My companions and I are in some kind of a building and strange, inexplicable things begin to happen. Every time we open a door to some room, the room and the things in it have changed. People try to explore the building and find that it has an impossible structure. They enter the top floor, go into a room and suddenly find themselves in a room on the ground floor.
Then someone screams out: “Don't you see what is happening! None of this is real! This is all Virtual Reality! Someone is running this game and we are all its involuntary, unwitting participants. So we can do anything, break all of society’s taboos, take any risks, shoot one another, because it is all a fake game.”
At once I devise a way of putting this remarkable claim to the test. I speed off in my car and start driving along train tracks that ascend to a great height before they end abruptly in mid-air. My car goes for a graceful flight through the air, spinning and turning, soaring up on the warm air currents, then gradually descending, rising again higher and higher, then stopping and hovering in midair.
Finally, I get tired of flying and crash land on top of a high-rise building. “I wonder if I have sustained any injuries?” I think to myself. “If this really is a virtual world then I should be just fine!”
It then occurs to me that the fact that my life has been virtual reality all along would certainly explain a lot of things. I always thought that this world and my life in it never made any sense – things were just too absurd and incoherent. Horrible, unthinkably terrifying events like massacres, famine, persecutions, injustices that would never happen in the real world kept occurring, time after time after time.
Now I could see why certain things kept getting lost and disappearing in my life, why my life never worked out right, why something always got in its way and ruined its forward progress.
Now I could comprehend why I could never fit in anywhere and always felt at odds with the whole world, for this wasn’t an authentic environment, but an artifice of someone else’s mind, a degenerate, corrupt copy of the real reality.
Yes, this wasn’t the universe that the Absolute Being created, according to His flawlessly sublime and ideal specifications, but rather a creation of some devious, impious, immoral human being. And so it contained within its make-up all the faults, deficiencies and imperfections that every human construction possesses, as well as being coloured by the particularly nasty character of the cad running this Virtual Reality game.
It was also obvious that this contemptible creature held, for some reason or another, an intensely bitter grudge against me in particular. He obviously meted out the worst of his cruel tricks on me, judging by how my life has been just one senseless absurdity after another.
“What kind of person am I really like outside of this game?” I wonder to myself. “What is my life really like in the real world? Who is the wise guy that’s created this diabolically evil game? What’s he got against me? Wait till I find my way out of this virtual world and get my hands on him! I’ll make him pay for all that he’s done to my life!”
And just then, an even more devastating thought strikes me: “What if I am the evil genius who created and is operating this game? What if it is I who inflicted all this misery, pain, suffering onto myself and the whole world? But why would I do that? Why would I torment myself so?”
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Comments: 19
Could you perhaps translate it into Frisian or Sorbian?
Oh yes, Princess is indeed a Tasmanian Devil. Her father addressed the students at my university on the last day of term in December. I would have listened, but I was too keen on the mulled wine and ginger snaps to pay much attention.
(Though it probably must be said that I am not a Dane. I am a Norwegian expat living in Denmark, which really is kind of the same thing after a while.. Just a small technicality.)
The entire first paragraph to me is confusion. The fact that the building is strange, ways cannot be found out, the floors change, to me, signifies confusion in which one is ready for or preparing for change.
The second paragagraph is a realization that what one thought of as reality is actually not and thus is taking risks one would not take in life itself. It also seems as if when one realizes they are in another "time" or "place" or "life" the ego begins to get the better of them and they set off on their own adventures doing what pleases themselves, not so much in a selfish manner but for oneself, not spiritually but just to have fun, see what they are able to get away with.
The third shows you doing exactly that ---> testing life, reality, its limits.
And then you come to a conclusion of tiredness, almost boredom and think to yourself what am I doing?
The next paragraph is your self realization.
And then comprehension of self.
And then comprehension of the world around you.
And the last paragraphs to me again, so speak to me as if you are speaking to yourself as in the creator of your own universe. The one who makes your life good or bad. The one running the game and not an Absolute God or anything but yourself. Running the show.
And then the final realization that it may be yourself that has been creating your own existence with all of its glory and pain and not another. That you essentially are responsible for your own pain and happiness and again, that it can only come from within.
Again, you interpret your own philosophy, although I read this as a dream with you questioning the meaning of it when really knowing the answer to begin with.
But a dream within a dream?
~ Poe
... I see your soul ... I see your spirit ... even in perceived aloneness ... we are all one ...
"A great revolution of character in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a society, and further, will enable a change in the destiny of humankind." - SGI President, Daisaku Ikeda
"Nam-myoho-renge-kyo"
Smile.