“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” George Orwell 1984
Some of you have likely gathered by now that I sometimes tell the story of the story, the evolution of that initial idea in my head. So, I began thinking about a piece, calling it The World According to Larry.
I know I frequently write about my reaction to one thing or another. Over time, it was impossible for me to not develop my own way of seeing things. I try to see through as clean a lens as possible.
I read more and more about the dire nature of the challenges we all face. I found the more you step back and the more inclusive your universe, the clearer the vision of where we are, all of us, everywhere.
For the most part, we really don’t have any idea how bad off we are. The real challenge is to look passed the smoke and mirror monologue of the money, always painting a masterpiece, a self-portrait of their avarice. I am not sure how many of you know that BIG money has made extraordinary profits during this time of unbelievable hardship for so many of us.
How could anyone think that from the moment we were officially deemed to be humans, we haven’t been marching on the exact same highway of our handiwork all this time? Our history speaks for itself, again and again. We are simply going to continue the march, victimized by the unconscious consequences of our actions.
We are incredibly imperfect and boy, do we try and keep it a secret from each other. I think a healthy dose of humility could have dulled this drive to be better than who we are, but it’s nowhere to be found. At this point, it doesn’t matter what the indicators are and what they are indicating. There is not a single positive benchmark relating to our future, no matter where you look in the world.
My God, look at our politics! Look at the rhetoric, both here and around the world. We are sitting on the upper deck of the Titanic, so we get to see everything. Third World countries, forgive my use of the word, are all below the water line, the first to drown. We watch it unfold from our vantage point, feeling distant from it, not knowing our immunity was cashed in too long ago.
At this very moment, we are witnessing something I never imagined. We’ve been sitting in the diner, taking up the same booth for thousands of years and haven’t paid a single dime for our tuna sandwich and coffee. Nature has just handed us a receipt, with no credit terms, whatsoever. So, we either pay or we’ll be asked to leave this place.
In the midst of this ongoing mental flagellation, I took a VR ride, courtesy of Raoul. I sat in a chair that was programmed to move in synch with the video I was getting sucked into. I wedged a set of goggles over my head, making sure my eyes felt completely cupped in. I had never done anything like this before. I certain wouldn’t call myself a Luke Skywalker type, able to flip upside down and do summersaults, while firing my laser guns, and never losing focus. If that’s the Force, I sure as shit don’t have it.
Between us, I flipped my cookies, sitting in that moving chair, yelling to stop that fucken, virtual roller-coaster, before I barfed. Raoul took the contraption off my head, a mili-second before I was going to throw it down. It took a while to get back in my body. Without getting too crazy, it felt like getting reacquainted with where I was in this world, after having briefly been away somewhere, a Disneyland of the Mind.
What really struck me about these experiences is how they are related. My diatribe on our sorry state of affairs, versus being submerged in a kind of alternate reality. They are extreme examples of how to truly engage the world as it is, versus how we’d like to see it.
You know, whenever I find myself strolling on the highway of my mind, not sure of the next exit, I whip open the Zen Atlas and imagine talking with the Buddha for directions and see what he has to say.
I think you can live in the world, seeing it exactly the way it is and at the same, live the life you want. To the Buddha, everything is an illusion, because no two people experience anything the same. I know for certain that is true, but I believe there are also larger forces at play and don’t ask me to explain, because I can’t and if I could, I wouldn’t.
I thought it was interesting to have started out feeling so grounded in the first part of this tale, then venturing off into a virtual world. Somewhere in here there is message wanting to be shared and I’m not sure. I am not sure if reality and virtual reality meet somewhere, but it has been interesting wrestling with the two.
With all that is going on, I get up on Sunday morning, looking forward to my motorcycle ride. I live in two realities, but you could also say they are both virtual, because it is about how I engage each. I try to look at the BIG world and see it for what it is, unfettered by my personal bias. At the same time, I look for joy in my own SMALL world, with all its biases.
I live in two worlds.