THE WORLD AND ALL THAT IS IN IT

INTRODUCTION

Currently there are very many beliefs about the nature and substance of existence. Christians believe one thing, buddists another, native americans something else, and scientists something else yet again. All these systems of belief tend to be incompatible with one another. Each has a different belief about what life is about. Is there a god or gods? Does life have a purpose? At one extreme, scientists believe we are an accident of nature, while at the other extreme, many religions believe that some god or gods created the world for humanity.

Scientist believe that the world is real and solid, and that there are no such things as souls or spitits, or anything 'supernatural'. Some ancient religions, on the other hand, do not believe that there is any such thing as a solid, material world: it is all just a dream, that human beings are all just 'dreaming minds', but the dreams we have in daylight, while we are awake, are just stronger, more real versions of the dreams we experience while asleep. In the language of our scientific age, they believe we experience a virtual reality (currently used to train pilots and doctors etc) rather than a solid, material reality.

In our western, scientific world, this idea has been explored by philosophers, found wanting, and dismissed. Essentially, they could not see how it could possibly be true, could not rationalise it, and so threw it out. Thus we in the west chose to believe in a material world. But let me stress, it is just a belief, not in any sense a verifiable fact. Science, just as much as any religion, is founded on belief.

The most famous attempt to tease out the issue of the nature of reality, was that of Rene Descarte. He tackled the idea that life is all a dream, but could not make it work because he did not have the concepts available that would allow him to make sense of the idea. In particular, we now have experience of virtual reality, and have made inroads in attempting to understand dreams.

This work revisits the idea that life is all a dream, and, using these modern concepts, shows that, not only can the idea now be made to work, but the change in perspective that results, causes all of human experience to fall into place and form one, comprehensible whole.

As a consequence, we can now find answers to such age-old questions as: is there a god? What is the nature of good and evil? ---- and any other question you can think up!

What is more, the theory moves beyond the confines of philosophical specualtion, and into the realms of the experimentally, or, more accurately, the experientially, verifiable. That is to say, it moves beyond the aegis of scientific experts, and becomes a matter for the individual. The reason for this is that we now have to view the world, as I shall show, as a living world.

The importance of this is that, unlike a dead, mechanical world, a living world responds to us. Ask it a question, and it will answer. So, the traditional difficulties associated with trying to find out and understand how the world works become trivial, and the new 'difficulty' becomes learning the language of communication with the world. However, this is no more than the difficulty we experience as children learning the language of our parents.


BASICS

All of us are minds; we have no material substance. A part of my mind is a virtual reality generator. All I experience is a virtual reality. My dreams are produced in the same way by the same part of my mind, the only difference being that they are in a weaker form.

The data that my mind uses to constuct this virtual reality comes from another, bigger, mind. I call this bigger mind the Que ( pronounced like the letter 'Q'). Each of us exists in symbiosis with a Que. Dreams, too, come from the Que. Our minds do produce dreams, but these are output to the Que.

When you consider the vastness and complexity of the universe of our experience, it is obvious that the 'software' needed to generate and maintain such a universe must be unimaginably complex. In fact, such complexity can only be achieved by starting with something relatively simple, and then building in change and development through evolution. So, all we have learned about the nature of the universe remains valid, but now we can understand how the virtual universe came into existence, and why it is the way it is.

Thus our minds, too, have had to evolve, and 'in tune' with our virtual universe. Through many lives we acquire and develop the ability to use our five senses, our cognitive skills and our emotional/intuitive skills. At every stage of this development, we move up to a higher level of consciousness. So, one can imagine some primitive past in which we may only have had consciousness of a world we could touch. Then we became conscious of sound, then, perhaps, of seeing. At each step, we became conscious of a whole new dimension to existence, and our existence became richer and more complex.So we can envisage our minds rather like onions: each layer of the onion is a level of consciousness, and our development is a matter of expanding our mind into new levels of consciousness.

Most recently, our emotional and cognitive ablities have developed. Of these, language and the ability to communicate with each other is the most important. The language we use is the language of symbols. The next level up is the language of metaphor. This is the language of the Que. the language of dreams. When we achieve the ability to communicate freely in the language of the Que, we are like children who have just learned to speak. Instead of having to learn by trial and (mostly) error, we can now ask questions.

In terms of consciousness, we now enter a dimension in which the universe is alive, ie, interactive, and is meaningful. By 'meaningful, I mean this: as I said, both the data for generating our dreams and the virtual world, come from the Que. So life is just a dream. That is, life, my experience, is interpretable in exactly the same way as dreams.


IN MORE DETAIL

The best metaphor to gain an understanding of this situation is that of a game such as Dungeons and Dragons.

This is an example of a game which started small, and can still be played in 'small' form, as a video game for one player, but which has evolved into a much more complex, multi-player game which has no end. It goes on increasing in scope and complexity, always offering more variety of gaming experience to more and more players. It is crucial to the development of such a game that it does not ever end. To achieve such complexity, you start with something small and simple, and then use evolution to progress towards something ever more complex.

The minimum requirement for any individual to participate in such a Dungeons and Dragons game, is for one player to form a relationship with one dungeon master.

The Dungeon Master is someone who knows the rules, and how the game works. He can change the rules or make new rules. It is the Dungeon Master's job to create scenarios for the players. The player is someone who experiences the scenarios created by the Dungeon Master.

A successful game is one in which the Dungeon Master is able to create scenarios that are sufficiently interesting that the player want to go on playing, and in which the player is able to give good feed-back to the Dungeon Master concerning his needs and preferences, and his assessment of the latest scenarios.

This raises the question of communication between the Ques and people.

The most straight forward and clear communication from the Ques to people is dreams. Dreams use metaphors drawn from the everyday world to create meaningful and purposeful communications. They are also a form of virtual reality. They are usually distinguishable from the waking world in that they are weaker, involving less sensory data, more like films than the full, virtual reality experience. Put it the other way round, and say: the real world is just a strong dream. The important point is this: that the real world is meaningful, and can be interpreted in exactly the same way as dreams.

This harks back to an earlier time when any unusual occurance was interpreted as meaningful. More recently, the psychologist, Carl Jung, attempted to make sense of the significance of metaphors as they appeared, not only in dreams, but in mythology, alchemy, and parapsychology. He was stopped from fully realising his ideas by two problems: firstly, he did not properly grasp the purpose of the communications, and, secondly--- and more importantly --- he did not see, much less solve, the problem of signal-to-noise. That is, if everything one sees and experiences is a possible metaphor for communication, how does one decide what is significant, and what is just noise?

I will return to this later, but, essentially, the problem has to be dealt with in the same way as a baby deals with the problem of learning to recognise and respond to human speech.

In the other direction, the Ques also need communications from people, and they receive communications in the form of dreams. The dreams we experience are from the Que; the dreams our own minds produce are sent to the Que.

These dreams contain our hopes and fears, our questions, our reactions to our everyday experiences --- all of our experience, in fact. This is where 'ask the world a question and you will get an answer' comes in. The Que will answer all questions, address all problems, fullfill all hopes etc etc.