We Live in Our Minds ? - Our Mind Creates Our Reality ? - Is The World an illusion ?

So We Are Living A Real Construct Matrix Simulation New World Order Year Zero is a prominent advocate of the simulation hypothesis, suggesting there's a very slim chance we exist in the base reality. This video explains, How we actually live in our mind, not in this world. The reality is an illusion. We create our reality in our mind. Everyone sees the reality differently. The video also explains how we can control our mind to live a happy life and how we don't need the external world to be happy?

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Our world is not outside. Our world is within our mind. Actually we see the image of this world inside our mind. So everyone is living in his own world created inside his mind. It means there are as many worlds as there are living creatures on the Earth.

Friends, we do so many things in our life to make ourselves happy. We waste lots of our time, money and energy to seek happiness and pleasure in the external world. But have you ever thought, why we need all this? What purpose does the external world solve? Actually these external things don't do anything to make us happy. What they do is just trigger the secretion of various happiness hormones in our body and as a result, we feel happiness. And as you know, many times these objects fail to make us happy.

Got the point? Ok, let's take one more example to make it more clear.
When a woman Hugs her child and husband then different types of hormones may be released in the body of her child and husband. Although the woman is same but it is triggering different types of hormones in different bodies.

Why this happens? Actually the relationship of child and husband with that woman is different. So they have different types of feelings, beliefs and memories associated with the same woman. Therefore the same woman triggered the release of different hormones in the bodies of her child and her husband.

So what does it mean?
It means external world only helps in the secretion of different hormones in the body and the same object may trigger different hormones in different persons.
Everyone including humans and other animals see the world differently based on their intellectual level, past memories, body structure, sensory organs and other numerous factors.

You must have heard the famous line - Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. For a mother her child is most beautiful in the world. There is no meaning of the external world unless there is someone to give it some meaning.

So now we understand, we actually live in our mind. External world is just a stimulant. But if we know that we actually live in our mind, then we can use other ways to achieve happiness.

It has been found that whatever pleasures and happiness you achieve by spending so much time, money and energy; can be obtained just by doing meditation. Doing meditation can release happy hormones like Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins.

You can remember good or bad memories in your mind and you will start to live in that time again. You will enter into the world that was present at that time.
Do you know, when we recall our old experiences, the same firing patterns of neurons are repeated in the brain that took place at that time. So we actually start to feel that experience again. We enter into that time again and relive that life. So we live in our mind.

What happens in your dreams.
When you dream, you are completely in a different world- your dream world. You are completely unaware of your surroundings. Your world is in your mind.
Your brain can not differentiate between the dreaming state and the wakeful state. Therefore you laugh, cry, smile, feel fear and pain while dreaming. Your heart beat increases, body gets sweaty, hence you show all the symptoms as if you are living your dreams in reality. when you dream, you are totally unconscious of the external world and you actually live in your mind.

In the same way we can live any life just by clearly imagining and visualizing that life in our mind. On doing this, Neural network's circuit will be triggered accordingly and desired hormones will be released in the body. So we actually be living that life.

My dear friends, All the pleasures and suffering are in our minds not in the external world. We actually suffer our mind, not this world. Our world is in our mind and we are the controller of our mind. We need not to control the external world if we can control our mind.

If everything is ok inside our head then you will see- all is ok with the external world too. But if there is some problem in your mind then you will see the whole world full of problems even if everything is totally ok in the world.

Actually you see events of the external world in your mind. And it's your brain that gives meaning to the meaningless events as per your perspective.
Keep it in mind, that your mind can be your biggest friend or biggest enemy. If it obeys you and takes your instructions then you can create your desired world. But If you can not control it, then your mind will start to control you.
World famous spiritual leader, Shri Shri Ravi Shankar says- “If you can win over your mind, you can win over the whole world.”

We Are Living A Real Construct Matrix Simulation New World Order Year Zero is a prominent advocate of the simulation hypothesis, suggesting there's a very slim chance we exist in the base reality. He famously remarked, "There's a billion to one chance we're living in base reality." This viewpoint is shared by an increasing number of academics. Exploring the likelihood of our existence within a simulation, examining supporting evidence, and considering the potential implications of such a reality is the focus of this discussion. Do we live in a simulation? Some physicists and philosophers believe that we are living in a simulation, a reality in which post-humans have not developed yet and we are actually living in reality. The simulation hypothesis suggests that we are all likely living in an extremely powerful computer program, and future generations might have mega-computers that can run numerous and detailed simulations of their forebears, in other words “ancestor simulations,” in which simulated beings are imbued with a sort of artificial consciousness. The simulation hypothesis is the latest in a long tradition of philosophical thinking that questions the ultimate nature of the reality we experience. If we do live in a simulation, it is likely that a great deal of our universe is “painted in,” leading to solipsism, the idea that we are the only person who really exists.

This is why no one should ever take anything personally literally ever, because people only act and react based on the inputs they have injected into their mind, the same way you put a DVD or cd into the player, is the same way you put information into your mind that eventually plays out that reality, therefore, you cannot ever get offended by others because they've only ever known what they grew up believing, what most people don't realize is we are no more than Alexa or Siri robots, we are the input that we receive, Alexa and siri are only getting smarter of dumber based on the inputs we give them, it's the same goes for humans, and that's why media and TV run the world because people allow the TV and media to literally program their universe, I look at it as a universe rather than a mind like you say, because it's YOU-niverse, your universe, your reality, you program it the way in which you desire. When you take ownership of your YOU-NIVERSE you become the author of your life. This video was great, this is the 6th dimension of consciousness that you're referring too, not 5D, like all the 5D people think they are smart, and ahead of the game, but they still think whatever they believe in their reality, is what's actual going on in others reality, when the truth is your neighbor in the apartment or home next to you can shift to an entirely different timeline than you at any given moment based on their reality inputs, and you can be in hell and they can be in heaven or Visa versa depending on what you inject or input into your reality. Their are infinite timelines that we can be in at any given time, this is the 6D understanding you're talking about in this video in which I would say maybe a few thousand people in the world even comprehend, this is great work.

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Life Force Energy Five Elements Ether, called “akasha” in Sanskrit is the first of the five great elements (pancha mahabhutus). It comes first because it is the most subtle of the elements. Often referred to as “space,” it is the essence of emptiness. It is the space the other elements fill. The origin of ether is shabda. Shabda is the tanmatra of sound, meaning that shabda is sound in its primordial, unmanifested form. Shabda is the primordial space from which vibration emerges long before it takes the form of sound in the ear. Sound and ether are inseparable.

Reality is an Illusion

Many scientists throughout history have tried to discover and find out what reality exactly is. How we can define reality, how all existed before humans were involved and if anything is by chance or if everything has been and is created in divine order.

Quantum science has proven that time is actually not linear as we perceive it to be, but that the past, present and future are happening all at once. This science has also shown that multiple versions of reality exist at the same time, meaning as now in the present moment. We can refer to this as 'parallel realities'.

If multiple realities exist at the same time, then another parallel reality must exist somewhere in the quantum field. Quantum physics has also proven that because all versions of reality exist currently and so meaning that all exists in the present, that we must be able to activate another reality, since it already exists.

Each and every version of reality has its own energy dynamic. Think of this in a way that if for example you would want to experience a reality where there's a healthy family dynamic within the home, whereas to the current circumstances, things are the opposite. If you would want to change the current reality, you would then have to perceive reality where the energy dynamic within the home is favorable to your desired outcome.

If we understand the mechanisms of reality, we understand that the universe works in terms of energy, frequency and vibration. All is energy at its core being and everything is always in motion and vibrating, or as a true matter of fact, oscillating. The way we are able to activate or experience a different reality, is by changing our current energy vibration to the reality and its energy dynamics we want to experience.

Reality is an illusion because reality is only our perception of it. If we change the way we perceive things to be, then what we are looking at will also change. Reality is only what we make of it and how we look at it. Whatever we desire to experience is possible as long as there is faith. Without faith nothing we desire can be accomplished. If we don't trust or lack faith, we can't activate or experience a reality of that which we wish to experience.

Everything in this universe stems from infinite awareness. That is us human beings, each thought we have and everything that has ever been created and will ever happen. Everything in our world is an illusion, because it all stems from our imagination and is mostly empty space. All that exists comes from something that exists everywhere and within everything, that is infinite awareness.

If we can imagine something then it must exist. That is because we can only be aware of and experience within our imagination, that which physically exists. There is an abundance of everything, since infinite possibilities exist. Think about it, is there something you can't be aware of or is there something that is impossible? Apart from some things, a lot of things are imaginable and therefore almost always possible!

Whatever we believe to be true is constantly being reflected to us. The universe is non-selective. Therefore we are never a victim of our circumstances. We exhibit great power and we are in control of a large extent of everything we experience.

Nothing is also ever coincidental, since everything that exists within our awareness is constantly being manifested in the outside world. That means that whether you believe you are poor or rich, or whether you believe that the world is a bad or good place, you will always experience in your outer reality that which you believe in your inner reality. The universe responds to how you identify your world or yourself to be.

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This is your head, your personal enclave of Heaven. Here we see God, portrayed within the structure of the brain in Michelangelo's masterpiece, reaching out to touch Adam. This space, your head, encloses your mind, the divine meeting point. The kingdom of God is within you" in response to the Pharisees' question about when the kingdom of God would come. This teaching is universal and timeless, and it means that enlightenment is within you, in your heart, and your spark of God has always been there.

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What Is 3-4-5D 2022 And New Earth Consciousness ? Ready for the news that will shake your world? It’s just the way the cookie crumbles. We are in the unfolding of a broadscale spiritual awakening — a shift into the loving awareness of “5D consciousness”.

Different from 3D consciousness that has controlled the Earth, 5D is about love. That’s it. No war. No jealousy. No competition. Just plain and simple respect, admiration and enjoyment.

Some have labeled this new reality the New Earth Consciousness. No matter the name, people across the world are having spiritual awakenings, and the news is exciting.

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A spiritual awakening is a period of time where you feel the divine channeling effortlessly through your Earth body. Spiritual awakenings have a tendency to induce “I am” consciousness.

The best part of “I am” consciousness is that you feel no separation at all from what you are looking at. Say you are walking outside on the boardwalk in Venice Beach California. You see booths with art, restaurants selling seafood, and young boys kicking a soccer ball. When you look at these things, you understand that you are these things, and you feel a warm intimacy with them. There is no room for fear, because fear is an illusion of separation. This is what 5D consciousness feels like.

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What Is 3-4-5D 2023 And New Earth Consciousness ? Ready for the news that will shake your world? It’s just the way the cookie crumbles. We are in the unfolding of a broadscale spiritual awakening — a shift into the loving awareness of “5D consciousness”.

Different from 3D consciousness that has controlled the Earth, 5D is about love. That’s it. No war. No jealousy. No competition. Just plain and simple respect, admiration and enjoyment.

Some have labeled this new reality the New Earth Consciousness. No matter the name, people across the world are having spiritual awakenings, and the news is exciting.

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What Is 3-4-5D 2024 And New Earth Consciousness ? Ready for the news that will shake your world? It’s just the way the cookie crumbles. We are in the unfolding of a broadscale spiritual awakening — a shift into the loving awareness of “5D consciousness”.

Different from 3D consciousness that has controlled the Earth, 5D is about love. That’s it. No war. No jealousy. No competition. Just plain and simple respect, admiration and enjoyment.

Some have labeled this new reality the New Earth Consciousness. No matter the name, people across the world are having spiritual awakenings, and the news is exciting.

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What Is 3-4-5-6D Future And New Earth Consciousness ? Ready for the news that will shake your world? It’s just the way the cookie crumbles. We are in the unfolding of a broadscale spiritual awakening — a shift into the loving awareness of “5D consciousness”.

Different from 3D consciousness that has controlled the Earth, 5D is about love. That’s it. No war. No jealousy. No competition. Just plain and simple respect, admiration and enjoyment.

Some have labeled this new reality the New Earth Consciousness. No matter the name, people across the world are having spiritual awakenings, and the news is exciting.

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You see, your eyes aren't just windows into the world. Think of them more like black holes, sucking in light and crafting the images in the back of your brain. That's right, the universe you experience is a mental projection, all created inside you. Ever heard of the Sigil of Lucifer? It's not some evil symbol; "Lucy" means light in Latin, making Lucifer a bearer of light. The ancient folks knew this, and they recognized that everything, including us, is part of a giant electromagnetic toroidal field. It's like a doughnut-shaped magnetic field, and everything is made out of it.

Your world? An electromagnetic holographic projection. We're living in what you might call God's mind. "Human" breaks down into "Hue" (light) and "MAN" (manifestation). Yep, you're a light being that's been manifested into physical form.

And your mind? It's at the root of it all. That's why "government" can mean "govern the mind." Think about it: the phrase "Let there be light" means light is a product of the mind. Light can become matter, and matter can turn back into light.

Ever wonder why the seven metals all have symbols linked to the seven planets? It's because light crystallized gives you those metals. Gold comes from the sun, iron from Mars, tin from Jupiter. They're all forms of light in their essence.

So next time you look at the world around you, remember: you're not just seeing things; you're literally creating them in your mind. It's more than a philosophical idea; it's the fabric of reality as we know it.

0:00 Through the Looking Glass: The Mystery of Sight - 2:27 Transcending Realms: The Power of Symbols in Decoding Light and Reality - 5:17 Waves of Reality: The Electromagnetic Fabric of Existence - 7:51 Manifestations and Mentations: The Dance of Light and Mind - 10:07 Light Embodied: The Seven Metals and the Spectrum - 12:27 The Vibrational Universe: From Thought to Reality

The Power Behind Symbols in Reality Creating Symbols are very powerful and can be extremely useful tools in the creation of your world. The Ancients understood the power of symbols and used them extensively in and out of their culture for protection, fertility, wealth, crop germination, death and birth rituals. Naturally, the use of a symbol on an object for a particular task does not in itself bring about these conditions; consciousness must do that. However, using a symbol geared toward a certain thing can help consciousness to release and hone-in on the energy pattern necessary to bring about the desired manifestation.

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We Are Living A Real Construct Matrix Simulation New World Order Year Zero is a prominent advocate of the simulation hypothesis, suggesting there's a very slim chance we exist in the base reality. He famously remarked, "There's a billion to one chance we're living in base reality." This viewpoint is shared by an increasing number of academics. Exploring the likelihood of our existence within a simulation, examining supporting evidence, and considering the potential implications of such a reality is the focus of this discussion. Do we live in a simulation? Some physicists and philosophers believe that we are living in a simulation, a reality in which post-humans have not developed yet and we are actually living in reality. The simulation hypothesis suggests that we are all likely living in an extremely powerful computer program, and future generations might have mega-computers that can run numerous and detailed simulations of their forebears, in other words “ancestor simulations,” in which simulated beings are imbued with a sort of artificial consciousness. The simulation hypothesis is the latest in a long tradition of philosophical thinking that questions the ultimate nature of the reality we experience. If we do live in a simulation, it is likely that a great deal of our universe is “painted in,” leading to solipsism, the idea that we are the only person who really exists.

Creationism is a religious belief that nature, including the universe, Earth, life, and humans, originated with supernatural acts of divine creation. It includes a continuum of religious views that vary in their acceptance or rejection of scientific explanations such as evolution. The term creationism most often refers to belief in special creation, where the universe and lifeforms were created by divine action, and the only true explanations are those that are compatible with a Christian fundamentalist literal interpretation of the creation myth found in the Bible's Genesis creation narrative.

Living constructs are special subtype that can apply to either humanoids or constructs. Living constructs are universally intelligent, if not necessarily very smart. Likewise, they are universally capable of change over time. While House Cannith claims to have invented this particular type of construct to fill the ranks of the Last War, there is some evidence that other, older living constructs existed during the times of the giants in Xen'Drik, thousands of years ago. Regardless of whether this subtype is applied to either humanoids or constructs, they all have the following abilities.

Unlike constructs, living constructs have a Constitution score. They do not get the bonus hit points due to their size, like normal constructs. Living constructs do not die until they are at negative hit points equal to their Constitution score, but are subject to the same rules for negative hit points as other humanoid creatures..

All living constructs have an Intelligence score of at least 1 and thus have skill ranks and feats as appropriate for their Hit Dice.

Dying living constructs have a +2 racial bonus to stabilization checks.

Like constructs, living constructs are immune to paralysis and sleep effects.

Unlike constructs, living constructs are not immune to disease, death effects, energy drain, exhaustion, fatigue, mind-affecting, nausea, poison, stunning and sickened effects, but they do get a +2 racial bonus to saving throws to resist them.

Unlike constructs, living constructs are not immune to ability damage, ability drain, bleed, necromancy effects (see below), negative levels, non-lethal damage, effects that require a Fortitude save or death from massive damage.

Living constructs do not need to eat, breath or sleep, but those with abilities that require rest, like spellcasting, still require 8 hours in a relaxed state to regain them.

Spells from the conjuration (healing) subschool are only half effective on living constructs, rounded down.

Like constructs, living constructs do not heal naturally, but can be repaired using an appropriate Craft skill (like armorsmithing, blacksmithing, gemcutting or sculpting). Each check takes 8 hours and the number of hit points regained is equal to the result of the Craft check -15.

Living constructs can be raised, reincarnated and resurrected. They cannot be reanimated as undead or deathless unless specifically stated otherwise.

Living constructs do not get low-light vision or darkvision, unless stated otherwise.

Regardless of whether the creature type is either humanoid or construct, those with the living construct subtype count as both humanoids (of the living construct subtype) and constructs for extraordinary abilities, supernatural abilities, spell-like effects, psi-like effects, feats, spells and psionic powers. This includes spells, like Repair Light Damage, special weapon qualities, like Bane (construct), and class abilities, like favored enemy (construct). If there a situation where the same effect would affect humanoids and constructs differently, like Charm Person, assume that the effect does apply and in the most severe applicable manner.

Yes Its Confirmed We Live in a Simulation Ever since the philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed in the Philosophical Quarterly that the universe and everything in it might be a simulation, there has been intense public speculation and debate about the nature of reality. Such public intellectuals as Tesla leader and prolific Twitter gadfly Elon Musk have opined about the statistical inevitability of our world being little more than cascading green code. Recent papers have built on the original hypothesis to further refine the statistical bounds of the hypothesis, arguing that the chance that we live in a simulation may be 50–50.

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Prophecy Hopi Indians Warned America For Year And Yet Nobody Listens ? It warn us that we are entering a dangerous period in our lives, as governments have abrogated native title and the time of plenty is coming to an end. Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi prophecy that marks the total disintegration of the life of harmony and balance. According to Hopi Dictionary: Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni, koyaanisqatsi is defined as “life” or “chaotic” life. In Lockdown Revisiting Koyaanisqatsi Revisiting Koyaanisqatsi in Lockdown explores this mythological destruction. Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi Prophecy It is an apocalyptic vision that warns us that if we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster. Near the Day of Purification, cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky and a container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky which could burn the land and boil the oceans.

The Hopi prophecy of the curse of Koyaanisqatsi marks the total disintegration of the life of harmony and balance. The subject of a poem of modern day environmental devastation also shown in the mythological destruction of the ancient Hopi city of Pivanhonkyapi.

The Hopi Prophecy - The Hopi Message to the United Nations (12/10/92)

We Hopi believe that the human race has passed through three different worlds and life ways since the beginning. At the end of each prior world, human life has been purified or punished by the Great Spirit Massauu due mainly to corruption, greed, and turning away from the Great Spirit's teachings.

The last great destruction was the flood which destroyed all but a few faithful ones who received a permission from the Great Spirit to live with Him in this new land. The Great Spirit said, "It is up to you, if you are willing to live my poor, humble, and simple life way. It is hard but, if you agree to live according to my teachings and instructions, if you never lose faith in the life I shall give you, you may come and live with me."

The Hopi and all who were saved from the great flood made a sacred covenant with the Great Spirit at that time. We Hopi made an oath that we will never turn away from Him.
For us the Creator's laws never change or break down.

To the Hopi the Great Spirit is all powerful. He appeared to the first people as a man and talked with them in the beginning of the creation of this world.

He taught us how to live, to worship, where to go and what food to carry, gave us seeds to plant and harvest. He gave us a set of sacred stone tablets into which He breathed all teachings in order to safeguard his land and life.

In these stone tablets were made instructions and prophecies and warnings. This was done with the help of Spider Woman. Before the Great Spirit went into hiding, He and Spider Woman put before the leaders of the different groups of people many colors and sizes of corn for them to choose their food in this world. The Hopi was the last to pick. The Hopi then chose the smallest ear of corn. Then Massauu said, "You have shown me you are wise and humble. For this reason you will be called Hopi (people of peace)."

Life Force Energy Five Elements Ether, called “akasha” in Sanskrit is the first of the five great elements (pancha mahabhutus). It comes first because it is the most subtle of the elements. Often referred to as “space,” it is the essence of emptiness. It is the space the other elements fill. The origin of ether is shabda. Shabda is the tanmatra of sound, meaning that shabda is sound in its primordial, unmanifested form. Shabda is the primordial space from which vibration emerges long before it takes the form of sound in the ear. Sound and ether are inseparable.

Because of their intimate relationship, the ear is considered the associated sense organ of the element ether, and voice (mouth) is its organ of action. Hearing loss and loss of the voice are difficulties that are often due to vitiation of the ether element in the body.

Ether has qualities, but unlike the other elements, ether’s qualities are based more upon the absence of its opposing quality than on the actual quality itself. For instance, ether is cold. It is cold because it lacks warmth created by fire. Ether is light because it lacks the heaviness created by earth and water. Ether is immobile because it lacks the propulsive nature of air. Ether is subtle because it lacks the profound presence of the more obvious elements. Ether is also omnipresent. It is everywhere. It is the substratum from which all other elements are derived. Ether is a part of all other elements. Within any aspect of creation, ether may be found. Ether is the most expansive of the elements. Without form or boundaries, ether has no limits. Because of its expansive quality, ether is the cause of differentiation.

Unrestrained, ether awaits a propulsive force to assist it in moving outward from the center of oneness. As a result, its form is able to take shape and differences emerge. In the formation of the embryo, it is ether that is responsible for allowing change and growth to take place. Ether creates the space for the other elements to fill. That which is the most subtle and difficult to perceive is a function of the element ether. The mind is composed of ether. It is formless and nearly impossible to contain. While the mind becomes easily disturbed, ether represents the substratum upon which thoughts and emotions ride like waves upon the ocean. The sattvic or undisturbed mind is an expression of the essence of ether.

In the body, ether is expressed within the empty spaces. The hollow of the empty intestines, blood vessels, bladder, and the lungs are filled with ether. Vitiation of ether in the body results in an increase of space and a decrease in structure. The result is the destruction of tissue. Parkinson’s disease is an example of a condition where space is created in the body where once there was cellular structure. The loss of dopamine producing cells in the substantia nigra of the brain stem creates an increase in emptiness. A similar state is seen in the pancreas due to the destruction of islet cells.

Vitiation of space (ether) contributes to the symptomatic dysfunctions that follow. The vata dosha contains both ether and air. Hence, any vitiation of ether will ultimately result in a vitiation of vata. Therefore, one method of controlling vata dosha is to prevent ether from increasing. Ether is prevented from increasing by filling the emptiness in our lives. Our lives become full not by being busy, but by being nourished physically and emotionally. Proper nourishment acts as a container for ether and the vata dosha. Moist, heavy, satisfying foods pacify ether as the empty space of the digestive system becomes full. Emotionally, love is the highest form of nourishment. By taking in the other elements the natural tendencies of ether are pacified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element

All of creation is made up of the five elements in different proportions. In our diet, the bitter taste contains the most ether, although ether by itself is tasteless. The bitter taste is composed of both ether and air, and it is air that provides the uniqueness of the taste. Consuming bitter foods is an excellent way to increase the influence of the ether element. This is wonderful if a person is overly constricted and driven by their routines. However, an excess of ether in the diet, especially the diet of the individual with a vata constitution, can result in the dosha becoming too expansive. While this increases creativity it also leads to becoming ungrounded. Obviously, a balance is desired.

Ayurveda is based upon the five elements of nature explains the relationship between the 5 elements in the following manner, “All elements originate from ether. Ether moves to become air, air causes friction to become fire, fire becomes water as it becomes denser, water becomes earth as it coagulates. And all five elements are contained in the Earth.”

Consciousness is Ether because they both have the qualities which are clear, subtle, light, expansive, and omnipresent. The 5 elements are the different manifestations of Awareness/Consciousness.

“Reality” is constructed by your brain. Here’s what that means, and why it matters.

https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/reality-constructed-your-brain-here-s-what-means-and-why-it-matters

Fix your gaze on the black dot on the left side of this image. But wait! Finish reading this paragraph first. As you gaze at the left dot, try to answer this question: In what direction is the object on the right moving? Is it drifting diagonally, or is it moving up and down?

Remember, focus on the dot on the left.

It appears as though the object on the right is moving diagonally, up to the right and then back down to the left. Right? Right?! Actually, it’s not. It’s moving up and down in a straight, vertical line.

See for yourself. Trace it with your finger.

This is a visual illusion. That alternating black-white patch inside the object suggests diagonal motion and confuses our senses. Like all misperceptions, it teaches us that our experience of reality is not perfect. But this particular illusion has recently reinforced scientists’ understanding of deeper, almost philosophical truths about the nature of our consciousness.
“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow at Glendon College in Canada. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.”

Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences.

All of this can bias us. Visual illusions present clear and interesting challenges for how we live: How do we know what’s real? And once we know the extent of our brain’s limits, how do we live with more humility — and think with greater care about our perceptions?

Rather than showing us how our brains are broken, illusions give us the chance to reveal how they work. And how do they work? Well, as the owner of a human brain, I have to say it’s making me a little uneasy.

Where the conflict between perception and reality lies in the brain
My colleague Sigal Samuel recently explored the neuroscience of meditation. During her reporting, she found good evidence that a regular meditation practice is associated with increased compassion. That evidence, she writes, “feel[s] like a challenge, even a dare. If it takes such a small amount of time and effort to get better at regulating my emotions ... am I not morally obligated to do it?”

Perception science, for me, provokes a similar question. If the science tells us our brains are making up a “story” about reality, shouldn’t we be curious about, and even seek out the answers to, how that reality might be wrong?

It’s not about doubting everything that comes through our senses. It’s about looking for our blind spots, with the goal of becoming better thinkers. It can also help with empathy. When other people misperceive reality, we may not agree with their interpretation, but we can understand where it comes from.

To approach this challenge, I think it helps to know that the brain is telling us stories about the smallest things we perceive, like the motion of objects. But it also tells us stories about some of the most complex things we think about, creating assumptions about people based on race, among other social prejudices.

Let’s start with the small.

In 2019, Cavanagh and his colleagues Sirui Liu, Qing Yu, and Peter Tse used the above “double drift” illusion of the two dots to probe how our brains generate the illusory diagonal motion. To figure this out, Cavanagh and his colleagues ran a neuroimaging study that compared how a brain processes the illusory animation with how it processes a similar, non-illusory animation. In this second animation, the object on the right really is moving diagonally. Trace it with your finger again.

With fMRI neuroimaging, which allows researchers to map brain activity, Cavanagh and his team could ask the question: If we perceive each animation similarly, what in our brains makes that happen? What’s the source of the illusion in the first animation? “We want to find where the conscious perception diverges from the physical sensation,” Cavanagh says.

One possibility is that the illusion is generated in the visual cortex. Located at the back of your head, this is the part of your brain that directly processes the information coming from your eyes. Maybe the visual system “sees” it wrong. The alternative is that the visual system “sees” it just fine, but some other part of the brain overrides it, creating a new reality.

The experiment included only nine participants but collected a lot of data on each of them. Each participant completed the experiment (and was run through the brain scan) 10 times.

Here’s what the analysis found. That visual system in the back of the brain? It doesn’t seem fooled by the illusion. Each animation produces a different pattern of activation in the visual cortex. In other words, “the visual system thinks they are different,” Cavanagh says.

Okay, the visual system correctly “sees” these two animations differently. Then why do we perceive them as being the same?

The patterns of activation in the frontal lobes of the participants’ brains — the higher-level thinking area dedicated to anticipation and decision-making — were similar. That is: The front of the brain thinks both animations are traveling in a diagonal direction.

“There’s a whole world of visual analysis and computation and prediction that is happening outside of the visual system, happening in the frontal lobes,” Cavanagh says. That’s where the “story” of reality is constructed — at least in this one example, as evidenced by this one small study. (To be sure: Vision is a vastly complex system involving around 30 areas of the brain. There are other illusions that do seem to “fool” the visual cortex, because no story about the brain can be simple.)

But you don’t need an fMRI to conclude that some part of your brain is overriding the plain truth about the path of the object. You can see it for yourself. “The remarkable thing is that — even when you are told what is happening — you still see it in the illusory form,” Justin Gardner, a Stanford University neuroscientist who wasn’t involved in this study, said in an email. “You can’t seem to consciously override the ‘wrong’ interpretation.”

So many illusions work like this: Even when you’re told about the trick, you can’t unsee the illusion. Take the classic checker-shadow illusion by Edward Adelson. Squares A and B are the exact same shade of gray when seen side by side. But when B is cast in an apparent shadow and surrounded by apparently darker tiles, it just looks lighter. There’s nothing about the physical construction of our eyes that would cause this effect, I’m told. The apparent lightening of tile B is a story told by our brains. Courtesy of Edward H. Adelson

The lesson: The stories our brains tell us about reality are extremely compelling, even when they are wrong.

We’re not seeing reality. Our vision runs 100 milliseconds behind the real world.
Why are we seeing a story about the world — a story — and not the real deal? It’s not because evolution made our minds flawed. It’s actually an adaptation.

“We don’t have the necessary machinery, and we wouldn’t even want it, to process carefully all of the amount of information that we’re constantly bombarded with,” says Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist and illusion researcher at SUNY Downstate Medical Center.

Think about what it takes to perceive something move, like the objects in the above animations. Once light hits the retinas at the back of our eyeballs, it’s converted into an electrical signal that then has to travel to the visual processing system at the back of our brains. From there, the signal travels forward through our brains, constructing what we see and creating our perception of it. This process just takes time.

“The dirty little secret about sensory systems is that they’re slow, they’re lagged, they’re not about what’s happening right now but what’s happening 50 milliseconds ago, or, in the case for vision, hundreds of milliseconds ago,” says Adam Hantman, a neuroscientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus.

If we relied solely on this outdated information, though, we wouldn’t be able to hit baseballs with bats, or swat annoying flies away from our faces. We’d be less coordinated, and possibly get hurt more often.

So the brain predicts the path of motion before it happens. It tells us a story about where the object is heading, and this story becomes our reality. That’s what’s likely happening with Cavanagh’s illusion. It happens all the time.

Don’t believe it? See for yourself. Here’s a simple illusion that reveals our visual system is a bit lagged.

It’s called the flash-lag illusion. The red dot is moving across the screen, and the green dot flashes exactly when the red dot and green dot are in perfect vertical alignment. Yet it’s incredibly hard to see the red dot and the green dot as being vertically aligned. The red dot always seems a little bit farther ahead.

This is our brain predicting the path of its motion, telling us a story about where it ought to be and not where it is. “For moving things — we see them ahead on their path of motion,” Cavanagh explains, “by just enough.” The illusion, he says, “is actually functional. It helps us overcome these delays and see things ... where they will be when we get there.”

Cavanagh and Stuart Anstis of UCSD have designed a more elaborate version of the flash-lag illusion. In the above GIF, you’ll see flashing red and blue boxes. The boxes are the same size and positioned in the same place, yet the red box seems smaller. It’s the motion of the background that confuses us. “The visual system assumes [the boxes] are moving too, and we get to see them where they would be if they had continued with the motion of the background,” Cavanagh says. Courtesy of Stuart Anstis

In Hantman’s view, what we experience as consciousness is primarily the prediction, not the real-time feed. The actual sensory information, he explains, just serves as error correction. “If you were always using sensory information, errors would accumulate in ways that would lead to quite catastrophic effects on your motor control,” Hantman says. Our brains like to predict as much as possible, then use our senses to course-correct when the predictions go wrong.

This is true not only for our perception of motion but also for so much of our conscious experience.

The stories our brain tells are influenced by life experience
The brain tells us a story about the motion of objects. But that’s not the only story it tells. It also tells us stories about more complicated aspects of our visual world, like color.

For some meta-insight, look at the illusion below from Japanese psychologist and artist Akiyoshi Kitaoka. You can observe your own brain, in real time, change its guess about the color of the moving square. Keep in mind that the physical color of the square is not changing. You might look at this illusion and feel like your brain is broken (I did when I first saw it). It is not. It just reveals that our perception of color isn’t absolute.

A moving square appears to change in color, though the color is constant.

Color is an inference we make, and it serves a purpose to make meaningful decisions about objects in the world. But if our eyes acted as scientific instruments describing precise wavelengths of light, they’d constantly be fooled. Red may not appear red when bathed in blue light.

Our brains try to account for this. “We’re not trying to measure wavelengths, we’re trying to tell something about the color,” Sam Schwarzkopf, a vision scientist at the University of Auckland, says. “And the color is an illusion created by our brain.”

When we think an object is being bathed in blue light, we can filter out that blue light intuitively. That’s how many of these color illusions work. We use surrounding color cues and assumptions about lighting to guess an object’s true color. Sometimes those guesses are wrong, and sometimes we make different assumptions from others. Neuroscientists have some intriguing new insights into why our perceptions can diverge from one another.

You remember The Dress, yes?

In 2015, a bad cellphone photo of a dress in a UK store divided people across the internet. Some see this dress as blue and black; others see it as white and gold. Pascal Wallisch, a neuroscientist at New York University, believes he’s figured out the difference between those two groups of people.

Wallisch’s hypothesis is that people make different assumptions about the quality of light that’s being cast on the dress. Is it in bright daylight? Or under an indoor light bulb? By unconsciously filtering out the color of light we think is falling on an object, we come to a judgment about its color.

Wallisch believes people who see this image differently are using different filtering schemes. Most interestingly, he suggests that life experience leads you to see the dress one way or the other.His study of 13,000 people in an online survey found a correlation that at first seems odd. The time you naturally like to go to sleep and wake up — called a chronotype — was correlated with dress perception. Night owls, or people who like to go to bed really late and wake up later in the morning, are more likely to see the dress as black and blue. Larks, a.k.a. early risers, are more likely to see it as white and gold. What’s going on?

Wallisch believes the correlation is rooted in the life experience of being either a lark or a night owl. Larks, he hypothesizes, spend more time in daylight than night owls. They’re more familiar with it. So when confronted with an ill-lit image like the dress, they are more likely to assume it is being bathed in bright sunlight, which has a lot of blue in it, Wallisch points out. As a result, their brains filter it out. “If you assume it’s daylight, you will see it as white and gold. Because if you subtract blue, yellow is left,” he says.

Night owls, he thinks, are more likely to assume the dress is under artificial lighting, and filtering that out makes the dress appear black and blue. (The chronotype measure, he admits, is a little crude: Ideally, he’d want to estimate a person’s lifetime exposure to daylight.)

Has Wallisch solved the mystery of The Dress?

“The owls versus lark data seems quite compelling for explaining a large part of the individual differences,” Schwarzkopf says. But not all of it. “There are still lots of other factors that must have a strong influence here. It could be prior experience with the subject matter, or related to other aspects of people’s personality,” he says. “Yes, the dress continues to mystify.”

To further study these phenomena, Wallisch even created a new image meant to provoke diverging perceptions based on personal characteristics. Internet, meet The Crocs. Wallisch wanted to see if he could make an image like The Dress, one that generates disagreement about the colors of the image itself. Here, an image of shoes and high socks is presented without much context. What color do you think The Crocs are? In an unpublished study, Wallisch found that people see them as either pink or a greenish-gray color. It comes down to your assumptions about the type of light being cast upon the Crocs, as well as whether you expect socks of this style to be white. “These crocs are actually pink in real life,” Wallisch says. Courtesy of Pascal Wallisch

The mystery isn’t totally solved, but the lesson remains: When confronted with ambiguity — like the odd lighting in the photo of The Dress — our brains fill in the ambiguity using whatever we’re most familiar with. “People assume what they see more of,” Wallisch says. If we’re more familiar with bright, sunny light, we assume that’s the default lighting.

But we have no way of knowing how our experiences guide our perception. “Your brain makes a lot of unconscious inferences, and it doesn’t tell you that it’s an inference,” he explains. “You see whatever you see. Your brain doesn’t tell you, ‘I took into account how much daylight I’ve seen in my life.’”

Wallisch says the disagreements around The Dress, as well as other viral illusions like Yanny and Laurel, arise because our brains are filling in the uncertainties of these stimuli with different prior experiences. We bring our life histories to these small perceptions.

It’s believed another textbook illusion, the Kanizsa triangle, works a bit like this, too. In this illusion, the Pac-Man-like shapes give the impression of a triangle in our minds. It seems like a triangle is there because we’re used to seeing triangles. We only need the suggestion of one — implied via the corners — to fill in the rest of the picture with our minds.

In 2003, the journal Nature Neuroscience published an article on the case of a man (called “Patient MM”) who lost his vision at age 3 and had it restored by surgical intervention in his 40s. In a study, he didn’t fall for an illusion like this one. He couldn’t see the illusory triangle (in the case of that experiment, it was a square). It may be that a lifetime of looking at triangles is what makes the rest of us see one so plainly in this image. Patient MM didn’t build up a lifetime’s worth of visual experiences to make predictions about what he saw. He had to build them from scratch.

More than two years after his operation, Patient MM told researchers, “The difference between today and over two years ago is that I can better guess at what I am seeing. What is the same is that I am still guessing.”

The horizontal lines are actually parallel, and not at all slanted.

Look at the distance between them at the start and end of each row if you don't believe it.

Wonderful version of the cafe wall illusion, by Victoria Skye.

Illusions of consequence
Some of these examples may seem frivolous. Why does it matter that one person sees a dress as black and blue and another sees it as white and gold?

It matters because scientists believe the same basic processes underlie many of our more complicated perceptions and thoughts. Neuroscience, then, can help explain stubborn polarization in our culture and politics, and why we’re so prone to motivated reasoning.

Sometimes, especially when the information we’re receiving is unclear, we see what we want to see. In the past, researchers have found that even slight rewards can change the way people perceive objects. Take this classic image used in psychological studies. What do you see?

It’s either a horse or a seal, and in 2006, psychologists Emily Balcetis and David Dunning showed they could motivate study participants to see one or the other. In one experiment, the participants played a game wherein they had to keep track of animals they saw on screen. If they saw farm animals, they’d get points. If they saw sea creatures, they’d lose points. In the end, a high score meant getting a candy treat (desirable!), and a low score meant they’d eat canned beans (kind of weird).

The very last thing the participants saw was the above image. If seeing the horse meant they’d win and get the candy, they’d see the horse.

In a more complex example, Balcetis has found that when she tells study participants to pay attention to either an officer or a civilian in a video of a police altercation, it can change their perception of what happened (depending on their prior experience with law enforcement and the person in the video with whom they more closely identified). “That instruction changes what their eyes do,” Balcetis told me last summer. “And it leads them to a different understanding of the nature of the altercation.”

You can’t completely remove bias from the brain. “You can’t change the fact that we’ve all grown up in different worlds,” Balcetis said. But you can encourage people to listen to other perspectives and be curious about the veracity of their own.

The neuroscientists I spoke to said the big principles that underlie how our brains process what we see also underlie most of our thinking. Illusions are “the basis of superstition, the basis of magical thinking,” Martinez-Conde says. “It’s the basis for a lot of erroneous beliefs. We’re very uncomfortable with uncertainty. The ambiguity is going to be resolved one way or another, and sometimes in a way that does not match reality.”

https://scienceandnonduality.com/article/illusions-and-the-minds-reality/

Just as we can look at an image and see things that aren’t really there, we can look out into the world with skewed perceptions of reality. Political scientists and psychologists have long documented how political partisans perceive the facts of current events differently depending on their political beliefs. The illusions and political thinking don’t involve the same brain processes, but they follow the similar overarching way the brain works.

In a way, you can think of bias as a social illusion. Studies find that many people perceive black men to be bigger (and, therefore, potentially more threatening) than they actually are, or generally associate darker skin tones and certain facial features with criminality. Cops can confuse people removing wallets from their pockets with people reaching for guns, often with tragic consequences. This isn’t to say that all instances of prejudice are mindless — many are enacted with clear malignant intention, but they can also be built from years of experience in an unjust society or as the result of systemic racism.

Our brains work hard to bend reality to meet our prior experiences, our emotions, and our discomfort with uncertainty. This happens with vision. But it also happens with more complicated processes, like thinking about politics, the pandemic, or the reality of climate change.

Wallisch has come up with a name for phenomena like The Dress that generate divergent perceptions based on our personal characteristics. He calls it “SURFPAD.” Spelled out, it’s an absolute mouthful: Substantial Uncertainty combined with Ramified or Forked Priors and Assumptions yields Disagreement. (Let’s stick with SURFPAD.) Simply, SURFPAD is a consequence of bias, or motivated perception. When an image, event, or some other stimulus isn’t perfectly clear, we fill in the gaps with our priors, or presumptions. And because we have different priors, that leads to disagreement about the image or event in question. Wallisch sees it everywhere in society.

I recently tweeted some frustration over how mass protests against police brutality might be perceived if it seems as though they led to increased Covid-19 cases.

“If there is a spike, it will be hard to discern whether it was reopening or protests, so people will go with their prior,” Wallisch replied. “As the priors are different, there will be massive disagreement. ... What’s truly terrifying is that given this framework, no matter what happens, [people] will feel vindicated, reinforcing the strength of the prior and increasing polarization.”

Later, I emailed him and asked whether his inclination to see SURFPAD in these current events was just an instance of his own priors (that SURFPAD is a real and influential phenomenon) coloring his perception.

“Of course,” he says. “It’s SURFPAD all the way down.”

Neuroscience is deeply humbling
I don’t want people to read this and think we can’t believe our eyes, or we can’t incorporate evidence into our thinking. We can seek out verified sources of information. We can turn to expertise and also earnestly question it. (Don’t let people gaslight you, either — another phenomenon that preys on the brain’s tendency to generate illusory thoughts.)

Instead, the illusions and the science behind them raise a question: How do we go about our lives knowing our experiences might be a bit wrong?

There’s no one answer. And it’s a problem we’re unlikely to solve individually. I’d suggest that it should nudge us to be more intellectually humble and to cultivate a habit of seeking out perspectives that are not our own. We should be curious about our imperfections, as that curiosity may lead us closer to the truth. We can build cultures and institutions that celebrate humility and reduce the social cost for saying, “I was wrong.”

This isn’t easy. Our psychology makes it hard. “We have this naive realism that the way we see the world is the way that it really is,” Balcetis told me last year. Naive realism is the feeling that our perception of the world reflects the truth.

These strawberries appear to be red, but the actual pixels comprising the image are either gray or cyan.

But illusions remind us it does not. This is why illusions aren’t just science — they’re provocative art. They force us to reinterpret our senses, and our sense of being in the world. They tell us about the true nature of how our brains work: The same neurological machinery that leads us to discover the truth can lead us to perceive illusions, and our brains don’t always tell us the difference.

Navigating this is the challenge of being a living, thinking person. But simply acknowledging it and trying to put it into practice is a good place to start.

I know I will try to keep remembering that reality always seems real. Even when I mess it up.

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