To recap:
You think everything is a simulation because you have made everything you come into contact simulated. In one sense, you had no choice. All your interactions with reality come through the filter of your sensory organs feeding outside sensations into a brain which then processes those stimuli into an incomplete picture. Your brain ignores parts of the spectrums of touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight which aren’t useful for the purposes of survival so what you get is an approximation, a recreation in your head. In other words, even before we were conscious, we were modeling reality in our minds. Everything you do, consciously or subconsciously, is exclusionary. Even language are designed to simplify and leave things out. Words define what things are by what they are not. The Tao, aka the essence of reality, is in all things and changes with the shifting circumstances of reality. Thus, “the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao”. It’s fine if you can understand this and then move on with your life, recognizing that you don’t know everything.
The problem comes when you try to make your model as real as possible, and then mistake the model for what it’s modeling. You trust your “model of everything” more than the reality that is showing your otherwise. Rather than trying to incorporate the anomalies into your system or adjusting your system to accommodate, you ignore them while adding layers of complication onto your model until you find yourself on the brink of collapse with no understanding of why.
The later statue may bear a closer resemblance but it still isn’t the real thing. Problem is, sometimes you get so close that you can convince most people it is.
You plant gardens of ever-increasing complexity and beauty that’s close enough to nature and eventually people stop longing to explore the wilds and forget about the dangerous plants and animals that exist there. You create foods that enhance and heighten the flavor and texture of what can be grown from the earth and eventually people forget about what’s actually in it. You do this to all your senses and eventually nothing feels right so you start wondering whether anything is. We surround ourselves with simulations, and then convince ourselves there’s nothing outside it. Typically, this is when civilizations collapse, because the stuff we didn’t think was important enough to account for in our models of everything come crashing through our simulated comforts with cataclysmic results. War, disease, natural disasters (which wouldn’t have been so disastrous if we’d prepared for them), misery and suffering on a massive scale. Dark Age-inducing stuff.
So that’s all the bad stuff, now here are a few ways out:
Finally, the Good News
The cliche’s true. It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, there are a number of easy things we can do everyday to escape our self-constructed simu-lives. Little confrontations with reality every day that, if each and every one of us did them, would allow us to skip plugging into the Mark Zuckerberg-created-dystopian-pseudo-verse in order to make life tolerable. And it starts with breaking boards.
Practice Kung Fu
Yes, not all of it is for self defense, and yes, many who are now practicing it are in for rude awakenings if they think any martial art alone will save them in every kind of physical altercation. Setting this aside, let’s look at the meaning of the words Kung Fu or “功夫”. In Chinese, the simplest meaning is something like “level of mastery”, as in “Your kung fu/level of mastery is impressive”. Just as there is a tao or way to all worldly phenomena, one can develop kung fu in just about any skill or pursuit. For example, one of the my favorite kung fu stories isn’t about fighting at all, it’s about a cook who lived during the Warring States Period named Ding.
According to Zuangzi, the lord Wen-hui was watching Cook Ding carve up oxen when he noticed how the man moved like no common butcher. The slabs of meat seemed to fall off the bones while the joints separated effortlessly. Ding didn’t hack or saw his meat, he danced. When asked about it, Ding explained that he no longer “saw” the carcass before them. Rather, he moved with the beast’s anatomy. Understood the musculature. Slipped his knife into the spaces between meat and bone, between joints and tendons, so that the portions melted off with each pass. So skilled was he that he hadn’t needed to change knives in 19 years, since the blade rarely needed to cut or hack to do its job. Cook Ding made butchery into an art, and is a shining example of mastery.
Whether Cook Ding had any Kumite trophies is unknown, but he definitely knew kung fu. He might have even applied his cleaver wisdom to daily life. Lessons like:
How to meet your goals with as little resistance as carving up a big game animal.
Take pleasure in your work, and you will do it much better.
Every moment is an opportunity to practice.
Preserve your tools.
The list goes on...
So what exactly do you get at the end of all those repetitive forms and board-punching training? Will you be able to… Punch through a brick? Depends on what kind of brick. Punch through a rib cage? Unlikely. But most importantly, will you know a little more about punching through your obstacles in life? Yes! The point isn’t to become invincible, or “perfect” at what you do, but to practice the mindset that lets you confront your fears and push beyond discomfort. Martial arts mastery, and most life skill mastery, is about reality mastery.
How you conduct yourself in your art will be how you conduct yourself in everything else you do. Knowing how much work it takes, it can be hard to start on the path. So what keeps you going, what will see you through extreme hardship, is a commitment to something beyond yourself. That’s about as good a segue as I can think of into…
Family.
In Chinese the characters that make up the word “country” (國家) are “kingdom” (國) and “home” or “family” (家). You can choose to see this from a propagandistic light, that the nation and the family are one, that one should see one’s nation as one’s home, and thus be prepared to die for one’s king, etc. But the other way of looking at it is simply that without a strong family, i.e. the immediate people around you who you go back to after the day’s affairs are done, and for whom you carry out the majority of your obligations and responsibilities, there exists no strong reason to keep going. Without strong families, there are no strong nations. If the nation is an extension of the family, and you have no strong feelings towards your family, then how will you know how to treat your nation?
Even on the battlefield, soldiers create de facto families. Interviews conducted with veterans of the First and Second World Wars showed that, contrary to popular beliefs of the past, what kept morale up and soldiers going weren’t the grand eloquent speeches of their generals or the propaganda posters of their politicians. What kept a soldier carrying on were the two or three closest comrades-in-arms with whom they served. These men for whom they would give their lives and to whom they looked to preserver their own became blood brothers. Some of the smartest writers and veterans knew this. It’s why Alexander Dumas had Three Musketeers.
And so it is that many of the renowned figures who believed in theories like “life is all a dream” or an evil game manipulated by malevolent gods, or that it’s all a giant computer programs, don’t seem to spend too much time with their families. It’s hard to continue in this belief that everything is just an illusion when entities exist outside yourself which you view as being more important, not in an abstract “the world needs saving” sense, but in a direct, “she’s cold and hangry and can’t feed herself” sense.
There are those who will tell you that these are just strong illusions, that Mara’s ultimate trick is to involve children. But even a renunciate like the Buddha wouldn’t voluntarily leave his family unless he believed he was going to find some better way to serve them later. In short, it’s easy to see what happens around you as the personal stimuli of some otherworldly hyper-intelligence intent on playing a sick game with you when you’re on your own. But once you throw family into the equation, and you take time to really empathize with your family members, then suddenly you realize that there are definitely real people existing outside of your personal, simulated universe. People with feelings, goals, and aspirations that may have nothing to do with you but who nonetheless require your help. That’s why looking to family is a good way to get out of the simulation.
Now, this isn’t to say that you should do everything your family says, because a good deal of their existence is likely caught up in simulating away their fears and pains. Paradoxically, another way out of the “all is simulation” trap is to return to the state of mind you had before you knew they existed.
Meditate to Forget the Simulation
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are so named because in the West, not many people did it. Or at least what they did, they did not consider meditation. Here’s the thing: you need to spend time every day evaluating your own brain, checking in with yourself, observing the you that lies beneath the worrying mass of voices and instincts freaking out over your daily tasks. The you that wants to escape into a virtual rabbit hole isn’t the real you, but if you don’t set aside time to remind yourself, it can easily take you over. To improve your self-observation abilities, I recommend trying one of the many kinds of Vipassana or mindfulness meditations.
The you that wants to be safe and entertained will manufacture entire adventures and stories, play video games and binge on Netflix for weeks on end, but it will not ultimately be happy or find meaning. Instead it will get lost in these delusions, and crave ever more convincing illusions because deep down it knows this isn’t real.
Ultimately, that’s what this whole simulation theory is: to pose the question, “everything isn’t real, right?” and then have the scientific community, and cultural figures, and politicians all nod to the same credo helps convince us that nothing we do has any consequence: If none of it’s real, then none of it matters. So we may as well not do it. It’s the equivalent of an entire society sinking into depression. But if each of us took the time to forget all of our constructions and return to a state of being that isn’t trying to define and deflect our experience, then we might remember that a world exists outside the one we tell ourselves is all there is.
The Taoists call this “Zuowang” meditation, and a simple guided version of it can be found here.
Why This Works
We talked in previous parts about Simulation Theory as “that creeping feeling Morpheus describes to Neo in the Matrix articulated as a scientific explanation of existence”. What’s it articulating? That creeping suspicion that nothing is real and everything is a computer program written by robots that keeps our minds dulled and enslaved. Or, the creeping suspicion that the world is run by some shadowy cabal of bankers, ethnics, literal demons, and all the people who are “not us”. Or, the creeping suspicion that the world is run by a god who didn’t actually create the universe trying to convince us that he did so that we will worship him. Or, the creeping suspicion that we’re all in a cave staring at shadow puppets projected there by malicious rulers who have convinced us that the show is reality and not the light casting those shadows from the reality outside. Or… you get the idea. Simulation Theory is the latest in a series of conspiracy theories about existence that is trying to explain why, after believing a lifetime’s worth of white lies, excuses for unsatisfactory conduct, and small compromises we make with ourselves, we might feel our reality isn’t truly the one we should be living.
Is simulation theory real? Are the Clintons still sacrificing babies? Is Bill Gates still trying to chip us with Omicron vaccines? It doesn’t matter. In a sense, many of the lies and hypocrisies and delusions are what allow society to keep running. Civilization starts when two people choose to overlook each other’s faults so that they can focus on fixing the faults in their immediate surroundings. When we try dismantling it without first dismantling our own self-deceptions, we come to disastrous results. What must change is whether we can keep ourselves as real as possible. Be the person you tell yourself and other people that you are. Own your actions. If you can fulfill all of your commitments in word with committed deeds, then you will be a congruent person. Under some moral definitions, that makes you “good”.
When reality confirms your self-perception, then the “hell built by other people” that is civilization will seem like a delightful game. The world becomes a sandbox where you can build whatever you want. Where you get to go your hardest and see your fullest capabilities. Where you get to create something nobody has before on the beach before it all gets washed away by the tide.
Here’s why the three practices I outlined above work: they keep your life as “un-simulated” as possible. It’s hard to convince yourself that you are good at anything if you regularly practice that skill and see how much you are not. It’s hard to think that you’re the only aspect of this universe that isn’t simulated when the people and animals whom you love so dearly have needs and personalities that exist whether you do or not. And it’s hard to continue down the path of word tricks and mind illusions when you spend a good quarter to a full our each day in the state you were in before you started differentiating everything.
At the end of it all, even if what you take to be reality turns out to be virtual, the skills you acquire will remain real, the memories with you created will be real, and the love you share will be definitely be real. In the end, that’s all the reality you need.
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I’m glad to have finally wrapped this series. Future emails will opt for a shorter-form, more bite-sized format as I take the year to synthesize more of what I know and have learned thus far. These days I have a day job, this blog, a book in the works, and a business I run. I’m also (when COVID regulations allow) training a martial art. So for the next little while expect more brevity and hopefully, greater concision.
If you liked the story of Cook Ding, then you might like to see it illustrated (along with several other great stories by Lao-Tzu’s lesser-known companion in the Tao, Chuang-Tzu (or Zhuangzi, depending on which spelling you choose). I’ve been meaning to write more about him because, unlike the author of the Tao Te Ching, we actually know some things about him. The illustrations themselves are quite delightful, drawn by the famed Taiwanese spiritual cartoonist, C.C. Tsai. Until next time!
I like that you outlined the problems—and then gave solutions!