We Are All Truman Burbanks

I am sitting and watching The Truman Show at the moment. I reached the scene, roughly 31 minutes in, where Truman begins to realize that everything, all of the objects, every person, every situation, every interaction he has ever had, in every moment of his life, is staged or unreal, as the music lifts into a crescendo. I began to cry as I watched him, ironically himself an actor, as the process of his awakening and all of its repercussions began to dawn upon him. He is surrounded by actors and actresses believing them to be real, believing the exchange of words and his interactions with them have meaning, believing his life has meaning through his interactions with them. 

Why did I cry? I have watched this movie dozens of times and I've never felt like this before. This summer, I reached an entirely new level of "wakening," myself. Through a devastating and traumatizing break-up with a certain man at the end of spring, I had an epiphany I don't think many in this lifetime get to experience. 

My epiphany told me that everything I experience with every human being is unreal and utterly meaningless. Specifically, it told me, as I was reflecting on how the loving, sweet, attentive and protective behavior of this man could literally instantly change one day, after 3 months of continuous relationship bliss, for no discernible reason at all, that actually, as humans, there is no intrinsic meaning to anything we experience--literally, every human interaction we have, whether positive and profound, passionate or negative, or shallow, or hostile, is absolutely meaningless. We impose meaning on every single feeling exchanged and word we speak and have spoken to us. I inquired as to how this could be possible, as I recalled the times I spent with the man in question, how genuine he actually was, how real the love and joy felt, the laughter and fun, how deeply and candidly we delved into one another and how compatible we were. Was I completely deceived? Absolutely not--if nothing else, I have a keen sense of when a person is being phony and when they are being genuine. The reply I got was that, the nature of the current system of life on Earth, combined with the human ego, necessitates all humans to become estranged from their souls and adopt facades, bio-behavior programs, as I call them, which have been programmed into us from various sources, as if we were computers. Even the most genuine human is running them, but most humans do not even interact on the deepest level of genuineness that they are capable of. The intimacy and closeness I experienced with this man was a result of the fact that both he and I were operating on the deepest level of genuineness that we were capable of. 

I am still trying to process this epiphany and the implications it has for me in my life. In this scene of the movie, I watched Truman only take the first steps on the path to processing the repercussions of the truth of this epiphany. I cried, because I am still plagued by the joy and love that both I and this man lost when he had the meltdown he had. I am still having trouble letting go. I am still having trouble accepting the utter falsity of our interactions, although I am analyzing both of us in retrospect with a view to understand how even I was running a bio-behavior program (an unintentional inaccurate or false representation of myself resulting from lack of self-awareness) with him and how the programs we were running with one another were interacting to create our joyful and loving emotional experience of one another.

There are levels of "being awake" in this world. I am a highly spiritual person, which I know is frowned upon by many on this website. The irony is, however, that the stage most people I have seen on Minds are at in this process of awakening is the emotional-intellectual pre-spiritual stage. If you delve deeply enough into the "rabbit hole," you will find eventually that there is no separation between the spiritual and the truths most on this site are currently uncovering. Most people just stop their journey down the hole when they reach the level of government and politics, thinking that manipulating those things, which are as unreal as everything else, will actually effect a real change.

Coming to the realization that nearly every single person on the planet and every word and every interaction I've ever had, even a love I thought was deeply spiritual and permanent, are actually completely false and unreal illusions upon which I imposed my own importance and meaning is a very hard pill for me to swallow. However, in the moment of my epiphany, I was also shown what IS real for me and my soul, personally. I was shown why I am on Earth at this time and I was shown what I need to be doing and focusing on on my life path. 

I believe each individual is incarnated on Earth with a plan which has been pre-determined by their soul and the only real things in your life are those things and those people, if any, who are directly relevant to the greater plan your soul has established for your life, which is completely unique for each individual. I also believe that the path most people on Minds have set out on would lead inevitably and increasingly to phenomena that are considered spiritual if individuals continued to venture more deeply down into the rabbit hole.

The tears I shed this morning while watching this scene were not merely for myself, but for humanity and the cruel extents to which the system and many individuals complicit within the system go to make us think we are delusional and crazy, so we stay under the veil of illusion. As I watched this amazing scene, which sends chills down my spine, I realized that not only I, but every human on Earth is living under this dark veil. 

Though our souls are diverse and have all chosen very unique and individual paths, this path of awakening is one we all share--and it's the first time in my long life I felt I have shared anything in common with humanity. We are all Truman Burbanks living in a false world, interacting with fake people, including ourselves (through things we are yet unconscious of or in denial of about ourselves and our lives), through no fault of our own, but due to the veil that has been cast over our planet. However, the crescendo of our epiphany will not come merely through the metaphorical stage light which comes crashing down from the sky. That is only level 1 of the rabbit hole. Go deeper. You cannot lift the veil over your life by externalizing an internal struggle, when the source of all meaning in your life is coming from within you. Swallow that pill, and the world will look like a much different place, one which requires you to approach it from a completely different paradigm--a paradigm that will give you real power to change things in your life on a personal level.