But what about the scourges associated with e-mails? Unlimited spam that promotes illicit pharmaceuticals, pornography, and solicitation of minors. What blessing can be found in that curse? Not to mention the sheer nuisance volume of Internet babble. Should the Lord's Prayer be amended, as one anonymous wit did, to read, "Forgive us our trespasses and deliver us fro e-mail"?

The hidden blessing in this case is that all e-mails are reducible to one thing: human consciousness talking to itself. In the expansion of consciousness there is knowledge, insight, and power. Unheard voices suddenly learn to speak. When you hop into a taxi in midtown New York City or Washington D.C., the cabbie often has his ear glued to a cell phone and talks in a foreign language the entire ride. It relieves his boredom, but at another level his conversation is a link in a global network that breaks down boundaries and dissolves borders. Fearful of our own security, we may darkly imagine that the network is buzzing with hatred and envy of America (there was the case of a former Boston cab driver identified as an al-Qaida operative). But the network also buzzes with talk of the future, hopes for a better life, and more basic things -- gossip and daily details of life in a new country. The same goes for text messaging and e-mails. We may cringe to see how shabby, petty, furtive, and selfish our thoughts are when broadcast everywhere, but the alternative is self-enclosed isolation and provincial prejudice that never lets in a breath of air from the outside. Technology becomes a tool for assimilation.

At the most mystical level, the Internet is God talking to himself through technology at the speed of light. Not every transmission is obviously divine, but it's not content that I am referring to. It's a process that involves bonding, free expression, and walls coming down. Spirituality may have a lot more to do with a cell phone photo taken on the spot of a tsunami or a terrorist attack than with homilies in church. That instantaneous transmission of another person's plight generates equally instantaneous compassion. Whatever God may ultimately be, her attributes are knowable only through human consciousness, and any expansion of consciousness carries us a step (or maybe only a tenth of an inch) closer to the mystery.