“I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy…and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that. Gus Speth
I have spent many years arriving at what I will talk about next. This is not some fuzzy new-age thinking, but ideas held by many of the world’s top physicists and science philosophers. Scientist-spirituality researcher Gregg Braden has done a lot to explain about this and I recommend many of his books. Many great spiritual gurus and teachers, and also traditional spiritual teachings from the past also talk about these ideas without getting into the hard science of why they occur. Let me preface this post with a request. Keep an open mind about all possibilities. Encyclopedia: “A simulation is something that represents something else — it isn’t the real thing. At times you might perform a simulation as practice for real life, such as a flight simulation that’s used to train pilots. A simulation should imitate the internal processes and not merely the results of the thing being simulated
A question for you to ponder as you read through this post and even as you go about your daily life. What do ALL the world’s spiritual philosophies, religions, and indigenous teachings tell us about how humans ‘ought’ to live? As you ponder that, consider how we actually live and what kind of life you would prefer. If you can imagine that we do live in a simulation, what might be its purpose.? Now back to the science of what may be going on.
As our computing power increases exponentially, the reality of quantum computers that store data in the hologram is almost here. Our capacities to create 3D games and situations indistinguishable from everyday life will reach a point where we cannot tell the difference – this gets to sounding a lot like the film The Matrix. (In the film a malevolent computer system is in control.) If we do these future gaming/training simulations, we will be in control. But we must consider that as our technology improves and we immerse ourselves more and more in the simulations for fun, will we deliberately start to induce amnesia. This would make the simulation more effective and real so that we can be fully immersed in the simulation without knowledge of our real lives. The gist is this – as our technological abilities increase exponentially, could we create alternate simulated realities to safely experience things in the simulation that might not be possible otherwise?
There is a wonderful saying, “Time is God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.” Time is an elusive concept. We speak of the past, present, and future. But there is only NOW (this is often referred to as NO-time), and linear time itself, that we live within, is actually an illusionary aspect of this dimension we live within. There is a growing body of peer reviewed science that now shows we may be living in a literal 3-Dimentional simulation. If there is no-time, then everything just happens; but with linear time, you get to see cause and effect occurring for every single action or thought. A great school of learning is when you can evaluate what you did during each lesson (simulation) and what you might do differently next time as you change key variables. In the film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays an anti-social kind of character who must live out the same day (some have calculated it must have been 34 years worth of days) to finally become a wonderful person. Each day he wakes up from having ‘died’ the day before, and slowly learns what works and doesn’t work. As the film progresses he slowly evolves from an egoistic self-serving person into an authentic more spiritual person by learning to serve others, and at the same time realize his own true desires that finally just happen along the way because of who he became. If only real life were that simple. Perhaps it is!
In 2016, ‘Scientific American’ ran an article, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? High-profile physicists and philosophers gathered to debate whether we are real or virtual—and what it means either way.” While many of these scholars have talked about simulations for years, it was a 2003 paper by Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom in 2003 titled ,“Are You Living In a Simulation?” that began the recent discourse. “Bostrom suggested that members of an advanced ‘posthuman’ civilization with vast computing power might choose to run simulations of their ancestors in the universe.” He used a simple algorithm to calculate the possibility that the universe is more than likely a simulation than not. These algorithms reveal three possible scenarios about how technological civilizations transcend the great challenges they face: 1) they don’t succeed for one reason or another, 2) they succeed by becoming agrarian localized societies, or 3) they succeed and continue to grow along a technological path in balance with natural systems. How are we doing? We are now at the crucial divide – we can be 1, 2 or 3 and the choice is ours!
As we continue to learn about the universe, more and more, it seems that universe comprises of mathematical laws and sacred geometry that repeats itself endlessly wherever we look. Whether that is in the patterns of a flower, the orbits of planets, or the spiral arms of a galaxy. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says, “If I were a character in a computer game, I would also discover eventually that the rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical, [which] just reflects the computer code in which it was written.” Other evidence of a possible simulation is that the universe is broken into pieces, like a pixelated video game, that mirrors fractal qualities. While we say the quantum universe and the ‘metaphysical’ universe are infinite and continuous, our universe seems to have finite limits (time, energy, space, volume). Rich Terrile, of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab says, “If that’s the case, then our universe is both computable and finite… Those properties allow the universe to be simulated.”… “What are the requirements for God? (Whatever you perceive God to be.) He’s an inter-dimensional being, connected with everything in the Universe, a creator, responsible for everything in the Universe, and in some way can change the law of physics, if he wanted to. I think those are good requirements for what God ought to be.” What is curious is this also describes what simulation programmers do with code. Terrile offers a thought equation as evidence, “Look at the way the Universe behaves, it’s quantized, it’s made of pixels. Space is quantized, matter is quantized, energy is quantized, everything is made of individual pixels. Which means the Universe has a finite number of components. Which means a finite number of states.” Which means it’s behaving much like a computer program.
There are doubters of course. I think they can only accept a Newtonian mechanistic universe. For instance in the Scientific American article, “Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University says “The [simulation] argument says you’d have lots of things that want to simulate us. I actually have a problem with that. We mostly are interested in ourselves. I don’t know why this higher species would want to simulate us.” Randall admitted she did not quite understand why other scientists were even entertaining the notion that the universe is a simulation. “I actually am very interested in why so many people think it’s an interesting question.”
The very idea that we may be in some kind of cosmic simulation is mind-boggling in itself, but it does offer some framework for understanding some of what was previously unfathomable questions about life, the universe and the human role in it. We can find good evidence that we might be in a simulation, but cannot prove we are not, since any evidence to the contrary would be from the simulation itself! The evidence I would like to consider comes not from Science per se, but from spiritual understandings. “Recognizing we live in a simulation is game-changing, like Copernicus realizing Earth was not the center of the [physical] universe.”
Now here is a possibility to end this post, and I will present evidence that perhaps it is not fanciful but probable. What we term the Metaphysical may be a reality beyond this one we live within that is pure energy – call it what you will. The hard physical reality we live within could be the simulation for us to experience something using just our five senses in a different way that we cannot experience in the energetic body. These physical bodies therefore, could be our avatars (like in a game where we play a character with specific atttributes) that we use to live within the simulation. If humans are the avatars, what are we really? So, let’s keep it really simple for now. If we can imagine and assume for now that that we live in a simulation, what is its purpose? What are we here to learn and master? What is the end-point goal of this simulation? I’ll delve into this and more in the next set of posts.
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