The world is actually a film

When I heard someone say this years ago it felt uneasy. because I had the idea that we need to break down the distance between ourselves and the world.

Over thinking the world, having a complex model of how things should be, being rigid in our view of things and having a deep layer of abstraction from the world is absolutely not the way we really experience things. Seeing our experience as a movie seemed the ultimate abstraction reducing actual experience to just a concept of data on a tape. This seems to complete undermine its central position and lends ultimate power to the conceptual mind.

Well this is true. But suppose we have done considerable meditated to start to experience things as they arise. Especially feeling the breath as it is rather than how we think it is. At least seeing that these two things are different.

Now we have the start of direct experience, and we can see the 6th sense of conception applying thoughts to this direct experience we have a realistic insight into the processes of manifestation of the world.

Once we are here then it makes sense to say the world is like a film!

What this means is that ALL sensory experiences that arise--especially including feelings and emotions--are just a film that is playing.

Normally when we are less observant we divide this film into the "external" senses like the wind and the sound of traffic, and "internal" senses like our thoughts, how we are feeling and our emotions like being annoyed. But this is lazy.

If we look properly we see both "external" and "internal" as just parts of the same film that is playing. This is a really important step to liberation because when we see EVERYTHING as part of the same film, we have eradicated the link between "our self" and the film. This is liberation.

One thing to test the extent of this is to look at consciousness when we are moving. Because we usually identify with a body in the world we think that consciousness is somehow linked to this body, when the body moves we infer that the consciousness move. So we "think" about motion towards a place as a fixed mental map and a body and consciousness moving around this map. When we arrive somewhere we imagine our body and consciousness moving into the area like a camera and whatever is at the point of arrival appearing on the film. But this is what we "think" it is not what happens. This is our 6th sense of events. It is not what the other senses experience.

We are only ever HERE. When we go there we make there into HERE. From the perspective of our sight for example we are an audience member sitting in our seat and as the film rolls we see the journey and the arrival at the destination. The film shows movement but we do not move! This is actually what happens when we move! Amazing to think but the movement happens "in" our senses, but our consciousness does not move and more than a cinema moves when the film shows someone driving.

This is exactly what is meant by saying the world is a film. And it is critical to appreciate. And it is not just movement. When the film shows the main character getting angry the audience does not need to get angry because the anger is in the film. This way we see that everything that we thought was "me" is actually just part of the film. This extinguishes the connection between the film and the "true me."

"True me" is a bit of a confusing name. It is just to say that our normal view of the world is actually quite correct and the vast nature of reality is all there for us. and we know it well. And all that the above does is not change any of this, it just put the division between what is not us and what is us in the right place. There is considerable "mission creep" from the self to start claiming all sorts of parts of the world. In the very worse case we start to claim physical objects like possessions. How ridiculous if we think about that we think a car has anything to do with me. It is almost like voodoo doll. If someone scratches the car we feel we have been scratched, even if the car is 100 miles away and someone sends a photo of it. How can that scratch have anything to do with me, how ridiculous. But those we are less attached to physical objects still cannot be smug because they probably think that thoughts are theirs, or feelings are theirs or emotions are theirs. But it is the same as the car although harder to prove. The point is that when we experience a car it is fairly easy to see this is not me, but if we think about it any experience is like the car and so it is not me either! "True me" is what is left when experiences are in the proper place and "over there" (as in Heidegger's Dasein). Where Heidegger is probably wrong is that Dasein is just the film. It says nothing about the vast reality that this film plays in.

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Daniel Dennett will be turning in his grave. He wrote at length about what he called the "Cartesian Theatre" which is the sense that we exist at the centre of our experience and the world unfolds as a film in the theatre of our mind.

His reason for criticising this is that when experiments are done on nerve activity what people say they are experiencing differs from what scientists record. When someone is asked to press a button and also say when they are going to press it, brain scans show that they actually go to press it before the parts of their brain start up to do with saying they are going to do it. So while we think we make a decision and the press the button, actually its the other way around. And there are many examples of the physical temporality of experience not  matching our conscious experience that leads researchers to argue that our conscious experience is just a manufactured model of reality not occurring at one time or place in the brain and the sense that we are a coherent central entity watching this unified and coherent here and now is just a hallucination created by the brain.

But even in this apparent incoherence there is logic. The reason that the finger goes to press the button first before we start to say we are going to do it is because it takes time for the nerve impulse to travel all the way down the arm. The brain knows to start this process first, so that when it says it is going to do it, the finger is already about to do it. There is a very good reason it is like this. So the researchers have found out that brain activity does not correlate directly with our experience, but that the brain works to overcome hardware limitations to create a coherent reality. This rather proves that what we experience is not the same as nerve patterns. If we are to argue that the brain operates to manufacture our experience we are also saying that nerve activity is not the same as our experience. There is a contradiction here. I think Dennett suggests that our experience is more like a simulation that is being run on the brain hardware.

However we can turn this inside out and say that it is the simulation that is primary and the brain is being driven by the need to manufacture this simulation. If the simulation is the real part, the artificial bit is the brain slaving away to obey the needs of the simulation.

Anyway these thoughts are not really necessary for the purposes of this blog.

The main thing here is to show how Dennett's Cartesian Theatre and the Film described above are different.

The purpose behind The Film is not the contents of the movie itself. It is the create a clear distinction between the processes of experience itself, that is the manifesting of all things, and the "true self" which is not something we experience but which does the experiencing. This distinction is clear and absolute.

The reason we fail to fully appreciate the Film is we are always identifying with things in The Film as "me." The way I expressed it just now is fraught with issues because "[something] which does the experiencing" suggests there is something there in addition to The Film. And what could this something be? Well we imagine some form, or try to think about and of course these are all just parts of The Film. Anything that manifests does so due to The Film. It is probably helpful to drop any idea of anything watching The Film, the main point is just to see experience unfolding like a film on a screen. That is all we need to do.

So Dennett's Cartesian Theatre is not entirely problematic. It actually does deescribe reality very well. The bit that could be problematic is to envisage someone sitting in the auditorium watching the film. This person is really just a part of The Film them self. If they are manifest and exist then they must be IN The Film. We realise it is an odd cinema because while there is a Film showing revealing all the things in the world as they occur, that is it. There is nothing else.