Tru -man

The movie is a basic parable of the journey of awakening from delusion. At the end of his journey, Truman Burbank escapes through the final door into freedom from the artificial environment - Seahaven - in which he was raised. He steps through the door into a broader reality that is essentially the same world he’s always known, but on a larger scale; same paradigm, same dynamics, same everything really, just one level up. Just like Neo in The Matrix, Truman doesn’t escape from Maya, he just leaps from one turtle to the next.

 “Your whole life has been moving toward this; you’ve undergone crisis after crisis, fought battle after battle, destroyed illusion after illusion. You’ve been living in a state of unrelenting emotional upheaval as your world collapsed around you, you’ve made a great journey, and now you’re about to discover the truth of your being. You’re about to leave the only reality you’ve ever known and step into a new, bigger reality you’ve never seen and only recently began to suspect.

In the movie-metaphor, Truman is just stepping out of a microcosm into the regular cosm we all know; it’s really the same paradigm he’s known in the vast soundstage of Seahaven, but on a different scale. 

(Jed) 

Her

The difference between the liberated one, or rather: liberation, and individuality is that when an emotion like anger arises, it just arises for no one, but all the time there’s an individual who thinks it’s his anger; that happening to him, that he owns it. In individuality there’s always an ownership of everything. In liberation there’s no one that owns the anger, but still the anger can arise, as it did before for no one. In individuality the so-called person keeps thinking it’s happening to him. In liberation it’s simply anger, happening to no one.

In liberation there is no witness. That’s over. In awakening there can be a witness, and even before awakening there can be a witness, but in liberation there isn’t even something that is aware of manifestation. There is just being, whatever is. Everything is perfect.

The process

For some, an awakening experience is easy and liberating. For others, it may not be liberating at all and stir up a whole lot of programming still to be cleared in order for ultimate freedom to eventually be lived in daily life as an wanted experience. Then, there are some for whom the awakening experience can be so disruptive and impossible to assimilate that they may become physically, emotionally or mentally non-functional. Some may actually die in the process or end up in a mental institution. Others may become so incapacitated to operate in the world that they may need to depend on others to care for them. They might possibly need to relearn how to do regular life again since the how to got obliterated in the enlightenment experience. Still others may not notice at all that something unusual happened until days or weeks later when it dawns on them that something has changed in their perception of the world. There are many more such variations I could list from ultimately great to ultimately not so great. As many people as there are on earth, that's how many possibilities exist as far as what enlightenment may or may not do for someone. To get hung up on one particular possibility creates a very one-sided view of the whole thing that does not serve anyone in the least. 

Months into my breaking-down, clearing-out, scrubbing-away process I was shown that what I had taken me to be was actually a mere compilation of concepts, beliefs, ideas, thoughts tangled up with feelings, piled up on top of one another, making up something like a scaffold... and nothing else.

Mark Twain

...a God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!
- No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger

There isn’t anyone there.

A lot of people don't come back to this message, because they don’t want to hear ‘There is no one, and there’s nothing that can be done’. That’s not attractive to them. It leaves no hope. People want to hear that there is hope, and that they can do something.

But the point is, you see, that in liberation there is no one there to communicate things, there is no agenda, there is no motive, there’s just what’s happening. So there is no motivation to capture people, or to make people believe this or that. It’s just someone standing there, responding and speaking, without any idea of going anywhere. Because, as far as the speaker…as far as liberation is concerned, the audience is already liberated. So basically, it’s not a teaching, it’s a sharing of something already known, a remembering. It is already totally known, but not by the mind. There are people who think they come to get something, and then they suddenly recognize that it’s actually about losing something, and there’s a sort of recognition of something already known, not by them, but by One. Oneness knows there is only Oneness, but it pretends it doesn’t. So people come and pretend that they aren’t One.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

Imagine as clearly as you can that you enter a large house that you have never been in before. You feel strange and scared, there is furniture and drapes but no people. You wander around, you go from room to room not knowing what you will find. You start to get nervous and a little fearful being alone in this big house. You wonder how long it has been empty like this. In time the sense of the bigness and emptiness of the house starts to weigh heavily on your nerves. Finally, when you can not stand it any longer a shocking realization occurs to you, your not there either! Only the experience, "house" exists.

This is how nonduality feels and is the real truth of existence. Remember the question, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Now you know the answer.

You see, -even though there is much activity in the world, there are no doers. The universe is in a sense, lifeless. There is no one, only happenings and the experience of happenings.The universe emerges spontaneously. It’s emergence and pattern are perfect in mathematics and symmetry and involve no chance. Nothing is random, everything emerges exactly as it has to. There is no random chance, or evolution based on chance. The universe is perfect, nothing is wrong or could be. There seems to be chance or unpredictability from a human perspective but that is only because our time frame reference can not see the universe emerge through its whole life span in a matter of minutes. If we could see that, then we would clearly see how every event was not only perfect and necessary but even predictable.