Everybody lives in a virtual reality of their own making.

It’s our language and how we use it; what stories we tell ourselves, which define our perspectives on our own very unique (and individually worlds-apart) existences.

The beliefs and ideologies which you prescribe to define you.

If you believe in true love, you may be blinded to the possibility that all love is true and appropriate.

If you have the idea that money is a stepping-stone to happiness you may find yourself chasing that ideal and occlude even the train of thought that life is already enough as it is, and you can be happy now.

Religion and institution will peddle the idea that you are not enough as you are, but you need to repent for your sins or you need a degree or a job or a this or that – the only power these ideas have is in the minds of those who listen to and accept them; which unfortunately is most people.

But where in this picture does your worth as a child of the universe reside? I mean before the celebrations of your wedding, the mercedes-benz, the gifts to your gods or the paperwork is all complete?

I guess it depends on what you believe.

Our perceptions on reality are so well defined and masked by our own language and cultural, sexual and spiritual ideologies that we have created for our minds the isolation of a virtual reality through which we cannot even connect genuinely to ourselves let alone with other people or our planet.

We need a new language – not of the necessarily-translated spoken syntaxes which use words as symbols for meaning. We need to communicate with meaning itself, visually beheld and experiential – not through the air as sound but through the eyes as light and communicated straight from the electromagnetic waves of the brain and telepathy of the heart.

The technology exists. We simply need the motivation to realise that we are trapped in our own minds, blinded by our own ideas and beliefs – and that just around the corner from this is a place where we do understand each other – without exception. We do love each other – without  exclusion. And we do have a future together where we can explore each other’s hopes and dreams and co-create a paradise for ourselves where our language manifests our reality with direct intent – guided by the empathy of genuine human connection.

In an effort to escape my virtual reality, I gave away my life and experienced my own death. I betrayed all of my beliefs and dismissed any ideology with contempt – I lost every part of myself until I was nothing but the emptiness of my own breath, the openness of the sky, the acceptance of the wind and the unending appreciation of the beauty in the stars.

I had escaped to Wild Valley, country Victoria and spent my time in isolation – living in a caravan on a hill and thinking about it all.

Nothing is what it seemed. Nothing. Change was the only thing I had left to hold onto and I believed only in the beauty of the unknown.

Then I started again.

Fifteen years is a long time. When you love something and you do it for fifteen years, it becomes a part of you. After all, love is the act of understanding.

I’ve been a communications designer since before the internet was a reality and my journey has led my mind deep into philosophy of how communication technology will continue to reshape our future realities.

I’d like to share my understanding of why design and technology will perpetuate the evolution of language to deliver us into a new dimension of awareness of ourselves and empathetic connection with our environment and each other.

Notice that we’ve been extending our reality with virtual technologies since the dawn of language. The abstraction of experience into verbalised syntax and cultural ideologies is itself a virtual reality which defines our outlook and perspective into ourselves, fundamentally.

The beauty of the imagination in the face of societal frameworks means that through art, through the process of understanding and through communicating new metaphors of language; we can challenge expectations, challenge our perspective and ultimately challenge our reality to create something completely new.

This happens every day and has for over three and a half billion years – but is no longer solely a biological process of evolution in the language of our changing DNA, but through the development of the conscious human mind, has extended the evolution of information into the conceptual realm of language; of the imagination.

Several billion people clocking-in every day on planet earth are perpetuating the evolution of language through culture and technology at such an exponential rate that the entire catalogue of human knowledge is no longer doubling every 1200 years but every 12 months – look a couple of years into the future and that density of information through language will start doubling every 12 hours, then 12 seconds – then you start to get an idea of why current modes of language will escape us. We need to be conscious of the importance of evolving our most fundamental human technology of language to keep up with future values or technology itself will surpass us.

Instead of fearing artificial intelligence, realise that we are already augmenting our own intelligence with the internet and smartphones and we now have the responsibility to either create and adopt an artificial intelligence based on compassionate values, or it will create itself and leave us on an evolutionary plateau of animal linguistics.

Change, is key. Not something that most of us are comfortable with, however will increasingly be a necessary adoption of thinking and behaviour as human beings as we start to face our futures.

We need to be comfortable with the knowledge that not only is it possible to fundamentally change the way we think and perceive the world – but it may be necessary.

Letting go of expectations and untethering from the safety of the familiar, embracing your adventurous spirit – and challenging everything. This is what is needed to face our future and, to me, is what it means to be alive.

Challenge everything; especially what you think you know.