A few days ago, someone posted a deepfake on LinkedIn that was incredibly convincing. The faces, the voices, the backgrounds, and the movement were all so realistic that you couldn’t convince your brain to not see it as real. Even though you knew it wasn’t. It occurred to me then that this is a perfect metaphor for our experience of the world.

Metaphors change over time. When steam was powering engines, people started using expressions like “letting off steam” or “if he doesn’t cool off, he’s going to blow”, and we were “under pressure”. When electricity came along, things became “shocking”, and we could “blow a fuse”.

Now that AI is here, it’s offering up possibilities for some new expressions that will be metaphors for life experiences, and one of those is “Deepfake”.

Our capacity for creating powerful illusions has been expanding at a furious rate. Video games are now producing experiences that are so lifelike that you get sucked into their world very quickly. Their realism fools us into believing and reacting to what is happening as if it were real.

When people do long meditation retreats or take hallucinogens, they often experience a shift in perspective or in their state of consciousness that causes them to realize that the world is not what it seems. This is sometimes called “waking up”, because when we dream we typically feel what is happening in the dream as being completely real, right up until we wake up and realize that “it was just a dream”.

For many in the mindfulness community, these moments of waking up are life-changing. These people now have the realization that there’s more to our reality than we realize – more dimensions, more connection, more meaning. And though life returns to “normal” afterwards, it’s never quite the same again. Because once you see through an illusion, your experience of it changes.

This is where Deepfakes are a great metaphor. We can “see” a famous person doing things, “hear” them saying things, and at the same time, we know that they aren’t real. Yet our brains have no choice but to perceive them as “real”. We are in the strange position of seeing something as being real while simultaneously knowing that it isn’t!

Just being told that a video is a deepfake doesn’t make it seem any less real. But it shifts how you experience the video.

Now, imagine that you have insights that show you that EVERYTHING you experience as “the world” is a deepfake. Could you ever un-see that? How would it change how you go through life?

I’ve concluded that it doesn’t change what you experience, but it changes your relationship to it.

Once you’ve peeked behind the curtain, the show goes on and you can enjoy it just as much as everyone else, (EVEN MORE, in some ways).

Life becomes more fascinating than ever. The things you care about change. There’s a certain lightness to life that wasn’t there before. You take yourself less seriously.

Once you know that reality is a deepfake, nothing changes, yet somehow, everything changes.