
VR is rapidly entering the commercial marketplace. Eighteen months ago VR was discussed almost exclusively in computer-oriented academic and trade journals. Today it is the subject of a major motion picture; one commercializer reports that its entertainment-oriented VR booths, installed in shopping malls around the country, are attracting lines that are two and three hours long. I believe that we will some day be going to VR theaters where participants all don headmounts to view interactive 3-D movies or documentaries. These will be far more powerful experiences than what we find today in movie theaters.
So what of the implications of VR for spiritual ministry? Perhaps most important is the collaborative nature of VR. VR “worlds” can be experienced and even inhabited by groups, or what will come to be known as “virtual communities.” Here’s how it works: users with a “body suit” can have their precise body shape projected into the virtual space. (Lawnmower Man is the first occasion that the public will be able to see this awesome spectacle of virtual bodies consorting in cyberspace, especially the romantic liaison of Jobe and his girlfriend.) An audio teleconference creates a virtual space for its participants; VR creates this sense of the telepresence of others in living color. New, “consensual,” virtual worlds to serve almost any purpose could be created and explored by the participants.
Cyberspace worship environments could create worlds of wonder and sacredness akin to those referred to Plato in his description of ideal Forms.
How would you come “dressed” to a VR gathering? VR graphical tools will allow users to “paint” their virtual body representation 10 make it realistic — or more fanciful. Their actual movements will be reflected in an artificial image. Sacred dances, initiation ceremonies, even liturgies, could be held in cyberspace. The backdrop for the ritual action could be the Rocky Mountains, a Tibetan temple, or a Pentecostal Church in Oklahoma. What sort of virtual ministry world would you design, given the chance?
One can only imagine the uses of VR to facilitate worship, or consciousness of the sacred. In The Sacred and Profane, Marcea Eliade spoke of the sacred as a quality of experience that emerges from awe-inspiring and mysterious discontinuities in space and time. “For religious man, space is not homogeneous, he experiences interruptions, breaks in it, some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.” Perhaps the conditions of cyberspace could allow for what Eliade calls a “hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different.” Cyberspace worship environments could create worlds of wonder and sacredness akin to those referred to by Plato in his description of ideal Forms.
Unfortunately, the other side of VR’s potential is perhaps easier to grasp, as illustrated in the movie Lawnmower Man, (as well as in Neuromancer; by William Gibson, the preeminent novel about cyberspace). VR is fertile ground for a Stephen King-style horror plot. Without doubt, the unleashing of the human imagination through the ability to simulate sensory experience with unlimited freedom — this has diabolical implications.
In Stephen King’s plot, the new-found freedom of VR causes everything to go off the rails. The protagonist Jobe is a robust but moronic young man who works as a gardener and mower of lawns. Through a varicty of twists and turns, he becomes the first human subject of secret educational VR experiments. In the experiments, threc-dimensional imagesprojected directly at the subject in cyberspace-are used in conjunction with neural drugs in such a way as to directly stimulate various dormant faculties of Jobe’s mind. (Of course. this is just one of many possible courses of application of the technology for education.)
In brief, Jobe progresses quickly from a half-wit to a genius whose intelligence surpasses the scientist who created the experiment. At one point he emerges from behind the headmount claiming that he has “seen God.” (Among the images the VR program projects toward him in 3-D space are sacred symbols of the world’s cultures.) Soon atter, for reasons too complicated to explain here, Jobe’s forward progress in intellectual growth spins out of control, and he begins to confuse himself with God. Jobe now becomes completely identified with his electronic “virtual self,” and attempts to dissolve himself into the VR rendering engine. He concocts a messianic plan to distribute himself from there into the computerized telephone network, thereby linking him and his “messages” to the whole planet-by telephone contact! Many other strange and diabolical events also occur as a result of Jobe’s transformation.
We’re all just beginners at this, but we need to raise ethical and spiritual questions about virtual reality now, before the technology becomes widespread. Only a new philosophy of cosmic scope, one that integrates science and religion in an unbroken explanation, can contain the implications of VR. Passionate VR users — our children in a few short years from now-will need to dwell in a philosophical container that is wider and deeper than any of their virtual reality programs. This new philosophy must permit them both the freedom to explore cyberspace without fear and prejudice, while at the same time pointing the way to increased self-mastery through its use. This same challenge can apply to many other emerging technologies that are based on the microchip.s
While providing many lines of praise of technology and its potential, Lawnmower Man gives some idea of the almost endless variety of abuses — and uses — that are possible with VR. To paraphrase the scientist who watches in horror as Jobe turns into an information-age Frankenstein: “Virtual reality will be the most important technology of the 2 I st century, but only if its uses are tempered with wisdom.”
Byron has been a joumalist and television producer and is now a consultant in the telecommunications industry.