The Theater of Life
PERHAPS YOU’VE HEARD OF THIS BOOK.
It’s called Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah.
In one scene, the main character, Richard, is speaking with Don, the reluctant Messiah. They’re walking down the sidewalk. Richard asks Don:
Why are we here, Don? Why are we on Earth?
Don immediately pulls Richard into a movie theater. It’s playing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Richard’s seen it so many times that, while watching, he’ll start deconstructing the film and analyzing its structure. Still, he loves the movie so much he can’t help but get sucked back into the story.
Towards the film’s climax, Don leans over and asks, “Richard, why are you here?”
“Sh!” he says. “This is a great movie!”
Unbeknownst to Richard, his question has been answered.
After the film ends, Don points out what a movie is: a series of pictures played so quickly it creates the illusion of fluid movement. Literally speaking, it’s a projector flashing images on a screen in a dark room.
The movie watching experience, he says, bears no fundamental difference from our Ultimate Reality. The movie is our dramatic life, the screen is our experience, and the projector is our imagination, our projector of consciousness. Though we sense this, we are too transfixed by the story to notice.
And the best part? We know this intuitively. It’s the reason we love movies so much: they are a reflection of our every day reality (“we instinctively know they are a parallel of our lifetimes,” says Don).
The big question is: if we know for a fact that the movie is an illusion, why do we still go?
Richard lists a bunch of reasons, all of which Don sorts into two categories: fun and education. Every reason we go to the movies can fit into those purposes.
This short passage is a spot-on parable for addressing one of our biggest questions: why are we here?
Many people seek cosmic purpose, something holy and fulfilling, but Richard Bach’s splendid story harkens to something much simpler:
We came here for the same reasons we go to the cinema. By paying admission, we’ve chosen Life as the movie and Earth as the theater, all in order to serve our core spiritual functions:
