No One Invented the Internet

Al Gore became the brunt of jokes when he was misquoted as saying he invented the Internet. He did claim, however, to have created a more receptive federal environment for the development and use of the Internet, and in a sense, that claim was correct.

The Internet, as we know it, is a recent phenomenon. We are all connected through our various computer devices to a global web of communication. But long before the modern concept of the Internet was a gleam in someone’s brain, a web of global connection was already in existence. Indeed it has been in existence since the dawn of creation.

The ancients called it the jeweled net of Indra, a metaphor for the interconnectedness of everything in the manifested universe. We fool ourselves in thinking that we are all separate beings, isolated from each other and from the environment we share with everything, not only on our mother earth, but throughout the cosmos and beyond all time.

Several months ago, while practicing taiji between two of my favorite trees at my forest cabin, I received a gift of awareness of this “universe-wide-web.” I felt the earth under my bare feet come alive, and filaments of light extended from the trunks of the trees towards me. My body responded as I sensed energy roots growing from the soles of my feet into the earth. Filaments of light emerged from my body and reached towards the filaments from the trees until they joined together, weaving a tapestry of light connecting me to the forest.

That might sound amazing, and it was, but what was really amazing was realizing that this energetic connection is always there, has always been there, will always be there. There is never a moment when we are separate from all of creation, and from the source of all creation. Oneness is not just an ideal, it is reality, not just to think about but to experience.

Since that day, even though I don’t see the energetic filaments with my eyes, I sense them. I feel the connection with all of creation. As my favorite Borg, Seven of Nine, famously said to the Borg queen, “Our thoughts are one.” Our very being is one, multiple expressions of the original Internet of creation.