Socketman!

[Guest guest]

>magus (==Gene Poole==)

>

>Yes. If you do a 'traceroute' on my particular phraseology, you will find

>that I send (as you read) requests to far-away, disparate 'servers' within

>your _aggregate consciousness_, what you refer to as "the collective body".

>By so doing, I tie together what had been discreet, and in so doing,

>encourage automatic reconfiguration of 'your' memory/indexing schema.

>

>This (new?) game of 'extended ping-pong' ramifies in several dimensions

>simultaneously, as you feel; not only the personal, but the universal is

>brought 'into play'. And now, I have this to say about that... it is 'just

>exercise'. This is NOT to say that I am saying nothing; on the contrary,

>there are things that I want to say. But the things, topics, themselves,

>are of less importance than becoming aware of the operations of

>'consciousness'. That is why I say it is 'just exercise'.

 

I snip most of Gene's posting, which is full of implications, to play a few

riffs on the idea of 'traceroute' and 'ping-pong'. As Gene knows,

Traceroute is a TCP/IP network utility (TCP/IP is the protocol that the

Internet uses) that allows you to find the path to any other host on the

network, the Internet. A 'host' in this case is just another connected

computer. (Perhaps or perhaps not it is significant that the 'host' in the

Eucharist is the sacramental element...but I digress...) Traceroute

operates by sending Ping's out on the network and traceing their path. A

Ping is a packet of pure information, i.e., it has no content. It just goes

'Ping", like sonar does when it hits the hull of a submarine. Sometimes on

this list and others we just Ping eachother for the sheer joy of it.

 

At a higher level on a TCP/IP network we have sockets. A host can have many

sockets going at once. The definition of a socket is "a logical

representation of a network endpoint." I might open a socket to Gene, to

Jerry, to Harsha, or whomever, and then we can have two way

communication...we can exchange a huge number of packets in realtime

because the packet contains its own route, it knows its way to the other

host and its connected socket.

 

As a user sitting at your computer you don't see this. You may see an icon

that says "Dial Up Networking" or you may see one that says "Network

Neighborhood". Then one day someone takes you into the computer room and

shows you the routers and patch panels and servers and T-1 drops and as you

watch the lights flickering on all the panels, suddenly your vision of

reality changes. In my imagination I see myself diving through the "Network

Neighborhood" icon and finding myself in a radiant night sky full of

winking lights that represent the infinity of sockets exchanging delicious

information, like the Net of Indra. My self that is my own personal 'host'

drops away and I join the great Self that is the Network. This is when the

realignment that Gene talks about happens. It becomes impossible to pick

out which winking light is my own, and if I could do so it would be

absolutely irrelevant.

 

If I could be a superhero I think I'd call myself Socketman!

 

David