Places

Physically speaking, the Digital Web is virtual space: a level of reality defined strictly by consciousness. It’s the there when “there” is a state unrelated to physical proximity. Folks used to think that reality was what you could see and hear and touch – a state defined by physical presence. Telephones and the Internet shattered that idea. Now you can share very

“real” experiences – a friendship, a romance, an argument – with people with whom you never have shared, nor will you ever share, physical space. It’s a state of reality that affects your life in ways that have nothing to do with physical existence. And if you have to ask whether virtual reality is actually real, just try counting the lumps of gold in your bank account and then ask that question again.

(Money itself is another form of virtual reality, but I won’t muddy the waters by going there just yet…)

Virtual reality is defined only by consciousness – by a thinking mind’s ability to perceive, process, draw conclusions, and adjust beliefs based upon nothing except mental activities. I could get all esoteric and argue that all reality is virtual reality, but I’ll save that lecture for another time. In the Digital Web, several forms of astral projection send the traveler’s consciousness into this virtual reality, typically leaving the physical body, or “meat,” behind at home. All elements of reality in that space, therefore, are products of the traveler’s consciousness.

For this reason, among others, the Digital Web – which is neither digital nor a web – exists in a state outside of the other Otherworldly Realms, and yet it overlaps almost every one of them. Even more than any other form of reality, it’s all in the mind. It’s not quite the High Umbra; nature and death are intrinsic parts of it as well. On a lot of levels, the Digital Web is the ultimate magickal domain… a fact that its pioneers tried, unsuccessfully, to keep to themselves.

In the beginning was the Mount, and the Mount was Qaf. And though Mount Qaf was said to occupy the center of all existence – as I mentioned earlier – almost no one knew it was there. You could reach this place only in your mind. A handful of mystics who would eventually form the Tradition called the Ahl-i-Batin recognized the significance of Mount Qaf, and they safeguarded the secret from common men. Millennia passed, and a world grew across the fringes of Mount Qaf. Eluding almost everyone, however, was the importance of Mount Qaf – the mountain standing at the center of everything and yet existing nowhere.

It’s been said that early experiments in virtual reality – telepathy, prophecy, remote-viewing magicks like crystal balls and scrying pools – all touched upon the fabric of this Web. Some philosophers even speculate that books constitute a form of virtual reality. It took the invention of the telephone,

however, to break through to the virtual space dominated by Mount Qaf and its surroundings. When people could hear the words of a person in one physical location reach across space to be heard in another one, the obvious conclusion appeared: the parties were meeting somewhere between the two of them. And from there, the real fun began…