In the world of high tech, right now, they are creating what they call virtual reality, and they do it in many different ways. People play games on their computers wherein they live in make-believe worlds, and they compete with other people on other computers, and it becomes a large part of their life.
People have dream lives. They think about how they would like things to be, as opposed to the way they are. People are constantly imagining the way things should be in their life. They’re constantly trying to picture what they want, and how they can go about getting it.
There are even self-help books out which tell you how to picture what you want, and how that will create the circumstances for you so that those things will arrive in your life.
Well, what is reality? What is virtual reality? What is illusion? What’s the difference between all these things?
In the tech world, at least they realize that what they’re giving out is a virtual reality not an actual reality, but something that’s made up. Well there’s a lot more that’s made up that’s not on the computer. Many of us live with our own virtual reality. We look at the world, and we assume what we want to from it, and then we pay attention to certain things, and those are the things that become real for us.
I was out of the country recently, and if you read the newspapers about what’s going on in this country, you get a certain impression of what’s going on. But if you’re on the ground, and you’re actually in the country and you’re living there, all of the things that are written about, you don’t notice them. They don’t become relevant to the everyday existence, and you also see that they don’t seem to be relevant to the people. Yet that’s all the newspapers talk about.
In America, if you look at newspapers, they basically cover the political scene; they don’t cover the lifestyles of the people, and they don’t cover what’s going on among the people. Everything’s from the higher end down, and then everybody’s fighting about who should be on top making decisions that barely affect people.
We all live within a framework, and a lot of the framework is beyond our control, and a lot of the framework is within our control. But we have to come to conclusions as to what is, and what isn’t, real for us.
Now, if you’re missing your breakfast, your lunch, and your dinner, and you have trouble grabbing some food during the day, after a short period of time that becomes real for you. Hunger is real. If you’re making $200,000 or $300,000 a year, and you’re spending every penny just to maintain an imagined lifestyle, and you’re in a panic because you don’t know how you’re going to maintain this, well that certainly seems real. It is just as real as the person who can’t get a meal, his hunger is real. The anxiety of maintaining that lifestyle is real.
We need to find, in our own lives…
