Edition: November 25th, 2021
Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS
- Excerpts from article by Tim Andersen, published on medium.com
With the recent reveal of Facebook’s new branding, Meta, as in Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg has taken the first step towards becoming the fictional entrepreneur James Halliday and engendering the dystopian world of Ready Player One and its own Metaverse, the Oasis.
Microsoft isn’t far behind, having already invested heavily in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. With their 3D Avatars and immersive meetings, they take a more corporate rather than leisure attitude towards unreality, but the outcome is the same.
A meta world is a world that is about the real world. That is what meta means from the Greek meaning above, about, or beyond.
It imitates. At best a metaverse is a reflection of culture, like art, but one cannot step into the painting. One must extract meaning from it and take it into the real world.
What is the opposite of Meta?
The opposite of above, about, or beyond, is inside and within.
The Greek word for this is mesa. Hence, a mesaverse is a world that is within the world. It is inside of it and below it, like a table, a mesa, supporting it.
If I were to conceive of what heaven is, where God resides, it would be in such a realm, not above or about the world, like some cloudy Platonist depictions, but inside it and below it, supporting it.
How can you enter a Mesaverse?
To enter a mesaverse is the opposite of entering a metaverse. Rather than entering a reflection or simulacrum of reality, one enters a deeper reality. Like waking up from the Matrix, the mesaverse is what lies behind the curtain of what we perceive the reality to be about.
Science can get at the mesaverse here and there. Perhaps that is its appeal, but it shouldn’t be confused with the mesaverse itself. Science creates meta data about the mesaverse, the underlying reality, to try to understand it, but it is only a reflection, like the metaverse is a reflection of our day to day world.
We have only our minds and consciousness to get at the mesaverse directly. All our perceptions of external reality cannot find it.
Our minds, however, are more subtle and able to pierce the veil shielding that deeper existence.
One wonders if we have minds for precisely this reason, to keep from getting stuck in simulacra (Something that replaces reality with its representation).
What do we find in the Mesaverse?
What we find, when we turn off the screens and the noise, and close our eyes, and take a deep breath, and let our thoughts slow to a stop, is a whole universe of silence.
Silence and something more, a universe in a moment. It is always there, in every moment, in the emptiness between every thought and perception.
Psychology and spiritual texts both try to describe this experience, if you can call it that, but they are part of the metaverse. They are talking about experience. They aren’t experience itself. Doing it and thinking or talking about it are as far apart as can be.
Experience of the world, meanwhile, is about the world, it is in the world, the verse. One does not experience it, one exists within it and layers, on top of that, experience. It is thus only when one strips away all experience, even thought, that one sees the mesaverse laid bare.
What is there?
Heaven, void, maybe nirvana? Certainly not nothingness, for nothingness cannot support everything that is. It is better to seek a deeper reality.
This generation cries out with a spiritual longing that nobody sees online but is everywhere in everything we do and share. However, that doesn’t make us feel any better. To escape this dystopia of the metaverse, we need to seek the mesaverse.
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(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)
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