Talk show – Virtual Reality and Spirituality

[Talk Show at Salt Lake City, USA]

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
so hello i’m honored to be here among all of you i am chaitanya i am a teacher and a student of the bhagavad gita which is an ancient yoga text by education i am an engineer and last 20 years i have been studying and writing and speaking on the bhakti yoga wisdom of the bhagavad gita i run the world’s only gita daily column wherein every day i write a meditation in the bhagavad gita and i’m happy to be here sharing some of the spiritual insights with you that’s beautiful it’s so nice that you have have you ever been to salt lake city before i’ve been to america twice but salt lake city first time oh wonderful we’re so honored to have you here and you are an author you’ve written many many books yeah i’ve written around 20 books till now on the contemporary application of spirituality in scientific cultural and social terms wonderful well i know that last night you gave a presentation on what matters matters that matter more than matter matters that matter more than matter that was very fascinating um and i think that everyone can can learn from your message it was a beautiful message so in in talking to you um and me as a 360 journalist and filmmaker i understand that you have an understanding as well of virtual reality and 360 filming and i wanted to ask you a little bit about that what your thoughts on of this new technology although it’s not completely new but this technology in our society today yeah virtual reality is one of the best best examples of how technology can point us to spirituality technology is in one sense what we use to control and manipulate the material world around us but in the tools that we use for that we can often get spiritual insights so in virtual reality a person may be sitting in a room but if they are driving a virtual car then they get completely absorbed in it in normal tv we have say sight and sound but here all the senses get involved and a person gets transported to another level of reality where they start experiencing a person driving they’re driving a car and the car say runs like goes going across a bridge and the bridge collapses and they fall down and the person who is identifying with it oh i’ve fallen horrified it’s almost as if they experience the agony of a virtual death so based on the identification of the person with the character in the virtual reality how strong the identification is to that extent the virtual reality becomes real now we have had movies like matrix which talked about how the whole concept of how the world we live in might it be also something like a virtual reality so the bhagavad gita explains that our existence is two-dimensional we are not just material creatures we have material bodies but at our core we are spiritual creatures and the fundamental characteristic of spirit is consciousness so we as non-material or spiritual beings our consciousness is projected into the body and through the body into the world so in a sense the world we live in is like a virtual reality in fact one of the krishna scientists dr rachel l thompson he was a mathematics doctorate from cornell university he wrote a whole book on this topic called maya the world as virtual reality and in that book he analyzes parallels between the concept of virtual reality as it is actualized through technology and the concept of the nature of this world itself as it is explained in the yoga texts all of us if we see we have a longing for living forever none of us wants to die yet everything around us is temporary not one thing even the biggest skyscraper building the tallest mountain with the most huge landmass nothing is permanent so if nothing around us is permanent where did the desire for eternal existence within us come from if a child is in a village in south africa where the child has never heard of a pizza and suddenly the child tells mummy i want a pizza the mummy will ask where did you hear about a pizza so there’s nothing in the circumstance from which a desire for a pizza could come about the knowledge of pizza would come about where did it come from like that nothing around us lasts forever and yet we have a desire to live forever where does this desire come from this desire doesn’t come from the material world around us it comes from inside us from our spiritual core which does not belong to this world which is eternal so in the philosophy of we could say science there has been a question if there is something non-material how could it influence matter and that is what has led to the idea of any non-material soul not being accepted in mainstream science Rene Descartes was a prominent philosopher he proposed the mind matter duality but his theories were rejected because he could not come up with a tenable hypothesis about how the non-material could interact with the material so i would say that the virtual reality setup demonstrates a very tangible way in which the non-material and the material can interact so just for example say a person is playing a video game in which they are driving a car now if we consider the movements of the car within the framework of the video game we could say it’s all happening by the mechanisms of the video game you know okay the car moves right car moves left car moves fast car moves slow car moves up and car moves down all that can be explained in terms of the simulated realities rules at the same time all those moves are happening by the intention of the player so the intention how is it connected the intention is what is projected into the virtual reality and that’s how there’s identification that place so similarly the non-material soul the bhagavad-gita explains in the 13 chapter 26 text so it states that the non-material spirit it gets caught in in this material world by the projection of its consciousness which happens because of the desire to enjoy material pleasure and just as a person who is identifying with a say a virtual car racer the car meets the accident this person feels horrified if the car racer wins this person becomes jubilant so various emotions they go through but actually that person that the virtual game player is sitting on a chair none of that is actually happening but all of it is happening in the consciousness similarly the non-material spiritual core that we are we are experiencing all this right now because our consciousness is projected in words projected into the world and just as there is as technology advances we can have more and more sophisticated simulations of reality where the simulation feels more and more real yes they they’re studying now people that are learning to walk yeah well they have paralysis and they see someone walking in virtual reality they’re beginning to rebuild muscles and their neurons are synapsing and their toes and feet are wiggling so they’re preparing to walk now exactly so just as at one level virtual reality can just be going into illusion that people go for entertainment another way that virtual reality can also help us to learn something so same way in the spiritual texts of yoga it is said that if our consciousness is caught in this virtual reality of the material world we stay ignorant of our actual nature but at the same time within this virtual reality itself just like depending on what kind of virtual reality a person is watching either they can just be entertaining themselves or they can be learning some skills special skills the same way in this virtual world if we hear special sound that is spiritual sound if we hear spiritual sound we see spiritual sites we read spiritual books then that awakens our consciousness that means while playing the game the game can take me into the into illusion but the game can also bring me back to reality that means that the whole process of bhakti yoga bhakti yoga is the yoga of loving devotion and in this yoga of loving devotion the idea is that the absolute the source of everything is present in the world also and through our loving intention our consciousness can be awakened consciousness can be risen to a higher level so in that sense yoga is actually the time-honored scientific process of raising our consciousness how interesting people are now doing yoga in virtual reality so they’ll have someone that’s filmed in virtual reality and then they put the headset on and they do yoga with that person oh beautiful isn’t that amazing that’s very nice so new new things are coming out every day but in a way what you’re talking about is age old yes actually i feel in virtual reality the timeless and timely are going to meet in a very exciting maybe revolutionary way how wonderful that that’s a wonderful um prediction because i feel like um with this technology things will change quite a bit and if it’s used for good then there might be that awakening that you’re talking about yes definitely the potential is there ultimately it depends on the level of human consciousness if our consciousness is low down and even the best things we will use for the worst purposes but our consciousness consciousness is risen up then we understand our place and purpose in the overall scheme of things and then we know how to use things for their best purpose for bringing out the best within us for realizing our spiritual nature for fulfilling our destiny for fulfilling for becoming what we are meant to become and for making the best contribution we can make in life beautiful well thank you so much we are so honored to have you with us today and that’s a beautiful insight to this new technology and thank you for sharing your time with us we know many people maybe today but um you’ve taken time to spend with us and to share this great message thank you for giving me the opportunity happy to be here this is live 360 in salt lake city at the krishna temple signing out for now