The realization that we all are living in a make-believe illusionary world of our perceptions came to me in the most unlikely of places. I had finished my work and I felt good, I had said my byes to my colleagues and was walking down the same route towards Churchgate station in Mumbai to catch the train home. Suddenly I felt strange, as if I was in a bubble, and out of nowhere I got the feeling that this (my reality then) is not true. That everything around me is fake - the buildings, the road, my career, my goals - that the whole world as we know it is fake.
There was nothing extraordinary about that day. The crowd at the station, muggy weather, the chaos, all seemed as real as the previous day. Yet, something had changed.
That was almost three years ago. And now, during the time of Covid, I finally understood what I had felt that evening.
Yuval Noah Harari mentions in his book Sapiens that only homo sapiens have the ability to create fictional or imagined reality that includes politics, religion, money, human rights etc. and accept that reality over and above the objective reality or the reality as experienced by the natural world.
This fictional reality we now have come to believe, to be the only known reality. So, majority of us go through our whole lives without doubting anything about it. Sometimes we meekly follow all the structures put in place since thousands of years, sometimes protesting the injustice perpetrated by these structures but still living within them with minor shifts here and there.
The chaos that ensued around the world after the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic suddenly brought the ‘fakeness’ into sharp focus in my heart and mind. I realized that our ‘fictional’ world, as we live it, is based on a fear-matrix. I am not talking about the pandemic here, though reactions to it are a virtual cherry on the fear-matrix cake. People who have seen the movie Matrix might be able to understand this better. Our collective psyche or consciousness is controlled by the power of fear, the basest of all human emotions. And its fear that gives rise to other base emotions of greed, hate, aggression, power and control, separation of the self from self itself as well as nature, separation of the mind and heart, division between people etc. Hence, all our societal structures, systems, hierarchies, human relationships were created and are still being created from this space, the lowest level of emotional evolution.
Even the love of a mother for her child – an emotion that is said to come closest to understanding ‘unconditional’ love – has elements of fear involved (I love her so much I won’t let anything happen to my child).
To understand this, do a simple exercise: If you had no fear in your life, what would that life be? Here you can include all the decisions that have a base in fear – the need to earn more and more money so that you can be financially secure, the need to be seen as ‘somebody’ because you don’t want to be seen as a failure, the need to get married because you don’t want to be alone when you are old, the need to have children because you want to leave a lineage etc. If there was no fear, you would perhaps leave your job and be the artist, healer, writer, story-teller that you always wanted to be. If there was no fear, you would perhaps be happy with living for the moment and not accumulate for future. If there was no fear, you would perhaps marry only for love and partnership. If there was no fear, your child would perhaps be a natural extension of you to be raised to her highest potential.
Spiritual and ancient traditions know that to heal and shift the perspective of the world, we need only a small section of the population to live from this ‘fearless’ state consistently for a certain period of time. This was also proven in a research on non-violence by Erica Chenoweth who found that it required only 3.5% of the population to actively participate in order for systems and governments to topple or for that matter change the world.
That the world is still in the throes of fear shows that we still haven’t reached the threshold number of people who have successfully broken out of this state, that fear is so pervasive and deeply entrenched that it’s difficult to even imagine any other world outside of this one.
On one of the lockdown nights, while walking around my terrace, I knew for sure that a joyful abundant world exists just beyond these boundaries. I felt I could reach out and touch it even. Whenever we return to normal (whatever that might mean right now), I will not be able to go back to the old ways of life and living. But how the path unfolds to the other side of the world is yet to be seen.
