Living in a virtual world

8.5 mins read + a cool video.

Learning meditation is important because there is nothing inherently stuck about us – we are not just material beings but spiritual beings with a deep inner life and indeed infinite capacity for freedom.

No one likes suffering, and my heart goes out to everyone right now because no one seems unaffected by this disconcerting new “normal”, whatever normal ever meant or will mean again. Yet suffering can be motivating — and perhaps it sometimes takes something like a seemingly inescapable stifling pandemic to think about how we can become happy and free from the inside out instead of continuing to pursue happiness and freedom from the outside in.

The reason we have this potential for enlightenment is that we have minds, and these are formless, not physical, and endlessly creative. We can learn to do anything with our minds, and when we change our mind we really do change our world. Meanwhile, our bodies are physical and very limited. If I want to go to London, I have to fly there on an airplane, if they’ll even let me these days. But today I was talking to my parents in London as if we were in the same room. Our bodies were thousands of miles apart but our minds were still meeting. You are probably finding that a lot yourself these days, now that the whole world has gone virtual and we are visiting people in all sorts of places while sitting on our sofa.

A few weeks ago Gen-la Dekyong talked to over 5,000 people tuning in through their computers and phones. Talking to audiences across the world, her mind was no doubt partly in the Temple with the recording equipment and partly in a bunch of other countries and partly who knows where else, maybe the Pure Land. And those of us who listened to her were both in our rooms and in England, were we not? Or did our minds meet half-way, in the middle of an ocean?!

This teaching also showed the emptiness of time because many of us heard the teaching later in the day and yet it still felt totally present, again a meeting of minds.

Even as you read this our minds are meeting in some manner, are they not? We are together somewhere — the question is, Where?! How? When?! Where and what exactly is this concrete physical reality of time and space that we keep trying to grasp at even whilst our formless minds are commingling?

We are so caught up in material, spatial, and temporal coordinates, just like we fall for these in a dream; but they are all projections of our mind, not objective reality. If Gen-la Dekyong was in England and you were in Australia, what time was it when your minds met? What time is it when our minds meet now?

We can’t find anything when we look for it — “Everything is like space,” as Shantideva says. If you’re ever in doubt about how we are grasping at concrete independent things that are not actually there, take a look at this video:

The point is that everything depends upon its parts and upon imputation by our mind. The wonderful promise of this is that when we finally get around to realizing it for ourself, we can deliberately and completely change our experiences and our world for the better, enjoying the great bliss and emptiness of reality.

Where we all live

People are still managing to meet, all over the place, every day. This virtual reality that we seem to be inhabiting is a useful doorway into thinking about how our formless awareness is not obstructed by matter and can go anywhere. If we think about the moon, there we go – in fact, let’s go! It is quite cool up here, don’t you think?! Let’s have a party, eat some cheese. Our minds go where our thoughts go, even to London, even to the moon. Our mind is not in any way circumscribed by space or even time – it is non-local, it can go anywhere. It can even go to liberation and enlightenment.

What obstructs our mind is not what obstructs our body, such as walls and miles; it is delusions and their imprints. These two obstructions obstruct our potential to be everywhere and love everyone. We have dualistic appearance and believe there is a world outside the mind, an objective real world — when there isn’t.

As I mentioned in this article, Aligning with reality, where is the world outside my experience or my mind? I’m supposedly in lockdown in Denver, but where is Denver, for example?

We seek our happiness though seemingly solid material stuff that ends up being more fleeting than we realized and also nowhere near as important. What ends up being most important is the quality of our thoughts, our consciousness – whether we are feeling happy and free or anxious and depressed, for example. Our mind determines everything.

Our mind is formless awareness, it has no physical properties. We cannot see, hear, or smell our mind, nor sit on it or photograph it — we can only know our mind by looking within with mental awareness. We cannot find our mind anywhere in the physical world – it is as if it is everywhere and nowhere.

And our mind is tremendously powerful, the most creative force in the universe — with our thoughts we create our world. Our world arises from our subjective mind. The world or life we experience depends on our experience, of course, one hundred percent.

Let’s say you’re having a meeting on Zoom. There is certainly a meeting going on, important things being discussed. Co-workers are beaming in from all over the world, and some of them also have crazy virtual reality backgrounds like beaches or temples or planets (I don’t know how anyone manages to concentrate, I know I can’t.) Question is, where is this meeting taking place? Where is it? Let’s find it. Where would you start looking? Is it the camera on my computer? No, most people cannot see my camera. Is it a co-worker’s couch? Is it that virtual reality temple? Is it another co-worker’s home office? Is it the words coming out of people’s mouths? Or the satellites beaming those words through the speakers? I could go on and on.

Wherever we look, we’ll never be able to point to this meeting, “Ah, there it is!” The more we try to pinpoint it, the more it disappears like a mirage. It is impossible to find this meeting outside of our mental experience of this meeting, both collective and individual. Collectively we agree we are in the same meeting, so there is some conventional reality functioning and we’re able to communicate on some level; but my individual experience of this meeting is also probably quite different to that of my co-workers, perhaps because I am seeing different appearances all around me and am in a different mood.

Immersive reality

It is easier to see how a virtual meeting cannot be found objectively, outside the mind — and I think we may as well explore this now while we’re having all these Zoom meetings. So what about when our bodies, including our eyes and ears, meet again one day in the same physical room — where is the meeting then? We might agree that we are surrounded by the same walls and the same people, and it is easy to grasp more tightly at the colors, shapes, sounds, shapes, and tactile objects that are appearing to our sense awarenesses as being an objective reality. It is the same when we put on virtual reality glasses – the world of our senses is so immersive that it is easy to fall into the hallucination that it is really happening.

However, even when we are meeting in the same room, where is that meeting really taking place? Is it the colors or shapes and so on of the carpet or the walls or the other people? No. Again, the more we try to pinpoint the meeting, the more it disappears like a mirage. The meeting only exists as conventional agreement or appearance or imputation, just like the seemingly real solid forest I talk about in this article, Mere karmic appearance of mind.

All this is showing that our mind has the extraordinary ability to be seemingly everywhere and nowhere, or rather beyond everywhere and nowhere because it is formless, a different entity or dimension to the physical world.

We cannot point to the mind in the supposedly physical world NOR to any objects outside of it. The appearances of this world exist as reflections or projections held by mind, like a sky reflected in a lake or like a dream. If we dream a Zoom meeting, for example, the moment the dream mind ceases (because we wake up), the moment the meeting ends. It is the same for any Zoom meeting you have while you’re awake.

Experience on demand

One of the main features of virtual reality technology is that it gives us experience on demand. If we understand how our mind is projecting our reality even without the enhanced technology, we can change our reality on demand by changing our thoughts or experiences.

Here is a simple illustration – changing our thoughts into thoughts of love. How do we stop feeling bored with all the people we’ve been in lockdown with for months now and yearning for more interesting company elsewhere?! Through love.

Talking of Zoom meetings, apparently one highlight for people is seeing their co-workers’ pets. Which got me to thinking how cats and dogs and even children can be incredibly boring if we don’t love them, even irritating; but utterly fascinating if we do. And what do you think about this theory – the reason that human beings often love their cats and dogs so much is because they’ve given themselves permission to do so. They feel safe in loving them, and they are happy to keep increasing that love. They allow the love inside them to come out fully. What’s to stop us loving everyone around us that way too? I bet you’d find they become a LOT less boring if you do.

I saw this lovely Rumi quote today on Facebook and will leave you with it:

Finally, talking of Buddha’s teachings now live-streaming all over the planet, the Fall International Kadampa Buddhist Festival is open to anyone around the world who has a computer. Unbelievable. And perhaps thousands of people will tune in and share this powerful experience with each other, as they have, in a silver lining, with all the other International Festivals since this Pandemic began. Click here to find out more about it.

Okay, out of space, whatever that means.

Over to you — please leave your virtual reality comments in the virtual reality box below.

A few relevant articles

Experience and reality

A practical paradigm shift

The non-thingyness of things