Now, you don’t have to wait to die to have a second life; there’s one available online, thanks to 3D Internet. In virtual worlds, of which Second Life is the most popular, you can create an avatar and live a parallel life — own land, a home, have a boyfriend, go dancing at a nightclub… and now, watch Bollywood movies. People can also make money in SL (as its “residents” call it) where real commerce takes place among not just landowners and buyers but also those offering goods and services and the avatars who avail of them.

For 18-year-old Deepak Badane, who works as a chai-boy in real life, SL represents democratisation in a virtual society. His semi-literacy (he has studied till Class VIII), lack of English skills and socio-economic pedigree are no barriers here. So, Badane is Deepak Mesmer, a  football pro, in SL. He dons expensive-looking denims, sports a chic hairstyle and of course, plays football like a dream.

Badane, aka Mesmer, represents the tip of what might be an Internet-led revolutionary iceberg in India. “Imagine what 3D Internet can do for distance education in India. We can reach out to people who have never spoken a word of English,” says Siddharth Banerjee, the 26-year-old CEO of Indusgeeks, a Mumbai-based firm that functions as a virtual guide for companies and individuals who want to set up shop in SL.

Child Relief and You (CRY) has roped in Indusgeeks to set up an action centre in SL, one where avatars can actually visit, interact with representatives and engage in charity work. On Children’s Day, November 14, CRY hopes to kickstart an awareness and fundraising campaign in SL, complete with a Bollywood star’s presence.

“Companies like IBM, Toyota and Reebok can and are doing everything in SL — from virtual conferences and product development to training and orientation,” says Banerjee.

A Medicine Buddha Mandala constructed in Paris France, will be built simultaneously in Second Life, in solidarity with the peoples of Burma. The Mandala, a detailed sand representation of the residence of the Medicine Buddha, will be constructed by Tibetan monks over four days. This offering comes at a particularly poignant time says Ven, Geshe Thupten Khedroup, Meditation Director of MindScience Institute. “Monks and Nuns of Burma have shown great compassion and courage demonstrating for freedom and democracy. Those who believe in human rights and human dignity must show solidarity with the Burmese people. This Mandala is dedicated to the peace and happiness of all beings, and especially to those who are suffering in Burma at this time.”

Executives from Unfrozenmind, a Strategic Innovation thinktank based in London and Community Chest SARL collaborated with MSI to simulcast this event in Second Life enable this message of peace and solidarity to be shared in an interactive way across the globe. “This is about technology with a moral compass and about the promotion of universal human values” said Alexei Levene, Marketing Director of Unfrozenmind.

Both the actual and virtual Mandalas are free events open to all peoples says Ven Geshe Thupten Khedroup “We are very happy if people can take some time out of their busy schedules to visit and share in this Mandala as well as expressing their solidarity in a peaceful environment.”

MSI Meditation Director, Ven. Geshe Thupten Khedroup will be building the Medicine Buddha Mandala between 18th-21st October at Espace St Martin, 199bis rue Saint Martin, Paris, France. To join the event on Second Life, please visit http://slurl.com/secondlife/UnfroZenMind/169/72/36 .

About MindScience Institute:

MSI is dedicated towards helping both Buddhists and non-Buddhists to train their minds through a practical application of ancient Tibetan techniques. Running courses, conferences and constructing Mandalas across Europe, MSI also runs Aid Projects to support children in need and monks and nuns in Tibet and India.

For more information on MSI, please see http://www.mindscience-institute.com

Virtual worlds have been attracting a huge amount of interest this year, driven by the success of Second Life, World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin and a host of others that have hit the headlines. When faced with something so shiny, baffling and new it is reassuring to see that imaginative artists have always intuitively understood both the charms and the dangers of leaving this world for another. Children’s writers in particular have made it their business to dramatise the process of imaginative escape into other worlds, and so children’s literature is full of that liminal moment when a child crosses the threshold and leaves the safe, ordered world they know for some strange new world in which everything is entirely different. This is of course a staple of narrative, not just children’s narratives, but there seems to be something about children’s minds which makes the feeling of leaving real life and entering a magical new world particularly seductive.

So in classic children’s literature such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and in more modern variants such as The Phantom Tollbooth or the Harry Potter novels, children walk through a portal into another place, essentially entering a virtual world of the imagination.

One novelist who knew about world building was C.S. Lewis, who in the Narnia books created an enduring alternate reality that has survived and flourished over decades, eventually making it onto the screen with all the resources of modern day computer generated animation.

There’s a brilliant section in one of the Narnia novels, The Magician’s Nephew, in which the book’s heroes, a boy and girl called Polly and Digory, find some magic rings which transport them into a place called the wood between the worlds. It’s a magical forest full of trees and little pools of water, and they discover that by jumping in the pools they can enter into hundreds of different worlds. It’s one of these jaunts that takes them to a brand new world which eventually becomes Narnia.

What’s great about this sequence is the moment of horror when the children realise that there is no way to clearly identify which pool leads to which world, or indeed, the one that leads them back to their own. They suddenly realise that they risk getting completely lost in the wood between the worlds, with no way to return home.

I find something extraordinarily resonant about the imagery of this passage, because it seems to me to capture perfectly the problem that we have set ourselves in creating online virtual worlds.

We have created an endlessly proliferating series of virtual spaces to explore. Imagine being a teenage boy today. You can jump into online massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, or play online against people around the world on Xbox Live in a game like Gears of War. You can jump into in the endless whirl of social networking sites like Bebo, or MySpace, or Facebook. You can explore the labyrinthine worlds of music, film, and television online, hunting out specialist websites to pursue your particular taste in obscure cultural niches.

The reality is we don’t have a wood between our worlds. We have the World Wide Web, and it’s this web between the worlds which is our jumping off point for all the new spaces that digital culture is enabling.

Like Polly and Digory, we also risk getting lost in this endless series of virtual worlds, and I think we’re naïve if we underestimate the challenge we are setting ourselves as a culture in finding order and meaning amidst so many different opportunities. The wood between the worlds is beautiful, and quite peaceful: nothing ever happens there, and no one really belongs there. I hope we teach our children the skills they will need to keep jumping between worlds safely. Sadly, and unlike the heroine in Frank L. Baum’s Wizard of Oz books, they can’t just click their heels together to find their way back home.

Michael Parsons will moderate discussions of the economics and the future of virtual worlds at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London next week

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, was once European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk