VirtualWayne

What if I had been born to the same woman but with a different father? Would I still be me? Half of my DNA would be different, so I would have some different physical and mental attributes, but would I still be me? Would I have the same sense of I-ness that I have now?

What if I had been born to the same father I had in this life, but with a different mother? Would I still be me?

What if both my parents had been different people? What if my parents had been African, living in dire poverty, struggling to survive. Would I still be me?

What I'm asking is, "Was I me before I was conceived? As I've mentioned before on this blog, when I was very young—about six years old—I had a powerful sense that I existed somewhere before I was born. I felt that I could almost remember that place where I had existed before I came to Earth, but in the end I could not remember it. 

So I'm asking, am I a soul who incarnated into physical existence at a certain time and place? I ask because that's the way I feel I came to be. And those people dying of disease and starvation and ignorance in places like Africa: they must be souls, too. If I'm a soul, then they are souls. We all are souls.

In which case, our bodies are like virtual reality headsets, except they're whole body headsets.

Imagine you work in a lab developing virtual reality "suits." You're at your lab bench, and you plug in your suit and turn it on. Instantly, you see that you're in a vast field of green grass and yellow flowers. If you look up you can see the blue sky with puffy white clouds. If you look down you can see the ground with green grass and yellow flowers and honey bees buzzing around the flowers, and if you squat close to the ground you are able to see details of the grass and smell the flowers and see the bees harvesting nectar from the flowers. 

This virtual reality (VR) suit you are wearing is very advanced compared to the crude VR of today. It  gives you not only vision and hearing but also smell and touch and taste. You are now living in a virtual world, and perhaps you will meet other virtual persons. They are real people, of course, and they lived (and still live) somewhere before they came to visit this virtual world. They will live a virtual life in this virtual world, but your (and their) virtual bodies will one day grow old and die. This is part of the program running the VR suit. One day you will die, and then you will "wake up" back in the lab where you started, and all your memories of your real life will return. You'll remember that your real life is here in the real world, and the virtual life was only a kind of game, a kind of school—a virtual world to learn and experience things that you cannot experience safely—or at all—in your real world.

Scientists say our bodies are controlled by our physical brains, not by souls. They say they know this because if a certain part of the brain is damaged, it always affects the same part of the body in every person with that same injury. But now, suppose you're in your virtual reality suit and someone cuts a wire in the suit. Immediately, your left eye sees the world as blurry.  Did the wire affect your left eye? No, the wire only affected data going to the left eye "viewscreen" in your suit. Your real left eye still works perfectly well, except now it is looking at a left eye "viewscreen" that is displaying a blurred image. Any person wearing the same VR suit would have the same faulty vision if someone were to cut the same wire in their VR suit that was cut in your VR suit.

Perhaps we have a true home and an earthly home. As spirits in our "true home" we have certain powers, certain abilities, and certain kinds of knowledge. But there is also a kind of knowledge and a kind of learning that we don't have access to in our true home. In order to acquire that different kind of knowledge, we have to be born in a human body and grow up and experience the world with the limitations of that human body. The human body is a kind of VR suit—a biological VR suit—with a soul as its true conscious inhabitant.

Why would our souls need or want a human body VR suit? One answer: if you're unkind to another person, you don't know what that feels like to them until your life puts you in the same situation and allows someone to give you the same experience of unkindness. We get what we give, because that is why we're here: to be educated. We die, and we're reborn in a very different life where all the lessons are new. Maybe not all the lessons are new; I suspect some souls are stubborn and have to repeat certain lessons before they understand.

What looks to us like unfairness and injustice may be part of a soul's journey of learning. For that reason, we cannot be too quick to judge. Everything in our lives, everything we now experience, may have been prearranged before our births for our individual journeys of education. VirtualWayne isn't real, he's merely spending a temporary life on this Earth getting some education about real human life. It's the kind of education you can't get when you spend all your time in Paradise.