A Comparison of Realities

A Comparison of Realities
Compare the realities of the rapidly-emerging virtual reality experience, of our everyday reality, and of the reality the mystic sees. Today's VR experience can seem very real but, experts predict, it will pale in comparison to VR of the future. Virtual Reality will not just be about games. (See Wall Street Journal.) “By the 2030s, virtual reality will be totally realistic and compelling and we will spend most of our time in virtual environments ... We will all become virtual humans.…. this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people.” (See The Atlantic.)
In spite of the compellingly-realistic nature of the upcoming VR experience, when we return from the VR experience to our more-real everyday environment, we will see that VR is not as "real" as is our everyday world—from the vantage point of our everyday world we will see that the VR experience is not the "real" world. For a fuller discussion of this point, see: [1]
Is there an even more "real" world beyond the world we experience every day? Persons who have practiced mysticism contend that there is. Mystics contend that the reality they see is the ultimate reality and that our everyday world is only virtual. From the vantage point of the reality the mystics discover, they see that our everyday world is not the "real" world.
I am sure I have turned off those readers, including the self-proclaimed "hard scientists", who believe that any mention of mysticism means I have lost all claim to be objective. However, an impressive number of scientists believe otherwise.
Paul Davies, an eminent theoretical physicist in his own right, believes that mysticism may provide answers to ultimate questions that our modern-day sciences cannot answer. He says:
“… many of the world's finest thinkers, including some notable scientists such as Einstein, Pauli, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Eddington, and Jeans, have also espoused mysticism.  My own feeling is that the scientific method should be pursued as far as it possibly can.  ….  It is only in dealing with ultimate questions that science and logic may fail us.  I am not saying that science and logic are likely to provide the wrong answers, but they may be incapable of addressing the sort of [ultimate] questions we want to ask.” (Paul Davies, The Mind of God, (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1992, 226)
I believe that as more and more of us experience the immersive technologies of the VR experience and see how difficult it can be to decide if an experience is real from within the reality itself, we will become more acceptant of the idea that the mystics may be right: our everyday world is itself a virtual reality that is so real that we can discover its virtual nature only by experiencing the true reality of the mystical experience.
Please share your thoughts about any of the realities discussed above. If you are, or share the beliefs of a "hard scientist", tell me what, from your viewpoint, I am failing to see. If you are a mystic or have practiced mysticism, please share your experience.

Note 1.
Donald W. Jarrell, At the Edge of Time: Reality, Time, and Meaning in a Virtual Everyday World (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012, 2014.) See especially pages 11-17, of At the Edge of Time.

Next post on a bi-weekly schedule: September 25, 2015.




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