Elon Musk and Ancient Indian Texts Suggest We’re Living in The Matrix

 What if we all live in a massive video game? What if there’s no reality to our world as we know it beyond someone else’s concoction where we play temporary roles with wins and losses? 5000 years ago, the oldest surviving texts we have today portray such a shocking picture of reality.

I lived as a monk for five years rigorously studying and teaching Indian Vedic texts as my primary focus. I continue to study and teach them to this day, and what I’ve gleaned is that our reality is very much akin to the movie The Matrix, which we screen and use as a teaching tool in our course The Call to Awaken.

The Vedic literatures of ancient India are an immense body of work numbering many hundreds of books and amounting to millions of poetic, philosophical verses that are all inconceivably united in describing the one complex reality of Maya, or illusion. Through the fascinatingly sophisticated lens of the Vedas, we peer into a Matrix-esque world where humans act out different roles, disconnected from who they really are in a construct where they ignorantly and blissfully live out their non-lives. It’s a prison with golden bars. This is the illusory world of Maya – literally, “that which is not.” And a prison is most sinister when its inmates have no idea they’re locked up…

The efficacy of Maya, as explained by the Vedic texts, is how it encourages its very captives to be cooperative in their own capturing! It’s the same genius of Aldous Huxley in his striking presentation of a Brave New World. Everyone is joyfully medicated by sex, drugs, and the other pleasures we commonly seek. Therefore no one rebels. No one wakes up. A perfect prison.

Enter: Elon Musk. I was absorbed in a lively coaching session with a bright startup founder, when this coachee and friend began looking deeper into the nature of reality with me. Noticing similarities to my experience with the Vedic texts, he enthusiastically pointed me the way of Elon Musk. When I did some research into Musk’s views, I found the tech giant claims there’s one billionth of a chance we don’t live in a simulation like The Matrix! I was intrigued.

Musk reasons that roughly 40 years ago, “we began gaming with a set of rectangles and a dot called Pong.” Today, “we have photorealistic universes” we can step into, that every year come closer and closer to virtual realities we can live in. Even if the rate of advancement in technology were to be reduced by a thousand times or so, in a thousand years from now, (which Musk points out is no time at all in the scheme of things), what will games look like? What will our world look like? Will we be able to distinguish the difference? These observations lead him to conclude that our current world is more likely than not a simulation!

Regardless of whether or not you find this a compelling argument, we can see there’s something rather haunting in the setup. And Musk is not alone in his perspective. As touched upon with The Matrix and Brave New World, not to mention The Truman Show, there have been a great many who’ve fantasized about this idea and set it forth in novels and cinema, as well as bold philosophers, and even physicists, who’d proclaim some version of this to be non-fiction.

So what if we do live in a simulation that’s less real than we think? Let’s say we dare to entertain the idea. Do we really need another disempowering perspective we can’t do anything about? Just one day reading the news or reflecting on what happens in the Oval Office is enough disempowerment for a lifetime. Living in a concocted game-world would be the very height of exercises in futility, right? Not quite. According to the Vedic wisdom, there’s a lot we can do! But it all hinges on recognizing what is and what is not (Maya), who we are and who we are not.

‘You can be anything you want to be’ we’re idealistically taught from a very early age. True, if you put on a mask. ‘You can try on anything you want to be’ would be more accurate. But to be what you try on is insanity.

Today we’ve become more enchanted by the concept of authenticity than ever before. Why? I believe it’s because we’ve come so far away from who we really are that we crave air in a world that reinforces the suffocating sense I can’t be who I am. I have to cling to my mask, or I won’t be good enough to survive and thrive on this planet where “perception is reality.” That’s illusion. Now, we may not all become self-realized in our lifetimes as the Vedic texts brilliantly envision and implore us towards, but we can take steps not to get lost in an ephemeral world.

There is a self within us that is not the same as who we actively think we are. We think we are the voice of the mind and we equate that to being the same as our present body. The fallacy here is that our thoughts are ever-changing, as are our bodies, and the person that harmonizes who we were as infants with who we are today has nothing to do with the outer layers of mind or body. Our minds and bodies are nothing now like they were back then. In fact, every seven years, there’s not one cell in us that remains from the previous seven years. And yet, we are the same person, though unrecognizable from these external vantage points.

What confuses us most is that everyone else identifies themselves with their minds and bodies as well. And so instead of being who we really are deep down, we get lost in a world of illusory pleasures and pains and wins and losses, participating in a societal situation that becomes a veritable hall of mirrors – Maya.

We all have our masks that we wear for the public. We like people to like us. We fear people may not. We have to be good enough, smart enough, strong enough, capable enough, charming enough, sexy enough. So we do ourselves up. We put on a mask we hope will convince, first ourselves, that we are who we want to be, and then hopefully the people in our lives. That’s how we fit into the world and contribute to the world. Morpheus in The Matrix calls it “residual self-image.” How you think you are then gets projected as your personality to the world. And now you have your secure place in The Matrix... 

But it’s simply not you. And your secure sense of belonging is to a prison.

The best place to operate from is who we really are, not a projection. But what’s often closer to us is who we’re not. That can start the peeling of the onion. By seeing the masks we take on to appear the way we want to ourselves and others, we suddenly have the choice to remove them. This is immediately frightening and freeing.

We can strive to be our best without striving to convince ourselves we’re enough. Without trying to prove. How many moments in the day do you have where, after sincere introspection, you can say you really have nothing to prove?

Even when we’re victorious in proving something, the pressure to keep proving continues. The best is when we can be our humble, honest, truest selves, and strive from there. Nothing to prove. To strive in this way is to try our best to improve ourselves, not to convince ourselves or anyone else of who we are or what we’re capable of. 

For example, I can tell you that when I get feedback which is painful and makes me feel like I need to prove I'm better than what the person is saying about me, I have to pause. I have to think about where I'm at, where I want to get to in becoming a more mature and helpful person, and how this feedback can support me to gradually get closer. Sometimes the answer is it won't, and that's very clarifying, but I'm always hungry to grow however I can, without trying to control what people think of me or what I think of myself.

In the work setting, this is the most crucial key for effective culture and effective teams - allowing ourselves and one another to be who we are without trying to prove. This is what creates the psychological safety for everyone to be free to be their best. It’s the same at home and in relationships. But it means we have to take time to unplug from the world of the external and illusory Maya to be with ourselves. It means we have to start taking off the masks we’ve been using to fit in and navigate the world with a secure sense of self based on how we’ll feel worthy. It means we have to go against the conditioning that’s been there for as long as we can remember. We must catch the unseen force that impels us to obscure who we are out of fear that we’re not enough as we are. We must catch the force that moves us to prove ourselves to ourselves at every moment, without cease, exhaustingly. 

I don’t believe Musk has a plan for how to get out of the video game. There’s no question of getting out without first understanding what we’re in. If we see the masks we use to prove we’re something worthy, that’s exceptional. And if we start removing them, then soon enough, the game is up. The simulation breaks down when we break free of the masks of who we think we should be.