Guest Article By: Dr. Gary Michael Vasey
I wonder how many people who watched The Matrix movie (or for that matter, The 13th Floor movie) and found themselves thinking….”Yes, yes, I’m not alone in thinking this isn’t real at all.” That’s certainly what I was thinking.
Even as a small boy, I always had a sense that reality wasn’t, well, really real! Back in the early 1960’s, I was convinced that I was in a small room attached to a machine.
That machine allowed me to see, feel, smell, hear and take part in this life. I thought that perhaps,everyone else was also having the same experience and imagined rows and rows of these booths with consciousness’s attached to this machine all experiencing and playing in this reality.
Back in the 1960’s as a small boy, I had no idea what ‘virtual reality’ was nor any concept of computers. That makes the idea that a 4 or 5-year old would think that way even more bizarre. Why then did I think that reality wasn’t real?
I don’t know about you but when I think back to being a small child, the world had a magical quality and it seemed that imagination and reality were simply extensions of the same thing.
Dreams and reality were simply two sides of the same coin and both equally unreal so far as I could tell. I was able to imagine things into reality or at least it seemed that way. Perhaps it was this idea that I could imagine reality that led me to believe that I really was imagining it sitting in a little box-like room playing some ‘virtual reality’ game.
Those movies and several others like them told me that I was not alone in my feelings. It told me that many people were awakening to the idea that reality might notexactly be real. What reality actually was remained a big question mark along with the question – What is consciousness? Me?
I pursued magic to try to figure things out. I learned how to meditate and I relearned (partially) how to imagine as well as I could when a kid.Suddenly, pow! It hit me. Reality, whatever that is, existed inside of me – not outside of me. Every interaction with the ‘outside’ world was essentially and in actuality a purely internal experience.
Everything had its existence inside my mind and everything was simply part of that. “The Universe is mental,” said the Three Initiates and I came to understand that, for me at least, they were right.
In magic, there are a number of sayings or universal observations. One of these is that the macrocosm and the microcosm are reflections of each other – the Universe is the reflection of the Mind. In fact, the Universe is inside the Mind it is reflected in.
Another is ‘Know thyself!” If, everything is really inside then knowing what makes that inside tick might very well be the key to unlocking reality right. Know thyself doesn’t mean knowing your name or whether you prefer yellow or blue as a color but it means truly knowing your own mind.
Check out the books below by Dr. Gary Michael Vasey !
