How Video Games Explain the Unexplainable: Past Lives and Synchronicity
In this article, we explore how the metaphor of a video game may be the best explanation for some areas of the unexplained phenomenon – including karma, past-lives, and synchronicity. By using this metaphor, we can learn to find and accomplish our quests in this life while we play the role of our character.
How Video Games Explain the Unexplainable
By Rizwan Virk
“Know all things to be like this,” says the Buddha, “A mirage, a cloud castle, a dream, an apparition, without essence, but with qualities that can be seen …” – Buddha
This year marks the 20 years since the release of the Matrix, the groundbreaking movie that popularized an idea that has come to be known as the simulation hypothesis. The concept that the physical world is based on information and light is not new in the spiritual traditions, though it took modern science some time to catch up with them.
Past Lives & Karma As. Quests
Mystics of the Eastern traditions have been telling us that the world we see is a kind of “illusion” or Maya and that all of our actions have repercussions which must be played out (albeit in future lives). According to the Hindu Vedas, the nature of this illusion is that we get caught up in the Lila, the grand stage play. Of course, a stage play is a metaphor that would make sense at the time – each subsequent generation uses the technology of its time to describe religion. Today we might say that Lila is an interactive movie that we get caught up in – which would be a video game!
In the Eastern traditions, the tenet of reincarnation, or transmigration of the soul from one body to the next – is one of the fundamental precepts that underlie various religions.
The basic idea in these religions is that there is a soul that “downloads” to a physical body. We then “inhabit” this body and in so doing, we create new karma as we go through the actions in this “play.” The Buddhist philosophy expresses this in Buddha’s endless wheel, a depiction of which is shown in Figure X. The reason we re-incarnate, the force that keeps the wheel spinning, is karma, the law of cause and effect.
Assuming for a moment that these religions are describing a real phenomenon, how would it work? How could it be implemented? There would need to be a place outside the rendered world which kept track of these “tasks” – these “causes and effects” and then the Lords of Karma need to create situations in our lives based on our previous karma.
Reincarnation is describing something so similar to playing a video game today that we barely have to draw an analogy. In video games, we are players who live outside the rendered world, and we play “characters” in the rendered world. When a player dies, we can start another life in the game. Quests are used as a way to focus a player on a particular task- and sometimes these quests involve multiple people.
We can think of Buddha’s endless wheel as an endless stream of quests. As you play, you create more quests for you to fulfill. It turns out that we don’t need the “Lords of Karma” at all. In my book, I describe exactly how a dynamic quest engine would work that could pull our previous karma and create new quests with other characters who are playing the game now (based on their previous karma) and then.
Synchronicity
Switching gears again, the term synchronicity was first introduced by renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung in an attempt to explain many aspects of life that bordered on the paranormal. The definition today of a “meaningful coincidence” is when a mental event corresponds to an external event. You are thinking about someone, and they call. It was originally an “acausal connecting principle,” and Jung gave a famous example of his patient who was describing a scarab (an Egyptian beetle) when a beetle tapped up against the window. Jung opened the window, and it flew in, causing him to remark that here was the beetle from her dream. This synchronicity helped her in her therapy.
Synchronicity, al0ng with a funny feeling that we have about people and places such as déjà vu, has been described as a “glitch in the matrix.” In my last book, Treasure Hunt, I described how these were “clues” that needed to be followed in life to lead you to the “work you were meant to do.”
Expanding on the Matrix analogy, if the world consists of information, then this information could be arranged based on meaning, and these “funny feelings” were meant as clues that we should pay attention to a certain person, place or thing. Why? It is where the idea of karma and quests come in.
Synchronicity and déjà vu in this model are the “clues” that are guiding us in this life. If you were going to build an all-encompassing video game like the Matrix, you would need a way to guide your players towards certain tasks and people.
Jacques Vallee, a well-known computer scientist who worked on Project Blue Book and for NASA, has theorized that information is stored associatively in the world beyond the “rendered world.” Philip K Dick, the famous once stated that we were living in a computer-generated reality and that feeling of déjà vu was evidence that something in the game had changed.
We can start to think about our life as if it were a video game. What quests are calling to you that need to be accomplished for your character to level up? If you don’t know, start paying attention to clues – “glitches in the Matrix,” which can guide you not only to the next clue but to your major work and tasks in this life! It can even guide you to other players that you need to accomplish tasks with – your guild of characters in the video game of life!
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About the Author
Rizwan Virk, a grad of MIT and Stanford is an entrepreneur, video game designer, bestselling author, and independent film producer. His new book, The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows How AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are In a Video Game.
