There is a movie on Amazon called Bliss. I have watched it twice and I see so much hidden in this movie that resonates deeply within me.

When I was a small buy, I had an idea that I was sitting in a small room attached to a machine and that this life was just a holiday or something experienced through that machine. Back in the mid 1960’s and at the age of 6, I certainly had not heard of virtual reality. I also had this vision that there were rows and rows of these rooms each with a machine and a person connected to it. I also used to dream such amazingly detailed dreams of another life and another place…..

When I saw the Matrix and 13th Floor, I had a similar feeling that someone was using these movies to remind us that we live in a simulation.

Then I saw Bliss.

In Bliss (spoilers ahead), we meet a man bored with life, work and so on taking anti depressants and dreaming his way through post-divorce life endlessly drawing pictures of a place and a woman. One day, he is fired but by accident, he kills his boss and to avoid any issues, props him up against the window behind a curtain. He then makes his escape to the bar across the street plainly not knowing what to do.

There, a homeless lady befriends him, asks him to retrieve some strange pills from her boyfriend in the bathroom and then tells him – it’s not real. Your boss isn’t real. She tells him she can save him from being accused of murder and after a little joint meditation, the window opens by itself and the bosses body falls to the street and it is judged a suicide.

As they walk down the street and back at her open air home on the street, she teaches him how to manipulate this reality as it isn’t real. They light candles from a distance and generally play havoc with people. They have some degree of magical control over this reality it seems. He then shows her his pictures and she points out that she is the woman he has drawn and that they are and should be together. They kiss.

His daughter is worried about him and is trying to find him and rescue him from whatever delusions he is going through living on the street with a homeless person. Seeing that he is uncertain about the non-reality of the world they are in, they use some other crystals to break out of this virtual reality to prove to hime it is not real.

They wake up seated in a circle attached to a machine that has multiple human-like brains floating around in a tank. Now in a perfect world where no one goes without and everyone has whatever they need, he finally sees that what he has been drawing is the home that they shared in this reality. We discover that the virtual world is an experiment for she has come to the conclusion that in a world of perfection,, one cannot experience bliss because you have no polarities. There is no rich or poor, love or hate, no suffering and so no happiness. The experiment, which is rumored to have issues, is to show that by using a virtual world to give polar experiences, people will appreciate perfection so much more.

However, even as they proving this to others, he is seeing his daughter from the virtual world. She asks him which is real and which is not. The perfect world is breaking down into disorder as a result of boredom and unhappiness and we are treated to a scene in which a man is explaining that tortoises sit atop tortoises atop tortoises… it seems an odd intrusion into the movie unless you read it as a hint. The hint is further reinforced when he uses magic in this perfect world as well after swallowing the same crystals used in the virtual world. In other words, both worlds are virtual and the implication is that there are N virtual worlds one on top of another like the tortoises discussed. Which then is real?

They have to return to the imperfect virtual reality because – and I am interpreting here – there is only free will in this duality. Free will is not really there in the perfect world – its like heaven – but you have no free will. So they go back and in the end, only one can return back to the perfect world, so he stays with his daughter and she goes back to her experiment.

If is sounds odd, watch it.

In my opinion, this movie has much magical depth. It addresses free will, magic or the use of powers hidden in the programming of the virtual world, parallel universes, the meaning of life and so much more.

In the end, it reminded me again that I think this a simulation. I too think I have had memories of another reality. I think here I have free will and here I can learn and grow as a spiritual being. I also saw in the movie the idea that the material sucks you in and consumes your mind if you allow it to and in that sense, it can be a wasted experience to some extent because you are unaware of the greater purpose. What you focus on, you give your attention and energy. Thus, you create your own reality and that can be hell or heaven. We can learn to bend the rules, make magic and control our reality but first you must escape the idea that this is real. You must get beyond a simple focus on the ‘reality’ around you and instead interpret it as a place of learning to experience, wilfully control and learn from.

The movie is amazing.