Unmask your Virtual Reality and expand to Infinity
You can swim in the ocean, touch the fishes & ride the sharks, you can fly in the sky & kiss the birds, ….. and can do many more things and experience all of them just by sitting in your living room. That’s the Virtual Reality (VR) Technology. You might have seen some of the VR Gadgets that are coming up in the market. Here is a sample.
Now, something even more interesting than this. Do you know that we all are fitted with an amazing VR Gadget right from birth? — that’s our Body-Mind complex.
Consider the following observations to understand the magnificence of our VR Gadget.
1) When we see a red flower, is there really something like ‘red flower’? If we ‘scientifically’ decipher this viewing, what is happening is:
- White light is falling on the red flower
- All other colours get absorbed and only the red light gets reflected
- Red light enters the eyes and falls on the retina of eyes which triggers electrical signals to the brain
- Brain processes the electrical signals and mind interprets as ‘red flower’ based on the past data that is recorded
- In reality there is no red object entering the eyes. It’s only an experience and an interpretation in the brain/mind.
In a similar way, all the five sense organs that we have generate signals which the brain (hardware) processes and the mind (software) interprets.
Isn’t the physical world that we perceive is a filtered and interpreted view of the existence through our body-mind VR Gadget?
2) Now, one more deeper step to inquire. Though a computer with a camera, or a VR Gadget, captures the lights from the objects (‘sees’) and processes them in the CPU & memory, that computer or VRG does not feel that ‘I am seeing the object’. Whereas we have a first-person experience of ‘I am seeing’. Who is this ‘I’ who ‘feels’ I am seeing? It’s not our eye (which works like a camera) or the brain which processes like a CPU with memory. Could our Body-Mind be a VR Gadget that we all are fitted with right from the birth and ‘we’ are different from the body & mind?
3) We know that though the spectrum of electromagnetic energy is vast, what our eyes can see are red to violet only. What we can hear is only the vibrations between 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz frequencies — we can not hear what dogs or bats can hear. We cannot smell what dogs can sniff…. etc. Essentially our VR Gadget is a narrow-band filter giving a limited & interpreted perception of the infinite existence.
Through modern science though we know that entire universe is made of same sub-atomic particles, we do not experience that way. We perceive separate, distinct objects, including ourselves. This is because of our VR Gadget, the Body-Mind complex.
Here is a great TED talk by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who observed her own brain functioning while going through a stroke. Very interesting to notice how she went beyond her VR Gadget and experienced the infinite existence.
How our Body-Mind complex is deceiving us by giving a filtered & interpreted narrow view of the infinite existence! (This is called Maya in Indian wisdom traditions).
Though logically we understand this deception, why is it that we believe that what is perceived/projected from this Body-Mind VR Gadget as real? This is because we are fitted with this VR gadget from birth to death — so, we haven’t perceived anything other than what is shown by this VR gadget. And everybody is fitted with exactly similar VR gadget without any exception. So, we believe what is shown by the VR gadget as universally Real.
So, are we ready to unmask from our VR gadget and move from limited perception to infinite view of the existence? If yes, you can explore the profound science & technology of unmasking from our VR gadget through the following references.
Talks by Swami Sarvapriyananda from Vedanta Society of New York delivered at Indian Institute of Technology, Khanpur on Kena Upanishath and Mandukya Upanishath:
If you want to have a deep dive exploration & practices, Just Be: Transform Your Life and Live as Infinity by Suresh Ramaswamy is a great resource.
Unmasking our VR gadget and realizing who we really are is the essence of Indian wisdom traditions like Upanishaths, Vedanta, Bhagavath Gita etc.
Happy unraveling and experiencing the infinite.
