Are You Living in Virtual Reality?

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This weekend I went to see the film Final Destination. It was an entertaining but gory film with lots of people meeting their death in horrible ways. When I looked at the screen the images were all blurry, but when I put on the special glasses I had been given, my brain was fooled into thinking that I was watching everything in 3D.  This meant that various object came out of the screen and appeared to be heading straight towards me so that I too would share the fate of the characters on the screen as their heads came away from their bodies.

The 3D technology is fascinating. One day I will be able to interact wityh the 3D images, have conversations with holographic characters in a virtual reality world, get to hold a virtual gun to shoot virtual people in the ultimate video game.

In the evening I went to sleep as normal then woke up in the middle of the night unable to get back to sleep. Suddenly everything changed. One moment I was lying on my back in bed awake, the next moment I found myself on a train.

“How did I get here?”, I asked in a confused way.

I then realized that I was in a lucid dream. I occasionally have such dreams. In these dreams nothing is happening. There are no strange adventures and peculiar things going on as in my normal dreams. Instead the  lucid dream is about the environment that I find myself in.

Here I was traveling in a train and knowing that I was in a world constructed by my mind. I began to explore my environment and found myself in various rooms as well as outside locations. I held ice and it was cold. I put my hands in a river and felt the cool water flowing. This lucid world felt as real as my everyday world. I marveled at how detailed the environment was and how my mind had managed, without any effort or even choice on my part, to construct this version of reality.

I woke up wondering what was real, my everyday life, or my lucid dream.

How does all this relate to non-duality? To approach an understanding of non-duality means that your assumptions about the world you live in, your physical environment as well as your thoughts and feelings, may not be true. The central assumption that most humans have is that the physical world is real and that there is a separate self that thinks and feels. Your mind tells you stories and your identity and sense of  reality is built on believing those stories.

What would happen if you told yourself a different story?

• I am not real
• My thoughts are not true
• The world is not there

It is not important if the above statements are true or not. What is important is to have the uncertainty that these statements could be true or false? This is the start of breaking down your identity. Letting go of all that you believe in and hold to be true can be scary.

Is this your final destination?

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