When I was younger, I was quite the rebel. I still am in many respects. I don't buy society as it is. Something - many things - are not right. Sure, that's obvious to most of us, but when I say it, I mean it in the most expansive way possible. One of my mentors, who is a brilliant individual, used to have a saying, "Says who?" It used to go quite well with one of my favorite tee shirts at the time, which read "Question Authority." We always have to question everything. Take time to reflect and put things into larger contexts. Otherwise, we're just sheep in this physical world, led by the beliefs, fears and often limited imagination of a select few or the collective at large. It's my observation that if we let ourselves, our daily lives and our perceptions be governed by the media, the physical hive mind and earthly institutions, those entities tend to put our overall awareness into an ever-shrinking box. I most often find nearly all of those institutions operate in a limited, contracting fashion, instead of being expansive. It's so obvious when you stop and think about it.
You can see a brilliant version of the confluence of these hive mind memes in the 1976 Sydney Lumet film, "Network", where Peter Finch amazingly portrays Howard Beale, a fictional network newscaster who reaches the tipping point and takes his rage to the airwaves, setting off a harsh reaction to this type of mental contraction and conditioning. It's always been one of my favorite films since first seeing it as a child. Of course now it has a lot more perspective and seems somewhat prolific, if not prophetic.
Having now spent three years working in virtual reality simulators for 70+ hours per week, creating landscapes, trees, plants, buildings, and interacting with different environments, my world view has changed immensely. Headphones for the virtual world experience are a must. Listening to the ambient sounds, a breeze or wind, insects, water, etc. adds to the immersive element of the experience. Maintaining your being in the air, floating and especially sailing across a vast landscape in the air while listening to music is insanely stimulating, as if there is a part of me that awakens and says, yeah... this is how it's supposed to be, because it always has been... I remember. I believe in the Seven Hermetic Principles, the second of which is Correspondence - As above, so below; so below, as above.
If you are familiar with these universal laws or you are just reading them for the first time, consider the words of John Lennon in his masterpiece, "Imagine". Then take a moment and subtract all of the world's religions, all belief systems, and consider that we exist truly within only a field of limitless possibility, of potentiality, and that we are only bound by the constructs, individually and collectively, of our minds. My aforementioned mosaic (my post-inherited, liquid construct of the world) has been increasingly conveying such an overall concept to me, at least at this point, which brings me back to how this physical planet isn't right - far from it. I increasingly get the feeling that we've been fleeced, robbed, and are somehow being herded as a race toward annihilation by a complicity of memes that are increasingly isolating us from nature and the planet herself, which I believe is a living consciousness along with everything we see, including the planets, sun and stars... as above, so below.
So I have spent this huge amount of time in virtual reality, and I have been awed at the feeling of deja vu and what comes as almost second nature to me. This is evident especially as I said when flying within the world, and also when "teleporting", which is the fastest means of moving from one place on the grid (which is massive) to another. There is an aspect of a failed teleport, where you can get "stuck" in between two points and have to retry the attempt. I have found that this mimics a certain state I've found myself in stirring myself from sleep while a dream is still in progress. I can awaken in the physical world in such a state where if I haven't moved my sleep position or opened up my eyes yet, I feel as though my consciousness is stretched across as vast distance - part in my body in bed while the other part is still actively connected to the dream state and I can sense great distance between the two points.
It's happened a fair amount of times since I started with virtual reality, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about it because of the experience with failed teleports, which has given my brain some sort of reference point to stop and consider what that might mean. When I am in that split state of lying in bed, awakening and feeling stretched across a great distance, the first thing that came to mind was, "Wow. My consciousness must be far more expansive that I think it is." I do know this: it does move. By that I mean that I noted some time ago that when I'm about to sleep, particularly when I'm physically tired and the environment is noisy, just before I drift off, the last thought I'll have is one of projecting my consciousness on to, most often, one of the walls of the room I'm in. When I have that thought, I can see the process taking place and that's the last thought I have before falling asleep.
Another wonder element in virtual reality is in the ability to see in a 360 degree fashion, knowing (within a mini-map popup window that's sizable within the larger viewer/client) window... all of the nearby lifeforms, their relative distance to me and a two-tone view of the surrounding landscape that can aid in further navigation of the territory or region you are exploring. It seems to me that I've done all of this before, probably many times. The resonance is off-the-charts for me in so many areas. I can't help but think, in a Hermetic sense, if we as humans create virtual worlds, why wouldn't those virtual worlds reflect back to us the larger universe and potential order of things? It stands to reason. Certainly there is something to the virtual world experience. It's all about ideas, creation and interaction. One conceptualizes and creates physical form by manifesting basic geometric shapes through one's avatar that are ultimately conceived by the mind of the person controlling said avatar from this physical world.
