No one can describe reality.
You must experience it, see it, feel the whole atmosphere of it.

― Jiddu Krishnamurti
Hello friends! This is the first post of 2022 and is supposed to be about New Year and related things like resolutions, back to normalcy life, global peace, harmony so on and so forth. But Covid has given us newer perspectives of the word ‘new’ as we encountered many new things, life style changes, philosophies and vocabulary. Life Lessons of course was the commonest thing each one of us either discovered, picked up or realized. Apart from life lessons some new words like Quarantine, lockdown, sanitizer, zoom, social distancing, bio-bubble, Comorbidity ,PPE, containment zone, WFH etc. were heard by some for the first time and experienced by us all alike. For a fifty four year old primary school teacher ‘zoom’ classroom was like finding a needle in a haystack. The battle of acquainting, updating and mastering the mute/un-mute mic and cameras lasted long, as she missed the noisy clatter, the piled up notebooks and interactions from behind the spectacles perched on the nose but finally she did it, after all she was a teacher. The IT professional’s upper half in a formal shirt tie and pyjamas to attend a video conferencing everyday, where poor network connection could also mean that that it’s a bad hair day was his newly found reality . Businesses, education, retail all turned remote adopting AR/VR/XR and the like, accepting and adopting newer market strategies.
Sticking to the virtual screen and successfully navigating through the virtual world has been the most challenging life lesson for most of us. Yes, a life lesson beyond ‘life’ which reminds me Sadhguru saying that “Your entire life is a Virtual Reality, because you are seeing it only the way it happens in your mind.” The reality that we construct and generate in our minds is subjective because it is either based on our perceptions or our experiences. According to Guerrilla Ontologist Robert Anton Wilson:
…the brain receives billions of signals every minute, and out of them we select a small portion and make a picture, which we project outside and call reality—that’s our reality tunnel.
Thus flabbergasted by quantum mechanics, bowled over by the many faces of reality beholden we embraced the many faces of reality. Virtual and augmented realities are no longer gaming technologies; everyone is looking for extended realities, perfectly amalgamating digital and physical (material) worlds. Indeed the most exciting thing that VR/AR/MR/XR ….have pushed us towards is the contemplation and reflection upon the nature and idea of ‘reality’. The simplified concept of reality as a system of the known and the unknown on the basis of ontological existence was neither simple earlier nor now, we have started ruminating much more now on the world known to us from our consciousness, the world as existing outside us or at least seeming to be outside us .And if the world beyond our perceptions is then known to us only through imagination it is all psychic and mental. The physical existence is then only an inference as Carl Jung said. The conflict is to delve deep into the cause of our perceptions which exist only in our mind. And are we gradually moving towards a reality that exists in the mind beyond the physical, be it virtual or augmented.
To be continued….