The Dream That Humanity Is Unable To Wake Up From

Buddhists often talk about something that sounds counter-intuitive but is actually most profound: “The mind is a prison”.  According to this concept, all of us can become consumed by our own thoughts to the point where we become hijacked, ceasing to pay attention to real events and stimuli from our physical environment.  We begin to alternate between the real world, and this made-up reality inside our thoughts which our mind prison has constructed.   As we spend more of our time in the latter, the real world begins to fade away: it becomes a mere version of the mind prison.  

In time, it becomes difficult to register correctly which one of the two worlds we inhabit at any given point in time:  the mind prison of our thoughts, or the real world, where real people live and die and real events occur.  By living in this parallel universe, we fall into a precarious state of unconsciousness whereby, although we may be able to perform all our daily tasks, we have lost cognition of everything real.  We begin to miss out on critical events which lie outside of our automatic routine, even as these unfold in broad daylight.  Events which, had we been awake, we could have had an influence on. 

Although this mental state sounds terrifying, it is more common than it seems.  It is the source of much of the tunnel vision, denial, ignorance, dogmatism and prejudice that have plagued humans through the ages.  The mind prison exists because it serves a purpose: denial is a type of mental shortcut as well as a “safe” room to retreat to as we take shelter from uncomfortable truths. 

Humans are always sceptical towards unfamiliar scripts they encounter for the first time.  They don’t only challenge their validity.  They question their very existence.  It is incredibly soothing to seek familiar images and systematically dismiss anything unusual as an “outlier”, a temporary glitch in the universe.  The knee-jerk reaction of humans has always been to disregard unusual events, rather than bring them to their awareness, process them, analyze and interrogate them.  These analytical brain functions require a good grounding in the present, and a freedom from bias which can only take place outside the walls of the mind prison. 

By spending excessive time trapped in the safety of our mind prisons, we quickly become bystanders to reality.  Torn between multiple narratives fed to us by the necrosystem, we become unable to distinguish the mirror images of the mind prison from the real world. Telling the mind prison’s video game virtual reality apart from the real world takes so much effort, we eventually give up: the mirror world has defeated us.  The world we are about to inhabit is a dystopian version based on re-constructed facts.  Worse even, we have very little interaction with this world, much like being trapped inside a dream where all we can do is observe what happens to us.

The mind prison is nothing but an endless library of video games and scenarios.   Every time we are preoccupied with our professional image, our personal identity, the past or the future, the result is likely to be the same: we are entering a world that only exists in our head.  As scenarios multiply through copious exposure to the marketed stereotypes of the necrosystem, we eventually shut down.  We have become passive spectators to our own autobiography, played by us but casted and written by someone else.  It is a dystopian out-of-body experience, but the popcorn is real as can be. 

The mind prison is a creative space, but also a trap.  Humans have been both blessed and cursed with imagination. We use our imagination equally to solve problems and to deny their existence. Although imagination is a useful skill, excessive rumination leads to psychoses and an inability to assign reality the importance it deserves.  Given that the mind prison struggles to access reality, it is incredibly susceptible to corruption.  The mind prison is indeed a prison, because it locks us out of the present.  As long as we live in the past or the future, we are unable to take action right now.  The necrosystem’s mirror world can become a one-way hologram, a dream one enters and never wakes up from: you try to run, only to find that there is no ground beneath you to run on.

The mind prison is increasingly the dominant place humans inhabit.  The consequences of spending so much time in the virtual space of this never-ending dream are disastrous.  The more we neglect the real world, the more it deteriorates.  We are setting the stage for the dream becoming a nightmare, and it won’t be virtual this time.

The paradox of the human brain is that it can consciously choose which version of reality it wants to believe in, effectively rendering itself unconscious.  Highly developed societies tend to put so much of their existence on autopiloted narratives that they eventually become sleepwalkers.  As long as the house furniture stays in the same place, the sleepwalker is safe from bumping into objects. Change the furniture around, and an entire civilisation is in for an unpleasant surprise.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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