The 'metaverse' is certainly a buzzword of modern times.
The term had been bubbling along quietly in blockchain circles for a number of years but then Mr Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook to Meta and the mainstream got hold of it and with their usual brand of efficiency spread it everywhere, muddied the waters, and successfully confused everyone new to the subject.
Back into Focus
I'll pause here and give a shout out to @acesontop who today released an excellent article called The "Living Under The Rock" Millionaires in which he looked at the some of the money piling into metaverse projects.
In that article is a quote from another writer - @taskmaster4450 - who, when discussing metaverses, says "...we don't actually know how will these look like and work."
Both of those writers are right, we don't know; we can speculate, imagine, forecast, but knowing is something different entirely.
Wary of Illusion
The purpose of this esoteric-focused blog is to look at things differently. That is to say with our eyes, minds and hearts open.
Park what we believe to be true and enter a sandbox environment where we can explore other possibilities without judgement or bias.
For the exercise today we are looking at the words of a spiritual teacher who suggests that while advances in virtual and augmented reality technology bring many benefits there is a danger of being consumed by the illusionary nature of the metaverses they may create.
Stay with me here, we are going to jump around a couple of places first before we go to the actual teaching to consider.
Mayan Metaverse?
A quick sidestep into history is necessary to show that illusionary worlds are not a new concept.
I'm sure elements of the ancient Mayan culture of Mexico and Central America are familiar to most readers here.
The Mayans understood illusion
Maya is a Sanskrit word that means magic or illusion.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica define the word as, "Maya originally denoted the magic power with which a god can make human beings believe in what turns out to be an illusion. By extension, it later came to mean the powerful force that creates the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real."
To the Mayan people, this physical world we occupy was/is an illusion.
Facebook's Meta
Fast forward to today and we find Facebook's rebranding to Meta included a new infinity loop logo.
No beginning, no end, limitlessness, the ability to expand endlessly of any object, state or condition with which it is associated = infinity.
An Illusionary Everlasting Dreamworld
Movie buffs will no doubt recall Leonardo DiCaprio's 2010 movie, Inception and the "Dreams feel real when we are in them" dialogue.
In the movie, the team assembled by DiCaprio ended up creating a dream within a dream.
The Teaching to Consider
An illusionary world. Infinite. An illusion within an illusion.
These are the things to contemplate while listening to this interesting, albeit belief-challenging, talk by Christopher Jai Smith.
Smith suggests this "Matrix system, that is being ramped up to the next level has the potential...to trap people in a dreamworld, a perpetual state, where their consciousness is housed into a virtual reality world. We have a name for it now. We call it the metaverse."
Caveat
As with previous articles here on this blog - such as The Spirituality and Physicality of NFTs - I stress this is not meant as an endorsement of either the message or the teacher.
The purpose of writing this is to provide access to the idea and for you to make your own judgements as to the merits of it.
If this particular message resonates with you fine, if it doesn't that's fine too.
Christopher Jai Smith may indeed have a unique insight but this doesn't mean he or anyone else should be adopted as a guru.
The old adage of listen to all, follow none is as true today as it ever was.
