New Realities recorded on September 20, 2025
Summary
In this episode, the hosts Alan Steinfeld and Suzanne Ross interview Rizwan Virk, author of ‘The Simulation Hypothesis.’ They explore the idea that physical reality operates like a multiplayer virtual reality game, drawing parallels between ancient spiritual concepts like Maya and modern video game mechanics. The conversation covers how a simulation mindset can help individuals reframe life’s challenges, the nature of UFOs and synchronicities as programmed phenomena, and the potential for human consciousness to upgrade to new abilities such as telepathy.
Transcript
Rizwan Virk
When Swami Yogananda, who was author of Autobiography of a Yogi, came over in 1920, so 100 years ago, he tried to update the metaphor of Maya and illusion. He said, rather than calling it Maya and illusion, he’d use the latest technology and he said, it’s like a film projector. Even though the characters in the movie are suffering, the actors are still there behind. So he encouraged his students of yoga to look away from the screen and look at the projector.
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome back to New Realities. I’m here with my very special co-host, Suzanne Ross, and we’re talking about the upcoming San Diego Transcendence Retreat, September 27th, 28th, 2025.
Commercial Introduction
You’re invited to join us for our San Diego Transcendence Retreat taking place September 27th through 28th at the gorgeous Bahia Resort on Mission Bay. Our event includes presentations, workshops, meditations, and sound baths by some of the world’s leading luminaries. When you go deep within anyone, you reach the same place, you reach universal consciousness. When the flash of light comes, there will be a moment when the body starts to feel extremely heavy, like it just will feel like your body weighs a billion pounds. As we’re moving into this higher frequency, the weight of the karma cannot come with us.
Rizwan Virk
Those soul aspects that were in my field merged into the physical body and is infused with a collective, a body collective of divine entities.
Commercial Introduction
Our event also includes a special mind sight and telepathy demonstration: now I have the three layers. I’m gonna walk down with him again and someone could just open up any page in their pamphlet and I will read whatever you point to. With Dalia and Lidu Borvoy. And we’ve just added a metaphysical workshop with Darryl Anka: the reason that I am creating the class by myself, as myself, teaching it as myself, is to spend more time to delve more deeply into a lot of his principles, to provide illustrations, to provide examples, to really help people understand his concepts much more deeply to make them their own. You’ll want to sign up for our sunset dinner cruise on the bay. Just visit SanDiegoTranscendenceRetreat.com.
Alan Steinfeld
And our special guest here and there will be Rizwan Virk of the Simulation Hypothesis book. It’s a fascinating subject, a great new perspective on reality really. So happy you’re joining us because the event is about transcending the old way. So Suzanne, jump in. Suzanne’s event, she’s producing it.
Suzanne Ross
I saw Riz on the Joe Rogan show and I’m just so fascinated by the concept that we’re living in a simulation. Had a presentation on the soul behind the simulation. Read your book, Riz, and loved it. I loved your interview on Joe Rogan to begin with, but just the way that you describe how we are likely in a simulation as information data, comparing it to a virtual reality game, really resonated with me. So bravo. Great book. Talk about how this is different than the old concepts of Maya, it’s all illusion, this is all not real, and we’re just the mind behind the reality. I think you bring it to another level.
Rizwan Virk
I think the way to think about it is that in any spiritual tradition they had to explain something to the masses. To do that, they had to come up with language that would be understood at the time. So if we’re talking the Hindu Vedas, we’re talking 3,000, 5,000 years ago, or even with Islam and Christianity we’re talking 1,500, 2,000 years ago. They had to come up with language and metaphors and concepts that would be understood. Yet they were trying to describe the spiritual world to people whose experiences of relatively primitive technology. Over time what has happened is that these metaphors can be updated. For example, when Swami Yogananda, who was author of Autobiography of a Yogi, came over in 1920, 100 years ago, he tried to update the metaphor of Maya and illusion. He said, rather than calling it Maya and illusion, he’d use the latest technology. He said it’s like a film projector. Even though the characters in the movie are suffering, the actors are still there behind. He encouraged his students of yoga to look away from the screen and look at the projector. You see, he came over, he was the first Indian Swami to come and live in the US, and he used modern technology to describe to an American audience a concept which is very complicated. I believe if he were alive today, he would say it’s like a movie where the actors and the characters, but we’re also the audience and we’re watching each other, playing these roles with each other, and we have a script but we don’t always have to follow the script, we can change it, and these aren’t our real bodies anyway. What does that sound like to me? That sounds like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game or MMORPG. My background was in building video games before I wrote this book. That’s really what got me thinking about the parallels between what was happening in Silicon Valley with the development of virtual reality, augmented reality, AI, and what the spiritual traditions had been telling us for thousands of years. I realized that perhaps there’s a convergence there that most people don’t see. That’s part of the themes that I’ll be talking about at the conference in San Diego.
Suzanne Ross
That is a convergence. I think about the concept of avatars. We’re avatars, just like in a virtual reality game. But there is a source for ourself, just like there’s a source for this universe. It’s that source universe, our source self, that is projecting this game. There’s many versions of the game. I liked how in your book you said there could be one source, but when you start projecting it and fractalizing it, there can be multiple copies of that one source. We talk about being multidimensional beings in many different timelines and dimensions all at once. But this source place is beyond time. It’s timeless.
Alan Steinfeld
So if we see that we are the simulation, like these bodies, this world, this is a simulation of a higher reality, how do we change this level to make it the best simulation we can have?
Rizwan Virk
It’s a great question. To your point of avatars, we are avatars that may have roles to play within the game itself. We may have gone through a process that is just like choosing a character in a video game. When you choose a character, you choose the race of the character, the profession, whether it’s an elf or a dwarf, a wizard or a thief or a warrior. You choose their backstory and storyline. It’s possible that we are choosing our overall storyline. But within that storyline, we have the ability to make choices and to influence where we might want to go. Now the way that video games work is they have quests and challenges along the way. What happens is you start off with very simple quests that are easy to do, but then you build up difficulty over time. So it’s possible that when we run into difficult situations here, it’s really the more advanced players who are running into those difficulties because they’ve chosen the higher level quests where the people who have everything easy may be the new players who don’t have as much experience. Just in the same way that actors tend to win Academy Awards for roles that are very difficult or characters that have been through intense suffering, for example. At the same time, we choose challenges for ourselves. The challenge is to not be particularly greedy in this lifetime and to be more generous to other people. So that might be a kind of challenge that we’re working on. I view karma as a type of database that exists in the cloud. As we go through life, we’re adding to this database. In the same way that when you browse the internet, there’s things that are happening along the way and you’re putting things in databases and later those things come up to you as well.
Alan Steinfeld
Where does it eventually get us? What’s the end game here? Where is it going? What’s the point?
Rizwan Virk
Those are big questions. I don’t think we’ll resolve them here. You can think of this at two levels. You can think of the simulation for an individual character, and then you can think of the simulation for an entire civilization. For a character, they’re probably working on specific challenges, difficulties, personality traits, lessons. Sometimes we’re there to play roles for other people. Maybe you know someone who is particularly challenging in your life. Perhaps they’re playing a role, like what we call an NPC role for us, in order to give us the opportunity to overcome that specific aspect or difficulty. You might think, that person annoys me. But there’s something about that person that is within us. At a personal level, why do we play video games? The reason we play video games is to have fun, but also to have experiences that we can’t have outside of the game. I can’t jump on a dragon and fly around and shoot at orcs in this physical reality, but I can do it in a video game. Similarly, I think it’s fair to assume that the challenges we have here with emotions and relationships, maybe we don’t have those outside of this simulation. So it gives us those experiences. In the same way that actors typically win Oscars for these particularly challenging roles. That’s one level of why we’re here. The second level could be at a civilizational level. We’re here to see how things might develop over time and to see what is the best outcome or most likely outcome. That’s why we run simulations. If you’re going to run a simulation of the weather or of a virus spreading or economics, you’re going to say, this is what’s likely to happen. Then you say, what’s the most favorable outcome? So you go back and you tweak the parameters and you run it again. At a civilizational level, it could be do we destroy the planet? Are we able to get off the planet, what’s called the Great Filter? Are we able to build simulations within? So there are these big questions around how we evolve as a civilization. That’s where this idea that there might be fractalized versions of ourselves comes into play. We may have run this reality multiple times. I talk about the works of Philip K. Dick, the famous science fiction writer. Blade Runner, Man in the High Castle, Minority Report, these are all based on his novels and movies. He came to believe that we were living in a simulation or what he called a computer programmed reality where it would be run and then the simulators would change the variables and then they would run it again. I interviewed his wife, Tessa, and she told me he came to believe that he was communicating with these entities that were running the simulation. He said that they told him they prevented the assassination of JFK in Dallas. And then he got assassinated in Orlando. When they prevented that, he got assassinated somewhere else. In the scenarios where he didn’t get assassinated, it led to something catastrophic like a nuclear war. It’s possible that we are running these simulations and we are only in one branch of the simulation. If you’ve ever seen the show Man in the High Castle, that’s about the Nazis and the Japanese winning the war. He came to believe that was a real timeline. In that there’s a character who realizes this is just one timeline, there is another timeline where the Allies won the war, which is our timeline. At a civilizational level, there are big questions that can be answered by running simulations. We are running a simulation, this is the timeline where it’s possible this could be the current, what Philip K. Dick called the most actualized consensus view of reality, but there are other probabilities and possibilities. That’s what ties to the idea of quantum mechanics and the multiverse, that there could be other realities as well. But this is the one we’re focused on and we’re observing.
Alan Steinfeld
At this event that Suzanne is putting together, Transcendence Retreats, which is about transformation, how do people then use these ideas to transcend and transform their lives? How would they apply that to themselves?
Rizwan Virk
I think the first way to apply it is to think of yourself as a character in a video game. In a video game, you ask yourself, are we here to get maximum points, what are we here to get? It depends on the type of game. I don’t think the nature of this game is Grand Theft Auto where we’re trying to abuse each other. But the way to figure it out is to say, how is the game evaluated? Across all the scriptures, they tell us that we’re really here to see how we treat other people. At the end of life, if you listen to near death experiences, you have the life review. What is a life review? You review every single event that ever happened in your life. But it’s as if you’re in a holographic, panoramic, three dimensional reality. What does it sound like? It sounds like a virtual reality. But you replay it from the point of view of other people. Even today one of the most popular types of content on YouTube is watching video game replays. When my nephew was three years old, he said to his father, I want to watch Star Wars. My brother said, you want to watch the Star Wars movie. He said, no, I want to watch that man and the woman playing the Star Wars game. It was a recording of them playing the video game. If you think of our entire reality as virtual, well now we have a mechanism for the life review, which tells us how we evaluate ourselves, which means that we want to be kinder and nicer to other people. That’s one major way people can take this in. The other major way is what I hinted at earlier. When we go into difficult situations, instead of viewing them as a blessing or a curse, we view them as a challenge or a quest that we’re taking on. It may be really difficult, and those of us that have been through serious physical ailments, you realize you can give up hope or you can view it as a challenge. I think that is a perspective that’s useful to have. If you meet someone that you might not get along with, you can see not to hate that person but to see what is the challenge I’m being presented with to overcome my own judgment.
Suzanne Ross
That’s right.
Rizwan Virk
With video games nowadays, with multiplayer video games, you have a friends list who are people that you’re going to play with. You communicate with them, you send them messages back and forth. You say, let’s all meet at this part of the virtual world to storm the castle at this time of day. In the video game of life, we perhaps are doing the same kinds of things, saying, when I’m 30 years old or I’m 40 years old, I’m going to go to Los Angeles and on Santa Monica Pier, you’re going to see me wearing this necklace. It’s possible that we’re going to set up these adventures or these multiplayer quests. By learning to pay attention to our intuition and our synchronicity, I think we can start to appreciate life more, but also do more of what we were meant to do. Because sometimes we act like NPCs ourselves, like an LLM that is just trained on this data and that’s all it knows. We are just acting on what we’ve been trained on in this physical life. This is what I call NPC mode. You can have an avatar in a video game or you can have an NPC which is all AI. Most of us forget that we’re also players with a soul that have a storyline and we start acting like an NPC. So we enter into NPC mode. That’s what the ancient traditions have metaphorically tried to communicate to us that we cross the river of forgetfulness, the Lethe in the Greek traditions. Or that we go through the 70,000 veils of forgetfulness in Sufism. Or that Meng Po, the goddess of forgetfulness, brews us the tea of forgetfulness in the Chinese traditions. They were all trying to describe something that’s a little bit like Neo in the Matrix where he puts the BCI in and he’s like, whoa, is this real? He forgets that there’s a world out there.
Alan Steinfeld
How do we then see beyond the matrix itself? How do we step outside, see these are avatars, this is not us, we are really operating the game from a non-local reality of super consciousness?
Rizwan Virk
I think that’s what the transcendence process is all about. That’s where many of these spiritual techniques come into play. We’re getting so much data, like assuming the idea of a VR helmet or a brain computer interface. Those are just metaphors. That doesn’t mean we’re literally sitting in a pod like in the Matrix. But we are getting the information which is just bits of information, and it turns out most physicists tell us the world is just bits. We have to stop putting all of our attention on that. That gives us the ability to then remember things we might not have otherwise remembered. We can also pay attention to synchronicity and coincidences and what I call clues. A clue would be a type of synchronicity that’s perhaps pointing you in a certain direction. A technological aspect of synchronicity. Synchronicity is when you have an inner thought and an event in the outside world and they relate to each other. The other day I was shopping for a backpack online and I saw a specific backpack and I was going to buy it. Then I pulled out my phone the next day on Facebook and there’s an ad for that backpack. Now I thought, that’s weird. Now we all happen to know how that works. When I put that in my cart, it registered my intent. I used to be in the advertising industry, we put it in a database. Later as ads are being generated, it was looking at that and correlating and creating a situation for me. Perhaps that’s what synchronicity is. Jung calls it an acausal connection, but there’s an information component behind the scenes.
Alan Steinfeld
But that’s being directed it seems like by us, the superconscious mind.
Rizwan Virk
Right. Or what I call our writer’s room. They’re saying what are we going to throw at them? We want to nudge them this way. Let’s give them a synchronicity or a coincidence. For example, I remember I was in Arizona years ago, I live there now, a friend was trying to buy a house and she couldn’t find a place that she liked. It was during a real estate boom where everybody was buying houses. For half an hour in front of her there was this car with tires that had something on the back and it said, not all those who wander are lost. It was there for half an hour in front of her. She came to me and said, what is this from? I said, it’s from Lord of the Rings. She was not a fan of Lord of the Rings. She doesn’t like that stuff. But there was a message for her which was, don’t worry about not buying a house right now, it’s okay. A few years later, this is my partner now, we had a house in California that we weren’t sure we wanted to keep anymore because we traveled so much. We walked into Hertz to rent a car and this guy walks right in with his friends. He turns away from his friends and turns to me and says, do you know that not all those who wander are lost? We ended up selling that house and just living internationally. You can see these threads and coincidences and synchronicities that happen right in front of your face.
Suzanne Ross
I remember one time I was thinking, what shuttle company am I going to hire for my Sedona Ascension Retreat? I kind of looked ahead of me and right in front of me there was a shuttle bus with the name of the shuttle company and a phone number. Right in front of me. I was like, oh my god! Asking and you shall receive. Riz, I have a question about evolving, mastering the game you’re in, so that you can up level to the next level of the game. Because game implies winning or losing, right? I don’t know much about the virtual reality game world, but I would imagine that you have to master one level of the game in order to move on to the next level of the game.
Rizwan Virk
It depends on the type of game again. There are games and there are games. There’s a class of games that are called virtual worlds. If you’ve heard the term the metaverse, Facebook changed its name to Meta because they wanted to try to build the metaverse. Basically that is a virtual world where you’re playing a character or an avatar, but your goal is not necessarily to fight or to get points, but you’re living a virtual life. There was a platform called Second Life years ago. 2007, 2008 and that was probably the best known metaverse product of the time. People would go in there and they’d have real lives and jobs in there. You go to your job, you come home and then you log in so you can go be a bartender in the virtual world and you get paid in peanuts. There was something about building this character and living this virtual life. While there may be levels, the way we think of levels is if you get this many points you go to the next level. It’s rather a set of what types of challenges are you mostly concerned with? Are you mostly concerned with physical survival challenges, are you mostly concerned with certain types of issues? Are you mostly concerned with relationship issues? Those are different levels. Or have you come back to try to be more spiritual in this life. Those are the people whose storylines may lay out the types of situations that would lead them to be more spiritual. I think we all have a sense of this in our lives. We have a sense of what we’re meant to do even if we’re not doing it. If you’d asked me in high school, what are you going to do? I would say, I’m going to be a software entrepreneur and then I’m going to be a writer. That’s exactly what happened. I thought I was going to shift at the old age of 28 because I was in high school so I thought that was old. I did start writing my first book Zen Entrepreneurship at 28. But I didn’t actually become a full-time writer until I was 48. It took a personal tragedy to get me off of this track. During that time, I got clear visions and messages saying, don’t you remember you’re supposed to do this and you’re supposed to do this and you’re spending way too much time over here. You were supposed to do more of the writing and so we’re going to make it so you physically don’t have the energy to do anything else. It was after my heart surgery so I ended up having just enough energy to go to Starbucks in an Uber because I couldn’t even walk at the time and do a few hours of writing. That’s when I wrote The Simulation Hypothesis because it brought together all of these different threads of my life.
Suzanne Ross
Well that virtual reality world like Second Life and then some that came after actually faded out because people found that there was really no meaning and purpose to it. They were just hanging out in this virtual world and it really wasn’t very exciting. Then you ask in your book, what is the purpose of this life anyways?
Rizwan Virk
If you look at it today, for example my nephews, they’re teenagers now, we used to go out and play baseball after school. They come home from school and then they get online in Roblox or Fortnite and that’s how they hang out with their friends in the virtual world. Just because something’s virtual doesn’t mean there isn’t real interaction and it isn’t real. We’re actually having this conversation in person but if we were having it on Zoom it doesn’t mean we’re not having a conversation. Or the people watching it will be seeing a digital version of this conversation. It hasn’t actually happened in another place and time, and there’s lasting effects of the conversation. You can learn a language over Zoom, it doesn’t mean you didn’t really learn a language. It was virtual, but it still happened and it still affected you and changed you. You could watch a movie and it didn’t happen to you, but you’re deeply affected by the characters in the movie. The older games kind of phased out, but then you have whole new set of games that are way more popular than those were. That gets into game mechanics, but the fact is that younger people today are more comfortable with avatars and being in virtual worlds and having friends than we were back in our day.
Alan Steinfeld
You know another slightly off the topic, but we had discussed this whole idea about UFOs and how we agreed that what we’re seeing today is like as if we’re living in a science fiction movie. There’s a science fiction edge to the UFOs that’s a projection because of all the programming, and there really is something happening there, the only context we have is the story of a science fiction story. What’s a better way of relating to a phenomena that’s not cognized in the everyday world that most people are living?
Rizwan Virk
I think with the UFO phenomenon in particular, we are looking at it through a cultural lens. That cultural lens is shaped through popular media. Of which science fiction is the most popular. In the 1950s when there were aliens, they were always from Mars. Because the people at the time could conceive of that. If you look at the contactees at the time, if a person from the 1950s were to ask them where are you from, they would say, we’re from Venus. Doesn’t mean they’re actually from Venus, but that was something that they could understand. The concept of being from another dimension wasn’t around, so as we evolve we say, now they’re from Pleiades or Zeta Reticuli. And now they’re interdimensional. If you look back at time, there are stories in the Middle East of the Jinn that are very similar to modern abduction stories. Is it that we are perceiving them as these aliens from another planet? I’ve written on this topic for major outlets like NBC News and CNN. They always say, we want you to talk about whether it’s aliens or not. We don’t want you to talk about this other stuff. It’s all part of the same thing. There’s all this other stuff that it could be, which is that there could be other players in the simulation. Many UFOs exhibit behaviors that look like projections. They move point to point, or they pop in and out. That’s how you travel in most video games. If you want to go the other side of the earth, you disappear here and you portal to this other set of XYZ coordinates. Is something going on where they’re projecting into our physical reality, but they’re presenting it to us? Remember, in a multi-user video game model, there is no shared rendered reality. You are watching it on your computer, I’m watching it on my computer, and you’re rendering it on your phone. We think we are seeing the same thing but we’re not necessarily. Because the server is sending down information and then the server is synchronizing our realities. You and I can be standing in a field and Allen is very advanced. He says, I see the UFO clearly. I’m only level one or level two and I’m looking up and saying I don’t see anything. There are UFO cases like that where one person sees one thing, the other person doesn’t see it or sees something else. We do that in video games. It’s called conditional rendering. You only render based upon your character, your level, what skills you have. You have the magic spell to see dragons. You see hidden dragons and other people don’t. Just like in Zoom. If you and I were talking on Zoom, you couldn’t be 100% sure that these pictures are actually behind us. It can change.
Alan Steinfeld
So the UFO phenomena seem like a key to another level of the simulation. You know how like in a game, there might be a figure or a magic thing that pops up that we didn’t know was there, suddenly it’s there because we’ve taken a certain move down there and it gives us a little clue to a deeper level of the simulation?
Rizwan Virk
It could be. It could also be if you wanted to influence a civilization to go a certain way. We get back to this idea that entire civilizations run timelines. If you wanted to influence them to go this way, you might try to project certain types of phenomena to see if they go this way or if they go that way. There’s an element of what Jacques Vallee might call the control mechanism. Or in this case it could be a steering or if you’ve ever watched The Hunger Games, there’s the people in the game and then there’s what they call care packages.
Alan Steinfeld
Is that your feeling about the UFO phenomenon, that it is a kind of a care package manipulation of social consciousness somehow?
Rizwan Virk
I think it’s a combination of things and I believe there is an element of that. I believe there are elements of beings that have been here all along. There may be an extraterrestrial component as well. I’m not ruling that out, because if you think of a video game world that has multiple planets, you might have life on multiple planets. Part of it might be to have them develop individually and then see where they end up and you send them things at different points. It’s a very complex phenomenon. I don’t claim to have the answer, but there’s an intersection of that.
Alan Steinfeld
Maybe they’re just logging in as a player in the game and then they log out. They drop in, pop out, log out.
Suzanne Ross
It’s weird though. All these aliens or crafts seem to know that they are playing a game and we are just on the linear level. They seem all to know that they can intersect in our simulation and then pop out. But they all know that. And we don’t. Not yet. But as we evolve to more advanced levels of the game and become more advanced users.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, you know, we’re here at the Psi games, which is a whole other level of human consciousness, and when you can activate your psi function, your telepathic, your remote viewing, remote sensing, seeing through blindfolds. That is another level of the simulation that makes us better players or happier, more fulfilled. I think maybe we’re at that transition point where we’re going through a reset and we’re going to game 2.0 or 3.0.
Rizwan Virk
Yeah, that’s very possible. As people realize these things are possible, then I think more and more people will be able to have these abilities. It’s not that they weren’t possible before, it’s just that we were so locked into what I call our first person perspective in a video game. You’re an avatar. But if you notice how the game works, there’s all kinds of information on the screen that can’t be seen in the rendering itself. The character might close their eyes, but if you move the camera up a little bit, you can still see everything that’s happening in the room. You look at what we’ve seen great demonstrations here at the Psi games. Mindsight, for example. Seeing colors. If you just pull your helmet off a little bit, where the helmet is only looking at that but you look at the screen, you can see. The woman that was doing it today, Dalia, she describes these windows that open up and she can see everything. Like menus, like on a computer. This is almost exactly what we’re describing, which is turning off the physical rendering so you can get the information out.
Alan Steinfeld
Amazing. So we’re upgrading our possibilities of playing this game for a more fun kind of adventure, right?
Rizwan Virk
Yeah, and perhaps more spiritual, to play more spiritually, whereas in the past we’ve been concerned more with the material, the physical.
Suzanne Ross
The rendering aspect, Riz, just really blows my mind how right now what can we see, we can see that building over there, I can see her, we can see the door, but that’s all that needs to be rendered in this moment even though there’s a whole big world out there we can’t see it right now, we don’t need to see it right now, that’s too much data to render. Just in this moment we’re rendering this just this right now because that’s all we need to render. I think that’s really fascinating. How does that compare to a video game?
Rizwan Virk
It turns out that’s what we do in video games. The reason we can render these vast worlds, like within World of Warcraft or there’s a game called No Man’s Sky that has 18 quintillion planets. There’s no video game team on earth that could design that many planets. Because it happens programmatically and they get generated on demand. The key for us to be able to do that is to compress data, but also we only need to render the part where your avatar, your character is actually at. The rest of the world is still there in terms of information, but it doesn’t need to be rendered at that moment in time.
Alan Steinfeld
Is that like quantum physics, the observer?
Rizwan Virk
It’s like quantum physics. So you look at the observer effect. From a physics point of view it’s really strange because there are multiple probabilities and it’s in what’s called superposition and it’s not until it gets observed or measured or interacted, basically on demand when it’s needed, only then does it become a real particle with one specific state. For me as a computer scientist, that’s weird, but not that weird because that’s what we do in video games. That’s how we build. In computer science, it’s always about limited resources, how do you use those computing resources optimally?
Alan Steinfeld
How does this help your personal life out here in this simulation?
Rizwan Virk
I think it’s a kind of way to understand this idea of that you are not your character. In Buddhism, you’re not your body. In Hinduism there’s the body, then there’s the atman. In Sufism as well. They end up using the same metaphors. Rumi the Sufi mystic, he also wrote a pretty heavy duty Sufi treatise called the Masnavi in Persian. It’s basically an instruction for self-awareness and he says in there that the soul puts on the body like a pair of clothes. It turns out that is the exact same metaphor that gets used in other traditions. In the Bhagavad Gita for example, they literally say that the soul puts on a body as if it was garments and then takes off the garments. It’s using that as an analogy. It means that you are basically becoming into this character. Today we can use a more sophisticated metaphor which is that of a video game character. You are playing this particular character for now, but that you are not the character and that there may be a part of you that’s directing it. For me personally, it’s helped me develop a broader perspective on this idea that it seems to me as if I’m my body, but there’s another part of me. This personality is all I know, but again there’s a larger part of me. That helps I think in becoming a little more detached, a little more calm, and a little more spiritual. But also in getting beyond the noise.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. And what’s so exciting about this time is like the simulation is being upgraded right in front of us. That’s how I feel with the Psi games, with the telepathy tapes, with the whole UFO phenomena becoming more of a reality, there’s so many things coming into this plane.
Rizwan Virk
Yeah, I think there’s some of that going on, like the telepathy tapes for example. At the same time, you’re getting more and more resistance from scientists and atheists.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, they’re just the old guard.
Rizwan Virk
Right, but it’s interesting that I don’t know that they’re fading away. I was on some podcasts in LA and I got extreme pushback on the idea that there might be a soul or there might be anything outside of physical reality. Somehow these people need a way to talk. What I hoped to do with the simulation hypothesis, the reason I wrote the book, was to give them a way to talk to each other with language. I can go to the biggest atheist and talk to them about simulation theory. They may or may not buy it, but at least we can have that conversation. You can’t go to a lot of these scientists and say God created the Earth in six days. They’re just gonna say that’s nonsense. It turns out it’s not nonsense if you used AI and you’re using a simulated world. You can go to the most religious fundamentalist and say the world is a hoax, it’s an illusion. I think we can help to bring them together. For the telepathy tapes the researcher was Dr. Diane Powell. She called me a few years back and she said, I’ve been studying acquired savant syndrome and we’re going to put on a symposium because I think that there is an information layer and the world is like a simulation and it seems to be the way these guys are accessing this information. She put on a symposium that myself and other people spoke at that was about savant syndrome and the simulation hypothesis. Looking at it as an information-based world is something that opens up possibilities that people might not have been open to.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s what I like about your work and everything Suzanne’s putting together at the upcoming San Diego Transcendence Retreat. Everyone’s coming in with these new possibilities and Tucker talking about the angelic realm coming in with possible solar flares. Sarah Breskman Cosme. Past life regressions. There’s all these new elements coming into play that makes this time really exciting and really about transcendence.
Suzanne Ross
You know what occurs to me is that when we’re accessing these advanced gifts, skills and abilities including remote viewing or telepathy or seeing interdimensionally, as we’re tuning into our gamer self. We’re becoming our gamer, we’re becoming our source self. And our source self has the ability to see all timelines unfolding all at once in one eternal now moment. If you master the ability to tune into your essence, then you can see beyond time, any timeline!
Alan Steinfeld
Well, some of us are there. Some of us have done that. Those people have woken up. Yogananda, I know you’ve written a book about it. They’ve seen the timelines. It seems like someone like that has seen beyond time and space.
Suzanne Ross
So this is happening to the general population, that’s why this is a sold out weekend, people want to be here and find out what’s possible.
Alan Steinfeld
Dalia and Lidu will be in San Diego. They did a fantastic demonstration that is a game changer. Seeing through blindfolds.
Rizwan Virk
Yeah, and she had 100% accuracy.
Suzanne Ross
Well because she sees it’s like, do you see a bed, do you see a table. That’s just what you’re seeing. Of course you’re accurate.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. Yeah. But seeing that done in person is a game changer for people that might be skeptical. Because even most people who try mindsight don’t get 100%.
Suzanne Ross
She was teaching children yesterday and these kids were getting it right away. We all can do this, we’re all infinite, we’re all forever, we’re all one.
Alan Steinfeld
So she’s seeing through the eyes of… like if you’re looking at the book and she’s blindfolded over here, she’s seeing through your eyes.
Suzanne Ross
Can be. Yes. I know it’s all. That gets very strange. Because that’s the oneness and the entanglement. We’re sharing this shared field of consciousness.
Alan Steinfeld
Well that is going to happen in San Diego. We could go on and on. There’s so much more. This would be a lot of fun. Thank you Riz.
Suzanne Ross
In San Diego, sandiegotranscendenceretreat.com. September 27th, 28th, 2025. Love to have you there, with Riz and a bunch of other great people. Thank you.