CHAPTER 1

FILM, REALITY, CRIME, AND THE AGENT

I once submitted a science fiction story to an agent in New York. His response was, “While the writing itself is excellent, your story wanders all over the map. It should, instead, quickly introduce a conflict which threatens survival, and your hero should set off to solve the conflict.”

The agent was essentially saying there is a formula that mirrors real life in some way. I would disagree. The formula is actually about what makes people feel comfortable, because it reduces life to a manageable set of circumstances which, in the end, are resolved in a satisfying way.

There is an even more basic assumption that underlies this formula: time.

Time as a series of events that seem to present a beginning, middle, and end.

This is really what we are addicted to. ADDICTED TO.

We want to witness a compression of time, in which the beginning, middle, and end are exciting and always give a resolution.

Film is about time. We can watch it unfolding. We can wonder about how things will turn out. We can find out.

Whenever, in a theater, or in life we encounter what appears to be a different version of time, we retreat. We feel confusion and perhaps disgust.

We attribute this disgust to having to watch an UNNATURAL unfolding---or worse yet, no unfolding at all.

Think about this.

We are conditioned to believe (and ultimately we are both the conditioners and the conditioned) that reality is a kind of coin that presents, on one face, a problem, and on the other, a solution.

We think this is life, this is the way life is supposed to work.

I’m talking about HEAVY CONDITIONING.

This is conditioning coming from us, and from outside sources as well.

If you took a film like The Firm and cut it up randomly and then showed it to an audience, most people in the theater would walk out.

They would say, “It wasn’t about anything.”

As if SOMETHING, on the other hand, was the only way.

Beginning, middle, and end.

And yet, in our sleeping dreams, we often experience events far more vivid than so-called real life. And these dream events are not stacked up in a familiar serial fashion.

In fact, and this is a kind of heresy, perhaps the very “out-of-sequence” nature of dream events is part of what gives the dream its force.

A dream, one could say, is a relaxing of the rules.

A dream is a kind of crime, if one adheres to the normal notions of time.

It is no accident that the Roman Church has tended to look at dreams as potential visitations from the Devil.

The Devil is the one who re-sets time in a different fashion.

Freud and his followers also gave a serious spin to dreams. Dreams are symbolic occurrences that connote a problem rooted deep in the human psyche.

Therefore, the scrambled time in the dream is actually a reflection of fear of facing “the real problem.”

Therefore, out-of-sequence events in the dream are in no way an ELEVATION to an alternative way of seeing time.

It is as if an unending jolt in prison was seen as normal, and an attempt to escape was a criminal act.

Now…we are all prone to bitch and moan about ANY commentary that is not essentially practical and down to earth. I realize that. Believe me.

I suggest, however, that at the root of this discomfort is exactly what I’m writing about here. Time. The acceptable formula of time. The beginning, middle, and end. The problem and the solution as a straight-line proposition. THESE THINGS ARE WHAT WE WANT AND WE WANT THEM NOW.

Well, prison life is all about what we need and want right now. We are sure we can only get what we want right now if we focus entirely on those things.

And thinking this, we ask for magical answers. We want, for example, to know what magical thought we can think that will instantly deliver to us what we really want. Today. Tomorrow.

In other words, we want a pat formula that will deliver to us the formula of time that turns out in a very happy way for us.

The formula for the formula.

We tend to view anything else as a distraction and as unnatural, as if we are being asked to perform a sex act that we find repulsive.

Or even worse, we tend to think, “Okay, if you want me to do something weird that challenges my comfortable view of reality, then I want results right away. I want a new car or a new house or an island with a mansion and a boat to pop out of the hopper.”

Well, what is it that the usual brand of self-help guru offers us?

Instant success.

The one-minute manager. How to become an instant millionaire.

How to buy property with no money and make a hundred grand in four months.

These gurus tell us to get outside the box and follow their formulas and then they promise us instant success. They offer a trade-off: give up your normal thought pattern and achieve immediate results.

To extend the prison metaphor, this is like saying, STOP THINKING OF YOURSELF AS A PRISONER AND TOMORROW MORNING A LONG ROPE WILL APPEAR IN YOUR CELL AND YOU’LL BE ABLE TO SLIDE DOWN THE PRISON WALL AND ESCAPE. IF NOT TOMORROW, THEN NO LATER THAN THE NEXT DAY.

Delivered in a somewhat more complex fashion, this was the message of the celebrated film, The Shawshank Redemption. And the payoff was money and, if not an island mansion, at least a beach and a boat and freedom.

The finely tuned plot of that movie moved us right along through a beautiful time progression, and the outcome was what we all really wanted.

Beginning (false arrest, imprisonment), middle (secret scheme to escape), and end (triumph and freedom).

A straight line, albeit with twists and turns in the rope, from bad to good.

Here is a fable: a man just 22 years old moves to a city and discovers that homes in the city are very underpriced. He gets a few partners, and together they buy up 20 houses and they fix them up and they sell them. With the new infusion of cash, they buy bigger homes and they hold on to them for 15 years. Eventually, they sell them, become millionaires, and they buy an island and build several mansions on the island. They marry wonderful women and raise kids and live on the island and sail and water ski and fly, in their private plane, all around the world.

Good?

Eventually, they all get sick (as they age), and they die.

And the question is, is that all there is?

Is that success?

Is that happiness?

Is that the best life has to offer?

Is that the prime beauty of life?

Is that straight line they followed from youth to old age the best way to go?

Is that what we’re here for?

Is that it?

Is that called escaping from the prison?

Is that your best dream?

On his deathbed, one of the old men suddenly recalls a dream he had when he was 20 years old. In the dream, he was flying over a building in a strange city, and he felt a tremendous surge of ecstasy---and he now realizes THAT IN THAT DREAM, HE FELT MORE JOY THAN AT ANY OTHER TIME IN HIS WHOLE LIFE.

And he thinks to himself, as he lies in bed dying, “That’s strange. The dream wasn’t part of the straight line I took from poverty to success. It wasn’t part of the FORMULA OF TIME I believed in.”

And he feels cheated.

He feels he cheated himself.

And then he thinks, “Up to this moment, I believed I was a child of God and that, after death, all my questions would be answered and all my lack, whatever there is of it, would be filled in by a great old man living in the sky who sits on a throne and has a beard and a chalice---but now I see that isn’t so. It’s not that I’m going to disappear. No, I’m immortal all right, but I’m not going to that throne to receive my final joy. No. Something else is going to happen. I don’t know what it is---but as I lie here, I can see space and time---what I thought was space and time---evaporate like a curtain. And as the curtain evaporates, I see that one of my central illusions was THE STRAIGHT LINE. It was a fantastic illusion. I helped foster that illusion, BECAUSE I THOUGHT THE STRAIGHT LINE WAS THE ONLY WAY I COULD FIND HAPPINESS.”

And then his body dies and he floats off.

And still, faced with this fable, we want to say, “Give us the direct line from A to Z. Give us the formula, because formulas and systems are all there are. Don’t fool us with PHILOSOPHY. Give us the straight line. Tell us how to do it. Tell us how to be as happy as the happy people we see on TV. They must have some secret. We want to know what it is. Now.”

I’m suggesting that there is another way. This other way is not becoming dumb or crazy. It’s not giving up our plans and strategies. But it’s different. It taps into, perhaps, other dimensions. Perhaps we are always tapping into other dimensions and we hide that from ourselves.

Perhaps the most ultimate secret society of all engineered what has become known as reality: the straight-line approach. Perhaps that is the ultimate trap. Perhaps the very formula suggested to me by the agent IS the trap: create in your mind a picture of success/joy in which you must see the main problem facing you, overcome it, and then occupy the promised land.

Think about it. When you move STRICTLY from problem to solution, what happens? A new problem pops up and then you solve that. And then, again, another problem and another solution. And after awhile, your ability to solve problems seems diminished. You tire. You are pushing the rock up the hill with your nose, and the excitement you feel about life is draining away.

You are the general in a war that always seems to provide new battlefronts. You win here, and then over there the enemy rises up with a new division.

I am saying this is by DESIGN.

I’m saying this is the prison.

I’m saying this is a very clever way to encompass (ENCOMPASS) all your efforts.

What is a prison? A place that, despite your best efforts, encompasses and surrounds everything you do. You make a breakthrough over and over but the basic walls still hem you in.

In the case of consciousness itself, the prison is a methodology of dealing with events which, finally, ends in a HABIT REFLEX.

THE HABIT REFLEX IS THE STRAIGHT LINE APPROACH.

FIND THE MAIN PROBLEM AND SOLVE IT, AND THEN FIND THE NEXT PROBLEM AND SOLVE IT, AND SO ON.

In the movies, we obtain a short cut of time in which the hero does, in fact, do what we are all trained to do. He solves the main problem---and then the film ends. He succeeds brilliantly at exactly the task we are programmed to accomplish---he does it better than we can.

On TV and in books and in the movies, we see thousands and thousands of such cuts, such episodes in which the hero does this.

That’s why we are addicted.

We see the perfect example of what we are trying to do.

Which, when you think about it, is a very high level of mind control.

We watch exactly the kind of triumph we are programmed to want.

We are living in a matrix where it APPEARS that this is the only way to proceed.

And so we consent. We give in.

We say, “What could we do other than this?”

We say, “I can’t think of any other way to proceed.”

We say, “If you have another way to go, tell us what it is and make sure it works by tomorrow.”

And so I offer this as an extension of THE FORMULA OF THE SECRET SOCIETY that I described in volume one: DESIGN A REALITY THAT LOOKS LIKE A SERIES OF HILLS AND VALLEYS MADE UP OF PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS; HABITUATE PEOPLE TO THE IDEA OF FOLLOWING THIS COURSE OF ACTION---FINDING A PROBLEM AND SOLVING IT, OVER AND OVER; EVENTUALLY CREATE A STATE OF MIND IN WHICH HUMAN BEINGS CAN’T IMAGINE ANY OTHER WAY TO PROCEED; HUMANS WILL THEN LOOK TO AN AUTHORITY TO SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS FOR THEM OR GIVE THEM ANOTHER WAY TO PROCEED; ULTIMATELY, THEY WILL NOT RECEIVE REAL SOLUTIONS AND THEY WILL NOT RECEIVE ANOTHER WAY TO PROCEED.

This is the gridlock we must break.

If you feel like resisting what I’m saying here, in this chapter, GOOD!

This is not a book written with the idea of obtaining your agreement. It is meant to challenge and get you to think and explore.

This is a book I hope will get you to make notes and devise your own plans.

I’m going for the big stuff here. A revolution of consciousness that

results in major changes for you, for us, and for the world---even if that looks impossible.

If it is impossible, what do we have to lose? And if it’s possible, it’s the most important thing we can put our shoulder to.

I offer this as a construct for you: imagine a secret society that, billions of years ago, designed a space-time-energy continuum in which problems and solutions would become the primary mode of operation for everyone living in the continuum.

This secret society…do you really think it cared about WHAT PARTICULAR problems were posed and faced and solved or not solved?? Of course it didn’t.

It only cared that the continuum would appear as a kind of rolling carpet of problems that demanded solving.

It only cared that the inhabitants of this continuum would be completely absorbed in facing problems and trying to solve them.

Why?

Because that would be enough. That would be enough to capture the consciousness of the masses.

Heck, they could have designed a continuum in which there was just one great big glowing object and nothing else. They could have banked on the idea that everyone would just stare at this object forever and fall into a trance.

But that’s less likely to work in the long run.

They wanted something far more complex and intriguing.

Expand this construct of the secret society and make it into a kind of phony vacation hype artist (hope you saw the film Total Recall).

TAKE A VACATION IN THE SPACE TIME CONTINUUM.

THIS ONE IS FANTASTIC.

YOU WON’T COME HOME BORED.

THE KIDS WILL LOVE IT.

YOU’LL GET PROBLEMS TO SOLVE.

TEST YOUR CLEVERNESS AND RESOLVE.

CAN YOU SOLVE PUZZLES? YOU’LL LOVE THIS VACATION.

THRILLS AND CHILLS.

So you sign up and take the ride.

The door closes behind you. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Ha ha. It turns out this isn’t really a vacation at all. It’s a drip-method hypnosis machine, and you’re getting sucked in. You’re solving problems like crazy, and after awhile you’re forgetting where you came from and you’re forgetting that this is a temporary vacation and you can’t find the door to go back where you started.

Now why would a secret society want to do that to you?

Because it has its own game.

HOW MANY ETERNAL SOULS CAN WE CONTROL?

WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO ROPE THEM IN?