I know. You're sick, and you're tired. You've been Y2K'd to a glass-eyed stupor. You're tired of hearing pundits yammer on about what the millennium "means." About how we're undergoing "psycho-economic megaschisms." You have fantasies about storming CNBC with fragmentation grenades to force those wind-up blowhards to define Oz-inspired phrases like "paradigm societal shift."

Hang with me. We're of one mind.

My own Millennial Burnout has reached violent proportions. This morning, when a Today Show anchor declared the birth of the Internet to be the defining moment of our century, I winged my buttered "everything" bagel at the television. I know, I know. But drastic times call for drastic measures.

Ahhh, yes, he said, sarcasm dripping like the butter on the television screen. The Internet. Forget, after all, the Wrights' conquest of the sky, or the lunar landing. Blink, and you missed those. And forget World War I, World War II, the Cold War and the civil rights battle, because now we can do nearly all of our shopping from home. Sweet Hosannah in excelsis, will the world ever be the same?

Bzzt, I'm sorry. Thank you for playing. If we are on the cusp of something significant as conscious beings, it is most certainly not a better BAUD rate. In the larger scheme, the Internet explosion is nothing more than the Gold Rush of the late twentieth century, an enterprising grab for riches hidden in unknown territories. Will it prove a boon or bust for humankind? Jury's out, but I can tell you one thing with certainty: in terms of relative significance, the Internet is a bug on the windshield of human history.

So, if not the tolling bell of the Information Age, what does the millennium mean?

Well, reductively speaking, it means that a few hundred years after the fact, the potentates of the Roman Catholic Church (which I seem to recall having another name besides "potentate") gathered with disparate data points and agreed, for posterity's sake, upon the year when Jesus Christ was born. Two thousand years and a handful of days hence from that date, we've chosen to bring the house down.

While the date itself may have enormous import to those of you who practice Christianity, or even Judaism, it means entirely nothing, in fact, to people of different faiths. It means nothing to animals, plants, or the earth on which we live. Cosmically, it's a yawner, a non-event. (Stick it out another twelve years for the Mayan calendar to roll over, and you might see some real interstellar fireworks. But that's another column.)

The truth, which you probably suspected long ago, is that the new millennium itself has little or nothing to do with the millennium celebration. But before you run off to sell your Streisand tickets, consider that the real reason to throw a party might be far greater than most people even imagine.

It seems that prominent scientists -- astrophysicists and quantum theorists, mostly -- have formulated a new model of the universe. This model, called String Theory, has evolved gradually since Einstein put forth relativity (an inspired but flawed concept whose mathematics crumble at the extremes of time and space). String Theory math, to the wonder and dismay of many of its proponents, holds fast.

OK, deep breath. String Theory essentially states that every component of energy and matter in the universe, or every quantum, are linked to every other component of energy and matter by strands of a dimensional force that binds literally everything in the universe to everything else. Forget electrons and atoms; they are matter, and matter -- you and me included -- is nothing more than a fleeting manifestation of energy.

Apart from the striking neo-spiritual beauty of Oneness, String Theory goes on to postulate that since everything is really One, there is no separation -- and that therefore there is no space. Yup. You heard me right. Every single "place" is everywhere else at once. Oh, and while we're at it, remember that pesky little thing called time? Well, forget it, because that doesn't exist either. Not the way we perceive it to exist, at least. As much as every single place is everywhere else, each moment in time has existed at every other moment in time since the birth of the Universe.

That was page one. Suffice it to say I never got around to the NCAA box scores.

For a week or more I laid awake in bed at night, my head in a spin, these new ideas alternately sparking terror and inspiration. Yeah, the notion that my reality was somehow an incomplete picture had certainly made it onto my radar...but time? Space? These are things I rely on having between my car and the one in front of me. These are the things by which I measure my life. I was in a shambles.

Oddly, a week later, I was at peace. Where I'd initially felt imbalance and discord, I had come to find these ideas strangely graceful and life affirming. With a rabid appetite for more, I picked up a copy of a book called The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot, which deals with the now-pressing question: if it isn't what we perceive it to be, then what is it?

Talbot and his contemporaries (too numerous to mention) theorize that the universe as we perceive it is a collision of omnipresent waveforms -- energy and matter alike -- that casts a dimensional image not unlike a hologram. Like the hologram, the image is not the thing itself, but a perception of the thing cast into light by the mere presence of consciousness (which is, in itself, energy). These are enfolded orders and unfolded realities of an unseen whole that we, as mere frequency receptors, can only imagine.

Forgive my butchery of Talbot's brilliant words; I'll let them speak for themselves (p.50):

Just as every portion of the hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left hand. We could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos. So does every leaf and every raindrop...

If this sounds familiar, it's because Wholeness, or Oneness, is an idea that Eastern faiths have grasped for years, though they may not have possessed the mathematical or astronomical acumen to prove it to the layman skeptic. Psychedelic pioneers have experienced it first-hand, but lack the mainstream credibility to sell it to the masses. But suddenly, scientists -- some of the most brilliant and credible minds on our planet -- are championing these ideas. Ideas that while they may fly in the face of Judeo-Christian dogma (which embraces notions of God as something Other than us, as a separate and monarchical body) are inherently spiritual.

What does this mean? It means that after a centuries-long game of tug-o-war, science and faith seem to have found a sliver of common ground. Ironically, they've found it in a void, in the wholesale denial of everything we see, smell, hear, touch and taste. But as much as these revelations may scuttle our notions of what Is, they lend an unmistakable momentum, among the people who care enough to think about such things, toward a grander, more unified consciousness. Toward an embrace of the All.

Fuck the Internet -- there's something to celebrate.

If the universe is waveforms, maybe it's not sight but sound that provides us with the purist and most unadulterated perception of the eternal. I've always found good musicians and appreciators of good music to be the most spiritually evolved and content people I've ever met, and I'm starting to realize why. Music is sacred; it is a church, a sacrament of Holy Communion. It allows us to transcend, together.

If you're lucky enough to see your favorite band this New Years Eve, transcend. Take a moment as the ball drops to feel yourself as a part of the crowd, the earth, the universe. Listen to the music, feel the spirit moving, peel open the curtain and see beyond to imagine what the future has already brought.

That's what all this millennium crap is about, anyway.