8 Jun 2008

Sunday Supplement

There are a lot of Second Thought given to a day inworld. And many references which resound in the real world, as that is where I am originally from. I looked at my small exquisite writing desk yesterday, where I do a lot of writing for the show. I was reminded of Virgina Wolf’s famous book title, “A Room of One’s Own” referring to the need a writer has to have that place, that privacy to let the words be released in the freedom which it deserves. You cant really write with someone looking over your shoulder, and the more personal ones comments, the more a need for that privacy. It could translate to any work in progress, it is much more profound and easier to accomplish when you are free to work on it as you like. Freedom, privacy and time it seems are the foundations of creation.

It occurred to me that this small house I cherish so much on SL, is my bastion of all the above, is the “room” I call my own, and I have transfered that which I love to look at and love to do into it. Because I can access it anytime I want as well, I carry it with me through out the day, and happily return “home” to work on what I have left behind in outworld travels.

I realize in this above paragraph there is a lot of belief suspended, and those of you who do not know SL might actually be shaking your heads in disbelief. However, we as a species of human have our limitations, many are self imposed (I can’t do that), some are gravity imposed (can’t fly) and some are molecule imposed (can’t time travel or become invisible) I never thought of myself as Three Dimensionally restricted until yesterday when I was having my Second Thought.

We actively suspend our belief in SL I realized. The screen is (Psst) flat, yet the world exists as a full 3D environment. Even though it looks completely “round” it is still a flat screen we are looking at, yes with depth of field, but not with any thing like a real third dimension. As if we are watching a screen, in the movie theater and accept this is “happening”, we also believe we are traveling, moving and walking through a dimensional environment. This is what I mean by we completely suspend our belief. We suspend our spatial belief initially, afterwards we suspend the belief in talking animals.

Yet because we suspend or belief we also make other things happen for ourselves. In reality, we tell our minds what we can or can not do. When faced with a problem, we do not as readily suspend our belief, we hold fast to them. ” This is solid, this is real,” and we also tell ourselves at times, “this is something I can’t do.” We are in the real world, where we do not suspend our beliefs. When we are in Second Life though, we have already suspended a lot of our belief structure, eg. I can fly.

And it occurs to me because we have already suspended our beliefs in many ways of just accepting we ARE in this world, our minds are so very much more open to what we CAN do here. This of course includes learning. We have set far less limitations upon ourselves spatially, so we also set less limitations upon ourselves mentally. This makes it much easier to learn or master skills inworld and I have come to think that is why Second Life is such a great laboratory for education.

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