In Pursuit of Mysteries

Journey to Wild Divine

My copy of The Journey to Wild Divine arrived yesterday. Damn that was quick (compared to the copy of The Hidden God that still hasn’t arrived…). and have their copies as well. I only did the intro and it was late but it is interesting.

It has a fairly solid piece of biofeedback hardware that plugs into your USB port: the “lightstone” and three “magic rings.” Basically, the magic rings are the sensors. They go over your middle three fingers on your non-use hand. They have small wings that press the back of your fingers so your pads quite comprehensively touch the sensors. They plug go into a cable that has a ps-2 port on the end. That plugs into the Lightstone. The lightstone is solid and plastic and obviously has technical bits inside. It has a fairly standard USB interface (one of the square ones) that you plug it’s cable into and the other end goes into your box.

The Artifact in Question

I only did the intro so I don’t have a lot to say about it. It seems like it has a lot of possibilities. The graphics are good but not super exceptional. I have a nice 3D card (Radeon 9600) for games so I have high standards. Fairly Myst-like in a way.

Ken Schroeder wrote a novel called “Permanence” which features a religious sect that is actually fairly agnostic but dedicated to spiritual ideals, practice and the maintenance of a longterm human culture (hence the name of the book). Among other things they do, they use devices to help them develop their meditation abilities and as part of their work. I think there are some possibilities there as long as they are used as a learning aid and not as a crutch to replace actual work. I see these things as teaching aids to help learn to recognize states and to aid them in learning practices.