S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 3 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 1 7 7 SLAVOMÍR GÁLIK – SABÍNA GÁLIKOVÁ TOLNAIOVÁ qua non, an indispensable and essential action to attain salvation: “If a person is not born from water and The Spirit, it is impossible that he shall enter the Kingdom of God.“ (John 3: 5). The sacrament of baptising is realised by either submerging into water or pouring water on the head. In either case, presence of human’s body is an inevitable condition. Virtual baptising therefore cannot be accepted since two physical components are missing – the body itself and the water. Eucharist, another sacrament, is also important for salvation: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.“ (John 6: 53–54). Eucharist is again based on material things (bread and wine) that are consumed, which is, again, impossible in the cyberspace of digital media. Moreover, to attain salvation, both baptism and Eucharist are inevitable in Christian religion. In this point, Christian religion and virtual religion can never meet one another. In Theravada school of Buddhism, there are no such sacraments as in Christian religion (or perhaps their definitions are different, for example initiation at the Sangha), but also here the human’s body is a significant component on the road to freedom. Human’s body is important in respect of mindfulness (vipassanā in Pali language), namely mindfulness of breathing (ānāpānasati) or walking (caṅkama). Mirko Frýba (1995, 151– 160) describes the first meditation as careful focusing one’s attention to breathing in and breathing out, either in the area under the nose or on the belly. Each disruption, for example an idea or feeling, causes a halt in the process and the person who is trying to meditate gets back to the previous stage. Similarly in the mindful walking meditation, when the person who meditates realises each rising of the foot and putting it back, every mental disturbance is taken as a defect. In both cases the mindfulness of action is refined until the stage of awakening is reached (nibbāna in Pali language and nirvāna in Sanskrit language). Mindful breathing and walking meditation that we find in Theravada school of Buddhism cannot be replaced in the virtual space. Perhaps even more intense work with body can be found in Tibetan (Tantrayāna) school of Buddhism, which works with the so-called subtle physiology, energy centres or chakras and nadi channels (Snelling 2000, 126). This school teaches that body offers a way to freedom that can be uncovered and awakened by means of concentration and meditation. If energy (kundalini) is unleashed, it can travel upward and thus open various energy centres from the lowest to the highest one (sahasrāra), in which freedom is achieved. Also in this case, it is utterly unrealistic for virtual surrounding to replace body, an indispensable condition to achieve freedom. We believe that among these boundaries, also interpersonal human communication (Modrzejewski 2016, 8) in either Christian or Buddhist religious community could be mentioned. Human body constitutes a unique realistic principle also in interpersonal communication “face to face”, thanks to which we know that communication with the other person is real and authentic. Reality and authenticity can be seen in the form of physical touch, for example, but also “auratic” radiation of the body. Neither physical contact not “aura” of the second person can be transferred through online communication in cyberspace. For this reason, spiritual experience in traditional, real religious community should be different and more intensive than the one existing in online community, offered by technologies. Internal limitation. The second boundary, though much more subtle, lies in the technological possibility to gain deeper spiritual and mystical experience. Also here Geraci (2014, 213) is an optimist when we says: “Researches at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California, for example, have used Microsoft’s Kinect to control World of Warcraft using body motions.” Other researches, according to him, use direct brain-computer connection that makes it easier for physically handicapped to control the game of Second Life. Geraci (2014, 213–214) goes like this: “If the user’s body and the game avatar are more closely linked through such technologies, the divide between what happens within the game and what happens outside it will turn fuzzy. […] in the very near future the distinction between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ will disappear.” The socalled Cyber-Shamanism also takes this direction, as it can use new technologies such as Oculus Rift [3] with the perspective of reaching changed state of consciousness, similarly to real shamanism [4]. The used technology is programmed to simulate changes in consciousness that happen in real trance. As one of the cyber-shamans confessed (Martínková 2008, 48), approximately one hour after an intense immersion into cyberspace he lost sense of time and space and felt thoroughly detached from everything. However, can cyber-shamanism replace traditional shamanism, which sees one of its goals in healing people? Does a cyber-shaman reach real spiritual worlds? Also, how much does such a form of cyber-spirituality transform a man? Our starting point is in the fact that after the cyber-spiritual experience the person’s consciousness and thinking come back to normal. We could also think of the possibility where regular applications of cyber-spirituality lead to permanent changes in nervous system. Yet, it is questionable whether such changes would push people in the right direction. It is true that there are various “techniques” that people use in different spiritual traditions to reach changed states of consciousness, for example drumming, dancing, rhythmical breathing or hallucinogenic drugs, but these are always used in certain spiritual context, with certain knowledge and in order to achieve a concrete
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