The World is Like a Movie, a Dream, a Video Game
If Yogananda, the rishis, or even Shakespeare were alive today, they would use a more up-to-date metaphor while preserving the basic underlying concept of the world as Maya. I can imagine what they might say, struggling with previous metaphors:
The world is like a dream, like a motion picture, and like a play, but one that is interactive, where the players are. However, they each come in with a script, have some agency to choose their actions and affect the outcome and re-write the script, and they can even become aware that they are in the middle of a play or dream, or movie.
The metaphor that makes the most sense today is that of an interactive video game. In role-playing video games like World of Warcraft, Fortnite, or Roblox, we, as players, exist independently outside the game. However, we descend or enter into the video game to play a specific character we identify with. Then we are able to only perceive the world through the eyes of that character, which is coincidentally called an avatar. The word ‘avatar’ comes from an old Sanskrit root that means ‘to descend.’
In the same way that video games today are much more sophisticated than the video games of the 1980s, like Pac-Man and Space Invaders (classic games that I played as a kid), the ultimate video games will be able to convince us that we are in ‘reality’ when in fact we are in an illusory world. As Buddha suggests, everything in this world would be ‘reflections on a very clear mirror, devoid of inherent existence.’
The interactive, multiplayer video game is the latest, most accurate, and most useful metaphor for the nature of our reality. This offers a better perspective on several issues: not just why there is suffering and why it’s important but also why we shouldn’t take it too seriously. It also explains how the magic and miracles Yogananda described in his autobiography can be explained while satisfying the modern, scientific need to respect the rules of the physical world.
