consideration of the intimate relationship of trust and policy, together with their derivative requirement for the establishment of identity, illuminates the systemic requirements of these devices such that individuals are able to more forcefully project the roles that they play within every social infrastructure that they participate in.

To relate computers to people, we need to understand groups and grouping mechanisms. For the human species, anticipating the development of group mechanisms was the development of basic communication among individuals. Within the domain of computers, personal electronic devices, like people, find their expression in communication and through this expression they find their persona; their identity. In the context of network access, be it for telecommunications, financial transactions, transport or the Internet, personal electronic devices exchange credentials, warrant the authority and enable the privacy required in the age of digital society. Moreover, while identity is a central and recurring theme of an individual personalized computer, their true utility extends into the conveyance and application of policy that controls actions in specific, though variable situations.

By the end of the XX^th century, the market for personal electronic devices had expanded enough that we could see their efficacy in several policy domains. For example, we can specifically note the role of such devices in the field of international telecommunications with cellular phones with or without digital capabilities of all sorts, in the flow of financial interchange with chip-enabled bank cards, in the development of digital entertainment on the Internet with music players enforcing digital rights and in the establishment of secure international networks by companies and organizations spanning the planet with instantaneous links through the auspices of identities protected by secure tokens. These devices have a common ingredient that we refer to as a secure core, commonly an embedded computer chip that is used for the secret, private and highly trusted parts of their operations.

While personal electronic devices were instrumental in the earliest efforts to facilitate access to and control of complex policy environments, we have come to recognize that a larger theological perspective is necessary for the shaping of our understanding of the relationship between real human beings and their network personae expressed by their secure cores. This recognition further suggested a need for us to better understand the role of the more intimate aspect of religious frameworks, particularly the mystic experience that is found at the base of every religion. Such an intriguing prospect stimulated our consideration and accompanied us in the extended journey of this writing.

Our perspective is that truly portable, private personal computing devices, like religions, are ultimately about trust and policy. They embody the current man-machine interface at the level of establishment, conveyance, implementation and boundary definition of our complex, often bewildering maze of competing and conflicting trust and policy infrastructures. They provide for the recognition of trust authorities and for the identification of the individual within the spheres of influence of those authorities. Furthermore, they are trusted conveyors of the policy environment itself, encompassing both authority and individual identity. A central characteristic of capability and utility is their ability to act as trusted arbiters of an individual’s policy choices within that environment. We might think of them in a certain guise as filling the role of shaman, a bridge between the divine source of trust and the earthly reality of policy.

As we have lived through and subsequently studied the explosive evolution of computer technology and social mores of the last half-century, we have drawn parallels between the development of religion and religious practice through the ages and the manner in which

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