Reality, Part 6

Reality, Part 6

 “The only reality is pure consciousness, and everything else, including mind and matter, is a modulation of that reality”[1] Deepak Chopra

When our children were six and nine we made the obligatory (for the privileged among us) family pilgrimage to Disneyworld. My favorite ride was based on the movie series, Star Wars. We entered an enclosed box, adorned as a space-ship, with rows of seats in front of a large screen. Our narrator for the journey was the robot, C-3PO. Once strapped into our seats, we were off on a perplexingly wild ride. The physical and emotional sensations were as intense as those of any roller coaster I have been on, except the box did not go anywhere. There were no tracks, no physical hills to climb, no precipitous drops to plunge down, and no steep curves or loops to navigate. The physical and emotional sensations were virtual, meaning they were not the result of bodily movement along the track of a roller coaster. My stomach rose and fell, my fists clenched, I cursed the pilot (under my breath) for recklessness, and I was challenged to walk straight when exiting the ride. The space-ship box we were in did make some jerky movements, and the seat cushions depressed just enough to give the sensation of being thrown back against the seat at key moments. The sense of movement, however, was almost entirely a product of the video and audio that captured our attention on this riveting and seemingly real space adventure. But physically, we hardly moved.

In a similar way, I have twice piloted professional helicopter simulators. I sat in a virtual cockpit with controls and gauges identical to those of the aircraft being modeled. Visual and auditory clues came from a screen in front and speakers around the cockpit. The simulator itself never moved more than a foot or two in any direction – in fact, some do not move at all – but the sensations from the experience were very real (including nausea, fear, and severe disorientation). I have not experienced the virtual reality headsets available today, but I have seen players act out physically what is only occurring virtually on a screen – as if it were real. How can experiences like these feel so real when they are only in our heads? Is physical movement required to carry us on a real journey? I can report that my experiences lead me to believe that virtual reality is every bit as real as so-called physical reality. From an experiential perspective, at least for me, there is no difference.

Part of the doubt about the realness of virtual reality stems from our mistaken belief that experiential reality originates from physical sources – like our bodies, roller-coaster tracks, brains, and other solid, tangible objects – when our sense of reality actually emerges from consciousness, from our awareness. In that sense, all of our experience occurs in our head. Except that our conscious awareness is not actually in our head, as from our brain, but is deeply integrated into our being, both physical and non-physical aspects of our being. From that place within, our consciousness connects with that of all other created beings. All of the seemingly physical reality we experience around us is a projection of and from consciousness. Just because we can exit the box or simulator from which we had a jarring physical and emotional experience and see that our body did not go anywhere does not make the experience less real. Our conscious awareness made it real regardless of the lack of physical causes for the experience, just as the little boy’s love for his stuffed bunny made it real in The Velveteen Rabbit.

I have previously equated the reality of our dreams to that of our waking state. When we are awake we tend to dismiss our dreams as random, mental meanderings. From within a dream, however, there is no such sense of unreality. Although our waking body lies mostly still in dreams, we feel, smell, see, and hear in ways seemingly no different than in our waking consciousness. We have a body, a history, a purpose, family, friends, and various experiences. Even though our waking-state bodies are inactive, our consciousness creates experiences that are only unreal when considered from the waking state, which is a severely biased and limited point of view. Is it such a stretch to believe our “physical” waking world is not also a creation and projection of consciousness?

The physical nature of our world is not where reality originates or exists. Physical reality is a reflection or an echo of a much deeper, unseen reality. Reality only and ever exists in our conscious awareness in the present moment and, like truth, is always time, location, and context dependent.

This is the 26^thin a series of Life Notes on Time, and Eternity. The opinions expressed are mine. To engage with me or to explore contemplative spiritual direction, contact me at ghildenbrand@sunflower.com.

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[1] Rupert Spira, The Nature of Consciousness, from the Forward by Deepak Chopra, Oxford, 2017, p. x.