The sixteenth century Spanish mystics, John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila, used a similar point of reference. Seeking words to connote a taste of spiritual divinty, they reached for the language of sexual ecstacy. They wrote of the breathless union of mediation in terms of the ecstatic blackout of consciousness, the llama de amor viva piercing the interior center of the soul like a white hot arrow, the cauterio suave searing through dreams of the dark night of the soul.
The altered state of consciousness encountered during sexual orgasm is verily easily seen as the zenith of human physical interface. In Neuromancer, William Gibson relates such levels of consciousness a human maintains while interfaced with the Matrix, the epitome of information technology:
Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his thumbs along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia. As she began to lower herself, the images came back, the faces, fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down around him and his backed arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slippinmg down on him again and again, until they both had come, his oegasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the Matrix, where the faces were shreaded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips. (p. 33)
