LOST IN TRANSLATION
by Hans TenDam
It is May 7, 2110. On her low-vibration couch, Maria Torschutz, has her second client that day. The client, a 31-year old woman, has a strange compulsion: she wants to chat. Not just with her friends and acquaintances, but with virtually everybody she meets, on the streets, in the shops, on the chopper-bus. If she can’t chat, she seems to go crazy, if she does chat, she seems to go crazy too. She is chatting on the coach, right here, right now. When Maria tries to focus on that, her own mind starts to buzz and whirr, not an unpleasant sensation, but hard to keep in charge of a meaningful session.
So she breaks in: “Close your eyes and feel your body. Which body parts carry your need to chat?” Strangely enough, the client responds: “I feel tapping sensations in my finger tips.” “Go right back to a time and place when you experienced the need to chat, with the tapping sensations in your finger tips, that you are feeling right now.”
Maria is tensely
waiting for the response of the client, because she just read that CCD, a new syndrome, is on the rise (CCD: Chatting Compulsion Disorder). Maybe, today’s session will bring a clue.
And it does, her client is right back in her youth in her preceding lifetime, pretty precisely one century ago. And there it comes: a plethora of terms: email, internet, ICQ, SMS, Messenger, Plaxo, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, Xing, blogging, SMS. Her previous lifetime is frantically keeping in contact, seeking new contacts, in an ever-widening world-wide circle of “friends”, all connected by bad English. She blogs about her chats with a Linked-In group that shares information about websites that relay top-tweets about what is happening in the latest Facebook developments. Eventually she dies behind the screen, with her head on the keyboard, producing ‘liKJ’H
]’P
I9HJFEQHI’LAhjpieqfuj
p[9ujfe2jnqfWE KJLQefkfeqKLFEQklkfe’;fgijgilhjfhifhgeig ijeio[ho’ii g
or something like that.
I don’t know what will happen. In fact, I hardly know what is happening. And I don’t know too much of what has happened. But the truth is that I am changing the shallow end of the world-wide digital swimming-pool for the deep end. Long ago, before the Coming of Internet, there was Gopher. With that program you could access the first digitized libraries of forward-looking universities. I have struggled with it and gave up. Someone advised something revolutionary: ICQ. I connected and within a minute someone asked my age and sex. I obliged. Two minutes later I was asked if I was interested in pictures of willing ladies seeking contact. That was the end of ICQ.
Now we can’t survive without email, internet and Skype. EARTh couldn’t survive without it.
For about half a year I am on LinkedIn. My presence on Xing is in limbo. I try to blog on my website. Now I have entered the brave new world of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. You can find me there under tassoinstitute. EARThlings are slowly filling the list of friends on Facebook.
My guess is that you need about 1-2 years to really know what is useful and how it can be useful. What appears to work, will stay. The rest will atrophy. Now I have to learn to avoid all loose remarks that will linger on the net when I am long gone.
I suggest you all record a spoken message on YouTube directed to your future incarnation. A kind of regularly updated life retrospect. Make sure you use material and phrases that will help your future lifetime to identify her-his past lifetime. And, make sure, your next lifetime will not be embarrassed by this one.
Meanwhile, this is a new market for past-life therapists. We may offer guidance in recording life retrospects. After all, we know what questions to ask, where to guide the attention during the retrospect. You know, questions of knowledge and understanding, of learning, of accepting and even loving other people.
Who knows, one day we may reach digital immortality. Regression? Search for your past-life on the biographical internet.
If you want to comment on this prose, you know where you can find me: not on ICQ.
We’ll meet at the Annual Convention next July!
Hans TenDam
