VR Birthday
Just before I spawned into my regular Sunday morning Be Here Now event, I noticed two of my VR friends were hanging out so I joined them. Mr. Nicerly lives in Oslo. Leith, his avatar name is Wild Grape, is in the Shetland Islands and he had Covid. He’s a long hauler and it’s still affecting him big time.
There’s a lot of navigation-by-friend in VR. It’s an endearing, almost small-town aspect of the way this immersive communications technology is entering the popular culture.
It was also a great start for my 72 birthday, catching up with new friends.
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I don’t see Ram Dass as a guru, more like the Lenny Bruce of spirituality. I love to listen to him talk. He makes me think.
That’s why I’ve been hosting sessions in VR centered on Be Here Now, talking about what he said 50 years ago. Working through his recorded workshops. We are now at, Behind It All.
By the time 15–20 avatars assembled, I stopped my rambling intro played the clip. Ram Dass reminding me pleasantly for the umpteenth time that my attachments keep me here.
We listen for a little then we talk a lot. More avatars drop in and join the conversation.
By noon we’d had enough fun with our gross physical plane, the astral and causal planes, and of course the Formless.
My plan for the day was pretty formless itself and when I noticed a cool looking jazz concert on the AltspaceVR Daily Events menu I knew what was coming next.
I know this must sound crazy to anyone who hasn’t been in a fully immersive Virtual World, but Saxy’s Jazz Club is right up there with any jazz club I’ve ever been to.
It reminds me of Paul’s Mall in Boston back in the 70s, except Boylston Street is a hard place to find parking and VR isn’t. This isn’t a promise but that might be my last no-parking-at VR-shows joke.
I was swept up by the feel of the place in one second and not too many seconds after that, SirSaxy himself started the program. I don’t even know where he was, playing his sax, but to me he was right there at Saxy’s Club with the rest of us.
I noticed my friend Geoffrey and he came over to my table. I messaged Grape and Nicerly and they came too, but our room was full so they were in another Saxy’s instance. Advocates of the Everett, Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics feel right at home in VR.
SirSaxy played a few Christmas standards, his jazz interpretations. Chestnuts Roasting, oh man, he really got the feelings flowing on that one.
Then a mind blowing thing happened. Another avatar went up and sat at the keyboard. He accompanied on, Little Drummer Boy, with SirSaxy or someone as the vocalist. They had it going. They were together like one instrument. hen the vocalist stepped away and the sax came back, the keyboard was right with it.
The two artists were not in the same place. They were feeling each other’s rhythm and dealing with the lag time and they just plain nailed it. No one had any idea until they told us. I might not even be describing it correctly.
What they did is considered impossible. One voice, One sax. The accompanying accents from the piano. Different locations but brought together here. The whole crew was emotional. The crowd felt it.
SixSaxy sat down. Someone else came up, sang two more beautiful slow jazzy, ending, Oh, Holy Night. I didn’t know it, but we were experiencing a MetaCulture show. From their About Us on the Web:
We were born out of the necessity for the representation and inclusion for people of color in virtual reality space. Metaculture’s mission is to shift the narrative from being strictly consumers to being creators and contributors by making culturally relatable events, experiences and spaces.
They’re doing it.
It was late afternoon and I had been in VR most of the day. Why stop now I thought as I dropped in to Slicks Comedy Club. I know Slick Rick and I’d been meaning to check out his place but I’m usually feeling too busy. Not today.
There was a lively crowd, but not out of control. The comics could perform, do their acts and not just deal with hecklers. I stayed for three of them. They weren’t A-List or B-List. But they weren’t just goofballs telling fart jokes. They made some funny observations, got off some good lines. The young man in the picture above riffed amusingly on God for a while.
We had a family dinner irl. Subtle and understated maple cake with whipped cream and mandatory singing.
I’m a grampa. The idea of downplaying a birthday is anathema to grandkids but it comes naturally to me. I don’t mind being celebrated; I would just prefer the focus to be accomplishments, not age. Maybe sometime I’ll learn to accept birthday greetings as a proxy.
When I was sufficiently feted for this year, I began to get ready for my final VR event of the day. The Sunday evening Be Here Now.
We hold it in the same World as the morning event, just a much darker sky, lights illuminating our space, and sky full of stars. Usually the two events draw two different crowds but this time there were numerous repeaters who wanted Ram Dass to wash over them some more.
The audio clip I played, with an image of the young Ram Dass there on the screen to look at, lasts only fifteen minutes. It always contains dozens of topics we could discuss for hours. We have.
In this kind of event, the emphasis is on people expressing themselves. It’s not me or anyone who supposedly knows, telling everyone else how it is. It’s everyone saying what they feel like saying about attachments keeping us on the physical plane, or being a fully realized Being, which where the main themes that night.
I graduated from college with Honors in Philosophy and I hear ideas every week from people at gatherings like this in VR that expand my mind, that give me a new way of looking at some Big Question or Big Topic I thought I had exhausted.
On this evening, people said over and over in different ways that Ram Dass let them take off a pair of shoes that had been too tight forever. They said, we don’t have to strive, we don’t have to attain, unless striving and attaining is what you feel like doing. We chop wood and carry water because that’s what we need to do then.
If we lose some layers of our conditioning by the way we behave day after day, we’ve evolved. I doubt I could have approached a birthday like I did VR Birthday without the pandemic experience I have had — trusting that when you let people speak from the heart, in front of caring strangers, we will all be touched, all be moved. You just have to trust it. You just have to Be Here Now.
I also write a brief and occasional e-newsletter about anything but VR, called Plain Thoughts. You can subscribe here https://tnickel32.substack.com/ if you’d like.
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