An Alternative to the Metaverse
With the recent reveal of Facebook’s new branding, Meta, as in Metaverse, Zuck has taken the first step towards becoming the fictional…
With the recent reveal of Facebook’s new branding, Meta, as in Metaverse, Zuck 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 VR. With their 3D Avatars and immersive meetings, they take a more corporate rather than leisure attitude towards unreality, but the outcome is the same.
There is something deeply disturbing about the embrace and celebration of virtual reality as universes in themselves.
Fake worlds, like fake friendships, are disappointing.
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.
At worst a metaverse is a blowup doll.
So, if the metaverse is about the verse, i.e., the real world, then 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.
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 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 for they are all plugged into the matrix of the verse.
Our minds, however, are more subtle and able to pierce the veil shielding that deeper existence, the one we long for on lonely nights as we scroll through the metaverses.
One wonders if we have minds for precisely this reason, to keep from getting stuck in simulacra like an AI driver in a circle of traffic cones.
We pray to have a glimpse of what this is all about.
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.
The mesa, the table, under the verse, our reality.
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. Thus, what is the experience of the mesaverse but a contradiction in terms? 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.
And what is there? Heaven, void, maybe nirvana? Certainly not nothingness, for nothingness cannot support everything that is.
Waking up from the Matrix meant waking up from a metaverse Neo didn’t know was one and entering the verse, the real world, a world of experience. But all worlds of experience are, in some sense, simulacra. Layer upon layer must be laid upon a solid foundation.
Yet, adding more layers, once you know they are there, is disappointing. Worse still is when those layers are created purely for idle enjoyment, selling products, or worse, meetings.
Far better to seek a deeper reality rather than one that is more removed from the one we already inhabit. This generation cries out with a spiritual longing that nobody sees online but is everywhere in everything we do and share that never makes us feel any better.
To escape this dystopia of the metaverse, we need to seek the mesaverse.