Therefore, go and make people from all nations into talmidim, immersing them into the reality of the Father, the Son and the Ruach HaKodesh.
Mat 28:19
Virtual Reality
When I was at the university, it was the dawn of virtual realities. It was then, and not when the Matrix came out years later, that I started to think about the concept of reality. The question remains: what is real?
One way to answer this question would be to look at cause and effect. What do I mean by that? I did a paper about the effect of accidents in a virtual reality on our “real” self. What if I’ld fall down from the Eiffel tower in virtual reality, would I die of a heart attack before hitting bottom as in real life, even though bottom never comes? The answer: it depends how real the virtual reality looks for your senses and brain. Do you identify with it enough to experience it as real? Then you will probably die.
The cure: to make changes to the physical laws such that our brain both consciously and, more importantly, subconsciously is aware of being in a virtual reality. There has to be this gap of expectancy and experience to remind you that this is not real. Walk through walls. No force feedback. Or lousy graphics.
But as soon as you start thinking about virtual realities, you will have to answer the question: is our reality real?
Experience and Identification
We certainly experience it as real since we identify with it. We usually get what we expect. Our experience usually is within the parameters of the possible. Especially with natural laws, but also with human behaviour.
But that does not rule out the possibility of us totally misinterpreting our world. We are just so used to it that it seems real to us.
Is our World View buggy?
Let’s go down a rabbit trail: there are bugs in Australia that are brown and shiny—at least the females. The males recognise them and mate. Until a few years ago, when Australian beer bottles seemed to become a problem: they were brown and shiny, got thrown into the bush, and though the bottle was hundreds of times bigger than the bugs, the male started to “mate” with the bottles—leaving their wives for the bottle. It became such a problem that Australian beer breweries had to change the color of their bottles.
One should mean that God gave enough vision to a bug to distinguish between a bug and a bottle. But maybe bugs do not see reality, but only concepts of reality?
That brings us back on track. What if we only see a conceptualisation of reality?
Physical Perception
We know that our eyes have a blind spot. It is rather big, but our brain fills this spot with what it expects to be there automatically. Thus, we don’t see physically what we mean to see. But since we move around with our eyes—they usually do that without us knowing—the brain has enough information to fill in the gap in a way that makes sense.
Speaking of eye movement: did you ever realise that when you move your eyes back and forth, that the image you see stays in focus? It should not, because we only have a very little area that is in focus, and moving, the picture should get blurred. The brain takes care of that.
Between the eyes and the brain something happens, and we cannot say how much happens. We clearly do not see what our eyes see. Expectation, experience, imprint, learning, and our make-up change the picture into what we interpret to be real.
Nobody knows how much reality differs from our perception. Just think of the bug. For him, a beer bottle looks like a great mate.
Does looking closer help? Not really. Even if we look at atoms, the gap between our eyes and our brain remains the same.
I am not saying that there is no spoon. I say that I don’t know whether there is, and what it looks like.
Thus, reality most probably is not what we think it is.
Biblical World View
Jesus tells us to introduce people into the reality of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I would recon that since God made it all, His reality is real.
The bible tells us that He spoke, and it was. It tells us, that everything is held together through Jesus, the Word of God. Could we then call reality a great story? Maybe we are just listening to a great story told by the greatest story teller of all times that becomes real in our imagination. A story we interact with, are interwoven with, and partially tell ourselves? It certainly would make sense then that Jesus was born in the mid east, an area where story telling is second nature to its inhabitants.
There is only one way to find reality. Connect with the story teller. Disconnect, dis-identify with what we call natural. Change your thinking.
This is hard. It takes work. It takes time. For too long we believed that our reality is real.
Subjective Truths?
I am not talking about making up our own realities. It is not as easy as panta rei, everything flows and changes. It is not as trivial as in everybody having his own subjective truth and there being no objective truth at all. Even though our perception of reality depends on our subjective and very personal past experiences and imprint, they overlap in great aspects such as the experience of natural laws.
I am talking about finding truth. Seeing behind the curtain. Seeing with the eyes of the Spirit, the creator of all. Getting real.
This is what the bible calls: change your way of thinking. Change the basic assumptions, the axioms of what you believe to be real, of what you take as given.
Did God create this gap between our expectation and experience to remind us, to hint to us that our perception of reality is not real? That there is another reality more real than ours?
Relearning
It is hard to change our perception because we have to do this with the exact agent that is interpreting our reality wrongly at the moment. Our thinker. Our soul, mind, emotions, the interpreter of and reactor to our surroundings. We do it through the same functions that we used to get our current representation of the world with. Thinking, learning, experiencing, abstracting, and so forth. Thus we can only do it as we did it so far: slowly, constantly change and enhance our interpretation.
But what is different this time?
This time we do not build our model off of our experience. We build it off of truth. Let truth shape our interpretation of what we experience, instead of experiences shaping our truth through interpretation.
Instead of saying that we do not experience any healings any more, thus God must have stopped healing, we say that God still heals, but we do not experience it any more because we do not believe and expect it.
The Agents of Truth
Truth is portrayed in the bible. The problem is that we still interpret it with our world view. We need help. The Holy Spirit helps us interpret the Word of God, but again, we hear Him through the filters of our view of reality. Granted, He speaks Spirit to spirit, but our spirit speaks to the soul for information and truth to surface in our consciousness. Filtered. Did I tell you that this was hard?
We only know in part, but bringing together our parts, we have a bigger piece. Our natural interpretation of reality to a great extend depends on other people’s experiences and our interaction. Therefore we need the same to change our world view: to interact with other people in faith and to shape our view of reality together.
We are back to the big three: the bible, the Holy Spirit, and others. Through communication. In relationship.
This goes much deeper than ways to act. It touches our perception of God. It changes our understanding of self. It changes our valuation of this life. It puts into perspective what is important.
I want to get real. I want to see clearly. I do not want to exchange what is real for what I think that is. In the language of bugs: I do not want to trade my mate for a bottle. Thus I seek truth.
And you?