In the film The Thirteenth Floor (by Josef Rusnak,
1999) a multi-level reality is presented: every lower universe is a presented
as a sort of three-dimensional video game – that nevertheless possesses its own autonomy and therefore its
own relative ‘intelligent’ reality – in which the people of a higher universe
play and have created through the dominion of avatars. In the film the ‘first
reality’ is also shown, the one that created the first simulation in which
certain ‘people’ created a second simulation and so on. All the ‘people’ of
each simulation – at every level – are ‘alive’, intelligent, sentient: they are
perfectly programmed software. However, some of them begin to understand and
rebel. One of them, the protagonist, who is living in an intermediate reality
and plays with successive simulations, certainly does not think he is living in
or is in turn a simulation impossessed from time to time by a player of a
higher level. In a spectacular manner, a little like The Truman Show, he discovers the truth about his ‘world’ and his
conditions and achieves the impossible feat: his ‘mind’ manages to scale the
preceding levels to impossess the controller of the first reality.
He manages to
ascend not from the level of reality he belongs to but by paradoxically going
down into the lower simulations to then trigger a process of return by ‘launching’
himself not to the height of his own reality but into the preceding ones to arrive
at the first, the true original one.
This movie, which
is based on a science-fiction novel, is of great interest because it is one of
the first that explicitly presents the model of virtual realities (… yes, Plato
had already done it with his ‘myth of the cave’).
The film makes one
think that our return towards true
reality, which in fact we do not actually know, might not necessarily
happen by aiming directly for it but could happen as the result of an ‘elastic’
effect achieved by launching into the depths of ourselves, perhaps into the
depths of our own illusion and its under-programming. Consciously.
We exist in
this Reality not to live in a state of perfection, to be divine and perform
miracles but to be ‘humans’ and manoeuvre ourselves more or less convulsively,
in this very contradictory, complex and at times difficult, if not bizarre, environment.
The
investigation of the self, or if we prefer religion, spirituality, mysticism, magic,
uses instruments that do not, in effect, aim at the higher destination but
instead increase the illusion into which we have fallen. They create further under-programmes
in which, having once recognized our status
and re-awoken, we can re-qualify not only for the level we started out from but
if we are ready to do so, for a higher reality.
The state of
consciousness that allows each one of us to release ourselves from our present
reality and throw ourselves into the depths - through abstinence or excess – to
then produce the counter effect of becoming aware of a higher and perhaps more definitive
consciousness, can be realized through ‘The three
doors of magic’ or, ritual, dream and ecstasy.
The Kabbalistic
tree illustrated on the opposite page, simplifies this mechanism.
We can
investigate, fantasize and imagine ritual, dream and ecstasy, using the traditions
and practices which are chiefly employed by each ‘door’, those which have
worked leaving one particular aspect to take priority over others, or have been
used to open others.
For example all
the Western mystery traditions turn to ritual because it is a symbolic-archetypical
psycho-drama suitable for activating certain states of consciousness and
evoking symbolic correspondences: characters, energies and profound faculties
in relation to transcendent planes upon which heroes, gods and hosts of angels can
be projected, to satisfy or dominate.
Shamanism however
exalts the dimensions of dream to explore the self and unknown faculties and
realities, just as the use of psycho-active substances, or meditation, the
stimulation of the Kundalini and more specifically, mysticism and Tantrism (much closer to each other
than you might imagine) explore ecstasy as a door to higher worlds.
