The Cosmic Perspective
Using Virtual reality as a tool to reconnect people to the earth, themselves and increase empathy in the world.
Introduction
Ever since I tried my first VR experience I been fascinated by its possibilities to awoke emotions and as a powerful storytelling tool to increase compassion and the broadening of perspective. My first VR experience touch me in a deep powerful way that I never thought was possible. Through its capability for a total visual and auditory immersion and ability to amplify emotions, through the embodied cognition it provides. It has the inherent capacity to give people a even better opportunity to take on the shoes of another and getting a different point of view and thereby also gaining a broader perspective of things.
The purpose of this article and our thesis is to try to leverage this technology to help create a boundary dissolving ontological shift in people and make them feel connected to everything around them instead of individuals, separated from everyone, the world and nature that surrounds them.
The Big Picture
This by using the so called “The overview effect” as a starting point. A experience, reported by space travelers as a life changing empianys event and a heightened state of awareness, often followed by feelings of transcendence, spiritual awakening, euphoria, epiphanic oneness with the planet and its inhabitants and the interconnectedness of all things. The first time the astrounts gets to see everything they ever known and lived trough from space, as one single thing.
The belief here is to create this feeling in people is of the utmost importance. Because humans are mostly irralinatlional creatures and are often driven by their underlying feelings and emotions rather than pure logic. So if we can create this feeling of being connected with everthing around them, we think this could be of the utmost importance for the collective psyche of the world. Because when you see everything through that lens of oneness, all ones destructive behaviour gets flipped on their heads. When you instead of seeing nature and everything else around you as separate from you, you see and feel them to be a part of yourself.
We want to achive this feeling by recreating a similar experiences as the overview effect with added musical and other emotional amplifying triggers in Virtual Reality. The idea and hope then is to try creating and facilitating a mystical transcended experience to help upgrading and raising the collective consciousness of people from a egocentric & ethnocentric awareness to a more world centric or possibly a kosmo-centric awareness on the spiral of Spiral Dynimics model. This to create more compassion and understanding in the world.
Higher consciousness as defined in this video:
More ideas a notions mentioned in the text
This heightened state of awareness and connectedness bares a lot of similarities to other mystical experiences reported as a result of deep meditation, breathing exercises, chanting, sensory deprivation chambers, dancing, sex and similar experiences has also been reported through the using of psychedelic substances such as psilocybin mushrooms as shown in studies conducted at the Johns Hopkins school of medicine as well as in the “Good-friday” experiments (Pahnke W, 1963). The hallmark of these mystical type experiences were reported as feeling of cosmic unity, interconnectedness and oneness with everything. It's also a sentiment that is echoed through many religions in one form or another.
For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one. ― Tesla, Nikola
I’m myself has have this experience and this cognitive shift in awareness and I will easy put it as the single most important and life changing experience of my life. Words can does it absolutely no justice and I feel I become a better and person, gained more self love and understanding for me myself and the world around me. I truly feel like this shift and giving more people opportunity to have this experience could be vital for our collective psyche through this turbulent time with ever increasing mental health & addiction levels skyrocketing. It's in our human condition to seek connection to others, in this age of ever increasing technological abunsces in the western world, we are getting ever more disconnected from each other and if we cant connect to each other we seek connection in other things, food, drugs, porn, facebook, games etc. Why not try introducing a experience that has instead help us reconnect to to it all, to a thing what we are all made out off. '
The Universe.
As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it:
Background
Overview effect
Porpuse
Creating the experience