On Simulations and the Purpose of Life
All of my life I’ve wondered: Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? And I think I finally know the answer to both of those questions. In fact, I’ve had the answers for a few years now, and have already shared some of the fundamental information behind the answers on my blog in the past. I’ll have more elaborate posts on these subjects in the future, but for now I want to share some of my thoughts related to the purpose of life in this post.
A few months ago I saw a trailer released by Larken Rose for one of his projects called “The Mirror.” You can watch it in the embedded YouTube video below. If you don’t know yet who Larken Rose is, he’s the author of the book “The Most Dangerous Superstition” which I highly recommend reading. In that book Larken shows how the current anti-social system that we live in, better known as “Statism”, which is based on the belief in ‘authority’, causes much of the pain and suffering that we can find everywhere around the world today. He shows how it’s ultimately our own thinking — where we hold various contradicting notions about reality and how we should live our lives — that’s ultimately causing us to do harm to ourselves and to others. Quite often we’re not even aware that we’re holding on to beliefs that are contradicting to each other and to the supposed high morals that we claim to stand for in our lives. Most of the time this can be blamed on the brainwash that we’re exposed to starting at a very early age and that we grow up with. Once we’re adults, it becomes especially difficult to detect, let alone deprogram ourselves, from all the brainwash that’s working against us.
So like many others, including myself, Larken sat with the question on how to best approach this problem. How do we make people see and realize that they’re holding various beliefs and assumptions in their minds that are contradicting and counter productive, and are causing us all to suffer? Larken came to realize that getting into discussions and arguments with people causes them to become defensive and shut their minds off to anything that threatens their worldview, and consequently takes a lot of time and effort before you can convince them to change their minds. Not to mention that it’s not a very scalable and efficient approach.
A better solution Larken came up with is the above mentioned videogame project called “The Mirror.” As explained in the trailer, while playing this videogame, people will eventually come to realize all by themselves that some of the beliefs they hold aren’t in their best interests, and go against the basic ideas of morality that they claim to live by. They’ll essentially be looking into a mirror while playing the game, being confronted with their own beliefs and assumptions in a relaxed and non-adversarial way. By answering various questions throughout the game, they’ll eventually see how their thinking is inconsistent with itself, and that they’re essentially being hypocrites. And the idea is that because they’re playing the game all by themselves, and don’t have to prove themselves or defend themselves against anyone else in an argument, they’ll be much more open to admitting to themselves that they’re wrong, and will be much more likely to change and improve their thinking. In fact, they have to if they want to progress through the game. Larken explains it in the video below, and I recommend checking it because it’s fucking brilliant.
While I listened to Larken explaining the ideas behind his project and the goals he has for it, I recognized many of the concepts that I had published in my posts “The All Seeing Eye” and “The Cycle of Life.” Based on my personal research over the years, I had already come to the conclusion that the reality that we live in might be an elaborate simulation, very similar to the computer generated virtual reality simulations and videogames that we have today, but obviously a lot more advanced. And one of the questions that people ask themselves is that if our reality is indeed a simulation, then what is it for? What is the purpose of it? I have an answer to that question, and it’s very similar to what Larken wants to do with his videogame.
Imagine that there’s a highly advanced and enlightened civilization that has finally reached (or got very close to) a ‘utopian’ social system where everything is in harmony with itself and with nature, and where there’s abundance and general wellbeing. How would they go about maintaining that state of civilization? How would they be able to prevent civilization from deteriorating again and falling back to the old barbaric ways of living together? Consider that there will always be new generations of people who haven’t experienced the old ways and the pain that it caused, and have never learned the important lessons that older generations learned from those situations. These new generations may come up with ideas that they think are new and will work better, but which have the potential to destroy much of the progress that was made by previous generations. How would you convince these new generations that the present state was indeed the best and most optimal way of living together?
For instance, if the social system in that ‘perfect’ civilization was a resource based economy like The Venus Project, one day a group of people might get the idea that perhaps Statism wasn’t so bad after all and with a few tweaks would be an even better option. How would you convince that group of people that they’re wrong? This is a scenario that’s very likely, and has happened already in the past. For example, in 1775 a revolution was started in America because Great Britain wanted to impose more taxes on the colonies, and the people living back then refused to accept that. But years later, in 1913, a new generation of Americans would actually vote for introducing an income tax — one of the most totalitarian of all taxes — something that would certainly have led to another revolution and war if the old generation of Americans were still alive. Like I mentioned in my post on income taxation, it took just a few generations for Americans to forget why they fought a war against Great Britain and to fall back into making the same mistakes that their forefathers corrected and tried to prevent from happening again.
So it’s more than clear that if we fail to properly educate new generations of people on the important lessons that we’ve learned in the past, there’s a 100% chance that they will make the same mistakes again and that history will repeat itself. But how do we educate them? The sad reality is that most people hardly learn anything just by having access to information (be it books, videos or other media). Most people learn best by experiencing for themselves. Like Albert Einstein said, and like my own research showed me, “the only source of knowledge is experience.” It’s one thing for someone to tell you why something is good or bad, but it’s a completely different story when you know it to be true from your own experience.
Therefore a highly advanced and enlightened civilization might come up with a solution whereby people are given the opportunity to learn all these important lessons by experiencing it for themselves. They’ll have access to very advanced technologies able to run sophisticated, elaborate and realistic virtual reality simulations where people can enter into in order to learn. In fact, children and young adults (“young souls”) growing up in such a civilization might voluntarily participate in these simulations in order to learn and make progress in their communities. And there might even be older adults (“old souls”, “ascended masters”) who would volunteer to also take part in these simulations to teach and guide the younger generation and gently nudge them in the right direction from time to time.
A lot of the evidence that’s accumulating right now, and a lot of research that’s being done, points to the fact that we might indeed be living in such a simulation. And the purpose of this simulation — the purpose of our lives in this reality — is to learn some very important lessons and grow our consciousness based on our own experience, so that we can reach higher states of awareness and enlightenment. This is precisely what my personal research, as detailed in my post on the All Seeing Eye, lead me to conclude. In that post I also show that this information isn’t new, and that very ancient civilizations already knew all of this, and had encoded this knowledge into various symbols and teachings.
So when we ‘die’, we might wake up and find out that we’ve just completed another day at ‘school’. And similar to our current concepts of school, should we have failed to learn some important lessons that we had to learn, or should we have failed to properly process the experiences that we had and extract the lessons we had to learn from them, we might feel compelled to return again (‘reincarnation’) to revisit those situations and experiences in order to learn from them and find closure, so that we might advance to higher levels of learning. This is a concept that Dr. Sigmund Freud had discovered during his research as well, namely, experiences that we fail to process properly during a single lifetime will keep returning to us until we find closure. This concept may also hold true for multiple lifetimes as well, as I mentioned in a footnote in my post on the Cycle of Life.
It’s interesting that while we’re in this simulation, people are thinking about building games and simulations just like the one we’re in, with the same goal of trying to advance our learning and consciousness — like Larken Rose is doing. Eventually we end up with simulations running inside of other simulations in who knows how many levels of recursion. Kind of like the Russian ‘Matryoshka’ doll concept or the dream states (dreams within dreams) in the movie “Inception.”
And it seems to me that once we’ve gone through the whole simulation, or possibly a whole series of simulations, we’ll have improved our consciousness to such a high degree that we may ‘graduate’ and become another valuable and respected member of the community in the aforementioned highly advanced and enlightened civilization. This seems like a very efficient and highly effective way to bring the consciousness of newer generations of people living in such a civilization up to speed, in order to prevent that civilization from slowly degrading again. In fact, I think it’s an ingenious solution.
Ever since I realized the above I’ve essentially been on high alert, trying to extract any important lessons that I need to learn in any given situation that I find myself in. I’m constantly reflecting on past experiences in order to learn from them and improve myself. Especially because I know that if I fail to learn the exact lessons that I need to learn, or draw the exact conclusions that I need to draw from my experiences in this life, and especially if I fail to act and put what I’ve learned into practice, it’s highly likely that I’ll have to return again in another life for another try. So I try to keep my thinking internally consistent (rational), my actions consistent with my thinking as well, and all based on the truth as close as I can possibly get to it. And it’s currently my goal to make sure that I learn as much as I can to take away with me when I die. We might not be able to take anything physical along with us when we die, but I’m 100% certain that our consciousness goes with us, including all the valuable knowledge and experiences gained.
Comments
There are 3 responses. Follow any responses to this post through its comments RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.