Butterfly Dreams

I was at the computer feeling sleepy and so I decided to lie down on my sofa for a while. And I fell asleep. And I dreamed.

I dreamed I was lying on my sofa. I looked across the room to the kitchen and there stood my dad at the kitchen counter. He was pouring himself a shot of whiskey. It didn’t surprise me to see him alive, though he died many years ago. In my dreams I’m never surprised to see my father or my mother, both of whom have passed away. In my dreams they are both still in the land of the living. What did surprise me was seeing dad pouring a drink of whiskey. He had been an alcoholic during his life but had quit drinking years before he died. Even though I was dreaming I remembered he had quit drinking. Watching him pour a drink was worrisome.

But I shouldn’t have worried. That wasn’t my dad; that was Virtual Dad. He was only a simulation of my father, a simulation that was running in my sleeping brain. My dream world was a virtual world: it looked like my world but it was not. Sometimes I wonder if I, too, am a simulation. Sometimes I wonder if what we call the Afterlife is nothing less than our true home where we all actually live, and this world – this Universe – is only a simulation running on a computer far advanced beyond anything we can imagine.

Ancient philosophers knew nothing of computers and simulations, but they knew about dreams. In the fourth century BC a Chinese philosopher named Zhuangzi wrote the following passage, well-known as the Butterfly Dream:

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

When we watch television, a movie or play, or even read a book, we suspend our disbelief and enter another world. Video games admit us to worlds that exist only inside the games. Imagine technology advancing to the point that we can enter a virtual reality so real it is indistinguishable from actual reality. Suppose, too, that one of the rules of the game is that you must temporarily and voluntarily have your memories blocked so you can’t remember your world is only a simulation.

We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime.
-- Yaqui Indian brujo (sorcerer) Don Juan Matus, quoted by Carlos Castaneda in Tales of Power

You and your friends decide in advance what characters you will play and the outline of the game. Perhaps you and your friends are “assigned” roles by wise teachers. Beyond the fun of game-playing, you and your friends have certain lessons to learn that are best learned in a game. You can make all kinds of damaging mistakes but they aren’t real. No one gets hurt. Only simulated characters in the game get hurt, and when you leave the game you’re intact and have learned (or not learned) important lessons.

We live in illusion 
And the appearance of things. 
There is a reality. 
We are that reality. 
When you understand this, 
You see that you are nothing. 
And being nothing, 
You are everything. 
That is all.
-- Tibetan yogi Kalu Rinpoche, quoted by Lama Surya Das in Awakening the Buddha Within

Simulations may be the way an advanced civilization teaches its members lessons – lessons that never cease no matter your age. In that other, “real” existence, it’s possible that we are immortal beings who never die but go on to learn greater and greater lessons: the importance of love, that mind creates reality, that thoughts are real, eventually learning things so complex and abstract that words cannot express them. You make mistakes and pay for them but when your part in the game ends, you awaken and you’re home. You rest for a while then go back to school for another assignment. Who will you be this time? Where will the game take place? Where will your role lead you? What lesson will you be striving to learn? Perhaps in your last role, your last life, a friend helped you to learn a lesson. This time, in this life, you will repay that debt by helping your friend learn her lesson.

The world that we see around us is real enough ... but it floats on a world that is not as real. Everyday phenomena are themselves built not out of phenomena but out of an utterly different kind of being. Far from being a crank or minority position, "There is no deep reality" represents the prevailing doctrine of establishment physics.
-- Nick Herbert explains the "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics in Quantum Reality

When I was young, only five or six years old, I had a strong feeling that my life did not begin with my birth. I felt strongly that I existed somewhere before I was born. At times I felt I could almost remember where I had been before my birth. But in the end, I couldn’t quite remember that previous existence. It was as if those memories were blocked. I grew up and the feelings of my pre-birth existence faded, but they had been so strong that I never forgot them.

Put another way, there is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it -- from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons -- are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.
-- Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe

Interestingly, many people who have had near-death experiences report that the experience was more real than “real life”. They say that dying is like waking up. They say they felt like they were going home. And often they report an encounter with a non-judgmental being who loves them and wants to know what lessons they have learned.

In short, Aspect's experiment proved one of the following two possibilities: Either objective reality does not exist and it is meaningless for us to speak of things or objects as having any reality above and beyond the mind of an observer, or faster-than-light communication with the future and the past is possible. On these two points the conclusions of the Aspect experiment are unequivocal. These are not hypothetical assertions. At least one of the above two options must now be accepted as fact.
-- Michael Talbot discusses an experiment conducted in 1982 by physicists Alain Aspect, Jean Dalibard, and Gerard Roger at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Optics in Paris in Beyond the Quantum

When the day comes that we are able to forget our identities for a while and take the role of a character in a simulation, that will be ironic. For then we would be virtual characters in a virtual reality who create a simulation within that simulation, completely unaware that one day we will leave our simulation only to awaken in a different simulation. But hey, that’s been thought of, too. The writers of The Thirteenth Floor made a pretty good movie using that idea.

Are we really virtual characters living simulated lives in a virtual reality? Truthfully, I think reality is much more complex than that, and I think humans have as much understanding of reality as a butterfly has of an airliner. But it’s a useful analogy. It’s a way of looking at something that is far beyond ourselves and trying to make sense of it. In some sense, we’re all asleep; we’re all dreaming. In our dreams, we do not know we are dreaming; we think we are awake. A few among us are aware of the dream, but even they are not sure what we will find when we awaken.

Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
-- Zhuangzi

Or as a twentieth century man put it:

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
-- Albert Einstein