The Mind-Created Virtual Reality

Feb 10. 2014

The only thing that really matters in life is learning how to escape from the mind-created virtual reality which we are stuck in and which is – generally speaking – the only world we know about…

Needless to say, we don’t usually see this as being an important thing at all. In fact it is of course not that we don’t see it as being an important thing but rather that we don’t see it as any sort of a thing, important or otherwise. It’s not high up on our list of priorities and it’s not low down – it isn’t anywhere! It doesn’t figure…

What we see as important are all the things that make sense within the context of the mind-created virtual reality – the virtual reality tells what is important, in other words. This being the case it shouldn’t really come as too big a surprise to learn that this all-encompassing artificial reality doesn’t tell us that ‘the only important thing is to escape from the all-encompassing artificial reality’. What it does do is to give us all sorts of other things to do that are supposedly important, valuable, helpful, etc and once we get engaged in trying to take care of these tasks we really won’t have any time left to concern ourselves with anything else.

This is how the mind-created virtual reality works – by taking away all the ‘free space’ so that the only sort of things that we can be concerned with are those which are given to us to be concerned with. As Henry Ford is quoted as saying, “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” The mind-created VR doesn’t provide us with ‘free space’ – it provides us with ‘unfree space’, it provides us with space which is biased but which we can’t see to be biased. It provides us with the type of space that tells us what to do without us realizing that it is telling us what to do!

This type of ‘pre-formatted space’ is very much like a large modern leisure centre in this respect. The leisure centre provides us with a number of options with regard to how we would like to spend our leisure time: we can go for a swim in the pool, we can go for a sauna, we can go bowling, we can go and see a movie, we can book into a yoga or pilates class, we can go to the gym, we can go and get something to eat in the café area, and so on. It’s all great – there are so many things to do! There’s something there for everybody…

The point is however that it’s all ‘preformatted’ – we can do anything we want just so long as it’s on the list of ‘things we’re allowed to do’. If it’s not on the list then of course there is no way at all that you can do it. In the case of the preformatted space that is provided for us by the mind-created VR it’s not just that there’s no way for us to do anything that isn’t on the list of things that we’re allowed to do – there’s no way for us to even think about it! There’s no way for us to be even aware of the possibility of doing it. And to seal it all, there’s no way for us to be even aware of the absence of the possibility of us ‘being aware that we can’t do what isn’t on the list’…

Such is the nature of the mind-created virtual reality! On the face of it we might think that we are very generously being provided with all sorts of excellent possibilities. This is the ‘overt level’ of meaning associated with the mind-created VR and – as we have said – this is generally the only level of meaning that we have access to. We only have access to the level we’re supposed to have access to! On the face of things the system is being generous because it is providing us with a whole range of attractive possibilities but this overt gesture of unqualified generosity deftly conceals the ‘covert move’ which is the move where something is taken away from us without us. What is being taken away from us is genuine space, unformatted space, free space. ‘Unformatted’ space is space without any bias or prejudice built into it and because there is no inbuilt bias we are free to do anything we want to do. We are free in other words to do what we want to do rather than always being covertly compelled to do what it wants…

The mind-created VR gives us the ‘freedom’ to do what it wants us to do but this only looks like freedom because it doesn’t let us see that there could be something else other than what it wants us to do. By not letting on that there is anything else other than what it tells us about the system actually takes away our freedom – the radical lack of freedom which is the ‘real deal’ is thus effectively concealed behind a highly prominent and attention-capturing display of ‘superficially-different choices’.

Unformatted space – which we could also call intrinsic space – doesn’t ‘give’ us any sort of freedom at all. Intrinsic space doesn’t give us freedom because it is freedom! It is the complete lack of any of any sort of bias or compulsion whatsoever. There are no ‘conditions’: no guidelines to follow, no prior assumptions to swallow, no framework to adhere to. Or to put this another way, intrinsic space is the absence of rules…

Intrinsic space is the same thing as ‘radical freedom’ and this is not a gift that is bestowed upon us by some supposedly benign and all-powerful agency, it is on the contrary our own inherent and inalienable nature. Preformatted space – which we can also call extrinsic space – only has a very superficial sort of ‘freedom’ associated with it. It only has the ‘freedom’ that is shown to us (or provided for us) on the surface. Underneath this prescribed 2-dimensional surface there lies the complete absence of freedom – there is the complete absence of freedom to do anything that has not been specified in advance by the system, the complete absence of freedom to do anything other than what is shown to us (or defined for us) on the ‘overt’ level of the game.

Extrinsic space is therefore like a movie that is packed full of action and drama, CGI special effects and car-chases, smart-sounding dialogue and glossy film-stars, but which is completely lacking in any intelligent content! On the surface of things, there is lots going on, but beneath this frenetic surface there’s nothing going. In fact immediately beneath the fast-moving and glittering surface there’s a complete vacuum!

The mind-created virtual reality doesn’t care what we do, just as long as we do it on its terms. It will throw us any number of supposedly important ‘things to do’, it will provide any number of apparently interesting ‘hooks’, and it doesn’t matter in the least to it which things we take on as being important, which hooks we get caught up with. The busier we are within the realm of extrinsic space the less we are going to notice the vacuum that exists behind it. The more wrapped up in the façade we are, the less likely we are to realize that it is a façade!

It’s very easy for extrinsic space to soak up all our consciousness – it is like a vastly porous sponge with unlimited ‘soaking up’ capacity! It can soak us up forever. It can soak us up and soak us up and soak us up and we won’t even know that we’ve been soaked up. We don’t know that we’ve been soaked up because we don’t know that there’s anything else to life other than being soaked up by some format or other! We don’t know that our consciousness has been tied down to preformatted space because we don’t know that there is any other type of space. We don’t know that we’re unfree because we have no sense at all of what freedom really is…

We think that freedom is the ability to do – in an unimpeded or uninterrupted fashion – whatever it is that extrinsic space wants us to do. We think freedom is when we can obey all the covert compulsions that are operating on us to perfection, so that we don’t feel bad about not obeying them! We think that freedom is when we can unproblematically do what our thinking mind wants us to do, demands that we do. This for us would be heaven…

When someone uses the word ‘freedom’ I immediately think that this has to do with the ability to obtain whatever goals or aims that I have in mind; I think that freedom is all about me being able to ‘realize my dreams’ without anything blocking me or standing in my way. The thought of this is very sweet to me – it’s as sweet as honey! As far as I am concerned, if only I could actualize my goals this would be the ultimate! What more could I possibly want than this? Being able to realize the designated goal is the same thing as WINNING and the thing is that I’m so hooked on the idea of winning (and how great it will feel when I do) that it never occurs to me to question the game that I am playing. It never occurs to me to question whose game I am playing.

What I don’t see is that both my conception of ‘who I am’ (and the goals which I find so extraordinarily and hypnotically attractive from the basis of ‘who I think I am’) have been provided for me by the mind-created virtual reality! Both my conception of myself and all of my cherished goals (all of my longed-after dreams) exist only on the two-dimensional abstract surface that is ‘extrinsic space’! That’s where it’s all happening. It’s all happening in ‘the world of surface-level appearances’, but this world has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘who I really am’ or ‘what I really want’. It’s all just the game. It’s all just the VR world that the system has provided me with, the false world that the system creates for me so that it can carry on with its perennial business of distracting me from seeing that I am not who the system says I am, and that I do not want what the system tells me I want…

Whatever I do in the mind-created VR world suits this VR world, not me. No matter what I do in it (on its terms), there is no genuine benefit to me. The only benefit is to the system of thought that keeps busily spinning the illusion. It is for this reason that we can say that the only thing that matters in life is escaping from the VR world that our thinking keeps spinning and spinning all around us, like a spider with its web. What else could matter other than this?

Of course we keep on thinking that other things are important, but these supposedly important ‘other things’ are all strands of the mind-web. All of the issues we keep getting caught up with, all the worries we keep fretting over, are all just ‘strands of the mind-web’. All of our concrete aims and goals, all of our dreams (inasmuch as they make are understandable in terms of the rational mind) are the mind-web. Our hopes and our fears, our plans and our agendas, our thoughts and our beliefs, the very words and ideas we use to talk about (or think about) our situation – they are all sticky strands belonging to that great glittering multifaceted spider’s web which is the mind-created virtual reality.