For some, a spiritual experience is sending thoughts and feelings, prayers and even curses into the ether, hoping to receive a response or reply or perceiving some effect. However, what is received due to that projection can be difficult to assess and measure.

The project Meditation for Avatars enlists personal computers to make such spiritual projections. Participants in this project donate processing time on personal computers; the computers process mantras and send them through the Internet. A mantra is a repeated chanted sound that is used to focus one’s concentration during meditation. Personal computers are used because if there is one thing computers are good at, it’s undeviating repetition.

The goal of the project, which the creators describe as an “artistic experiment”, is to raise the spiritual consciousness of those donating processor time… “they [computers] meditate to raise our consciousness” proclaims the website. Participants can select which mantra is to be processed and see, on a screen wallpaper, the current mantra is “chanted” by the computer. According to the project developers, computers in this experiment become charged with positive energy, and this energy can be passed on to the users of the computers. By watching their computer “meditate”, participants will be encouraged to practice their own meditation.

Mantra Screen shot.

Like other forms of meditation or prayer, the consequences of devoted computing are best perceived through a filter of faith. “In order to be able to receive this energy, we need trust and faith in the positive” the website proclaims. This reviewer must lack such faith because I am compelled to wonder about assessment: how can anyone know if this works? But then, having faith eliminates the need to measure this experiment’s result. Still, many forays into the spiritual are done to realise some change on the earthly plain. The change that Meditation for Avatars seeks is “… in terms of our experiment, the greater the number of computers online, the more powerful the energy within the network. This energy can positively influence everything connected with it – the individual computers, the community network, and the Internet”. The spiritual energy in this experiment is meant to influence another non-substantial artefact – the Internet positively.

The parallel this project draws between the Internet and spirituality I find intriguing. Like many perceptions of what a spiritual realm would be like, the Internet is not wholly concrete. It has a real impact on human affairs but in ways that are not easy to gauge. As spaces, the Internet and spiritual realms both provide private and communal experiences; cyberspace is immaterial, but like a spiritual realm, it is accessed through material practices.

When we open our browser, we project ourselves into a non-corporeal space and the responses to our projections are sometimes hard to fathom. Indeed, the Internet can be downright ethereal at times. For example, those cryptic emails from an unknown source, like voices from beyond, give us the power to enlarge our body parts. Or those invitations to friends on Facebook that remain mysteriously unconfirmed; how like an unanswered prayer an unfulfilled Internet communication can be. Google acts as a Delphic oracle, an intermediary between the elusive spiritual and the actual. When we consult the Google oracle, 30,500,000 responses to the search prompt “why doesn’t anyone love me?” become available. Google performs as oracles have always done – Google will lead us to directions on how to make toast but can’t make clear the really big issues. I wonder what a Google search for “the benefits of positive spiritual energy in my computer” would turn up.

Meditation for Avatars draws a line connecting spirituality and the Internet and I ask the project to connect the material practice of computer processors chanting mantras and some measurable impact on the human condition. But perhaps the concept of the Internet as a spiritual space is where I can resolve my difficulty with the Meditation for Avatars project. If computers, as avatars, chant our behalf, perhaps the performance of our other avatars on the Internet has real consequences. Maybe the mayhem that is perpetrated in World of Warcraft corresponds to violence and intolerance in real life. Maybe Second Life is really a Second Chance, and instead of accumulating stuff and gratifying appetites, digital space is where avatars can perform differently, more nobly, than we do in Real Life.

But let’s admit it – like Real Life, our projections into cyberspace can be far from noble. The list of egregious digital ugliness people bring to the Internet is long. The violence and corruption of Real Life is mirrored in hacks and assaults on sites and in pernicious child pornography: victims of cyber crimes experience feelings of violation and helplessness that mimic the feelings of those subjected to Real Life crimes of violence. A counterbalance to the uglier side of the Internet might be the tasks we assign our computers. The steadfast churning out of mantras may work to detoxify our systems and us. And while the processors drone on, the Meditation for Avatars wallpaper provides a tally of our computer’s (and therefore our) contribution to the good, a measure of gentle sanity in the cyber-world.

As a project, Meditation for Avatars asks us to consider the ramifications of our projections into digital space to imagine that the time and energy to which we devote our computers affect users and the network community. This is another way of asking us to be responsible for what we do with the Internet. The Internet is ultimately a communal space: we need to care about how we treat each other in that space. If, in an experiment to raise spiritual consciousness, our awareness of others is heightened, then Meditation for Avatars might be on to something.