“We don’t just passively perceive the world; we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much from the inside-out as the outside-in.” ~ Anil Seth
What if you were told that your reality is a hallucination? Most people would laugh it off, you can touch and pick up objects you can do everything. I believe my question would resonate better with people more familiar with Eastern philosophy.
Eastern scriptures have put forth the concept that this world is “maya” an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem. Something which basically boils down to our consciousness being tricked into believing what we see, taste or smell is real.
In recent times science has been making rapid progress in understanding what consciousness is. According Anil Seth, a neuroscientist, we’re all hallucinating all the time, but when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it “reality.”
This TED talk divulges into the depths of our human nature and how we as a species use our brains to understand what is outside us like our environment and how we experience our reality by our experiences and perspectives or in other words our conditioning.
I must warn you that this video is a bit heavy as it will make you question your pre-conditioned beliefs.
Research such as this adds support to the fact that we create our reality. If you pay attention to how our brain processes information using the best guess system, it always becomes equally important about the information we feed our head.
A negative environment and information will automatically lead to negative thought patterns. The two experiments in the above video show how easy it is for us to be biased with our perspective and for some reason this also makes me question how easy it is for us to be manipulated 🙂
I believe this quote sums up what I have in mind, “Man is a hostage to the cage of cultural programming and the mass hallucination of the propagandist’s narrative illusion.” ~ James Scott, the Center for Cyber Influence Operations Studies