Imagine that for your entire life you have been sitting in a chair in a movie theater. The place is dark, like all movie theaters- but you can feel there are restraints – shackles over your wrists and ankles, making it difficult to move your arms or legs. The back of your chair is high, rising above your head so it is impossible to look behind you. All you can see is the movie screen in front of you and the people sitting next to you in the same condition. In front of you, sweeping around on all sides of the theater as far as you can see, is a gigantic IMAX 3D screen. You sit there watching movie after movie, and it seems as if you’re part of the movie itself, fully immersed in it.
Like the shadows and echoes in Plato’s Cave, these movies are all you have ever known. They are, in fact, your only reality, your life. The actors are good and the scripts well-written, and you get emotionally involved in these movies, feeling anger, pain, sadness, regret, joy, enthusiasm, antagonism, fear, and a wide range of other emotions depending on the storyline. You have your favorite characters – family members and friends, for example – who show up often, and others you despise and wish would not appear at all. Some movies are pleasurable to watch, even beautiful at times happy, poignant, satisfying, enjoyable. Others are dark and ominous, disturbing, painful, producing reactions inside you which aren’t very comfortable. You resist watching those and wish you didn’t feel what you were feeling. You close your eyes at times, wanting the script to change. But you’re content to stay there and watch, because you’ve been told and have come to believe from experience – this is the only reality there is, and you have to accept it. The vast majority of people – 95% of the Earth’s population, if I had to guess, maybe more – will die sitting in that movie chair. For others, something interesting will happen one day. In a particularly uncomfortable movie, you might scream “No!” and forcefully twist your body in the chair. Suddenly you’re aware that you no longer feel the shackles on your wrists and ankles, and you realize you can now move your arms and legs. You use your hands to feel around and discover the shackles had no locks on them, ever and your panicked movements simply pried them open. All along you had just assumed, believed you were a prisoner, like a dog who stays clear of an invisible fence. You wonder what to do next. You realize you no longer have to sit there and watch the movies if you don’t want to. You could get up; but you don’t, not right away. You might lean over to the person next to you and start telling them there are no locks on the shackles, but all you get is a “Sshhhh” in response.
Woody Allen’s example-
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