signal from noise: raising babel from the seas of the da'atha-sphere

Last night I was practicing my nightly asanas, leting myself disolve into breathing, when a startling noise like the end of the world erupted through the ordered peace of the room, piercing my conscioussness straight to the core. After a paniced moment when I felt all of reality had turned on its head I realizeed it was only the fire alarm, set off by the candles I was burning. My heart beating in my throat and sleep now an impossibility, I sat down and started reading Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" in order to calm down, but soon found myself drawn into his world of viral information and interconnected knoweldge. There amidst ninja hackers and religious franchsises I stumbled upon a chapter that detailed some things that have been creeping around my head, ideas of myth as tales of social organization and information processing. In particular, Stephenson talks about the Sumerian myths, interpreting the storys of Enkil fertilizing the river valleys as the creation of communication (as he is the water god, and Sumerian society wrote on clay from the river banks created from his heart-waters (sperm, as original information carrier). But then another sentence broke through, much closer to the research I have done, after Asherah, the Sumerian ophidian (snake) mother goddess is compared to Eve, "Eve, as I recall, is responsible for getting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Which is to say, it's not just a fruit- it's data."

In hebrew, Da'ath is knowledge, and is the "hidden" 11th sphere of the Tree of Life, the abyss seperating the lower spheres from the supernal triad and not located in any one place on the tree of life as it is the space between the spheres. A quick jaunt through the Net revealed that Da'ath is linked to the Tree of Knowledge, that when Adam and Eve ate the malus malum (bad apple) from the Tree their universal consciousness was reduced to the limited ego perspective of duality (good vs evil, light vs dark, self vs other). By sampling a specific bit of data their perspectives became limited from the whole of knowing to a simple binary mentality. This is represented in the tree of life as a fall from the non-local connection of Kether to the singular being of malkuth, and as googlism so aptly put it, da'ath is the hole left behind when malkuth fell out of the garden of eden. And so knowledge was reduced from the "appreciation for interconnected details" (wikipedia) of indra's net, in which all the hanging jewels (things, data, fruit, sephiroth) are reflection of all others, to a gaping abyss literally between oneself and the rest of the world. And so in one fell bite the order of the world is reduced to an incomprehensible chaos and a new order has to be formed (there are some interpretations of this myth that claim that God intended this in order to reorder his relationship to the world and be more intimately known in it).

Now, the idea of a choas that becomes ordered (or reordered) is rooted in many mythologies (the Sumerian again, with Enkil's slaying of Tiamat and reshaping the world from her body). Chaos is often represented by a serpent or ocean mother, who is the matrix, the prima materia from which all form arises. (see my article on the matrix for more information). According to information theory (and to paraphrase metachor), chaos is an increased state of entropy that allows messages to occur non-linearaly, in an ordered complexity that is essentially a measure of our inability to match signals we recieve from our experiences of the world with the frameworks we view it through, much like the choas I experienced before I realized the fire alarm was just that, and not a herald of armegedon. The form (signal) of fire alarm rose from the chaos of unprecedented noise. Or like this article, pasted together from the buzzing noise of opinions and subjective references that makes up our collective discourse.

Chaos is also considered as an abyss or void, and is akin to the space between things when the world is viewed as self and other. It is only by the distance between that one is able to interpret a relation to another object, and meaning (knowledge) is only the interpretation of that relation to one's self. In magical traditions, the adept has to across the abyss, or chapel perilous, in order to find understanding, a relationship to the jewel (data) hanging at the other side of the abyss. Picture yourself in a vast darkness with a thousand jewels hanging all around. You start walking to one, and as you move a colored trail is laid down in the dark to mark your path to whatever object you approach. You find a jewel, a book maybe, or a tree, and head towards another. At the same time others are moving through this abyss, making their own paths, so that soon there is a web of trails marked out between the jewels, establishing them in relation to each other. Not the infinitely reflecting web of indra's net, but a subjective web of referances ordering the objects, signals, in relation to the observer, much like the pheremone trails left by ants so others in their nest can find food (the idea of which is called stygmergy), but built from the chaos, the noise, itself (the medium is the message). So now we have replaced the complex chaos-matrix with a framework ordered to our own experiences, and constantly evolving as new knowledge is linked together. As knowledge expanded and the links were passed down from generation to generation, new technologies sprang up to represent this web of knowledge, culminating in what is now the internet, the datasphere or da'atha-sphere.

I propose that this da'atha-sphere is synonymous to the tree of knowledge, which runs perpindicular to the tree of life (line conscioussness vs. point conscioussness), and forms the web on which the spheres are hung in relation to each other. But it is also synonymous with the tower of babel (literally "gate to god) as an edifice to our push towards the godhead of interconnected conscioussness. In the myth, which also plays a large part in Stephenson's "Snow Crash," a tower is built with "the heavens in its roof," only to be abandoned when god causes its builders to speak in seperate tongues, so that they can not communicate where they all spoke the same language before and can not finish construction of the tower. No communion with the godhead, better luck next time. But next time is now, thanks to the translitartive powers of the internet, and a new tower is being built, this time spread out over the entire globe (knowledge stored serialy instead of hierarchichly). What does this mean? What strange and unexpected collective signal will emerge from the chaotic white noise of infinite bits of data swirling across the earth like a blizzard in some great infopocalyptic vision?

That remains to be seen. Any expectation of the singularity, like magical attention and quantum subjectivity, presupposes a result. What you look for you will find. If we look at this through the order of our established beliefs, we will only find them reflected back on us, though that might be what we are going for in the first place. If we want to see god in the collection of human knowledge, then we will see god.

Whether it is or not is an entriely different story.