Escape Velocity by Mark Dery Page B

Masters, which draw connections between the new physics and Eastern mysticism, the language of physics and the theoretical musings of physicists have been used to buttress New Age thought. In Bridging Science and Spirit: Common Elements in David Bohm's Physics, the Perennial Philosophy, and Seth, Norman Friedman strikes a delicate balance between the quantum physics of Bohm-best known for his theory that the brain replicates, in microcosm, the structure of the universe-and the teachings of Seth, the channeled "energy personality essence" whose revelations about the nature of time, space, and the self-creation of reality comprise Jane Roberts's The Seth Material.
    Furthermore, New Age dreams of self-actualization are increasingly tethered to transformational technologies such as the mind machines, smart drugs, and other "tools for the expansion of consciousness" mentioned earlier. The catalogues of New Age direct mail marketers such as Tools for Exploration ('*your guide to adventures in consciousness") offer a variety of "consciousness technologies" that harness advances from "the cutting edges of neuroscience and electronics" in the service of a vision of human potential that partakes of self-help, corporate motivational psychology, and New Age mysticism.
    The copy in such catalogues keeps the reader mindful of the fact that such appliances are high-tech upgrades of pretechnological traditions. A mind machine sold in a 1993 ToolsJor Exploration catalogue is marketed as the "new

    shamanic technology," an information-age upgrade of the hypnotic campfire and ritual drumming used in primitive cultures to induce shamanic trances: "Goggles with flickering solid-state lights provide the 'firelight,' and digital stereo synthesized sounds create the 'drumming.'"••^ Such a device represents the best of archaic and future worlds, it is implied, reconnecting the user to a mythic, holistic past even as it incorporates what we are told are the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience and microelectronics.
    In one of his catalogues, Terry Patten, the founder of Tools for Exploration, relates a New Age parable that neatly encapsulates the resolution of mysticism and materialism in cyberculture. After recounting how he and his wdfe had "sold everything: the house, the cars, the furniture" (a ritual renunciation of the secular world familiar from Christian and Eastern mysticism) and traveled extensively, he notes the psychic dislocation he experienced on returning to his former life, that of "a 3-piece suit professional":
    My wife . . . and I had realized that, too often, we become alienated by the very technology designed to make our lives easier. So we went on to uncover a new kind of technology-one created to connect us more deeply to our bodies, minds, emotions and souls. We call it Consciousness Technology, and from this discovery. Tools For Exploration was born.'^°
    Patten offers a holistic vision of technology that integrates rather than alienates. In its power to repair our fractured inner selves and help us realize our "unlimited capacity for positive growth and change" (Patten), it is almost godlike. But despite its desire to make room for the sacred in the technosphere. Patten's high-tech theology has the paradoxical effect of secularizing the Spiritual; the higher powers have dissipated into impersonal, pseudoscientific energy fields, accessible through microcircuitry. The focus, as in the human potential movement to which the "mind tech" wing of the New Age owes so much, is on the perfectible self; pilgrim's progress has given way to personal power.
    In Mega Brain Power: Transform Your Life with Mind Machines and Brain Nutrients, Michael Hutchison elevates "Consciousness Technology" to the status of a divine agency, a saving grace capable of lifting humanity out of the human condition. "To some it may seem odd and paradoxical that

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    machines-the synthetic, hard, material devices of this electronic temporal