Security!

I'm on a Near Death Experience kick. Interviews, books, documentaries, it's pleasantly infected my algorithm. Proof of Heaven was particularly good. After, by Bruce Greyson, was too. He's a psychiatrist who's spent decades studying NDEs.

Here's what his research says. Ask thousands of people across every religion—and no religion—what happened when they died and came back, and they don't describe fear. They don't describe judgment. They describe a wall coming down. Unconditional love, so overwhelming it's the single most common thing reported. A presence that knows everything about them and loves them anyway. The line between self and everyone else, gone. An illusion.

Ram Dass said we're here to awaken from the illusion of separateness. That the ego is a costume the soul forgets it's wearing.

These ideas would have sounded like abstract spiritual concepts to me once. Now I think they might be pointing at something odder than "none of this is real" or "all of this is simply God." Maybe it's both: the drama is God, and the drama is still a drama. Not a curtain hiding something truer behind it, closer to a play God is fully inside of, playing every part, meaning it, and still, somehow, performing. Sacred and staged. Not one or the other.

I live as if that's true. I also spent a week convinced I was the only one who'd noticed it was staged, and that conviction got me locked in a ward. So the question I actually live with isn't whether it feels like theater. It's what you do with something you know is a performance and believe is holy at the same time. Because "it's not real" tells you to stop caring. "It's not real, but it's still God" doesn't let you off that easily.

Years ago, during my last major episode—Trump had just been elected—I became convinced I was living inside a Truman Show. Everyone around me was an actor, bad ones, no complexity. It took a while before I considered the possibility that the bad writing was mine, not theirs. The psychiatric unit was a set. The doctors behind the glass were watching to see if I'd figured it out. I passed a note to the security guard who patted me down: "I know what's really happening."

I didn't.

At one point in group, I snapped. The plot was so obvious. It was time to go. I tested the doors. All locked. I screamed that I'd checked myself in, that I could leave whenever I wanted. I taunted the Girl, Interrupted character through a glass pane, she came at the door, a nurse held her back, and I smiled, certain I'd caught her performing too.

Here's what I'll say in defense of that delusion: it wasn't made out of nothing.

The instinct underneath it was trying to tell me something real. I had lost my sense of self. My marriage was unraveling. My inner life had become unbearable. The version of "normal" I kept trying to return to felt impossible because it no longer existed. Something really was collapsing.

The mistake wasn't sensing that a change had happened beneath the surface. The mistake was becoming certain I knew what it meant.

The cameras. The actors. The plot. Those were the stories my frightened mind built around a genuine intuition. The intuition came first. The certainty came second.

I've started to think that's what makes delusion so convincing. It doesn't create meaning from nothing. It recruits the same faculties we depend on for art, love, spirituality, and science—pattern recognition, intuition, symbolic thinking—and asks them to carry more certainty than they were built to bear.

So here's where I've landed on the question that actually matters to me, not whether the drama is illusion, but why illusion wouldn't be a reason to stop caring about it.

I don't think it comes down to what you see. I think it comes down to what's running the seeing.

Is there a witness present? Is there enough ground beneath you to stay connected while the old structures fall away? Or does the ground disappear with them?

In observation, the witness stays in the room. In dissociation, the witness leaves the room and mistakes the distance for clarity.

A trauma therapist friend of mine would object to that framing. "Dissociation isn't a failure," she'd say. "It's survival." She's right.

When the house is on fire, leaving the room isn't a moral mistake. It's what keeps you alive. The question isn't whether I should have stayed then. The question is whether I'm still using the same escape route now that the fire is out.

That's the difference I'm trying to point toward. One movement carries you back into relationship. The other carries you farther into certainty.

All these years later, I don't ask whether an experience feels true anymore. Lots of things have felt unquestionably true. I don't ask whether it feels certain either. Certainty has lied to me before. I ask the quieter question: does this make me more loving, more connected? Or does it leave me isolated, convinced I alone can see what everyone else has missed?

I've learned to recognize the weather now. The fear-tone before the certainty-tone. The isolation creeping in before the plot does.

I've noticed a glimmer of it start again in the last month. Losing my job. Weighing whether to leave a field I've worked in for twenty years. The old instinct is close: pull back, go quiet, let the isolation do what it always offers to do, it feels like safety.

Watching Trump again, I notice the same instinct rising, the evil feels so obvious, the script is bad, and I can't understand how people are still acting like this is normal. I still think it's theater. I've stopped believing that means it's not God. That belief doesn't get me out of the fight. It's the reason I show up to it. If everyone is playing a part, then love isn't an escape from the play. It's how you play your part.

So I write it down. Not a note to a guard this time, strangers on the internet instead, which is either much healthier or exactly the same thing with better production values. I still think the writing is bad.