Why VR can be a great potential for meditation and mindfulness?
VR has great potential for mindfulness, because of its inherent ability to control the environment and create scenarios to help break the illusion of the Self.
Mindfulness: what it does not add
Mindfulness meditation is not intended to be a stress reliever or a focus-improving practice. It’s not even intended to be a method of enhancing your mental health. All of these are unintended consequences of the practice.
It’s not attempting to avoid having thoughts. It is not required to be done while sitting with your eyes closed. Meditation is not a single technique, but rather a collection of activities from various cultures across the world that include gaining knowledge of the nature of consciousness.
Meditation’s purpose
Understanding the genuine nature of awareness, that is, recognising what your mind is truly like and who you are, is a key objective of various mindfulness techniques. And, sure, you are most likely incorrect about what you believe your mind is like. The technique is useful because it allows us to untangle the myths and erroneous ideas we have about our minds and identities.
And you would be saying “What you just stated smells like racketeering to me.”
I appreciate it. I, too, despise crackpots and dubious scientific claims. We now lack good terminology to express the benefits of meditation, but I will attempt to spell out some realities with the practice. It’s about realising that your ideas and experiences do not originate from you, but rather from this emptiness, as a matter of experience. Those are not your thoughts. Similarly, bodily experiences such as sound, touch, pain, and sight are not truly You; they are only felt in the great open expanse of your mind.
In actuality, everything you see, think, feel, and live through is not You, or you may conceive of it all as contained in a single consciousness. This is my interpretation of non-duality or the recognition that there is no difference between You and Everything Else. In my experience, they are both the same. It takes practice to achieve this condition of perceiving what you are for real, especially if you wish to retain this level of non-duality for an extended period of time. This condition also provides you with a sense of well-being and relaxation, as well as the ability to choose your ideas. You can always recognise and let rid of negative ideas while retaining positive ones (while not leaving the non-dual state).
It is also tough to acquire and requires consistent practice.
This is where virtual reality can truly assist.
VR is excellent at altering your surroundings. Many meditation methods place a high value on the surroundings. I envision that when used imaginatively, VR may effortlessly go from a “transparent” real-world feed to virtual worlds with diverse qualities in order to examine the many elements of consciousness and then combine them. It also appears to be in line with Douglas Harding’s “headless” studies.
In general, I believe that VR has the capacity to free a person from the sensation of identifying with his/her ideas by recognising the non-duality of awareness. I want to see amateurs, not academics, experimenting with new ideas and thinking out of the box.
If you really resonated with my thoughts, I would be grateful if you do clap and share among your friends and colleagues.
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Peace!
