Thematically related to my earlier posting on SL in historical context, what follows is nonetheless, as much as anything else, a purely autobiographical reflection. Skip it if that’s not your cup of tea.
By the age of 14 I pretty much knew who I was: whatever inherently ungraspable complexities in oneself that can be summed up and uneasily packaged under reductionist notions such as ‘temperament’, ‘personality’, ‘tastes’, ‘style’, ‘character’, ‘interests’, ‘persona’, ‘aspirations’, and the like, were pretty much, and undoubtedly quite confidently, in place (I was as strong-willed, opinionated, and assertive then as now) and have remained fairly constant to this day, 44 and a bit years on. Even if, at 14, I might never have been fully aware (though I suspect I was) that there existed an academic discipline called ‘Psychology’ nor that there were people who, as career professionals, devoted their lives to unraveling the mysteries of the mind, I knew very well that, as much a matter of personal compulsion as of intellectual curiosity, I very clearly saw my future, my vocation, my spiritual evolution, my destiny, my apotheosis, not merely in the formal study of the mind but equally as a personal quest for self-understanding and self-transformation. 
In respect of the latter I therefore immersed myself not only in the reading of academic psychology but also in the study of Buddhism, witchcraft, the history of religion, shamanism, mythology, and altered states of consciousness. In some sense I was, then, simply a receptive product of the era in which I was growing up, the age of the Maharishi, the age of LSD, the age of psychedelia. Yet I was aware that there were few, even of my own generation, who felt themselves so obsessively engaged as myself.
In October 1966 I bought the Barry Mason single “Over the Hills and Far Away” (I see myself walking into Weston Hart record shop at 84 London Road, Portsmouth, where I’d buy most of my music during those years). Not even a ‘one-hit wonder’ (it failed to make the pop charts) and therefore probably never played on the radio, I’d bought the record possibly for no other reason than that the review in New Musical Express or Record Mirror had included the word ‘psychedelic’ and perhaps mention that it had been produced by The Yardbirds’ Paul Samwell-Smith whose “Still I’m Sad” it in some ways musically resembled. Once home, I must have played it and replayed it twenty, thirty–who knows how many?–times or more, thrilled musically by the insistent and mesmerising drone of the minimalist melody and intrigued by the lyrics.
Where is he?
Lost in a mist he can’t see.
Every man dies in a dream
reaching for something unseen
Over the hills and far away
The song had been brought back to mind this morning when I’d glanced again at SlinkiJay Sugarplum’s Second Life profile, seeing under Picks an extract from this blog quoted back at me:
80% of the people in SL are there for the sex”, opined Lady Maylea. I agreed that sex possibly pipped even shopping to the post as the primary activity in Second Life. And yet my intuition was that the sex in itself might turn out to be, for many, a tangible emblematic expression of something less tangible, “an elusive quest” in the words of my friend SlinkiJay Sugarplum who, on reading the draft of this page, very eloquently wrote:
transformation is such a profound issue
in mexico i was struck by all the altars, the shrines the people on their knees
with flowers, photographs
begging for, longing for aching for
offering everything for
this elusive transformation
from what to what?
what is this transubstantiation we try and do etherically?
and why?
what is missing?
what is it we so seek that we will offer our very souls in its pursuit?
it is an elusive quest, but it burns in us so deeply
“Lost in a mist he can’t see … reaching for something unseen” probably fairly describes the experience of many in Second Life, the ‘lotus-eaters’ as I suggested in my last posting to this blog. Although the medium may be new, the quest is not. 1960s counter-culture guru Timothy Leary often suggested in the last years of his life that virtual reality was the new LSD; and, although (to my knowledge, but see Readings below) he never explicitly drew in-depth comparisons between the mind-transformative potential of LSD and of virtual worlds, a number of statements beginning with his contributions as a panelist on the SIGGRAPH90 panel session ‘Hip, hype and hope—the three faces of virtual worlds’ indicate his belief that the controlled exploration of shared alternative ‘electronic realities’ (as he called them) offered opportunities for self-discovery and the expansion of consciousness that previously he had sought in the use of psychotropic drugs. And, of course, just as drugs may become a downward-spirally retreat from reality rather than a path to discovering new realities, so may Second Life.
This is all by way of documenting my own journey from my obsessive teenage interest in the nature of mind to the moment when I became compulsively fascinated by virtual worlds and, eventually, by Second Life in particular. To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, one might reasonably suggest that Second Life “is the continuation of LSD by other means”.
Readings
Timothy Leary, Chaos & Cyber Culture.
» http://www.scribd.com/doc/35954417/Timothy-Leary-Chaos-Cyber-Culture
The Unlimited Dream Company 