Excerpt of Jed McKenna's Theory of Everything. Talking with his 'students' about the movie Truman Show.
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“So, pretend it’s you opening that door,” I tell John and
Claire after the movie when they come to discuss it with
me. “Your whole life has been moving toward this; you’ve
undergone crisis after crisis, fought battle after battle,
destroyed illusion after illusion. You’ve been living in a
state of unrelenting emotional upheaval as your world
collapsed around you, you’ve made a great journey, and
now you’re about to discover the truth of your being.
You’re about to leave the only reality you’ve ever known
and step into a new, bigger reality you’ve never seen and
only recently began to suspect. Okay?”
“Okay,” they agree in unison.
“Okay. In the movie-metaphor, Truman is just stepping
out of a microcosm into the regular cosm we all know; it’s
really the same paradigm he’s known in the vast
sound-stage of Seahaven, but on a different scale. He’s just
tunneling from one cell into a larger cell, right?”
I wait for their reply because this is a good time to have
everyone on the same page. They assure me they are.
“But what if, instead of standing at a door to the next
level, he was standing at the final door? A door that
wouldn’t open into just another layer, but beyond all layers
and into the ultimate, eternal and infinite reality. What if
he’d killed his final Buddha, took his final bow, and
stepped through that door into the perfect void of nothing
forever? What then?”
They treat the question as rhetorical and stare at me.
“There’s no time or space on the other side of that final
door,” I continue, “no energy or matter, no motion, no
relativeness, no otherness. The mountain is not a mountain.
There are no people or places out there, no character to play
or audience to play to; it’s all truth and no Truman. There’s
nothing to perceive, so there’s no perception, and without
perceived and perception, how can there be a perceiver?”
“What does that mean?” asks Claire.
“Nothing forever,” I say. “The void of undifferentiated
consciousness.”
“But what does that mean?” asks John.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I say, “it just is.”
They look at each other, and back at me.
*
Let’s say Truman makes it to that final door. Then
what? Maybe he extends his hand through the door and
sees it disappear, or maybe he dives out and lands back on
the spot he dove from, or maybe... well, we kind of run out
of metaphors at this point. Standing at that final door isn’t
like anything. It’s the end of the line. The final question is
destroyed, the final veil is drawn back, the final gate is
opened. Everything is understood. Perfect knowledge is
attained because all false knowledge has been destroyed.
He has arrived at the only place in Maya’s universe where
there is no further, a strange and lonely place called Done.
All he can do now is turn around and re-enter the false
reality he gave everything to escape. Only now he is, quite
literally, disillusioned.
And there it is. The enlightened guy is really just a bad
sport who stomped off in a black rage and then slinks back
after discovering that there’s nowhere else to go. I called
enlightenment a booby prize, and this is why, but truth-realization
isn’t achieved by desire, so it’s only those who
can’t get there that would be disappointed. The black rage
guy didn’t want to become something true, he wanted to
un-become something false. That is achievable, and that’s
the only way it works.
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Damn, he's good!!